The past couple days have been both cold and rainy, which means we haven’t gone out much. Yesterday we went out only to buy a couple fish for the aquarium. Today is also a grey, gloomy, wet day. Such a bummer because I was looking forward to spending a couple hours fishing with the boys. 🙁

When I first started building my Victoria, I thought I would just go totally stock and modify it later. I had read that the instructions for the boat were great and it would be smooth sailing (pun intended) all the way until it was finished. Well, the instructions are, in fact, really good. However, there were some parts that left me scratching my head as to why they did it that way. The measurements for some of the rigging pieces were also a little suspect.

I ended up doing the rigging pretty much stock, though, but then decided to tear it down and modify it a bit. First, I ditched the blue rigging line that came with the kit and went with a combination of 50lb braided (spectra) fishing line and “tiger tail” jewelry wire from the craft store. I also added some fishing snap swivels to make the mast fully removable without cutting any rigging. I re-routed a lot of said rigging to make this happen, and had to use some small screw-eyes from Home Depot. These work well since they are low friction, and go into the plastic deck really easily.

There are a few more minor mods I will make over the next couple days, plus I would like to get a lighter mast and new sails someday. And I need to finish the paint job. But in the meantime, the “Brezza di mare” is pretty much ready to hit the water as is!

RC Sailboat Flickr Set

There is a new Japanese restaurant that just opened in North Austin (Arboretum). It’s called “Kenobi”. Mariko was telling me that they probably wanted it to mean “Beauty of Swords” (Ken no Bi), but instead it sounds like “Growing Hair”. Star Wars fans probably have a different take altogether.

I just watched the promo video for the new Amazon Kindle ebook reader, and I am impressed, but also a little disappointed. First, the technology looks really nice. The quality of the screen looks good and with the SD card slot, you can hold thousands of books on it. Plus, all the books you buy from Amazon are “backed up” in that you can download them again if you ever delete them off the Kindle. And the free wireless data connection to download material is great. You can preview titles and them buy them instantly, from wherever you are. It also has support for blogs and newspapers, has a dictionary, and connection to Wikipedia.

But I am disappointed in that it is so expensive ($399) and that it looks like ass. I mean, it’s so dumpy! (maybe the design will grow on me?) The Eee PC, though, which can do so much more…

This is a very sad story.

[via Chris>

Yesterday we went to Marie Callender’s to meet friends for our 5th? annual Thanksgiving lunch. This year I opted out of having turkey, since I knew I would be eating it again today, and then of course on Thursday. Instead, I got the meatloaf sandwich on grilled Parmesan sourdough bread. The sandwich was good, but the bread was awesome! I gotta learn how to do it. It seems just like butter and Parmesan, but there must be some secret… It was delicious.

I downloaded the official non-beta release of Miro the other day, and have been really impressed! It’s basically a free, multi-platform video player where you choose from a library of channels. The channels are so varied, from National Geographic, to the Onion and Adult Swim. You subscribe to a channel, then you can download (or auto-download) episodes of that channel. It uses bittorrent as the download mechanism, so the distribution is shared. It’s kind of a neat way to present bittorent video.

Another cool thing is that you can add any folder from your computer as a channel. So, I can add our shared network drive that has all of our dorama on it, and they will appear in Miro. This has me thinking of building a cheap box and hook it up to our LCD and using Miro as the video player…

The UI is attractive, but there are a couple little things that annoy me. For instance, when adding a subscription, it takes you to the channel page, but it is not easy to “go back” one click to the browse page. They need a back button, or even a breadcrumb like iTunes Store. It’s actually easier to add channels from their website in a browser. Although there is the ability to export your channel list (OPML), they should have an option to have the list linked to your account. (Signing up for an account is totally optional) That way I can sync with multiple computers. Also, it has crashed my Ubuntu machine twice. It’s the only app to ever crash that system. Hopefully an update will fix that issue. Lastly, even though you can add local video files to Miro, there seems to be a bug that all folders aren’t showing up as channels correctly. They show up in the Library just fine, but not in their little channels.

I guess we should expect these problems since it is just out of beta, but I am hoping that they will be fixed shortly. Otherwise, Miro is a nice way to watch videos on your computer.

I bought an RCA antenna to pick up the local stations for the new TV. After some adjustment, I finally got five channels to come in. The three networks, plus the local PBS affiliate and of course Univision! KEYE here in the Austin area has their morning newscast in HD, and of course it looks great. I am looking forward to watching some Sunday NFL in HD, even though I am not a huge football fan. All-in-all, the antenna is great, not only because of the HD, but because we don’t currently have local channels via our Dish Network plan. Now we have access to those channels, plus they look awesome.

I saw this one on Manny’s blog.

1. What is the first music album you remember owning?

Star Wars and other Galactic Funk by Meco

2. If not the same, what is the first music album you purchased for yourself?

Pretenders I

3. What artist currently occupies the most space either in terms of shelf space or megabytes on your hard drive?

Zard

4. How many different types of music media (vinyl, cassette, CD, etc) have you owned in your lifetime?

LP, EP, Single, cassette, CD, CD Single, MD, Digital Download

5. Who or what has had the biggest effect on your music taste?

My friend Colin during HS.

6. How do you currently prefer to listen to music?

iPod via Sony V6 headphones

7. In terms of music memorabilia, what is your most prized possession?

Don’t really have anything. Maybe a Puffy (Ami Yumi) poster.

8. Have you ever “swapped headsets” with a complete stranger (meaning have you ever unplugged the earphones from your listening device and plugged them into someone else’s player and had them do the same)?

No

9. Have you ever been completely obsessed with a particular artist? Who and to what level did your fandom go?

Right now I am obsessed with Zard, but not really to the point of crazed fandom.

10. What is the farthest you’ve ever traveled for a concert?

Not far. From home in Torrance up to Hollyweird? (45 mins)

Who have you seen in concert the most?

I have seen Everything But The Girl maybe 3 or 4 times.