Monday, October 22, 2007

Friday, September 14, 2007

Monday, August 27, 2007

Instrumentation, lack of apparent motion, milestones

 
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Box of peril

 
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Electric car festival 08 25 2007 palo alto

So color me disapointed...

Electric cars appear to be the exclusive domain of hobbyists and crackpot commercial ventures at this point. Still even as hobbyiest go it was pretty disapointing, a BMW 2002 with 800 pounds of lead acid batteries on board is not the sort of thing that makes me think this exercise is worthwhile. The rav4-ev's were cool but they're now 8 years old and climbing, still with about double the range and less silly problems than any of the other vehicles I saw you have to really wonder. Toyota could produce another one tomorrow. And a few weird people in the valley would buy one but to what end? Where's the electric car for me?

 
 
 
 
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For Lucy...

Freaky louis XV couch with monkey king on it...

 

From the palace of the legion of honor... Clearly San Francisco aristocrats collected crap that their children and grandchildren had no idea what to do with. Frankly it's been 250 years and there's still no good place to put it.
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Sunday, August 26, 2007

Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Poor little unloved blog...

It's hard to belive that some whoe makes their living basically writting day in and day out would. Neglect this thing as much as I do. It's not like I have nothing to say.

Monday, July 30, 2007

Honda Jet is a bit larger than I figured

 
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Not exactly the honda civic of jets. The excel jet looked cool but it didn't seem extremely practical, maybe that's (totally) not the point of personal jets. Composits are totally remaking the avaition industry but it's still really just the super expensive toy business.

Buy it now for...

 

Oshkosh was fun but seriously theres a dose of unreality that goes along with the event. Sure, there's plently of experimental aircraft their but much of it is simply a platform for getting all the folks with fat wallets in the same place so thye can drop another 500k on a mooney or da42 and of course be there when they're ready to trade up to a citation.
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New Bathroom Motif...

Ok, so egyptian themed bathrooms are a little tired.

How about mer-people?

 
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Sunday, July 15, 2007

Turns out...

You can now buy Nokia phones via Dell. So maybe the North American distribution efforts are working out... For off-contract prices they aren't bad. about $420 for an e61i

http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?c=us&l=en&s=bsd&cs=04&sku=A1152187

Still unless you've already got a blackberry setup and plan on using the blackberry connect client, or plan on using mail for exchange, the built-in imap client is not super awesome. So what do you get for your $400 besides several sometimes indifferent email client choices?


  • A decent (good actually) browser based on khtml and kjs from the the konquerer web-browser. The same broswer engine powers safari on macos and the iphone. for something rendering to a 320x240 screen it's generally good. flash support is fairly obsolete, I find it slightly absurd that I'm dependant on proprietary adobe products to the extent that I am but there you are.

  • A sip voip client that generally works pretty well, but only over wifi... You can extend it's functionality with the gizmo project client or fring.

  • A qwerty keyboard that makes the pim apps sms and web browsing genuinely easier.


What don't you get?


  • A touch screen. They're just better for some apps. At the same time, if it requires giving up the keyboard it's not worth it.

  • Seamless roaming in and out of wifi and cellular connectivity with always on networking.

  • Linux

  • A 3.5mm jack plug. media without headphones is useless. The pop-port can be adapted but at best that's an annoyance.


I guess you can see where I'm going with this, or at least where my sensibilities lie. The e series devices make a reasonable stab at being the best phone out there but they come across more as very good phones and less as general purpose computers.

Size comparison E90 VS helio ocean

 
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Friday, June 22, 2007

ministry of storing empty oil drums and dead tractors

 

Avarua Cook Islands
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Crappy Island sunset...

 

Clearly suffering in this miserable tropical paradise.
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scurvil

 

spotted palo alto mid may
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Friday, June 15, 2007

Cook Islands

 
 

This year PACNOG brings us to the Cook Islands. Watery!
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Monday, June 11, 2007

Yay Cake!

 

Hans was getting all arty...
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