I was quite surprised when I heard my name being called for the weekend at the Encantado resort. Now I have until November 2010 to decide when and with whom I’m going to take that vacation at home. Woohoo!

The are tons of things I like about this device, most importantly that I can easily get to all my email accounts and access most of the mobile content I’m interested in. The multimedia capabilities (iPod) are also nice and well implemented.
However, it’s still a phone and I’m afraid to say that you are not very good at it.

Rewind two years and you find me raving about it: I was happy in the beginning. Saw 4 out of 5 bars as far as signal strength was concerned. No dropped calls.

Fast forward to the present and things are different: The phone’s cradle has been in the same spot for the last years and the 4 bars have been reduced down to a measly 2, sometimes 3. When I have to pick up a call on the iPhone at home, I rush outside, climb up the ladder to the roof, ascend the wooden tower that I built up there and then press the button to get the call (ok – I’m exaggerating a bit).
I also catch myself parking on the side of the road (which is actually a good thing) when I receive a call in the car, because I’m afraid I will fall into one of the many AT&T black holes during my ride. Signal strength and performance have actually decreased over the years, which makes it hard to justify staying with AT&T any longer.

The device is great, but choosing AT&T as the exclusive carrier was a big mistake.

I had heard little of Perla before, but I within two songs I was mesmerized. She’s not only good when she sings, she’s also a funny story-teller between songs. She embarrassed at least two people, dragging them on stage for a “Happy Birthday” song or letting them sing with her. It was funny to hear when both, Christina and I, likened her to Edith Piaf after the concert.

Great (short) show, great Music, great company – what more can you ask for on a Friday evening? Thanks again, Christina!

The “Laptop Lunches” guys also post a once-a-week recipe idea on their web site. Here’s the one from this week, Garden Pancakes:

Some of the lunches may be a little bit over the top for early morning preparation, but you can adapt the ideas to dinners and then use the left-overs for lunch the next day.

First tooth

For the past couple of weeks Pia looked like the wicked witch of the East: one of her bottom front teeth pointed in all directions but the one it was supposed to point to. On Friday morning it was at a 90 degree angle from all the other teeth and she wiggled long enough to get it out. She’s actually holding the tooth in her hand, but you can barely see it.

And before you ask: no, those are not freckles on the right side of her face. Those are the marks that a fall from the monkey bars at her after school care place left …

Update: I guess he’s not going to live to tell about his adventure; balloon touched down, but was empty; most likely he fell out earlier on …

Update2: So happy to be wrong on this one; the kid was found – he never went on the balloon to begin with – phew!

My parents were here a little while ago and helped with some work around the house. Dad can’t sit still for more than a few days and then he has to do “something” productive. While I was sitting in the office he was cleaning up the garage. I always had planned to organize things a bit better in there, but did not have the time and patience to work on it. My parents presence (and a gift towards the purchase of storage solutions) finally pushed me over the edge and encouraged me to get this done now.

We saw some storage items at Sam’s Club, but they would not deliver and the items were too big to fit in my car or the parents’ rental car.

After some browsing I honed in on the Craftsman storage collections available through Sears. They deliver right to the front of my garage. I was also delighted to see that there was a special Columbus Day Sale Event, which applied to Craftsman items and dropped the price by another 20%.

The only real hurdle was sears.com. For a solid 4 days I was unable to order from them. Problems surfaced all over their web site: adding items to the cart, viewing product details, checking out – every day there was a new problem. Quite frustrating. I ended up calling them and attempting to order the stuff over the phone, but there were even more problems. First the rep did not find the bundle I was talking about, then the price was different and once he matched the price that I saw on the web site, he was unable to complete the order, because of “computer problems”. He promised to call back once the problems were fixed. Yes, you guessed right, he never called.

This all did not instill a lot of confidence, but I still gave it a few more tries and finally succeeded. Excited about garage storage solutions – I think I’m getting old

I started to blame the 16-port Linksys switch, because one of those had failed on me before. This morning I was the first customer at Office Depot to get a replacement switch. Once installed in the office, I was surprised to still see the same networking issue.

So I went through all devices attached to the switch and power-cycled them one after another. When I arrived at the third server and hit the reset button on it, everybody else in the room was suddenly happy again. That server was running an older version of FreeBSD and while there was no obvious traffic coming from it (the lights on the network interface were off) it somehow managed to screw up things for everybody else.

Most unexpected hardware fault I’ve ever seen …