Vegas, baby!

Spent last weekend in Vegas. I was up, I was down and I played alot of blackjack and had a wonderful time with friends. I took my new camera with and took this shot from the top of the Stratosphere hotel before I boarded the rollercoaster hanging off the side. I think it was more unnerving to step off that ledge into the car than the actual ride itself. Being 800 feet in the air and looking down between the concrete and the car is a bit disconcerting. Next time I will ride the other rides that shoot you off the top of the tower and hang you over the edge in a coaster car.

Say Cheese

I found a great deal on a digital camera finally. I bought the Canon PowerShot A400. This is my first picture from it taken by my coworker. It is small enough for my needs, comes with a 16MB memory card and from the looks of this picture, takes really nice pictures considering that I ended up paying $80 for it (3.2MP) after rebate. 

I want my HDTV

Today is a glorious day for television enthusiasts. The headline "Court yanks down FCC's broadcast flag" came across my screen and put a smile on my face. As a MythTV developer in my spare time, I was looking at being forced to purchase an HDTV tuner for my machine before July 1st because of the broadcast flag. So now, instead of broadcasters and hardware manufactures being forced to limit access to digital television, the market is open for all. This is a great victory, especially for open source projects like MythTV that can only survive in the age of digital television if the standards are open and access is unrestricted.

Patent pending

It seems a patent application I was involved with in years gone by has finally made its way to the USPTO patent website. Ironically, of all the things that our team worked on at Motorola, this was one of them that hardly got out of the concept phase. By contrast, our main project, a mobile phone based pizza ordering site called Pizzacast where we did many innovative things, never approached the patent phase. In fact, it ended more for stepping on other people's patents than anything else...