NASCAR on Fox

I was flipping through TV channels (procrastinating on my Argentine Tango user manual for my technical writing class) and came across this on Fox. I've never been a racecar fan and am particularly wary of NASCAR because of the whole redneck thing.

But I have to admit, Fox makes it pretty entertaining. They have a very high-tech setup, with cameras on the ground, on the hood of each car and even inside the cars to see what the drivers are doing. A ticker near the top of the screen shows where each driver stands, and real-time labels make it easy to identify each car. And at the bottom of the screen they'll show a car's throttle and brake readings. Very cool.

Smiling on cue

 

Wow, this blog is turning into a regular "look at my baby" site.

Elena smiles

Somehow, she woke up in a good mood this morning.

Testing MoBlog

This is only a test.

Posted from moBlog – mobile blogging tool for Windows Mobile

Elena is a month old

Has it been a month already? Has it been a whole month since I last posted to this blog? Was February the last full night of sleep I had?

It's been an amazing and exhausting time for both Andrea and me -- especially Andrea. But other parents tell us it gets better.

Elena has been especially fussy today, so it looks like we're in for a long night -- it looks like she's a little colicky.

So that's why I haven't posting -- or doing much of anything outside the home -- recently.

She's here!

Andrea's in labor!

Google Fixes Gmail IMAP Problem on Windows Mobile

Yay! It's actually useful again!

Andrea is full-term!

She's convinced that baby Elena is coming early. We'll know within three weeks or so.

MacBook Air

I'm at MacWorld today covering Steve Jobs' keynote. I was really impressed with the super-thin MacBook Air -- until I found out it has no Ethernet port and an "integrated" battery that can't easily be replaced.

It makes you wonder just what market Apple is targeting here. Business users are the natural market, but I can't see many corporate buyers overlooking these details.

The four stages of CES

Stage 1: Denial

Set up every possible appointment you can. That's the whole point of a conference, right?

Stage 2: Shock

Sudden realization that you might not have much time to walk the show floor, eat or go to the bathroom because you've set up too many appointments.

Stage 3: Bargaining

Running progressively later for appointments, make apologetic phone calls, try to rearrange schedule.

Stage 4: Acceptance

Brazenly skip every other appointment; use the extra time to run to remaining appointments.

Ouch.

Making room for baby

Andrea and I just signed a lease for a bigger apartment and have begun setting up the baby's room. Figuring out the Ikea set-up manual will probably be the easiest part of parenthood.

Gmail IMAP is next to useless on Windows Mobile

I was aware that Google's e-mail service had a problem in which HTML mail accessed through IMAP on Windows Mobile devices shows up as blanks, but it never bothered me as much as it did today.

I got an urgent e-mail from work asking me to check a typo in a graphic I had sent last night sent -- it came in the form of a PDF (this actually makes a lot of sense when it comes to formatted graphics). Not only could I not read the message using Windows Mobile's default e-mail, I couldn't download the attachment, either.

Forwarding the message to my Yahoo account from the phone's e-mail software didn't work, because the message had been ruined by that point. So I had to log in to Gmail's Web interface and forward it to Yahoo from there. What a pain.

Maybe this is a Windows Mobile problem. But it doesn't matter -- a lot of people use the OS, and Yahoo has figured it out. Google engineers are aware of the problem, but apparently, don't consider it much of a priority.

Journeyman is actually a pretty good show

I didn't really like the first couple of episodes of this series about a San Francisco journalist/time traveler, but kept recording it for some reason. With a dearth of new programming on due to the writers strike, I finally got around to watching the shows piling up on my Windows Media Center. And you know what? Journeyman really grows on you.

Now I'm all caught up on the first half of the season and can't wait for the second half to begin. I hope it doesn't get canceled. It's one of the more sophisticated sci-fi shows I've seen on TV (one of the strengths of Battlestar Galactica) in a while -- and has been far better than season 2 of Heroes so far.

Or maybe I'm just a sucker for sci-fi stories centered around journalists.

Update: Oops. Too late.

Vista SP1 release candidate

I went to the "install fair" at Microsoft's Silicon Valley campus this weekend to get an early peek at the long-awaited service pack 1 for Vista. The event gave Microsoft engineers a chance to see how the install process goes on a variety of machines so they can tweak things before this week's public release. The entire install process took about three hours on my machine, but the folks at the event said many people there (including me) ran into a problem that caused a hiccup -- it should be fixed before the service pack goes public.

Unfortunately, I had to uninstall it, because it messed up the sleep function of my laptop. I don't know if this is because my 2710p's sleep feature is nonstandard or whether it's a bug in the Vista service pack, but I can't afford to have anything wrong with my laptop, so I'll just have to wait for the final release. I do plan to install the service pack beta on my home machine to see if it improves reliability. We'll see.

General update

Between my Flash class, apartment hunt and pregnancy (Andrea's pregnancy, actually), I haven't had much time to do any real writing. Today, I'm at a venture capital conference in Half Moon Bay between sessions. Anyway, here are a few odds 'n' ends:

• My iPaq 6915 died. Or more accurately, it stopped syncing to PCs through the USB connection -- which for my purposes, is the same thing. A repair and badly needed battery replacement looked like it was going to be $100 or so, and who knows what else was about to go wrong with it? So I replaced it with the AT&T Tilt, which was going for half price Thanksgiving Day weekend. I'll write more about it later, but it's a pretty nice phone -- powerful and 3-G network ready. My data plan went up another $20, but it connects at true broadband speeds, dulling the financial bite a bit. I can even share the Internet connection with my laptop over Bluetooth. So no more hunting around for Wi-Fi.
• Andrea has reached the 7-month mark of her pregnancy. She's starting to feel the physical discomfort of having another person inside her. The baby is very active, which is a good thing.
• Google Maps has added a "send to GPS" feature that lets users send a destination to their TomTom device. I haven't gotten it to work with my TomTom Navigator 6 software, though.
• And in other Google Maps news, the mobile version of the service added a feature that shows your approximate location without GPS. It triangulates your position using information from your phone carrier's cellular transmission towers. Kind of handy, but a little creepy, too.
• And this is a little old, but Microsoft's Live Search mobile application has added a feature that lets you use voice input. It works pretty well and comes very handy in certain situation.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Holiday tip: There is no finer Thanksgiving Day desert than Coco's Harvest Pie. You can thank me later.

My Xbox is back

Better, stronger, louder. With a different serial number.

Microsoft must be sending already-refurbished consoles to replace newly broken units in rather than waiting to complete the actual repair. In any case, I'm glad to have a functional console back so quickly -- three weeks from the time the old one broke until the refurbished unit was on my doorstep. Just in time for the Thanksgiving weekend.

I can feel the heat coming out the back of the new unit, so it looks like the fix involved much better heat transfer out of the system.

The only downside is that -- because Xbox Live purchases are tied to the hardware as well as your user name -- I now have to be connected to the Internet to play my purchased arcade games, even though they're saved to my hard drive. I hope Microsoft is working on a way to transfer the licenses permanently to the new box.

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