Rob Chambers

Holiday Traditions

2007-12-24T12:07:00.001-08:00

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 ...

2007-09-16T15:57:00.001-07:00

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

2007-09-03T22:24:00.001-07:00

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

2007-06-29T22:26:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-24T12:41:00.000-07:00

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

2007-03-17T19:44:00.000-07:00

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

2007-01-20T11:19:00.000-08:00

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".

miniPC by Systemax (the VXR2)

2006-09-16T20:51:00.000-07:00

Just saw this really cool little miniPC on Gizmodo yesterday. It's a Windows XP Media Center PC, that's about the same size as the Mac Mini. But it's a full blown PC, not one of those Mac imitation PCs. :-)

It has a 1.66 GHz Intel Core2 processor, 1GB RAM, DVDRW drive, 80 GB SATA HD, and a built-in ATSC/NTSC hybrid tuner and it comes with the MCE remote control. Nice.

I might have to get one of those to add to my home setup... Hmmm...

Fall TV: 2006

2006-09-02T22:50:00.000-07:00

Yep, it's fall again, and it's time to set up Tivo to record all the shows that I like (or think I might like)...

Here's what I'm going to set up:

Battlestar Galactica, Sci-Fi, 10/6 @ 10pm

Nip/Tuck, FX, 9/5 @ 10pm

Prison Break, [HDTV], FOX, 8/21 @ 8pm
House, [HDTV], FOX, 9/5 @ 8pm
The Simpsons, FOX, 9/10 @ 8pm
American Dad, FOX, 9/10 @ 8:30pm
Family Guy, FOX, 9/10 @ 9pm
24, [HDTV], FOX, Winter 2007! @ 9pm
American Idol, [HDTV], FOX, Winter 2007! @ 8pm
King of the Hill, FOX, Winter 2007! @ 7:30pm
NEW: Vanished, [HDTV], FOX, 8/21 @ 9pm
NEW: Justice, [HDTV], FOX, 8/30 @ 9pm
NEW: Standoff, FOX, 9/5 @ 9pm
NEW: 'Til Death, FOX, 9/7 @ 8pm

Wife Swap, ABC, 9/18 @ 8pm
Desperate Housewives, [HDTV], ABC, 9/24 @ 9pm
Lost, [HDTV], ABC, 10/4 @ 9pm
NEW: The Nine, [HDTV], ABC, 10/4 @ 10pm
NEW: Day Break, [HDTV], ABC, 11/15 @ 9pm

My Name is Earl, [HDTV], NBC, 9/21 @ 8pm
ER [HDTV], NBC, 9/21 @ 10pm
Medium, [HDTV], NBC, Mid-Season (2007!?) @ 10pm
NEW: Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, NBC, 9/18 @ 10pm
NEW: Kidnapped, NBC, 9/20 @ 10pm
NEW: Heros, NBC, 9/25 @ 9pm

Survivor [HDTV], CBS, 9/14 @ 8pm
CSI [HDTV], CBS, 9/21 @ 9pm
NEW: Smith, CBS, ???/Tuesdays @ 10pm

TiddlyWiki

2006-08-30T08:30:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine, Brian King, just told me about a cool little wiki that's completely self contained in a single .HTML file. Amazing ... Not only is that an amazing feat of JavaScript and XHTML, it's also very cool to use (both as an author and a user). Check it out here.

Uploading Images from Live Writer

2006-08-16T22:19:00.000-07:00

OK ... Here's a test for you ... Can I use the new Windows Live Writer to upload images to my own FTP server? Let's see ...

How about this picture...

It's a picture of Jac at Disneyland from last week. It was his first experience with "characters" at Disneyland. Well... Not really. He was there last year when he was just 1, but he didn't even realize anything was going on then. This year, he loved them. Especially Pooh.

Windows Live Writer

2006-08-16T22:06:00.000-07:00

I've been using Windows Live Writer for a couple weeks, and now Microsoft has finally made it available to everyone!!

If you haven't already, you should check it out!

2007 BMW X5

2006-08-05T22:02:00.000-07:00

Although I love my 3 series, and I love my new little Mazda 5 van, I'm currently very excited about the new upcoming 2007 BMW X5. When it debuts, I can probably trade in both my cars, and get one car (or SAV as BMW calls the X5) that will not only haul all my family, it will also be a sweet ride.

According to this X5World post, it looks like it's going to be officially anounced next week. I can't wait!!

Tesla DarkStar - An Electric with punch

2006-07-28T06:45:00.000-07:00

I've had my 2004 BMW 330Ci now for a little over 2 years. I love it! It's a great car. This spring I just bought a 2006 Mazda 5 mini-van as well to tote around all the kids (we have 4 boys now). But ... This morning on my drive into work, I heard about a new car. One that I shouldn't really think about buying. But one that I really think would be a fantastic car to own: The Tesla Dark Star.

The Dark Star

It's made by a Silicon Valley start-up, lead by the guy that brought the world the Rocket eBook Reader... This thing is freakin' sweet! It does 0-60 in 4 seconds, and it effectively gets 135 MPG. Unbelievable.

It also costs $80,000. Maybe that's a bit much, especially for a family guy like me... But I was thinking... I was considering getting rid of the 3 series becuase it's a fuel hog. This would solve that problem, nice and proper.

They'll be shipping early 2007.

Maybe I'll ask Santa for one.

Mariners Little League Day

2006-05-20T18:34:00.000-07:00

We're here at Safeco field on Mariners Little League Day. Zac, Nic, and I just finished walking around the field (One of the special treats for Little leaguers).

We're in the 300 sections. Got the tickets from Zac's team. Only $10 each. Not quite as good as the seats Kris got for us for the other 4 games this season. :-)

Baby Beckett is here!

2006-05-16T17:28:00.000-07:00

Baby Beckett is finally here. Mom is doing fine.

Beckett weighs 8 pounds and 5 ounces, and he's 19 and 1/2 inches long.

More info soon...

:-)

We're at the hospital

2006-05-16T14:23:00.000-07:00

Here we are.

We're checked in and waiting for our turn in the operating room.

Nic at Hari's party

2006-04-08T17:10:00.000-07:00

Video on the go

2006-04-08T10:08:00.000-07:00

I bought a Video iPod last weekend. I thought it would be the best thing since sliced bread. However, it wasn't. I had the darndest time trying to get it to synchronize with my music library on my PC. In the end, I even had to call Apple Technical support. They helped me trouble shoot some stuff, and in the end said my iPod was defective. Not the best first time experience with a Video iPod. So I took it back to Costco, and got my money back.

Now I'm trying to figure out what to get (or use) instead. I have a Sony PSPand an i-Mate Sp5m. Maybe I'll just use one of those. Or maybe, I'll get a new Tablet PC slate form factor.

I did find some software that'd be pretty sweet to use to push stuff off of my Tivo or off a Media Center (once I get one). It's called MyTV ToGo.

Decisions ... Decisions ...

Using my Sp5m in my car

2006-03-22T22:18:00.000-08:00

Since I upgraded to my new i-mate Sp5m, I haven't connected it to my carPC yet. I'm going to try doing that tomorrow. I found a great blog entry that should help anyone trying to do the same: http://blogs.msdn.com/mpoulson/archive/2006/01/17/514017.aspx

Battlestar Galactica

2006-03-13T13:57:00.000-08:00

I can't believe that season 2 of BSG is over... I love this show. I watched the finale on Friday, and then I re-watched part of it again on Sunday.

Sigh ... I have to wait util October for new eps when season 3 starts.

But ... Until then, I can hang out on one of the boards, or read all the transcripts from seasons 1 and 2. I can't believe somebody has the time to do all these transcripts... Crazy.

PGR3 progress ...

2006-02-25T11:13:00.000-08:00

I’ve unlocked 11 of the acheivements, have all the cars except 3, and completely love this game!!!! According to this site I should be able to unlock 3–4 more in just a small bit of time…

Cool real estate valuation site

2006-02-11T14:38:00.000-08:00

Kris just showed me a neat site she heard about that you can track valuations of properties over time, ... and ... it shows you the value of all your neighbors houses on a map overlay!

Check it out: http://www.zillow.com/

SuperBowl XL -- commercials

2006-02-06T21:27:00.000-08:00

Well… Seattle lost. It’s too bad too. But … We got to watch some interesting commercials too! :-) You can check them out here and vote for your favorites.

My Christmas present: Roland TD6S V-Tour Electronic Drum Kit

2006-01-03T08:41:00.000-08:00

Last year Kris bought me an electric guitar because I’ve always wanted to learn how to play one. It was a great gift, but I never really got around to learning how to play it. :-(

So this year, she bought me something I already know how to play, an electronic drum kit, from Roland.She got me the TD6S V-Tour. I didn’t get the double kick pedal, but I’m thinking I’ll upgrade pretty soon.

I haven’t played a kit in almost 20 years (yes, I’m really that old), but it came back pretty quickly. I had a blast over the last 2 weeks playing with it…