Carl Hutzler's Blog

I found a great little stop motion movie that I first saw when DSLR camera’s came out and were becoming popular ways to shoot this type of movie. I lost track of it but heard the soundtrack on Radio Paradise this evening and Googled the song writer to find it again.

A technical issue at our email hosting provide this week forced us to move a bunch of mailboxes to a new server. The moves went just fine for 6 out of 8 people. But two people experienced duplicate calendar events on their blackberries. Evidently the blackberry had some data left over from the old server and sync’d up new event data to the new server which resulted in dupes. One user told me about a couple of issues and he deleted the dupes on the BB and it seemed to work just fine. So I thought nothing much of it.

Another user, Jessie, had a lot of dupes and when she went to clean it up on her BB, she ended up deleting the events on the new server. This left her with stale, non-sync’d events on her BB and an empty calendar on the exchange server. Had I known, I would have just had her wipe the handheld and re-activated, but the damage had been done.

I tried restoring her calendar from her Blackberry via USB but the blackberry has limited data, is unaware of “all day” and “recurring” type events, and is generally missing a lot of other fields/data…so it was a dead end.

Jessie’s calendar data was gone. Or was it?
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We got a new heat pump in November and it was one of these ultra efficient new systems (R-410 type). I was surprised this month to see a bill seemingly exceed any bill I had ever paid for electricity before (we have an all electric house). So I went back 9 years and plotted out our usage as well as the per kWh costs. I found that we were using about as much as we had over the last 3 years or so…and given that this winter has certainly been cold or maybe colder than recent winters, I guess things are looking good. And we certainly have a lot more always on electronic stuff in the house these days than in the old days. Maybe we should unplug some stuff and be a little greener? We do have CFL bulbs in 90% of the house, new windows in most of the house, and I did the weather stripping this year. But jeez, that is a lot of kWh.

The below graph is a plot of usage (kWh) by month in blue with a 2 month moving average trend line (scale in kWh on left axis) compared to the cost per kWh in red with a linear trend line (scale on righ axis in $). Wow has the cost of a kWh gone up a lot! 250% in 8 years which is like 15% a year. How about that for deregulation inflation. (click image for larger)

Over the valentines day weekend, the family made our second annual pilgrimidge to the big apple to attend our good friends Kenny and Michelle’s first annual valentines party. We met up with the inlaws (Rylan’s sister’s family) to double the fun.

On Saturday we drove up. (made it in 3:45 from DC to Brookly – not bad!) It was a nice day so we got a bite to eat at the mexican resturaunt at the intersection of Union and 4th Ave in Brooklyn. We ordered the guacamole and they made it fresh on the table:

2.5 Guacs
1-2 Chopped Jalapenos
Pinch of Cumin
TSP of Salt
1 Lime
Chopped Cilantro
Chopped Onion (at the end)
Chopped Tomato (at the end)

It was the best most everyone at the table had ever had. We went back again the next day to get more!

After lunch we walked up to Prospect Park and explored. We found plenty of trees for the boys to climb on and many half frozen ponds worth of a rock throw or two. And there was a nice little outdoor market with fresh vegies and apples and stuff right at the entrance to the park.

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Tonight was the Bloggers for Good Gala at O’Faolains in Sterling, VA. The “BFG” event was set to raise money for the Loudon Interfaith Relief…and that it did! O’Faolains donated a portion of everything we ate and drank, not to mention the donation jar that was fairly nicely filled with checks and cash. I would guess that 50 or so fellow bloggers turned out for a fun time. I saw a few old AOLers I had not seen in a while including Nicholas Graham who I worked with very closely in my anti-spam czar days at AOL. Very fun.

Erin Rice (Himstedt?) did a great job organizing this innaugural BFG event. She got some folks out from the local press in Loudon County and the Washington Post. Hopefully we get some blog entries from the event to drum up interest in the next outing. Everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves and for a great cause!

Some pix from the event follow…

Rogue Amoeba software released a new version of their Airfoil software recently. The software allows you to stream any sound from a computer (Mac or Windows) to another Mac or Windows machine (or even linux!) that has speakers connected to it. This was very useful for many things….no need to buy Airport Express’s for every pair of speakers in your house…if they had a computer hooked up, you are good to go.

And you could stream any audio…not just what was coming out of iTunes. For example, you could stream an audio source that iTunes could not play like some windows music streams, content playing in youtube flash players, DVD soundtracks and similar. Have an internet radio station that does not play through iTunes…bingo.

I never bought the software, though, because it had one limit. You could not stream sound TO an airport express with airtunes. Since I already had a couple of these, I wanted that capability. Well, today it can do that too! (oh, and it can also stream to an AppleTV which essentially has airtunes built in)

http://www.rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/mac/
$25

One more thing… Looks like you will be able to stream to an iPod Touch or iPhone later as well as they are working on some software to allow you to do that. I imagine you could hook your iPhone up to a pair of speakers and use it as a remote speaker. Not sure how useful that it or not. I doubt they coul allow you to stream it to your device as you travel around town as they would have to have a way to find your device on the wide area network. But maybe? Not sure how you would control the streaming source back at your house, but who knows what the good folks at Rogue Amoeba have up their sleeves.

Personally, I would love to be able to stream music that is stored at my house (in my iTunes collection) TO my iPhone and be able to control it from my iPhone. Then I would care a lot less about how much memory my iPhone has on it and less about syncing music to it….I could just stream music. Maybe that is battery intensive, but it would be cool.