I really like the idea of a Kindle. Almost enough to justify the price. The thought of getting periodicals and newspapers delivered to my bedside table, while I’m brewing my morning cup of coffee, does appeal to me. I can even believe it would make me a better (at least more well-read) person.
So, with a casual thought, I checked the wireless coverage map to see how many far-off places I could visit while downloading to my new e-reader. What I found was, although I could enjoy lightning-fast 3G downloads while visiting our Choroa Safaris office in Arusha, Tanzania, I would have to drive over an hour north of my small, but cosmopolitan town of Bend, Oregon, to reach the edge of the worst coverage. Nice.
Kindle…sometimes works better in remote eastern Africa, than sitting at a Starbucks on a major US highway.
At least they talked me out of spending $259.
What a wonderful time we had last night at the new Zydeco‘s location in Downtown Bend. It’s also a great story of opportunity in the recent economy. The building was built in the boom-time here in Bend and the first tenant was a high-end restuarant, Volo. They went out of business and Zydeco snatched the opportunity to move from their highly trafficked, but unsophisticated location on 3rd street to the high-class new digs on Bond. The inherited some great tenant improvements, and we even heard last night that the wine cabinets were full of expensive wine when they moved in. What a deal!
Laura had the Kansas City Strip and I the duck breast over cavatappi. Both were incredible. I’ve never had a bad, or even just mediocre, meal at Zydeco.
As kind of a follow-up to an earlier post, ThinkPad Still Going Strong, a partner of mine just recently had some trouble with his new Lenovo laptop.
I’ve been a little apprehensive since Lenovo bought that part of the business from IBM a few years ago. IBM had earned a large amount of respect from me with their laptop products for both quality and service. Even though I understand Lenovo was the manufacturer behind the IBM product, I still had to wonder if the brand would continue as before.
My friend ordered the W-series laptop as he is a power user working from the same desk most days. (I always opt for the little X-series) Even with my pleading, he didn’t opt for the ultra-cool dual-screen extension that comes as an option. When his new laptop first arrived, one side of the keyboard was spongy and felt unsupported from underneath. Not one of those things that you think might be a figment of your imagination, but a real honest-t0-god problem. Lenovo admitted that the issue was part of a known recall, which begs the question why this unit ever shipped. Instead of just issuing him a new laptop, they repaired the one he had. When the his laptop arrived to the office again, signed off by quality control, the Windows 7 boot screen hung for over an hour demanding another call to support. Today the laptop seems to be working fine, but it’s only a few days old. I’ll continue to monitor it’s health and wonder if the reputation of the ThinkPad as the don’t-have-to-worry-about-it-because-it-just-works laptop might be a thing of the past.
I don’t get it…Sitting here minding my own business….streaming music through iTunes, chatting on Gmail, blogging in Chrome, editing some logos in GIMP, finishing them in Inkscape, proofing them in Picasa, copywriting in OpenOffice Writer, keeping an eye on my stocks with E*Trade MarketTrader, catching my Twitter traffic through my Google Gadgets…everything nicely distributed between my dual monitors…and all of the sudden my computer crashes! What gives? When is someone going to write an OS that you can actually use?
REPOSTED FROM MOVETOBEND.COM> You have to love that phrase. Unfortunately, when it comes to the commercial real estate market, it might be more descriptive that we’d like to hear. We’ve been predicting a rocky road for commercial buildings for quite some time.
“Huge commercial real estate lender may file bankruptcy, heightens meltdown fears”
As more businesses struggle in this economy, it certainly affects their ability to pay what is often their largest expense, rent. We know several local landlords that have had to forgive rent, lower rent, and still lose tenants. And, when you’re dealing with commercial buildings, their value is all based on the rents they generate.
That loss in value is never good, but it is certainly worse for those that borrowed the money for their building. It affects “the ratio”, or the amount of debt on your property in relation to what it is worth. In the past, this wasn’t as big a problem. You could know that your property was worth less than you owed on it, but that fact was not something the bank wanted to think too much about. Today, with the FDIC making frequent visits to banks, auditing their files and checking their loans, bankers are much more keen to watch these ratios.
So how do you get your “ratio” back in compliance? Simple…the bank calls you up and asks you to write them a check in order to make up the lost value. Ouch! And in the recent real estate market, depending on when you bought or built your building, that check could be a whopper.
So now, your building is costing you more than it’s making you every month, its value is decreasing and picking up speed, and to top it off, the bank wants a huge check. Some borrowers are saying to heck with this, stopping their payments, and now their banks gets to hire expensive attorneys to go through the foreclosure process so that they can take possession of an almost vacant building which they essentially paid well over market prices for.
You can’t run through that scenario too many times and still call yourself a business. Don’t believe me? Ask Capmark.
I absolutely love finding awesome open source software. I don’t know why it entertains me so much. I guess it’s because I feel like I’m getting away with something. Like a little kid that just successfully snagged a cookie from the jar.
Whatever the reason, it happened again. I was helping Laura with some graphics for her blog, and what I needed was a good vector graphics editor. I often use Gimp for most of my graphics needs (another awesome open source program), but for the intricacies of these particular graphics, raster just wasn’t going to cut it.
A quick read through some bulletin postings, and I found Inkscape. Still in its relative infancy, this program was able to take a raster copy of the graphic I was trying to duplicate and quickly traced it into a multilayer vector image that I could easily manipulate.
Like most full-featured graphics programs, the litany of tools and options will take me weeks to explore, but that’s half the fun. The other half is, of course, turning out cool, clean vector graphics.
Laura’s dad sent these images to me via email. There was no reference to the artist, but since it looked like a perfect opportunity to play with my new image handling software for this site, I felt compelled to upload them here. Fortunately, a quick Google search on “sidewalk artist 3d” revealed the artist as Julian Beever, an Englishman living in Belgium.
I wonder if cities require a permit to draw on the sidewalks. And if so, what kind of permit is it? Seems like this would be a fantastic advertising idea in the right setting. A while back, the BendFilm Festival used a similar idea by stenciling their logo all over the sidewalks of downtown Bend. I don’t know how well that went over with the city, or whether they asked for permission, but I do remember several of the logos persisting on the sidewalks for quite some time. Effective idea.
Not too long ago, Laura was asking me about the best strategies for backing up computer files at work. No one wants to lose all of those priceless digital photos of family and holidays, and for business people, the loss can be devastating.
There are a number of different options today, in large part thanks to the greater capacities in storage media. However, my favorite option right now doesn’t even use storage media. (Well, not in the traditional sense you’d think of.) Mozy.com will back up an unlimited amount of data from your home pc utilizing nothing more than your internet connection. You just download a small application, checkbox the folders you want backed up, and it does the rest automatically. If you’re doubtful as to how easy this can really be, they’ll let you backup up to 2Gig of your files for free. That’s the service package I’ve been using, and I’m really a fan.
Now, I normally do not like anything with a monthly recurring fee (it’s like being pecked to death by a duck), but I think that unlimited backup for $4.95/month isn’t bad. On an annualized basis, I’d probably spend more than that on any other solution. Maybe not in dollars, but certainly in time and fuss. They even offer a nice discount for those that would pay for a year or more up front (as I will.)
Here are some photos from the opening of duck season last weekend. I shot a lot more with my camera than my shotgun.
A few months ago, I fell for a sale at Costco. (This is not an unusual occurence.) The product was a small portable document scanner packaged with software for scanning business cards, receipts, and other business related documents. ( NeatReceipts )
Now the justification was easy. One scanned receipt, that would have otherwise been misplaced, would easily pay for this device come tax time. So it was with much enthusiasm that I purchased the gadget and rushed it home to install my new business process. Some of that enthusiasm was lost when the installed software did not want to load on my laptop. The rest of that enthusiasm was lost when it also would not load on either of my desktop machines. I called tech support in Mumbai, who quickly and diligently went to work on the solution. No small feat I might add. By the end of the “session”, I’d allowed them to install remote software on my machine, log into my laptop, and carefully rearrange my administrative services and registry.
The biggest drawback, it seemed, to their software is that it uses MS SQL Server. Now, I don’t have so much experience with all of the different database packages that I could intelligently discuss the pros and cons of all the major brands (we get along quite nicely on MySQL), but what I do know is that everytime I have a software package which is built on SQL Server, it sucks. And I don’t use that word lightly…they are just plain awful. (Some of the later versions of Act! come to mind.)
Even after the tech support guys got the system working, it was slow, and my laptop started up with a SQL error everytime I rebooted. In general, I lost interest in the software and the little scanner.
But, fast-forward a few months. I’m happy to report that Neat has come out with another service patch for their little software package, and on a lark, I installed it on one of my desktops, and who could have guessed? It worked. Worked great, in fact. Now I’m like a little kid that found a Christmas present long forgot about. I’ve scanned an entire stack of receipts and marveled as the OCR engine grabbed the amount, date, vendor, and a host of other information and neatly (no pun intended) stored it into the database.
