Holiday Traditions

Every year we pack the family up in our truck, drive to Snoqualmie Pass, and play in the snow on Christmas Eve. This year's no different! We just finished sledding and throwing snowballs at the Hyak Snow Park. It was a blast. Sledding conditions were great, nobody got hurt, and Beckett even enjoyed himself walking around in ankle deep snow.

Afterwards we always go to the pancake place for lunch. Here you can see Zac playing his Nintendo DS (Pokemon no doubt) while we wait for our food. We don't come here because the service is great. The food isn't all that special either. But it is our tradition.

In case we're still here waiting for our food tomorrow, I thought I should wish you all a Merry Christmas! :-)

Nic didn't catch it, but ...

The guy next to him did.

This is the last of the Mariners games we're going to his year. Nic kept saying, "When is the ball going to come over here?"

Turns out it was in the fourth inning! :-)

The guy sitting right beside Nic did catch a pop up foul ball and then let Nic take a look at it. Pretty cool!

Fall TV: 2007

It's that time of year again. It's September and each September for the past couple years, I've posted the shows that Kris and I are thinking about watching in the new TV season.

We don't actually watch all of these shows, but we set them all up on Tivo and watch quite a few of them. It's not uncommon for us to save them up and have double header nights were we'll watch two Houses, or two Mediums, or maybe a couple Simpsons, a couple Family Guys, and a Scrubs for fun.

This year, like all years, we have mostly a list of returning shows that we've watched before, a handful of shows that made the cut from last year's new shows, and a small smattering of new-for-this-year shows.

There's a bit of a problem this year, though: I'm not sure when we're actually going to get around to watching any of these shows. You see... we've recently gotten hooked on West Wing. We've been getting disc after disc from NetFlix, and we're really loving it. We're loving it so much, we're watching 2 episodes each night.

We're all thru the 2nd season, and we just started the 3rd season a couple nights ago. We have over a hundred episodes to go. At 2 a night, we're good for 7 more weeks. Yikes! That's a lot of TV.

Maybe I'll have to buy a bigger hard disk for our Tivo.

Anyway, here's the list for this fall:

Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi, 11/24/2008, Sundays @ 10pm

Nip/Tuck, FX, 10/23/2007 @ 10pm

Prison Break, [HDTV], FOX, 9/17/2007 @ 8pm
'Til Death, [HDTV], FOX, 9/19/2007 @ 8pm
King of the Hill, FOX, 9/23/2007 @ 7:30pm
The Simpsons, FOX, 9/23/2007 @ 8pm
Family Guy, FOX, 9/23/2007 @ 9pm
House, [HDTV], FOX, 9/25/2007 @ 8pm
American Dad, FOX, 9/30/2007 @ 8:30pm
24, [HDTV], FOX, 1/13/2008 @ 9pm
American Idol, [HDTV], FOX, ??? @ 8pm
NEW: Kitchen Nightmares, 9/19/2007 @ 9pm

Desperate Housewives, [HDTV], ABC, 9/30/2007 @ 9pm
Wife Swap, ABC, ??? @ 8pm
Lost, [HDTV], ABC, February 2008! Wednesdays @ 9pm
NEW: Pushing Daisies, [HDTV], ABC, 10/3/2007 @ 8pm
NEW: Samantha Who?, [HDTV], ABC, 10/15/2007 @ 9:30pm

Heroes, [HDTV], NBC, 9/24/2007 @ 9pm
My Name is Earl, [HDTV], NBC, 9/27/2007 @ 8pm
ER [HDTV], NBC, 9/27/2007 @ 10pm
Scrubs, NBC, 10/25/2007 @ 9:30pm
Medium, [HDTV], NBC, 1/20/2008 @ 9pm
NEW: Chuck, NBC, 9/24/2007 @ 8pm
NEW: Journeyman, NBC, 9/24/2007 @ 10pm
NEW: Bionic Woman, NBC, 9/26/2007 @ 9pm

CSI [HDTV], CBS, 9/27/2007 @ 9pm

My iPhone thoughts

Things I liked:

Hardware is very nice

• Feels good to hold in your hand
• Not to light. Not to heavy
• Screen is beautiful
• Looks to be completely scratch proof (I tried scratching it a bit when they weren’t looking :-))
• Didn’t run hot at all, even after playing with it with WiFi turned on for 15 minutes

Software is very fast and responsive

Gestures

• Zooming was very intuitive
• Scrolling was also
• Animations and transitions
• Consistent all thru all the applications
• Make the device feel light and playful
• Rotation transition when rotating the device in your hands is very cool
• Dropping the pin points onto the map after searching for a business was very cool, too

Emotional response

• I was surprised because I didn’t think it’d happen to me. But it did. I really loved the device.
• It was obviously happening to others standing around me that were waiting to play with it (see the 15 minute comment above!)

Things I didn’t like:

Text input

• It would take forever to tap out an IM or email.
• It’s obviously not possible to use while not looking, but I thought I might be able to use two thumbs before I tried it. After I tried it… No way.
• Their prediction seemed to only work in IM and email, not in their mapping software or in Safari. And even in IM and email, you have to click a really little teeny tiny prediction window to accept the predicted text, which I couldn’t actually ever get to happen.

AT&T / Cingular misleading web connection speeds

• Unbeknownst to most demoers, the phone was running connected to WiFi in Cingular, not connected to the wireless web via EDGE
• The WiFi was just installed yesterday at the Sammamish office (so said the Cingular employee I talked to about it) specificall for the iPhone launch. No other brand phones in the Sammamish office were connected via WiFi even though several were capable.
• When you turned off WiFi, the browser was a big pig running over EDGE

Viewing web pages

• It’s “neat” to see them in full rendition and zoom in and out. But … It’s only neat as a demo, I tried reading some news this way, and it was horrible.
• I crashed Safari on my personal picture library I wrote in ASP.NET with just a little tiny bit of Jscript in it.

All-in-all

I went there to buy one. I left without one. The text input killed it.

When I was on the Pocket PC team a long time ago, I knew that the soft keyboard was a tough sell for users. Granted it didn’t have predictive error recovery then, and it still doesn’t today. But it’s hard to give up a real keyboard.

Blind typing is a nice thing… Even a 12 key is better than a soft keyboard. iPhone fanboys will eventually learn that. And so will Apple.

Nic just 3rd place at the TKD Tournament

Nic entered the annual True Martial Arts Championship today. There are two parts to the competition. Form and Sparring.

He just finished competing for Form... and he won 3rd place out of 8 people in his division!

Go Nic!

Arbor Ski Party

We had the annual Arbor Ski Party today. It was a blast. Zac, Nic, and I had fun skiing.

but probably he funniest hing was when the girls helped dress Kenna up s a "girl". Cute, huh? :-)

Nic at EthanH's Star Wars Birthday Party

Nic was invited to EthanH's birthday party today at Pump It Up! in Kirkland. He had a blast! The theme wa Star Wars and Darth Vader even showed up. The kids "faught" him with balloon "light sabbers".