HTC Incredible review
I finally joined the 21st century about four months ago ago by purchasing a smart-phone. I've been thinking about getting one for several years now but finally decided to take the plunge. I got an HTC Incredible, and am overall quite pleased with it.
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Posted on 08/12/10 at 20:53:56 by dchaley (David Haley)
3 comments
Pizza pizza
On Friday, I made pizza for the first time, and in a real wood oven to boot. Well, I didn't make the dough, but I threw some ingredients on, stuck it in the oven, turned it around to cook evenly, and all that. It's actually pretty hard to get it into the oven on what is basically a big spatula: if you don't push hard enough off the spatula, the pie stays on and ingredients go flying (we lost a few good pepperonis that way!). So you really have to flick it quickly and aggressively to get the pie off. (It would probably be easier if the pizza pie had a "border", but these were all flat crust.) Then turning the pizza is pretty interesting: I found that the best way was to pick it up, tilt the pie to one side, and then pull back. The tilting causes it to turn as you pull. But the people who knew what they were doing were far better at it, so I guess there's some secret technique I have yet to master.
Anyhow, it was good fun, and it was certainly novel to use a ~1000deg F wood oven to make pizza for the first time. :-)
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Posted on 08/07/10 at 23:05:27 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Smart store policy
Whole Foods recently introduced a "party pack", an eight-pack of beer for $10. My guess is that they do it to get rid of the six-packs from which people pulled out a bottle or two. This lets them get rid of lots of no-longer-six packs without having to work too hard. And it lets them have relatively interesting variety packs. It's also a decent enough deal for customers (a six-pack normally costs $8-$12 depending on what kind of beer you're getting). It's a pretty smart solution and lets them keep full six-packs on their shelves, without having to wait to recombine six-packs of the same beer.
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Posted on 05/24/10 at 22:19:54 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Nice seatbelt ad
I thought that this seatbelt ad from Sussex County, UK, was remarkably well-done, and a refreshing change from the ones with splattering blood.
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Posted on 02/10/10 at 13:11:56 by dchaley (David Haley)
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First Person Tetris
This first-person version of Tetris messes with my head! I love the retro 8-bit music though.
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Posted on 01/14/10 at 10:10:31 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Rent Happiness
You might have heard about the court case involving Tishman Speyer and Stuyvesant Town, whereby they were found guilty of illegally deregulating apartments (because they were taking J-51 tax breaks for capital improvements). There has long been a question of what this would mean in practice, and it's finally coming to a resolution: rents have gone down; in my case, rent went down by just over $800. Yay! :-) (Funnily enough, because we started renting at the height of the bubble, the rent stabilized rate is not that different from what we would have been paying had we signed about a year later.) Also, our apartment will be re-stabilized, meaning that there are caps on how much rent can change every year, and under what circumstances they can force us out, etc.
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Posted on 12/22/09 at 10:05:23 by dchaley (David Haley)
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401(more)ok
For the first time since I got my work 401k, the value of my account is greater than the amount of money I put in. Harrumph!
Vanguard says some pretty weird (/dumb?) stuff, though. In a newsletter they sent out:
While the U.S. stock market fell 37% last year, diversification helped many 401(k) investors cope. A balanced mix of 60% stocks and 40% bonds held up better, falling 22%.1 Diversification isn't exclusive to 401(k) investing, of course. But your plan makes it easy to hold a mix of stocks and bonds.
(The effect of ongoing contributions further softened the markets' blow. Among Vanguard plan participants who had account balances at the beginning and end of 2008, the median change in balances was –14%)
The parenthetical remark is rather odd when you get past the marketese; it's basically saying:
"You lost a lot of money, but if you kept putting money in while losing money, your balance didn’t decrease as much as if you hadn’t put in any money"
So if you put even more money into your 401k just to see even more go away, you should still be happy because you prevented your 401k balance from decreasing as rapidly, and instead made your normal bank account not increase as rapidly. :-)
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Posted on 10/30/09 at 08:10:33 by dchaley (David Haley)
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The Perils of Cheap Wine
At the grocery store last night I wanted to pick up some cheap wine. I found a $7 bottle of "Merlot" (yeah... "cheap" in NYC is a relative term, I suppose), but when I opened later that night it I noticed its color was slightly weaker than usual. That's when I saw, in small font on the bottom of the label, the note "Wine Product - 6% alcohol". Sigh!! The ingredients were listed as red wine, water, sugar, and some other stuff. It doesn't taste terrible, but it certainly doesn't taste like red wine. Oh well. Next time I will pay more attention. :-)
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Posted on 10/15/09 at 08:02:37 by dchaley (David Haley)
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Free food
I got a pleasant surprise when at a Pret store the other night at closing time. They were throwing out their food because there was some issue with the charity that normally comes to pick up their leftover (boxed) food. They told my friends and me that we could take whatever we wanted, and gave us some plastic bags. So, the predictable result of giving free food to hungry people who just spent a couple of hours at the dojo followed: we all loaded up with bags full of sandwiches and salads. For the $8 I spent on my sandwich, I ended up leaving with some additional six sandwiches and three salads. Not a bad return on the investment. :-)
Incidentally, I guess they really do make everything fresh every day.
Anyhow, I thought it was nice that they gave it to us (and to charity normally) instead of just throwing it out.
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Posted on 09/21/09 at 08:01:29 by dchaley (David Haley)
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A tale of a phone lost and found
I cleverly managed to forget my phone in a taxi last night. I tried calling it as soon as I got home, but no answer. I was afraid that it was going to be basically gone because I had no idea which cab I was in (didn't get the receipt). I tried again this morning, and got lucky: somebody picked it up and said they'd bring it to me. It actually turns out that it was the police! I guess the driver dropped it off with them. I was fairly surprised that the police actually brought it to me (instead of having me go to a station) but they did. The officer just asked me a few quick questions about the phone (e.g., what model is it, list some contacts from the address book) and then had me sign something and I got it back. Phew! Very nice of the police to do that, in any case.
Aurelie had the same mishap a few months ago, but when we called the number a passenger picked it up. In that case, they were kind enough to stop near our place on their way back from dinner, so we picked it up from them.
Two lucky strikes, and lesson definitely learned. I usually check my pockets as I leave the taxi; last night I checked just 30 seconds too late -- the taxi was already gone.
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Posted on 07/31/09 at 09:50:23 by dchaley (David Haley)
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