A tribute to Pluto

Greg is doing a school project about our solar system this week. He has to create a model showing the sun and all nine planets. Nine planets? Just this week, astronomers decided that Pluto is no longer a real planet. Instead, it will be reclassified in a new category of "dwarf planets".

Greg's teacher, mr. LaPorte was unfazed. He sent a note home that, despite the astronomers decision, he would like the students to include Pluto in their project. And so Greg did. As a tribute to Pluto, he colored the tiny sphere nice and purple.

Window washers

My office is on the 27th floor of a glass tower called the King. It's right next to the Queen. The two are called King and Queen because they resemble a pair of chess pieces.

But the towers get dirty and their glass surface needs to be washed from time to time. A team of window washers will descend from the top of the tower armed with gallons of windex. They're dangling from a single rope swinging from window to window. Here's a picture I took from our office today. I'd rather be playing a game of chess.

Later... with Jools Holland

My new favorite TV channel is Rave. It's one of 15 or so extra HDTV channels that Dish Networks added when it started distributing Voom. And my favorite show on Rave is Later... What other show will feature Mori Kante, the Arctic Monkeys and Anita Baker in one episode. When watching Later... today, Sammy was appalled by the lipstick and hairdo of The Cure's Robert Smith. "That sure makes an ugly girl", he said.

Google in Redmond

Who would think that the king of web advertising would go outdoors? That's exactly what Google is doing in Redmond, WA. Microsoft is headquartered in Redmond and Google is after their engineers to develop Google Video, Google Talk, and Google Maps. Google thinks there's a better chance to find these engineers in the Redmond Town Center than on the web.

Back to school

After a loooooong vacation, Greg and Sammy went back to school this morning.

Helping DVD players become smarter

How can simple appliances become so complicated? Yesterday, our two months old Toshiba DVD player died after a power surge. Actually, it did not die completely. It just did not play DVDs anymore. Audio CDs and Video CDs still worked fine. Bummer. It was capable of playing DVDs from all regions, and it was able upconvert DVDs to HDTV.

All this stuff you need to worry about. The movie industry came up with this great idea of carving the world up into regions. North American DVDs are region 1. So are most players that are sold here. These players won't play the DVDs I receive from Holland, which is in region 2. Neither do they play DVDs that Ina buys in Indonesia. This regions nightmare spawned a slew of businesses specialized in selling region free DVD players, so people can enjoy movies from their home countries.

While searching the web for ways to cure our Toshiba, I discovered that many ordinary DVD players can be made region free. So I re-installed our old Philips player and found the procedure to make it region free on Google. Victory! Now I just need to get the Toshiba back to work.