frommel.net

11 Dec 11 - 12:23Family Gettogether

My Mom and Dad arranged a fantastic family lunch in the Strand with 45 people from around the world. We had a chance to catch up with people we haven’t seen in years, and shared some stories about what we had all been up to. We also managed to do a refresh of the family picture. Here are 2 versions:
[300k - for viewing]
[6MB - for printing]
Here is a short video with some footage from the occasion.

tagged as family, south_africa - one comment

21 Nov 11 - 10:32Wedding Anniversary

Maureen and I had a wonderful week-end in Chicago to celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary.  We had great support from our friends in Napa who juggled Daniel and Colin through all the week-end’s activities.  We started with dinner at Sepia with Jennifer and Mitch.  On Saturday, we walked along the Magnificent Mile and visited the Museum of Contemporary Art which was quite interesting (pictures).  But the trip really revolved around Alinea.  Masud and Janice flew to Chicago to join us and Josh and Kimberly for this experience.  Eighteen courses with wine pairings (5 hours).  It was an incredible experience.  You can see some of the pictures here but I would also recommend browsing the Alinea website to see what this place is all about.  Fantastic week-end!

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01 Nov 11 - 17:12Close, but no cigar

This PlugBug power adapter is a pretty cool idea, but at $35 it is just not worth it.  You can really just use the USB ports on the computer you are charging, right?  Now if Apple adds two USB ports to their built-in power supply, I would actually use it. But buying another piece of hardware for one USB port… fail.

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27 Oct 11 - 13:02Garmin’s new iPhone App

I think this has some interesting uses.  I have the Garmin Edge 305 cycling computer, which uses wireless ANT+ sensors for cadence, speed and heart rate.  With this app, and the ANT+ attachment for the iPhone ($50…), I can imagine tracking my routes on my iPhone also.  I don’t think this will remove the need for a cycling computer for real-time things like distance, time, speed, cadence, but pretty cool for capturing the ride directly on my iPhone and posting to Garmin Connect directly without the need to plug in my Edge 305.

one comment

18 Jan 11 - 09:2317 years at Sapient!

I celebrated my 17 year anniversary at Sapient yesterday. Check out this hilarious video card that Chip sent me.

tagged as funny - no comments

09 Jan 11 - 22:05Dinner, Wine and Kinect

We went to Bruce and Danny’s for a wonderful evening of Wine, Food and Kinect.  The kids behaved pretty well, and we made an amazing Tomato Gorgonzola Soup (recipe).  Always a fun evening at Bruce and Danny’s.

tagged as food, living - no comments

09 Jan 11 - 13:41Sunday Morning

A few pictures from our Sunday Morning at church.  Daniel now goes to Sunday School and actually enjoys it quite a bit.  I helped out with the Kindergarden group today, so decided to take a few pictures.

tagged as living - no comments

20 Nov 10 - 16:37Windows 7 on my MacBook Air

I love my new MacBook Air (13 inch).  At least the hardware.  The software?  I run Windows 7.  Not through Parallels, VMWare or Bootcamp, but natively.  I formatted the disk and installed Windows 7 Home 64-bit from an external drive.  Instructions for doing this are here.  Remember to copy the bootcamp drivers off of your MBA before formatting the drive!  One thing to keep in mind is that the Windows 7 installer will not recognize the SSD as a valid drive to install to.  You will have to Shift-F10 at that point and use diskpart from the command prompt of the installer to fix this.  This is discussed here.
So, what are the results?  This machine flies with Windows 7.  The mini display port works great with the VGA adapter and I get about 5-6 hours on the battery.  My Windows 7 score is 5.2, compared to my fully kitted-out Desktop scoring 5.5 and my Lenovo S10 netbook scoring 2.2, this is very good.

tagged as technology, toys - no comments

17 Sep 10 - 20:37The Breakup – Goodbye for now, Android

Over the last year or so, I had a great time with Android. I saw the devices get more and more powerful, saw the app store grow tremendously, to the point where I really don’t miss too much of the iPhone’s applications. I had a Droid Eris, a Nexus One, an HTC Evo, a Samsung Captivate (Galaxy S), and I still have the HTC Aria. I run the latest nightly Froyo ROM on my Aria, but I am about to give it up and go back to the iPhone.  Read on to see my reasons. [read more]

tagged as technology, toys - one comment

07 Jun 10 - 21:55HTC EVO 4G vs. iPhone 4

This is fantastic.  Friday, I got my Sprint HTC Evo 4G.  A magnificent phone.  There are issues with it, which may force me to return it to Sprint after the 1 month trial.  Full refund.  And if I do decide to give up on Android for now, there is the iPhone 4 available on 6/24.  So, since I will be on one or the other by the end of the month, I went ahead and sold my existing iPhone 3GS on ebay.  Sold within 5 minutes for the same price I will pay for the new iPhone 4!  $300.  Check out Engadget for a quick comparison.

tagged as toys - no comments