ThisLooksInteresting.com

This is an interesting read. Maybe this explains my battle for simplification as someone with and Engineering background working as a Developer amongst what must be Computer Science people.

The Complicator's Gloves also goes with this rather nicely.

There are many things the motivate me but the number 1 thing is just 3 miles away from my home. There is an airport neighborhood where houses have hangers instead of garages, streets are wide taxi ways, signposts are short to avoid the wings and the runway is right there. What is especially attractive is that the people that live there are not necessarily super rich. Many are just normal people all be it with slightly different priorities.

What is surprising is that a very functional small airplane can be bought for the same price as a luxury car. Of course it will be 30 years old but the tight regulation on maintenance is comforting. A pilots license can be yours for about $6,000 and at least 40 hours of flying time.

One part of my dream is commuting from my home via plane to the Bay Area. That way I can get that fun tech job and not have to suffer the living expenses of the Bay Area.

Sound crazy? Many people that live there are already doing that. One-plane garage with a view

In a couple of weeks are start my first steps. I'm doing pilot ground school at the local community college. There I should learn all the necessary theory for a private pilots license. I can hardly wait!

I've never been rich but I couldn't agree more with this.
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4. Stuff does not buy you happiness.
There is an image that our society as a whole seems to subscribe to of what it means to be rich, and a good part of that image is attached to buying stuff. With a lack of a different role model, I found myself subscribing to that belief system, even as I questioned why the heck I needed these things.

Next time I’m rich I’m not going to attempt to fill holes in my life by purchasing stuff. I’m going to use the money to do good and live a more extraordinary life, defined by what I do and experience, not what I own. Stuff just ties you down and forces you to make yet more money. You can be rich with a lot less money if you stop buying lots of stuff!
"

5 Things I learned from being rich and losing it all

I don't know if it's age, moving to the land of consumerism our something else. But I don't have the lust for stuff that I used to. I also have far less respect or care for stuff. Who cares about inanimate objects even if they do cost a bunch of money? Living things, now that's something to worry about.

Here is a great book review on what looks like an interesting book Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us). It appears that traffic is more about psychology than road design.

I've certainly experienced "parking foreplay" where people will spend 5 minutes driving around the parking lot to find that perfect space so they can save 30 seconds walking. Some are then reluctant to leave as they do not want to loose that perfect space. My favorite place to see that is in a gym parking lot. Everyone goes to the gym to exercise right? But they still do not want to walk far to/from their car. I can't help feeling life has bigger fish to fry.

People have really upped their game for digi-necking. As if slowing down to look wasn't enough. People are now snapping pictures on their cell phones!

Why do desktop LCD monitors have much lower max resolutions then laptop LCD's?

I have a very ordinary 3 year old laptop with a 15.4" display that has a max resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels (WUXGA). It's a great display. I love having all that screen real estate that allows me to see multiple applications at once. Sometimes I increase the font size in my browser if I'm surfing at arms reach but that's it.

A 15" desktop LCD has a max resolution of 1024 x 768 (SXGA). The 19" LCD monitor I have at work doesn't do much better with a max resolution of 1280 x 1024. To get the same resolution desktop LCD I have to go all the way up to 24".

Why isn't anyone selling a laptop quality LCD packaged for desktop use?

For many years I have been too stingy to have a cell phone on a contract. I don't make a great deal of use of a cell phone and there doesn't seam to be any low use plans. About $40 per month is as cheap as it gets. So I have been using Pay as You Go. For the most part Cingular/AT&T but also with a period on Virgin Mobile (made me feel old). With Pay as You Go I spend on average $20 every 2 months and that is it, no additional fees, taxes, etc. Pretty good deal.

Since the iPhone was released and now the iPhone 3G I've had some serious tech envy. It looks like a great device. Especially attractive is the new app store and the thought of writing a few apps myself. But the thought of signing a 2 year contract and paying $70/month on top of the price of the phone just makes it a non-starter for me.

However I just read this excellent article on Life Hacker.
Forget the iPhone--The iPod Touch is Good Enough. That article is full of great uses of a plain old cell phone. It also mentions the fact that 95% of the iPhone apps work fine on the iPod Touch as they do not make use of the features it does not have.

Now I have iPod Touch envy instead.

For a while I've had an old Windows XP desktop (PIII 1GHz with TV out card) sitting next to the TV for playback of Music, Video and Photo's. I tried a number of different kinds of Media Center software but settled on Yahoo! Go. It worked fairly well, but with only a regular mouse it wasn't that user friendly. Plus my wife was not that excited to have a PC in the living room. So it wasn't long after getting a Wii that I tried to figure out how to use it instead.

Nintendo does not provide any kind of Media Center features on the Wii so people have become a little creative. There are a number of solutions that people have come up with. There are 5 options here. None of those appealed to me so I went with Orb.

Orb allows you to stream your media anywhere via it's web interface. You install it on a PC tell it where your media is and that PC acts as a server that you can access from pretty much any web browser. You can download a Wii web browser (Opera) from the Wii Shop Channel for $5. Orb will recognize the Wii browser and give you a nice looking interface that works well on the Wii. Orb on a Wii.

Now I can browse my Music, Photo's and Internet Radio from the Wii. There is some Video support but only Flash movies. But I have a much nicer interface that I can operate using the Wiimote and it boots up much faster than the PC.

You can also add Sirius satellite radio streams to Orb which are also usable from the Wii. This guide shows you how to do it for an iPhone. But the setup in Orb is the same whether your using an iPhone, Wii or any other web browsing device.

This is a nice way to discover new music and have people discover your new music. Kind of Digg for music but more so. Very nicely done.

The Sixty One

I have used a few different content management systems (CMS) from Mambo Server (horribly painful) to Interwoven TeamSite but none of them come close to Drupal.

1. Drupal makes sense to non-technical users.
2. Drupal doesn't get in the way of technical users.
3. The community is polite, helpful and well organised.
4. The more I learn the more I appreciate how well thought out Drupal is.
5. Drupal is a tool I look forward to using.
6. Drupal gets the job done with minimal fuss.
7. Documentation is extensive and of high quality.
8. Using Drupal increases speed of web development more than any other tool I've used.
9. Drupal's module development framework is extremely well executed.
10. There is an extensive collection of modules that are of high quality and have minimal overlap.

drupal.org

Interesting quote and useful links here