Photo Albums

At some point, real soon now, I shall add a 1 or 2 TB drive as a USB external device to our $25 "everything" home network server (an awesome linksys WRT54G) . Then I shall gather up and archive our music and photos there. Meanwhile, we have digital photos on lots of different services, machines, and media. Some of us prefer photoworks and we have lots of photos there now; they let you store the full resolution of the originals. We have not bumped into any storage limits; we order Kodak prints; they default crop better when they print and we are happy with their quality. I also have lots of photos on mw.spaces.live.com. I would like to put some of these albums on my phone to show to my relatives when I am there next week. So when I went to pull down some of the albums from live.com it said I needed to install "Windows Live Photo Gallery." If I did not work at Microsoft, I would immediately abandon live.com and run screaming for photoworks or some other competitor. Forcing me to install software in such a competitive space as photos is a bad scenario. However I saw the Windows Live Photo Gallery application demonstrated at work a while ago and it has some cool features and I know it is very trustworthy since I work in Trustworthy Computing, so I went for it. I like the album-at-a-time download feature as well as the integration with email. It's also pretty cool how it scans for photos and puts them in albums. So anyway I am making some slide shows now and shall put them on my phone to show them to relatives, just as Arnold did for me in the restaurant -- he showed me a large album of a recent field trip he took with his daughter's class.

Living the Windows Mobile Life Style

I went jogging at noon and had just made it up the hill where 40th St dead ends into bridle trails park

(the park was nice in the sun) when I got a call from the admin that I was supposed to present and facilitate a "human performance consultation" in half an hour.

I was listening to Bach, using my phone as an mp3 player and those groovy a2dp bluetooth stereo headphones. When the phone rang, I pushed the button on the headphone and it picked up the call; I had never used the headphones as a bluetooth headset before. The microphone apparantly sucks but we were able to communicate.

So I ran (quickly) back to work, prepared the hand-outs and questions, and went to the meeting. I love this phone. I plan to add home movies and slide shows to show relatives when I fly east next week.

I sometimes wish the phone had wifi or gps (or I had a data plan) but mostly I am thrilled about not paying the ridiculously high rates to the phone carriers.

Yofi bridges to boyscouts

The second year Webelos bridged into their boy scout troops last night. Entertainment was provided by an awesome jumprope dance troop.

Yofi received his arrow of light cub scout award. The blue & gold banquet was not as ceremonial as other such parties I have attended in the past but the low-key atmosphere and excellent facilities enabled more social networking among the parents.

Rockets kill another civilian in Israel

One of the 43 Qassam rockets fired into Israel from Gaza so far today killed a student. Other rockets wounded some kids. Homes and a factory were badly damaged by the barrage. A direct hit was scored on a cafeteria moments after people left.



In response to this brutal war crime targetting civilians, the Israeli government announced their commitment to peace and stepped up shipments of fuel, electricity, and food to the Iranian-sponsored terrorists firing rockets at civilians from Gaza. Yosi Beilin called on the government to enter serious peace talks with the Islamist terrorist group to discuss a long-term commitment by Israel to use no military action against terrorists.


Here the medical crew is trying unsuccessfully to resuscitate the dead student. Medical crews did rescue a kids arm from amputation, though.

The NYTimes and other US media area studiously ignoring the rocket fire and carnage. More than 800 rockets and mortar shells have been fired from Gaza into Israel since 1/1/08. About 2,300 were fired at Israel during all of 2007.

I can't imagine what the US response to Mexico would be if hundreds of rockets and shells rained down on San Diego from across the border.

Ski Green but Rest Black

In addition to selling ski green tags when you buy lift tickets, Snoqualmie summit ski area also has three roaring outdoor fire pits pumping CO2 into the air faster and more efficiently than dozens of round-trip car rides to the pass.

Eitana's First Time on Ski Lift

Eitana can turn in both directions. The weather was perfect. We all had a great time.

Epilog: Back in WA -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

Bye Bye Berkeley

I never blogged the last bit of our journey Monday and I found some photos in my phone that I had not posted.

Simeon lost in the round-of-32 (called a "bubble round") in Lincoln-Douglas and in the semifinals of Impromptu on Sunday night. Therefore instead of my going hiking in Tilden park on Monday while Simeon battled for the California and Western states championships, we headed home early and slightly disappointed.

At the border between Oregon and California while I was sleeping and Simeon was tooling along, listening to John Grisham's The Appeal, we had an encounter with CHP's finest and need to remedy some things.

Here is Simeon in the car while the attendant pumps gas in Oregon.




Susan, creating partybees.


Reformed convicts washing the car in Berkeley at a church:


Headed for college in the fall!


doggie park hoodies!


Arnold, using the GPS feature of his phone:


More snaps of the campus and a self-portrait (you can tell I was running):






I like this picture in spite of the poor camera optics:

Day 3: Run up -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

I went running on the Berkeley campus, trying to reach the top of the hill where I remember the Berkeley Hall of Science is. When I got there, I noticed I could cross the street and keep running up the hill so I kept going and found myself in some weird mini-campuses that had U.S. government vehicles and tall cyclone fences topped with barbed wire. I also encountered lots of deer and poison oak along the wilderness trails. On the way down I kept getting stuck inside the compound fences and needed to back track quite a bit until I found a street that dropped back down to the main campus. I ran about an hour longer than I planned but I felt much better. I also ran around inside the main campus once I got down the hill.

During the run I got a call from Simeon; he has advanced to the later rounds of one of his events so he will be home late again tonight. The later he calls to get picked up, the better because it means he has advanced further towards the championship. He speculates that he will not reach the final rounds of his other event but he won't know until all championship round pairings are posted. Most judges do not reveal who won the round and Simeon has no coach here. He linked up with the Bainbridge Island team and is having dinner with them. It would be great if we could leave at a reasonable hour tomorrow but it would be even better if we had to stay because he advances so far in the Lincoln-Douglass event.

We shall see what happens later tonight...

Day 3: Richmond Costco Bark Park -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

Simeon was really tired and grumpy this morning. I hope he can cheer up for the judges and take home another victory. We had breakfast at "Nations" again. I plan to buy new tires for the car at the Richmond Costco. Arnold is meeting me there at 10am, after which we shall ask the GPS for ideas about what to do. When our family lived here from '92 to '05, Richmond was the crime capital of the area, with more violent crime per capita than any area city, even more than East Palo Alto.

http://www.cityrating.com still ranks Richmond among the worst US cities. I remember visiting the Richmond high school to try to get the kids away from drugs and into computers a few times. The school was like a prison.

Arnold is great. We walked around the bark park next to Costco (Point Isabel Regional Shoreline) while waiting for Costco to put on the tires. There were dozens and dozens of doggies off-leash, swimming, flirting, fighting, and playing. From Point Isabel you can see the golden gate, the bay bridge, and a big Island -- I think it's Angel Island but it seems too far North, opposite Tiburon. You can see the bridges behind the doggie pictures I snapped with my phone.

Arnold is hard pressed to hire a large number of people for his new start-up http://www.reardenlabs.com/ where he is running all of networking, operations, data center, systems administration, and operability engineering. He wants Simeon to interview there for a summer job. The social network of people we formed at Synopsys in 1992, including the SAGE professional organization, the kernel of Operations people at Netscape, WebTV, TellMe Networks, GNAC, and others has mostly splintered and disintegrated. Mark Verber is coasting along at Metaweb; J and Rory are at Ooma.com; none of the great people we nurtured are interested in another start-up. A few nibbled but turned down Arnold's offers. So Arnold is looking to create a new community of more junior people who have fire in their bellies and want the intensity of a start-up environment instead of a relaxed, comfortable, big place. He will probably raid Google and Yahoo now that their stocks are gliding down towards the toilet.

Arnold is also very active at the Christa Mcauliffe school in Cupertino. He showed me a movie on his phone of their last week-long field trip outing. It was interesting how the kids had to plan and execute their homesteading simulation. Arnold claims that phones like ours with large displays will completely replace wallet snapshots and small photo albums. Maya suggested lunch at the Pacific East mall where most of the shops and restaurants had no English translations of their Chinese (Taiwan) signs and menus. The food was good, the service was slow, and the mall was nice.

Day 2: 7pm Pleasant-on Fremont -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

I ran some errands and was precisely on time to my lunch date. My friend just accepted the role of president at http://www.hiperware.com/.

He is very excited about his new job. His wife just created a new store-front indoor party venue called http://www.partybees.com/ and they will open in a few weeks. She is also very excited and spent the whole day interviewing staff members for her new enterprise. It's great to see the enthusiasm of these entrepreneurs. I am bullish on their prospects and wish them both good luck. After lunch he asked if I were interested in travelling somewhere to do some manly thing, just guys. I was pretty surprised and gave it a lot of thought. I don't play golf and he does not enjoy snow camping. I was thinking of places my family would hate that we would both enjoy and came up with Pensacola. But I need to give it more thought.

The drive down 680 to Fremont brought back memories and the foot hills of Mission peak were beckoning me to run along the ridge line again. I visited some more old, close friends. He is now a performing musician, playing local clubs and composing some original guitar pieces. He is learning composition and rehearsing much of the time. His 12-year-old son is now taller than his 6'3" mom and will soon pass his very-tall dad in height. He is the star of his basketball team as one might imagine.

I spent a long time talking to everyone and headed back up North around 6:30pm. Simeon "texted" (sent a SMS message) that he would be debating until 10pm.

We got back from Thai dinner at 1045pm. Over dinner, Simeon explained his debate rounds. After breakfast he had only water and chocolate (no lunch or dinner until 10pm) and was not hungry for dinner. Simeon won his first three rounds easily in the morning and was paired against the Stanford tournament champion (National champ from Texas) in the fourth round. The kid was the most charismatic, "magical" opponent Simeon has encountered. The judges had English language problems so both debaters slowed the debate down to a crawl, speaking slowly, carefully, and enunciating each syllable of each ultra-terse phrase. Simeon said the entire round was surreal and he was crushed by the champ. He will probably advance to the finals (he won all later rounds) and we may be here until Monday night, sigh. Simeon took some time between rounds to explore the facilities at Berkeley. The EECS department has older class rooms and facilities while the history department buildings are newly-renovated. There are power and Ethernet for laptops everywhere, in all class rooms of the campus.

I really love the clear skies, sunshine and overall atmosphere of this "bay area" and miss it dearly.

Day 2: 7am Great Debate or Wait for Fate -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

Up at 0600 to the screaming windows mobile alarm sound, breakfast at "Nations" diner, then on to Dwinelle Hall on campus to find the pairings and discover against whom and where the first round will be. There are dozens of high school debaters everywhere we look.

One of my daughters named our Garmin GPS "Maya" and the name stuck. We refer to the device as "she" and talk to her as she patiently gives us directions. She navigated a much better route to Dwinelle than the printed instructions. We were early.

These pictures are from the hotel room window at 0715. There are lots of taxis whisking the kids off to Dwinelle; we are only 5 blocks away and I think we shall walk there tomorrow. In the photos you can see our little Elantra in the parking lot, the hotel's big sign, and the "Nation's Diner" across the street through the trees. The second photo shows a taxi taking debaters to Berkeley campus.

Both Simeon and I really like it here in California. The crisp air smells to me like "let's go running on a wilderness trail now!" and the cloudless sunny skies are a welcome relief from Seattle. I plan to run over to the Berkeley Costco later this morning, then meet up with Fremont friends for lunch, hiking, and nostalgic conversations in the afternoon.

playing for pizza by John Grisham

During the 14-hour drive from Seattle to Berkeley, we listened to John Grisham’s Playing for Pizza.  The book is trite, cliché, and melodramatic, but also very enjoyable.  Grisham really loves Italy and the book is a gushing tourist’s love of the country, the culture, and all the tourist attractions.  The cardboard NFL characters and shallow protagonist are minor distractions from a good story.  I recently started learning about football because my youngest son is playing in the local pee-wee program.  The picture Grisham paints of the NFL from a third-string quarterback’s perspective is therefore more interesting to me than it would have been if I did not care about the game.  The key to the sport, as Grisham points out repeatedly through the action in the book, is the rough, barbaric, “killer” hitting.  When the quarterback chooses to go out and hit defenders or take hits to make plays, his team wins.  When he tucks and runs, or throws poorly under pressure, his team loses.  The sport, no matter which league or level of play, is about hitting, coaching, and injuries.

Day 1: The drive down -- Mitch and Simeon's Excellent Adventure to Berkeley 2/15/08 - 2/19/08

After stuffing some socks and underwear in back packs and packing some high-calorie meals, we headed South, hitting the road at 0545 and making great time all the way through Oregon. We stopped a few times to pee but the car is getting about 40 MPG on the highway so it was not thirsty for petrol as often as we needed to stop. We ate lunch in the car, cruising at 75 on the I-5.

I-5 is pretty boring in Washington but more interesting in Oregon. If we had more time I would hug the coast or go further East (not take I-5). We did not see the dense forests of Oregon I wanted to experience. We did not see the amazing coastal areas either.

We did see Mt Shasta and lake Shasta in all their splendor.

We also saw went over the Columbia River bridge and experienced the beauty of the river in the early morning light. We did not spend enough time "smelling the flowers" or appreciating the scenery. We did get to talk a lot, however, which made the whole trip worthwhile.

We arrived at the "Inn at the University" in Berkeley which is actually 5 blocks down from the campus on University Ave in the "little India" neighborhood of Berkeley. It's a nice little hotel with clean, modern, functional accommodations.

Across the street is an Elvis-bar 1950's style diner with great food (vegetables and hash browns for me) on which we gorged ourselves before heading to the Sheraton in Emeryville for registration. The GPS battery died but we managed to get to the hotel while the registration line was still relatively short. It's a HUGE debate tournament with hundreds of kids competing for the California State title and trying to break into the National "tournament of champions." It really is the "best of the west" debate event and it even appears in the Lincoln-Douglas Wikipedia entry. We bought some bottled water and energy food for Simeon, discovered where the pairings would be posted on campus at 0700 Saturday, verified the information in his "packet," and headed back to the hotel. Simeon started to get nervous and commented about how terrible the highway onramp on Powell St. in Emeryville has become as a result of the detour. It is completely dark (no lights or street lamps) and looks more like the area one would dump dead bodies (in the lake next to the on-ramp).

While Simeon did some "pre-flow" for his "aff and neg cases," I reviewed work email and made some plans for Saturday. Simeon crashed early and started snoring. I went to bed later.

My phone runs Windows!

A good friend of mine at Microsoft took a job in Microsoft China and the company got him a new phone. He had no use for his old one and gave it to me. I was very happy with my old Nokia 3220b. It has great reception; it is small. The battery lasts 10 days. It is relatively rugged. And I put some extra Java games and text things in it using the data cable. However I decided to try out the HTC Tornado which AT&T/Cingular labels the "2125." The reason I tried it out is that it is the same size and shape as my tiny Nokia and it has no silly "touch screen" (I can't stand those phones). The gadget freaks at work all have the new "Tilt" touchscreen with slide-out keyboard or the older models that lack a GPS and high-resolution camera. My wife uses one of them as well. They are bulky, fragile, and stupid (a two-handed phone?).

The reviews on the 2125 are mixed. Many people have the same problem as my friend, namely that the joystick in the middle of the phone sticks. When the phone arrived, I unlocked and flash upgraded to the latest wm6, installed all the usual suspect stuff (office, games). I found, purchased, and installed 9-way keypad to overcome the joystick stickiness and it works better than a functional joystick! (It includes copy/paste functionality and some other features).

I tried out the “pocket informant” calendar replacement my wife runs in her phone but that program is too big and slow for this phone and I don’t need to coordinate 7 calendars so I don’t need 99% of the features she uses. I deleted that application.

I used drdivx to convert NFL afc and nfc championship games from 10 GB mpg2 movies to 250K pocket-mobile divx and I installed the wm6 divx player on the phone. I watched them at the airport and on planes during my last trip. I don't like the divx player and plan to replace it as soon as I find a better one.

I own a Kyocera wireless Bluetooth a2dp stereo headphones that doubles as a Bluetooth hands-free mic and headset. I love the head phones (very good sound quality, very comfortable on the ears, and battery life is awesome); they Bluetooth bonded perfectly the first time with the phone so the phone is also now my mp3 player. I have a bunch of music on the storage card and also an audio book. I love it!

I never owned a camera phone before and started travel logging photos during a recent business trip. I also capture whiteboard and poster results from my class with the camera phone. I also captured a few videos but the quality is very poor.

I have e-text of a book I was reading so I stuffed that file into the phone and now I read it from the phone’s screen instead of paper (much lighter, always with me, etc.). E-text is very small so I have the next book in the series on the phone as well. I am looking for a better e-book reader than pocket-IE or ms-word; it appears the e-book readers all want you to web in to their site and buy e-books. I just want an ebook reader that will read files instead. I need it to remember my place (book mark) when I reboot the phone so I don’t have to scroll down to where I was.

Similarly, I would prefer a media player that lets me drag mp3 or video files to the phone's storage card and watch / listen to them. The concept of using the PC's media player to "sync" is silly. I was able to create playlists on the phone with some classical music and some Carla Burni songs but I don't know how to save / edit them yet. I actually like Microsoft's media player for the quality of the media (it uses the entire screen; divx player does not). But the interface is really difficult for me.

One thing missing is a GPS. The "tilt" has a GPS and it works great with the map programs, both online and offline (Pocket Streets 'n Trips). The other thing I miss is wifi. I can sync and get "net" via bluetooth but wifi has a longer range and works where I don't have a computer that does have net and bluetooth.

I really like the form factor of the 2125. It is much smaller and thinner than the 8125 / tilt / wing / mda family of phones

Here is a short video of my 4-year old that I took with the phone today: