Skip to content

2007

  • 1 min read

Costco rental car discount

I've been a member of Costco for years. Yeah, you always buy more stuff there than you intended, but it's so much fun!

I uncovered today that Costco also has great discounts for travel, rental cars in particular. If you are not part of a big corporate program, call Costco Travel, ask for your rental car company, and you get connected to their 'Costco Desk' (is it a real desk?). Anyway, the point is I got a real nice discount over what the default Hertz web site price or Kayak deal was. Just a LifeHack for you.

  • 1 min read

Daylife’s Universe: Eye Candy or Brain Food?

Daylife is a new news oriented web site that came onto the scene a little while back to a lot of fanfare. I've used it on and off and it's ok. It's certainly a lot prettier to look at than things like Google News. Daylife's emphasis on design and the use of photography both are quite striking and make the site worthwhile.

Today they are introducing another wonderful bit, via Daylife Labs (does everyone have to have a 'labs' now?) It's called Daylife Universe.

What is it? I can't quite explain it. It's a super mega visualization of all the news that is happening or is happening in a series of displays (they call them stages.) It's one of those things that you have to see, and even then, you have to play with.

There's no question that it's a very interesting and novel product of graphic design, animation and creativity. Check it out.

  • 1 min read

[GEEKY] Firefox angst

On Mac, I've been using only FireFox for a while now. But lately I've seen some things that have made me nervous. More than once I've seen FireFox peg the CPU for no apparent reason. Recently I had bad experiences with the latest latest release of the del.icio.us add-in. So I decided to scan for the other browsers out there to see if I was missing out. I installed Camino, Safari and OmniWeb and tried to use each one for real work.

Well they are pretty and may be fast, I don't know, but, guess what, I am back with FireFox. Three reasons stopped me dead in the water before I got hooked on any of the alternatives:

  1. The really handy Performancing blogging add-in seems to only be available with FireFox
  2. None of the others have the very nice incremental search (type ctrl-F) that FireFox has
  3. And in the end, I really didn't see any fundamental differences or advantages over FireFox.

So I am back.

Dear readers: have you seen FireFox pegging the CPU from time to time? Any fixes or explanations?

  • 1 min read

Dave DeWalt leaves EMC

I guess that many of you who read this blog are eRoom, Documentum and EMC alums so you'd be interested in reading what John Newton, co-founder of Documentum has to say about the departure of Dave DeWalt from EMC:

"[snip…] Being a co-founder of Documentum prior to starting Alfresco, it is only natural that people are asking me what I think of Dave DeWalt’s departure from EMC to become CEO at Security Software firm McAfee [snip…]" from Content Log.

As a humerous aside, I've heard from more than one person that this silly blog of mine is blocked inside of EMC! Can you believe it? The lunkheads in IT have classified it as porn. Maybe it was because of this post that I aptly titled "balls"? It just shows that whatever you write on the internet will follow you around for life 🙂 Oh, it's the #1 Google hit if you search for "Balls Pito Salas"

  • 1 min read

Robot Ethics

Isaac Asimov was a visonary don't you think?

"South Korea's obsession with technology has led it to consider what may be the first government-backed ethical code for robots." (from The Telegraph)

  • 1 min read

[Tivo Owners] Who Killed TivoToGo?

I am a die-hard Tivo user. Yesterday I stumbled across mention that TivoTogo now worked on Macs, so the promise of watching Tivo'd content on my iPod led me to waste a couple of hours trying to get it to work.

I am not sure yet, but it looks like TivoTogo is disabled on Tivo Series 3. It's kind of hard to find anything definitive about this, but in the article "Who Killed TivoTogo" I read:

"It's the latest digital media murder mystery: TiVo Series2's TiVoToGo1 enabled limited portability of recorded content to PCs and other devices, but the TiVo Series3 HD did not include this feature when recently released.2 In other words, if you want to upgrade to HD, you have to downgrade your TiVo's features." (from EFF.ORG)