David and Susi’s Blog

Well, we promised to post more pictures of the house project, but one thing always leads to another and we still haven’t taken many new photos lately.  Partly because we have been taking a much needed break from the project, partly because there hasn’t been much going on with regards to the house as Robert has been away working on other projects, and lastly because David had sinus surgery last Wednesday.  Here are a few pictures from the New Office area (Spare Bedroom) on the second floor, the room has been painted and the new laminate flooring has been installed.  The room is almost complete, we only need to paint and install the baseboard trim and finish up some electrical/network wiring and then it’s pretty much finished.  Susi got very creative with the painting of this room and it really turned out very nice!

Since I was a little under the weather last week from the surgery, I took Wednesday and Thursday off of work to recuperate and pretty much took it easy all week.  On Saturday, I started feeling pretty much back to normal, so we decided to venture out a little from the house for a little shopping.  We ended up in about 12 different stores trying to find an end of the year deal on a new BBQ, after having lunch and buying some new work clothes.  At the end of the day, we had seen many very nice grills, a few good deals, but didn’t buy anything.  So, this brings us to today…  With not really having much to do, and not feeling like doing to much, Susi, Robert and I all decided to load up in the “Hooptie” so that we can go and buy a new grill.  We also had a ton of excess house project stuff to return to Home Depot, so off we went to Home Depot.  While Susi was dealing with the merchandise returns, Robert and I spotted the “Grill of all GRILLS”, and decided that this one was the right one.    Fortunately, we had unloaded all of Roberts tools from the Hooptie, or there would have been no way that this thing would have ever fit in!  As it was, we had to partially disassemble the thing, and leave all of the packing material at Home Depot–even then, there wasn’t much room to spare.  We had intended to buy a smaller stainless steel grill,  perhaps one with the new infrared heating systems but after seeing this one, and falling in love at first site, this beauty had to come home with us.   Here are couple of pictures of the “Grill of Grills”…

The first meal cooked on the new grill was pretty damned good, if I have to say so myself!  Well, with the exception of the Burnt Offering Garlic Potatoes which I so courageously prepared for the all mighty BBQ God’s…  But seriously, the steaks, Corn on the Cob and chicken were pretty frigging amazing!

Well, that’s about all for now, until next time–Happy Grilling!!!

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Well, after much consternation, I finally broke down and bought an iPhone 3g.  Susi’s cell phone had all but stopped taking most incoming calls, so we went to the local AT&T store to get her a new phone.  To make a long story short, we ended buying a new iPhone 3g for David, and he in turn will hand over hist trusty Palm Treo 650 to Susi once he gets all of his data transfered off of the Palm.   For anyone who knows me, I had always been a Palm Smartphone diehard well at least for the 6 years anyway–first carrying a Treo 600 for several years and later the Treo 650.  While the Palm Treo certainly is not without it’s faults, they are a pretty darned good devices.  The Treo always performed very well for me, only requiring a rare reboot to set things straight maybe once every 6 months or so.  You sure can’t say that about any device running Windows Mobile anything.  I would have liked to have upgraded to another Palm Device, but the current Palm offerings through AT&T just didn’t do much for me–small screens and small keyboards were the major drawbacks.  We just happened to be in the AT&T store the day that the iPhone 3g was released, and after seeing all of the media hype about it, I decided to take a look at it.  At first site, I fell in love with the feel of the phone.  The weight is very nice, coupled with a slim thickness and a nicely contoured back.  All of these aspects when put together make a very comfortable phone to carry and use.  Then there is the beautiful screen!  The screen is just amazing on this device, crystal clear display, very good brightness and it even auto adjusts to changing light conditions–something that Palm should look to do on their devices.  I have had the new iPhone for almost a month now, and have grown to love a lot of the bells and whistles on it, but there are still a few things that I am not overly crazy about.  The first thing is the battery life.  Despite the claims to extended battery life over the first generation iPhone, I am not impressed.  I have found that I need to pretty much always be close to a charger at the end of the day or I will be dead in the morning.  This is really hard to get used to since I could go several days between charges with my Palm devices.  The relative short battery life coupled with the fact that the battery is not replaceable with a spare battery, is a bit rediculous.  I hope this will be re-thought in in the next version.  This is really the only major drawback that I have experienced to date with the device, and if you don’t mind being tethered to a charging cable, this might be the perfect phone for you.  All of the other issues that I have with the iPhone 3g are really pretty minor in comaprison to the battery issue, some of which I will discuss here…  The iPhone 3G has these cool sensors that detech changes in the position of the device and do things like prompt you to end a call when the phone is moved away from your head, or when you rotate the phone from vertical to horizontal orientation, the display also changes accordingly.  While this is very cool, it would be real nice if ALL of the included applications and also anything downloaded from iTunes also had this capability.  The built in GPS is functional and novel, but it suffers poorly if you are attempting to use it as a navigation tool.  The Google based maps work nicely, but this is one of those applications that really would be nice in widescreen mode, but since the application doesn’t recognize the sensors I spoke earlier about, you are limited to a narrow strip map sort of display.  I am hoping that TomTom will finally release their navigation software for the iPhone, as I am sure those guys will do it right!  Oh did I mention that I really miss my TomTom navigator / Palm Treo 650 combo?  Web browsing on the iPhone 3G is pretty amazing with the Safari Browser–way better than attempting to use the internet in any capacity on the Treo 600/650.  It will actually load a modern day webpage complete with graphics!  I know that may sound rediculous, but for anyone who has ever browsed the web on a Palm device, this is huge!  When the iPhone is on AT&T’s new 3G network, the surfing experience is much better than the older edge network, but since the iPhone will also do WiFi, it is even faster when connected to either a home network or one of the many wireless hotspots available these days.  I never really got into the whole MP-3 craze a few years ago, but the MP-3 palyer on the iPhone is very nice for doing Video Podcasts, audio podcasts and of course playing MP-3 music if thats your thing.  I have to admit, that it’s pretty nice being able to download a 30 Minute HiDef Video podcast of the NBC nightly news to stay on top of the latest world news, all without commercials!  My current favorite application for the iPhone is the free streaming audio player for the Pandora Internet streaming radio, it’s amazing, and I am totally addicted!!!

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