General

I finished my Christmas shopping

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This is a new record for me. Usually I’m scrambling to finish my last minute shopping the week before Christmas. I got started early this year when I found a few gifts at woot.com. I also did some of my shopping online, including a few photo gifts.

What American accent do you have?

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I took this quiz after seeing it at MiniPundit:

What American accent do you have?

Your Result: The Northeast

Judging by how you talk you are probably from north Jersey, New York City, Connecticut or Rhode Island. Chances are, if you are from New York City (and not those other places) people would probably be able to tell if they actually heard you speak.
Philadelphia
The Inland North
The South
The Midland
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have?
Take More Quizzes

Actually I am from New York.

Toyota Hybrid Pioneer Killed

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Via Wired: Dave Hermance, the lead engineer of Toyota’s hybrid vehicle development in the U.S., died on Saturday when his small plane crashed into the Pacific Ocean near Los Angeles. He was instrumental in bringing the Prius to the U.S., and his passing is a blow to Toyota’s hybrid vehicle program.

New Phone

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A few days ago I got an LG CU500, which Cingular is offering as an upgrade for $49. It’s a very nice phone, much slimmer than my old Motorola V551. More importantly, the sound quality & reception is a lot better and it hasn’t dropped a call. It’s a 3G phone with a built-in music player.

However it has a very big problem: it doesn’t work with iSync, and there isn’t any other software that will sync with it. Since it’s a fairly new phone, hopefully that will change soon. I ended up copying the addressbook from my old phone on a SIM card.

It requires a Micro SD card for music. I bought a 1 GB card today, only to find that it didn’t work – I always get an error saying the card isn’t ready. The card does work with a card reader, though. A google search shows that it’s a very common problem and the phone is very picky about memory cards.

I have hot water!

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The guy finished installing my new water heater today. It works as nicely as I’ve heard. As soon as I turn on a faucet, it switches on, and as soon as I shut the faucet, it switches off. The water comes out hot almost immediately and it never runs out of hot water.

New Water Heater

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I’m having a tankless water heater installed in my condo now. The guy did the wiring today, which involved replacing a circuit breaker, and he’ll be back tomorrow to install the actual heater. He left the old heater in place so I’ll still have hot water tonight. Right now my kitchen is a mess, with holes in the wall and wiring conduits sticking out.

A lot of my neighbors have tankless water heaters and they’re very happy with them. It takes up a lot less space than the old water heater, which will let me put another cabinet in my kitchen, and they use a lot less electricity since they only heat the water as needed.

Sorry about the lack of posts

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I apologize for not posting recently, but I’ve been very busy lately with work and XPressLinux, which is coming along very nicely.

One of the things I had to do for work involved Mac OS 9. I haven’t used CodeWarrior in more than a year and my current source code won’t compile in CodeWarrior, so I had to go back to an older version. I finally managed to compile it, only to discover that my G4 is’t able to boot Mac OS 9, since I didn’t install OS 9 drivers the last time I reformatted the drive.

All my free time is being spent on XPressLinux now. Taylor is doing the artwork & design, and I’m working on the installer. The major features of XPressLinux include having VLC, Wine & enhanced NTFS tools pre-installed so users upgrading from Windows will have access to their data & applications and will be able to play most media files.