this weekend i participated in the paddle for life dragon boat festival. it’s a charity race where we go and paddle dragon boats. it was my first time ever paddling in a dragon boat and it was a lot of fun. i went to two of the three practices for the race and though i did not feel like i had very good form, it was still a lot of fun to paddle.

the boat holds 20 paddlers, a steersperson, and a drummer. the drummer is responsible for keeping everyone on pace, the steersperson keeps us going straight. the rest of us are there to paddle and paddle hard. the race only lasts about 3 minutes, but it’s the hardest three minutes ever!

still, i had a lot of fun. paul, leeya, mike, and dardy came out to watch us, too. the photos are actually from paul and leeya. leeya was sporting her new canon rebel xsi. the camera has a HUGE LCD. enormous, really. the camera body is a little too small for my hands, i think, but i think it fits perfectly for her.

i am not a twitter user, but i understand the appeal of the technology. it’s great that they are getting so popular and that they have the good problem of too much traffic. i think it’s ridiculous though that there problems are so bad that they have to rate limit your number of requests for updates to 10 per hour. personally, i would find that would make the service close to useless for me. the joy of twitter is getting all of those little twits when they were twat! not 6 minutes later…

i hope that they resolve their load issues soon because right now they have really opened up the space for a new player to come to town and take all of their users away.

since i’ve started using a mac, my entire workflow for processing images is a mess. i just feel completely inefficient when i’m processing the photos. i think that i just need to understand what programs i should use and when to use them. maybe i should hit adam up to see what his workflow looks like these days and see if it is something that i could learn from.

what i really wished i had were tools that were similar to what i had for windows. i’m not sure why i feel like things are so slow right now, but it’s a real struggle. it’s part of why i’ve been slow in posting new photos. oh well, i’m going to try and process paul and leeya’s photos from the weekend and see if i can work on the process.

i know i’m lame. it’s been a long time since i was first issued my blackberry, but this is the first time that i’ve learned how to sort my icons. it was driving me nuts and i finally looked it up and found the answer.

1) hover over icon you want to move
2) hold ALT and click mouse wheel
3) select move icon and move the icon to the desired spot.

how sweet it is to finally be able to move my texas hold ’em icon to the top of the list! company email? yeah, that’s secondary to poker!

my sonicare order, which i didn’t think was going to come in until next week, came in today! this bring me more joy than you can imagine. i have been suffering with a real toothbrush this whole week and let me tell you, it has been quite the bear.

but now i am reunited with my sonicare. i cannot wait to plug it in and get it all charged up. =P i think that there is something wrong when i get this excited about a toothbrush.

i ordered a new tomtom because my GPS and i have been having a rocky relationship for a long time now. it would take FOREVER to get a GPS satellite link. i’m talking sync times of over 15 minutes sometimes. the screen is small and typing on it is always tricky for my fat fingers, so after much frustration, i’ve finally bit the bullet and bought a new tomtom.

what i didn’t know about the tomtom is that it is an embedded linux device. and, of course, if there’s linux, there’s a hack. opentom.org seems to have already found a way to expose the underlying OS. what exactly you gain from exposing linux on the tomtom is sort of up in the air. the most popular app appears to be an mp3 player, but i think that the tomtom model i have plays mp3s out of the box…

it looks like there are third party apps that allow you to watch video on your tomtom. the catch? you have to encode the video to the tomtom’s screen size. maybe i should start to script that sort of thing. i wonder if i can find a way to automate the downloads i have to automatically encode the video. that would be kind of cool…

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oh, that was fast. the tomtom is here. it looks pretty cool, i’m trying to update the software right now. we’ll let all of the tomtom stuff update first before i try to install any third party apps.

the new tomtom home software is a much more polished user-friendly piece of software. it doesn’t look like a windows 95 application anymore. kudos to tomtom for fixing their eyesore of an app. the update process to get the latest software is pretty easy and except for a server timeout problem, it has been without incident.

an interesting feature of this tomtom is the map share corrections. this allows other tomtom users to make corrections to maps which can then be shared to other tomtom users. it’s actually kind of neat.

what’s sort of annoying is that the default voices installed on the tomtom are pretty limited. you have to install voices from the CD to get more choices. this wasn’t the case on the tomtom go 920 by default, so maybe i’m a little spoiled, but i’m confused as to why tomtom has done this. i think it’s a blow to usability.

it’s nice that tomtom is letting me update my maps to the newest maps available for free. nice, but it’s a big download at over 1.5GB. oh well, they are throwing in the guam map updates too. i wonder how much the roads change in guam because it’s a 0.7MB update. =P

looks like it’s gonna take over an hour to download the map, so i guess i’ll let it download and install and see what happens after that.

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the download took a while, but was uneventful. it’s surprisingly just how much you can customize your tomtom. i guess that’s the big thing these days and tomtom is catering to personalization. i think it’s a novelty, but it’s a nice touch. the biggest thing for me was being able to add more computer voices and POIs.

last night a bunch of us went out to the cheesecake factory to have dinner and catch up since warren was in town. it was good to see everyone and catch up with warren. warren and i have been talking at great length about projectors. he has one installed at his place and i have been thinking about getting one for the house. my room is pretty small though and i never realized just how much work there is to getting the projector to work. there is all sorts of research that needs to be done on projector technologies, offset angles, screens, mounts, and the like.

i think it is a telling sign when the last two big gatherings that i’ve been to have had topics of conversation which include life insurance, long term health insurance, taxes, financial instruments, sod, and remodeling. i swear it was with the same bunch of people that i used to talk about crazy girls and dates that we’ve been on, the best place to eat a burrito, or what computer game we should go play later that night. i guess we are all getting older…

we went to a wedding in sonoma over the memorial day weekend. it was held at the sonoma mission inn and it was a clasically beautiful wedding. it was forecasted to rain, but the sun came out when the ceremony began.

there was a lot of good eating that was done in sonoma. it was a nice break from all of the craziness that has been going on.

i just watched the series premiere of in plain sight and it looks to be a pretty promising show. the usa network has really been picking up some great tv shows with burn notice, psych, monk, and now in plain sight. quality tv is all you need to make a network. i’m actually pretty excited about the summer tv season. i cannot wait until my boys is back on the air.

in plain sight stars mary mccormack, who despite being hotter than i remember her being in the west wing (loved her in that!), who is a U.S. marshall who takes care of witnesses in the witness protection program. i know, tough, hot female U.S. marshall…sort of sounds like something that’s already been tried a couple of times right?

well, the writing is pretty good, some of the dialog feels a little forced and i wasn’t sure if i could buy into mary mccormack as a tough U.S. marshall. the thing is that she totally pulls it off. i think she actually pulls it off much more believably than carla gugino when she was karen sisco (another failed tough, hot U.S. marshall tv show).

i think that it’s always tough to have a female lead in a show like this because there is such a dichotomy in the character. first they have to be this tough, strong U.S. marshall, but later these shows try to explore the vulnerable side of the character which might undermine what we know of the character. shows that do it well (buffy, for example) are amazing. shows that don’t do it well find themselves canceled pretty quick.

one of the hardest things for me to transition to mac os x is getting my workflow in photo processing to be as efficient as my pc workflow. i feel like i should be able to do the same things that i have been doing, but i just don’t seem to be using the tools right.

the biggest thing is that the mac uses the ALT key instead of the PC which uses the CTRL key for shortcuts. for auto-levels and auto-contrast, it can be as much as a four key shortcut and the keys are different! i couldn’t figure out how to do auto-contrast, even though i thought i was hitting the correct keys. eventually, i found out that you can remap the keys in photoshop to create your own shortcuts.

this has made using photoshop so much easier on me. this probably means, though, that i won’t be able to use photoshop on somebody else’s mac. kind of a bummer, but i don’t really plan on using anyone else’s mac, i guess.