kahunaburger

While I was talking to the FedEx guy this morning, I noticed something crawling on the ground next to the Aspen trees. Upon closer inspection I saw Willy, the fearless Wasp, trying to convince Cathy, the fat Caterpillar, to come with him. I watched them for 10 mins while the wasp tried to get off the ground with the caterpillar. It is without exaggeration when I say that the caterpillar must have weighed at least 20 times more than the wasp. Still the little insect would not rest and several times it looked like the wasp was actually getting that fat, green thing off the ground.

Wily and Cathy

When I looked again in the afternoon, I saw the caterpillar dead next to the trees with ants all over it. Photo above rendered at 100% size for extra ewwww-factor

Stuffed Bell Peppers

Pia seems to have a thing for stuffed bell peppers. Whenever I ask her what she wants to eat, one of her answers is that dish (after Macaroni & Cheese, French Fries and other Junk Food entrees).

Saturday morning we went to the Santa Fe Farmers Market and got some good Pecos Valley Grassfed Ground Beef. As bell peppers are not really in season yet, we also had to venture to Whole Foods and get some ridiculous expensive peppers. Back at home, Pia helped with the preparation and you can see the result above (before they went into the oven).

Don’t you laugh! I know you want to, but it would hurt seriously

At 5:20am this morning I switched on my computer and checked email while having the first cup of coffee. I almost spit a whole mouthful of joe all over the monitors and keyboard when I ran across an email my brother had sent.

There was this strange young boy looking at me: awkward position, rosy cheeks, well-fed and dressed like a Bavarian clown. It took only a fraction of a second before I realized: THAT’S ME!
If I can trust my memory, that photo was taken 28 years ago in 1981 for my confirmation (I’m supposed to be a protestant).

My brother warned me that there’s more where this one came from … oh dear!

Once every quarter Adobe has an Employee Meeting to talk about the financial results and other interesting stuff. This meeting is usually held in a large conference room in San Jose and, in the past, it was quite common to schedule a trip back to California around the same time.

Traveling has been cut down substantially since last year. You have to have a very good reason to justify a business trip these days.

Most satellite offices and tele-commuters participate via our web conferencing software “ConnectPro“.

As I joined the web conference today (15 mins before the official start) I saw something nifty:

For each person who logged on to the web conference software, ConnectPro, calculated the distance based on the geo-location of the IP-address that was used to connect to the conference. It then calculated roughly how much in CO2 emissions were saved by not attending the meeting in person. Had I gone on a trip I would have produced around 756 lbs of CO2. This information is summed up for all participants and you get not only the combined figure for CO2 emission, but also the $$$ the company saved by not putting people on a plane.

The $32K figure for combined savings changed dramatically later on as more people joined …

How much do you want to bet that the conservative media is jumping on the “Obama vs. Fly” story today and is going to blame him for killing an innocent insect?

I’m on a mission to grab random Cannes Movie Festival winners (and nominees) from Netflix. A week ago “Irreversible” hit the top of the queue and was sent to me. I had picked for the previously stated reason as well as the fact that Monica Belluci starred in it.

I’ve switched off movies in the past: too boring, too stupid, etc., but I’ve never switched off a movie because I was grossed out by it. Irreversible did it for me. For those who’ve seen the movie as well: I could not finish the scene in the dimly lit, reddish underpass – had to hit the stop-button on the remote half way through it. And for those who have not seen: unless you are into extremely violent, long-drawn scenes of forceful female abuse (don’t want to get kahunaburger banned), do yourself a favor and don’t watch it.

Makes me think twice about my Cannes Festival quest mentioned above …

It is still not over! I can’t believe I have to write about this again.

Per suggestion of a friendly kahunaburger-reader, I called Chase over and over again to have them refund the late fees and finance charges. Somebody suggested that you will eventually end up with a customer service rep who is willing to refund those items. And, sure he was right: after about 5 calls I had somebody on the phone who reversed the charges, leaving me with a positive balance of $18.29 (money that Chase owed me).

At the same time the charges were reversed, I asked them to cut me a check, send it to me and delete my online account for good.

This morning I fired up mint.com and within a minute of updating my balances, I receive an email from them, telling me that a “Finance Charge” of $1.00 has appeared in my Chase account.

My initial reaction was “WTF?”! You can see the original late payment fee ($39) on April 27 after they did not get my payment on time. On April 30 you can see the transaction that paid off my balance entirely. A week later there’s the finance charge ($11.19) and finally on May 19th, both the late fee and the finance charge were reversed.

On April 27th my card was destroyed. The same day I also changed all automatic payments that used the same card number. No activity whatsoever since that day.

And still those guys have the audacity to charge a $1.00 finance charge on June 5th!!!

Three lessons learned from this experience:

1. Never, ever do business again with anything that has Chase associated with it.
2. Whenever you don’t like a fee that appears on your statements, call them a thousand times until the fee is waived.
3. Check and re-check every single line item on every statement – you’d be surprised how much money you save that way.

Next on my list: make them remove all records that they ever had of me and make sure that I’m not getting a single piece of snail-mail/e-mail from them – those two are going to be the hardest yet.

Two links of interest:

1. Adobe BrowserLab: How often do you have to check your web designs in a number of different browsers to make sure that things look ok in all the browsers your customers are going to use? You either need multiple computers (MacOS, Windows, Linux) with multiple versions of browsers installed or you have some virtual machine solution (VMWare) on a single computer.

   Adobe just released a new web-service, which allows you have a URL rendered by some of the most popular browsers and see the results as screenshots in your browser. Granted, something like this has been done before (see for example browsershots.org and netrenderer), but BrowserLab has at least one feature that makes it very interesting – it offers an “Onion Skin View” that allows you to overlay the output from different browsers on top of each other. See the example below, that shows “Firefox 3.0″ on the left and “Safari 3.0″ on the right (both on MacOS X). You’ll see immediately where the two diverge from each other:

   

   Things are bit slow on the service at the moment … give it some time, it’s worth it!

2. Prezi: prezi.com is a pretty interesting concept for “presentations”. Think of it as one large canvas where you layout all the information that makes up your presentation: text, photos, graphics, videos are spread out over the canvas. Once all items are placed, you define a path over the information and pan, zoom, rotate to draw attention to certain sections of the canvas. It’s hard to explain, but just go to prezi.com and have a look at the examples there.

   

Some of you may have heard about Papervision3D, a 3D engine for Flash, which provides some awesome performance given that it’s written entirely in ActionScript.

I’ve seen some interesting (small) Papervision3D applications in the past, but this BBC project has got to be one of the largest PV3D projects ever. “Big and Small” is a kids comedy show of the BBC. Plug-in Media created a accompanying site using PV3D and the results are pretty stunning. You can visit the site using this link: http://www.pluginmedia.net/clients/bigandsmall. When you go there, keep in mind that everything is rendered on your local system – the server just sends the 3D (and 2D) objects.

(from http://sprott.physics.wisc.edu/pickover/pc/manwoman.html)