Citizen Moore: An American Maverick

..this I gotta read. It should be hilarious (in a sad way). Some of Moore's stuff is funny, but it's tarnished by having to play so loosely with the facts to pull it off. The author of a coming bio on this well known buffoon has a piece today in the Independent worth a read at this link.

Ten Politically Incorrect Truths About Human Nature

From a Psychology Today article here.

New gadgets!

I picked up a BlackBerry 8300 ('Curve') a few days after it came out on AT&T. It's my first BB, and also my first PDA sort of phone. I previously had the messaging-oriented Nokia 6822 (never offered on Cingular/AT&T; it was a mild update to the 6820 that was available on Cingular), and the 6800 before that. The 6800 was pretty sweet when I got it, and the 6822 was a worthwhile upgrade..but by this point, it was really long in the tooth. Worth of all, it had pretty crappy reception. The Sony/Ericsson 525A that I briefly had after the 6800 (and concurrent with the 6822; I got it when renewing my contract) had far far better reception. It was the difference between usable cell reception at my house and having to stand in certain rooms to use the phone (and even then, spottily).

The Good:

• Great battery life. I've been going nearly a week between charges.
• Slim enough. Takes up little space in Jen's purse!
• Great reception. I'm getting 3/5 to 4/5 in my study at home. The 6822 would often drop calls in the same spot!
• Pretty snappy UI paired with a great screen.
• The messaging is super easy to use (I suppose this is really a BB-wide feature, though), and the keyboard is easy to use. I think the 'old style' keyboard on the 8300 is probably easier to type on than the sleeker keyboard on the 8800, owing to the 8800's lack of any space between keys.
  

The Bad:

• I always wish it was a bit slimmer. For it to stay this wide, it would have to be thinner yet to be in a pocket and not look dorky.
• I wish it had the GPS that appears in the 8800. I probably wouldn't use this a ton, but when I did use it, I'd probably be quite thankful. It would saved Luie and I on our adventures on the way to Lincoln, RI (we overshot by 40 minutes and had to stop at a Tim Hortons to find out where the hell we were). I just ordered a QSTARZ BT-Q1000 yesterday!
• I don't care so much about lack of WiFi, but 3G data would be nice. It's still not a huge deal (due to the Sprint card I just got, see below), but would make the sluggish EDGE browsing and Google Maps data transfer less painful. Then again, I'm not sure it would be worth the huge hit to battery life.

I also picked this up (picking up a Sprint contract in the process...glad I can expense this!) It's a Sierra Wireless 595U, a USB-based Rev A EVDO card. Having this makes the slow EDGE on the Curve not that big of a deal, as I can now fall back to this when I need to get online from a client site (or the coffee shop). I was getting over 130 KB/second sustained using it last week while at Mozart's, downloading Eclipse 3.3.

Ride for the Roses Once Again..

Jane managed to goad me into coming out to the RunFar monthly time trial at the S. Mopac loop on Tuesday. It seems they have the results up already. It didn't go too bad -- ok, I think. 21.6 mph. I had no idea what my average was going to be, as I can't seem to get the Cateye unit I bought last fall to reset and work correctly (Jane has the same unit, and the same problem!). If I can start riding again and get an additional 1-2 mph, I'd move way up the list. The fastest guys there were pretty crazy fast, though (29.9 mph average around the loop??).

I think there is lots of room for improvement though: if you count only rolling time, I averaged 20.1 over the entire Hotter 'N Hell Hundred course (quite flat) a few times ago. The weather was much cooler than normal that year, admittedly...making it pretty similar to the weather during Tuesday's TT, actually. Perhaps I can get close to that again at this year's HH100.

Livestrong was running a promotion yesterday to get people to sign up for this year's Ride for the Roses -- the registration fee was halved for yesterday and yesterday only. They wanted to get 500 new registrants on May 16...and it looks like they ended up getting over 1200. The fund raising requirement is not halved, however. It's gone way up since the last time I rode it (2005, when it was $100), now up to $250. People should expect to get fundraising emails from me on this one!

Windows Picture Viewer Doesn't Play Nicely With Orientation Flags!

All of my titles were pretty short, so I went with a long, descriptive one.

The past few albums I've published have had an annoying problem -- all of the thumbnails always look fine, but the larger (but still scaled) image that is displayed after clicking on the thumbnail sometimes was completely messed up: it was clearly the same picture a thumbnail had been displayed of...but now all in green and pink and black! It seemed like a small minority of the pictures were this way, and I wasn't sure why.

I published a new album today (http://cklempay.homeip.net/gallery/05_08_2007, containing pictures from Jen's visit to SF, her birthday, and her new bike), and some of the pictures had this same problem. I then realized: the pictures that appeared in green were all of the pictures that I had rotated in Windows Picture & Fax Viewer. I went to the JAlbum support forums, and promptly found this thread. Apparently, some software does not correctly update the orientation flag when rotating pictures, and Windows Picture & Fax viewer is one such program. It turns out that JAlbum correctly does the rotations, and will do it automatically when it comes across photos taken sideways (I could have avoided all of that manual rotation entirely!).

In other news, Jen thinks this ad is completely about me. I didn't know Budweiser had even heard of me!

Overdue pictures...

A new album was finally posted (remotely, from the hotel in Burlingame and also from HQ in San Mateo). This has dessert party pictures as well as all of the pictures from Loyens' wedding.

http://cklempay.homeip.net/gallery/03_24_2007

This is the middle of week 2 of the 3 week Guidewire initial training, and Jen comes in this weekend to visit (she's never been to San Francisco). Oddly today, just as I was working with Luie to debug some GScript he had written, I received an IM from Brandon, pointing me at this post that he had just seen!

Mark Zupan!

Jen and I went to see Bob Saget do standup last night at the Paramount Theater. That was pretty damn funny (I still can't get used to Danny Tanner being as vulgar as the real Saget!).

More noteworthy: we had great seats up close (row A!), in a strip of 4 seats on the left side aisle. Jen and I had the two rightmost seats of that strip...and the other 2 seats were occupied by Mark Zupan and his girlfriend, Jessica! Mark Zupan is the main character of the documentary from 2005 called Murderball. He's one of the players on the US Paralympic wheelchair rugby team, and was the most covered character in the movie. He's the one in the picture on the linked IMDB entry.

At the intermission (the opening comic was quite funny), I talked to him for a few minutes. He's an extremely nice guy and very friendly. He even offered to grab me a beer as he headed up to the bar at the end of the intermission!

I'd been telling Jen about the movie probably just two or three weeks ago -- I guess now I need to be sure she sees it! I'd seen his book, Gimp, at Barnes & Noble when it came out this fall, so I picked it up while out today.