I took this shot while traveling through the town of Vernazza in Cinque Terre, Italy. Since I was backpacking, I was really travel weight conscious so I took along the lightest tripod I had. This turned out to be a huge mistake. It was so flimsy that I had a ton of trouble composing these night shots because the vibrations from the ground would get so easily transfered to the shot.

I had to find creative ways of weighing the tripod down to dampen the vibrations. Every one of my long exposure night shots took at least 3 times longer than they should have.

I love this particular shots because of the variation in colors that run from left to right. Every time I look at this photograph, I remember the warm breezes at night and the fantastic pesto pizza my sister and I enjoyed at sunset.

The Mexircus.com guys just notified me that Admiral 1.1.1 was released.  I  discovered this neat app while I was previously hunting for a way to replicate the Mac Expose feature on Windows XP, and I’ve been using it ever since it’s been a real boost to my productivity.  I regularly have over a dozen windows open while I’m working and this was a real time saver instead of trying to ALT+TAB through all them.

Their previous 1.0 release had a few bugs, but in this latest release they’ve resolved all of them (at least the ones that plagued me).   The single best feature of this new release is that they’ve added miniaturization for related Windows (for demo of miniaturization, check out this screenshot I took). So if you have an IE 7 window currently in focus and activate Related Windows Miniaturization, you will only get shown all the other IE windows.   This is the perfect feature for me, since there are so many times where I’m in one Outlook email, and I want to bring up another email for reference.  So instead of miniaturizing all windows, it only shows me the Outlook windows.

In the setup of Admiral, I had to specifically tell it to exclufe the Windows Sidebar and the Outlook Reminders window in the miniaturization.  I have configured the top right corner to activate related window miniaturization, and the lower right corner for miniaturization of all windows. 

They’ve got a 30 day trial going and after that you can buy a full copy for $7.99.  These guys have a great piece of software, and should really look to extend their reach by getting themselves on places like Download.com and Windows Marketplace.  Direct purchase through their wordpress blog is definitely limiting their audience.

Prior to seeing this video, I thought Vista speech recognition was pretty good. Admittedly I didn’t use it for very long, but this user apparantly tried creating a perl script with it and the results are just freakin’ hilarious. It starts off slow, but give it a chance

(via Omar)

Over the holidays, one of the 2007 goals I set for myself was to complete the Seattle-to-Portland (STP) bike ride this summer over the July 14th weekend. 

Last sunday, I took one step closer in my quest to complete this seemingly impossible task.  I get tired driving 200 miles, and now I’m thinking of biking it?! 

My training started the second week of January with spinning classes at my gym to increase my aerobic fitness level and to see if I liked biking enough to actually complete STP this year.  It was far cheaper to buy a 10-class punch card for spinning classes than to buy a bike just to decide I hated biking :)  Besides, I think I’m a glutton for punishment with all my coworkers ridiculing me due to the padded spandex shorts.

After deciding I liked biking enough, I started on a quest for researching road bikes.  I’m usually a research nut when it comes to PCs and gadgets, but road bikes were a completely new world to me.  What made it worse is that there wasn’t a ton of online references, so I had to resort to asking friends and visiting bike shops in person to understand what I was getting myself into.  This helped me realize how much easy my life is when I’m researching other topics — I fire up Live Search (it really does return relevant results) or Wikipedia, and after 15-20 mins, I normally have a ton of information at my finger tips for me to dive into.  With road bikes, I was getting search results leading me to online stores fo various bike shops with no good objective information.  Wikipedia had a smattering of information about different bike components, but not much on the topic of buying a road bike.

After over a month of researching and shopping around, I finally settled on a 2007 Scott S-20 road bike.  It was pricier than I originally budgeted but after doing a bunch of research and test rides, this was definitley the bike for me.  Not only does the frame fit my body geometry the best, it has components that are of sufficiently high grade, that I can “grow” into the bike as I get better.

I was deliberating between a 2006 S10 and the 2007 S20 models, with the ‘06 S-10 discounted quite a bit (~$400) due to it being an ‘outdated’ model.   The biggest differences between the 2 were that the S10 has full Ultegra components whereas the S20 is full 105.  The S10 also has a different front fork (still carbon, but better quality and lighter). 

I really loved the S10 as I could surprisingly tell the difference between Ultegra and 105 components (though not the front fork), especially in the shifting of the gears.  The shifting was just that much smoother on the S10.  However, I couldn’t justify the extra $350 since I still had to fork out cash for a biking computer, patch kits, spare tubes and other accessories to just even begin riding on the road.

My spinning classes are completely whipping my butt every week.  Anyone that thinks that pedaling on a bike indoors at the gym is an easy task, I challenge you to try out a spinning class and be prepared to re-define the meaning of ‘tiring’.

This type of training is different than what I’ll experience for STP since spinning classes are more about simulating bike races with hill climbs and sprints, where STP is really an endurance event covering mainly flat roads.  I’m anxious to get on the road and start pedaling.

My bike has to be special ordered, but apparantly shipping is lightning quick since it should be ready for pickup this weekend. For anyone buying a bike, I highly recommend Sammamish Cycle in Redmond. Not only do they know their stuff about both mountain and road biking, but they are willing to take the time to really set you up for substantial test rides.  This is a stark contrast to many other bike shops in town, including the famous Gregg’s Cycles in Greenlake, which wouldn’t even put on SPD SL pedals onto the bikes so I could ride with my own biking shoes that I previously purchases. Image trying to buy a bike for a 200 mile biking event based only on a test ride in sneakers.

Now that the weather is starting to clear up, I should be able to get on the road pretty soon.  In my spinning classes I’m doing 20-25 miles a week, and I figure I should be able to do 30-40 miles a week once the weather gets consistently better and ramp up from there as I get closer to STP.

I’m currently shopping for a biking computer, so if anyone knows about these things and has a recommendation, shoot them my way!

Recently, I was researching trying to find the best option for adding flash memory to my Sony VAIO VGN-SZ381p notebook to take advantage of the Vista ReadyBoost feature.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t find any good information on which flash memory options were best for the Sony SZ. With flash memory being so cheap these days, it’s conceivable to get a 2GB USB or SD card for ~$40 and ideally leave it in my notebook fulltime.

According to the ReadyBoost information, you need flash memory that has at least 2.5 MB/sec for 4kb random reads and 1.75 MB/sec for 512kb random writes.

The Sony SZ series notebook have a few different options for connection flash memory.

First it has the conventional USB 2.0 ports so you can use simple USB keys. I don’t like this option since all USB keys would protrude from my laptop forcing me to remove it every time I shut it it down.

Second connection option is through the ExpressCard slot through a 5-in-1 memory card adaptor which supports Memory stick, Memory stick Pro, SD, xD and MMC.

The third option is through a dedicated Memory Stick DUO port on the left side of the notebook.

To do my tests, I used the built in Vista tool winsat which can be run from the command-line as follows:

Read speed:

winsat disk –read –ran –ransize 4096 –drive <drive_letter>

Write speed:

winsat disk –write –ran –ransize 524288 –drive <drive_letter>

Notes:

• Substitute <drive_letter> with your drive letter without the colon. So ‘D:’ would be ‘D’.
• You have to run the command line as administrator in order to use the winsat to measure read and write speeds.

Here are the tests I’ve done so far:

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