Back from Maui and Oahu.

Some things went went:

Some things went not-so-well:

Alas, a full write up will have to wait – I’ve got 600 unread work related
emails that survived my filtering process. Not bad – about 100 per day, I
expected more. Here’s a short recap:

Great:

1. Congrats to Wendy and Steve – fantastic wedding.
2. Snorkeling with contacts for the first time at 
   
   Hanauma Bay. Lots o’ fish.
3. Met up with a dolphin.
4. Shook hands with Sam Choy.
5. Got engaged.

Not so great:

1. My
   Panasonic Lumix FX9 camera was stolen from the beach. (Irony: I’ve never
   been the victim of crime in Manhattan, Baltimore, or SF – but instead Maui.
   This was my negligence though.)
2. My Audiovox 5600 was stolen. And worse, Cingular asked me for $14.95 to
   get a new SIM card via priority mail. Thanks for helping me out guys.
3. I left behind my
   Etymotic 6i earphones on my flight back to mainland. My calls to AA’s
   Lost and Found at LAX have gone unreturned so far.

4. Coming back home after staying at the
   Sheraton Moana Surfrider.

5. Not having enough time to see all of Oahu. I guess I’ll have
   to go back!

Are you trying to call me? My phone got stolen (my digital camera too) while I was at the beach in Maui.

Leave a voicemail – I’ll get to it.

New Yorkers are polite? Yes, says mag – Yahoo! News

New Yorkers are a polite bunch.
ADVERTISEMENT

No, really, they are. So says Reader’s Digest.

The magazine sent reporters “undercover” to 36 cities, in 35 countries, to measure courtesy. New York was the only American city on the list.

In a city with a reputation for being in-your-face, New Yorkers seem to be expressing themselves with a new one-finger salute: a raised pinkie. In fact, they seem to have even better manners than people in London, Toronto and Moscow.

In its admittedly unscientific survey, the magazine’s politeness-police gave three types of tests to more than 2,000 unwitting participants.

The reporters walked into buildings to see if the people in front of them would hold the door open; bought small items in stores and recorded whether the salespeople said “thank you”; and dropped a folder full of papers in busy locations to see if anyone would help pick them up.

Wow… how times have changed!

6 years ago today, I joined Microsoft.

Since then, some things have gone pretty well…

Some things have gone not so well…

Some things have gone extremely well…

But for now… back to work… this release of Toolbar is going to be damn hot.

shahine.com/omar/ – Adobe and PDF

This reminds me of when we used the QuickTime SDK in Mac IE 5 for our “media bar” feature and we had to remove it at the last minute because Apple got pissed off at us for playing video in IE and bypassing the QuickTime player. Sheesh.

Wow… what a flash to the past. I bet there’s probably at most 20 people who remembers what he’s referring to.

One of the many “stories” of Mac IE.

I saw this piece today:

A train ride into America’s melting pot | csmonitor.com

And if you hop aboard New York’s No. 7 subway line, which runs 9.5 miles from Times Square, Manhattan, to Flushing, Queens, you’ll travel through one of America’s most richly diverse communities.

Our photographers recently rode this subway line and stopped along the way to explore the neighborhoods. Salsa music, Asian cuisine, Indian fabrics, and Muslim prayers blend in a sensory experience of taste, color, smell, and sound.

Nothing brings back my memories of living in NY like the 7 train which I would take all the time as a kid. Called the daily miracle, I never realized that it went a mere 9.5 miles – in part because it takes over 30 minutes to go from one end to another.

Check out the pics. You really do see an incredible diversity taking this train. You’ll also see people sleeping on it from the first station to the last station.

Although eventually I’d upgrade to the LIRR, the purple 7 will always have a special place in my memory.

A bonus, here is a link to pictures of what happened to the original 7 trains, and where you can find them today. Hint: they’re sleeping with the fishes.

I saw this article tonight:

TechEd 2006: Hybrid hard drives to become Vista Premium requirement | TG Daily

- At a discussion of flash memory technologies to be included in Windows Vista and “Longhorn” here at TechEd 2006 this morning, Microsoft’s program manager for Windows Client Performance Matt Ayres confirmed to TG Daily that inclusion of hybrid hard drives will be a requirement for mobile systems that carry the Vista Premium logo, beginning in June 2007.

In the Windows Logo Device Program Requirements document, version 3.01, quietly released by Microsoft last Friday, storage requirement #0005, whose description has typically read, “Hybrid disk drives or systems that implement a hybrid disk drive must meet the requirements outlined here,” is now followed by this phrase: “This requirement will go into effect for premium mobile systems in June 1 2007.”

Not familiar with hybrid hard drives?

Hybrid drive – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

A hybrid drive is a new type of large-buffer computer hard drive, currently in joint development by Samsung and Microsoft. It is different from standard hard drives in that it employs a large buffer (up to 1 GB) of nonvolatile flash memory to cache data during normal use. By using this large buffer for primary data storage, the platters of the hard drive are at rest almost all of the time, instead of constantly spinning as they are in modern-day hard drives. This offers numerous benefits, chief among them decreased power consumption, improved reliability, and a faster boot process.

I really can’t wait until these come out and become commonplace. When I boot up my work PC or my laptop, it honestly takes up to 5 minutes sometimes before I can start doing some serious email management, or web browsing. (Which, btw, is a phenomenon I don’t recall seeing on my Mac.) Hard disk speed could definitely use a boost on laptops – this should be super sweet.

Ship it!

If you’re ever on an Alaska Airlines 737-400, take a look at the Aircraft Safety Information card in the seat back pocket.

In Revision 11/04, check out the section documenting the proper brace-positions for a hard landing. (You know, underneath the section that subtely tells you that you only have 7 seconds to put on the additional oxygen mask… without telling you that you only have 7 seconds.) In particular check out the shoes the person in the middle is wearing.

Artist’s joke? Product placement?

You decide.

Oh… and check out how you’re supposed to use the rafts. I would’ve though you’d get in to them. Apparently not.

Update: Greg the President of SafeAIr writes “Artist inside joke. Not product placement. Also check out the image of the radio.” Also, it turns out that those are slides and not rafts. Yipes. Check the comments.