“Sure, thing!”

I recently sent a small request to an engineering leader in another team where I work at Yahoo!, and got this quick response:

Sure, thing.

An inadvertent comma puts me squarely in the cast of the Aadams Family!

how do people survive w/o a techie in the house?

Sunday night I noticed that our Tivo HD box had not recorded any new movies. I checked and discovered that the entire To-Do list was suspended, with a message next to each entry saying no shows found. But on clicking through, clearly there were lots of upcoming shows. Being a programmer gives me a high chance of solving these kinds of things quickly, because I can guess what the nature of the bug is. I went to the Season Pass page and reordered one of the shows to be above another show. Saved. And voila, the to-do list was repopulated.

A happy ending in just a few minutes, but what happens to all the other poor sobs who don’t have a programmer lying around? I assumed that Tivo had pushed some new software down, and sure enough, last night I had a message that I can now play YouTube videos on my Tivo. That’s cool, but for some I wonder if that’s all they can play without a lot of pain!

Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show

We rented Mr. Vaughn’s DVD the other night and went for a wild 30-day tour-bus ride with him + a host of comedians. An amazingly funny film – highly recommended.

The iPhone 3g goes “buh-bye”

I tried. I love the design. The apps are incredibly beautiful. But I can’t justify ~$1800 over two years for a phone whose battery doesn’t last a business day. Thus my iphone is going back shortly for a refund.

After about 8-9 hours it goes into “20% remaining” panic – that’s a death cookie. The treo I had before my blackberry did this, also, and the battery life will only get worse from here.

Also, although it’s amazing to listen to streaming Pandora audio on the freeway, the signature buzzing line noise goes on and off regularly – very annoying. I’m guessing either from 3g downloads of emails or as the device tries to find wifi for me. For that reason and also because it doesn’t have the 3-4 dedicated buttons of an ipod, it’s frustrating to use in the car.

Useful or fun “time killers” do seem to be the killer apps for iphone and other mobile app development. I like to check on current deals, used piano listings (craigslist, oodle), friends’ blogs, high tech industry news, etc, via google reader while standing in line or waiting for someone. Guessing the sweet spot is 30 seconds to 2 minutes per use.

Update: returned the iphone and wow, was it a pain at the Apple Store to do so. Don’t go before 10am, they aren’t “really” open and it takes a special employee to do the return. Took about 40 minutes for me, and they tried to send me home with a gift card because system had problem w/my (same) credit card.

Labradoodle Lion Cut

We are thinking of dressing up our Mini Labradoodle, Bronco, as a lion for Halloween. What we need is someone good with photoshop who could show us what he might look like based on his image below plus one of these very funny images of a cat who got a lion cut by accident (snopes – not an urban legend).