Category: General

About 2 weeks ago, I switched from DSL to cable modem and my connection is much, much faster now. It mostly just makes a difference when I’m pulling down large files. I’m not sure why I couldn’t get more out of my DSL connection… I think it might have had something to do with my distance from my nearest CO (central office). I know that I wasn’t eligible for SBC-Yahoo’s premium service for this reason.

So I’ve been thinking about this ever since I bought a new wide screen Dell Ultrasharp LCD monitor and integrated speaker for the PC downstairs: wouldn’t it be cool if the 100 or so CDs that I have ripped to my iMac upstairs were available everywhere in the house? The only thing preventing it was the fact that iTunes’s built-in sharing feature would only permit sharing between computers on the same subnet. So I actually spent the time to reconfigure the two routers that provide network connectivity between the apartment upstairs and the house downstairs so now they’re on the same subnet and voila… iTunes everywhere. It’s pretty cool… The stereo for the speakers on the patio and by the pool are immediately below the apartment (which is where the iMac is) so nowadays when we are out by the pool, I just drag one of the laptops down there and wirelessly share music from the iMac upstairs to iTunes on the laptop downstairs. What we used to do was sync some music to the iPod Shuffle and then hook that up to the stereo downstairs.

Now I’m thinking about getting some appliances — like the Roku Soundbridge — that will eliminate the need for a laptop or a PC in between. I wonder if the iTunes SDK could enable a plug-in for Beyond Media for iTunes? I would LOVE that.

I discovered something interesting… I occasionally check e-mail on my company e-mail address through IMAIL’s web-based e-mail client. Recently, from the computer downstairs at my house it hasn’t worked and today I figured out why. I have the Google Web Accelerator installed on this computer and somehow it prevents IMAIL’s web-based e-mail client from working correctly. Is there anything out there that fixes this problem in Google’s web accelerator? Is it a known bug (or is there a similar class of bugs that’s known)?

I was hyping Google Earth to my brother-in-law and sister last night as I drove them back from the airport and when we got home I pulled it up and punched in the address for their new home in Monroe, Louisiana. No high-res data! I wonder how Google Earth determines which areas they store high-res data for and which ones they don’t — seems logical that they would use something like population density. I would have thought that they’d simply have the entire United States covered. However they determine that, I don’t like hyping something only to fall flat on my face when I go to demo. Curse you Google Earth!! 🙂

If anyone’s curious about why they are moving to Monroe, it’s because my brother-in-law has recently taken a job with CenturyTel.

http://www.thefatmanwalking.com/page/65308/index.v3page

I read a short essay by this guy at the back of the New York Times Magazine two weeks ago and now he’s getting a lot of attention in the tech world — CNET wrote this article about him. Steve appears to be in Flagstaff, AZ right now so he’s well on his way from CA to NYC. It sure would be nice if his site had an RSS feed!

I finished off the remaining video footage on the “disposable” video camera that Anu bought from CVS and dropped it off at a nearby CVS just before lunch. After lunch, I swung by the same CVS and was disappointed by two things: 1) they tagged me with a charge of another $12.95 (+tax) for the DVD (?!?) and “processing” and 2) the quality of the video on the DVD was seriously lackluster. I shouldn’t have expected much better, but the net-net is that definitely wasn’t worth $45. I still love the hardware and the simplicity of the model, it’s so well contained as a product:
1) buy/rent some inexpensive and simple hardware
2) have fun using it to record video and then
3) hand-off to someone and get a DVD back.

I didn’t have to mess with any firewire / USB cables, I didn’t have to think about video qualities to save to the DVD, etc. It just worked, it was foolproof. So I like the idea, I like the hardware, but the final product was expensive and low-quality.

A note to Robert Scoble: I know it’s the evangelist thing to do to talk up announcements (early morning ones at that!) but maybe that’s not the best approach. Maybe a better approach is to let announcements and releases speak for themselves, ie underpromise, overdeliver. In the blogosphere, announcements and releases speak for themselves (and then some!) and all you do by over-hyping things is set yourself up for a fall, especially when you are Mr. Microsoft. But the bigger thing here is that hype like this makes it sound like you’re trying too hard, like you need other people’s confirmation of your ideas. What a company really needs to be successful is a strong internal compass pointing the way and with this, I believe, evangelism becomes the human voices to communicate what the compass is saying (yes, it’s a talking compass :)). I had a similar feeling about the hype around the Microsoft RSS announcement made at Gnomedex. When people figure stuff out why something is meaningful on their own, they understand it a lot better and you can create self-propagating evangelism/buzz. But anyhow, we’ll see what the response is like to the big announcement on Monday.

And, as an aside, is it just me or does a 6am PDT announcement seem nuts? I know, I know, it’s probably so that the news coincides with the opening of the stock market, but I’m assuming the buzz that you’re trying to generate here isn’t buzz on wall street. Steve says press releases are dead but I’m not even going that far. I’m just saying that when you’re making an announcement that you want people in the tech world to get excited about, 6am might not be an ideal time.

On the way back from the airport after picking up my niece, nephew and sister, we passed a CVS near my house. The digital marquis outside the store was advertising a disposable video camera on their digital marquis. A disposable video camera?!

So when Anu, my sister, was in Monroe on Wednesday she picked one up to try it out and take some video of their new house (they are in the process of moving from Denver, CO to Monroe, LA). Anu got back to Houston today and I’m checking the thing out and it’s AWESOME. What a great product.

* 20 minutes of video
* little unit that fits comfortably in one hand
* nice full color LCD that serves as the viewfinder
* only four buttons on the thing — on/off, playback (you can playback the last clip you recorded), a record button and a delete button (presumably, you can delete the last clip).
* you return the thing to CVS and they give you a DVD with the video on it, presumably with chapter points at the beginning of each segment.
* I think the cost of “processing” and the DVD is included in the $29.99

Anu just handed the thing to me and asked me to finish off the last 10 minutes of video for her and I love this product, I can think of all kinds of uses for it. It’s only a matter of time before these things are all over weddings, being used in businesses for field visits and more.

Hey pt, how long before you hack one of these?? The LCD on this thing is great. I’m sure you can think of all kinds of cool uses for it.

Update: I’m behind the curve. Someone’s already hacked this thing.

– my new bluetooth mouse came in earlier this week (Logitech MX900, I talked about it here last weekend). it’s working quite well with my iMac and it’s great to have gotten rid of a wire.

– I also received a new external USB 2.0/Firewire hard drive for my periodic backups — 320 GB. I’m going to initiate it this weekend and use it to do my next backup. I really wish my laptop had a larger hard drive.

– My Dell laptop is now running with 2GB of RAM, up from 512 MB. I’ll report in the next couple of days how it impacts the performance of my PC. Basically, I’m hoping it’ll prevent my PC from slowing down when I’m running 10-20 apps at once, each with multiple windows.

– Last weekend, I watched the Aviator and found out that Howard Hughes and I went to the same school… of course, I graduated and he dropped out. He also seems to have married someone with the last name of Rice (Ella Rice), someone presumably connected to Rice’s founder, William Marsh Rice. Good movie by the way, though it wasn’t interesting, well done and thought provoking in the same way that Birth was.

– Just came back from chai at Balaji. If you are in Houston and like chaat-type of Indian food, this is our favorite place. I recommend the pao bhaji and chole bhature.

– We released Beyond TV 3.7 this week. It’s been nearly ready for release for about two weeks, so it was nice to see it go out this week.

If you’ve met me, in person, in the past 2 weeks, you probably know that I’ve been having fun with Google Earth. The first day I downloaded it, Shonali and I had a great time flying/driving around Delhi, identifying all the places we could recognize. The keyhole database only has data for about half of Delhi, the south half, but that was OK because that’s the part of Delhi that both of us used to live in. It seems like somewhat of a fluke that Google has data for Delhi, when you consider that they don’t even have data for Bombay in India.

I hope the Google Earth team licenses/acquires some street level data for Delhi. If anyone from the Google Earth team is reading this, Eicher’s of India definitely has street level data for Delhi. While I was living there, they were the first company to release a detailed book of roadmaps for Delhi. Get the data from them and let me know when you have it intergated into Google Earth!

Anyways, in the spirit of participatory Google Earth’ing (?!), I posted a bunch of spots in Delhi to the Google Earth BBS.

Also, in the “huge and unique” forum, I posted a link to the only baseball diamond you’ll find in Delhi.

Zoomed out on Delhi with all the places that Shonali and I identified

Baseball field at ACSA, across the street from the American Embassy School