Jake's Weblog » Personal

New Feed for Lion’s games

Jake — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 00:53:07 +0000

It seems that the feed at ical.mac.com hasn’t been updated yet for this years schedule and one game has already been played (and won by Detroit, I might add!). So I went looking for a new feed provider… and found Yahoo. My Upcoming Events plugin seemed perfectly capable of handling the Yahoo feed. So now, simply by putting http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/teams/det/ical.ics in the Path field and clicking the “Update Now” button in the Upcoming Events options, I was able to get the upcoming Lion’s games back into my calendar.

Grand Central

Jake — Thu, 19 Jul 2007 01:52:50 +0000

Google recently bought out a company whose services I find myself quite impressed with. Grand Central is a company that will give you a “phone number for life.” But that’s not the half of it. Part of the service includes the ability to ring multiple phones at the same time. You can put up to five number into the system and when you get a call it will ring all of them and transfer the call to the first number that answers it. You can even have an address book where you can define groups of people (by default there’s 4 groups: friends, family, work, other). You can set preferences about which phones ring for which groups. So I can set it that friends and family ring my home phone, but work and others (anybody not in your address book is in the others category) don’t. It has a call recording feature (a message is announced to both parties); voice mails are retrievable by phone or online; you can set up a temporary number to forward calls to in addition to the configured 5 via phone or online; you can set ringback and voice mail messages specific to each group; and I’m sure there’s a few that I’m not listing. All and all it looks to be a really nice service. It’s currently in beta (though most of Google is in beta ) and invite only, but free. They’ve stated that there will always be a free version, but someday they will start charging for premium features. As this develops, I can see it being a really good fit with Google Apps (that’s probably why they bought it).

Wiiiiiiiiiiiiii

Jake — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 22:44:17 +0000

I had previously posted that my wife and I were looking for a Nintendo Wii (actually, it’s supposed to simply be branded “Wii” w/out the “Ninentdo” in front). We ended up getting one last week (3-Jan), but I never did get around to posting that update. Laura had been calling around to pretty much every store in town and finally found that Meijer had gotten a few that morning. So she dropped pretty much everything, grabbed Haylee, and ran to Meijer. She managed to get there in time. While she was there, she saw three other people purchasing Wii’s and was told there were only 6 when she called. So she probably didn’t make it by much!

But the short version is we have a Wii and are enjoying playing it. We have the Sports game that comes with it (a really great demonstration of the motion sensitive controllers), Cars, GT Pro Series, and The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. So far I think we’ve spent most of our time playing the Wii Sports game. From a driving standpoint, I think GT is much more fun that Cars, but I haven’t done the Cars story line to know if that’s any good. I’ve spent very little time in Zelda, but it seems like it’s probably a very deep game.

We also went out last night and rented Excite Truck and Ice Age 2. I kinda like Excite truck, it’s a lot of fun.

We have no Wii

Jake — Tue, 26 Dec 2006 21:52:47 +0000

My wife and I just decided that we would like to get a Nintendo Wii. We’ve been kicking the idea around for a few weeks now about maybe doing that as part of a joint gift to each other. We decided against that in the end, but just this morning we tallied up birthday money, Christmas money, gift cards and the like and discovered we have enough money! Unfortunately for us, everybody around town is sold out. We’ve tried neighbouring towns and online stores, but to no avail. Not that anybody out there really cares .

What I wonder is why this problem seems to happen in the first place. It seems like had Nintendo released a couple months sooner they could have had enough systems produced by Christmas time to meet demand. It also seems that if they had enough systems produced so that everybody who wanted one could get one they’d have made more profit, too. And isn’t that the point of making it in the first place? Granted, I don’t have a degree in economics or anything, it’s just my opinion…

Update 9-Jan-2007: We now have a Wii.

She’s Here

Jake — Mon, 23 Oct 2006 20:38:16 +0000

Many people have mentioned that I haven’t updated this blog in a while… looks like the last time I did was to announce that Laura was pregnant. Well, it’s been long enough since I last posted that Haylee is now here. I’ve got a site created for Haylee with some pictures. Maybe I can post a little sooner in the future .