Fun with camera phones

At my last chiro visit, the typical Hawaii sun-showers cleared and I mentioned how I'd been taking rainbow pics with my iPhone while driving. Dr. Dan told me how earlier that day he grabbed his iPhone and took pictures of his hand "holding" a rainbow from his 16th floor office, and insisted I take a similar shot with my iPhone.

Wanna fly?

Google now has flight simulators

Google Earth is amazing, but now with Sky, it's..hmmyeah, out of this world! Great for educational applications, if not for the general coolness factor. (Check out the galaxies!)

They've recently unveiled their newest feature. Fighter pilot wannabes should check out Google's flight simulator using virtual F-16s and SR-22s.

About a month ago, some of us were lucky enough to tour an Air Force base. A portion was about F-15s and soon-to-be F-22s. It was pretty exciting, even though security was tight during that part of the tour and were told that if we crossed certain lines we could be shot by an overly-anxious 18-year-old.

(That's me on the right climbing up to the cockpit.)

Vote for Honolulu

Monopoly is being redisgned in the "here & now"

Hasbro is conducing an online poll that will allow consumers to decide which new cities and their famous landmarks will appear on their "Monopoly Here and Now" game board that will be in stores in the fall.

Landmarks in 22 cities are up for grabs. Honolulu has Diamond Head, Kalakaua Avenue, and Waikiki Beach. Personally, I thought that was a little redundant since Waikiki Beach fronts Kalakaua Avenue (and how many people who've never been here can even pronounce "Kalakaua"?), but I'm all for putting us on the map, er, game board.



Vote now through May 12th, and vote often! The live results show that Honolulu needs more support, but it appears you can vote for that city just once a day. Technically. Honolulu just got 4 votes from me today from my different computers at home. Note to self: Enlist kids next week from the computer lab!

New Venture

Motivational (??) Posters

Been wasting too much time playing with pictures I've taken, so I decided, hey, why not make something worthwhile from them? I was leaning in the direction of those hilarious de-motivational posters, but I quickly discovered that not only am I not hilarious, I guess I'm just not cynical or depressed enough. Today, anyway.

Don't know if these three I made would actually motivate anyone to do anything, but it's a start. I won't quit my day job just yet.


click for 3-poster slide show

Made out like a bandit today!

Then used my savings to buy more shoes :)

A friend just bought a new Sony Vaio, so I told her that now would be a great time to buy a Sony digital camera to go with it. Decided to look through today's ads to see if any good deals were available. Lucked out: Office Depot had a Sony Cyber-shot for $129 after rebate, an Epson projector for $799 + an instant $100 gift card to be used on the next purchase, and an HP all-in-one printer/copier/scanner/fax for $149 before its 15% discount.

I bought the camera and projector for school use (left one camera for my friend if she decides to get it), and used the $100 gift card toward the printer, which ended up costing me only $32.79 after tax!! I've never liked the idea of those all-in-one models, since if one part flakes out, you're still stuck with the whole machine. But my two printers and two old scanners don't work well with my latest operating system, and the price was more than right. My test scan was a page from a magazine that I had Butch autograph :)

Office Depot is conveniently located right next to Nordstrom Rack. After loading the goodies into my car, I decided to take a look around at the Rack. Found a beautiful blouse..and two pairs of shoes. Yikes, I know I shouldn't keep buying shoes, but it's so easy to do. I threw out a bunch over the summer, but have replaced them with even more pairs since then.

The blouse is gorgeous and definitely not something I'd wear to school. It'd be great to wear to a special night out, like to an Eagles concert..or a Motley Crue concert! Yeah, it looks as if I *will* be going to that one, after all!

Yahoo has Widgets

Over a thousand of them -- all for free!

Apple might've made a big mistake not buying Konfabulator (maker of the original widgets) when they decided to make "Dashboard" and widgets part of their Mac OS X Tiger operating system. It was announced yesterday that Yahoo purchased Konfabulator, and, voila, has made their widgets available for free today! (Mac OS X 10.2+, Windows XP and Windows 2000)

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, check out Yahoo's new widgets. Widgets are attractive little applications that float on your desktop, giving quick access to all kinds of information. And since there are over 1000 available, you might find a few that you can't live without. I use several of Apple's Dashboard widgets regularly, but might try Yahoo's. Below are four that are included when you download the program.



Oh, while there are 1042 Mac widgets currently available, there seem to be only 646 for Windows so far. That's bound to increase. Hey, that's 646 more than what was available up 'til today!

At least it kind of rhymes

fayesspace.com

So did fayesdays.com and fayesphase.com, but I didn't really care for them much. Then there were the names that had "three" in them (my favorite number): threebeesknees.com, threegreenpeas.com, threebvds.com, but those were just silly. All are available, if anyone's interested; but of course, the domain names I *really* wanted weren't.

So my latest domain name is fayesspace.com . I think I'll use it for my "Somewhere I Belong" site. Should take effect in a day or so. And I guess I'll stop purchasing domain names for a while. One a day is plenty enough ;)

talkintomyself.com

Much shorter than http://homepage.mac.com/fayeh/iblog/index.html - whew

Thanks to my friend's comment on my other blog, I now own the domain name talkintomyself.com . It never occurred to me to even check to see if it was available because I've always wanted shorter, spiffier domain names, but this one I can actually use! I'm using it to point to my regular blog website, but at least the unwieldy URL http://homepage.mac.com/fayeh/iblog/index.html doesn't have to be used anymore.

I registered it late last night through GoDaddy.com . Everything went smoothly until the last page, when the final form couldn't be submitted, claiming a required field hadn't been filled out. All required fields had been filled out, and multiple failed attempts at re-doing the form, even re-starting the entire process was getting me pretty frustrated. I called their 24/7 tech support and the person who assisted me (restarted the process, which I wasn't able to do from my end) was great.

People can be quite pleasant

I could've left and found another cashier with a shorter line, but I was in no rush. She was a trainee, and it was just kind of, well, nice, that the man in front of me was making a return and commented that she would get good practice from it. It did take more than several minutes, and just about any other time I would've gone to another cashier since the store was pretty empty and there was no one behind me, but I didn't mind waiting tonight.
Don't know why that should surprise me

Everyone was in a good mood, and the guy looked at my items laid out on the converter belt and said, "Maybe I should join you tonight" because I had several bottles of wine lying there. (Not at all in a flirtatious way, mind you.) He apologized for the delay and asked if it was making me tired because I was yawning, but I told him that it was allowing me to catch up on my sleep, and honestly, I didn't feel like moving. The trainee was learning what she needed to learn, no one was impatient, and it was all good.

When his transaction was finally completed he thanked her, then turned to thank me and tell me good night.

But the best part was when he had said earlier, "Sorry to to keep the young lady waiting" -- meaning me. Hah.