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Shanghai Sailing and Racing
!>http://www.shanghaibyc.org/images/inline_fleet_wanderer.jpg!: http://shanghaibyc.org “Shanghai Boat and Yacht Club”:http://www.shanghaibyc.org/ had to happen. Some fun things going on and there if finally a sailing club here. It is at Dian Shan Lake and for instance this “Sunday”:http://www.shanghaibyc.org/calendar.php they have a Round the Lake Pursuit They are based at the “Shanghai Water Sports Center”:http://www.shanghaibyc.org/locations.php#swsc. Form March to November the…
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Shanghai Biking
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Beijing Airport Air China Club has Wifi
It’s never clear in China where you’ll get Wifi access, but the Air China Club in the domestic terminal has free Wifi access. They also have about a dozen network taps but about half seem to be broken all the time. Also the “airport”:http://www.bcia.com.cn/en/index.jsp has real time arrival information which is pretty valuable if you…
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Identity Theft
Read a good piece about identity theft. One thing they mention is pulling your credit reports every year which is a pain. “Annualcreditreport.com”:http://annualcredireport.com seems to do this and makes it easy.
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Mobile Blackberry site
!>http://mobile.blackberry.com/mss/content/home/images/screen_home.jpg!:http://mobile.blackberry.com Well, it is almost impossible to discover, but Blackberry has for its latest models running Blackberry OS 4.1 a very cool site that free games, ringtones and other such stuff. It called “mobile.blackberry.com”:http://mobile.blackberry.com and for some reason is buried in the help menu. The best way is to type it into your blackberry browser…
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Smelly Plane
When you fly enough, you’ll see everything, in my case, this was some strange odor on a flight yesterday that caused the plane to return. All the smoke detectors went off over the Olympic Peninsula, so it wasn’t super fun to have to divert. The flight left this morning, so hopefully it will be trouble…
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Being Reasonable
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Google Analytics
!>http://www.google.com/analytics/images/intro_small.jpg!:http://google.com/analytics/ Google Analytics. “Bob”:http://www.bobsplanet.com says that this is without a doubt one of the coolest applications he has ever used. You basically put a tiny piece of javascript onto every page and you can see what the world sees. Google Analytics tells you everything you want to know about how your visitors found you and…
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Canon Rebates
“Matt” reminded me that you have to be pretty smart these days about photography. He sells his photos online and says you have to have a nice portfolio and then can get on stock photo sites. A good dream. Also reminded me that Glasers is a great place to rent and try lenses. Final great…
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Wang on Canon Lenses
Wang just sent me a great set of tips on wide angle lenses and his recommendation. If you recall from Tong Family Blog: Bob on Canon Lenses Bob talked about getting the Sigma 12-24 for wide angle work if you can find a good sample. Or the Canon 16-35L potentially. Wang’s comment is mainly that…
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The 10 Greatest Sports Songs
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Bob finds a cool hovercraft
!http://bobsplanet.com/serendipity/uploads/suna-x-xsmIMG_8419.jpg!:http://bobsplanet.com/serendipity/index.php?/archives/88-Hovercraft-spotted-in-Lake-Union.html What a cool craft. The story according to “Skyscrapercity.com”:http://skyscrapercity.com/showthread.php?t=222307 is even more interesting, instead of building a road through a wildlife preserve, about 200 people got congres to give them a $8.8M hovercraft. Wahoo. Tax dollars at work. I want one. hattip to “Bob”:http://bobsplanet.com who has by the way been revamping Bob’s Planet with…
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Disk Boot Failure Insert System Disk and I Forgot my Password
The gremlins ate our CMOS and also the boot hard disk of Connie’s computer this morning and now we get the dreaded “DISK BOOT FAILURE: INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS ENTER”:http://www.pcguide.com/ts/x/sys/booterrGBER13-c.html. It is an incredibly obscure error which no site seems to document properly. In my case, what happened was that I had put a…
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Alaska for holiday or for living
Living in Seattle, we see lots of folks up in Alaska and we end up being the jumping off point. There’s a big difference between living up there and taking a holiday there. The summers in Alaska are pretty amazing. We were there for two weeks in August and the weather was incredible. We have…
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Olympic Theme Songs
Well, in prepping for Calvin’s party, learned some fascinating (at least to me!) things about the Olympic theme songs: # “Answers.com”:http://www.answers.com/topic/olympic-symbols. The song we most closely associate with the Olympics has nothing to do with the official Olympics. It is actually written by Leo Arnaud and is called “Bugler’s Dream”. Someone at ABC heard it…
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Rebooting Your Blackberry
Hat tip to the folks at “Blackberrycool.com”:http://www.blackberrycool.com/2005/03/15/00275/ for these tips that give you the equivalent of CTRL-ALT-DEL for your Blackberry: * If you have a 72xx, 75xx or 77xx then if the Blackberry crashes, you get back by holding ALT+CAP+DEL to reboot the device if you have Blackberry software V3.x or earlier. These are usually…
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Blackberry Back From the Dead
I thought I had completely bricked Connie’s 7100. But thanks to the wonderful folks at T-mobile (double credit for helping me, really bad that it isn’t just on the web), I got it back. To review, I was installing new firmware, when I got, the dreaded, installation failed from the desktop manager and when I…
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Girl with a Pearl Earring
!>http://www.doxycide.org/gwape/painting_thumb.jpg! Just saw the movie, “Girl with a Pearl Earring”:http://www.doxycide.org/gwape/about.php and while a little obscure, it sure was a beautiful period piece. The painting of course is known as the Mona Lisa of the North and it is pretty amazing. Some interesting facts: * It all started from Johannes Vermeer (often credited as Jan Vermeer…
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SLI Disable message
Answer Error stating that SLI Multi-GPU rendering is disabled every time the system is booted on a NON SLI capable computer
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Virtual Skipper Skins
Virtual Skipper has a bunch of European sites that have a huge number of boats that are designed for it. The skinning work is amazing, so check out and you put them in c:\program files\Virtual Skipper 4\Templates\ and create a file which is the name of the boat: * “Virtual Winds”:http://www.virtual-winds.com/modules/mydownloads/viewcat.php?op=&cid=48 * “VSK-Aus.com”:http://www.vsk-aus.com. These are…
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Starforce Removal
Starforce is a copy protection scheme that loads drivers on your computer. Here’s how to get rid of the drivers that can slow down your CD/DVD player if you are not careful. Both Virtual Skipper 3 and 4 “use it”:http://www.glop.org/starforce/list.php, so it will appear on my machines with it. You can also use “Daemon”:http://www.daemon-tools.cc/dtcc/t7576-scsi-blacklists-or-why-some-perfect-images-wont-run-with-daemon-tools-v4.html to…
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Comparison Shopping Engines
We’ve been looking at comparison shopping companies. Its interesting to see who has what presence on the web right now. From google:”comparison shopping” we get the initial list whic includes: bizrate.com mysimon.com pricegrabber.com dealtime.com shopper.cnet.com It’s interesting to see that shopping.com doesn’t come up. An “Alexaholic”:http://www.alexaholic.com/shopping.com+shopzilla.com+pricegrabber.com+bizrate.com+dealtime.com?y=n&r=6m&z=1 shows that mysimon.com is way lower and shopper.cnet.com isn’t…
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Shoes online
!>http://www.zappos.com/images/818/7144818/97060-t.jpg! I haven’t had to buy dress shoes since 2004 (ok, so I don’t wear them much). Interesting to see how discounting works. I picked the Johnston & Murphy Stanza as a benchmark. The discontinued Bentley I got for $140 in late 2004, here’s what the deals are like now for shoes that are made…
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Linda Withington can do small and large jobs…
It wasn’t clear from this if you want a landscaper or a landscape architect. This review is for an architect to plan a project. We’ve had her work on a small landscaping, a big one and then a whole front lawn and she’s done great each time. Not the cheapest, but you’ll get a really…
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Another reliable fellow
The folks at Sprague do our regular pest control maintenance. They are good about coming regularly and they do a good job. Our main problem has been carpenter ants, but when you need a nasty yellow jacket nest taken care of, they will do it. They are environmentally sensitive to the extent you can be,…
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We’ve been working with Chet for three years now
And the best thing is that he’s reliable. You can call him on his cell phone and he’ll tell you what job he is on and what is doing. The carpet cleaning is thorough. Probably a little on the expensive side, but you get what you pay for. The nice thing is that you can…
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Cannot use Alaska Miles to upgrade on American or Hawaiian
We are trying to see if we can use upgrade mileage, the short answer is that it is both expensive in terms of mileage and very hard to do. On American, we can use Alaska miles, but they don’t let them use them for upgrades. AAdvantage Partners and Mileage Programs – Partner Details Between the…
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What Rich Listens To…
“Melodeo”:http://melodeo.com/user/rich lets you see what podcasts I’m listening too. They have this cool feature where there is a personal website for each user and I got that key user id “rich”:http://melodeo.com/user/rich. Also they sync with your cell phone, so you can listen to podcasts for free over your cell phone if you can figure how…
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Blue Angels in Seattle
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12 planets?
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