One of my all-time favorite bands is Steely Dan, and one of my all-time favorite venues is Red Rocks in Morrison, Colorado. When I heard that The Dan was playing at Red Rocks, with the added bonus of the amazing Michael McDonald sharing the bill too, I knew I had to see this concert. In…
The fine folks at Namaste Solar just finished installing a 3.01 kW grid-tied PV system consisting of fourteen SunPower panels on the roof of our garage behind our new house in Boulder, CO. Now I have to wait a couple weeks for inspections and for Xcel Energy to tie it in to the grid and…
We’ve made the big move from Silicon Valley to Boulder, Colorado. Here’s the view from our back deck. It is nice to be back in Colorado after seventeen years in the Bay Area. And maybe someday, I’ll even be able provide a link to our house on an online map. But for now, our home…
One of the more annoying aspects of using a cellphone (beyond dropped calls and bad reception) has to be dealing with voice mail. I understand why there needs to be a least-common-denominator interface into voicemail, so it is accessible from any phone and from anywhere, but let’s face it, a touch-tone user interface is a…
In the 21st century the new equivalent excuse to “the dog ate my homework” has become “sorry I didn’t reply to you — your message got caught in my spam filter”. I often find that the overzealous spam filter in my Outlook/Entourage client has a serious false-positive problem. In contrast to my MSFT mail-client, as…
My wife and I just bought a new home on Pine Street in lovely Boulder, CO. It is a recently remodeled 1921 Craftsman in an old historic district called Mapleton Hill. It may be on one of the nicest residential streets in Boulder, but it has one glaring problem: the major online mapping services don’t…
My wife and I went with our friends Craig and Kristin to see An Inconvenient Truth last night. In our case, Al Gore was preaching to the choir, since we needed no convincing that global warming is a very real and very urgent issue. Yet the movie still had a big impact on me. It…
I’ve decided to start a series of posts that I’ll call Feature Request. I’m going to gripe about things that bug me with existing devices, services, sites, life, etc. and also wonder aloud why certain features (or entire products) don’t exist. If anyone can point me to a product that solves my problem or knows…
Several of the gadget blogs I read yesterday pointed to this cool video than an early-adopter user posted of his brand new Motorola Q running the new SlingPlayer Mobile client. Get a Slingbox, a Motorola Q and a TiVo, and you’ll be the coolest kid on the block. This blog post was also an excuse…
I just read Fred Wilson’s Texting Home post. Fred details the shortcomings of landline phones versus what is now possible with mobile phones. Despite the dropped connections and inferior voice quality, he is ready to abandon his landline because, as he says, “all I really want is increased functionality”. Me too, as soon as I…