lifebsideben

I got a bunch of goodies for Hanukkah this year, so thought I’d share for those of ya that might care:

Books:

• The Areas of My Expertise, by John Hodgman; this book is hilarious
• The Google Story, by David Vise and Mark Malseed
• Blink, by Malcolm Gladwell
• Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found, by Suketu Mehta
• Unuseless Japanese Inventions, by Kenji Kawakami
• Catch a Fish, Throw a Ball, Fly a Kite by Jeffrey Lee

Toys & miscellany:

• Birduzasu, a Neo-Kaiju figure by Tim Biskup
• PSP Grand Theft Auto: Liberty City Stories for PSP
• A LED-festooned spinning top with sound (”Laser Tech Top“)
• A bouncing star-shaped rubber thingy with color cycling LEDs inside
• A huge scented candle

Gift to myself:

• Espresso machine (DeLonghi EC701 Espresso Maker–hasn’t gotten the best reviews, but got a great price on it at Bed Bath & Beyond, and used one of their ubiquitous coupons… so far, so good.)

So pretty much, I’d better start taking the train to work more religiously so I can get to reading all this stuff! At least it’s a lot easier to get the brain functioning with a nice café con leche before I head out!

Tags: Hanukkah, holidays

It always happens–right around April 10th each year, I realize I’m probably not going to hire an accountant to do my taxes. So it’s off to TurboTax for the Web. I’ve always been oveall very impressed with this application, I’ve used it for a few years now. This year, things were pretty simple, so it was straightforward… except for finding my new son’s Social Security number. Now, where did that card go? We looked all over the place, through the files over and over again, in the piles of mail, etc. No luck. It’s gone. OK, no sweat, turns out we can go to the SS office in San Mateo to get the number, and a new card. Enter the beaurocracy… fun fun fun. Two hours later, we actually had the number–after convincing them that the paperwork we brought was “good enough”, as we didn’t have the official birth certificate yet. Fine.

Well, during this same time, my parents were in town visiting, so I was pretty distracted from finishing up the taxes. They finally left April 15th, and when I got home from work it was time to get serious about finishing up. OK, get the paper with the kid’s social on it and… uh… where’d it go?!??! Yikes. We gave the parents some paperwork that was with that, before they left… did we accidentially give them that too? As we called them to find out, I prepared the Extension to File in turbotax… ugh… anyhow, they don’t have it. Grrr. OK, it HAS to be here somewhere! Maybe in the car? Yep! What’s it doing on the floor of the back seat? No idea. Well, at least we found it. Then the only thing left is to decide if I’m going to actually report that pittance (well, but still Real Money to the Feds, I’m sure) I made off AdSense last year. OK, fine, it didn’t affect the refund that much, might as well report it. I’m probably the only unincorporated small website owner who actually reported it, but at least my audit will be clean!

Hmm, what’s the deducation I should shoot for next year… buy a house (not likely with prices still rising in the Bay Area), or another kid (not likely if the wife has anything to say about it…) Hmm…

Tags: taxes, turbotax

Finally the SD300 is available, I’ve been waiting for its release the past 3 months. I’ve been wanting to replace my Olympus D40Z digital camera for a while now… it takes decent pictures most of the time but I still wasn’t satisfied. I’m a “little camera” fan, I’m willing to give up (some) features for smaller footprint, and so far I’m quite happy with the SD300.

Here’s the big differentiators from the Olympus, in my opinion:

• fast start up and shot-to-shot cycle time
• much smaller footprint. the sd300 I really can fit in any pocket!
• larger LCD display, and entirely more sensical operation. after a shot, if you want to keep the review onscreen, press one key. no mode switching, no rushing to show it to people before it disappears!
• it actually remembers the last mode you were in, complete with various manual overrides etc., between power-off and back on. this was immensely frustrating on the D40Z.
• SD cards go a lot bigger and faster (I picked up a 32x 512M) than SmartMedia!
• the movie mode is waaaaay nicer, including 640×480 @ 30 fps, saved as some variant of QuickTime (I think actually MJPEG)
• formatting a SD card takes less than 1 sec!
• “stitch assist” mode for panoramic photos, and half-decent software to stitch them
• generally the software is much much nicer than the olympus stuff, and has full OS X support too!

That’s the good stuff. The less impressive stuff about the new camera so far include:

• Uses proprietary batteries. All the smaller cameras do, but there is something nice about NiMH AAs, and the ability to “fall back” to alkalines when you’re out of the country, can’t get to a AC outlet, etc. (This happened to me in Romania; I didn’t have time to charge the batteries but could pick up some cheap AAs to tide me over until the end of the day…)
• Picture quality, in general, is not noticeably better than the Olympus. But I’ll take more outside shots and compare further. So, it’s a 2-year-later-model camera, same resolution, but about same quality pictures. I guess I expected some advances, even in a smaller camera.
• No case included, and the official Canon one is on backorder. When the camera has 40% of its back as the LCD, you really feel safer with a case to put it in! I finally just picked up a $10 Case Logic model from Fry’s in the meantime. I can’t find the specific case on their site, but it’s kind of cute–built like the black case that comes with the iPod 2nd gen… like two pieces of padded material with snug elastic on the sides.
• “long shutter” mode is up to 15 sec; the Olympus can do 45 sec. Granted, you don’t need this often, but I’ve gotten a few really cool nighttime shots of the sky with the long exposures.

That’s kind of the roundup at this point. I’ll see how I feel in a few more weeks after the holidays… really worried about the battery situation, until I can get a spare (for $40!)

Now the really sad part is that the D40Z, which cost me $550 at Amazon 2.5 years ago, only goes for about $100 on eBay. Sigh…

Tags: cameras, photography, review

I finally got around to renewing my driver’s license, which was slightly cough cough out of date. I just got the new card in the mail, and as I was replacing the old one in my wallet, noticed how much a few years (3, to be exact) has changed me, at least in the eyes of the DMV camera. The wife says the previous picture (on the left) looks Pilsbury doughboy-ish, and I think the new picture looks like I’m either a felon, or a roadie for Metallica…