Aniela's First Birthday

A couple of weeks back, we celebrated my goddaughter's first birthday. We played around with his new strobes by practicing taking pictures of the guests against a white seamless background.

Click on to my Flickr! or my Multiply pages for the results of our efforts.

iPhone 3G

It's been a little over 2 weeks.

Likes:
1. Double the space! I now have 16GB instead of the original 8GB.

2. Better location with a caveat (see #2 in dislikes).

3. Apps. I had apps with my original iPhone, but still. I like.

4. Exchange ActiveSync - not that I really want to check work email, but being able to is a huge convenience for me.

Dislikes:
1. 3G Reception sucks. So bad that I have turned 3G off, and almost never turn it on. When using EDGE, I get 5 bars, as soon as I switch 3G on, it drops to 2 bars. The people experiencing this issue are all arguing, is it the iPhone? Or is it AT&T?

2. 3G/GPS Positioning sucks, possibly related to issue #1. When I turn on 3G, it always places me in Fairfield, CA even if I am in Hayward or Union City. As soon as I turn 3G off, I get placed where I really am located.

3. MobileMe, getting sorta push was nice, but the problems with disappearing contacts/calendars was very inconvenient, and it would happen at very awkward moments.

Update: Cancellations

Also canceled my PureHost webhosting account. The site that used to be on that website had not been updated in years. And besides, LunarPages is way better in terms of support and features and priced better to boot!

Cancellations

I canceled a couple of accounts today. The first was my J2 Account, which I used to use for faxing, but I haven't used the service in a really loooong time, so I figured no more paying for that. I'll keep my money in my pocket, thank you.

The other was my XM Radio Account. Canceling the XM Account was a bit tougher, I do like XM Radio, but once they started tossing advertisements and annoying infomercials between music, they became FM radio. If I wanted to listen to ads, I'd listen to FM, and not have to pay for it. I used to put up with like one ad every half an hour or so, but now, it is as often as every 10-15 minutes. I may try XM Radio again, but if only if they did become truly "commercial free".

The Eyes Have It

PopPhoto.com has a very interesting article on how human eyes work, and how it relates to how people perceive images. A very interesting read.

Read It

Tourist Trap

Clarence, Mike's brother is in town for a few weeks, and we took him to the usual touristy locations.

More pictures at my Flickr! account. Or at Multiply.

Hooters

I was thirsty, and I ordered a rootbeer....

Field Day 2008

Another ARRL Field Day has come and gone. This weekend was exhausting, we finished setting up our three transmitting stations at the Union City ARES/RACES Field Day site at around 12:30pm local time, and started working stations at around 1:00pm.

Band conditions weren't the best but we made a decent number of contacts from around the Bay Area up the coast to Alaska and BC, Canada, and as far east as Maine. I also passed by the Palo Alto Amateur Radio Association Field Day site at the usual spot in the Bayfront Park at Menlo Park.

After 24 hours, it was time to tear down our site and get some well-deserved rest.

Jeth Vader... (updated)

OK, seriously, I've never embedded any YouTube videos to this blog before, but after visiting Gizmodo this morning, I just found this clip to be sooo funny.

Update: So I found out, this was Eddie Izzard. And someone made the Lego stop motion animation. Excellent work, I say.

PC Reminiscing

When I woke up this morning, I started checking my email and going through my daily routine of checking my usual websites. Then I started thinking about how much computers have evolved since I first learned BASIC programing on an Apple ][e clone.

My very first computer was a Commodore VIC 20, with a whopping 5Kb of RAM and a cassette tape drive to store programs on. It was a bitch trying to purchase software for that machine.

The next machine I had was the Apple //c, a desktop machine that was designed to be "luggable", it came with 128Kb of RAM, had a built-in floppy drive, and had a matching 12" green CRT monitor.