blindsquirrel.org

I’ve owned a 2007 VW Passat for the last 10 months that typically gets anywhere from 350-370 miles on a tank of gas.  With gas prices getting higher and higher I decided to try to drive a little more “gently,” meaning less aggressive starts at lights and stop signs, a little slower on the interstate, etc.

Well, I had to fill up for the first time since trying this new method and I had driven 450 miles.  Not too shabby for making such a small change to how I drive.  That translates to less stops at the gas station, which translates to less money coming out of my pocket for gas.  That’s a good thing.

First, Colorado Springs is absolutely beautiful.  I’m out here for an HP Executive Briefing that went very, very well and the place is just amazing.  We’ve definitely added this place to our short list for future vacations.  I wish I had brought a decent camera as the one on my Treo700wx is as close to garbage as one can get.

Second, after sitting on a conference call for 90 minutes with a Treo that just kept getting hotter and hotter glued to my head, I finally broke down and purchased a decent bluetooth headset.  I picked up the Jawbone at the Palm store at the Pittsburgh airport of all places.  I know what you’re thinking, but their prices were actually better than the Apple store and they sell ones that are already charged.  Nice perk.  I picked up the black model.  The noise canceling seems really good and I can hear really well with this thing instead of the straining I used to do to hear from some of the others I have purchased over the years.  Hopefully this one is a winner.

Third, if you use VMWare Fusion, make sure to check out the update that came out tonight.  No problems with it so far, although anymore I tend to only fire up my WindowsXP VMWare guest to perform anti virus and Windows patch updates.

Fourth, are you running Firefox version 3 beta 5 yet?  If not, you should take a few minutes and check it out as the performance is excellent and it is very close to becoming my main browser, although Webkit has yet to let me down.  Very impressive release so far.  I think I heard the final release comes out in June.  Pick your operating system and try it out.

Fifth, I’m finding it harder and harder to avoid the iPhone as I am finding it harder and harder to find free WiFi where I need it.  The iPod Touch I use for so many things is nice when I have connectivity, but I almost wish I could have an iPhone with just the data plan.  I don’t really need the phone piece as work gives me a Treo that I have to have with me, but everything about the iPhone and iPod Touch is so much better that I can feel I will eventually break down and end up with an iPhone.  We’ll see how things look after the release of iPhone 2.0 in late June.

Lastly, I finally joined Twitter.  Why?  I don’t know, Robert Scoble told me to.  After having it for one short week I have learned that, for me, it is not a matter of being followed, but a matter of who you follow that makes it interesting.  I’m there as blindsquirrel.

That’s about it, looking forward to getting home.  I like seeing new cities, but I still can’t wait to get back home to Pittsburgh.

I noticed when shopping this weekend at Kohl’s that it is not very easy to find clothes without some kind of advertising.  TShirts all have company’s names on them: jackets, sweat suits, even some pants have names or logos on them.  So what’s the big deal?

Well, usually companies pay to advertise - magazine, billboards, movie and TV placement, etc.  Big money exchanges hands.  Yet somehow it became acceptable for us to pay for the privilege to wear someone’s logo as free advertising; often times actually paying more for that privilege.

It just seems strange to me.  How did we let this happen?

Since VMWare Fusion has worked out so well, I was finally able to get rid of the last remaining Microsoft Windows computer in our house by installing WindowsXP on our shiny 20″ iMac.  We still need Windows for Quicken since the Mac version of Quicken is not even close to the Windows verion and can’t even import all of your Quicken for Windows data.  Since we’re giving our old Dell PC away I thought I would completely wipe the hard drive, boot from the WindowsXP CD and give them a nice, clean computer to start with.

I forgot how long this process takes when starting from scratch.  I had to load WindowsXP, then I had to use another computer to find any 3Com NIC drivers that would work, then I went straight to Service Pack 2 to reduce the amount of updates needed.  SP2 took quite a while to install, especially since it forces you to backup all your system files in case it has to revert back to them.

Then I ran Windows Update.  91 updates.  Wow.  After they completed and the system rebooted, I ranWindows Update again.  10 more updates.  Rebooted.  Installed IE7.  Windows Update.  More updates.  .NET.  Windows Update.  More Updates.  Might as well grab Silverlight while I’m there.  Oh, can’t forget Adobe Reader, Flash Player, and Shockwave Player.

It looks like I’m finally finished as I am watching it go through its (hopefully) last reboot now.  No way can there be any more updates for this thing.  Total time, somewhere between 4 and 5 hours - and I have Verizon FIOS - 15Mb of glorious bandwidth delivered over fiber to our home.

So thankfully it’s over.  Maybe I’m done building WindowsXP machines now.  The machine is too old to run Windows Vista, but I know from experience that Vista SP1 took somewhere between 1-2 hours to update on a brand new Dell computer.  That’s still a long time to me.

What did you do with your Saturday?

I woke up this morning not to the sounds of my kids ripping the house apart looking for their Easter baskets, but of my 8 year old daughter standing there with a card for me.  When I opened it I was surprised to find a $5 bill!  My 8 year old gave me a card with money in it.  Cute.

He can’t be serious?  I’m still one of the folks that think his running in 2000 handed the election to the Republicans, so I’m sure they are hopeful he’ll run again.  Heck, I’ll even start the conspiracy theory and say the Republicans are probably putting him up to this since they’ll have a tough time beating Obama (sorry Hillary, I just don’t see how you can stop him now).  He ruined it for Gore so maybe he can do a repeat performance.

OK, seriously, why would he run?  He can’t possibly think people would vote for him?  What does he have to offer?  This offers nothing but confusion and disruption.  He cannot possibly win.  He should fire any handlers that are telling him anything different.

Disclaimer: remember, I know nothing about anything (but even I think this is a stupid idea)

Most people tend to think of the calendar year as January through December.  Around here we don’t use the standard calendar and instead our year goes something like this…

• New Year’s Day.  Say goodbye to our favorite foods.  Diet starts tomorrow
• Valentine’s Day - Chocolate season
• Girl Scout Cookie Season - speaks for itself
• Easter - Chocolate and peeps season
• Memorial Day - Cookout season starts
• July 4th - More Cookouts
• Labor Day - Cookout season ends
• Halloween - Candy season
• Thanksgiving - Stuff ourselves and then ease in to Christmas candy season
• Christmas - Christmas candy season
• New Year’s Eve - Parties and food

Then you start the year all over again.  Who needs a regular calendar?

I was picking up some new music for an upcoming trip when I thought I’d look at the Amazon.com MP3 Download store.  I’ve done 100% of my music purchasing on iTunes for the last few years because it is just so easy the way things are integrated with my iPods.  I was surprised to see how easy Amazon has made it not only for those of us that use iPods, but OS X itself.

Amazon provides a decent downloader that brings down the music and adds it to your iTunes library automatically.  It’s completely browser based so it’s not as seamless as iTunes, but I think it’s about as good as we’re going to get with a vanilla web browser for a while.

But the fun didn’t stop there.  I picked up 3 “albums” (is that really still a valid term?) and not only were they $2(US) cheaper per album, but they even had one that iTunes did not carry - an old Radiohead album. $7.99 for the full album definitely has my attention.  The no DRM piece is a nice bonus as well, and I’m happy to take 256k MP3 files for less money.

I think iTunes finally has a little competition here and competition should be good for the consumer.  I felt a little like I was cheating on iTunes with the first purchase.  The second click was easier, and by the third click the guilt was gone and I was just begging to get caught.

Nice job Amazon, I’ll be sure to check your store as well as iTunes when i am looking for music in the future.

While at home, I’ve done a fairly successful job of not using many Microsoft technologies for my Internet experience.  At work I’m locked in to all things Microsoft, at home I can use any technology I choose.

I use Gmail for my email, Google for my search engine, Adium for my IM client, Safari, Camino, or Firefox for my web browser, Google Reader for my news feeds, and Flikr for some of my photos.  But the most important page I hit every day is my personalized My Yahoo! page.

I’ve never been impressed with MSN.com’s pages and the new Windows Live sites don’t do much for you with an alternate browser or operating system.  I was not happy with Yahoo when they released the new version of their home page because I was so used to the old plain text look, but over time it has greatly improved, added Safari browser support, and is finally performing like the old version.

When Yahoo first released the new version I decided to try to make the move to iGoogle.  It wasn’t even close at the time.  We use the Yahoo Finance pieces a lot and Google’s instructions to import that data over to iGoogle sounded easy enough - just highlight all the data, including headers, and paste it in to the import field.  It almost never worked, and when information finally did import it never brought all the information I needed over.  Very disappointing.

So I went back to the new My Yahoo and that’s when things started getting better.  It’s become a great home page again - except for the massive ad that you can’t get rid of, but I worry that Microsoft’s influence would ruin the experience.

So I took another shot at iGoogle and was happy to see that things have improved a bit and they now have themes as well.  It is still not as nice as my My Yahoo page, but my iGoogle page is pretty darn close and I’m ready to make the switch if necessary.  After all, if Microsoft really got all the Web 2.x stuff they would never be bidding on Yahoo.

From the outside it sure looks to me like Microsoft needs Yahoo a lot more than Yahoo needs Microsoft.

Hang in there Yahoo, you can right this ship on your own.  If not, I’m sure there are better suitors out there that would make better partners.  Microsoft will take your best technologies, rebrand them, and you’ll be but a distant memory 5 years from now.

Hey, whatever happened to Excite anyway? ; p

There has been something that drives me crazy about using Safari to access Outlook Web Access for Exchange email on the iPhone or iPod Touch. Whenever I reply to a message it is always a surprise where the cursor will land and I found that if I just press in one location and move upwards the magnifying glass will popup and it will slowly scroll to the top of the message where I want to reply. The longer the email the more patience this move takes.

Then I ran across this post that discusses two-finger scrolling in Safari on the iPhone. Although it doesn’t specifically mention Outlook Web Access, it does work for what I needed.

When you reply to a message in OWA on the iPhone/iPod Touch just tap inside the message area and the keyboard will popup. Press Done and the keyboard will then go away. Now scroll in the message area using two fingers to the top of the message, tap, and the keyboard will now let you reply where you expected it to. I never knew you could scroll in a text box like that with two fingers. That should take care of Safari Mobile’s lack of scroll bars in certain text boxes.

So thank you to Brett Peters at http://nobodywantsastyl.us/ for teaching me something new, and valuable, today.