New Notebook Version!

Just wanted to share my relief at getting a new version of Notebook out the door. It includes the ability to tag and sort notes and integrates with Google Bookmarks, features that people have been wanting since we launched a year and a half ago! It also includes (thanks to David's 20% time and Akshay's whining) the ability to export your Notebook maps into Map Shop. For example, I exported the final route of the Exponential Decay Bar Crawl.

Breathless summary of recent events of or relating to Southern California and marriage

I promised Annie a shout-out in honor of her getting married, so (belatedly), Hi Annie! Congrats! She was quite the radiant bride, and the wedding had numerous highlights, including but not limited to

• the bartender giving me a bottle of Curvoisier to take back to my table
  
• Annie's brother-in-law explaining how getting married was choosing a life of "ennobling pain"
  
• this Newlywed Game-ish quiz about who does what in their relationship
  

Wes also did a great job showing me around LA - we went to the Dali exhibit (that man was obsessed with ants), had tasty Italian food, shopped for a couch, went to Trader Joe's for panini ingredients, ate at a pancake place that his friend saw Turk from Scrubs at twice, and went to a tea bar showing football games with scantily-clad waitresses. I guess I should actually thank Yelp, which is where Wes's roommate-to-be found most of these places.

While I was in SoCal, I also got to catch up with Jen, Robin, Vince, Albert, Yaz, Jenn, Judy, Kathy, Richard, and Charles. So many people! Other than the fact that everybody's getting engaged (congrats Yaz and Robin!) or in relationships, the most important thing is that we need to convince Vince to recapture his dream to start a business.

I also spent a lot of time in traffic. How do people put up with that?

Speaking of Southern California - my family was evacuated but is now back home. Thanks to everyone who was checking in - I felt very loved!

Cleaning up is hard to do

One of the few things I routinely use my kitchen for is to make popcorn, which is very tasty, but always leaves a frustratingly hard-to-clean oily pot behind. This weekend, Googling in anger, I discovered that I should be using a Dobie pad. Skeptical of the ridiculous name but desperate, I bought one, and it worked miracles! Dobie pad, I love you! The Dobie pad has joined the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser and Scrubbing Bubbles in my pantheon of life-altering cleaning products.

Tips for Manhattanites venturing into Brooklyn

After countless forays into our hipper, less convenient neighbor to the East (mostly to meet up with girls - why do all girls live in Brooklyn? discuss), including one just this Saturday, I feel like I should share the various valuable lessons I have learned:

1. Bring an umbrella. Especially if Dolapo is coming. Nine out of ten times, if Dolapo is present in Brooklyn, it will be raining. I do not know why this is. Maybe Dolapo secretly controls the weather and does this to give him ammo against future invitations to Brooklyn. Maybe Brooklyn hates Dolapo. The jury is still out, so your umbrella should be, too.
   
2. Bring numbers of car services. Dolapo-inspired rain can humble even the most golfish of umbrellas. For example, an awesome Philip Glass/Dracula/Kronos Quartet was cancelled halfway through because the lightning might possibly kill us. If this happened in Manhattan, we would hail a cab and head for safety. This is not an option in Brooklyn, where there is significant religious opposition to cabs. Instead, it's important to bring the numbers of some "car services" which you can call for a ride out.
   
3. On a related note, bring a map. Most of Brooklyn is not near a subway and these are often places you want to go, such as the Red Hook ball fields (remember NOT to bring Dolapo!). And the parts that are on the subway turn out not to be near one another. If, for example, you are going from Park Slope to Williamsburg, it's pretty much a toss up between walking, a horse and buggy, and the G train. If you are going from my apartment to Prospect Heights or Fort Greene, it will take at least two transfers, and probably the train will be skipping exactly the stop you intend to get off at.
   
4. Be sure to tell people serving you food and/or beverages that you are from Manhattan. For example, the man serving us mojitos on Saturday (in lieu of our ballfields visit, *cough* Dolapo *cough*), was very entertained to hear that we were from Manhattan, and promised to do his best to rival those on our island. Although the drinks were cheap, they also tasted heavily of sour mix.
   

Don't get me wrong. Brooklyn is awesome. There's tasty food. And a park. And large apartments. Just come prepared.

Oo, my 10-year high school reunion is coming

I was catching up on my blog reading, and it was a good thing, too, because Annie had a link to the web page for our reunion. And now I'm passing it on!

I sold my soul to Apple and all I got was a wasted evening

[ pretend there were some prefatory remarks about not blogging in a while because so many exciting things have happened, too many to enumerate at this late juncture here ]

This Saturday, I lost my phone in a cab (yes, the second time this year, but only the second time in my whole life (not counting some close calls)) just as I was lusting after everybody's iPhones, which was quite convenient, some might say suspiciously so. So Sunday, I finally went to the Apple Store and decided, hell, while I was there, why not get the Mini I've wanted forever as a media PC (if only it could play Netflix movies without buying Parallels!). Being a good OCD shopper, I had already looked up the various options for connecting the Mini to my TV, which suck, since Apple has decided the Mini, because it is useful, should be harder to connect to your TV that the Apple TV, which is neither useful nor more expensive. I believe this is what they call "market segmentation," in so far as I, the market, want to segment my eyeballs in frustration.

So, here I am, it's Monday night. I was up late last night with a tool called DisplayConfigX, which is about user-friendly as its name might suggest, eventually gave up, came home, and tried again for a few hours. There are all sorts of random settings for various TVs posted on the Interwebs, but not the ones for mine. Although my TV claims it can do 1024 x 720, when I feed it that resolution, the image is most definitely cropped on the top and the bottom, and that's even after fiddling with the "front porch" and "back porch" of the signal to get it to center correctly. Did you know video signals had porches? It's fascinating. I'm imagining my desktop drinking mint juleps between frames. Or not.

Right, so, it's Monday night and instead of doing anything remotely useful, I have labored extensively and am now the proud owner of a screen that has a 1 inch black stripe on the right side and is cropped on the top and bottom and another that is center horizontally and vertically but still cropped and ostensibly the wrong resolution. Two great choices.

But I am listening to my mp3s over an optical connection to my receiver, which is hott. And I do love love love my iPhone. Anyway, if anybody has any leads on getting this perfect on my TH-37PHD8UK, I'm all ears.

Update 11/23: I managed to at least make all the pixels show up and not look funny and fill most of the screen at the totally random resolution of 1048 x 700. The settings are Horizontal (16 front, 112 sync, 216 back) and Vertical (40 front, 3 sync, 21 back).

Liveblogging jury duty

The rumors are true, there is Wi-fi in the waiting room! But, for reasons that have not really been explained even during the handy video introduction from some of your favorite national news personalities (including graphic depictions of the trial-by-ordeal that we should be grateful for supplanting with this "jury" thing, a reminder that some day when we're on trial the awesome jury we get will justify all the waiting around, and the specious assertion that jurying is more important than voting), the demand for jurors is incredibly unpredictable. Anyway, we arrived at 8:45, the first people left at 10 something, and around 11:15 they dismissed us from a 3 hour lunch. Now, an hour later, 1 batch of folks has left and the rest of us are sitting around. A girl in front of me has read 150 pages of In Cold Blood so far. Highlight of the day: bubble tea. Yum.