Archive for April, 2007

$65M Lawsuit over Dry Cleaning Mishap

Thursday, April 26th, 2007

According to a Washington Post article, a lawyer in Washington, D.C. is seeking $65M in damages from a dry cleaning business that lost a pair of his pants.
Apparently the amount was reached by taking the legal maximum in damages ($1500 per day), multiplied by the three defendants, multiplied by the 1200 days his pants have […]

Five Rules for Owning a Large SUV

Wednesday, April 25th, 2007

Owning a large SUV such as a Ford Expedition or Cadillac Escalade can be tricky. Here are some basic rules that should help.

Never use your turn signals. Your vehicle is big enough that everyone should be able to see what you’re doing.
Always follow closely behind the car in front of you. Since you have such […]

Wiimote Straps

Tuesday, April 24th, 2007

So there was a deal recently where Nintendo offered to replace the strap on the Wii controller, due to reports of the strap breaking and sending the remote flying through windows or television sets or wherever else. I’ve played the Wii, and I have to wonder exactly how these people were managing to do this.
The […]

Fibonacci numbers

Monday, April 23rd, 2007

A Fibonacci number refers to a term in a sequence with a recurrence relationship based on the previous two terms of the sequence. More specifically, a given number in the sequence is equal to the sum of the two previous terms. The first two terms are both 1, which yields the sequence { 1, 1, […]

View from Columbia Center

Tuesday, April 17th, 2007

Here’s another snapshot from the Sony Ericsson Z710i that I recently reviewed. This is the view out of my floor in the Columbia Center, the office building in downtown Seattle where I work.
View of Elliot Bay from the Columbia Center
I’m still trying to find a plugin for Wordpress that will let me upload and resize […]

Weird comment behavior

Monday, April 16th, 2007

Recently I installed CAPTCHA software to cut down on automated comment posting. I was already running Akismet to detect known spam and suppress spam comments.
However, after installing the image-based plugin, I noticed that Akismet still claimed to be catching new spam comments. Something is fishy here. Either it is tagging legitimate comments as spam and […]

Holy Wars and Heavyweight Choices

Monday, April 16th, 2007

There are a variety of holy wars out there in the computer world, particularly among those who would consider themselves “power users.” There are many well-known versions of the holy war, such as text editors (vi vs Emacs), or posting styles for e-mail and forum messages (Top-posting vs Bottom-posting), or using tabs vs using spaces […]

Considering a Digital SLR

Thursday, April 5th, 2007

For a while, I’ve been content to use a snapshot camera that more or less fits in my pocket. My wife and I have a 3.2 megapixel Canon that works well for most things. I had always thought that getting a digital SLR with a good lens was only needed for professional photography.
However, my parents […]

Car Interface for Phones

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

Many newer cars are starting to have Bluetooth interfaces that allow hands-free access to your cell phone while driving.
Many newer phones also support playing music. Verizon’s V-Cast phones, the Apple iPhone, the Sony Ericsson “Walkman” series phones, all are designed to let you download music to your phone and play it wherever you go.
Why not […]

Review: Sony Ericsson Z710i

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

About a year ago, I wrote a review about my then-new Motorola RAZR V3. About a month ago, I decided to replace it with a new phone, as the vibrating ringer alert had stopped working.
I ordered a Sony Ericsson Z710i which, like all my previous phones, is a flip phone (”clamshell”). I am not sure […]