Small pictures, but pictures nonetheless. Nice job, Tony!
Mercury Completed
I’m still playing my PSP and trying to stick to one game at a time. It took me a few months, but I’ve finally completed Mercury, a surprisingly addictive puzzle game. I probably tried the last few levels 50 times before I finally finished them. I don’t see myself playing this cache for old times’ sake, so would anyone like to trade?
Now I’ve got to get good at ATV Offroad Fury so I can challenge some folks at work. Right now I’m still laughing at myself everytime I run into a wall and throw myself off the ATV.
How to know when your music tastes are old
On Wednesday night, Anne and I went to a concert. There I felt like our musical tastes were getting old. Here were the signs:
– It wasn’t at a club downtown, but an estate in the hills.
– They only served wine, not beer.
– The event was sponsored by Lexus, not Red Bull.
– The only people younger than us were a few ushers.
– I heard a conversation that went like this:
Middle-aged woman 1: What song does Suzanne Vega sing?
Middle-aged woman 2: I think it’s that “What I Am is What I Am” song.
[‘What I Am’ was by Edie Brickell and the New Bohemians]
Middle-aged woman 1: No, I don’t think that’s it. That’s by Boy Meets Girl
[Uhh, wrong. Boy Meets Girl’s only hit was the the colossally cheesy “Waiting for a Star to Fall” ]
Middle-aged woman 2: I’m 98% sure, she had a #1 hit with it. It’s “What I Am is What I Am is What You Are”
[Still wrong. “Luka” is Suzanne Vega’s most recognizable song and it only ever reached #3]
(Middle-aged women go back to talking about their kids)
– And another like this:
Middle-aged guy 1: I recently rediscovered Aimee Mann.
Middle-aged guy 2: Oh yeah?
Middle-aged guy 1: Yeah, I liked her new album. I can’t remember what it’s called…. “Astronaut Something”…
[It’s called “Lost in Space” and was released 3 years ago]
Anyway, we went to see Suzanne Vega and Marc Cohn at Villa Montalvo or rather I want to see Suzanne Vega and Anne went to see Marc Cohn. Suzanne Vega was cool. Most of her songs were palatable the audience except for “Blood Makes Noise” which she apologized for after she sang it. Marc Cohn really only played stuff that was 10 years old, but it wasn’t bad.
Montalvo is a cool venue – very small. They actually had the power go out at 4 pm for a 7:30 pm concert and had to scramble to get some generators in to power everything. I’m amazed they didn’t have to cancel.
One thing I noticed was that for some reason anything a performer says on stage is deemed hilarous. Both of them said some normal-sounding stuff and people just bursted out laughing. Perhaps I missed the jokes.
It was a good excuse to get out of the house for a night though and socialize with the old folks. 🙂
Using your Treo 650 to dial extensions
One poorly-documented feature of the Treo 650 is setting it up to dial extensions after the main number.
I use this to dial into a conference call which requires a 10 digit passcode I never want to have to remember. You can also use it to quickly send a page a to numeric pagers. Trying to dial these long sequences while driving could be fatal.
Strangely you cannot do this in the regular contact list. You have to use a favorites button (that grid that pops up from the main phone screen).
Here’s how to set one up:
- From the phone, navigate to an empty favorites button using the navigation pad.
- Hit the menu button then hit the E key to edit the button.
- Make sure the type is Speed Dial and enter a Label like “Conference Call”
- Enter the main number
- Click the “More” button
- In the Extra Digits box, start by entering a bunch of commas, probably at least 7. Each comma will wait for one second before dialing the digits that follow it. You can also use # and *.
- Check “Dial Extra Digits Automatically”
- Click OK and OK again.
- Try dialing your new Speed Dial button.
It may take a few tries to get the number of commas right. You can listen in as it dials to determine if you’ve got too many or too little.
Anyway, it’s a handy little feature that I use quite a bit.
A Complete Game
Yesterday I pitched my first ever complete game at Yahoo. Not that this has anything to do with baseball – I just completed 9 straight back-to-back meetings. This must mean I’ve finally “made it” as a manager.
From 8:30 am to 4:30 pm I shuffled from conference room to conference room. Here’s a few simple tips for getting your own complete game:
* Make sure you’re double or triple-booked throughout the day. My game was almost ruined by the inevitable couple of meetings that were cancelled.
* Be on the lookout for “spontaneous meetings.” Sometimes you might just be in the right place in the right time and find out you’re “needed”.
* Have your laptop with you and on at all times. This not only makes it easier for people to find you to invite you to spontaneous meetings, but also dismisses any inkling to head back to your desk. Sadly, sometimes I think I get more done sitting in a hallway waiting for a meeting to start than I do at my desk.
A few months ago I pulled out the DVD drive in my laptop and and replaced with an extra battery. That lets me go at least 5 hours straight. It’s a bad sign when I need to go get my power cord in the middle of the day.
The amazing thing was that when I finally arrived at my desk at 4:30, I was completely caught up on email and I had actually written and deployed some code. That’s the miracle of wifi and a bunch of meetings where I was seeing the same presentation I’ve already seen several times before.
Considering the space crunch we’ve had at work of late, perhaps I should start renting out my cube. Here’s the ad:
Full-size cube, next to window. Power, docking station, 20in LCD, ample desk space. Free parking nearby (before 11 am). Hardly used.
Pizza: Day 5
Can man live on pizza alone? Probably not, but it sure makes for a tasty meal.
This is day 5 for me of eating pizza at least once per day.
Saturday: Huge “family-sized” Grilled Chicken and Bacon Stuffed Pizza from Papa Murphy’s.
Sunday: DiGiornio at Todd‘s and Chris’s
Monday: Todd orders pizza for a lunch meeting, Papa Murphy’s leftovers for dinner
Tuesday: Slice of Papa Murphy’s with some other leftovers.
Wednesday: Last of the Papa Murphy’s.
I’m going for a week of pizza. I have to remember to grab some at lunch tomorrow since I’m out at home now.
Mostly pizza is good because it’s really easy. Eating is always such a chore. So much work for 20 minutes of “reward” and you have to do it all over again every day. Give me a meal in a pill and I’ll be happy. I have too many other fun things to do to be bothered with basic human functions.
ASCII art reborn
It’s been a while since I’ve seen some good ASCII art, but I just got this spam.
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Brilliant! Those spam filters are going to have to get a lot smarter.
The Second Best Thing Since Sliced Bread
Yesterday, PocketTunes 3.1 was released, adding support for Windows DRM. The net of this is that I now have a device that can play unlimited downloaded tracks from Yahoo! Music Unlimited – my Treo 650!
Some pros and cons over my iPod:
Con: Tranfers through USB are slow. I need to see if I can just pop out my SD card and transfer them directly.
Pro: Unlimited, legal music!
Con: My 1GB SD card is a tad smaller than my 40GB iPod. Then again, it takes quite a long time to listen to 1GB of music and I always listen on shuffle, so does it really matter?
Pro: No additional device to carry around
I didn’t quite understand at first that you had to run PocketTunes while it’s connected to your computer for it to show up in YME as a device. I also haven’t figured out how to have YME autofill my device with 1GB of random music. I don’t want to have to select and size a random set of music to put on my Treo. Previously I did this off my MP3 collection with a small perl script that kept selecting random tracks until it got to a certain size. Perhaps it’s time for me to write a new YME Plugin.
My iPod is now almost permanently stationed in my living room as the living room music player. It’s connected to my stereo which works quite well. But I think it’s getting lonely.
The Worst Song You Love
I’m hanging out with Chris and Todd and we’re discussing the worst songs we love. Of course you can’t tell which one is your worst song, someone else has to tell you it’s bad.
Todd:
Color Me Badd – All 4 Love
Chris:
Phish – Bouncing Around the Room
Me:
Cher – Believe
Hey at least Cher had a pretty good career compared to the others, especially Todd’s.
We thought about trying to figure out Anne’s worst song but then decided they were all equally bad!
So what’s the worst song you love?
Coordinate Maps
Until recently, good interactive maps were something you could only get from desktop software like Streets and Trips or MapSource.
When Google Maps came out, it was quickly hacked for use on other websites. I didn’t think this would last, but when I did, I started playing with it myself. And then even more surprisingly, they opened up their API for everyone to use.
The utility here it to simply share some geographic data, plotting custom points on a map that they can look and and really understand where things are and how far apart they are – without installing CDROMs full of map data and deciding amongst a bazillion different mapping formats.
I’ve got my implementation in a good state now and I’m opening it up for others to play with.
My Coordinate Maps allow you to plot all kinds of data:
- A single point
- Points from the Geocache GCNHFG
- Aquariums of the World found by Geocachers
- Disney Benchmarks (dynamically scraped from this page)
- Some Geocaches in the San Francisco Bay Area from a GPX file
And there are number of not-so obvious features:
- Click a point for more info about it.
- Click and drag the map to move it around.
- You can use arrow keys, +, -, page up, page down for navigation
- GPX files of Geocaches will display with custom icons.
- GPX files can be uploaded in .zip format so they will load faster.
It gets kinda slow when you start trying to display hundreds of points, but it’s good up to a thousand or so. Check it out.