Blogging is too much work when you never get a comment. On Facebook I can tell that people are reading. If you found me here – go get current info there.
Not much to see here
April 29th, 2009Why are Cordless phones so bad? – especially Phillips
February 26th, 2008Maybe it’s a test – how bad can cordless phones be and people will still buy them? We had some Cordless phones – they were Panasonic – They drove Sandra a bit crazy, but they were quite good.
Then there are these:
When we moved we needed Cordless phones with 3 handsets – we now have 3 floors, and I wanted Dect phones so all the Wifi in the neighborhood wouldn’t interfere with our phones. We found a great sale on some Phillips phones (the poetically named CD4453B/37). These phones are SUPPOSED to have a long battery life – 150 hours of standby and 12 hours of talk – Sadly not even close – I followed the instructions on charging the batteries fully and letting them drain fully the first few times, I try not to leave them on the charger if they don’t need charging… Sadly they need charging every second day, and if you put them on Speaker phone they will often die with no warning –Even if they still have 2/3 bars showing on the charge indicator- they you have to go around the house looking for a phone that still has some charge. I may try buying different rechargable batteries to replace the ones that came with them – but maybe that’s throwing good money after bad.
Why would anyone want different Cordless phones to have different memories on them? You need to program each phone seperately, teach each one how to get messages from the invisible answering machine, teach each one a good phonebook – yes you CAN copy phonebooks from phone to phone, but to do that you need to have all of them in one place, and hit some keys on each on – yes I really want the phonebook to come to the other phone. The memory belongs in the base so you don’t have any of this insanity.
The UI on these things is crazy too. Most anything you want to do requires lots of keypresses – and now I’ve lost the reciept and I’m stuck with them. Of course it could be worse – I could have gotten the next model up which looks and feels more like a relay baton than a phone.
Lesson: Don’t expect much from Cordless phones, don’t trust brand names, keep receipts.
Recommendation: buy something else if you can.
Lunar Eclipse 2008
February 24th, 2008
We all went out to see the Lunar Eclipse this week. I was sadly confused about how far I would have to drive to find a nice dark site.
Of course you don’t need a dark site to see an Eclipse, but for the rest of the experience it is nice to be able to see the stars too. We were able to show Cassie Orion and Sirius. I was sadly unable to find her eponymous constellation.
I was able to take these pictures hand held with my camera. Using the manual settings – including manual focus was a bit of a fight. Remember when taking pictures of the moon to use the sunny f/16 rule – on the Moon it’s sunny right now – even if it is nighttime. After the Moon is in Shadow (the colorful part of the lunar Eclipse) you have to experiment, or bracket, or have a really good spot meter to get the exposure right. My camera couldn’t get much image during totality – I think all of my pictures are during the lead up to totality.
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Updated Wordpress and added new Geocoding plugin.
February 6th, 2008I’m addicted – what can I say? I added a new Geocoding plugin to this site – Now to see how it works.
I’m working in Woodstock NB this week, so if you look at the map that’s where I am.
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Shark feeding.
December 31st, 2006Last night we went to a local fish store and saw the shark feeding. I think it was a black tip shark, but I’m no expert. It was cool watching the shark hunt highly dangerous squid meat squares. Cassie is excited by the prospect of Santa bringing fish.
Ottawa Municipal Election, 2006, Mayor
October 1st, 2006Candidates:
- Piotr Anweiler
- Bob Chiarelli (Incumbent)
- Robert Larter
- Alex Munter
- Larry O’Brien
- Barkley Pollock
- Jane Scharf
I am happy to link to more official candidates webstites – these are the best I could quickly find.
Ottawa Municipal Election Info:
Ottawa Municipal Election, 2006, Ward 13; Rideau-Rockcliffe
October 1st, 2006Candidates for Ward 13; Rideau Rockliffe, Ottawa Municpal Election Nov 13, 2006.
- Jules Bouvier
- Maurice Lamirande
- Jacques Legendre (Incumbent)
- James T. Parker
- Muinis Ramadan
Ottawa Municipal Election Info:
That looks fun, but I’ve seen it now.
September 25th, 2006Just watched a trailer for Eragon. I’ve been seeing Eragon at bookstores and thinking it would be cool to read, then I saw that it was a movie and thought that would be neat too. Sadly the trailer takes a 2 hour movie and distills it into 2 minutes. Where is the mystery and need to see the full length movie there? Oh well, it has John Malkovich, so it may be worth it.
The best trailer ever was for “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.” Nothing to do with the content of the movie, everything to do with the spirit of the movie.
Cuts – Video player that lets you share EDLs
September 25th, 2006I just found Cuts today. It’s vapour at the moment as far as I can tell, but the promise is to be able to mix and mash video up by sharing cut lists (EDLs – Edit Decision Lists). This way you need the original video, and the cut file to see it the way I intend it. This is low bandwidth, and possibly high creativity. It is a bit like a post I used to have on my site about a “Fantasy DVD player.” I’ll have to dig that post up if they seem to want to patent this. I hope it is cool.
More:
Today in the IMDb I read that this was possibly a “legal way to censor movies.” Boring. Part of the message of YouTube is that MashUps are interesting to lots of people. Making video mashups easy and low-bandwidth is super interesting. Splicing in the “deleted” or “alternate” scenes from the extras on your DVD is interesting.
Cuts Press Release & AP Article -Sept 25, 2006.
Moo – no I’m not a cow. I will give you picture cards.
September 19th, 2006Moo is giving away 10 MiniCards – think small photo business cards – to flickr pro users. That’s me, so I went for it. The UI for picking which pictures you want from flickr to appear on one side of the cards, and adding the text to the other side of the cards is delightful. I’m looking forward to getting my cards and may get more.
Link via Daring Fireball.
