my old indoor antenna broke and it was time to replace it. i decided to try out the terk hdtva indoor antenna. i bought one on ebay for just under $30 and i am happy to report that i am able to watch HDTV OTA just fine.

this weekend i’ve been watching football in HD and it has been great. this antenna is less susceptible to interference and it appears to pick up the signal better than my previous antenna.

i live about 40 miles from the broadcasting antennas, so picking up the signals can be difficult, but so far, so good.

• Smells really bad of rotten eggs outside the office. What is going in here? #
• Met christi and koda at the dog park in Sunnyvale. It is cold! #
• Koda and I are at sports basement. http://twitpic.com/joe9d #
• Do not try to be cute by color coding your iPhone apps. It looks cool but it is really hard to find your apps! #
• Christi started having contractions. Still pretty far apart, but was not expecting them just yet. Baby coming sooner than expected? #
• Christi is willing the baby to stay inside her. She still hasn't packed her bag. #
• hello, contraction. didn't we just see you 5 minutes ago? #
• Admitted in hospital. Christi has an epidural and I'm sleeping on a fold out chair. Any hour now! #
• Water just broke. Still no baby. #
• 7lbs 8oz and 21" long. The baby boy has arrived with 10 fingers and toes this morning. http://twitpic.com/juyms #
• changed baby's first diaper. was later told that nurses would have changed his diaper if we asked them to. need to milk that service. #
• http://twitpic.com/jzb66 – getting discharged today and we've just picked the name. we need to go find the birth certificate lady to ma … #
• Circumcision, hep b, hearing teat, and heel prick: check. Finally left hospital and got home at around 4:30pm yesterday. #
• Exhaustion has started to set in after the first night of feeding. Supplementing breast milk with just a little bit of formula. #

i’m not sure exactly why sudo is trying to do something with your hosts file, but i just installed fedora core 11 and i tried running sudo and it was painfully slow.

this thread at fedoraforum.org discusses a solution that worked for me. apparently, having a bad /etc/hosts file will require sudo to timeout on the DNS it is trying to do before the command will run.

• Now at Blush in milpitas getting froyo http://twitpic.com/io6n0 #
• Tea Era – roasted barley milk tea. http://twitpic.com/ioamm #
• Dinner with Ella at shabuway in mountain view. Mmmm shabu shabu. http://twitpic.com/ioamx #
• lots of tv from yesterday to watch: how i met your mother, the big bang theory, house, heroes, dancing w/ the stars, gossip girl, csi: miami #
• Today is our two year anniversary. For lunch I celebrated by myself with Taco Bell. Dinner is a surprise. http://twitpic.com/iqqva #
• Celebrated two year anniversary at Sent Sovi last night. http://twitpic.com/iupvz #
• In case you aren't lucky, you still will be caffeinated. http://twitpic.com/iv5br #
• Installed car seat bases a few days ago. It wasn't that hard but they aren't nearly as secure as I imagined they would be. #
• am really hungry now and all i can do is think about the three steaks i didn't eat last night. #
• iPhone MMS update applied & now MMS for the iPhone works. all this time i wanted the feature, but now i have no pictures that i want to send #
• waiting for putty to dry to touch up the fixed holes in the walls. it's like watching paint dry…except it's putty. #
• still have a big backlog of tv to watch… #
• Down to the very last diet coke in the house. Going to make a diet coke run soon. How did my supply get so low? #
• kurt warner: what are you doing running 28 yards in the WRONG direction? that's worse than just giving up. #

so it turns out that my sister and my wife are in pretty regular contact and my sister’s enthusiasm has been downright blatant. today, while talking to christi, my sister had somehow gotten it in her head that christi was going to deliver the baby…like now.

she then decides to IM my brother and tell him that something exciting is going to happen sooner than they had expected, but she can’t say what. and then she logged off.

then my brother is IM’ing me asking me what’s going on and if the baby is coming out now. i tell him that i have no idea what he is talking about and he tells me that our lovely sister has told him the baby is coming.

i check online to see that christi isn’t online and that moment of what if creeps in. she said that she might make an unplanned visit to the doctor just to make sure everything was ok because something was different and i hadn’t heard from her about how that went.

so i get in touch with her after all of this hoopla to find out that she had just left the doctor’s office and everything is fine and normal and there’s no new status. my sister’s enthusiasm has led to all of this excitement for naught.

i started to panic that christi and i haven’t packed ours or koda’s hospital bags yet and there’d be a rush of things to do. turns out that there’s no immediate urgency, but i think that i will pack some bags tonight.

i’m trying to install a 64-bit guest OS (fedora core 11) in a 32-bit host OS in vmware server and the fedora kernel kept complaining that the CPU was not 64-bit capable. vmware documentation says that 64-bit guests will install just fine on 32-bit hosts.

it turns out that after a BIOS upgrade, an option for virtualization was exposed. once the virtualization option was enabled, i was able to install fedora just fine.

seeing kristin chenoweth win best supporting actress for a show that is no longer on the air was pretty amazing. i think she did a great job on the show so that was great to see.

i still don’t get why everyone thinks that 30 rock is so fantastic, but seeing just how many awards they were nominated for, there must be something that everyone else sees that i don’t.

• just shot a portrait in real world conditions with my 85mm f/1.2L. that lens needs more use b/c the pix that come out of it are amazing. #
• stream torrent is a fabulous and amazing thing. quality isn't anything to write home about, but better than nothing! #
• Found my m2m CD. Just as fantastic as the day I got it. #
• why are the refs in the OAK/SD game wearing red and white uniforms?? #
• 4th and 15 and you go for it w/ jamarcus russell as your QB AND you go for it?? AND THEN you score a touchdown. man, gutsy play calling. #
• poor raiders…it looked so good for them, but at the end of the day, the chargers managed to pick up the win. #
• most of monday night football was seen today courtesy of p2p tv streaming. saw the second half of MNF only because raiders sold out @ home. #
• RT @SebastienPage Tutorial: Jailbreak Your iPhone 3G 3.0 With PwnageTool For Mac http://tinyurl.com/l2qjfn #
• I keep forgetting that a lot of jailbroken apps may not work immediately after upgrade. I have a semi-crippled iPhone now. #
• giving mika's new album _the boy who knew too much_ a listen. pretty good stuff. if you liked his last album, you'll like this one. #
• just spent the last several hours debugging an issue and finally found out what was wrong. the fix: 1 line of code! i need a cooke break. #
• Cookies or fruit? Such a tough choice. http://twitpic.com/i3kuj #
• The Pizza Box in San Jose serves pizzas as large as 26 inches wide. 30 square pieces of pizza! http://twitpic.com/i4p5m #
• The Pizza Box in San Jose http://twitpic.com/i4rvs #
• soooo tired… #
• Couldn't help myself with this hot weather. Got some pearl tea to cool down. http://twitpic.com/i7plc #
• get SlingPlayer on iPhone to work over 3G http://bit.ly/JzlDn #

i had the opportunity to check out the tomtom iphone app firsthand and i have to say that at first glance the iphone app looked really good, but upon further inspection there were some glaring omissions.

the good
the GPS app itself works reasonably well. the interface is very similar like their dedicated devices. it’s reasonably easy to use and after some use, quite intuitive. the menus actually feel a little simpler to use that the dedicated devices.

the update of the map while driving is actually not bad when you are on the move. when you are slow, though, the weaknesses of the iphone’s GPS are painfully obvious. the update doesn’t really register movement well when you are moving less than 10-15mph.

the bad
1GB of storage space is required to install the app.

no text to speech functionality!

POI appear to only be looked up in DB, no inet updates.

so after all is said and done is it worth the $100 for the app? well, functionally, the iphone app gives similar functionality as the low end tomtom units with text to speech, so it’s a nice consolidation of devices.

it’s unfortunate that tomtom didn’t include the text to speech functionality. one would think that the iphone would be able to handle it. still, if i had the app, i’d be tempted not to bring along my tomtom unit when travelling.

WPtouch detects if the browser is an iphone/ipod touch and loads a mobile friendly theme optimized for the iphone. all this is done in a plugin so you won’t have to mess with themes it’s all detected and run at run-time.

the interface is nice and clean and the ajax calls makes the blog viewing seem more application-like.

the only thing i don’t like about it is that you have to click a title to read any blog. the first blog isn’t show by default. i guess it’s a design design, but that’s an extra click (touch :P) before you can start reading anything. form over function? i think it’s worth it.