I just received the following email which appears to have been sent from a friend’s Gmail account.

Hello,

How are you doing?hope all is well with you, i am sorry that i didn’t inform you about my traveling to England for a Seminar.

I will appreciate whatever you can afford to help me with, i’ll pay you back as soon as i return. Kindly let me know if you can be of help? so that i can send you the details to use when sending the money through western union.

Your reply will be greatly appreciated.

It sounded fishy and it is. Don’t fall for this scam.

~Posted by Al

We’re not sure exactly how long it’s been since we’ve spent a weekend at Kishauwau on the Vermillion, down by Starved Rock and Matthiessen National Parks, but our best guess is 12 years or more.

We headed out on Friday, May 15th. It was cool and raining. After doubling back twice due to road closures for construction, we finally made it to Route 39; we were on our way. We arrived two hours later.

This was the first time in this cabin, named Jacks. It’s a two story building, but the lower level is used for storage and unavailable to guests. Jacks has a medium sized, combined living room and dinning area, small kitchen, large bedroom and a hot tub room.

We settled in, got comfortable and did some reading before dinner.

Way out here, cellphone reception is spotty at best. I joked about going through withdrawal from being online. It was an adjustment to be sure. It quickly became apparent how reliant we’ve become on technology. After reading for a bit, we decided it was dinner time. We had planned to cook dinner on the grill that’s on the property, but it was still pouring rain. Plan B was to find a restaurant for dinner. Without the Internet, Google Maps on the cellphones, or mapping software on our computer we had to go analog.

Side note - In the past, about 5+ years ago, I always had a copy of Microsoft Map point on my computer. We’ve been using Google Maps on the laptops and cellphones for a few years now that it never occurred to us that we may want to install Mappoint on Judy’s Windows laptop. Alternately, I could have purchased one of the mapping software with full maps for the iPhone.

Fortunately, the hosts at Kishauwau had a long list of restaurants in the area.

Of course, “the area” is pretty spread out about 20-50 miles. We found an Italian restaurant in Peru that we wanted to try. With a map that was provided by the hosts in the mail for driving directions, and that may have been photocopied from a phonebook, we mapped out our route to Peru to find Armici’s.

The drive was simple enough, even though I overshot RT 6 and had to turn back one street later. While Armici’s parking lot was small and disjointed (on the side and back, accessed separately) it had a very nice atmosphere inside. We were seated in the second dinning room which as decorated as an outdoor cafe, complete with a street lamp in the middle of the floor behind my seat and stars shining in the sky (i.e. ceiling). Dinner was very good, the Riesling less fruity than we’re accustomed to but still good. It was an enjoyable dinner.

On the drive back to the cabin we pick up some ice cream and hot fudge topping for brownie sundaes. Back at the cabin, we played Phase 10 and ate the hot fudge brownie sundaes while listening to the rain and thunder. Life was good.

We slept in on Saturday morning. We got up mid-morning, but by the time we were showered and dressed it was 11:30am, so we skipped breakfast and made lunch. We grilled the marinated chicken that we couldn’t grill the night before. It was a great lunch, one of our favorite meals.

After lunch we headed to Matthiesen State Park where we spotted a Pow Wow sign on Friday. It had been a few years, possibly 6 or more, since we went to an Indian Pow Wow. We checked out all the arts and crafts for sale and display, ate some Indian Fry Bread and watched some traditional Indian dancing, including a very cool hoop dance where the girls worked their way up to eight hoops.

An organization name S.O.A.R. had two trained hawks and an eagle on display there. It was amazing to see these majestic birds up close.

One of our goals for the weekend was to go fishing. We drove to the other side of the park to Matthiessen Lake which was high on the banks and covered with lake scum along the shore. We hiked a portion of the trail after being drawn to it by the sound of a raging waterfall. The trails were muddy and slick at times from the recent torrential rains. We decided to try and find our way to LaSalle Wilderness and Fishing Area, again using the old fashioned map. We arrived at LaSalle, which was located right next to the Exelon Nuclear Power Plant and wind farms. It was very windy and the openess of the Wilderness and Fishing Area allowed us to feel just how windy. We debated whether to try and fish the rough waters or leaving, deciding to give it a try. We both caught a bullhead, but decided that it was too cold to stay out any longer.

We went back to the cabin, where we had grilled ribeye steaks, baked potatoes, corn on the cob and spinach for dinner. After dinner, we had a campfire and roasted marshmallows for s’mores. As twilight was ending, we headed inside to hang out by the fireplace for some reading. As Judy headed to bed around 11pm, I headed outside with my binoculars to stargaze for a couple hours.

Sunday morning Judy made us delicious breakfast of bacon, eggs and fried potatoes. It was unfortunate that the weekend trip was coming to an end. We agreed that we needed one more day and night our here so we can visit Starved Rock and search for more fishing spots.

On the drive home we found an off the path spot for dinner. We found Fritz Wooden Nickel in Stillman Valley, Il, but unfortunately it was closed. Instead we had lunch up the street at the Royal Blue Restaurant where we enjoyed some burgers and fries.

After lunch we returned to Woodstock and spent the afternoon walking around the annual Fair Diddley craft show at the square.

A full set of photos from this weekend are available here on Flickr.

~ Posted by Al

I’ve been using Windows 7 Release Candidate exclusively on my work desktop since it came out on May 5, 2009. It runs great but I’ve encountered one problem that is extremely annoying. The windows behind the active window will flicker.

A video is worth a thousand flickers…

~ Posted by Al

Our neighbor and his son are part of the 13-U Woodstock Lightning travel baseball team (coach and player, respectively). They have organized a fundraiser to help offset the costs for a tournament the team wants to participate in. This baseball tournament is in July at the Wisconsin Dells.

This adults-only fundraiser will be on Saturday, May 30, 2009 at the Edgetown Bowl in Woodstock, IL. The event will be from 7:00 P.M. until 9:00 P.M. Tickets are $40.00 per couple which includes 3 games of bowling and pizza, with a cash bar. There will be 50/50 raffles along with other side bets. The format is Scotch doubles (you throw the first ball/your partner throws the second ball) so you don’t have to be a good bowler to participate; it’s all for fun.

Contact us via the form below and we’ll put you in touch with the organizers. Update: Had to remove the Contact Us form because only spammers were using it. You can reach me for more details on Twitter via @frumpa.

If you are unable to attend, pass this along to family and friends that may be interested.

I’ve been listening to CNET’s Buzz Out Loud podcast for a few years now. When I started listening, the co-hosts were Molly Wood and Tom Merritt with Veronica Belmont as the producer. The cast has changed over time. Veronica left and Jason Howell took over as producer. In late 2008, Buzz Out Loud brought in “rotating guest hosts.”  In early 2009 Natali Del Conte, one of the frequent guest hosts, replaced Molly as co-host. Since that change there has been a ongoing debate about who is better: Natali or Molly.

I think that all of the Buzz Out Loud co-hosts, full-time or guest, are talented. Each one offers a different perspective and personality. More importantly, each combination creates a different dynamic for the group. I’ve been trying to find a good way to sum up how I feel about the various “team members.” Then it occurred to me, I’ll use the analogy of the beloved star players from the championship Chicago Bulls. This is how I see the Buzz Out Loud Team:

• Rafe Needleman = Tony Kukoc
  Rafe is a great supporting player.
• Brian Cooley = Dennis Rodman
  Brian is controversial, to say the least.
• Natali Del Conte = John Paxson
  Natali is a great point person but a little bland when compared to the rest.
• Tom Merritt = Scotty Pippen
  Tom is the well rounded, all-knowing, go-to-guy on the team.
• Molly Wood = Michael Jordan
  Molly is the one with all the amazing shots (i.e. rants, commentary, opinions and perspective)
• Jason Howell = Phil Jackson
  Jason orchestrates the whole thing.

No doubt that some will agree with me, while others disagree. Let me know your thoughts via comments below.

~ Posted by Al Degutis

During Apple’s Q2 earnings report conference call yesterday they were asked about Apple’s interest in the netbook market. Tim Cook, COO, responded with the following. I’ve highlighted the anti-netbook comments in red and the pro-netbook type-device in blue.

For us, it’s about doing great products. And when I look at what is being sold in the netbook space today, I see cramped keyboards, terrible software, junky hardware, very small screens, and just not a consumer experience, and not something that we would put the Mac brand on quite frankly. And so, it’s not a space as it exists today that we are interested in, nor do we believe that customers in the long term would be interested in. It’s a segment we would choose not to play in.

That said, we do look at the space and are interested to see our customers’ respond to it. People that want a small computer so to speak that does browsing and e-mail, might want to buy an iPod Touch or they might want to buy an iPhone. And so, we have other products to accomplish some of what people are buying netbooks for and so, in that particular way we play in an indirect basis.

And then of course, if we find a way where we can deliver an innovative product that really makes a contribution, then we will do that and we have some interesting ideas in the space. The product pipeline is fantastic for the Mac. We are – as we look back over the last four plus years, 17 of the 18 quarters of the last four-and-a-half years, we’ve exceeded the market rate of growth.

My interpretation is that Apple is developing a new device, a mini tablet using the rumored 10″ touch screens. The real question is when will they announce it?

Posted by Al Degutis

The end with the koosh ball and Jello are very cool. You may want to click on the video to bring it up in the larger size on the Vimeo website.

I-Movix SprintCam v3 NAB 2009 showreel from David Coiffier on Vimeo.

I love this parody of the Microsoft Laptop Hunters commercials (Lauren, Lisa and Jackson).

Yesterday I learned of native Twitter client for Mac OS: Nambu. What caught my attention is the Mac app look and feel and it’s ability to have a multi-column view based on groups. As I explained in this post, groups is the main reason I like using Tweetdeck. Both Nambu and TweetDeck are still in beta but after a full day of testing Nambu (v1.1.10), Tweetdeck(v0.25b), which I’ve used exclusively for many months, is much more stable and further along in features. I briefly tested the Seesmic Desktop preview (i.e. pre-beta) but stopped using it within a few hours. It just was too raw for me.

Things I like about Nambu:

• Mac app look and feel; it feels at home on a Mac.
• Groups - I gotta have my groups which I use to ensure I don’t miss tweets from family and friends, monitor local happenings and news, and keep up with tech. The single column view of all the tweets from those you follow is fine if you only follow a handful or a dozen, or two, people. That’s not me.
• The ease with which you can add people to groups, through either a list or a context menu brought up by clicking on their tweet.
• Threaded responses - Nambu will show a reply to tweet immediately below it as part of that tweet. 
  Hopefully Nambu is using the Twitter message ID to link the messages and reply and not just grabbing the most recent reply as some other Twitter clients.
• Nambu displays the source of a link, albeit only a partial, instead of the URL shortener link, allowing you to look before you click. If you hover over the link, it shows both the shortened and destination links. This could help avoid malicious websites like last week’s Twitter worms.

Nambu bugs uncovered so far in v1.1.10 (3029):

• Some links in tweets are not active hyperlinks so you have to copy and paste them into the browser to get to the web page.
• Hovering over the Twitter profile of someone in the Home (a.k.a. everyone feed) will sometimes bring up the profile details for someone else. It’s an intermittent bug, but once it confuses the profile it continues to do so for a while.
   

Things I’l like to see in Nambu:

• The ability to manually resize the columns. Tweetdeck could use this feature as well. It seems so simple and obvious, at least to me, for an app that allows you to create multiple column.
• A way to reorder the columns in the group view. If an easy method exists, I can’t figure it out. I’ve had to close the columns and reopen them in the order I want them to appear.
• Twitter statistics - Tweetdeck will show you a Twitter health status, the number of API calls used and when the next reset will occur. This helps me know if Twitter is down, or if I’ve exceed my Twitter rate limit for the hour.
• Deeper threading of replies. As mentioned above it appears that Nambu will only display one reply per message. I’d like to see the full thread of reply which would help bring context to many messages. It could be a settings option so it wouldn’t need to be forced on everyone. Even better would be the ability to expand and collapse the thread.
• The ability to choose your preferred URL shortener. Nambu is hardcoded to use only tr.im.
• The ability to sync your settings, especially groups, across multiple computers so I can have the same set up on my Macbook Pro and my iMac.
• The ability to backup your group settings. I’d hate to spend a lot of time configuring my groups to loose them due to a app bug or system problem.
• Stability - Nambu locked up once for me within the first few hours of use, which very rarely happens on Tweetdeck. It may have been an isolated incident since I just started using it yesterday, but a quick look at the @nambucom Twitter account it may be related to groups. Time will tell.
• Twitpic preview - Tweetdeck recently added this feature in which clicking on a twitpic link will bring up a preview window showing the image, or part of the image if it’s a large one. You can then close the preview or click on the image to bring up the browser. It is so much more efficient than having to open a browser tab to view the image only to close it immediately afterwards.
• Facebook intergration, especially being able to post updates to Facebook. It’s handy to be able to see other’s updates, but I mainly use Tweetdeck’s Facebook integration to post to Facebook.
• Friendfeed integration - Twitter, Friendfeed and Facebook all in one app would be the trifecta.

I’ll continue to use Nambu, at least in the near-term, in hopes that the bugs and features above eventually are fixed and added, respectively.

~ Posted by Al Degutis

We have some sign-happy people around the office.

~ Posted by Al