Why is it that we don't reuse dental floss?

We reuse our toothbrush.

If toothbrushes were $0.01 each and floss was $0.50 a foot, would the roles be reversed?

The chinese symbol for the year 2009

Officially, 2009 is the year of the ox or cow. But really, 2009 is the year of the buyer.
Or 2009 is the year of the cowsumer.

The five stages of California real estate

Especially San Francisco or Silicon Valley real estate.

Denial, anger, depression, bargaining and finally acceptance (or rejection).

Also see the five stages of grief.

Fricking amazing

I wanted to find the owner's manual for a battery charger and typed "sanyo nc-mqh01u" into the address bar of firefox. Nothing happened, so as I was trying to cut and paste the search terms into the search bar to do a Google search.... another window opens up and ... It is a PDF of the owners manual I was looking for. Fricking amazing.

It all happened so silently, it blew me away. Here's what happened under the covers.

1. The URL "sanyo nc-mqh01u" was invalid, so Firefox did a search on Google, my selected search engine.
2. Google did an "I'm feeling lucky" search in which it chooses the top result, which happened to be the onwer's manual.
3. Voila!
   

A little driving challenge...

As originally stated, this is Silicon Valley (San Jose Area) specific, bu you can adapt it to your own region. Rules of the challenge:

• You cannot directly or indirectly impede anybody else (cars, pedestrians, bikers, etc)
• You must obey all traffic laws
• No tampering of any kind
• The traffic signal must be working normally
  

The challenge:
How slowly can you cross El Camino Real in your car (driving on a cross street)?

If you are in another locatin, pick the largest street instead of El Camino Real, which is the main drag in Silicon Valley. Also, I start and stop timing when my front wheels cross the boundary of the intersection, typically the bordering lines or the cross walk lines.

I've discovered getting a record breaking time requires both smarts and luck. For example, late at night, the lights cycle too quickly to get a good time. I also get odd looks as my car putters across the intersection...

Scroll down to see my best time. Or guess what time is possible.























































































My best: 30 seconds.

This is about how long it takes a pedestrian to cross. The other challenge is deciding whether to look at the row of drivers watching you, squarely in the eye.

Scroll down even more to see the factors it takes for a "record time".























































































Factors:

• It has to be during peak traffic so the light cycle is at its daily peak in duration
  
• Pick an intersection that is major, so the light cycle is long
• But not too major, as you need to be the only car in your lane, with nobody behind you the whole time (remember no blocking/impeding anyone else)
  
• And this is key: you need to have "walker support" in which pedestrians are also walking, which lengthens the traffic light cycle even more.

In short, my time is limited by the duration of the green light and the luck to have nobody behind me.

My intersection of choice was in the Santa Clara, Sunnyvale, Mountain View, Palo Alto region.

Ordering a Canon camera from Dell is no Deal this time

I place a fair number of orders with Dell, though it is more for accessories than computers. Their sales on digital cameras in the last year and LCD monitors from 2003-2005 have been very good. In fact, the last 4 orders were for digital cameras, largely gifts. (Their price of $540 for a Canon Rebel XT with the 18-55 kit lens before Christmas, remains the best price I've seen to date).

I wanted to get a Canon A530 (the lowest end medium sized PowerShot) but missed the deal in Nov 2006, as this camera maybe discontinued. I was thus, surprised in a happy way to see the bargiain site DealCatcher show that Dell Home advertise it on a 20% sale in mid January with the somewhat commonplace free shipping. I didn't dilly daly and ordered it. The ship date was 2/14/07, about 2 weeks away. I've ordered from Dell often enough to semi-expect that on a "hot" item, though this was definitely not considered an in-demand item.

I checked back on 2/09 or so, and the A530 was still to be shipped. On 2/16, I checked and the order was not shipped yet. Mostly due to the order having been cancelled. By Dell. Without even notifying me(!!).

Of course this was a Saturday that I noticed. On the order status page, I read "If you do not find a new Order Number or if you feel your order was canceled or changed in error, please contact Dell's Sales Representatives at 1(800) 915-3355, option 1, ext. 7243784 for assistance." Not surprisingly, this number will be out of service on Friday Dec 22. I wasn't sure which year, but it was 2006. Nice. The website gave me an out of date phone number.
They really want you to use the website. After trying the chat with a rep deal, I was told the wait would be 2 minutes, but the person never came on line to chat. (Could it be that I was using Firefox?)

I think I got my fair shake, though. I called back today (a Monday, President's Day) and first spoke to a cust rep, who understood the issue in a polite but brainless way and who then made a note of it. I was transferred to a sales rep and in a transaction that took around half an hour, he finally reinstated my order for the same price but for the next higher level up camera, as the bottom level unit apparently is out of stock. I was using speaker phone mode, so I was not at all inconvenienced by the wait.

I'm not sure how much a sales reps time is worth but it must have been at least $30 all told.

And all for a $120 camera.

Vive la France

Got back from a wonderful 2 week trip to France. I sadly found myself liking many of the French ways and disliking many of the American customs.

We visited:

1. Paris, for 2 days.
   
2. Vaison La Romaine
   
3. Lyon
4. Paris again but for 5 days.

Some observations on France and the French.

They are much more polite than Americans. We could speak more softly because everyone was doing so. I found this endearing. There was nary a raised voice in all the time we were there. As our final plane landed returning us home, I was shocked to hear the loud buzz of people talking on their cells phones arraning rides from several rows away. Just shut up will you!

French table wines aren't always that good. Everyone says they are so good and so cheap, but that was only true about 40% of the time. And the table wines are a simple light style.

A cheap one-time use cell phone especially with text messaging is the deal. Rather than figure out how to use our cell phones in France, we used a cheap Nokia from Virgin bought there. As minutes were expensive, we used SMS (text messaging) and it was both so fun and so effective. I can't believe (ok I can) that in the US, texting is more expensive than talking. That's retarded.

Yogurt is huge there. In fact in the relatively small grocery stores there, an entire refrigerated aisle was devoted to yogurt-like products.

A french grocery store is the antithesis of an asian market (my wife pointed this out). There's lots of dairy and cheese and wine. Additionally there was a lot of refrigerated sections.

I took a zillion pictures when I was there. I had a spiffy new DSLR and it rocks compared to the compact digital cameras most people (including me) have. I found that if someone noticed I had taken a picture of them, they glared at me 2/3 of the time and smile the rest.
One woman even raced after me, after I had taken a shot of her baby in sunglasses from my hip. I "missed" but I still erased the picture.

Lyon was really nice. My comment was that "Lyon is more Paris like than Paris itself." due to the general cleanliness and approachability of it all. There are a couple of pedestrian streets that are literally restuaraunts only. You could eat lunch and dinner for a month on Mercatier and never repeat. What a sight.

Paris was also great, because you were never more than 2 blocks from some historic important landmark or museum.

Our trip was a complete success as we visited zero museums. We were tempted to visit the Musee D'Orsay but managed to skip it.

I'm not sure if it is a French or Paris law, but I went into numerous brassieres and cafes whenever I had to go to the restroom and had no issues what so ever. This seemed fair and just, as these places live and die via tourism. Still it was nice not having to look far when walking around.

I miss the environmentally green approach of the French (and most of Europe). There were no paper towels in any restroom, as instead there were the hot air hand dryers. They were a bit more annoying but I liked not seeing a mess by the trash can.

Details of our trip

The catalyst for the trip was our friend Stephen, who was visiting Paris for 5 weeks to take French classes being immersed in the language. He had found a ultra cheap apartment (500 Eu/month, which is about 1/4 the going rate) in the 4th arrondisment of Paris. We were visiting after he had been there for two weeks. Early on we got email from Steve, asking rhetorically "if we could survive ANYTHING". There was talk of Steve staying the dead guys apartment. A few days later more email about the Steve cleaning up the place so it was "less of a HOLE."