Russia was pretty much as I expected except for one thing. People’s apartments are tiny and their appliances are miniature. The refrigerator and stove look exactly the same, just scaled down 30%. Apartments are more like studios (you basically have one room plus a small kitchen, with that one room being an […]

The economy in Russia is out of whack (you hear about it in the news, but you don’t really know until you visit). Here’s some examples…

A Hummer costs $120,000

A Kia costs $38,000

Gasoline costs $1.50 per gallon (for 95 octane no less). Maybe someone there should start selling gas mail order. heh

A normal […]

While sitting in the airport yesterday, I wanted to transfer a 800MB file from my laptop (a Titanium Powerbook) to my girlfriend’s iBook. Her computer is newer than mine, so she was running 54Mbit wireless, while mine was 11Mbit. So I setup a private computer-to-computer network (no biggie).
But here’s the part I thought […]

The metro in Moscow is neat. It takes you anywhere you want to go within the city for a quarter. It’s crowded and old, but that’s part of the fun. Oh, it’s pretty fast too.
It’s sort of like a roller coaster… you know you probably are safe, but your body tells you […]

It looks like Pioneer might be following Alpine’s lead and making an iPod adapter for their car stereos. I couldn’t find any info about it anywhere, but if you look close at the AVIC-N1 specs on Pioneer’s website, it has a little note saying it’s “iPod Adapter Ready”. Hmmm… interesting.

Since I’m going to be on an 18 hour trip (3 flights) to Moscow next week, I checked to see if there was an off chance that the airline had power plugs in their seats (most airlines do in first class, but I’m not flying first class). And guess what? They DO! […]

Almost two years ago, I went to Hawaii to laze around. We stayed at the Hyatt Regency in Kauai (which by the way is the nicest hotel I’ve ever seen).
Anyway, they had a specialty drink there called the Poipu Passion (I probably had like 80 of them during our stay). Guess what? […]

I knew about this some years ago, but I forgot until today (Yelena is going to Russia today). Right now, she is on her first flight, traveling at 550 mph at an altitude of 37,000 feet just past Phoenix, Arizona.
If you happen to see this today, you can watch her flights…
First flight […]

The image functions aren’t really anything new for me, I’ve done some things (like graphing functions) with the PHP image functions, but I mucked around with some advanced functions (alpha blending of multiple layers and scaling the output). And all I have to say is the PHP imaging functions are awesome (of course most […]

Not that I really know *how* to play Tennis that well, but I started playing (well, at this point I wouldn’t exactly call it playing… more like trying to play).
It’s a pretty fun sport (I’ve played three times in the last week now, and each time I’m getting better). Even hitting the ball […]

My perfect system would be this:
Double DIN touch-screen controller
Video out (to drive monitors in rear headrests)
Navigation system that can be controlled from the touch-screenIt doesn’t seem like a terribly tall order, but I don’t think I have any options. Some stuff is close, but nothing is “complete”.

Alpine System
Pluses

Touch screen is cool because it gives […]

I wonder what day this guy woke up and thought that this might be a good idea?

With my new truck, I was expecting to get about 8 miles per gallon. I drove it around over 100 miles today, and the on-board computer showed me getting 12.5 miles per gallon overall. Definitely not great mileage, but better than I was expecting.
One nice thing about it is my Toyota Tacoma has […]

Well, I finally decided to get one (a 2005 SUT), so I picked it up from the dealer today. Got a pretty good deal on it, and it was exactly what I wanted (I would never have bought it if it wasn’t). This is what I ended up getting:
2005 Hummer 2 SUT (Stealth […]

Just a little note to let everyone know how super stoked I am (Yelena too) that Chechen terrorists are hitting Russia 2 weeks before we go there. In the last week they blew up two planes, suicide bombed a subway station and now they took a school hostage and are killing kids.
Can’t wait to […]