njr 3.0

wmf points to Googlism. Some of the more humorous matches for me:

• sabi is an outstanding location for the wildlife photography enthusiast
• sabi is sometimes referred to as a style of art
• sabi is often best enjoyed in the winter months
• sabi is an unforgettable experience
• sabi is a way of life
• sabi is aligned with the science and technology white paper and the product of broad consultation in the relevant research community
• sabi is the beauty found in things worn and weathered with time and use
• sabi is not to everyone's liking
• sabi is the art of finding beauty in the imperfect and the incomplete
• sabi is a prisoner of conscience

The last two are truer than you might think.

1:50 AM | Radio
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Jordan Mendelson, former senior architect at Napster, has done some major fixing on the Ogg Vorbis QuickTime components. They now work seamlessly in iTunes, and playing Oggs uses even less CPU (5-7% versus 7-8%) on my G4 than MP3s. Importing is a bit slower, perhaps because of QuickTime overhead. Take a look and download.

3:36 PM | Radio
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I was all ready to get a Hiptop this week. Now Sprint has flat-rate wireless data and its price is down to $249 from $500, only $50 more than the Hiptop (essentially a wash given the activation fee), the Treo 300 is rather enticing: it will mean one fewer device I will have to carry around with me. I realize data integration on the Treo will be worse, but if it'll do always-on AIM or email messaging, I will be happy.

Here's a comparison of the two devices (keep in mind I've used the Hiptop but not the Treo at this point). If any of you folks have used both, please let me know if there's anything important I've missed.

2:31 PM | Radio
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Progress exam over. Did well on genetics, ran out of time on histology (but the latter was only 10% of my grade, luckily).

I spent the vast majority of my non-studying time over the weekend working on Pester. Lots of new features are coming in 1.1, and most are already implemented. The only major new features still remaining in my plan are repeating alarms and better notification of expired alarms, but there are a lot of bugs still remaining to fix. I may put off repeating alarms until 1.2, depending on my bug fix rate.

9:13 AM | Radio
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On Wednesday Jon Udell wrote about Vonage, VoIP service for the home. You get a real, portable phone number in your choice of area code (just move the box to a different network, plug it in, and your phone calls are routed there), all the typical features the phone company wants to charge you extra for such as call waiting, three-way calling, caller ID and voice mail, and wonderful call forwarding services. Currently I have Vonage set to ring the IP phone for 10 seconds, forward to the POTS, and if 30 seconds pass without an answer there, go to voice mail. You can even check your voice mail messages on Vonage's Web site.

My parents make a lot of long-distance and international calls, and Vonage provides unlimited nationwide calling for $40/month, with 6 cents/minute to Australia. I had sent an email to my parents back in August about Vonage, but we'd all been too busy to deal with it. Jon's mention reminded me to take a closer look. I ordered the service Wednesday night, the Cisco box shipped Thursday, it arrived Friday, and my parents just set it up tonight without any help from me. It's really as simple as plugging in the phone, Ethernet and power connections, and you have a dial tone. Voice quality is better than CDMA cellular (which I'm used to, I don't use my land line any more) and the latency is unnoticeable.

I'd hesitate to recommend it unconditionally until we've tried it out for a few months, but so far, it's fabulous.

8:31 PM | Radio
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