Weekend Update

Well hopefully I will get to say this every week - spent another Saturday on the beach then in the hot tub. This time the water was a bit warmer so I headed into the ocean - the waves were fairly high so I didn't do much swimming, but jumped into the waves and let them carry me back to the beach. Also walked all the way north/west along the beach - for a while there are homes right on the sand, but I think they are rentals, but then there is a little cliff of rocks and just behind the rocks are homes that look like people might live in them and there are stairs down the rocks about every other house. Being only a few blocks from the beach I'm of course jealous of the people 10 feet from the beach...

Sunday was an exciting day of laundry, shopping and cleaning up. Also found some decent Thai food in Ventura on Main St.

Solish Sunday

Susanna and I headed to Ben's house for a BBQ on Sunday. It was good to see Ben and to catch up on all the AEPi happenings. The food was good and we got a chance to play a little basketball (well, horse).

WinZip

If you are using windows (boo!) and you need to unzip a file that ends in .zip you can get WinZip just get the free trial version (it will just remind you it is free occasionally and might expire at some point). I have not used JustZIPit but it looks like it might be a bit easier and less of a pain with the trail version stuff.

With either of these you will need to download the zip file and then open the file in the program and choose to unzip it.

If anyone reading this has a favorite unzipping program for windows please post a comment.

Thank goodness for the hot tub

Well after a tough day of reading on the beach and walking along the ocean I sure was glad that the building has a hot tub so I could relax after my taxing day.

I'm thinking California isn't such a bad place...

The 40 Year-Old Virgin

Susanna and I saw The 40 Year-Old Virgin last night and wow I have not laughed that hard in a long time!

I do feel I need to warn that this movie is not for the easily offended, but if you are not easily offended - go see it!

Topdesk - Expose take off for windows

I got this from Akshay's blog (and Susanna pointing it out) TopDesk.

On Mac OS X if you hit F9 it tiles all of the open windows and then you can just click on the one you want to bring to the front. If you hit F10 it tiles all of the windows for the current program. If you hit F11 it shows the desktop and hides all open windows until you hit F11 again. On Mac OS X it is not only what I think is the best way of moving between applications (unless you like to have a bunch of terminals or text editors open) but it also looks super slick. TopDesk does basically the same thing except it doesn't look quite as slick and I think it is just on the edge of being too slow to be worth it. Although maybe if you have a fairly recent machine it will be snappier. 8/19: Thanks to James (see comments) for pointing out that if it is running too slow turning off Live Window Updates makes a significant difference. I am very impressed by the support provided!

You can download a trial version which is free but every once in a while will pop up a little message basically just to annoy you into buying it which is $10.

Greed

Ok, so I put some ads on this blog. They are off to the side and down a bit on the page. This is more of a market survey than a final decision. I am interested to see two things. One, if over say a month I actually earn enough through the ads to be worth it (I haven't even told google where to send the money yet so if this is moving slow the code will just be deleted and the ads will be gone). Two, how people react. If you are offended by the ads and especially if you are going to be less likely to read this blog because of them - please post a comment and let me know. I don't have many readers so it will only take comments from a few people to get rid of them.

Seat Guru

Not sure how useful this actually is, but a cool site Seat Guru.

Firefox RSS

Here's an easy way to get started into the world of RSS. If you are using firefox then when you are looking at a site with an RSS feed (such as the one you are viewing right now) then at the bottom right hand corner of the browser there will be a little orange icon. If you are interested in reading the page on a regular basis click on the orange icon and then a gray box will pop up - click on any of the options (there will probably only be one option) then a little dialog box will come up where you can give the book mark a name (such as David's Blog) and then when it says create in you can pick where ever you want, but I suggest picking Bookmarks Toolbar Folder. After that near the top of the browser window (where your bookmarks are) click on the bookmark you just created and there should be a drop down list of the recent posts. Warning it is just a set number of posts, unlike other RSS readers, it does not know what was the last post you read. So if the whole list is new to you, you might want to go to the page to see if there were some posts you missed.

Another good example of where to use this is if you go to craigslist and pick say furniture in your area you can do the same thing and then you can keep an eye on what people in your area are selling.

Many news sites and other blogs also provide this service (RSS).

ING referral money

Yes, another post about ING. If you are going to get an account let me know and I'll refer you and we'll both get a little cash...

In an Expected Revamping, Agilent Plans a Buyback

Not sure how interesting anyone else finds this, but as someone who interviewed for a position in Agilent's semiconductor division and now work for a competitor of its chip testing unit this is quite interesting to me: In an Expected Revamping, Agilent Plans a Buyback

Do Try This at Home: Assess Your Area's Real Estate Bubble - New York Times

Interesting for those of us who have to live in an area where we could never afford a home at current rates: Do Try This at Home: Assess Your Area's Real Estate Bubble - New York Times

Traffic School

Well one Friday morning a few weeks ago I got up a bit late and decided that on the fairly empty stretch of the 101 between Carpinteria and Ventura I would drive a bit over 80 mph (well it wasn't as preplanned as that makes it sound). I think that the fairly empty part is what got me in trouble since groups of cars are often going faster than that on the 101 with no one being pulled over. But as you have probably guessed by now, a California Highway Patrol officer noticed that I was going a bit above the legal speed limit of 65 and turned on the flashing lights. I was not feeling very rebellious that morning so I pulled over to the right shoulder very safely and fessed up to speeding (he actually did not ask me if I knew why he pulled me over, he just asked how fast my speedometer said I was going, after telling me what he clocked me at). Luckily he decided to report my speed as 75+ which he said would reduce my fine. He also described to me traffic school. Apparently if you get a ticket in California you can attend traffic school and the state won't tell your insurance about the ticket. (This is limited to one ticket every 18 months).

Well I paid my ticket online and then started online traffic school. As I run long simulations at work I read through the text and then it has little multiple choice tests at the end of each section. Unfortunately, because I got the ticket in Ventura county I have to go somewhere to take the final test since the county realized that if you take it online anyone could take the test for you...

The thing I found most interesting in the traffic school material is their explanation for why you don't save time by speeding. They said if you go 75 in a 55 for 20 miles you only save yourself 6 minutes and since people usually drive less than 20 miles they don't save much time. Now I drive at least 90 miles a day... that's 24 minutes I could take off my commute! Ok so the limit is 65 and the rule of thumb is they won't pull you over for less than 75 so I'd actually have to be going quite fast to save that much time, but I just thought that was a rather silly line of reasoning.

Now you may be asking - David aren't you at work? Why do you have time to go on and on about a speeding ticket? Well the project I am working on has several parallel tasks to it and they are all currently blocked by one person who appears to be in an all day meeting. And while this has given me a lot of time to go through the driving school stuff I can only take so much of that. Plus you might have notice that public has demanded a post. Luckily (or unfortunately depending on if you consider more work good) there is another project I am probably go to help with so I will have something to do when I hit these situations.

Ok time to get back to traffic school and learn more about how much speeding would help me if it wasn't so expensive to get tickets (and something about safety).