If I’ve been scarce and frantic for the last few months, you now know why:

Yahoo! Tech

It’s been a long time since I started looking for people to help build this. We’ve been working very hard to create a different kind of tech site, one that’s NOT for people like me, but for the average person who uses gadgets.

The site might be a result of an explosion at the web 2.0 factory, but it also totally accessable and usable on screen readers and cell phones. Heck, I even fired up lynx and the site works fine, thanks to Ted.

Check out some of the press. I’m going to see if I sleep off the stress headache I’ve had for the last week. Tomorrow should be even more interesting as the world discovers the site.

I’ve finally caught up to the current episode of ‘Lost’.

What’s the big deal with watching 40+ hours of television? I did most of it while running. I decided if I was going to keep myself interested in running then I better have something good to entertain me. I downloaded all the episodes and watched them on my Mac as I ran every morning.

That’s 40 episodes x 3 miles = 120 miles of running while watching Lost. Not bad. I think I’ve even lost 5 pounds. Now I’m gonna have to wait a week to watch each episode like the rest you.

Lost does a good job of keeping my attention off the clock while running. Now I just have one question:

What’s the deal with the magnets/polar bears/Walt/Others/hatch/food drops/Ethan/numbers/black rock/Dominic/Libby/map/incident/monster/black smoke/french woman?

I’m seeing this end up like the X-files where every episode answers a question and asks 10 more until it’s cancelled and they ‘explain’ everything. By then you don’t really care.

Up next: 24. I’ve heard good things about it, but never seen it. Season 1 starts playing on the treadmill next week.

In the 80’s, HBO would fill up the time between movies by running short films. One I remember well was All Summer in a Day. It’s the story of a class of schoolchildren on Venus. It rains all day every day there. One day the Sun comes out for an afternoon. The flowers bloom, the kids run out and play and then it goes back to raining again.

That’s how I’ve been feeling about the weather in the Bay Area lately. It’s been raining every day. We even got rained out of hike last weekend. And I thought I moved out of Seattle 7 years ago!

The forecast calls for actual sun this weekend. I’m looking forward to it. Let’s hope it lasts more than 2 hours.

WordPress (the software that runs this blog) was recently upgraded to fix some security issues. I loathe updating WordPress because it’s such a manual process. Copy this here, check that, download this, blah blah blah. It doesn’t help that the instructions are mostly written for people who only have FTP access to their web hosting accounts.

I was sufficiently annoyed today to write a script for the power user to upgrade wordpress. I successfully upgraded from 2.0 to 2.0.2 with it, but I don’t guarantee that I won’t blow up someone else’s blog when used.

echo "you disabled all plugins, right?"

rm -f wpbackup.tgz
rm -f latest.tar.gz
rm -rf wptmp

echo "enter mysql password"
mysqldump --add-drop-table -u boulter -p wordpress > wordpress/wordpress.sql
tar -cpzvf wpbackup.tgz wordpress/
# just in case we really break things, we have a full backup
cp wpbackup.tgz wpbackup`date +%Y%m%d%H%M%S`.tgz

mkdir wptmp
cd wordpress
cp wp-config.php .htaccess ../wptmp
cp -R wp-content ../wptmp

# extra directories I use
cp -R archives ../wptmp
cp -R maillist ../wptmp

cd ..
rm -rf wptmp/wp-content/cache

wget http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz

rm -rf wordpress
tar -xzpvf latest.tar.gz
cp wptmp/.htaccess wordpress/
cp -R wptmp/* wordpress/
rm -rf wptmp

echo "now go upgrade at wp-admin/upgrade.php"

I feel better now.

This is from an internal Oracle tool at work.

Break the user’s back button and then blame them for using it with a big red Error message. Nice.

It was another early start. We had to be ready to be off the boat by 8 am and they started blaring over the intercom earlier than that to make sure everyone was up. After a few last bites in the cafe, they called our color and we headed off the ship.

The port was a frenzy of cab drivers and tour bus operators. We almost took a tour bus to the airport and then we learned that there would be a few other stops on the way. No thanks, we escaped into a cab.

At the airport we said goodbye to my family and then waited for our flight for 3 hours.

I’d like to nominate Miami International Airport as the least traveler-friendly airport. There’s almost nothing to eat inside the terminal. Dying to get some power before the flight, we walked up and down the new section of the terminal and found no working power plugs. We ended up sitting on the floor near a smokers’ room. On the way in, I swear we walked a whole mile from the terminal to the baggage claim. They’ve cluttered up the hallway with all kinds of little vendors so it’s impossible to get around.

While we walked around we saw lots of people, especially on flights to Mexico, wrapping their bags in plastic. Very strange. I guess it’s to protect the bag from airline damage and prevent people from shoving drugs in them?

The flight was direct and uneventful. Our friend Tom picked us up and delivered us home.

As soon as we opened the door we knew something was wrong. It stank – badly. The cats’ litterbox was filthy and they seemed to have started just going around it, not in it. They were completely out of food. Their water bowl was dry as well. What the hell happened to the cat sitting service I set up?

After tending to the cats and apologizing to them, I investigated. Before I made an angry phone call, I decided to check my email and see what dates the pet sitter was supposed to come. Oops. I had given them the wrong week. They were coming the last week BEFORE our vacation, i.e. during the day when we were at work. The last day they came was the day after we left, which means they were alone for 8 days. I felt terrible. I think they kept each other company though so they weren’t too upset. They didn’t seem to be starving either; when I refilled their food they didn’t run to it. Apparently they had discovered water in the toilet bowl and were drinking that. While they were nervous for a few days afterwards, worrying that we would leave again, they seemed to have suffered no long-term effects.

I readjusted back to the time change relatively easily. Anne not so much. For a few days, we were both feeling like things were still rocking slightly back and forth.

All in all it was a great trip and a relaxing way to see a lot of places. I’m looking forward to another one some day.

For more, check out the full photo set on flickr.

Our digital camera is quite old. It has only a 1.3 megapixel sensor, takes FOUR AAs, and uses SmartMedia. You often have to blow on the card to get it to work. Compared to current cameras, it’s huge and heavy.

It’s one of those pieces of technology we know we need to upgrade, but we didn’t have a good reason to buy one for a specific occasion or agreement on what we should get.

I’ve been partial to the Casio Exlim line and the popular Canon PowerShot Elph. Both are ridiculously small, which means you’re more likely to bring it with you. A digital camera you left in the car doesn’t take great pictures. I also liked that they started up quickly and had nice LCDs that allow you to legitimately view pictures on it.

My biggest problem with these cameras was that they used proprietary rechargable batteries. I use my Powerex recharger religiously. I like to know that if I run out of juice I can grab a few other rechargables I’ve charged or in the worst case swap them out from another device.

Anne was really concerned about zoom. Since digital zoom is useless, optical zoom was what she wanted. Most small camera max out at 3x. Some slightly larger ones go to 4x. She wanted more like 8-10x. Those cameras are way bigger. (She also preferred cameras that had a bit more to grip, so this was a positive in her opinion.) I just didn’t see myself carrying it around and using it. We’re not even amateur photographers and I had no idea what we’d be taking pictures of that was so far away…

We looked at cameras at Costco or wherever else we came across them but always left in a size v. zoom stalemate.

Then something unexpected happened. At Christmas Anne’s mom gave us a Canon PowerShot SD450. We hadn’t asked for one or even discussed it with her in my recollection. The SD450 is a 5 megapixel camera with a 3x zoom and 2.5 in screen. It’s tiny.

You’d think that this would be the end of it, but it wasn’t. The camera favored my preferences, so it was up to Anne to decide whether or not to keep it. We left the box sealed and brought it back home to California. We unpacked our suitcases and put the still unopened camera box on the kitchen counter. And there it sat. Days went by. We didn’t speak of it.

One night we decided to go look at cameras at Best Buy to see if we could decide to exhange or keep the one we had. It also gave us a chance to visit the new Best Buy in Sunnyvale. The store was a mini-Best Buy and didn’t have a lot of cameras. That didn’t prevent us from spending an hour trying them all out and yet leaving no closer to a decision. We stopped by Circuit City too on the way home and saw a greater selection. Still no decision.

Weeks went by and the camera box began collecting dust on the counter. One night in late January I brought up the subject again and Anne said she had actually decided a while ago to keep it. Finally! A new gadget to play with!

I took it out turned it on, and tried to get the cats to stand still long enough to be test subjects. It was a nice camera.

Though it was far from a sure thing, the gift turned out to be less about a camera than a decision about a camera. The decision turned out to be a good one.

That decision was not ratified until this vacation when we used it a lot. Anne took a couple hundred pictures and appreciated the small size very much. We took it everywhere, which is exactly what I hoped for.

No camera is perfect though. My issues are all related to batteries. The battery is a little thing, but you can’t replace it with any type of standard battery. The charger is a little plate that plugs into the wall. I’d prefer to have a tip to use with my iGo universal charger, but they don’t make one. More annoying is that you have to take the battery out to charge it. You can’t just plug in the camera or let it charge over USB while plugged into a computer. Worst is that there doesn’t appear to be a way to check the power left in the battery, so you have to guess when the battery needs to be charged, lest you find out halfway through the day that it’s dead. This problem manifested itself when Anne complained that I was wasting the battery when viewing some of the pictures I just took. It seems the only way around this is to buy a second battery and keep it charged too. That’s annoying.

On the last day of the cruise I spent some time collecting all the pictures my sister and my parents had taken and copying them to all our laptops. Anne took most of our pictures and the numbered more than triple the others had taken combined. That’s a good measure of success.

The rest of the day was spent lounging and taking in a few activities. The captain’s talk was interesting. The guy who does the ice sculptures did a demonstration. At dinner we celebrated Anne’s birthday a week early. At the final evening show I was conned into going on stage to particiate in a paper airplane competition. Despite my innovative tailfin, my plane crashed badly. My lovely parting gift was a keychain.

Some of the show cast started bawling onstage during their performance. Apparently for many of them their 8 month contract was over. Yeah, I’d be crying for joy – that I finally got to get off the ship.

Anne redeemed the Ship Shape dollars we collected for a free t-shirt and visor. We ate more food and ice cream. It was good to have a lazy transition day before a day of travel home.

Grand Cayman was a scheduled “Jeff and Anne” adventure day. That means that we rent a car and try to see as much of the island as possible. Strangely, after Aruba, none of my family wanted to join us. 🙂

The big issue in Grand Cayman was going to be driving on the left side of the road. Anne said she would do it, but I decided I’d rather drive. A few days before were discussing this while walking around the ship and Anne made a comment about them driving on the “wrong” side of the road. A woman with a British accent immediately spoke up and said WE drove on the “wrong” side of the road. We enjoyed the laugh.

We got up early and got ready to go. We were second in line to get off the boat and take the tender boat to the dock. Once there we got some directions from the information lady about where we should go to call Avis to pick up the car. We took a short walk over and found that the place she suggested wasn’t open yet. Anne was determined though and went into a nearby shop and asked if she could use their phone. A few minutes later the Avis van arrived and we went over to their offices. We ended up getting this tiny little half-car, but it suited our needs.

We used the island’s caches as targets and drove pretty much the entire island. The first stop was The Caves of the Lost Pirate’s Booty. It was only a third of a mile from the road, but it turned out to be way more challenging than expected. First there was barely any trail and it was lined with thorny bushes on both sides. We lost the trail a few times and it was hot. What we found when we arrived was rewarding though. It was a set of huge caves, both with tree roots dripping over the front. There was supposedly a cache inside, but after crawling around in bat guano for a half hour we gave up. By the time we reached the car our legs were all cut up and they stayed rashy for a few days. Fun times.

We wanted to go check out Stingray City, a sandbar where tame stingrays hang out and allow you to feed and play with them. We ran out of time, but the rest of my family did a tour that included it and I made a copy of the video they bought of them.

(there’s no sound in the video)

The rest of the day was far less aggressive and enjoyable. We drove through the island’s only national park, which was basically a bunch of dirt roads by the water. We went the post office from Hell.

Overall, Grand Cayman is a picturesque island with white sandy beaches – pretty much what you imagine when you think of a Carribean island. Clearly they were still recovering from hurricane Ivan. We saw lots of trees with no tops and houses with no roofs. Many of the houses were for sale.

At the end of the day we finally put our snorkeleing equipment to use. The waters in the Devil’s Grotto were ok. Most of the coral was dead. I think we are just way too spoiled from when we went snorkeling in Fiji. It was far less populated there and the fish and coral were colorful and abundant.

The last boat back to the ship left at 5. We were on it, and we didn’t get there until a few minutes before it left. First ones off, last ones on. It was another exhausting but fun day, our last day in port before we returned to Miami.

I really like the balance of days doing nothing at sea and crazy adventures when at port. After two days of crazy adventures, I appreciated sleeping in and doing nothing. I found a slot machine that wasn’t completely surrounded with smoke and said goodbye to $20. Big gambler, I am.

Spending another day at sea really drives home the idea that ship travel is not an efficient way to get around. Your top speed is about 25 mph, making a quick plane ride the equivalent whole day sailing. The ship burns about a gallon of fuel for every 40 FEET. That’s pretty terrible gas mileage. Then again, we’re massively carpooling.

The most challenging part of the day was trying to run on a treadmill on a moving ship. I literally stepped off a few time and fell off the back of the treadmill. It hurt both my sides and my ego.

We ran partially because the guilt finally hit us from all the food we were eating. On one of these ships you can pretty much look in any direction and see what you’ll look like if you don’t exercise. That’s a pretty good motivator. 😀 When I got home, I got back on my running regimen as well. If I fall off the treadmill at home, I’ll have to blame an earthquake.

Day 8 was another early start. We assembed in a lounge until our group was cleared to leave. The destination was the Crazy Monkey Canopy Tour. I’m not sure how Anne convinced me to sign up for this weeks ago, but it sounded fun at the time. Since then I just felt nervous about the zip line and the 1.5 hour drive through Costa Rica to the tour.

My family decided they weren’t that adventurous and did a tram tour somewhere else. We boarded a bus and a tour driver told us about Costa Rica while we drove down the coast from Puerto Limon. The road itself was “interesting”. Much of it was dirt, with a LOT of potholes. Apparently this is typical of Costa Rica, especially on the less populated Eastern side.

The tour guide proudly told us about how Costa Rica was the world’s largest pineapple exporter. That was pretty funny since the tour guide from Panama told us yesterday that Panama was the world’s largest pineapple exporter and not to believe the Costa Ricans if they say otherwise!

We arrived at the Almonds and Corals resort after almost a 2 hour drive and quickly got ready. They fit us with climbing harnesses and marched us up to the tour start. The whole thing turned out to be very tame and not scary at all. You were always secured with a few lines, even walking up stairs to the various platforms. It was surprising how loud the lines were.

Zipping along was not very fast, and felt very secure. It was a cool experience though and something that I may never have the chance to do again. The end of the 12 platforms put us at a beautiful beach.

Anne had a few opportunities to bust out her Spanish with the tour driver and the guys manning the zip lines. It’s still amazing to hear her switch it on. She must find it annoying everytime I ask her “what did they say?”

They said we might see monkeys and sloths. We saw a few sloths hanging out in the trees. They weren’t that exciting. It wasn’t until the bus ride back that we saw some monkeys. The tour guide had finally shut up and someone in the back of the bus screamed “monkeys!”. The bus stopped and we saw a few howelers just hanging out in the trees next to the road.

Soon after the potholes rocked me to sleep and I was out for most of the rest of the ride. We had really hoped to take a second tour to the Tortuguero Canals, but we got back to the port 15 minutes too late. Anne was bummed, but it gave us a chance to relax and walk around Puerto Limon for a bit. At least we got our money back for the tour we bought.