Bernie’s Blog

Ok, maybe if think out loud and write a blog post about it I might find the reason why I’m not excited about the iPhone. I’m such a sucker for all things Apple, and when Steve announced the iPhone in his Macworld keynote, I was fascinated by that finger scrolling thing that he did. Then came the announcement of the official release date – June 29. And the price ($499, $599), the specs (4GB, 8GB), and the provider (AT&T). Honestly, if it had been cheaper I would have got one. But I’m not one who will hold out if I love the product, but this time, price was holding me back.

Ok, I may be in the minority, but I don’t hate my current phone. It’s a Nokia E62, and I’m subscribed to the unlimited data plan and basic SMS. I find that I can use it to surf the web, browse Google Maps, check email using POP or Gmail, Tweet, do text messaging, listen to music (it has an SD slot). I would say the only gripe I have is the inability to sync. But I’m pretty contented with what I got.

So I have my MacBookPro, my iPod, and my E62. I guess I don’t have any reason to fit an iPhone in my life. There will be too much overlap, and I do like to keep gadgets separate and specialized in their function, so that when one fails the others don’t fail with it. This reminds me about the HP Officejet all-in-one that’s sitting at home. I couldn’t get the ink cartridge to work, and because of that, I wasn’t able to use the built-in scanner. Now I have a Canon printer AND a Canon scanner separately, and I find that it does work better that way.

This doesn’t mean that I’m not open to getting an iPhone, just means I’ll wait till the 2nd rev before making a decision. It is still a very beautifully designed piece of hardware. Now if Apple makes an iPod that looks like the iPhone I’ll definitely get one.

Blogged with Flock

If it wasn’t for Veronica Belmont of CNET, who officially announced that she’s going quit CNET and go to this exciting new startup called Mahalo, I wouldn’t have even found out about it. What is Mahalo? It is a People-powered search engine. What does that mean? Basically a bunch of people, many, many people, known as Guides, attempt to create search engine result pages of popular search terms.

How is this different from Google? For one, It is more structured. For example, every search result page will have the Mahalo Top 7, Guide Notes, and Fast Facts. Standard sub topics such as Blogs, Forums, Videos, News and Articles, and Pictures make the results easier to read. Secondly, there’s no spam. With more policing of the links, you can be quite sure that the links on the results page will not lure you to phishing sites.

I find this a very interesting concept, but will it be successful? Weren’t intelligent algorithms created (Google) in search engines so that we can get more accurate and objective search results? True, results compiled by people are much more meaningful, because sometimes the more useful information are 10 pages down, while the less relevant ones populate the first two pages. But one cannot argue that automated generation sure beats humans in terms of speed. Google’s “spiders” can index webpages faster than humanly possible, and if you are searching for a topic that requires new information fast, the people-powered search engine will lose. However, if you are looking at certain topics that are historical, academic, or knowledge-sharing (tutorials, how-tos, references) in nature, the latter will prevail.

Say you are a new Mom, and you want to find out about the different stages of pregnancy, and what resources there are available online. Searching on Google might only provide you with a few big sites like Babycenter, AskDrSears, and maybe some articles on About.com, but what about sites like Maya’s Mom, Babble, and MommyClicks? It’s hard to search for online communities that might actually be more useful to a new Mom who doesn’t know anything about babies and want to get to find answers from real people. In this scenario, Mahalo will be a very useful search engine to get answers from. Ideally, it should have a search result for “New Mom”, where the Guides would have compiled a list of tried and true useful sites that would help the new mother in search for information.

Another scenario – I want to find out if my favorite game’s website has been launched or not. If I use Mahalo, the Guides might not have found out about that site’s URL and updated the page, but if I use Google, any new site created, if created well, would appear on the Google’s search result page very soon.

So here’s the question – Will Mahalo’s Guides be diligent enough to attempt to constantly update the search result pages as new sites are created? What’s stopping someone, or a company, even, to “bribe” Guides so that he/she will post the link to THEIR page rather than a competitor’s? Gone is the objectivity of the results.

Having said that, I still find this idea by Mahalo something that definitely has to be tried out in the real world before any conclusions can be drawn from it, or what effects it has on how we do search in the future (humans and/or robots?). Right now its too early tell. I’ve already signed up to be a Part-Time Guide, and will try to contribute as much as I can to this, and I really want to see how it grows, or not grow. This is very similar to past ventures like dmoz, wikipedia, suite101, and even about.com, so we’ll see. Do check it out and let me know what you think.

Blogged with Flock

Mashable today did a writeup on 11 craziest ways to browse Flickr photos. Being a conventional browser, the way I browse Flickr is to go to http://www.flickr.com. Now with Flock, I browse through my Media Top Bar on the browser, and occasionally I use the Yahoo Widgets on my work desktop to see pictures of my baby. This Mashable article shows you how you can actually make use of the collective pictures on Flickr to create fun and interesting views. For example, you can generate a word using Flickr photos with Spell with Flickr, and browse by color using ColorPickr. I just love Flickr.

Blogged with Flock

Flock, which is touted as the social web browser, just launched their newest version 0.9. On first impression, all I see are some new icons on the left side, making it easier to get access to the different services. What’s good about it is that you can integrate all your social networking accounts together, such as del.licio.us bookmarks and Flickr photos, and RSS, though I’ve started using Google Reader now, so it doesn’t concern me much now. The browser hasn’t crashed on me so far on my MBP, but I can’t seem to get it to run on my Windows XP work machine. Extensions don’t install at the moment, hopefully the Flock guys fix that soon as I need my Twitter extension! Twitbin works though even though it was built for Firefox, but the sidebar gets replaced when you click on the services icons, so that can be pretty annoying.

Blogged with Flock

I had no idea Converse still existed since the 80s until a couple weeks ago when a blogger took pictures of his on his blog. This piqued my interest, so I visited converse.com and got a pleasant surprise at their nicely designed site. These shoes bring back memories because when I was a teenager I had a pair of navy blue hi-tops and loved them. So I got itchy and ended up ordering a pair of lo-tops this time, from Zappos. Thanks to free overnight shipping, I’ll get them tomorrow! Whee!

We drove up to Brentwood in the hopes of coming home with some juicy peaches and nectarines. June, July and August seems just about right to visit the fruit farms, and depending on what types of fruits you like, the season might begin earlier than others. For example, right now is the season for peaches, apricots and nectarines, but cherries and strawberries belong to June, and most of the farms don’t have cherries or strawberries for picking anymore.

Ever since we came to California, fruit picking has been a yearly affair. Although it might be more expensive than getting it from the store, the fruits are usually more ripened, and thus you get a much juicier and sweeter fruit. What’s more, when you are in the farm, you can eat as much fruit as you like. There’s usually a minimum weight you need to buy, for this instance, its 5 pounds. That isn’t really unreasonable as the fruits are pretty heavy anyway. The farmers just don’t want people to just eat their fill inside the orchar and then go home without buying anything.

This time, we get to experience it with Rebecca. As we walked into the farm, we were greeted by the owner, who started telling us where the different types of fruits are. He has peaches, nectarines and apricots. The sizes of the fruit were smaller than the last time we visited, but they were just as sweet. Having just mastered walking, Rebecca walked around by herself. She didn’t really dare to pluck the fruits from the trees. I picked a little one for her and she held on to it while walking. As we sat in the shade and fed her lunch, D and Grandma walked around picking fruits.



For desert, Rebecca ate one peach and one nectarine, and after hanging out for a bit, we slowly walked out of the orchard. If it had been a little cooler, we would have more fun, but it was a good first time for Reb.

See more pictures here.

Today Charlotte turns 3. She is the first doggie pet D and I have as a married couple. We drove all the way to Morgan Hill to pick her up. Happy Birthday girl, and we love you!

Here’s a slideshow of her set on Flickr:

Rebecca learned so many new things in her 17th month. The most significant milestone is her walking. I’m now a firm believer that there’s no need to rush things with babies. They will do it when they are ready. It was like one day she’s crawling, and another day she decided to get up and walk. We’d spent the few weeks before coaxing her to walk on her own, but she just wouldn’t do it. When she started walking on her own (no holding hands), she needed to use her arms to balance her step by step motion, and would walk really unnaturally, but just last week, her speed of walking could almost beat her speed of crawling.


Another milestone is her talking and imitating others and what she sees on tv. She’s learned a bit of sign language too, things like baby, hat, book. When she hears music she will sway to the music. She’s just hooked on children shows with dancing large life-size puppets like Barney, Sesame Street, and there’s a Baby Genius series with characters Vinko and DJ singing nursery rhymes.

The highlight of today was the BBQ. Since we’d bought all the ingredients during the weekend, we didn’t need an extra trip to the grocery store. So it was a pretty relaxing day. I like Wednesday holidays. They don’t happen often, but psychologically you feel that you only work two days, a week – Tuesday and Friday are the “Fridays” this week!

We spent the morning at the park, the whole family (well, Clover stayed home). Rebecca wanted to hold the doggy leash so I let her. She found that very interesting. She was feeling happy and was even willing to walk all by herself.

Then we spent the evening grilling, having a good time, and watching fireworks on TV.

Spending the Weekend with “Rebecca 24/7″ is never dull. I was diligent enough to walk around with my camera last weekend, and took quite a few pics on Saturday and Sunday.

Here she is walking around with my Tokidoki bag.

We decided to take the car out into the backyard. She started by sitting on it and me pushing her around, then she decided that she wants to push it, which is actually a little hard because of the grass. But we had fun.

Then she saw Grandma take out the Swiffer thingy and wanted to help clean the floor. It was a good effort.

Sunday was warm and sunny, and we took the little teeny pool out for her to play in. She was hesitant at first, but after realizing how fun it was, she didn’t want to come out!

I’m getting excited about the Tour. It’s only 5 days away! During the weekend I’ve been trying to search for good TdF news and blog sites where I can use to see videos of the race, read news, and see pictures. Here’s what I have so far:

1) Le Tour – The official tour page.
2) TdF Blog – Bloggers of TdF.
3) Versus - The TV channel that TdF will be on.

So that’s what I have so far. Check out my TdF links on my delicious page. Now I wonder if there’s going to be any podcasts for the Tour …

We took Rebecca to see Ratatouille on Saturday. She’s 17 months old and this is the first time she’s ever been in a theater, and for us, the first time in AGES since we last saw a movie. We planned for the worst, thinking that we could always just leave the cinema and ask for a refund. However, she took it really well.

The show started at around 3pm, Rebecca napped while we drove there, and while we were in line for the tickets, she woke up. She started looking around, not fully awake. As we walked into the place she stared at all the posters on the walls and the patterns on the carpets. We’d initially thought she’ll freak out at the darkness of the theater, but she didn’t. She took it all in pretty well. When the show started, she spent the first half hour quietly watching it, while sitting on my lap. Not a peep from her, other than an occasional “uh oh”, “ooh”, and some pointing. After about 45 minutes into the show, she got a little restless and wanted to stand and walk around. As we sat close to the front, she could see all the faces of the people when she turned around. I took her out for a short 10 minute walk outside, and we went in again. She was losing interest in the show at that time, but then focused on it again towards the end.

When the show ended, and we walked out, she was walking with a happy gait, she seemed all proud of herself for doing an “adult thing”. I’m sure she enjoyed the experience. No screaming, shouting, or crying. Maybe it was because of the cute ratties in the movie, but the whole experience for us was, surprisingly … why, can I even say the word … EASY.