The O.S. Addict

We have finally arrived in Amsterdam and gotten a train and then a tram to our b and b. It very nice, just as I remembered it. Robert, the owner is very warm and helpful. We both actually got about an hour of sleep on the last flight. We are feeling better. But now that we have both taken showers we are feeling a whole lot better. We are off to get some food and I think we are going to try to stay up and go to bed at the local bed time here. I’m told it helps with jetlag. We’ll see.

We are now in London with an hour to go before our last flight to Amsterdam.

We just ate at a great place called Giraffe. It turns out the waiter is Polish, which we didn’t find out until Marzena was paying the bill and he asked after seeing here name. They chated for a bit in Polish and found out that he and wife are here for a while to save money. He said in Poland you make enough to get by, but not enough to save.

We are both really tired and can’t wait to get to the bed and breakfast. I’m pretty sure we will both be sleeping like the dead. I got about 30 minutes sleep. Also, I don’t think we will be taking British Airways again.

-Begin Rant
The folks and the food are very nice at ba, but the size is way too small. American Airlines had much more room. I truely felt like a sardine in a can. The other thing that really sucked was the entertainment system. One of the best parts of taking long international flight is that you get to see a couple of movies. I was trying to watch what was listed in the magazine as “Thank you for smoking” and turned out to be some funny movie about the faked alien autopsy. It wasn’t bad, but I was annoyed that I watched a movie I didn’t really want to. The reason I kept watching is because one of the characters in the movie was the same one that is in “Thank you for smoking”. By the time I realized that it really wasn’t the right movie, I figured it was too late to start another movie. Beyond that there was a really loud background clicking in the audio system and every once in a while the a really loud static that would be louder than all the movie audio. So, after I put with enough of that to get through the wrong movie, I listened to my audiobook on my iPod. I sounded so good after listening to total crap audio. I was not the ony one having the issue, I know that Marzena was. She tolorated it a bit better than I, plus she got lucky and got a movie that was not listed in the magazine that she wanted to see. “Kinky Boots”
-End Rant

We are in Vancouver now waiting for our flight here and I’m having a hard time staying awake. We have a four hour layover here. We are down to one hour before our 18:10 flight. Can’t wait to get on board and sleep. I think I’m running on five hours of sleep now after a long hard week. Marzena seems to be doing ok though.

Marzena and I just got on the plane to Vancouver. Then it is off to London and then Amsterdam!

It been a crazy week trying to get everything done in time. We finally got everything moved off the first floor Thursday and Friday the crew ripped up all the old floors in a day!

Last night, we went to visit my grandpa Bruns in the hospital. We wanted to see him before we left, so we drive up at like 9 pm and got to see him. So much of the family was still there to visit I was amazed. It was good to see everyone and to see grandpa is his usual joking high spirts. He did look a little pale, overall pretty good. I thinks he is getting out today which is great!

After visiting, we spent most of the night finishing up packing and then the morning putting all the stuff on the counters away and tweaking the timer for the soakers hoses that will hopefully keep our garden alive. We are looking forward to having the hardwoods and tile work done when we get back. We are also replacing most of the doors are the first floor. For those of our friends that have not seen the place since we remodeled the kitchen, I think it will really look like a new house.

Anyway, I’ll stop my rambling on now, but we just wanted to say thank you to Marzena’s dad, Gerard, for coming this morning from Tacoma and giving us a ride to the airport and seeing us off.

Really just testing the email post thing.
Sent via BlackBerry from Cingular Wireless

I was looking from something that I wouldn’t notice much while in my pocket.  Whcih means small size and low weight.  I like my sister’s new Olympus Stylus 810, however it was lacking two things I wanted. That being an optical viewfinder and good video.  Since video has come a long way on these kind of cameras, I wanted something would be useful in making family dvds and so I can hold off on buying a read video camera until the HD stuff drops in price.  Anyway, I did a ton of reading online with reviews on all the cameras in this size.  I finally came to the concusion to buy an Canon SD450 It is a great camera, can do 640×480 at 30fps and is only limited to 1G files. So I get about 9 minutes per clip. With the 4G hard I got I can take over a half an hour of footage in an amazing small package. Since the camera is almost a year in old in design it can me had for around $260. I bought ming at newegg.com,which had a combo deal to get a discount on a nice size SD card.I looked at some of the new model, but the add both weight and size for things like more megapixels and higher iso, which really aren’t worth it for me.  The top of the line Canon SD700 IS does had to sweet feature, Image Stabilzation and 4x optical instead of 3x.  The Canon software and processing has come a long way since my Canon S30.  It takes a picture at just over a second from power on.  It also has this great feature, no matter how you have the camera tilted when you take the picture, when you review pictures it knows which way you have the camera tilted and shows that picture right-side up.  Anyway, I highly recommend it and you can check some review here.  Steve’s DigiCams dpreview Image-Resource

Check out the Tour below of the new flock browser. I giving it a whirl right now. Looks real nice and has sweet intergration of blogging, photos and bookmarks.  I’m posting with it now.



Tour

Well, for now this is just place to put the geeky or cool stuff I find and use in the world.
——
A quick way to get a movie onto your ipod or psp, as if handbrake by itself wasn’t fast enough.

http://handbrake.m0k.org/

Got a good tip forwarded from Dan today.
http://www.apple.com/pro/tips/spotlighthint.html

I recently got a question about ogg and itunes. Looks like there is a couple of options.
http://www.nouturn.com/oggdrop/index.php
http://www.illadvised.com/~jordy/

Also, for the quicksilver users, and nice quick way to send a gmail or add to gcal.
http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/04/quicksilver-plug-ins-for-google-calendar-and-gmail/

Some very cool desktop setups

http://www.tuaw.com/2006/05/02/rig-of-the-day-many-macs/
http://flickr.com/photos/interceptor/138871552/in/photostream/

One last thing,
Some good basic docs for iLife if you know anyone the might need a little help with it.
http://www.wellesley.edu/Computing/Idocs/index.html