All airline tickets now booked…
Not that it was such a pain that I now feel I've really achieved something or anything.
Hacking a webcam to be an IR camera
Hacking webcams to work in IR land, again open in my browser too long. [icbm: work]
Paul Graham pages on startups
These have been open in my browser long enough for me to "link" to them from here: How to start a startup, and Ideas for startups. [icbm: work]
So, how am I getting to the US?
Well, I just booked my flights to the US... The flight there is on 18 November 2005, and goes from Canberra, to Sydney, to Los Angeles, to San Francisco with Qantas. At least I get club access along the way.
What are we doing with the pets?
We own a dog and a cat. We've had the cat, Taffy, for a long time and he's quite old now. The dog, Spike, on the other hand hasn't been with us for very long. So, when we move to the US, what are we going to do with the pets? Well, the cat is relatively easy, as he's too old to cope with a move, and is quite attached to my father. He'll be staying in our current house, which dad will be renting from me. The dog, Spike is harder. The kids are now quite attached to him, having been initially scared of him (we got him as a puppy, and the kids didn't like that puppy phase too much). He's now a year old or so. On the other hand, he didn't like the flight from Sydney to Canberra when we acquired him, so a 14 hour flight to the US is too much for him. If we don't like the US and want to come home really, soon then he would also end up in quarantine, a four hour drive away from us, for a very long time (around three months I believe). Worse than that,…
Two weeks of being sick
And 31km travelled. Not too shabby given I couldn't breathe and had goo coming out of my head. I feel quite unfit riding now though, so I need to put some work into getting back into things. James talks about commuting to Google, which is currently of interest to me so I'd like to hear more about the practicalities of commuting in Mountain View if possible. For instance, are their off road bike paths, do American drivers try to kill you, and how far is Jame's commute on the bike each way? I'm not sure I really care if commuting to work by bike is cheaper, I only want to own one car in the US if I can (I have two here), and I like the idea of living close enough to work to be able to ride there. [icbm: home]
Meet the life hackers
A nice online article about personal productivity, and why I feel I never get much done. [icbm: work]
The book process continues
Despite my lack of posting here in the last couple of weeks, and the death of my laptop (which I believe is traditional when you write a book), the book process continues. This is the first time I've written a book, and the process itself is pretty interesting. At the moment I'm looking through edits from the copy editor for the first chapter (previously this chapter has survived technical review, a review from the acquisitions editor, and review from the project manager). The copy editor is providing comments on my writing style and how to make the chapter easier to read. I guess that I could take the comments as hurtful, but to be honest it's fun. It's kinda like having a personal coach trying to teach you how to write better. I like that. One interesting thing that has happened is that the chapter title was tweaked to "be more active", which I like. I guess that means some of the chapter descriptions I have already posted might actually be wrong. Oh well.
A first taste of Google blog reader
So, Google has released a beta of their bloglines equivalent service, and given that Liferea crashes about four times a day for me I thought I would give it a go. Login et cetera is easy, and the user interface is nice and AJAXy. It's fairly intuitive as well, although when I was importing my OPML file from Liferea I missed the message at the top saying the import was in progress as first. That said, it's been 30 minutes and it still says it's importing my 460 line OPML file. I just refreshed the page for the import, and the import stopped and said that I now had 54 subscriptions. So, I guess that means I should wait longer for the import. I'm now going to try importing over the top and see if it's smart enough to squelch duplicates.
Winchester Mystery House
When Andrew and I were in San Francisco recently we ran out of time to see the Winchester Mystery House, a mansion built by the widow of the dude who invested the Winchester rifle. She was convinced that the ghosts of Indians killed by Winchester rifles were haunting her, and modified the mansion to confuse them. Then Boing Boing pointed to this blog about the house which has some interesting photos online. I really must try to make it there sometime.