| Wednesday, 30 May 2001, 8:03 pm Tags: Blogging |
Uh oh. We got the well report on the new property and the well is only pumping .45 gallons per minute. About one-tenth what we would like and half that required by the county for new building.
We can live on 720 gallons per day, but we won’t have much surplus for irrigation. And we’ll have to be very careful about water conservation. Those of you with wells… what do you think? Should we pass on the house?
| Monday, 28 May 2001, 3:05 am Tags: Blogging |
OK I couldn’t resist doing a panorama with the new camera. Olympus requires you to use Olympus SmartMedia to do this, so I had to re-insert the 16 meg card that came with the camera. This is without a tripod and the angle is weird so it looks kinda strange. But it’s cool too!
I’ll do one of the new house when we move in.
| Sunday, 27 May 2001, 6:04 am Tags: Blogging |
Looks like we have a deal. We’ll be moving within the month. Green Acres here we come!
| Saturday, 26 May 2001, 2:59 pm Tags: Blogging |
My new digital camera finally came last night. Can you believe this is my first? I’ve resisted buying one all this time because I like film. (Plus I’ve been able to borrow cameras from the Products department whenever I’ve wanted.)
I tried the Olympus C3030 last year and fell in love with the quality of its optics and comfortable form factor – it’s just like a small SLR. Olympus has updated the camera this year to the C3040, and when I saw it at DBuys for under $600 I just couldn’t resist.
So far, I’m still impressed. It’s a very nice camera. Easy to use and it takes terrific pictures. It’s not as small as the Canon Powershot S300 I originally wanted, but it’s much more flexible and the size and form factor are really better for photography anyway.
The following pictures were shot as uncompressed 1024×768 TIFs (to see how well the camera could do at its best quality – I’d usually shoot in HQ mode, 2048×1536 JPEGS). I compressed the originals into 80% quality JPEGs but if you don’t mind a 3.8 MB download you can download the original TIFFs.
Now who wouldn’t want to buy this house?
| Saturday, 26 May 2001, 5:03 am Tags: Blogging |
Happy Memorial Day weekend!
It’s especially happy for all the TechLive folks. We all thought we’d be working Monday, but at the last minute Greg decided we weren’t ready to do a full nine hours on a non-news day. OK. I can use the time off.
We’re still waiting for those offers on our house. There are three couples who have looked at the house multiple times now. They all seem very interested. I’m sure we’ll get an offer or two this weekend. We were able to get a time extension from the people selling us the house in the country, but if we don’t get an offer by this time next week the deal is dead. Jennifer is extremely anxious about the whole thing. I’m happy either way. I love our current house, but the idea of having a couple of acres in the country is very appealing, too.
Henry and Abby have soccer games tomorrow, then I promised I’d take them to see Shrek. I want to see it, too!
File of the week: I know I always say screen savers are a bad idea, but here’s one I can’t resist. Everyone who sees it on my computer at works flips out. It’s the best looking aquarium screen saver I’ve seen. Download a copy of Jim Sachs SereneScreen 3D Aquarium then watch the cat go crazy. I like it so much I paid the $20 to unlock all seven fish.
| Friday, 25 May 2001, 2:22 pm Tags: Blogging |
It look like we’ll have at least one offer on our house tonight. Possibly three! If all goes well we’ll be moving within the month. I’m looking forward to country living but I sure am going to miss my cable modem.
I know not all cable modem users are so happy, but I’ve had three years of high-speed bliss. Not to brag, but my connection has held fairly steady at 2-4 megabits downstream ever since @home implemented the upstream caps of 128 kbps. I’m not crazy about the caps, but it clearly was needed to stop people from eating all the bandwidth with Shoutcast servers, etc. I was able, using Download Accelerator Plus, to snag both ISO images for Mandrake 8 in less than an hour (that’s 1.3 gigabytes!). Actually it was closer to half an hour, but if I said that you wouldn’t believe me. That’s almost 6 mbps – close to the max Ethernet can handle.
I’ve investigated DSL at the new place but I’m 15,000 feet from the CO. The technical limit for ADSL is 18,000 feet. And the closer you come to that, the slooooower it becomes. I’m going to have to investigate more exotic options, too. There are some high-speed wireless choices in my area, but they’re expensive. The Bay Area Wireless User Group has a list of high speed wireless choices an as soon as I’m sure we’re moving I’ll be checking them out. Oh, well. It’s useful research.
| Wednesday, 23 May 2001, 7:08 pm Tags: Blogging |
The shows we taped in Austin will air tonight and tomorrow. It’s taken Ken Marquis every available minute to edit these things. All the field pieces were dynamite, but apparently we had some trouble with the footage shot on stage. I haven’t seen it yet, but I’m sure it’s better than Ken’s letting on.
Management was happy. They want us to plan another one for this summer, and we’re doing an On the Road in Seattle in October, Orlando in November.
Oops. Gotta run. Erica’s done talking!
| Friday, 18 May 2001, 7:37 pm Tags: Blogging |
Everybody at TechTV is reading One Day At TechTV. I don’t know who’s writing it, but we’re all howling! Nice work.
| Friday, 18 May 2001, 1:43 pm Tags: Blogging |
Click on the thumbnail for a full-size image.
Pat and Yoshi taking a cookie break
Roger and Joshua are ready for anything
TechTV’s sultry Martin Sargent
| Friday, 18 May 2001, 12:56 am Tags: Blogging |
Oh man do I have a cold. Second in a row. I must have caught it on the plane. I’ve been sneezing on everyone so watch for an ill Screen Savers crew next week. Stacey Tisdale, too. Sorry guys. (It was fun working with Stacey – first time. Jennifer London doesn’t want to anchor any more, so I guess they’ll use Stacey until they find a replacement. That’s ok. Jennifer was so gorgeous that I couldn’t concentrate. Actually I have that problem a lot around here.)
I’m having trouble focusing in general because we just put in an offer for a new house in the country. 2.16 rolling acres with 30 fruit trees, two big out buildings, and a main house. The out buildings are huge old chicken coops (our area used to be chicken country). One had a shake roof and is in pretty bad shape, but the other has a metal roof and is completely salvagable.
If we get the house I’ll fix up the coop as a radio studio. Actually it’s about 1000 sq feet so it’s big enough to be a guest house and a radio studio and an art studio for Jennifer and a dance studio for Abby and a hangout for the kids. They accepted our offer but only gave us two weeks to sell our current house. It’s a very charming old Victorian which should sell quickly, but two weeks is fast. If it sells for anywhere near our asking price we’ll be moving to the country in late June. I can’t wait. I’m putting in a croquet court first thing!
Swag
