I think I spent half of my free time (when Anne is busy) deciding what to do with my free time. Usually it’s an hour or two at home at night or a half-hour in the morning. The possibilities are usually:

1. Log my Geocaching finds
2. Write some code for a website (usually Geocaching-related)
3. Solve some Geocaching puzzles
4. Think about balancing my bank accounts (I never actually do it)
5. Read a book/magazine
6. Play my PSP
7. Watch TV or a Movie
8. Fix something broken in the house
9. Fold and put away laundry
10. Play with cats (and shut them up for a few minutes)

These are the things I could do, most of which, when done, I could claim some kind of accomplishment. Instead, it’s almost always:

11. Read email/blogs/websites followed by random web surfing/searching for something stupid.

I suppose it’s one way to keep in touch with the world and keep abreast of culture/technology, but I feel like there’s so much more I could be getting done. Mostly I think it’s inertia. I sit on the couch, grab the laptop and check my email. After that I can wander aimlessly online for hours.

Perhaps I just enjoy being lazy more than getting things done.

The long-denied switch of Apple from PowerPC to Intel chips was announced today.

This will NOT be a big deal for end users. There will be an emulator, so most (all?) current apps will run on the new Intel-based machines. The biggest difference will be that the new machines will be cheaper and faster. Do you care what kind of chip is inside your TV? Nope, you care how it works. In this case it will work exactly the same. You might see an Intel logo instead of a PowerPC logo on the box, but the computers themselves will look the same as they would if they had PowerPC chips in them.

This has nothing to do with “Thinking Different” and that ad campaign was never about the processor. This is about thinking cheaper and faster, but not necessarily quieter or cooler-running as Pentiums tend to be size and heat monsters.

It will be the most work for developers, though those that already develop software for Intel chips will likely welcome it.

This is good and bad for Microsoft. Bad: Intel is hedging its bets on Apple. Good: VirtualPC will be frickin’ fast! These machines will NOT run Windows. (Until someone hacks a Mac to do it, but why would you want that? To finally have a good-looking PC?) What might be interesting is if Microsoft went the other way and started supporting PowerPC processors. They’ve already done some work for the Xbox 360.

The biggest problem I see now for Apple is who will want to buy a PowerMac now? Mine is 5 1/2 years old now and I don’t really want to buy another unless it’s Intel-based. That means I’m keeping my money for at least another year.

Long term this will be a great thing for the Mac, but change is hard.

Anne must have been feeling a bit punchy on our trip to New Orleans because she kept saying funny stuff. Here’s my favorites:

“Yummmmmmmm!”
Her single word reaction to her first beignet, before even her first bite was complete

“I’d live here it was colder.”
Ruling out the possibility of ever living here

“That’s all you need in your life – It’s you, your Treo, and that’s it.”
Intimidated by the power of my phone

“This is a really crappy highway.”
Complaning about a particularly bumpy section of “the 10” (only people from So. Cal. prefix interstate names with “the”)

“Heeeereeeee, Crocodile!”
Trying to call crocodiles out of the swamp and onto the highway so she could see one

“I’d like to go to Mississippi, Rob.”
Making an unusual request

“Because it’s so disfunctional, we’ll call it a ’roundabout'”
Settling the debate over the correct term for a ‘rotary.’ This one was disfunctional because it had traffic lights in the middle of it.

“I’m so glad my name is not ‘Rumpert'”
Displaying a distaste for street names in New Orleans

“You’re in Mississippi; people have guns here. Don’t act weird.”
Repremanding Rob for making a rude gesture at a close-following car

This time it’s not for News or Yahooligans, it’s for a new Yahoo! site focused on technology – cell phones, cameras, computers and other nerdly gadgets. Find ’em, compare ’em, buy ’em and use ’em.

If you ever wanted to play with cool toys and get in on the ground level of building an entirely new Yahoo! site, here’s your chance!

You can send resumes to me directly.

Sticky.

For Memorial Day weekend this year, we took a long weekend trip to New Orleans with our friends Rob and Eustacia. Since they’re on the east coast, we’re always tooking for opportunities to “meet the middle”. Rob was at a conference earlier in the week, so it was the perfect time.

From the moment we got off the plane, it was evident that I was in a climate that I was not accustomed to. It was hot and sticky. We got to our hotel in the French Quarter to find something strange about the carpet in our room – it was also sticky. Beer? I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know.

We wandered over to Bourbon Street a few blocks away. I didn’t know it was possible to make an entire street smell like vomit. It was fun and an interesting study in social behavior, but not the kind of place I’d hang out.

The next day we toured around and ended up having dinner at Cannon’s in the Garden District. People had told me how good the food was down here and after having a steak here, I agreed. Then again, it was my first real meal in 48 hours, so almost anything would have tasted good. Apparently it was a good day to get married; we counted ten of them just driving around.

I didn’t realize how close the states were here. On Saturday we took a drive all the way across Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama. I hadn’t been to either state before and I picked up my first caches in each state. For most of the day there was torrential rain coming down and some of the roads had inches of water. That made for some fantastic lightning storms on the way back.

One thing I don’t get about Mississippi and nearby states is the abundance of Waffle Houses. You’ll find them less than a mile apart and they don’t look that nice. Perhaps it’s the Southern equivalent of Dunkin’ Donuts.

New Orleans was fun, but I’m glad to be home. Wandering around in all that humidity made me feel, well, sticky.

Selected Photos on Flickr

Since all the Verizon folks are finally getting Treo 650s, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about must have accessories and apps for your Treo.

Here’s what I think you should go run out and buy (or download) as soon as you get yours, in descending order of importance:

Silicone Case – $20
This case adds minimal weight and size to my Treo and keeps me from freaking out anytime I scrape it or drop it. It also provides a lot of grip – a little too much. It’s hard to shove it into a tight pocket, but it’s otherwise worth it.

1GB SD card – $70
32MB is not nearly enough on a Treo. Mine has a bunch of apps, photos, data and the rest (900MB) is all music. 2GB cards are dropping in price quickly.

TreoCentral Screen Protectors – $16
These are WAAAY better than the one that comes with the Treo that you have to cut out. It’s thicker, washable and completely prevents fingerprints. It’s also a nicer surface to use the stylus on the rare occasions that I need to.

palmOne Headphone Adapter – $6
It’s annoying that this is needed at all, but this allows you to use any old stereo headphones to listen to music on your Treo. With a 1GB SD card, it has nearly replaced my iPod too. I use the bundled RealPlayer to play music, which works fine.

FileZ – Free
This is a file manager for PalmOS (think Windows Explorer). You need it to install hacks like the Bluetooth DUN patch.

VeriChat – $25/1 year
This is a great IM client for your Treo. It does Yahoo/AOL/MSN and others. It’s not cheap, but it’s worth it for me.

PalmOne Stylus Pen 3-pack – $13
With my Treo, I always have lots of things with me – why not a pen too? It’s proven useful many times. I wish they made one that didn’t require you to screw off the pen cap as that takes some time. (One that you could click to get the pen tip would be ideal.)

palmOne Vehicle Charger – $20
The 650 charges pretty quickly, but it sucks to run out of juice when you’re on the road. This keeps that from happening.

SnapperMail Enterprise – $60
Easily the best email client for the Treo. It does IMAP, which is most important to me. The interface is excellent, way better than VersaMail.

TreoAlertMgr – $15
I wouldn’t stand to have a pager. That’s such ancient technology. The only problem is that SMS alerts on the treo don’t “nag” you. One alert is probably not enough to wake me up in the middle of the night, so TreoAlertMgr keeps beeping until I deal with it. This is NOT Anne’s favorite accessory.

Sync and Charge Cable – $20
This satisfies part of my life quest to elminate cords. Wireless power would be nice, but this is the next best thing if you’ve got a laptop around. Synching with USB is much faster than bluetooth.

TuSSH – Free
This is how I reboot servers from the top of mountains.

Marbles 2 – Free
I don’t know what it is about this game, but I’m still addicted to it. If anyone figures out a strategy for winning, let me know. I don’t think I’ve gone beyond level 3.

CacheMate – $8
If you’re a Geocacher, this is essential. Sadly I think this is what I use my Treo the most for.

Finally my Verizon friends can get in on the Treo 650 fun.

Don’t think, just buy it.

The Yahoo! Music Engine was launched tonight. It’s a pretty cool little app and it’s dirt cheap for a subscription to all the music you could possibly listen to and more. As I write this, I’m listening to the new Ben Folds album that I didn’t know existed until I used YME.

Back when I was at Y! Music, we talked about building an app like this a lot. There’s just so much you can’t do in a web app. Having bits on a machine meant you could do cool stuff with MP3s and the like. That was before iTunes and Rhapsody.

One weekend I threw together an MFC app that embedded IE which became the prototype for the original LAUNCHcast App. It didn’t do much other than play LAUNCHcast, but it did give you a task tray icon and an icon on your desktop for LAUNCHcast. From there we dreamed of doing more cool stuff and I floated a few proposals, but nothing really happened and eventually I moved North.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t get to contribute though. Something less publicized is the plugin architecture that allows you to run all kinds of cool things inside the app. There’s even the Y! Search Plugin, written by yours truly. Actually, Ian did most of the hard work, but I adopted it and cleaned it up a bit.

Since Yahoos have been able to play with this for a while already, I’ve also helped report and track down bugs. It’s cool to see little changes made and fixes made so the millions of people who will download this thing in the future will have a better experience.

It’s amazing how much fuctionality has been built into YME in such a short time – downloads, MP3 management, LAUNCHcast integration, sharing with Messenger buddies, music directories, recommendations and a subscription service. The bar for new music management apps just got higher.

One of my favorite hidden features is the ability to monitor a directory for new music and add new files in that directory to YME automatically. This always annoyed me in iTunes. Eventually I wrote some nasty Perl/AppleScript/shell script to manage it, but I shouldn’t have to.

I’m lukewarm on the Yahoo Music Engine name. It sounds too marketingy. I suggested “Yahoo Music Gravity” since it’s an app that draws all your music together, but I’ll admit it’s less intuitive.

Desktop Search, the Developer Network, 360, News, and now YME – this is turning out to be a great year for Yahoo products, and we’re not even half-done!

I’ve been feeling some gadget lust for a new gaming system recently. My last game system was a Nintendo 64. I’ve completed most of the games I have for it and it probably hasn’t been played in at least a year. Before that was a PlayStation, an NES, Coleco ADAM, Atari 2600, and some kind of generic thing that played pong-like games. It only worked when it was upside down for some reason.

I looked at the Xbox and PS2 but they’ve both been out for a while and I don’t want to buy into old technology. As details of Sony PlayStation Portable came out, I found something that could quench my thirst for some gaming.

For one, it was new, it was a cool gadget and I’d be more likely to play it when I can do it anywhere. There’s too much setup for me in playing a game on a TV, especially when we only have one TV in the house.

I pretty much made up my mind a few weeks ago, but things were very busy at work, so I didn’t want to temp myself with a distraction. Plus, it would be a good reward for myself later.

I went down to Fry’s on Thursday night, hoping they would have one. I was there a few days earlier looking for some for my team and they didn’t them. I was hoping I’d get lucky this time since others had said they had seen them there.

I approached the tables where they have the PSP stuff. They apparently haven’t bothered to put it on a shelf I guess because it sells out so quickly. There were none on the table. I decided to ask anyway. He said they only ones they had were ones with bad pixels and said they would have some more “in a couple of weeks.” So I asked him if other stores might have them. He started to check and then said they may jave JUST gotten some in. He went to the back to check.

While I waited, I watched people wandering around the store. Everytime I come to Fry’s I hope and pray that I look less nerdy than just half the other people here. My standards aren’t that high, I just want to be in the top half. I think you can get most of the way there just by remembering to shower daily.

I could feel the aniticipation while I waited for the clerk to reappear. I would be disappointed and pissed off if they didn’t have any. I wanted it now! Suddenly the clerk showed up, with a nice little PSP box in his hand. Awesome!

I went over to the table to grab a few games. I picked up Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade, Wipeout Pure, ATV Off-Road Fury, and Darkstalkers. Kelly seemed to like Untold Legends. Wipeout Pure would be fun with a bunch of other people. Anne expressed an interest in ATV Off-Road Fury and Darkstalkers fit the bill for a good fighting game.

Once I had picked out my games, the clerk insisted he had to escort me to the checkout counter. I asked him if this was for the store’s protection or mine. He said it was because they usually keep the PSPs behind the counters. Sure enough, while I was waiting a guy went behind the counter with a basketful of PSPs, probably the remainder from the box mine came from.

Soon I was on my way. When I got home, I had some things I needed to do, so I made sure I did them first; I knew that once I started playing there’s no way I would be convinced to do chores. I finished them quickly and unwrapped my new toy.

It’s much smaller than I imagined it. That’s a good thing, it just looked bigger in the pictures. Even more amazing is that how the space is allocated. The front half is for the screen and buttons. The right back side is where the battery goes. The middle is for the UMD card and the left back is for the Memory Stick. Where the heck did they put the processor? It must be jammed in by the Memory Stick somewhere. I’m impressed that this thing does anything at all.

The screen is big and bright – very nice. It booted up and I set up the time and date, and then the network. It connected to wireless LAN just fine once I figured out there was a switch on the bottom left to turn on Wifi. Why couldn’t I set up the network first, then have it set the date and time automatically?

There are quite a few buttons, including the analog stick which I thought was a speaker at first. The UMD slot continues to puzzle me. I can never remember which way the cards go in. Luckily they go in only one way. I’ve found that the door for the Memory Stick slot is poorly placed and it often comes out when I’m playing it.

I tried all the games, but so far I’ve been playing Untold Legends almost exclusively. I think I’m almost done with it. ATV Off-Road was fun too, especially as frequently and comically I ejected myself off the bike.

I haven’t actually used the Wifi for anything yet or tried to play music on it. The headphones are suspiciously iPod-like, especially since they’re white when the PSP is mostly black.

Overall, it’s a damn cool toy. I just need to find more time to play it! I also need to find some people to play head-on against me, which should be even more fun. Unfortunately, the wifi at work takes up all the channels, so you have to go outside to play. There’s something very ironic about needing to go outside to play video games.

Last week we noticed that Pixel’s foot problems were back. He gets this pussy infection around his front 8 toes and all this green and black waxy stuff accumulates there. It’s really gross. Worse, he had an ingrown toenail that looked like it really hurt. One of the pads under his toes was punctured by his nail and it was bleeding. Nasty.

He had it a while ago, but it seemed to get better and I stopped checking since he didn’t seem to be limping or unhappy in anyway. But now it was worse than ever.

This morning I had to bring him to the vet. Here’s the drill:

1) Pull the cat carrier out the night before, putting it in a small room, the front opening standing up
2) Witness the cat find it a half-hour later and run away in fear
3) Grab a crappy blanket and cover the carrier
4) Pretend to want to show affection to the cat
5) When he gets close enough, grab him and throw him in the small room, closing the door
6) Grab the blanket and lay it out on the floor
7) Wrap the cat in the blanket and drop him in the carrier
8) Turn over the carrier and listen to a cavalcade of desperate cries

We arrived at the vet and they took some vital stats. While we waited for the doctor to come in, Pixel found the only possible place to hide – in a closet full of dog food. The vet came in and checked out his nasty toes. This was a different guy than last time and he said he had never seen anything like this on a cat. Great.

They brought him in the back to do what they did last time – trim his nails and wipe out off all the gook. A few minutes later the vet came back to say that he wasn’t cooperating. It must have really hurt because he was trying to scratch their eyes out.

He told me that they would have to put him to sleep… for a few minutes while they cleaned his feet. I went to work and they said they would call when he was ready. I left about 9 am.

I thought it would be just a few hours. They called at 3. I guess it took a while for the sedative to wear off. He was groggy when the brought him out. I, on the other hand, woke right up when they handed me a $318 bill. That covered the cleaning, sedative, examination, a cone to keep him from licking off the ointment, and three types of medicine. They gave him some stuff for pain, some cleaning fluid for his feet and some antibiotics.

The latter two are what they gave us last time. Getting 2ml of antibiotics down his throat is a challenge that takes two of us and we don’t always win. Actually getting in there to clean his toes will be close to impossible.

Pixel jumped right out of the box when we got home, but was surprisingly affectionate. After being at the vet all day, I think he was happy to be out of there. He’s not liking the cone much though. He keeps running into things and scaring himself when it rubs into walls. We’ll be able to remove that tomorrow.

I went back to work and came home again about 7:30. Pixel was about, but Signal was nowhere to be found. We started to get worried, so I looked around and found him hiding behind the couch. I wasn’t sure what was wrong with him; he wouldn’t even come out and play. Later he poked his head out, but scrambled back behind the couch as soon as he saw Pixel. Apparently he doesn’t like the cone either. Or perhaps he has a fear of cats dressed as clowns.

It’ll be at least 4 weeks of antibiotics for Pixel and lots of fun for us. The vet still doesn’t know what’s causing this. They took a culture and should get results back from the lab in a few days about what it is. Hopefully if we’re diligent about it, this will be the last time.

Having cat medical issues is enough to deal with. I can’t imagine having to deal with unhealthy kids!