Der blinkinlichten ist lookenpeepers goot!

Posted on Tuesday, March 22, 2011 by David Veatch

Wherein a little history, and new Blackburn Flea 2.0 USB lights are reviewed.

First, some history…

When I first built out my 2003 Kona Fire Mountain as a commuter way back in ’07, I mounted two Cat Eye TL-LD600′s on the front fork, one on each side pointing to the side, and two pointing towards the rear off the rear fender, and my Triple Shot rounding out as the bright headlight.

This was a good setup, but I got tired of replacing batteries in the TL-LD600′s. They were also quite the protuberance on the fork up front. Eventually, and perhaps inevitably, the fork lights came off; one snapped off, and the other looked lopsided. Additionally, the Triple Shot, bright as it is, is heavy, and the separate battery is bulky, takes up valuable frame real-estate, and is not as convenient to recharge as I would have liked. I wasn’t really complaining though, and rode with just the headlight and taillight for a while. Then I didn’t ride for a while. Then I rode again, and nearly got plowed into twice in two days by people who clearly were not using their lookenpeepers.

That brings me to today. I’m back to my original setup, but this time with different lights. I still have an old TL-LD600 on the seat post. But on the fork I now have two Blackburn Flea 2.0 USB rear lights, each pointing out and to the side. For headlights I’ve replaced the heavy and bulky Triple Shot with two Blackburn Flea 2.0 USB front lights. I’ve gone the extra best-practice mile and mounted another on my helmet.

When they’re all set to blinkin, I am quite a sight to behold, and after all, that’s the point, isn’t it?

On to the review…

Construction

The lights are very small and light, which is a nice change of pace from my old Triple Shot. As far as construction goes, they feel moderately sturdy, but not quite as solid as I’d like. That goes double for the helmet mount. The base that sits against the helmet is metal, but the bracket that slides into the slot on the light itself is plastic, and I’m worried that it’ll snap off. I’m playing pretty careful with it to push that day out as long as I can. I’m a little disappointed with that piece, and would have expected only metal for the price of $15. Still, it’s possible they went plastic to save wear on the light chassis, which is itself plastic. I’ll entertain the possibility, though I’m pretty sure it was a cost thing.

Lighting Modes

The four LED headlights have three modes: a rather bright standard, a much brighter overdrive and the standard blinking. I rode this morning in the dark with the headlights set to overdrive and the helmet light set to blinking. This afternoon I set them all to blinking. Run times are quoted as 3 hours on steady, and 5 hours for flash. It’s not stated whether steady is for standard or overdrive modes. I suspect overdrive to be less than 3 hours. I probably won’t time them to see, but that should provide a solid week of riding to and from work without recharges. If it’s less than that, I keep closer track, but otherwise I’m not worried about it.

The four LED rear lights (which I have on my fork) have three modes as well: all-on steady, flash (all lights blinking in unison), and chase (alternating blinking between two pairs). Run times are quoted at 6 hours steady, and 12 hours flash. I suspect 12 hours is for chase mode, and flash to be somewhere in between, but again, I’ll only keep close track if they’re obviously falling short of those times.

Brightness

Both front and rear lights are, as one would expect from LEDs, very bright. Rated at 40 lumens, the front lights aren’t anywhere near as bright as my 130 lumen Triple Shot, but two running in tandem illuminate the urban landscape aplenty for my purposes, and they’re nowhere near as bulky. I wouldn’t take them on singletracks at night, but for daily street use, they’re plenty sufficient.

Charging

They charge via a little USB dongle. The light sticks attach to the dongle via two magnets, which also serve as the charging contact points. I found the holding power of the magnets more than sufficient, and was able to charge three of them at once in my D-Link USB hub. The first charge took about half an hour per light before each was fully charged and the charge indicator went from blinking red to blinking green.

I bought one set that came with a solar charger, but I’ve not tried it yet.

The button that serves as the USB charge indicator, and that you use to turn on and off the lights and switch modes, also serves as a running charge indicator. After you shut the light off, it’ll glow green to indicate a charge of 75% or more, orange to indicate a charge between 25% and 75%, and red to indicate a charge of 25% or less. That’s useful insofar as knowing about how much charge you have left, but not really useful in knowing how much time you have left. Still, it’s probably enough… red simply means charge as soon as you can.

Price

At ~$25 per light, they’re cheaper than a lot of options out there, but if you want more than one, the $$’s add up. Still, the charging method definitely offsets the initial price.

Mounting

They mount to the frame via custom made Velcro straps, with protective strips on the non-sticky side to help protect the frame. The straps need to be completely removed in order to properly charge them, which means they have to be remounted after every charge. That’s not a big deal to me because they’re very easy to mount, though it might be to some. The ability to quickly move them around the frame, or share them with friends in need outweighs, at least for now, the inconvenience of having no permanent mounting bracket. That said, it shouldn’t be too tough to rig up a permanent mount (perhaps using the, albeit plastic, helmet mount) if one were so inclined.

The rear lights have what look like belt straps on them that the Velcro frame mounts slide through. They also allow them to be strapped directly into loops, belts, or wherever else you can find that fits. They’re allegedly compatible with certain helmets. Unfortunately, mine isn’t one of them.

Conclusion

So, what’s my final take on them? Traffic was pretty light today, but those cars I did encounter showed every sign that they saw me. There were no close calls at all, and I certainly felt better having the directional light on my helmet. All the blinking made for a very cool and eerie strobe effect that lit up reflectors everywhere! In the dark of the morning, they were bright enough for me that I wasn’t worried about potholes, stray cats or zombie arms reaching out from sewer drains.

I have to take some points off for the construction, though. Though I’m sure they’ll last as long as I want them to, the lights don’t feel quite as solid as I’d like,. The helmet mount feels like it could break at any time. I’m pretty sure I’ll be taking them up on their (limited) lifetime warranty for that piece. Until then, I’ll be handling them with kid gloves to put that day off as long as possible.

All in all, I’m going with 4 out of 5 der blinkinlichten after my first day with the lights. Points revoked for construction, but more points given for size, price, performance, convenience, ease of use and charging method.
Blackburn Flea 2.0 Front Light

Twice in Two Days

Posted on Friday, March 18, 2011 by David Veatch

That’s how many times I was nearly hit by a driver not paying attention. I don’t know that there’s any way to compare that to the average ride for the average rider, but for me, it’s twice the number of near misses I’ve had for the last three four years. My own memory is very likely faulty, but I only remember one other instance.

Yesterday morning, I was heading south on Lowell and turning left onto 91st when a woman heading east on 91st Terrace went straight through the intersection towards 91st St after I was already well into my turn. She, in effect, wanted to share precious intersection space with me. I saw it happening, easily adjusted my course and we pulled into the eastbound lane side by side with me in the middle and her next to the curb. She sped ahead with a look of shock (reproach? distaste?) on her face and I moved to the right behind her. I tried to catch her at Foster – you know, for a friendly reminder about paying attention – but the light turned before I got there and she was gone. Oh well.

This morning, I was much closer to home at an intersection within an apartment complex. I was heading east on Kings Cove Dr, and the driver heading north on Brittany St and turning west into me. When I say “into me” that’s exactly what I mean. In spite of my rather crazy bright light (ok, only 140 lumens) and bright fluorescent windbreaker, the driver clearly didn’t see me and just pulled out. I saw it coming though, and easily engaged pulled into the oncoming lane with a rather loud, throaty and heart-felt “WATCH WHERE YOU’RE GOING!!” I’m sure they only heard “WAt wer yr gn…” I looked back and they were stopped (in the middle of the road). I can only hope they had to stop b/c their own inattentiveness lanced adrenalized terror through their chest. That might be too naïve though.

Rather than continue the focus on the well covered topic of driver inattention, I want to turn the focus away from what others are doing, and point out two things:

I made it safely through both scenarios because I was paying attention, was planning ahead and was riding defensively. I can’t help whether drivers are paying attention, or if they’re reading, writing, putting on makeup, eating, using their mobile phone to text or talk, or any of the 10,000 other things people do instead of drive, but I can help whether I’m paying attention, and at the end of the day, that’s what’s going to keep me rubber side down.
These back-to-back near incidents inspired me to do something I’ve needed to do for some time. In the first case, it’s entirely possible that, because of my bike’s position relative to the woman driving and the position of the lighting on my bike (front and rear only), she just didn’t see me. Additionally, it was that low visibility dusk/dawn period. I’ll give her that. So, I’ve ordered a helmet light I can flash in people’s eyes, and two rear lights I’ll attach to my fork pointing to the sides. I used to have that setup, but I let it slide through exchanging this bike for that, that light for this, etc., you know how it goes. I’m also looking into some highly-reflective tape for my pannier and frame (nod to CommuterDude for the tips on electrical tape and placement).

So, there you have it. I’ve had two near-encounters with inattentive drivers in as many days, after zero encounters in years. I’m sure it’s a statistical anomaly, rather than an indication of things to come, but just to be sure, I’m ramping up my visibility.

Just do me a favor will you, don’t tell my wife about this. She worries enough as it is. :)

Biting the NAS Bullet

Posted on Monday, February 28, 2011 by David Veatch

UPDATE 2011.03.09 – I think I got a handle on it. I’m still pursuing the subject of this post, but I’m no longer worried about the backups.

I’m done.

I’ve given up on USB based backup solution. Sunday morning has become my standard “find out what went wrong with the full backups last night and see what I can do to fix them.” I tire of it. Granted, the failures this weekend were because I ran out of room on my little 80GB USB drives. Totally my fault. It was just a matter of time. I wasn’t paying attention and the backups failed. Fortunately, that’s all that happened, as opposed to something more insidious. At least it wasn’t some sort of kernel panic, or soft-updates issue again.

I could easily solve it by spending a few bucks on a larger drive, but that would just be another stopgap. I want a solution that will carry us a few years and then some.

So, I’m thinking NAS*. Something that would serve my family’s needs (which amounts to my wife and I at this point, but we’re really hoping for a little papoose sometime here real soon). That means a lot of storage space. That means seamless connectivity with our existing machines, and that means dead simple to use.

I could spend a few hundred dollars on hardware and many hours putting together my own FreeNAS server from pieces parts (or any one of a number of other free options). Or I could spend a few hundred dollars and a few minutes on an OOTB solution.

I’m leaning towards the OOTB solution.

Sure, it’s not as proudly geeky as a home grown solution, but my gorgeous wife doesn’t appreciate geekery as much as some of you and I do. She appreciates things that work and work now. If I’m going to spend this amount of time and money, she has approval powers – it’s just part of that thing called Happily Married. Frankly, the older I get, the more I agree with her. So, OOTB NAS it is.

So far, though I’m still keeping my eyes and mind open, I’ve narrowed my choices down to:

Synology Disk Station DS410
Synology Disk Station DS410j
Netgear ReadyNAS NV+
Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra
Netgear ReadyNAS Ultra Plus
QNAP Systems 419P+
Thecus N4200Eco/Pro
Seagate BlackArmor NAS 400

Each of them fits my base requirements:

Interoperability between Windows, Mac and *nix machines
Function as a print server
Four drive bays for RAID5 or better (hot swappable a huge plus)
Small physical footprint

Each of them will do the job. So now, it’s a question of features, performance, future-resistance and of course, price.

I’ll be researching each of these models (and any others that come across my screen in my research) over the next couple of weeks (or less).

* Yeah, I know NAS != backup. This is just a step in the right direction. For backups of the NAS, I’ll grab a big 1 or 2TB disk, throw it into my dev server, and rsync the data from the NAS to it. I’ll keep my backups scripts running for my server data, but I’ll point them over NFS to the NAS, rather than to flakey USB drives.

Plan Reset, and Chromebook as Sysadmin Tool

Posted on Wednesday, January 19, 2011 by David Veatch

As I suspected, my 100MB/month plan reset this morning, and I’m back up to my full allotment.

Which isn’t that much, as I also suspected. See, I’ve been tracking it, and my own data usage on my desklaptop is pretty severe, and I really haven’t used it that much. Admittedly, I’ve used it more in the last couple of weeks as I built out my two servers, and wanted the ease of side-by-side ssh sessions. Lots of research and referencing online tutorials, how-to’s, man(n) pages, and the like. Most of it was primarily text based (not a lot of imagery in man pages – don’t you think they could be prettified a bit?), but the bandwidth usage still adds up. In fact, for me, it adds up to about 100MB per day!

I could have used my Chromebook, but it really wasn’t ideal for the task. My wife was, many times, confounded by the sheer amount of LogoRhythms I was ensconced within. Throughout the bulk of the builds, I never had fewer than two sessions going (one for each server), and several times I had upwards of 5 and 6 as I tailed logs there and yonder, and ran compiles and code and configs here*. Though I got around the lack of key based ssh authentication in crosh $ with Match statements in my sshd_config, the lack of window tiling, while not fatal to the task at hand, would have hindered me a touch. It was immensely helpful to have multiple and simultaneously visible windows open at once. I’m also a stickler for the look of my terminal sessions, and crosh doesn’t allow much by way of customization.

A sysadmin platform the Chromebook is not. Then again, it was never designed to be.

Only slightly apropos of the topic, we had a lot of home showings over MLK weekend, at both houses. The Chromebook was handy to have around when we didn’t really have any place to go in particular, or errands to run. It provided for plenty of lightweight and easily portable distraction at bookstores and coffee shops with free Wi-Fi.

You better believe I browsed everything http://. That https:// stuff is for wussies. Live a little, people. I’m sure the shady characters off in the corners with their hoodies on and their screens tilted down and facing the wall appreciated that.

* I could have reduced my workload significantly by building one server and mirroring the drive with dd but… well… I didn’t. Maybe next time.

Starting Line Bike-for-Transportation Setup for 2011

Posted on Monday, January 3, 2011 by David Veatch

I’ve decided that I’m going to return to my 2008 habit of getting to work on my own power, sans internal combustion engine, as much as possible. There will be days when I have to resort to the relative warmth of a car cabin, due to meetings in another building, but I think I’ll be able to make it happen again with the same commitment I had back then, barring compelling spousal objection or injury, of course.

It looks like I picked a decent week to start:

Monday – Mostly sunny. High: ~41°F
Tuesday – Mostly sunny. High: ~38°F
Wednesday – Mostly sunny. High: ~44°F
Thursday – Partly cloudy. High: ~42°F
Friday – Partly cloudy. High: ~43°F

So I’ll have some things cycling related things to write about again. Tomorrow, I’m going to talk about my new helmet, a Lazer Helium. Wednesday, I’m going to talk about my new cycling glasses, the 7eye Cape with Airshield.

Today, I’m going to go over my rig and gear.

The Rig

I’m riding a nearly stock ’09 Kona Dew Drop. The details are given below on the off-chance you’re interested, and b/c I’m not sure how long they’ll be available on the Kona site. It’s a fine bike with good parts. The only thing I’d change is the frame for which I’d go steel instead of aluminum. I’ve not ridden it enough (~600 miles), in spite of how long I’ve owned it, to really get a comfortable sense of how it handles. Thus far, I’ve treated it with kid gloves. I can say the handling isn’t as tight as my Torelli, but it’s been saddled with heavy panniers for most rides. Those tend to alter the handling characteristics a bit, ‘nom’sayin? Besides, it’s like comparing a sedan to a Ferrari. It’s just not a fair comparison.

My Gear

My additions to the bike, simple though they be, are a front fender, handlebar mounts for my Garmin 705 and Cateye Triple Shot, a top tube bag for the light battery, a couple Shimano A530 SPD pedals, an old tube lovingly and protectively wrapped around the chain stay, an Axiom Journey disc brake compatible rear rack, one Cat Eye TL-LD600 facing the rear, and a couple cheap bottle holders.

Note that I don’t have a rear fender. That rack, plus the disc brakes and mounts made for a problematic rear fender install… I eventually determined that, for me, it wasn’t necessary. The rack takes most of the water when it’s wet out anyway.

I’m carrying my clothes back and forth in a Nashbar Commuter Garment Pannier. It’s been pretty solid for me over the last couple of years. I really should write up a full review of it, though. For now, I’ll say that I’ve had no problems, but have changed out the stock rack hooks with a couple of small stainless steel carabiners. While the stock hooks worked on my old rack mounted to my Kona Fire Mountain, the new rack on the Dew Drop (necessary due to the disc brakes) has different hook points, and the stock hooks weren’t stable. The carabiners are definitely more stable, but they’re also a lot more difficult in the tight spaces under the pannier. I’m thinking larger hooks would be easier to handle, and wouldn’t slide through the eye holes in the rack (yeah, I really need to write a full review).

I’m looking for some additional lights to mount on my front forks pointing either to the front, or to the side. Ideally, I’ll find some wraparound lights that light up the whole fork in the round. I dare a driver not to see that! Wait… nevermind, they won’t see me no matter what I did. Maybe a helmet mounted front/rear lighting set up would help.

Rig Details

Saved for last b/c I know most people just won’t care. This is here primarily for my own future reference.

Frame Size C56cm
Frame tubing Kona 7005 Aluminum Butted
Fork Kona P2 700c Disc
Headset Ritchey LB-Plus
Crankarms FSA Vero
Chainrings 52/42/30
B/B RPM 7420
Pedals See Above
Chain KMC Z-72
Freewheel Shimano C Series (11-34, 8spd)
F/D Shimano 2203
R/D Shimano Deore
Shifters Shimano 2203
Handlebar Kona Sweeper
Stem Kona RD
Grips Velo Wrap w/Gel
Brakes Avid BB-7 Road Disc
Brake Levers Shimano 2203
Front hub Formula Disc
Rear hub Shimano M475 Disc
Spokes Sandvik Stainless 15g fr/14g rr
Tires Continental CountryRide 700x37C
Rims Rigida ZAC19SL
Saddle Kona Comfort
Seatpost Kona RD
Seat clamp Kona QR
Color Metallic Red
Extras Kona Bell

Power vs. Mobility, a Question of Need Raised by the Chromebook

Posted on Tuesday, December 28, 2010 by David Veatch

At the tail end of the day, with a beverage in your hand and your feet up, that’s what it usually boils down to. You can have power, or you can have mobility. You can’t have both. Take your pick.

I’m not saying modern mobile platforms aren’t powerful. You can have both, but to reach the pinnacle of mobile PC performance, you’re going to pay, and you’re going to pay dearly. On the other hand, with a desktop rig, you can spend the same amount, get more power and maintain some upgrade potential. You can also spend a great deal more and get a great deal more power and upgrade-ability, but I’m talking similar specs. So it still comes down to power vs. mobility. What do you need?

That was the unexpected question raised by the arrival of the Chromebook.

Though they’re a lot cheaper than the desktop replacement monsters I’ve been looking at to finally replace my Aurora (the Alienware m17x, for instance), I’ve never even considered a netbook or mini laptop. What’s the point? They’re far too underpowered for my needs. With their tiny little screens, cute little keyboards, cuddly CPUs and GPUs… bah.

That cute little black rubber ducky of a computer changed things up a bit. I’ve had to revisit the question of why terrible power has to accompany convenient mobility. The answer used to be to make it easy to attend LAN parties. That and… well, that’s pretty much it. But I don’t attend LAN parties anymore. All my old beloved LAN party buddies have moved away and/or started adult really-real-world lives (including myself), and this new generation of whipper snappers is just too much for this old fogey to handle. Strike bestial power from the list of mobility requirements. I still want/need the mobile, but I no longer require a gaming Tour de Force in my lap. In fact, my Aurora has basically become a desktop, and hasn’t left the office in months.

The Chromebook allowed me to realize I can have my power cake, and slather it up with lots of mobility icing too. I don’t need All the Power All the Time. For most of what I do, I can get by with far less. I can, with nary a reservation, return to my old hobby of building my own rig (assuming I don’t go the way of the Forbidden Fruit) to get a stupid fast setup for less scratch that allows me to save the world in high resolution and cranked up detail, and yet have my little laptop for when I’m out and about, or don’t feel like getting off the couch to look something up, answer an e’mail, throw together a senseless blog post on the quick. After all, that’s all I really need out of a mobile computer.

There’s another benefit of going the mini/netbook/ultracompact laptop route, besides savings. Those gaming laptops can be heavy! Sure, they’re technically mobile, but they’re not feather weights. Then there’s the fact that they’re hot! There’s a reason there’s a glut of laptop cooling pads available, complete with fans and fins and all manner of cooling whatnot. I wonder how long it’ll be before they have liquid-cooled laptop cooling pads. Wait, what?

Finally, when I consider the cost of a fully decked out gaming/multi-media laptop, and an comparably decked out gaming/multi-media desktop, the difference easily allows for a separate, smaller, more mobile mini or netbook. While I’m spec’ing out a new desktop rig, I’m also paying attention to what hardware Chrome OS will eventually be retailed on. Rumor has it that it’ll run in the $300 – $400 range, easily within the margin between a bleeding edge gaming laptop and an equivalent desktop.

At the tail end of the day, with a beverage in my hand and my feet up, I can have my power and mobility too. By separating them, my power will be more powerful, and my mobility will be more mobile. All it took to finally realize that was the surprise arrival of a Chromebook.

On Google/Verizon’s Chrome OS Pilot Program Data Plans

Posted on Monday, December 27, 2010 by David Veatch

I’ve never been subject to bandwidth caps or quotas, so I’ve never really paid it much heed. I have been aware of their existance, and have kept them in (the back of my) mind with my own designs in the past by keeping imagery low and abiding by the “Content is King” mantra, and keeping my content in the realm of text.

Now, with the Cr-48 Pilot Program, I’ve been inducted into the frightening world of Bandwidth Caps and Quotas, and it’s been a bit of an eye-opener. My own estimates of how much data I throw about in a typical browsing day fell dramatically short of the mark. To their credit, they do say the free plan is “…enough for hundreds of emails or occasional browsing” (emphasis mine), I just wasn’t listening. That’s assuming your e’mails don’t include attachments or crazy signatures with images (any signature with an image is crazy, but that’s a subject for another post in which I lament the demise of plain text as the primary e’mail delivery format).

Their Plans

To help us preview their new OS, Google, in cahoots (ok, in cooperation) with Verizon, initially offers the following plans:

2 year 100MB of data per month for $0.00
1 day (24 hour) limitless pass for $9.99
30 day (720 hour) 1GB pass for $20.00
30 day (720 hour) 3GB pass for $35.00
30 day (720 hour) 5GB pass for $50.00

All plans are effective from the moment they’re activated. Though most of the plans are for 30 days instead of calendar month, I believe the 2 year plan is by calendar year. So, starting the 1GB plan on 12/01/10 means it’s good through 12/30/2010 (30 days from date of plan activation). Starting the free plan on 12/01/2010 (as I did), however, means you get 100MB free per 30 day period until 12/01/2012. It would end on 11/20/2012 if it were a 720 day (24 months * 30 days per month) plan. I’m sure this is all documented somewhere, but half the fun is guessing!

I’ll take note when my data cap is reset to 100MB to verify my assumptions, but it should happen on 1/19/2011.

My Plan

I plan to spend most of my time connecting via Wi-Fi, rather than 3G, so I opted for the free 100MB/month. However, burning through nearly 90MB over the space of 3 days while at my parent’s house with *exceedingly* careful usage has got me thinking about how much a typical browsing session uses.

By “*exceedingly* careful” usage, I avoided, as much as possible, all streaming media, all file downloads, any image heavy sites, online gaming, and kept my forays onto the Web as short and sweet as possible. Mostly, to be honest, I was just writing my Initial Impressions post. And that was mostly offline, with occasional textual updates online to make sure I didn’t lose anything (it is, after all, such a fine post… meh). Unfortunately, advertisers aren’t worried about the bandwidth capped or those charged by the MB. There are far too many bandwidth heavy flash and streaming ads out there for my taste, and in some of the most unlikely places.

So… Here are some numbers I’ve put together. It’s not scientific, terribly regimented or documented, but I wanted to get a general sense of how much data is transferred in a typical session for me. I’m using NetWorx on my Win7 laptop, b/c there isn’t a bandwidth usage monitor available yet for Chrome OS that I found (that would be incredibly useful, if someone wanted to put that together). I don’t feel like hacking my router just yet to install DD-WRT, Tomato or whatever other alternate solutions are available, nor do I feel the need to implement Squid, so I’m going to deal with local monitoring for the time being. Most of my time is on Google Reader, Gmail, Google Docs, and my own site. My Google Reader usage is primarily text, but there are some feeds that are fairly image intensive, including a few online comics thrown in for good measure.

My Results

Tonight, over the course of about three hours of intermittent browsing broken up by an episode of Firefly, some financial talk with my wife, and dinner, I burned through 18.8MB of data. No single site I visited carried a heavy media payload, and I didn’t honestly browse around that much. I caught up on a few feeds, read some articles, and fixed some books on Goodreads. Nothing was that intense. Truth be told, I saved this video for my Chromebook so it wouldn’t be counted amongst the bits tallied.

I’ll keep monitoring my usage to see, but it’s certainly looking like 100MB/month truly is a pittance that would fulfill only the most spartan of Internet users.

As an aside, just collecting links by visiting the site to copy/paste the URL, and polishing this post burned another 14MB. Ain’t that something?

Christmas 2010 Recap

Posted on Sunday, December 26, 2010 by David Veatch

Christmas break this year was a lot of fun. The week before Christmas was spent mostly in Wichita with my brother back in town from the Northwest. Both Mom and Dad were overjoyed to have the whole family together again for the holidays, even if it wasn’t on Christmas Day Proper. It’s not the date that matters, but the time spent, no matter the date. There was lots of eating, lots of relaxing down time, some pool, some shopping, and generally enjoying family time.

Christmas Day Proper was spent, just my wife and I. We carried on what is becoming a wonderful tradition of opening one present per hour. We did that first on Valentine’s Day, and she had the fantastic idea of applying it to Christmas too. So, with homemade IHOP style pancakes and mimosas, we opened our gifts to each other, watched Milo & Otis, and I introduced her to Firefly. She’s not totally hooked yet, but I can see the roots sprouting. ;)

The day after Christmas was spent at her parent’s house. Her younger sister and bro-in-law were there with her parents, and her older sister joined us via Skype for the opening of yet more presents. I wasn’t sure how that would go, having only been a Skype user since the night before, the the extent of my usage being with my wife in the other room, but it was really quite cool. We just turned the laptop (and thus the built in webcam) around to face whoever was opening presents at the time, and it was almost like she was right there in the room with us. I have some pictures of her on Skype, but they’re not terribly flattering.

At the end of it all, my wife and I got quite a few presents, some fantastic, some more funny than anything, and others merely… curious. But, instead of going through the Christmas swag we snuck away with, I think I’d rather talk about what my wife and I gave to others (and what I gave to my wife). This is pretty much a complete list (as far as I can remember), but there are a few things that I couldn’t find, so I’m keeping them in the queue for next year.

$30 Gift certificate to Sears
DVD’s of Milo & Otis, The Aristocats, Cinderella, Lady & the Tramp
DVD’s of Firefly Season, Serentiy
Bathtub waterproof foam pillow (non-inflatable)
Bathtub adjustable shelf with bamboo book rest & wine glass stand
Silver mini Christmas Tree
Flannel Shirts
Presso Hand-Pressed Espresso Maker
$100 Gift certificate to Par Exsalonce
Candy bars and lemon drops
Schlemmertopf German clay glazed roaster
Gingersnaps
Jellies
Postit Notes
Bath salts
Topsies Carmel Corn
Dominoes Mexican Train Set
Grizzly G1286 3 x 3 Large Sanding Drum
Jacobs Chuck 30602 1/2-Inch Keyed Chuck
Lodge Striped Hot Handle Holders/Mitts, Set of 2
Peltor NEXT Skull Screws Foam Earplugs Corded – Single Pair
Samsung SH-S222A/BEBE Internal Half Height Supermulti PATA 22X DVD-Writable Drive
Tiny little cast iron scent skillet & scent cubes

Elliot the Cat doesn’t care about presents. He misses The Squanto, and wants his nap. We have to disagree about the presents, but we miss The Squanto, and like our naps too. At the end of it all, I have to say I like married Christmas. :)

Google Laptop? Why sure, here you go…

Posted on Friday, December 17, 2010 by David Veatch

I came home this afternoon after work, on the first day of a week long vacation, to find a surprise package on my doorstep. Turns out it was a Google Chrome OS Laptop!

I remember filling out the form for the pilot program, but I never heard anything back about it, and assumed I hadn’t qualified, or whatever. I guess I did.

Pictures and a full first impression coming very soon…

Fighting terrorism the right way vs. the TSA way

Posted on Friday, December 3, 2010 by David Veatch

Good essay on fighting terrorism the right way vs. the TSA way…

The truth is that exactly two things have made air travel safer since 9/11: reinforcing cockpit doors and convincing passengers they need to fight back. The TSA should continue to screen checked luggage. They should start screening airport workers. And then they should return airport security to pre-9/11 levels and let the rest of their budget be used for better purposes. Investigation and intelligence is how we’re going to prevent terrorism, on airplanes and elsewhere.

Dave's Good Stuff

Drink wine, and you will sleep well. Sleep, and you will not sin. Avoid sin, and you will be saved. Ergo, drink wine and be saved.

Tag Archives: Gadgets