Category: Weblog

I guessed I missed posting on Fair and Balanced Friday. My brother did a good fair and balanced post though. It’s Saturday morning and finally life has slowed down a bit.
Yesterday evening, James and I went to go see Pirates of the Caribbean . Damn that was a good movie. I really enjoyed the film. Even the British uniforms were dead on accurate. You know my Age of Sail thing. Coming in November is Master and Commander, a film based on the novels of Patrick O’brien. Russel Crowe stars as Jack Aubrey. Of course, I much prefer C.S. Forester’s Horatio Hornblower stories, but I’ll take what I can get when it comes to Age of Sail stuff.
I digress. We saw the movie at the Arclight Theater in Hollywood. The film was played digitally on screen with a high end DLP projector. This technology is the future of cinema, and it looks good. Once the price of the equipment drops and a good method of distribution is developed this will be the way most people see movies.
Weblogs
I got a nice note from Norah telling me how much she likes Cruftbox. She’s just starting out into blogging and I pointed her toward using Typepad instead of Blogger. You can cheer her on at Cogitations.
Speaking of Typepad, I saw great demo of it this week. We use Movable Type at the office for a few things and while I was in New York, we had a meeting with some ‘influential people’ about Typepad and the future path of Movable Type in regards to using them in business. Typepad is quite impressive and the future MTPro software should be able to help a wide range of businesses organizations beside feature hungry, power bloggers.
If anyone else is just getting started into weblogging, I highly recommend going with Typepad.
In other news, I guess in need to help out my NYC friend Keith. It seems he didn’t have a flashlight, batteries, radio, or even emergency cash. I guess out here in LA we take the earthquake threat seriously that everyone seems to have emergency supplies in the house. I’m glad to hear that he and everyone else I know in New York made it through fine.
Linkage
I stumbled upon VentureBlog, which is an interesting site for people that deal with technology planning. I deal with a lot of this stuff at work and even deal with our in-house VC people from time to time, so I find much of the stuff relevant to the discussions we have at work. It’s buzz & tech heavy, so consider yourself warned.
Gizmodo continues to be a fun site. The amount fo new gadgets rolling out is astounding.
Books
While on my trip to New York I finished Google Hacks and started Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yes, I know I asked you all for suggestions and promptly ignored them. The day before my trip I walked into a brick & mortar book store and had to buy something. I couldn’t remember what people had recommended, so I bought what I had been pondering.
The DaVinci Code will probably be next since three different people recommended it to me in one week.
Alright, that’s enough for now. Time to get started with the day.

Tomorrow will be Fair and Balanced day. Please take part.

I returned home after the plane ride, walked into the house and began sweating.
My assumption was the that the air conditioning was off, but when I looked at the panel, it was running.
After much investigation, I finally found that the entire chiller coil was frozen over with ice. Solid ice. I just spent the last 2 hours trying to defrost it.
The fan needs to run all night and probably all day to get all the ice melted and the water cleared out before I can turn on the AC again.
What a welcome home. Time for bed.

As I type this, I’m somewhere over the middle of America in the plane heading home. Unfortunately, I put the computer into standby and most of the battery drained.
Here’s a bit of randoms thoughts on my last five days in New York.
Friends
On Saturday night I arrived into town, checked into the hotel, and promptly found my self with nothing to do. I checked my email and saw a note from Keith at Unrelated News about Wifi access in the city. I gave Keith a call and we decided to go out and have some drinks.
The different thing about going out with Keith is that we had never meet before or even talked on the phone. Keith was the old room mate of James, my wife’s cousin. We had been reading each others weblogs for a while and exchanging occasional emails.
I took a cab downtown and met up with Keith in front of a bar. We grabbed some drinks and started chatting. It was like talking with an old friend. We knew what was going on in each others lives and were able to talk about past events. I had a good time. The fact that the internet had allowed us to get us to know each other fairly well before actually meeting was fairly amazing.
TIme to shutdown the computer due to battery issues. More later.

Busy day. Several different meetings in several parts of town. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in nice places around town.
New York is one expensive town.
OK, time to go out and smoke cigars.

WiFi access at the Starbucks at Central Park West is good. I’m sitting here with a coffee and obviously typing away. There isn’t much for me to do today, so I am going to wander around NY a bit.
Michele asked me to pick up some fabric for her down in the Village, but the store isn’t open yet. Perhaps they are closed on Sunday. So until I figure out what to do, I’ll just sit, surf, and drink my coffee.
My location and how to reference it in NYC is a bit of mystery to me. Supposedly this area is called ‘midtown’. I don’t know the zip code. Are zip codes important in NY? How will I find a movie?
There are three young Italian women sitting nearby. One of them has been ranting nonstop about something for 15 minutes. Every couple of minutes she pauses and says, ‘eh?’ waiting for the others to acknowledge here. They murmur something and then the rant continues. I wish I spoke Italian so at least I knew what her problem was. It’s really bugging her.

Currently I’m at 41,000 feet in a private jet. It’s 12:50PM PDT.
As I mentioned earlier, I’m flying to New York today. Yesterday I got a phone call from the company travel group and they asked if I wanted to fly out on the company’s private jet instead of on United. What else could I say but “Yes!”
This is one of the kick ass perks of being inside on the evil trans-national corporation.
I think the plane is a Gulfstream something. There’s about 10 seats and a galley. The chairs are more like Lazy-Boy recliners than aircraft seats. Each seat has a personal monitor jack for watching DVDs, music channels and even 110 AC power outlets. Everything is made of wood and leather. There are only 5 passengers, 4 adults and 1 child. It is quite a luxurious way to travel.
America is scrolling by beneath me, a patchwork of farms, desert, highways, rivers and mountains. This flight is not making me want to take more flights, it’s making me want to drive across the country and see all the things I’m flying over.

I’m leaving an hour for New York. I’ve got a business trip and I’ll be in NYC for a few days.
Hopefully the hotels and local hot spots will allow me to blog from Manhattan.
I hope my liver can take four days in The City That Doesn’t Sleep.

Wandering the net I stumbled onto a story about raising the Tricolor from the English Channel on Critical Section The Tricolor was a huge car carrier ship that sunk last December loaded with expensive European cars.
The way they are solving it is pretty damn cool.
Be sure to check out the whole Critical Section site. It’s a pretty cool weblog.

I finished my most recent book a few days ago and am ready to start a new one. On my nightstand is Illium, the new book by Dan Simmons. It’s a big book around 600 pages that will take me a while to read. I’m not sure I feel like a reading another long novel right now.
I am looking forward to the Tivo Hacks book, but it’s not out yet. I’ve looked over the table of contents and it appears to be chock full of cool stuff for me to play with. There’s another two books coming out, Hacking the Tivo and Hacking Tivo, but neither of them are out yet either.
I guess I could pick up the Google Hacks book, it’s out. But the Windows XP Hacks book, is you guessed it, not out yet.
Maybe it’s time to go off the normal path and finally read Guns, Germs, and Steel, supposedly a great book on history.
What to do, what to do? Perhaps a trip to the library is in order.
Any suggestions?