Kong Dog Toys

We had to put my dog Tulsa down a few months ago after fifteen years. My wife and I bought her as a pup --- she was a "mistake", the result of a New Hampshire farm Lab jumping the fence and getting it on with a Cocker Spaniel. She was the smallest of her brothers and sisters, and won our hearts by looking up at us and, well, peeing in submission.

Tulsa was a pretty small dog --- she looked like a Lab puppy her whole life. But she could chew like nobody's business. She could eat through nylabones and cow hooves in just a couple of hours. But she met her match with the Kong.

We still have her old Kong here. It's a bit chewed at the edges, but she never beat it. It's particularly fun to hide a treat inside the hole and watch them work to get it out (yes, eventually she'd get it --- we're not that sadistic!). With their weird shape they also bounce all over when you throw them, which makes for a seriously confused dog.

Anyways, I just came across one of her old leashes and it made me think of her. We all miss her a whole bunch.

Smartwool Hiking Socks

Originally I got my Smartwool socks for hiking, but now I pretty much wear them all the time. They're particularly lovely with my Birkenstocks ... what a hippie I've become.

Pretty much you get all the warmth, padding and other goodness of a wool sock, but in some kind of super high-tech magic junk that doesn't itch. Woo hoo! I'm all over the magic of chemistry.

10x10 Folding Canopy

Have I mentioned it rains a lot here? Well it also gets pretty sunny in the summer, and the way our deck is positioned the sun can get pretty hot. My wife is on medication that makes her extra sensitive to the sun, so we've tried various means to cover the deck.

Ultimately the right answer will be something like a retractable awning, but we've got plans to rebuild the deck and until we do that it doesn't make sense to put in anything permanent.

We finally hit on one of these 10x10 folding canopies from Quik Shade. They're cheap and remarkably sturdy; while they say they're not for "permanent use" ours stays up almost all year and does great.

It definitely extends our use of the deck into the start of the rainy season, and makes summer dinners much more pleasant.

A hint --- on a wood deck like ours, you can actually secure the feet to the deck with cable ties; trim the ends and they're virtually invisible.

Heated Mattress Pad

When I moved to Bellevue from the Northeast fifteen years ago I thought it was pretty funny how everybody thought it was "cold" when it was 40 degrees out --- after all, the lovely streets of Hanover, NH were usually below freezing in the winter and often well below zero.

I'm not laughing anymore. I've become a whiner just like the rest of us. A couple of years ago my wife got a heated mattress pad for our bed and, well, it may just be about my favorite thing in the world about this time of year.

Ours has dual controls, which is nice but we don't use that often. Generally we just put them both on "low" a few minutes before we get into bed --- by the time we climb in it's perfect, and the blanket turns itself off after a few hours so we don't have to worry about it in the morning or waste a lot of energy once we're asleep.

Truly a wonderous use of simple technology.

Tom's of Maine Toothpaste

Back to the personal care aisle. I guess I've been using Tom's stuff for eight or nine years now. The interesting thing about Tom's toothpaste is how un-sweet it is. When you first use it, it tastes just weird. What I learned is that "normal" toothpaste is about a zillion times sweeter than almost anything else we put in our mouths --- even the "minty super winter freshmaker" toothpastes they advertise on TV. If you use Tom's for awhile and then go back, it is an incredible jolt. That stuff is nasty.

They have all the permutations: flouride or no, whitening, baking soda, tartar control, you name it. I don't really have a favorite; although there is something exotic about using toothpaste with Myrrh in it --- wasn't that one of the wise mens' gifts to Jesus? He totally would have used Tom's.

Emacs

Please forgive this post --- it's embarassingly dorky. But I just got yet another reminder of why I still use Emacs to write code which, at the end of the day, is what I do for a living. I've written for a bunch of systems and a bunch of languages over the years --- and now will be living in the Microsoft .NET world for awhile. Emacs has followed me throughout.

Now that I'm living in Visual Studio 2005 all the time (rather than Linux/GCC where I spent the last few years) I thought I would try to see if I could use the VS IDE for writing code. They've brought back an Emacs emulation mode for the new version, and it actually works pretty well.

But here's the thing. There are two key behaviors that don't work the way I need them to. And without the full programmability I get with Emacs, I'm kind of hosed. VS does have a very rich Macro language, and maybe I'm just not skilled enough with it yet. But the barrier got too high very quickly, so I'm back to my old standby.

Mechanics spend thousands of dollars on their tools. Software developers get Emacs for free, thanks to a lot of hard work from people who really care about and understand what we do. It does have a learning curve, but once you've gotten over that it's hard to go back to anything else.

Personal UPS by APC

The Back-UPS CS 350 is a super product. You can get it at Staples (at least I got mine there awhile ago) or Amazon for about $80, which is a great price. Having units like this that are affordable and small is a huge boon for those of us running home servers for whatever reason --- for me it's both home (pictures and video) and business (books and client files).

If you're not familiar with them, a UPS is basically a big battery backup --- if your power goes out, it has enough juice to shut machines down cleanly rather than just dying (it comes with software so that happens automatically). But more importantly for me, it smooths over all of the brownouts we get at my house. We get these multiple times per week, and the cute little APC box just keeps things running along fine.

It will be nice when somebody figures out that people really do want an all-in-home home server, with shared storage, a print server, broadband router/firewall, and wireless access point all together. But things are getting better; you can assemble a good setup pretty easily using stuff like this APC UPS unit (and USB hard drives!).

Sports Night

Sports Night is my favorite TV comedy ever. My wife and I didn't actually catch it the first time around, but watched it nightly in reruns until they took it off the air. Then we got the DVD set and filled in the gaps.

The basic deal is that the show is about the crew of a cable sports show pretty much exactly like SportsCenter on ESPN. But it's not really about sports; it's about these great characters and their dorky relationships.

Dialogue makes this show what it is. Aaron Sorkin of West Wing fame was the creator; he has an incredible knack for fast-paced, hilarious interactions that come and are gone one after another, nonstop, the whole time. The muse of my irony-dependent generation.

Felicity Huffman who is now a lot of fun to watch on Desperate Housewives is the producer of the fake show; Josh Charles and Peter Krause are the hosts. But the two key charcters for me are Jeremy (Joshua Malina) and Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd) --- Jeremy perhaps hits a bit close to home!

Anyways --- DVD box sets are pricey, but this one is absolutely worth it. Done.

Balance Bar Gold

Over the last few months I've lost a bunch of weight, like 22 pounds. This is good, because I was getting pretty porky. In the long run I've come to terms with the fact that pudge is my destiny, but every couple of years I knock it down to try to stave off the inevitable.

When I do try to lose weight, it honestly seems pretty straightforward. I won't be so arrogant as to think that my strategy would work for everyone, but pretty much I find that if I eat less than 1440 calories a day, I lose weight. I figured this out with the help of some nutrition book back in college, and it has served me well as a guide ever since.

These Balance Bars are a big part of making that easy. One bar for breakfast is about 220-240 calories (Clif and Powerbar are also good). Some soup or a small sandwich for lunch ranges from 150-300 calories. So at worst I have about 900 calories for dinner and a late-night snack, which really is pretty reasonable.

I do exercise some, but I'm kidding myself to say that has much to do with it. It's all about the calories.

Key if you live at my house: most fast food places now have full nutritional guides online, and the truth is you can eat reasonably at almost any of them --- even McDonalds. For example, a hamburger is just 260 calories, which isn't tiny but certainly won't throw you completely off once in awhile.

My point is that you don't need to go overboard with a diet for it to work. I believe in calorie counting because it allows me to be creative about what I eat, rather than getting stuck in some mundate rut of frozen foods day after day after day.

John Denver "The Wildlife Concert"

Yes, it's true --- I'm a huge John Denver fan. I'm not an exhaustive collector of anything, but it's been a long time since I've found a JD recording I don't already have. Of all of them, The Wildlife Concert is by far the best collection he ever made. His live stuff is so much better than his studio recordings; I highly recommend this CD set.

It's bizarre how much John Denver songs are woven into my life. I went to see him in concert the first time with my then girlfriend, now wife. I danced my daughter to sleep to his music and had him on a tape player in my son's isolette when he was born early. Every Christmas our staple soundtrack is John Denver and the Muppets. I'm probably the only guy who actually read his autobiography and has seen the movie Oh God (but, thankfully not the sequel Oh God You Devil).

If you like, I'm happy to go into a great deal of boring detail about why I think JD was a good role model in addition to a great singer/composer --- despite his extraordinarly obvious flaws. But this blog is about my stuff, not my world theories, so I'll leave it for another time.

Victorinox Swiss Army Knives

I've actually had the same knife since I was a kid --- it's a "fisherman" model that doesn't seem to be available any more. Love the fish scaler and hook remover. I assume that pretty much everyone has a swiss army knife, but if you don't you're kind of an idiot. There is no more useful piece of hardware to have around. I never really realized it, but it seems that Victorinox has a virtual lock on the market. Interesting.

I got my kids each the a Spartan model a couple of years ago (blue for C, red for A) and they've done a great job of learning to use them responsibly. Probably my most memorable gifts (beyond the Colecovision) as a kid were my knives and my BB gun. And I never put my eye out!

Oregon Scientific Weather Station / Atomic Clock

Alarm clocks are always a pain. I never remember to change the "backup" battery, so am hosed when there's a power outage. Daylight savings always causes a nice morning of confusion. And most of them are made cheaply and die within a year.

Anyways, I've had this Oregon Scientific dealie for about a year and a half, and it's going strong. So far so good! It's actually a great unit and I can't say enough good things about it.

• The remote transmitter works great; I've only had to replace the battery once (which it told me I needed to do) and it seems to do a better job predicting 24 hour weather than our local news channels do.


• Since it syncs automagically with the National atomic clock, my various time-related screwups are kept to a minimum.


• The alarm clock is loud enough to wake me up, but quiet enough that I don't freak.


• I wish it didn't rain so much here!

My only beef is that the backlight goes off way too quickly when you press the snooze button. Makes it hard to see the time early in the morning when I'm still not-so-swift. But, a minor point and there's always got to be something to complain about.

Play TV Baseball

Another Christmas goodie --- I thought this one was going to be a bust. But Play TV Baseball is actually a great game! It's easy to set up, just plug it into the wall and into the RCA input jacks on your TV. Our living room TV is an old Mitsubishi but it does have a few different input channels, so we can leave it plugged in.

Play TV is best as a two-player game (although it's ok for one as well). The batter has a plastic bat and actually swings it as the ball comes over the plate. There is some kind of accelerometer or something that senses the swing and sends it wirelessly to the base unit. You can also bunt or steal using buttons on the bat. The pitcher holds a ball which is connected by cable to the base unit. You use a directional pad on the ball to locate your pitch, then hold down a combination of three pitch type buttons (one combination means fastball, one for a curve, one for a knuckleball, etc.), and finally make a throwing motion --- don't let go of the ball! The same kind of sensor recognizes how fast the ball was "thrown" and it shows up on the TV.

Sounds complicated, but it's really easy to get down and the game just "feels" right. It's definitely worth the relatively low cost.

Levitron

The Levitron is another in the long line of Sean's office toys. The one pictured above isn't actually the one I have, but given that I got it in 1997 that's not surprising.

Anyways, this guy is a lot of fun. Strong magnets are built into the base and the top; you can optimize the weight of the top by adding or removing little washer-type discs. Basically, the magnets repel each other and by spinning the top perfectly you can create a stable state in which the top floats, spinning, in mid air. With so little friction to slow it down, once you get it going the Levitron will spin along happily for quite awhile.

Getting it going, however, is quite a trick (or at least it was with mine, which unlike the new version didn't have a "spinner" to get it started). You had to give it enough oomph to keep it balanced, but also do it very steadily so you didn't introduce any wobble. The base had to be pretty close to perfectly level and the weight of the top was key.

People spent hours trying to get it working; after a lot of practice I generally could do it in a couple of tries. It's been a long time, though --- I may have lost my edge.

American Standard Faucets

We bought our house about eight years ago from an architect that actually built it for himself. He'd just gotten divorced and built this great house, but then got re-married to an interior decorator who liked her own house better. Pretty funny.

Anyways, he put these nice American Standard faucets all over the house. The one in the bathroom next to my office started leaking a couple of months ago, and finally it got too bad to ignore (which is saying a lot --- I'm very good at ignoring).

Thanks to my wife's impressive Google skills, we found the model and schematics on the web. When I took the faucet apart, it became clear what was wrong. The cartridge in the faucet has these ceramic pieces that slide together and apart to turn the water off and on, and a big shard had broken off of one of them. I actually found the shard stuck in the flow control valve down at the bottom of the faucet, which explained why the water flow had dropped off at the same time the leak started.

Here's the cool thing --- I called American Standard and they said, "ok, we'll send out new cartridges." No messing around, just a quick and easy no-hassle fix. I got the parts in the mail within a few days and now my bathroom is as good as new.

In a world where my expectation is that every warranty/service interaction is going to be painful, this was incredibly refreshing. You can be sure I'll be buying from these guys again. Very cool!

Animal Crossing (DS and Gamecube)

My kids LOVE Animal Crossing. They both have their towns and houses and are constantly redecorating and remodeling, buying and selling stuff, and basically living completely virtual lives as bizarre Japanese animated characters.

They still play on the Gamecube, but they got Nintendo DS systems for Christmas and the game is even cooler on that platform. With the wireless connectivity, they can visit each other in their towns at the same time.

My son has figured out that he can collect cherries in my daughter's town where they're plentiful, then bring them back to his town where they're scarce and sell them for a bunch of money ("bells"). My daughter read somewhere that if you set up your house according to Feng Shui principles your character is "luckier" in their day to day explorations. Unreal.

I am amazed at how rich these virtual worlds have become. They even match the seasons with the real seasons here at home (except they get snow when all we ever get is rain). There is just no end to the depth. Totally cool. Someday when I'm retired perhaps I'll join a virtual world and never come out.

Unshelved

My friend Bill has been writing Unshelved for a bunch of years now. He's self-published three volumes of the strip and has sold a whole mess of Unshelved-related merchandise. It's just fantastic to me that he has built up these characters, every day, for so long --- and consistently stayed funny.

Unshelved basically follows the staff of the Mallville public library (I particularly like the town sports team, the "Mallville Shoppers"). The focal character is Dewey, the cynical pop-culture-obsessed "young adult" librarian. I won't go into the whole crew here; take a look at the Unshelved primer for that.

Go read it --- now! And while you're there, marvel at the over-designed web site and commerce engine that Bill wrote. Still a dork, Bill.

Gillette Mach3 Shaver

Back when I worked at drugstore.com I got a freebie Mach3 for some reason. Classic subsidized marketing; they pretty much give away the shaver and then charge like nobody's business for the blades. But here's the thing --- it's really a good shaver!

Who would have thought there was actually a difference with these things? But I have long since hung up my disposable razors and actually continue to shell out for new Mach3 blades every couple of months.

Still, I'm loving the Onion's F--- Everything, We're Doing Five Blades. You heard me—the second strip lathers!

Quicken Premier Home & Business

After three years of working for myself, I just took a "real" job again. We'll see how that works out. But one of the great things that helped me get through those independent years reasonably intact was Quicken Premier Home & Business. Some folks will tell you to use QuickBooks or something with more firepower, but my experience was that Quicken with a few added small business features was the perfect in-between solution.

I keep two sets of books, one for home and one for the business. A couple of times a month I hand-enter my receipts (haven't yet made my NeatReceipts part of the routine), reconcile them with a download from the bank and I'm off to the races. I still pay most of my bills with paper checks, which most people I know think is crazy. Something about that OC complex again; I love that perfect little stack of posted envelopes ready to drop in the mail!

(Working to catch up on entries after a fantastic long weekend trip to Disneyland. Woo hoo, Grand Californian!)

Graph Paper!

Life would be so empty without graph paper... nothing satisfies my disturbingly obsessive-compulsive need for symmetry and geometry like doodling on it. You can make all your shapes exactly the same size, and your diagonal lines all match up ... ooh, I'm getting goosebumps.

Back when I was about ten I would visit my dad's office and draw armies of Tie Fighters on graph paper, each one exactly the same. Then I'd Xerox the page and --- miracle --- the blue graph lines wouldn't show up, so it'd look just perfect. That was the beginning of the end.

You can also take really great notes on graph paper, because when you indent your bulleted lists they line up right.

Now I'm even kind of scaring myself. Sad but true --- I was jotting down some brainstorming notes on the plane today and realized just how much I love the stuff.

Delphi MyFi XM Satellite Radio

Another Christmas goodie --- the Delphi MyFi portable satellite radio. We got XM in our new Honda Odyssey pretty much by mistake, and turns out we really love it. So my wife got me a portable version so I could use it in my office and my accessory-deprived Jeep.

I guess I could talk about both XM and the MyFi here. Having all the Red Sox games available during the season is key from the XM side of things. The quality and quantity of the stations is great, and with your account you get free streaming of most XM channels over the net. A good thing.

The MyFi unit is really pretty well put together as well. To use it in my office, I had to feed the "home antenna" out through the window, which could be a pain depending on your location and setup. But once that was good, I've been really happy. The UI is surprisingly usable as well. They did have some recall problem with the battery overheating, but a replacement is on its way for free.

Seems like more and more personalities are moving over as well --- Bob Edwards of NPR fame is a prime example. More freedom and goodbye FCC censors! :)

Singing in the Rain

So I'm sorry, but there really is just no better movie than Singing in the Rain. If I had to pick my favorite overall screen couple it would have to be Fred Astaire and Ginger Rodgers, but for this one show Gene Kelly and Debbie Reynolds get the prize. Throw in Donald O'Connor and, well, yowza.

We had the opportunity to see a great version of the story done at the 5th Avenue Theater in Seattle, and it was quite an experience. They actually dumped something like a gazillion gallons of water onto the stage during the big song, with some ingenious apparatus that collected it (and mostly shielded the orechestra from the spray!). But I still come back to the movie for some of the best song and dance execution ever.

Anyways, if you haven't seen it, you're pretty much leading a deprived life. Rent or buy it as soon as possible. Unless you don't like musicals, but c'mon, who except brooding surly teenagers can really turn down a great musical?

You can get a guaranteed laugh in our house any time by shaking your head back and forth saying "yes, yes, yes!" or giving even a semi-passable screeching version of "and I caaaaayn't stand it!"

Donkey Konga

My wife got Donkey Konga for the GameCube last year to play at our annual "celebrate new years with the kids and grandparents on east coast time" party. I was, to put it mildly, skeptical. But truth is, this is a really great game --- and a super one for parties where nobody is scared of looking, well, dorky.

Instead of a regular GameCube controller, you plug in a set of bongo drums. There are a bunch of game variations, but they all boil down to this: you pick a song and it starts to play. "Instructions" in the form of symbols scroll across the screen --- yellow means hit the left drum, red for the right one, pink for both, and so on. You're supposed to do the right action exactly when the symbols hit a magic line on the screen. That's it.

The game starts easy, but gets really hard as you make progress! And if you get lost, forget about it. But it's a great game for a lot of different ages, and don't be surprised if the kids, even little ones, kick your butt. Nothing makes for a better game than one that makes the adults look dopey.

Terk Leapfrog Wireless Video Distribution

Some products you can kind of tell aren't going to be around for the long haul, but sure are nice to have for awhile. That's how I think about the Terk Leapfrog wireless video distribution thingy that I have upstairs. One day the TV industry will get its act together with respect to video distribution --- but until then my Leapfrog unit does a pretty good job.

The deal is that you can take pretty much any audio/video input, plug it into the transmitter side and send it over a 2.4ghz (custom, not wifi or anything) wireless link to the receiver side, where it can plug into anything that will take a video input.

I bought the unit when I wanted to watch Red Sox games during the baseball season last year. I subscribed to MLB.TV (which for its cost was definitely worth it), but wanted to watch the games on my TV. Hooking up my laptop to the Leapfrog was pretty simple --- just needed S-Video and audio cables --- and shazzam, I was able to watch the Red Sox on the regular TV. Quality wasn't the best ever, but that had far more to do with bandwidth for MLB.TV than with the Leapfrog.

Since then I've used it to show slide shows at family gatherings, and sometimes the family all plays a video game (Harry Potter, woo hoo!) together. Using the TV is nice for that so we don't have to all crowd around a computer.

The big downside is that there are way too many cables to deal with. Power on both sides, plus video, plus audio --- bleah, it's a mess. Radio quality also isn't perfect, especially in a house like mine with lots of wireless devices all yammering at each other. Like I said, someday soon these things will all work together, and that'll be fantastic. But for now, I like my Leapfrog.

Homedics Paraffin Spa

The Homedics Paraffin Spa has been sitting in our bathroom for the last couple of years and gets used a lot every winter. All it really does is keep a bunch of wax melted; you dip your hands (or feet or elbows) in it and they get coated with the wax, which feels, well, awesome --- and is way better for dry skin than any lotion we've found (although Aquaphor is super as well). You leave it on for a few minutes and then just peel it off and dump it back into the spa.

Actually, the best trick seems to be to put on a bunch of hand lotion, don't rub it in too much, and then dip in the wax. The heat and wax combine to make the lotion really soak in.

Think I'm going to go use it now. My hands are all chapped. Thanks for the crappy weather, Seattle.

Seagate External USB Hard Drives

We've had a home network for a long time now, and I've tried a bunch of different ways to store our pictures, music and other family stuff. After yet another RAID disaster that took a week to recover from, I think I've finally hit on the ideal home storage solution: a cheap server PC and external usb hard drives.

What I realized is that these drives are now cheap, fast and big enough to totally hold all of our stuff. The picture above is from my server closet (which, by the way, is really a closet, not some fancy pants rack system). It shows our 160GB drives, but the technology is actually moving so fast I don't think you can buy those anymore --- Amazon currently has a 300GB model for just over $200. Holy crap!

So here's the setup: get a cheap desktop box from Circuit City or whatever (I used the Compaq SR1500NX because it was on sale the day I walked into Circuit City, but it doesn't really matter. Get two of these drives and plug them in. Share one out on the network for people to use. Then buy a simple drive mirroring tool (I used Easy2Sync, which does the job pretty well) and set it up to copy everything on your primary drive over to the other one on a nightly basis.

At this point you've got a sweet, low-cost network storage system that is surprisingly redundant. PC dies? Get another one and plug the hard drives into it. Bing! One of the drives dies? Get another one and do a full copy from the surviving one. Bing! Need more storage? Buy another pair of USB drives --- if you run out of USB ports you can get a hub for almost nothing.

I still burn DVDs of our really important stuff and stick them in the family safe deposit box once in awhile in case of catastrophe. But I couldn't be more pleased with my little network server over in the closet. I love it when things make sense and just work!

Islands Magazine

My son's school is always hitting us up for money --- most recently they were guilting us into getting a bunch of magazine subscriptions we didn't need. However, among the bunch we got there was one real jewel: Islands.

At some level this magazine looks the same every time it shows up: cover showing a perfect tropical beach with a lagoon in an over-the-top beautiful shade of blue. Lead article about "secret" island getaways that "nobody" has heard of yet. Lots of ads with tag lines like "Close to Home. Far from expected." But man, I love reading it, every issue, just the same.

I've been to Hawaii all of once (unreal). I went to Guadeloupe when I was a kid (very cool). But really, I'm more of an island dreamer than a doer at this point in my life. Two of my favorite books hands down are "An Island to Oneself" by Tom Neale and "Castaway in Paradise" by James Simmons. One day I'll rent that house on Rarotonga --- honest!

Until then, I'll sit on my couch while it freaking pours rain outside, turn up the thermostat and read my copy of Islands. Almost as good as being there --- sort of.

;)

9-in-1 Combination Game Table

We got this game table a couple of years ago for the kids. It's quite sturdy and at around $300 has a pretty low price point for what you get:

• foosball
• mini pool
• air hockey
• shuffleboard
• mini ping pong
• table bowling
• chess, checkers, backgammon

This is one of those toys with impressive staying power. It may get ignored for awhile, but then the kids will get excited about one of the games and it gets played hard for weeks (pool is the current "cool" game). The foosball is good enough that I play with friends who are used to a Tornado and they only complain a bit.

The foosball unit is a bit awkward to lift on and off, so we still help with that. But the other games are drop-dead easy and the pieces even store pretty well out of the way.

Table games are nice "in-betweens" for when it's too cold or rainy to go outside, but you don't want to sit totally still and play video or board games. Definitely recommended.

The Grand Wailea

Growing up on the East Coast, neither my wife nor I had ever been to Hawaii before last year when our friends suggested our families make a joint trip. If you've never been, well, holy crap. It's unreal. We flew Hawaiian Airlines (very nice) direct from Seattle to Kahului, Maui and stayed at the truly fantastic Grand Wailea resort.

Within a day we had our routine down: breakfast in our room, morning on the boogie boards at the beach, lunch next to the incredible pools, afternoon swimming in those incredible pools (connected by waterslides and rope swings), a nice dinner and off to bed. Repeat. My daughter and I did take one day to go snorkeling and "Snuba" diving at Molokini, a protected marine habitat in a submerged volcanic crater. I wish we'd brought my son and wife along; it's pretty much impossible to describe.

I have been fortunate in my life to visit many beautiful places --- Maui in general, and the Grand Wailea in particular, win the prize. If you've never been, definitely give it a shot.

Devil Sticks

When I was about twelve I taught myself to juggle --- I think it's a requirement for membership in the nerd order. If you want to learn, I definitely recommend making yourself a set of weighted tennis balls. Just cut small, penny-side slits in three tennis balls and fill them about 1/3 full with pennies. It's even better than learning with beanbags, because the balls are easier to throw evenly.

Anyways, once I could do three balls well and four balls passably, I moved on and got myself a set of devil sticks. When you handle them well it appears that the middle stick is basically floating in the air --- a pretty sweet effect. It takes a bit of learning, but becoming competent isn't a big deal.

Devil sticks are still a part of my standard office toy collection. If you have folks just learning, make them do it out in the hall.

Handmark Scrabble

I dearly love my Treo 650 --- I had a 600 before and drove it into the ground. Windows CE is fine, but my trusty old Palm OS still has the best usability and application support out there. Don't get me mooning over MobiTV, which is truly fantastic --- I'll write about that another time.

In any case, the one app I come back to again and again is Handmark Scrabble. It's the perfect phone game; easy to pick up and play for a few minutes, but engaging enough to last through a two-hour Seattle-to-Oakland flight as well. The computer opponent is okay in expert mode and still wins once in awhile. They've also done a good job with the interface when playing between two real people --- sometimes my wife and I will play on the Treo rather than bothering to set up the whole board.

The download and install process is completely painless, and Handmark is really good about keeping your purchase records around --- I've been able to install a new copy with no problem each time I've gotten a new device.

I did have some very small display problems on my 600 --- for example, a "Q" on the board looks more like an "O" and can be confusing. But these nits cleared up on my 650 and I really can't come up with much of anything to complain about. SO SO SO much better than those lame game downloads provided by Sprint.

By the way, if you're a Scrabble obsessive like me, you should also try the online version over at the Internet Scrabble Club. It's a lot of fun and you can play with folks at many different levels.