Golden Gate Bridge

We went to San Francisco last weekend and took a boat tour of the bay. I took three pictures like this; Lynda liked this one the best. I'll post the others later.

Haiku

I jokingly told a friend that there’s a new coding standard that all code must be written in haiku form. I knew it wasn’t an original idea so I Googled it. Among other things I found the DeCSS Haiku by Seth Schoen. I had seen it before and realized that not much has changed since it was released. This rediscovery inspired my humble attempt at haiku:

In this harvest time
We chose to girdle the tree
Have we killed freedom?

West Sac Christmas

We used to live in West Sacramento. There are some pretty ghetto areas there, so it has a bad reputation. A friend of ours still lives there so we wrapped his present "West Sac style".

Installing Windows 7 on a Dell Inspiron 1521

A friend of mine has a Dell Inspiron 1521 laptop that he wanted to wipe clean and start over. We thought we'd try Windows 7. The Dell Support page didn't have it listed as being Windows 7 compatible so I searched to see if anyone else had done it. It looked like some people had and many of them were having minor driver issues. I decided to try it anyway. It went quite smoothly all things considered. Here's how I did it:

• Install Windows 7
  • I opted for the 32bit version since he doesn't plan to install more than 4 gig of RAM.
• Get Windows updates
• Install AVG
• Install Firefox
• Get the touch pad update from Dell
• get Ricoh R5C833 driver from Dell
  • tell it to override the newer driver
• No yellow triangles!

The Ricoh R5C833 is a Flash Memory Card Controller. It was the hardest thing to figure out as it wasn't properly identified. When installing the driver it told me there was a newer one installed. I told it to install it anyway and the final yellow triangle disappeared.

The built in microphone seemed to be the main issue people had after installing Windows 7 on the Inspiron 1521. I didn't have any issues with it.

My friend is happy with his laptop, and it seems faster than it was with Windows Vista. Since we didn't run any benchmarks, it's impossible to tell if it actually performs better, but he's happy.

New Year’s Eve in Downtown Sacramento

We spent New Year’s Eve in Downtown Sacramento for Sacramento’s first ball drop. I took this photo from the balcony of our hotel room at the Hyatt. I love the way the lights interact with the fog; it gave the city a very “Gotham” look.

Scenic Fence Version 2

In a previous post I posted this same photo, pretty much strait out of the camera. In this version I leveled the horizon and used Adobe Lightroom to digitally "develop" the photo. It's similar to what happens when you shoot film and have prints made, except it's done on a computer. Here's a version with the two photos side by side.

We took the scenic route from Santa Cruz to Sacramento and captured this lovely view on Stage Road between Pescadero and San Gregorio.

Skyline Blvd

Skyline Blvd overlooking the San Francisco Bay Area. The vineyard in the foreground is Thomas Fogarty.