Last week, Becky and I got to go on a hot air balloon ride from Woodinville. It was amazing. We really lucked out with great weather that day; it had been raining a couple of days prior, and most of the days since have been at least cloudy and cool.

Here are some of my favorite images from the flight. The yellow balloon was ours; the one with vertical stripes was the other half of the group we flew with.

Continue reading ‘Hot air balloon ride’

Many of you have heard at least something about the struggle we’ve had getting our master bathroom remodeled. I won’t recount the whole saga here, but suffice it to say it’s been stressful. It is now, at last, done. (Well, 99.9% done — there are a couple of small things to finish up). I wouldn’t say I’d do it all over again, but it is definitely a huge improvement. Continue reading to see the before and after photos.

Continue reading ‘It’s about time…’

I thought I was famous when the back of my head was on CMT. But now that the CMA Closeup has aired on GAC, I’m even famouser! You can actually see my face (and Becky’s too). Several times, in fact.

I’ve yet to receive a paycheck…

Things are looking better for finding iPhones, but they’re still not universally available, and there are still lines. Availability was very low over the weekend, but overall it’s been trending upward.

Chris Barnes put together a tool that surfaces this data in real time. Good stuff. I actually have an interface that does the same thing, but I decided not to release it to the public (partially because I was too lazy to get it polished enough to not be embarrassed by it, and partially because I didn’t want Apple to get annoyed and shut off the data feed).

Here are some updated charts. (Previous graphs and trivia are here.)

I finally was able to get my hands on an iPhone 3G (black 16GB, at Bellevue Square). But I’ve continued to be kind of fascinated by the whole issue of availability. Finding an iPhone is still not easy in many parts of the country! I’ve been gathering some data from Apple’s availabilty checker (which I disparaged in my last post). It isn’t 100% accurate, but it appears to be better than I originally thought.

The trick is that it seems to be showing current availability, even though the page is worded to make it sound like it’s showing the next day’s availability. So after the Apple Store has closed for the day, the only way that page is going to show phones as available is if they had some left over at the end of the day. If they’re getting more the next morning (as many stores have been), it won’t be reflected on that page. Of course, the page also doesn’t tell us how many phones are in stock — if it’s only one, you’re not going to have much luck getting it.

Anyway, I started collecting the data that the availability checker page shows a couple of days ago. If you can look beyond my embarrassingly bad Excel charting skills, these may be interesting (yes, I should be using Google Charts, but I wasn’t feeling patient enough to figure out how to make it do what I want, and gnuplot gives me a headache every time I use it). You’ll notice that stock goes down over the course of the day (i.e. stores run out of stock), then it spikes back up again in the morning.

Charts updated July 18 at 9:15PM PDT, the rest of this post reflects data as of the evening of July 17.

A few other interesting tidbits:

• Since I started collecting data, only one store has never shown as having any iPhones in stock: Lehigh Valley in Whitehall, PA.
• Many other stores have been mostly out of phones since I’ve been watching. The ten most neglected stores (besides Lehigh Valley) are, in order: Natick Collection (Natick, MA), Leawood (Leawood, KS), Bridge Street (Huntsville, AL), Deer Park (Deer Park, IL), Los Gatos (Los Gatos, CA), MacArthur Center (Norfolk, VA), South Hills Village (Pittsburgh, PA), Willowbrook Mall (Houston, TX), Bayshore (Glendale, WI) and West Towne (Madison, WI).
• No stores have been fully stocked with all three models all the time, but a few have come close. SoHo has been out of Black 16 since 7 PM PDT today, but has otherwise always had everything. Fifth Avenue was out of Black 16 for about 4 hours early this morning, but has been fully stocked the rest of the time. The rest of the top 10 best bets (in order) are: Lincoln Road (Miami Beach, FL), Stonestown (San Francisco, CA), North Michigan Avenue (Chicago), Manhattan Village (Manhattan Beach, CA), Century City (Los Angeles, CA), Lenox Square (Atlanta, GA), Oakridge (San Jose, CA) and UTC (San Diego, CA). Of course, these are just the “best bets” with respect to how often they have phones — line length (and comfort) is a whole different story…

If I have time, I’ll run these queries again next week when I have more data. Of course, this should all be taken with a grain of salt, since it’s only as accurate as the data Apple publishes on their availability web page. But it’s better than nothing.

You know that nifty “Check iPhone Availability” page on Apple’s website? The one that’s supposed to help you avoid a trip to an Apple Store that has no iPhones? Yeah, it doesn’t work. At all. It claimed that the Bellevue store had all models in stock today. But when I arrived this morning before they opened, the helpful and friendly employees told me that the online checker is wrong, and should basically be avoided because they have no idea where the data is coming from. Neat.

For the record, Bellevue did have some 8GB models in stock, and an apparently minuscule number of white 16GBs, but no black 16GBs. I would have taken a white one, but I was told that there’s no way I’d get one given the number of people already in line. The line was estimated to be 3-4 hours (roughly half an hour before they opened).

So, no iPhone for me today. Maybe later this week, if I get lucky. I’m not holding my breath, though.

Update: I posted some more information about iPhone stock.

Ok, famous might be a bit of an exaggeration. But I’m on national (err, cable) TV. Well, the back of my head is, at least. For maybe five seconds.

See me? I promise, that’s really me! This is from CMT Insider’s coverage of the Miranda Lambert fan club party.

If you want my autograph, email me, and I’ll see what we can work out…

I dreamed of going to Nashville, we went, and now we’re back. We spent a week in Nashville going to CMA Fest, hanging out with some very cool people and seeing the Tennessee sights.

We started the trip out with a visit to the Grand Ole Opry. We didn’t even go to the hotel first — straight from airport to Opry. That’s the way to start a vacation! It was a great lineup including Montgomery Gentry, Luke Bryan, Whispering Bill Anderson and Carrie Underwood. We were way up in the balcony because we delayed too long on buying tickets, but it was still incredible.

Continue reading ‘CMA Fest 2008′

Ok, this technically isn’t something I bought that I love — it was a gift. But it’s a very cool gadget, and I do love it. It’s a Mastercool 52224-A Infrared Thermometer. It looks like a little gun. You just point it at something and it instantly tells you the temperature. Cool! (Or “hot!” as the case may be.)

See? Cool!

See? Hot!

See? Even hotter!

I know I’m a major geek, but it’s very fun to be able to instantly tell the temperature of anything in the house. I can tell how cold different areas of the fridge are. I can tell how hot different parts of the oven or grill are. I can see how hot the gear in the entertainment center is getting. Nifty! Apparently this is really supposed to be some sort of automotive tool, but I doubt I’ll actually ever use it for that kind of thing.

Since I’m in the process of seeing how hot different things are, I’ll do this last one. Just for you, Jennifer

I have to hand it to MySpace. They really know their demographic. They know that the best way to communicate with their users is to write like them.