Xenocid's Lair

Wow! That’s pretty impressive new phone.

• It’s an Android 2.1, which means that you’ll get tons of apps and though iPhone apps in average are still better , Android apps are getting better and better each day
• 8MP Camera + video – this is something to kill for. I use Nexus One 5Mp camera as my primary one these days, but this little baby should be so much better
• Second 1.3 front-facing camera – I don’t care too much about video calls, but it maybe handy for Skype
• 1 GHz SnapDragon processor – It’s the same as in Nexus One and it’s really fast
• Acts like Wi-Fi hotspot for up to 8 devices – This is HUGE! Right now, if you have multiple devices, for example, laptop, phone and netbook or iPad and you want them all to be connected you have to either pay for each one separately which is super-expensive or buy Verizon’s MiFi which is cool, but they have a pathetic 5Gb cap or buy a Palm, which is apparently not a good idea right now. With a phone like this – you can make it your central WiFi hub and share Internet to your other devices through WiFi. And it looks like Sprint doesn’t have obvious caps on their data plan. This thing along maybe a huge motivator to get this phone. Paying something like $70 a month for WiFi anywhere and for all of your devices – sounds pretty attractive to me



• Sprint’s 4G network – I didn’t use their network, but they claim that it maybe up to 10x times faster than 3G. And probably it will be less clogged on events like GDC
• Last, but not least 4.3″ display – that should be very good for reading books or watching movies

Day 48 (Wednesday, Feb. 17, 2010)

Missed the aikido class, because of some urgent stuff at work. Actually regret it. It wasn’t that urgent, but I was kind of sucked in and was quite frustrated by some conversations, so I decided not to bother. I really need to be able to fight such surges of apathy. Coincidentally, one of the best way to fight an apathy is actually doing physical exercises and, specifically, martial arts… Well, you know – hindsight is always 20/20.

Watched the latest episode of “House M.D.”, which was really awesome. Denis, you will love it. Such a wonderful picture of a day of a typical manager. And getting outside of the box and making Cuddy main character at least for one episode was definitely refreshing.

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Monday (Day 46) was quite dull. It’s a holiday – so I stayed home, but most of the time was just doing chores. Really, nothing interesting to write about.

Tuesday (Day 47) though was quite a busy one. Went to Seattle earlier than usual since I had a meeting at client’s office about our new product with them. I can’t really say anything, but it’s quite exciting one and I love to work with those folks. On the way back to office, get a cup of brew from my new favorite coffee shop – Seattle Coffee Works. Those guys seems to be the only coffee shop in entire Downtown Seattle who roast their own coffee right there in the shop and I should say that it’s hard to not notice the difference. Their coffee just rocks! And funny thing – they just released an Obama blend with some beans from Kenya – good sense of humour, dudes!

In the afternoon, had an appointment with a doctor to get my medical examination for greencard papers and, of course, as most of immigrants, who actually vaccinated against tuberculosis – we all have a positive Mantoux tests, so instead of giving us papers, they sent us to hospital to do chest X-Ray. Of course, we all are healthy, but they have to follow the rules, which means 3-4 more days to finish with this stupid medical examination. But hopefully I should be able to submit next week.

We actually spent quite a bit of time in the evening sorting through all these papers that we already prepared. It’s quite a stack.

And late at night, I watched “Up In The Air” which was highly recommended by my Minsk colleagues. It’s a very good movie indeed – romantic comedy on the surface and nice personal lifestyle lecture at the core. It’s wit and funny and highly recommended.

We were lucky with the weather. This was a typical Seattle day when it’s rainy and cloudy, then 15 minutes later it’s sunny and beautiful and then again the weather changes to something nasty. So we were lucky to get few hours of sun exactly when we decided to have a walk around Kirkland’s shoreline.

From Kirkland

We don’t particularly celebrate Valentine’s Day, but we didn’t miss the opportunity to have a wonderful dinner. Of course, home-cooked by Julia. We had Asian-style seared tuna with noodles and salad and a pear pie for a dessert.

From Cooking

Spent some time playing with Jolicloud. That’s a Linux-based ‘cloud’ OS specifically developed for netbooks. I’m quite happy with Windows 7 on my ASUS EEE 1000HE, it does pretty much everything I need (in fact, I’m writing it right now on my netbook), but still sometimes it lacks a little bit of CPU power for Win7 and I thought that maybe magic of Linux will allow me to do basic stuff like browsing somewhat faster. And last, but not least, you can’t be an uber-geek (like me) without trying new and cool techno-stuff. So lo and behold, I downloaded 600 Mb of express installer and off we go. Good thing about that installer that it actually installs Jolicloud side-by-side with Windows 7, so I don’t have to sacrifice my existing environment. Installation itself was completely flawless and within maybe 15 minutes I had my new OS. It’s actually not that bad and I will definitely give a try and will use it for some time, however right now their server-side infrastructure is very unstable and while all packages that came with installer work just fine, so far I was unable to install any additional apps since the connection with their servers is dropping like every few minutes and some sections like App Directory just doesn’t work at all. I hope this is a temporary hiccup, since the entire system has a pre-beta label. If I will start actively using it I’ll make a separate blog post about my experience.

Also I spent few hours going through my ‘packrat’ legacy. While I’m relatively good so far (in 2010) in keeping my e-mail Inbox at zero most of the time (Yay!), I can’t say the same thing about my other inboxes. In particular, Evernote – where I have like ~400 unprocessed notes and Read It Later – where I have ~5700 links saved for later reading. I’m less concerned with RIL, since it’s not like all those thousands of URLs need some action (though some of them definitely do), but it still bugs me to have this paramount of unprocessed ‘stuff’ so I decided to process few dozens of links each day and either delete them or move into more appropriate place. Some will be stored as reference material in Evernote, some deleted, some tagged in Delicious. So far, so good…

And while I was doing all those “sortings and filings”, I decided to finally cross the Rubicon and pay for my Evernote. I’m using it for about 18 months now and while I’m super-happy with the product and was always glad to pay for it, I just never had enough reasons to do that. The truth is, for most people, Evernote will be good enough as a free product. However when I started to store entire webpages with lots of pictures in my Evernote as a reference material, I noticed that my data transfer limit started to climb pretty fast and I said ‘Bingo!’ – this is the good-enough reason to pay those guys. So now I’m $45 poorer, but much more happier person with a premium Evernote account.

Oh and while I was playing with JoliCloud and sliced-n-diced through my URLs I caught up with few TV shows and podcasts. Two last episodes of Diggnation, latest 30 Rocks (Elizabeth Banks – OMG, she’s super hot!) and Office (meh).

Morning coffee is a collection of interesting links I happened to discover today

• I admire Marissa Mayer (except one part – her laugh, but one can have a single flaw, right?) and here’s a short article on her famous meeting management style – How To Run A Meeting Like Google
• Collection of books and other stuff purchased on Amazon by Paul Buchheit, creator of GMail and FriendFeed – Books and stuff: three years of Amazon addiction.
• HabitForge – yet another online tool for acquiring good habits. I am not particularly impressed with design, but this is quite untapped market so at this point you can’t be too picky.
• New post from Leo Babauta on a “How to make the Most of the Fresh Start of a New Year”. Leo’s “simplicity theory” is very attractive to me and while I am not sure that I have the guts to completely dive into it, I still enjoy reading his articles and this oe has a perfect timing giving the fact that I’m injecting many new habits into my life right now.