They finally added mobile support to Blogger Beta

Nox exploring the garbage can.

Madison

I'm safely in Madison. Just dropped Jen off at her classes and now I'm waiting for the ReloCube to be delivered.

Flight was decent. The guy sitting next to me went to the bathroom then a couple minutes later they were asking if anyone was a doctor or medical personnel. Never did find out what exactly happened but I had an empty seat next to me for most of the rest of the flight. So I'm not sure if he was the one that needed help or he was giving it. In any case I was happy taking up my seat and half. No sleep on the plane so a bit tired and punchy. I really need to invest in one of those travel pillows. They showed Nacho Libre on the plane which was nice cause I've been wanting to see it, but now I'm glad I didn't spend any money on it.

Getting the car was pretty painless. Not as easy as it could have been since it was so early and the desk at the airport wasn't open. I'm very happy with it. If I spent a lot more time in my car I'd definitely want something like it. Also the traffic in Chicago at 6am is nuts and that was the traffic trying to get out of town. The traffic trying to get in was even worse.

Ok, time to get reacquainted with my cats and try to get some sleep.

Sea-Tac

Well, I'm glad I was leaving and not picking someone up. The road into Sea-Tac was backed up for about a mile for the arrivals and there were people parked along the side of the road for another mile. I decided to just park at the airport since they have a decent weekly rate and anything to shorten the trip when I get back with a very angry cat is worth it.

I left myself plenty of time to get here and it was a bit too much. I'm here at the gate an hour before the flight leaves. Check-in was easy, it wouldn't let me auto check-in cause I have the animals on the ticket. Security was a breeze and I got the ride the subway here at the airport. There are two remote terminals that are connected to the main terminal via the subway. So its not like some airports where the trains will just get you there faster, if you want to get the the N or S gates you have to take the train.

Its also a different perspective on flights out here. Being in the middle of the country you can get a more or less direct flight everywhere. The flight I'm taking is continuing on to Atlanta after Chicago. I suppose a direct flight from Seattle to Atlanta overnight wouldn't be that popular.

Another random thought. They finally had to re-record the security messages they play constantly to remind people about the liquids and gels thing.

I was dumb and forgot to get my iPass password before I came to the airport. So it cost me $7.95 to get it. I lost the password and my Starbucks script when my file vault was corrupted a couple weeks ago.

That's all I got for now. I'll be in Chicago in a little under 5 hours. Pickup some time from going with the jetstream, but lose two hours for the time change.

The perils of search-and-replace

The perils of search-and-replace
Originally uploaded by marnanel.

Arrr... It be Talk Like A Pirate Day

Avast, me hearties, September 19th be International Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Reno Balloon Race 2006 Time Lapse Video

This is very cool. They must have the box winds like in Albuquerque there cause it looks like most of the balloons landed where they took off.

Who wants some turkey to go with their hockey?

Just booked my ticket for Thanksgiving. I'll be arriving 7:30amish on Thanksgiving and leaving 6pmish the following Monday. Hockey tickets have been secured and they should be good games against Michigan and Michigan State.

Update: Make the flight home on Sunday. Oops.

Stanford Prison Experiment

I found this documentary about the Stanford Prison Experiment on Google Video. If you are at all interested in psychology you should definetly check it out. I'll warn you that it is pretty long (about 50m), but I think its very interesting.

Russian's Advice on Drinking Vodka

Must be the weekend, people keep sending me stuff about drinking.
A russian tells you how to survive a night of drinking vodka.

Drink more == Make more money

http://digg.com/business_finance/Alcohol_use_helps_boost_income_study

I can't move my arms

My trainer destroyed my arms yesterday. Typing this hurts. Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a shower when it takes great effort to raise your arms above your shoulders? Ok, enough whining.

I probably didn't tell everyone, but I signed up for this program called Health for Life here in Kirkland. Its pretty nice, I get a doctor, dietitian, health coach, and personal trainer for 6 months. So I'm eating better, just started exercising. I'm down about 10 lbs already, which sounds great (and it is), but still have a long way to go. Those couple of months of unlimited gourmet food in Mountain View didn't help my weight any.

Back to typing as carefully as possible.

FSU to Phase Out Academic Operations

Florida State University To Phase Out Academic Operations By 2010

I knew it was just a matter of time.

Washington so far

From Going to Kirk...

The most frequent question I've been getting is "How is Washington?" even from the locals. To start with this is the view out of my office window. So I could be doing much worse and yes those are the Olympic mountains way out in the background. Kirkland is fine. I honestly think you could swap it in for Middleton and you'd barely notice. You would just wonder where all of these hills came from, but its a nice affluent suburb with all of the franchises you'd expect. I've got my Target, Walgreens, McDonalds, Taco Bell, even found a Qdoba. The grocery stores are Safeways and Fred Meyers instead of Copps and Cub. However the density of Starbucks does kind of give away where you are. I've yet to find a grocery store that doesn't have one in it. I can think of at least 5 within a couple miles of my apartment, including a 24 hour one with a drive-thru. I've only had time for couple quick trips into Seattle, but I've liked it so far. I'll probably save the touristy stuff for when Neil and Becca visit in October.

I haven't had long to sample the weather, but so far its been pretty good. Looks like we are up for a bit of colder turn in the weather. Highs in the 60s instead of 70s and every few days in rains in the morning. I'm still curious how I will deal with the winter grey here, but as of right now I still think its going to be better than the bitter cold in Wisconsin.

Post any question you have in the comments and I'll do my best to answer them.

REI Flagship Store

I ran over to the REI Flagship store in Seattle tonight to get a camping chair to sit on in my empty apartment. If you didn't know what you were looking for it would be very easy to miss it. They have this crazy little mini forest out front of the store where I think you are supposed to try out the hiking and biking gear. From the street it just looks like a some kind of park. I'll have to go back sometime in the daylight and take pictures. Luckily I knew where it was and found it just fine and I know have someplace to sit and watch my new TV.

New TV

From New TV

My shiny new Sharp LC-32D50U arrived on Tuesday much to my delight. I picked it because it was one of the few models out there with a DVI port. This makes hooking up my Mac Mini just easier. It also has two firewire ports so when I get my D-VHS deck out here I can view the native pass-thru of the video from the source thru the TV.

I've got the HD DVR from Comcast hooked up via HDMI to it. I'll just add the choir that HDMI cables are ridiculously expensive. It can record two things at once, but the overall user interface leaves quite a bit to be desired compared to a TiVo. Also the included drive is pretty tiny once you start recording HD. It only holds something like 10-15 hours of HD content. I'm very tempted by the new TiVo Series 3, but I'll wait till people get them in their hands to make a final judgement. Also OnDemand is becoming a pretty useful feature these days.

Badger Hockey iCal

I know at least Jen was using the Badger Hockey calendar I had published in the past. I'm moving over to using Google Calendar and someone has already entered all of this info for me. Just subscribe to this URL in iCal.

Finally found a hole in the copy protection

These guys saved whats left of my weekend. I was looking for more info about the cable box Comcast gave me and stumbled across this. The FCC ruled a while ago that the firewire ports on digital cable boxes have to be enabled so people can record digital content to their DVHS decks. Then Apple comes along and writes a virtual DVHS deck in software. So all I have to do is record whats coming out of the cable box and then VLC will play the file as it is recording. So I can finally watch TV and not just listen to it. I found this a bit late to watch the Formula 1 race, but at least right now I'm watching some Speed World Challenge races and I'm very happy.

Other good news is my real TV should be here on Tuesday. This hack should get me thru till then. Also in the future if I want to do some work with the video from the PVR I have a good way to get it into my computer.

Common Courtesy

I hope you can read this, the camera in my phone isn't that great. Basically somebody in my building is very unhappy that some other people are hogging some carts. I will say this isn't completely unfounded since I didn't even know there were community carts to be used since I had never seen one.

This just got me wondering if you have to harp on people to get them to do something is it really "common courtesy"? Its obviously not that common or we wouldn't have to teach people about it. I also found this amusing since it went up while the apartment manager is away on vacation. So I guess somebody was lacking their normal outlet for this kind of complaint and decided to take it into their own hands.

I'm liking Blogger

So Blogger is at least as easy to use as iWeb. I can update it from anywhere. Even my phone. Check out my mobile blog. Whenever they get the mobile blog support into the Blogger beta I can actually roll that into this main blog and send in updates from my phone. Pretty sweet. I can also go back to using MarsEdit if I don't want to use the web interface. Not sure which I like better yet, they are both pretty good.

So if you've been thinking of starting a blog and maybe putting it off cause you don't know how or are just plain lazy (I'm looking at you Neil). Setup a blog on here and give it a whirl.

Nigierian Scam Mail Comes to Life

I've already pointed you at Ze Frank at least once. If you haven't checked out The Show you really should. Ze recently spoke at TED and his opening was hiliarious.

iWeb Blog Continued

This blog is a continuation of the one I started over on .mac with iWeb.
http://web.mac.com/smmurph/iWeb/Site/Blog/Blog.html

Really Really Bad Technical Day

Technology hates me today. I finally get my cable and internet installed today. I'm "lucky" enough to get the new Comcast PVR with the HDMI output. So I don't have any way to test it until my new TV arrives next week. I get the bright idea that I can get an HDMI to DVI adapter and use my monitor to watch TV till my new one shows up. However HDCP decides to bite me in the ass and it won't work. Fine, I can listen to TV now. Better than nothing.

Next I'm setting up my new wireless router with the new cable modem. Everything working fine. Then my laptop locks up so I force reboot it. It comes back and I try to log in and it tells me it can't let me log in now. I do a search on my other computer and it saying there is something wrong with my FileVault home directory. So I boot the laptop into target mode and attach it to my Mini. Try to mount the home directory, no dice. Corrupted. Try some repair utilities nothing works. So I can at least move the old image out of the way and make a new one so I can at least use my laptop, but I've lost my home directory for now. I'll check with the helpdesk at work on Monday to see if they have any tricks to fix it, but I'm not holding out much hope.

Anyway one of the things I lost in my home directory was the files I need to keep using iWeb for my blog. I'd been thinking of ditching it for a while anyway. So this was a nice kick to take another step in my Googlification and start using Blogger. Now I have to get a new entry into my iWeb blog to point people here.