kahunaburger

I was never really a cell phone person. Yes, I had one of those cheap Verizon-branded LG phones, but I rarely used it. If I made 10 phone calls with it per month, then it was a lot.

Now that I’m by myself I could not participate in the Verizon family plan any longer and decided to “upgrade” to something a bit more geekish. I decided to try the new Blackberry 8100 (Pearl) in conjunction with a new T-Mobile plan.

Oh my - what a change it is! The thing just arrived last week and I spent some time over the weekend to get used to it and configure it to my needs/wants. For $20 a month I have unlimited Internet access from the device. This means I can receive and send emails, browse the web and use WAP-enabled services without having to worry about air-time and/or bytes sent/received. What a joy it is. Just yesterday I was sitting at the Tesuque Village Market for lunch with a copy of the Santa Fe New Mexican newspaper; I looked through the Real Estate section and was able to pull down details of properties via the Real Estate web-sites. And all this on a 240×260 screen on the cell phone. This was actually useful and I was amazed how flawlessly everything worked.

My work/private email is also forwarded to the device (unfortunately this includes some spam as well) and I can process the stuff right on the phone. Deleting messages on the phone will also delete them from my message store on the computer at home.

I’m a convert - now I feel I don’t want to do another day without it.

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I hate filing paper documents. I never seem to find stuff again. I wish my filing cabinet had a search button that would automatically retrieve documents from the pile of junk.
So with things changing all around me, I decided to change the filing strategy as well.

Meet my new buddy: a Fujitsu ScanSnap 500. He is a tiny desktop scanner that can fit anything from business card to legal sized documents. The neat thing about the little baby are the facts that it not only features a duplex-scanning mode (front and back page are scanned at the same time), but it also produces Adobe PDF documents instantly. Each page is scanned in about 3 secs. After the scanned page is transferred to the computer, an Optical Character Recognition process tries to figure out the “words” on the scanned pages. This is a background process that can take anywhere from a few seconds to a minute, depending on the complexity of the document.

All documents are filed on a harddisk using “year/month” as the folder-criteria. So everything from this month goes into “2006/10″. This area is automatically mirrored to another harddisk (just in case). In a second step I use Acrobat’s full-text index feature to create a word-index from all the documents. This step allows me to search very quickly through a large set of PDF documents. Search results appear almost instantly (alright, I only have about 50 scanned documents in there, but I’m sure search times will not increase too much with more documents).

The software that comes with the ScanSnap also shows a nice preview of all documents that you have scanned so far:

And finally the paper-documents end up un-categorized in a file folder. I have one for 2006 with a separate drawer for each month.

I’m gonna keep using that for a while and see if this makes it easier. Wish I could get rid of the paper documents all together …

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There’s at least one piece of artwork that followed me all the way from Munich to Amsterdam to California to Santa Fe. That’s the Ebony man I bought a long time ago on trip to Kenya. He’s standing in one of the nichos here in Tesuque and holds his beard and … uhm … private parts. I still remember the guy who sold the piece to me and how he said after modifying the first version of the sculpture to include an enlarged middle-section and how sales suddenly increased. That must be close to 20 years ago.
For our open houses (there was another on today) we have all the lights switched on and I could not help it and had to take a picture of him.

Ebony man from Kenia

PS: I tried another HDR on this one, but for some reason the registration was off between exposures and I got this strange halo around the sculpture. That’s what you get for picking a cheap tripod …

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After letting the dogs out this morning, Pia stopped on the stairs to the main entrance to play with the countless leaves from the tree right there. Fall is here all around us and it’s getting pretty chilly in the mornings. Still, we are not going to switch on that heating for a few more weeks - reminds me that I got to get more wood for the fire places …

Pia and the leaves

PS: That was before she got her first hair-cut today.

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I’ve been with Adobe Systems for almost 13 years now. I’ve seen a lot of talented people come and go. As a manager I was also responsible for some of them and I have (mostly) enjoyed the time that I was allowed to guide other people.

It always hurts when one of them decides to leave and goes out to do something else. It hurts in a good way and in a bad way at the same time. Take Jon for example: he was/is brilliant and Adobe could not offer him enough at the time when he needed it. He decided to move on and managed to secure a job at Google, where he will be working on Google Video. Can’t wait until he sends me information about the features that he has been working on. If I was in his position, I would have done exactly the same.

Today is another sad day, because Lan is leaving. She has so much creativity packed into her little body, it’s almost unreal. I know that she will be fine outside the womb (that even made me laugh), but I still feel like a parent who sends the first-born off to college. If that’s not a sign of getting old, what is?

Good luck to you, Lan - I know you don’t need it, because your talent, creativity and inspiration will take care of everything that normally would require luck. We’ll miss you and adore you at the same time! Say hi to Ben!

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The Linux community waited a long time for a new version of the Flash Player, but now it is finally available. Head on over to the Flash Player 9 area on labs.adobe.com to download your copy of Flash Player 9 for Linux. First reactions seem to indicate that the new release is more than welcome. Woohoo!

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In April I went to Belize on an Aggressor boat for scuba diving. Some folks who were with us on the boat created a short (20 min) video of the week. I uploaded it to Google Video last night and the results are right here. Yours truly appears several times, but with all the fuzziness going on it’s hard to identify myself.

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Last night my computer copied half of my photo collection across the network and imported it into Lightroom. Still works pretty well with those 12K photos in there. I’ll add the rest when I get a chance.

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This just came in from one of my co-workers:

YOU CAN MAKE A LOT OF MONEY IN THIS GAME (golf). JUST ASK MY EX-WIVES. BOTH OF THEM ARE SO RICH THAT NEITHER OF THEIR HUSBANDS WORK!
- Lee Trevino

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They have the cutest little boy with the cutest name (eh, Tobias), but they don’t post pictures of the little one online - tss, tss, tss. Do I have to do everything around here?

Here’s a shot of my brother Marcus with his son on the terrace of their new house a few weeks ago. I hope that dad got a haircut since then …

Tobias the 2nd in Germany plus dad Marcus

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