We got a portable DVD player and it’s impressive. I’ve already watched a couple of movies on it and the sound and picture are very good for the size. It’s a Toshiba SD-P2600 and I’m impressed with it. I am in the midst of The Godfather series, and I haven’t seen all of it before. I’ve never seen Robert DeNiro look so young. And Al Pacino is great.

Merry X-mas and a Happy New Year everyone.

Ipod wackiness. So I spent most of the weekend fiddling with my ipod mini. I swear I must have iTunes dyslexia because I can’t figure the damn thing out and everyone else thinks its so easy. I was thinking about getting 5 free songs by signing up with Paypal but I was foiled by a horrible interface, which is something you expect Apple to excel at. The interface for that cross marketing deal was horrid. I understand that it’s very hard to make it a nice seamless integration between the two sites but I was still underimpressed with how they did it. I was looking for something to hook up my mini to my car and the currently popular solution is to attach it to a short range FM broadcaster and then tune into that channel on your car stereo. I bought a Belkin Tunebase which is both an FM broadcaster and a car cigarette lighter, but I’m not sure I’m going to keep it. The sales guy at the Apple store on University warned me beforehand that all of the FM broadcasters are underpowered and I immediately noticed some static when I tuned into my ipod. The semi-rigid snake neck design of the Tunebase would work well in most cars but unfortunately the cigarette lighter on my s2000 is not on the dashboard, but rather behind me between the seats. This makes it hard to make any adjustments while driving. I still like the idea of an FM broadcaster for my music, but maybe it’s not quite ready yet.

I’m pretty sure my cats are super intelligent. We frequently come home and find that the web browser on one of our computers is pointing at some random site that neither Tracy nor I was looking at. Today it was howstuffworks.com. I suspect our cats are well on their way in executing their plan for world domination.

Oh and we went to the Computer History Museum the other day. That was neat for geeks like me.

The use of the word “basically” as a conversational filler word has become pretty frequent around me. I thought it was just people in my office and a few of my other friends, but then the other day I was interviewing someone who flew in from Canada and I noticed that he used it too. It’s possible he had picked up on it from my office mates, but it still surprised me. Basically is the latest in the tradition of other great filler words including “like”, “you know”, and more recently in my group of friends “apparently”. I expect I’ll start all my blog posts with basically now.

Basically, I had a dream that I had my identity stolen and someone stole all the money in my bank account. That sucked, thankfully I woke up. Identity theft really is a problem, which is why privacy advocates are so up in arms. I know at least 3 people who have had it done to them. It usually didn’t cost the person that much money, but it was a lot of trouble for all of them, and there’s not really any justice. The perps(that’s TV cop-speak shorthand for perpetrators) are rarely caught and prosecuted. And spyware these days makes it even easier. People need to know how to practice safe browsing.

In other privacy news, today California opened up their registered sex offender database to the web. This information was available before, but in a harder to obtain manner. So now it just takes a second for me to find out what child molesters live on my block. I am not completely decided on how I feel about this, but right now I’m not too enthused about it. If a person has been let out of prison, don’t they deserve to live free like everyone else? If they are a danger, shouldn’t they be just kept in prison instead of letting them out? There were 18 sex offenders listed in my city, which is more than I expected, but I am a bit sympathetic to their right to privacy. I don’t have kids so I am sure most parents have a different view of the situation.

I went to In and Out Burger the other day and I have to say, man it was good. I feel sorry for vegetarians sometimes. Tracy has never been a real fan of the place, but once in a while I get a craving to go there and it always hits the spot. I’m generally a believer in listening to food cravings so I grabbed a double burger with cheese and two orders of fries. I admit it was a bit excessive, but in my defense, their fries aren’t that big and I hadn’t eaten a full meal until dinner. They have no freezers so everything on the menu is fresh. The menu is extremely limited, pretty much only burgers, fries and drinks(both pop and milkshakes though). It’s the ultimate in specialized food service. My great idea is to serve up Chen’s Kosher Foods for the discerning Asian Jew.

This week was x-mas party week. We had my company’s party last night and Tracy’s firms party tonight. Sort of the usual corporate party. At Tracy’s party, one of the senior partners at the firm recites a long poem he’s written about that year at the firm. It’s nice in a “I would never do that with my time” kind of way. At our party we hired a magician, which is always great fun. A pretty young guy who was pretty good. Whenever I see a magician, I’m always reminded of my old college roommate Joe Gold. He was a bright, outgoing young magician who is now an actor in Los Angeles last I heard. This kid(he said he was 19) we hired last night was good, a little bit better than Joe was when we were roommates. His sleight of hand was pretty good. He stuck with mostly the basic card tricks. He did a couple of the other types of tricks, but not many. That’s just as well because card tricks are the standard by magicians should be judged(illusionists are a bit different). One thing that struck me is that all magicians have the same type of showmanship. They all do the same type of presentations. They have similar setup jokes. They prefer to find your card for you on the 3rd try. They always choose a woman from the audience to help them out with their tricks(maybe because they are always single men).

Here’s a an excellent short article on when to use open source by open source guru Bruce Perens. I have always been an advocate of using open souce products. The key points are that non-differentiating software makes up a huge amount of the software development, but far too frequently companies don’t believe that other companies can do as good a job as their internal developers. Companies also often believe that the software development being done is very core to the business and must be done internally.

I think that a part of the problem is marketing. Few people understand how much open source software exists. From Linux for a Windows replacement to Open Office for a Microsoft Office clone to Compiere for CRM, almost anything that you can think of has an equivalent open source product. A great place to start is Source Forge which is one of the best repositories of open source software.

Well I’ll let Michael speak for the company, but I’m really proud of what we’ve done in the short time we’ve had, and I think we’re definitely competitive with some of the other search engines out there. We aren’t quite up to competing head-to-head with Google yet, but we have done a great job with our resources and we’re making significant improvements quickly.

Well we have launched our internal only beta. I’m proud to introduce Become.com. Registration is currently limited, but will open up pretty soon. Tell me what you think of the logo and basic site right now. That of course is not what’s most important, but any feedback is welcome. The important thing is how good the search results are. Lots of hours went into it. I told Tracy that it was pretty good for 6 months of work(I started in mid May), and her response was that it was really more like 8 months of work. If you want me to sign you up so you can test it out, send me an email.

We’ve got this insane ant problem at our house. We usually have some ants when it gets cold or wet, but with the cold(and by cold, I mean relative cold with nightly lows in the mid-low 30’s) the past 3 days, we have had our worst outbreak of ants ever. It’s kind of gross, but it usually passes in a few days.

With my crazy work hours, the thing that has suffered most is the amount of time I get to watch TV. It’s not that great a loss of course, but I do kind of miss the laziness and relaxation of sitting on the couch with Tracy and just vegging. There are at least 5 more hours of TV per week that I would watch if I had normal working hours. Tracy usually has watched the good early shows by the time I get home, so I just get to watch a few of the later shows. I have less time for games in than I used to, but I still get a number of hours in. I’ve been playing quite a bit of online poker again at PartyPoker.com and I’m doing well right now. The long hours have taken their toll on my workouts as well. I probably have the time to workout, but it’s just really tough to get motivated to workout at 7:30am or 9pm during the weekdays, and by the weekend all I want to do is sit on my ass.

Valve has released Half-Life Death Match, but it needs some work. I played and it’s really laggy and not very well balanced I don’t think. The gravity gun has too much power. Counter Strike is significantly better polished. I expect they’ll make enough changes to make HL Death Match to make it playable, but right now it’s not.