I’ve been wrapping up our tax returns, running reviews and reviewing an actual paper copy. One document (well, two) that I couldn’t find were the bills from the California Department of Motor Vehicles for the car registrations. But I was very pleased to find that they have an online retrieval system to help [...]
The Wall Street Journal has an article, “Clever Gags Score High On Super Bowl Ads”, with best and worst polls to accompany the online edition. We, for a change, actually watched the SuperBowl this year—with appropriate TiVo gymnastics to cover the grossly underestimated duration given in the television listings—and so can comment on the advertisements. [...]
A while back, I was speculating about getting a new camera. I finally gave up using the S30 with the broken screen and decided to act. Although I showed some recent system-administration-confererence-action shots, indoor snapshots are never as much fun.
So when we decided to go see the visiting reindeers—from central Oregon apparently—at the San Francisco Zoo, [...]
I ordered an additional drive for our long running Series 1 Tivo last week from one of the firms that specializes in such things. The drive “marriage” didn’t go well, and the unit was stuck at the Green Screen of Death—and, since these upgrades are supposed to just work, I didn’t have a backup. [...]
Now that the Shuttle system appears unsalvagable—no activity, even with a nice fresh BIOS chip—I suppose I should record the emergency server rebuild from a few weeks ago. On Saturday, Dina noticed she wasn’t getting any email. We had houseguests, so I didn’t slip out to Central Computer until Sunday, with a plan [...]
Ben and I biked to GeoKids and then I carried on to the Menlo Park campus yesterday, perhaps in honour of Canada Day. Ben was pretty happy for the first few miles, but I suspect was bored by the time we made it to downtown Menlo. (Google Maps has the distance at about 5 [...]
The Digital Photography Review just posted its review of Canon’s PowerShot S2 IS, a 5 megapixel camera with 12 × zoom and image stabilization.
Hard to resist; I’m leery of going the full prosumer (or even professional) SLR route, and this camera has almost everything I would want.
I had an enjoyable half hour assembling a piece of furniture from IKEA, before returning for some late night text composition. It goes much faster with a power screwdriver and a good set of bits. (Also, a 16oz hammer makes tapping in dowels directly satisfying.) But if you want to grab hold [...]
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I’ve been using a dual Opteron as my primary desktop lately, but Solaris doesn’t support the sound device included on its motherboard. After asking around about the likelihood of support arriving, I was told that one possible path was to use a USB Audio device instead.
So I drove off to Fry’s to look around [...]
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I sent the following email to Design Witin Reach. It’s opinionated, making an almost drunken attempt to spray bile at manufacturers and retailers in various markets–but they have each failed in mediocre fashion, so I’m maintaining my position.
From: Stephen Hahn Date: Tue Nov 18, 2003 21:52:05 US/Pacific To: sales[@]dwr.com Subject: Telephones?
DWRians,
A class of items I would [...]
Cutbacks at work over the past few years have forced me to take action. As the coffee and teas supplier has moved the offerings from a wide selection of Bigelow teas to a small selection of Bigelow teas to an alternate tea vendor (nameless), the quality of my tea break has dropped so that, [...]
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@schahn