A Suggestion for Game Developers

Electricity isn't free. Even if you aren't concerned about the environment, you should at least be concerned about parents' bills because they won't have money to buy any more of your stupid games.

How do I turn off the XBOX 360's auto sleep feature?
XBOX 360: Beware, I Hunger

Funniest Cat Ever

Bitter Sweet Election of 2008

As much as I am happy about the Presidential election results, I'm disappointed by California's failure to reject Proposition 8 which eliminates gay marriage in our state. Thankfully, the lives of farm animals in our state will improve. Hopefully this will set off a chain reaction in the rest of the country as they see this progression in California.

Where did we go wrong on Prop 8? I've tossed around a few ideas in my head that I think might have some substance:
1) The proposition was confusing. We were voting "Yes" to say "No" and "No" to say "Yes". That's not intuitive. Were there an equal number of confused voters on both sides of the issue? I don't know.
2) Personally I was not informed about the rights which are granted with marriage. I'm still not sure about marriage rights versus domestic partnership rights and where the two diverge. If most voters were as uneducated as myself about this, then I believe voters were answering a different question. "Do you think homosexuals should be allowed to get married?" instead of "Should a homosexual couple have the same rights as a heterosexual couple?" I think the ladder may have had more success because it separates the issues from religion more.

I'm thinking we need another word for "marriage" to appease the religious folks. Maybe government should ONLY recognize some kind of newly defined partnership that requires a nice big ceremony complete with giant ridiculous cakes and thousands of dollars to make it nice and official feeling.

If most people consider marriage a religious term, maybe we need to remove the term from government completely in order to better separate our church and state.

I Lost my Vote-ginity and No on 8

I was the 30 year old vote-gin until today. Get it?

Also, I just wanted to make sure that anyone who cares to read my blog doesn't think I voted yes on prop 8. Google Adsense seems to keep putting yes on 8 adds on my blog. I wonder if I can filter adds for things I don't support.

Yearbookyourself

Oh man - I could do this ALL DAY LONG.
www.yearbookyourself.com

Tivo and Netflix Together at Last

I've been waiting for this day for a long time. I even wrote Tivo and asked them to stop adding ridiculous features and implement something useful like Netflix download support. Finally I can sleep peacefully at night knowing I'll be able to watch Netflix movies on my TV where they belong. I don't know what the hell took so long but finally Netflix and Tivo are together at last.

Second Life

I'm in it now and it is cool.

This is a pic of my girl and I just chillin' in virtual Harlem. She has no respect for telescopes.

Batch Change File Extensions With Applescript

I remember a day when Mac OS and every application running in it didn't give a rat's ass about file extensions. iPhoto has issues importing files that don't have extensions on them. It looks like the finder knows what the file types are but iPhoto just chokes on them (at least for avi's). Here is a simple Applescript to add or change file extensions of all files in a directory:

set thePath to choose folder with prompt "Select folder to rename files in:"
set ext to text returned of (display dialog "Extension to Replace:" default answer "")
set extNew to text returned of (display dialog "Replace With:" default answer "")

tell application "Finder" to set name extension of (files of thePath whose name extension is ext) to extNew

Cut and paste in script editor and hit run. Who needs terminal.app anyways?

Just kidding!

Katie Couric Messes With Palin Again

God I love Katie Couric. She's found a ratings gold mine in messing with Palin's head. Funnier than most things on television.



Unfortunately the threat of Palin becoming our President wipes the smile off my face, sobers me up, and leaves me with a horrible hangover. At least McCain seems more capable than Bush. Palin is a step down.

Prop 2

Video of a piggy explaining California's proposition 2:



Here is the official voter's guide summary for prop 2.

Yes - of course I'm for it.

Meat Production and Global Warming

I'm just becoming enlightened to how much our meat production contributes to global warming. This article claims 18% of human global warming is from meat production. They include the impact from chopping down forests to make new grazing land. With their calculations this is more than all of our transportation combined (13%). The reasons to eat less meat just keep piling up and I keep acknowledging them while ordering more steaks. Maybe I can eat more chicken? Will that help? Chickens don't fart as much, right?

Reasons for me not to eat a cow:
1) Many cows are very cute.
2) Better health.
3) Do my part to lower demand for beef, and lower demand for grazing land.

What's next? Coffee growing contributes to global warming?

Venetian Aroma

I just returned from Vegas. One question which pops in to my head every time I walk in to the Venetian hotel is why the hotel has such a strong smell of flowers or perfume. I don't see any flowers around. Where is it coming from? Well, I did a little googling and as of 9/2/08 www.scentair.com has the Venetian listed as one of their clients.

RC Airplanes

My new hobby is flying RC airplanes. It sounds pretty geeky and a bit childish, but man is it Zen. Also it isn't as geeky as my friend's new hobby which is ham radio.

That's my plane up there!

Stop Thief!

I've resurrected an automatic kitty feeder at home with a video camera. The quality of kitty feeders on the market seems to vary from bad to awful. In our case, our feline thief was able to simply paw at the feeder door causing an enormous amount of food to dump out on the floor. So I built an attachment to cover the door. So far so good. Here is a video of the first test.

Biological Counters

How do we know how to keep a beat with no metronome anyways? I was thinking about this a lot today. Humans can keep rhythm really well. It's like we all have clock crystal oscillators and digital counters in our brains. I wonder what that circuit looks like in biological form. Wouldn't it need some kind of oscillator?

That got me thinking why we need to keep accurate time anyways. Why can we keep a beat so well? My theory from an evolutionary standpoint is that we developed the ability at the same time we developed the ability to move. Around the time frame one of our amoeba ancestors made some neural connections enabling the ability to send out correctly timed nerve pulses which rhythmically moved part of its blob body, we developed the ability to keep a beat and make music.

Look at the Fanboys!

Still waiting for their shiny (smudgy) new iPhone 3Gs. That's right. I took this picture today.

Eject the Second Optical Drive on Your Mac

Ever wonder what would happen if you had a second optical drive on your mac? How would you eject that second optical drive? Option-Eject. How would you eject the third? No idea. Sometimes I think Apple takes the "less buttons is simpler" design mantra a bit too far. Having fewer buttons doesn't always make a product easier to use.

Light Saber iPhone App

Don't knock it untill you've tried it!

Bodum Double Walled Ice Tea Glasses

For my birthday I purchased myself a pair of Bodum double walled iced tea glasses. Although they are $20 per/glass, I think they're worth it if I can manage to get some use out of them before they break. The Borosillicate glass can't withstand the wrath of my hands forever. Until then, the double wall keeps cold drinks colds and the outside of the glass free of condensation. No coaster needed. So cool. Highly recommended if you're no more than mildly clumsy.

Seriously?

Seriously? I can't even read this article with that thing looking at me.

Nanowire-based memory promises leap in storage capacity

SMART Status on OSX

I was playing around with different tools for getting the SMART status information out of the hard drives on my computers. Of course there is no better tool than a free one. Open source smartmontools comes to the rescue on OSX. Here's how to get going.

1) Get and install macports so you can install smartmontools.

2) Install smartmontools.
sudo port install smartmontools

3) Try to query your drive's status.
smartctl -a /dev/disk0

If your drive has SMART support disabled, you're going to see something like the following:
Robbook:~ rabarton$ smartctl -a /dev/disk0
smartctl version 5.38 [i386-apple-darwin9.2.2] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Momentus 5400.3
Device Model: ST9120822AS
Serial Number: 5LZ06WLV
Firmware Version: 3.ALB
User Capacity: 120,034,123,776 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Thu Jun 26 11:39:07 2008 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Disabled

A mandatory SMART command failed: exiting. To continue, add one or more '-T permissive' options.

4) You can see SMART support is disabled on my drive, so I need to turn it on.
smartctl --smart=on /dev/disk0

5) Now query the drive's status again.
smartctl -a /dev/disk0
Now you should see something like the following:
Robbook:~ rabarton$ smartctl -a /dev/disk0
smartctl version 5.38 [i386-apple-darwin9.2.2] Copyright (C) 2002-8 Bruce Allen
Home page is http://smartmontools.sourceforge.net/

=== START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
Model Family: Seagate Momentus 5400.3
Device Model: ST9120822AS
Serial Number: 5LZ06WLV
Firmware Version: 3.ALB
User Capacity: 120,034,123,776 bytes
Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
ATA Version is: 7
ATA Standard is: Exact ATA specification draft version not indicated
Local Time is: Thu Jun 26 11:43:35 2008 PDT
SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
SMART support is: Enabled

=== START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED

General SMART Values:
Offline data collection status: (0x82) Offline data collection activity
was completed without error.
Auto Offline Data Collection: Enabled.
Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
without error or no self-test has ever
been run.
Total time to complete Offline
data collection: ( 426) seconds.
Offline data collection
capabilities: (0x5b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
Suspend Offline collection upon new
command.
Offline surface scan supported.
Self-test supported.
No Conveyance Self-test supported.
Selective Self-test supported.
SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
power-saving mode.
Supports SMART auto save timer.
Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
No General Purpose Logging support.
Short self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 1) minutes.
Extended self-test routine
recommended polling time: ( 111) minutes.
SCT capabilities: (0x0001) SCT Status supported.

SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 10
Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x000f 114 099 006 Pre-fail Always - 0
3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0003 099 098 000 Pre-fail Always - 0
4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 094 094 020 Old_age Always - 6469
5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 100 100 036 Pre-fail Always - 0
7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x000f 076 060 030 Pre-fail Always - 42617292
9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 099 099 000 Old_age Always - 1544
10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0013 100 100 034 Pre-fail Always - 0
12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 099 099 020 Old_age Always - 1218
187 Reported_Uncorrect 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
189 High_Fly_Writes 0x003a 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
190 Airflow_Temperature_Cel 0x0022 066 053 045 Old_age Always - 34 (Lifetime Min/Max 31/34)
192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 246
193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 036 036 000 Old_age Always - 128997
194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 034 047 000 Old_age Always - 34 (0 18 0 0)
195 Hardware_ECC_Recovered 0x001a 089 060 000 Old_age Always - 112978893
197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0012 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 1
198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0010 100 100 000 Old_age Offline - 1
199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x003e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0000 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
202 TA_Increase_Count 0x0032 098 251 000 Old_age Always - 2

SMART Error Log Version: 1
No Errors Logged

SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1

SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
1 0 0 Not_testing
2 0 0 Not_testing
3 0 0 Not_testing
4 0 0 Not_testing
5 0 0 Not_testing
Selective self-test flags (0x0):
After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.

6) Lastly, search for SMART on Wikipedia to figure out what all the parameters mean so you can figure out how likely is that your drive is going to kick the bucket.

Handlebars

I was listening to the Flobot's song Handlebars this morning.  I had purchased it already without even realizing they were delivering a message. Really good song. Definitely check out the video too.

Katee Shean Representing San Jose

I just found out this morning that Katee Shean from So You Think You Can Dance is representing for San Ho!

http://www.fox.com/dance/top20_katee.htm

PicLens

You MUST try this. So incredibly cool. Thanks to Art for showing me this.

http://www.piclens.com

Enabling PHP in Apache on OSX Leopard

There is some dated information on the web I *think* because OSX 10.5 includes Apache 2 now.  So, configuration of the web server is now in /etc/apache2/http.conf instead of /etc/httpd/http.conf.

Just open up http.conf, find the line that loads php, uncomment it, and restart your web server in OSX sharing preferences.  Easy breezy.

Kernel Panics, I/O Errors, Hard Disk Failures, Oh My!

Dorothy, Tin Man, and the Lion are skipping down the yellow brick road.

All Three: "Kernel Panics, I/O Errors, Hard Disk Failures, Oh My!"
All three: "Kernel Panics, I/O Errors, Hard Disk Failures, Oh My!"
All three: "Kernel Panics, I/O Errors, Hard Disk Failures, Oh My!"

It dawned on me this morning that the frightening things of days gone by have been replaced which has severely dated The Wizard of Oz.

BlueWordsLive Raises 2nd Quarter Estimates

Today BlueWordsLive raised quarterly earning projections to $3.57 from $3.30. CEO and founder Robert Barton said "there has been significant interest in our recent blog postings and targeted advertising which is boosting our bottom line." The stock was nowhere to be found in after hours trading.

Wong Microsoft! Contd.

"If your computer has any of the pre-release (Tech Preview, Beta, or CTP) versions on it, they must be removed in the correct order BEFORE you begin installing the release version. This process is not officially supported."

This just keeps getting better. Now they're imposing an order of software removal on me. Damn you people for keeping this company in business. Damn you.

Ok, I own an xbox but I think they still lost money on my purchase.

Wrong Microsoft!

"You need to make sure that .NET Framework 2.0 is installed prior to install SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition on Windows XP Professional Edition."

No Microsoft. YOU need to make sure it is installed. How hard is a simple dependency analysis?

Double Click iPhone Home Button == iPod Control

I just discovered that if my iPhone screen is off, I can still control the iPod functionality by double clicking the home button which brings up iPod controls without the typical slide to unlock and opening the iPod app. Probably well known information which will become very stale on Monday.

Mercury is in Retrograde

I mentioned to my girlfriend this week that all the electronic gadgets in my life are misbehaving. She told me it is because Mercury is in retrograde. Then she started googling things to show me. Stupid me asked what the scientific explanation is for the problems Mercury causes. She stopped what she was doing and stared at me glaringly and said, "Are you trying to find the scientific reason behind Astrology?" At this point I realised she was talking about Astrology and I knew the correct answer to this question was most assuredly "No." Take my word gentlemen. I got it right.

So far this week the following has occurred:
1) The AppleTV could connect to my computer but would not synchronize due to what the software claimed was some ports not open on my computer. However, it magically started working a few minutes later.
2) The Tivo has crashed at least 3 times.
3) The cable company is experiencing difficulties which may have caused number 2 but I'm going to side with Mercury in retrograde.
4) My receiver has turned itself on twice. Once was at 7am this morning. Stupid Mercury waking my butt up. That just isn't funny Mercury. I never did anything to you besides ignore you because you're not very interesting. Take that lifeless planet!
5) The prototype RFID reader I'm building at work has been absolutely nuts.
6) I accidentally e-mailed the wrong person in an e-mail and the wrong person was at the other side of the wrong address? Does that make sense? Forget it.

I'm a believer now too. Mercury is in retrograde. Batten down the hatches folks.

Tennis

"I play tennis. The best thing about tennis is that no matter how good I get, I'll never get better than a wall. I played a wall once and that fucker was relentless." - Mitch Hedburg

I really wish I had the chance to see Mitch Hedburg when he was alive.

EdFred

EdFred toilet bowl cleaner really works.  It does.  EdFred shower stall and tile cleaner also really works.  I've never seen a product remove the mineral deposits on our glass shower door as easily as this.  In fact I've never been able to remove the deposits prior to using EdFred.  The hard water ring on the toilet bowl is also completely removed.

Wax and Polyurethane Don't Mix

I like to think of myself as an average to above average home improvement DIY kind of guy.  Usually I think my work turns out nice looking, relatively goof-up free, and able to withstand the test of time - until last weekend.  I decided to refinish my kitchen floors after learning that cleaning them was an exercise in futility and a wax based floor rejuvenator didn't appear to have any effect on the square foot of floor I applied it to.  My mistake was precisely this.  I applied wax to a square foot section of floor prior to refinishing.  I didn't realize the wax was being smeared around the floor on the bottom of the ridiculously fun orbital sander I rented.  Son of a bitch.  Polyurethane does *not* like wax.  I even knew this already, but I didn't think the amount I put on could cause quite so much havoc.  Now the floor has serious issues, and I think the areas where wax was smeared around will quickly degrade in appearance even further.  I need to figure out what my recovery options are.  Probably industrial strength wax remover after scraping down a few layers?  Any suggestions are appreciated.  My back is already aching just thinking about having to fix this.

How About Perfect World?

I recently just purchased some PWRD. Anyone have an opinion on this one? Seems like an interesting company to hold for a year or so.

How to Stop a Hung File Copy in OSX

This happens rarely.  In the most recent case my girlfriend was backing up her computer to mine over the wireless network.  I'm not sure what the events were after that, but I was left with a hung file copy dialog box on my machine for days.  Relaunching the Finder seems to be a safe way to get rid of it without hurting anything.  I hope.   Apple Menu -> Force Quit->Finder.  Hit relaunch.

Tenori-On Sale in US

Have you seen videos of the tenori-on? Super cool music gadget.

http://tenori-on.keyfax.com/

They just went on sale in the US for $1200.

A Terrible Lie

Hahahahaha! Hilarious. Somebody get me a bulldozer because I need to
do some excavating. The great thing about golf is being able to laugh
at your friends' misfortune or your own misfortune...in this case my
own.

Inconsiderate Golfers

Unfortunately these are the kinds of friends I keep.

Incandescent Graveyard

That's what I call this photo.

Save the Coca-Cola Commercials

As we can all imagine without polar bears there would be no holiday Coca-Cola commercials.

I've signed the We Campaign's petition to put polar bears on the federal Endangered Species list. Will you join me?

Just go to:http://www.wecansolveit.org/page/s/polarbears

Thanks!

Tesla Roadster is in Production

I saw an earlier prototype of the Tesla Roadster at a meeting of the Bay Area EV club and since then I've kept my fingers crossed in hopes that it would actually hit the market.

It did!

Here is a clip of Jay Leno test driving production unit number one.

Nice Work PA Semi

The story is all over the web.  Apple announced their purchase of PA Semi for $278 million today.   I know a lot of people who work there.  Congratulations Bill, Luka, Brian, Fatty Patty, Greg and Jim.  I hope the payouts for you guys are enormous.

Now, what the heck is Apple going to do with you?  You better tell me.

Griffin iTrip AutoPilot for iPhone

Just thought I would let anyone who cares know that the Griffin iTrip AutoPilot barely works in my Honda Civic.  Maybe this is due to the position of my car stereo's antenna which may be built in to the rear window glass, but I'm not really sure.

The AutoPilot for iPhone sports Griffin's "SmartScan" technology which as far as I can tell randomly picks a station regardless if someone is or isn't broadcasting on it.  Very smart.

The sound quality when I could actually hear this thing was terrible.  So smart.

This product comes highly recommended for use as a lesson in how not to build a product.

Passenger Airplane Efficiency

A friend and I were wondering about the efficiency of traveling by passenger airplane.  Again a Wikipedia article comes through and says somewhere around 49 mpg per passenger back in 1998 but efficiencies have been improving since then.  I wonder if that includes the ridiculously long times the airplanes sit at the gate or taxi around with their jet engines on.  Hopefully Airbus and Boeing will be able to license Toyota's hybrid synergy drive so people can feel good about themselves as the electric motors take over while taxiing at the airports.  Then everyone in the cabin would be talking about how they can't even tell the airplane is on.

Dreyer's Mint Karaoke Cookie

Dreyer's has some trial ice cream flavors on the market right now.  They're all made with their slow churned process and are lower fat than the regular flavors.  Today I tried the Mint Karaoke Cookie flavor and its by far the best flavor they have on the market right now.  Its even better than French Silk.  True.

The choice for their new flavor is being put to a public vote, so if you have the time please surf on over to www.slowchurned.com and help make sure Mint Karaoke Cookie is around for the long run.  I need it.

Problems with AVIs in Quicktime

I just spent a good hour trying to get AVI files to play on my Macbook with Leopard.  At first I saw nothing but white screens when opening the files in Quicktime.  After installing a few Quicktime components including Perian and the DivX component, I could see a rendered video frame but trying to play the movie would cause Quicktime to crash.

Others have had the same problem over at the Apple discussion boards.

I assumed that it was some conflicting playback components, so I removed playback components until I was able to playback the video.  Here's what I left in my Quicktime components directory:

The ones I removed:

I can playback the AVIs from my Casio Exilim now.  I have no idea what the problem was but if you know please do tell.  I hope and doubt that removing the EyeTV component was necessary since the AVI file was encoded with mpeg-4, but I really don't know.

Is it just me or does this Quicktime component plug-in mess seem....messy.

Mad Cow Disease in America

I learned today that a person only a few degrees of separation away from myself recently passed due to mad cow disease (vCJD).  My heart goes out to friends and family.  This person fought the disease for years never having been diagnosed with the illness until the autopsy took place.  This peaked my curiosity and I did a little reading which lead to some alarming realizations:

1) Testing of cows in the U.S. is far more relaxed than many other countries.  This Wikipedia article claims there are a large number of countries with import restrictions on meat exported FROM the U.S. due to the lack of thorough testing HERE!

2) In the U.S. hospitals and physicians are not required to report mad cow deaths.  

Why is U.S. mad cow testing not up to par with our neighbors to the point where they're worried about eating the meat we ship them?

The Wikipedia article claims only 3 knows vCJD cases in the U.S.  Maybe I should modify the article and bump that number up to 4?  Now I'm not one for conspiracy theories.  I typically fall in the camp that suggests a large organization doesn't know the left hand from the right hand and therefore things like mad cow testing and accurate reporting of mad cow related deaths might need improvement, but then again there is an awfully large sum of money involved.  I think we're all aware of the nice things people do for money.

I Caught Another Bug

This one is awesome.  He looks like a small bird with owl eyes.  This time I didn't need no stinking non-responsive entomologist to identify him.  He's a White-Lined Sphinx moth, often mistaken for a hummingbird.  Now that's a cool bug.  Props to my lady for letting me know this guy was hanging around in the garage.  This pretty much made my day.

Now THAT'S a Solar Array

Check out the solar array on this covered parking lot. This school is going to be generating electricity for themselves and probably half of San Jose.

Tankless Water Heaters

Today I learned that tankless water heaters for homes are real.

The reason this surprises me is that I've never seen one. I watched a video on the web where the guy claimed these things are new technology, however a person from Spain left a comment saying he has never seen a water heater with a tank.

Great.

So why the hell am I keeping a giant tank of water hot 24/7 when I use hot water once a day for about 10-15 minutes? Why has Spain had this supposed "cutting edge" technology for years while we here in the US go to work and earn money to have it disappear into the ether above our idle water heater tanks?

Lastly, why couldn't I have heard about this 3 months earlier when the Federal tax break of $300 would still apply to this type of appliance purchase bringing the hardware cost down to about $400 for a beautiful Bosch tankless gas heater.

B-boy Cico

I'm not a b-boy or anything but I can certainly appreciate it. This video blows my mind.

EPA's New Automobile Efficiency Ratings

My friend and I keep bringing up the topic of the EPA's new automobile efficiency ratings which were revised for 2008. Neither of us knew what the new standards are or why they were put in place, so I said I would do a little research and sum it up.

Why: People aren't achieving the kinds of fuel efficiencies the cars were advertised to be capable of.

What changed: They added some tougher tests. One of the new test includes operation of the vehicle in a cold climate. One includes operational efficiency with the air conditioner on, and the third includes faster acceleration, higher speeds, and harder braking.

The results are supposed to be efficiency ratings more in line with reality.

My one complaint about the new ratings is it seems like merging the results together might not be the best for the consumer. If I live in Alaska I really don't care if the air conditioner kills my efficiency. If I live in Hawaii I shouldn't be too concerned about how inefficient the engine is in cold weather climates, right? Maybe combining these efficiency tests in to a highway and city rating is a bit of an over simplification.

Here are my sources:
http://www.earthcars.com/articles/article.htm?articleId=6

http://www.fueleconomy.gov/feg/findacar.htm

Iogear Bluetooth Serial Port Adapter Gotchas (GBS301)

I've had some time to play with Iogear's Bluetooth serial port adapter, the GBS301. It looks like a bunch of people on the web have had a few issues with this thing. The documentation is a little concise shall we say? Two big gotchas with these adapters I found are:

1) If your serial port peripheral that you're working with doesn't use hardware flow control, meaning the RTS and CTS pings are not used by the device the bluetooth adapter won't work as is. A work around is to tie the RTS pin to the CTS pin. This tells the bluetooth adapter that your peripheral device is always ready to receive data.

2) For my revision of these adapters, after the adapter was paired, if I wanted to repair with a different device I had to go in to the firmware menu and select the menu option which resets the firmware to factory state. Isn't that nice.

Do ALL bluetooth devices suck?

Unidentified Citrus Pest

Today I was busy protecting my Lime tree from some really nasty looking pests all in the name of fresh Limes for Mojitos. I took a picture of a really nimble one and haven't been able to identify it yet. I definitely had some Cottony Cushion Scale on the tree too which was also extremely disgusting. Looks like it's time to get out the spray bottle with soapy water. I solicited some help from an entomologist and I'll let you all know what it is as soon as I find out because I know how much you care.

Straight From my iPhone?

I remember when my friend and I thought we were so cool because we
started a web site where people could post things straight from their
mobile phones. Good use of our time, huh Eric? We could have spent
that time blowing up more soda bottles with dry ice.

Anyhoo, here's a picture of my girl and I carving up the slopes with
our asses.

What the Hell Are They Doing Over at Tivo?

Don't get me wrong, my Tivo is nice but would it really hurt them to rearrange the interface a bit so it's actually intuitive? The menu structure looks like it was designed by a bunch of monkeys playing with those stupid refrigerator word magnets.

Ok, those magnets aren't stupid, but honestly Tivo, how about you update the interface for your HD Tivo so that it actually looks NICE on an HDTV? What the hell are your engineers doing? Oh right, they're watching Tivos.

Honestly Tivo, you need to innovate faster. Stay ahead of Apple while you can. With your current product, if Apple decides to ship a PVR, they'll eat you alive.

Also you should really stop shipping beta hardware and software. One of these days you're going to let a piece of hardware out the door that you can't fix with a convenient firmware upgrade. Meanwhile I hope you're working on a firmware fix that will prevent my box from crashing right before Lost comes on because there aren't too many things in this world that can piss me off more than that.

JabbaWockeez!

JabbaWockeez "absolutely smashed it."  Crowned America's Best Dance Crew tonight, they were my favorite since they made a crew member fly.  You know what I'm talking about if you saw the season.  I just don't think they'll ever be topped.

Below was their audition.  It only got better as the show went on.  Long live the Wockeez.  This crew is incredible.

My iPhone Bluetooth Headset Bites It

The reviews were average but I bought it anyway.   Performance was as I expected based on the reviews; not as good as some other bluetooth headsets, but so nicely integrated with the iPhone.   I was willing to sacrifice a bit of performance for the nice integration.  Now the range of the earpiece has dropped to about 1 foot.  It seems like Apple is over extending themselves a bit these days, and I say this as an investor.  Good thing nobody reads this blog.

Excuse me while I waste two hours searching for a receipt.

David Cook's Chris Cornell's Version of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean

If you're not an American Idol fan, you missed out last night. David Cook performed Chris Cornell's version of Michael Jackson's Billy Jean. This kid is smart and while all the girlies have the hots for David Archuleta, they reluctantly have to admit that Cook schooled him last night. Not even a contest.

Bristle Bot

This is the coolest simple project I've seen in a long time.

Oh it's on..or its on? What ever.

I don't know what its/it's to use and I still put double spaces in between sentences so I don't clog up or munge letters from my typewriter, but that's not going to stop me. The Best Blog in the Whole World is live. You better believe it bloggers. You're going to be so busy reading MY blog that you won't even have time for yours.

I bet you I can write one post every week - for a whole year. Want to place bets?