I'm headed to Las Vegas this Monday through Wednesday. I'm going with one of my best friends, it's something we try to do once a year, especially since we don't work together anymore. We'll play a lot of poker, and Eric has told me that his last trip he learned to play craps. So I suspect I'll be learning to play craps this time, apparently it's a ton of fun.

Poker is my favorite thing to do there. Nothing high stakes really, just a little $2/$4 limit Texas Hold 'Em. Keep an eye on my camera blog, I'll be updating it with random pictures from our trip. We fly out Monday morning @ 8:30 AM and come back Wednesday night around 11PM.

I'm looking forward to three days with no kids, is that bad? I'm sure that when I get back I'll be glad to get home.

I purchased the device from Newegg for just under $200. Seems like a good deal, and I'm impressed with the manufacturing of the device, the thing is heavy and it's solid. It comes with USB, CAT5, and power cables, pretty nice for the price considering when you buy a printer, you don't even get a USB cable.

The NAS drive arrived around lunch time today. I was working from home so that I could sign for it when it arrived. I immediately took it out to the garage, and put it with all my networking gear. I unboxed it, plugged in the CAT5 and power, and went back inside. I sat down at my laptop and ran AngryIPScanner, looked for the new device, and opened up Internet Explorer and connected to the IP address over HTTP.

There was a page with an administration link, and a list of all the current shares that were setup. I clicked the administration link, and was challenged to enter security credentials, a guess of admin/admin and I was in. First order of business, change the admin password. Then I renamed the device "NAS". So now all my network devices can see a 'thing' called NAS on the network. It even picked up DHCP, DNS, and the gateway all automatically, nice.

I created three shares initially in the the LaCie interface, itunes, photos, and misc. I then terminaled into my desktop machine where the majority of my media and photos are. I mapped a drive to the NAS itunes share, and after entering the userid and password, I was connected. I started to copy all of my itunes and photo files to the respective shares on the NAS, I did the same with my laptop.

I copied Gigabytes of data to the device, it pretty much finished around 4:00 PM. So the copy process of almost 50GB was not too slow really. Here are some screen shots of the device's user interface, it's not glamorous, but it's clean, and makes sense.

Impressions
The thing just feels good when you hold it. Like it's really solid and engineered well. Setup took me less than a minute. I'm going to post more about the details of the device in the coming weeks. My plan is to put all of our media onto it, music, photos, movies, etc. Thus having an entry point for all computers on my network to access said data. I'd also like to create some sort of automated backup to it as well.

I have not installed the LaCie software yet, but I'm curious what's on the disk, so I probably will. More on that in a later post. So far, I'm totally stoked for the amount of money I spent, for what I've actually gotten. How often can you say that?

Screenshots of the User Interface (web based from the device)

Here is the status screen that shows the shares, and what services can connect to them.

Network details

Disk usage metrics (just after I started copying to it)

Service status screen

He's not walking yet, but if you distract him, he'll stand there for like a minute before he 'realizes' he's standing.

Pretty funny.

I just went to the Apple site, and went through the quick steps to get my $100 credit. If you need to get your credit, go here, and type in your cell phone number, and serial number. The serial number of your iPhone can be found inside the Settings > General > About section. Once you have entered these two items, you're sent an SMS message containing an code.

Simply enter this code, and your phone number into step two on the web site, and that's it. You are presented with a page that has your $100 credit. Just print it out for use in a brick-and-mortar store, or copy and paste the credit number and pin for use on the Apple Online Store.

I was going to get a new Nano, but opted for a iPhone dock that will connect to our home stereo (with remote!), a 2nd pair of earbuds with the little button on them for answering calls and advancing tracks, and lastly a $25 iTunes gift card. My total cost after the rebate was $3.

One of the things I think the Internet is great for is getting information on large ticket purchases. There is a multitude of resources for researching purchases. Product write ups, manufacturer web sites, and lastly (and arguably the best) consumer opinion. I really like sites that have a rating scale that aggregate the results of every person's review. Sometimes reviews contains tidbits of information that are not available in the product documentation, nor disclosed by the manufacturer. Sometimes it's a special setting to use, or it's a tip on what or what not to do. Other times it's a gripe that saves you from a huge headache.

These are the good reviews and there are reviews written by people that have no understanding of why they're submitting a review, yet alone how to write a review. I'm not saying that I'm the review-master. But when you're scanning through a ton of reviews, and you read something that's completely unrelated or not germane to the product, your time is being wasted.

I was recently looking for a few items online, some purchases I'm considering.  The first item is a Canon Zoom Lens, an "L" series lens which is their top of the line, semi-professional lens. The one I'm looking at (drooling over) is priced at around $600 (retail price is over $1000) which is quite an expensive purchase. So naturally, I want to glean as much information as I can. While this is an entry level lens (read low end) in the "L" series, I still want to ensure that I know what I'm getting into. Looking at Amazon's reviews I see:

So it seems like it's got a favorable rating among people that have reviewed it. Over 100 reviews, cool. So now I'm really interested in people that have given it one, or two stars. Let's see why they didn't like it so much. I start to look for lower reviews, and see if I can come across a reason why it might have some downsides, and I come across this.

Are you kidding me? This review has nothing to do with the lens. So the guy gives the lens a two star review? What an idiot. What's even more shocking, that I just noticed, is that 4 people found the review helpful? WTF?

Another purchase I'm considering is a NAS (Network Attached Storage) drive to keep all my music, video, and photo media on. With a device like this, I'll be able to access the data from any machine on my network, and free up this space on my computers. I will probably even be able to use it as a backup device. While this device is not expensive as the previous, the function of this one is almost more important to me, it's something I'm likely to use almost daily.

So I'm considering a LaCie 301138U 500GB Ethernet Disk mini NAS. It retails at newegg for just shy of $200. The reviews are almost all favorable, and I like how newegg lays it out. Looks like 80% of the people gave it a high rating (8 of 10) and 20% of the people said it was average (2 of 10). After reading each review since there were only 10, it seems like a good deal for me, and I'll give it a shot. Newegg is really good about returns, so if it does not work out, I'll return it.

All of the reviews were written well, nobody complained about FedEx or anything stupid like that. I'll have a post soon about setting up iTunes and media and sharing them between workstations on a network. It seems like it should be really simple, but my guess is that I'll run into some issues.

Our fax/combo/laser printer device finally canned out. Since my wife is doing a part-time teaching gig, we needed to have a reliable printer so she can print out her class materials. Looking at laser printers, I found that color laser has come down to a price point that is very affordable. So after a little research online, I'm giving the Brother HL4040CN Color Laser Printer a shot. The c|net review alone sold me on it.

So in my research of Color Laser Printers, I've determined the following factors to be things to consider if you're thinking about getting one.

• Cost
• Toner Replacement Cost
• Speed
• Duty Cycle
• Features
• Quality

There are HP color laser printers in the $200 - $300 dollar range. Sounds tempting, but look into the toner replacement and feature set, and you'll quickly read horror stories of $500 toner replacement costs, crummy quality, long print times, and lame features.

I think the Brother printer we've purchased does a good job in all arenas. The printer itself is normally priced at $400, I recently saw it with a $100 mail in rebate, and decided the barrier to entry was low enough to take a shot. After playing with it in the store, looking at the demo pages it printed, I brought the 65lb. beast home.

It actually looks better aesthetically than the previous printer, takes up about the same amount of space, but is realllllly heavy! I opted to purchase a spare black toner cartridge because the sales person said the toner cartridges it came with are only 1/3 full, I'm not sure I buy that, because I can't find that documented anywhere, so part of me feels an upsell to pad someone's commission.

Cost - for a standalone laser printer, it's not the cheapest, but throw in color and the features that it has, I think it's a great price. Throw on the $100 rebate, and now you're at $300. According to c|net you can probably find it online even cheaper, just make sure the rebate will work! We needed it right away, so I couldn't shop around too much.

Toner Replacement Cost - Black Brother Toner was $52 for a cartridge that will do roughly 3000 black/white pages. The color toner cartridges, a bit more at roughly $70 per color, Cyan, Magenta, and Yellow. Compared to other manufacturers, this was one of the cheaper toner replacements.

Speed - I was shocked when I printed some of the first pages on this thing. While I have not timed it, pages come out WAY faster than I would have expected. Black and white only come out almost instantly. I printed a full 8 x 10 photo, and it took less than 20 seconds? Compared to some of the HP printers I saw in the store, this thing is blazing fast.

Duty Cycle - The duty cycle for this printer is something crazy like 35,000 pages per month, not something I probably need to worry about on any printer I would have considered.

Features - The printer has some nice features that others in this price range don't have. My favorite is Network printing capabilities. Just plug a network cable into it, and connect to the built in web server to configure it for network printing. Sweet. The model above this one has wireless capabilities and duplex printing, this one has 'manual' duplex printing, meaning you flip the page and press a button. Another nice feature is an LCD screen that has the toner levels displayed so you can always see where you're at. The last thing that's kind of cool, but a tad gimicky, is a USB port allowing you to plug a flash drive/memory key and print PDF or photo files off the device, with no computer interaction. It will even print a file manifest of what is on the key/drive, kind of cool. 64MB of onboard RAM, wow, my last multifunction printer had like 4MB? It also has a nice flat paper tray that accommodates up to 250 sheets of paper, no lame standing paper slot.

Quality - Black and white text is sharp, clear, and easy to read. I have not seen any random artifacts around the page anywhere. Not much more to say. Color printing is great too, I printed a "Webkinz Adoption Certificate" for my daughter from her Webkinz site, and it looked exactly like it did online. The colors are pretty close to what you see on the monitor, and are solid, I have not seen any patches that are lighter/darker. Printing an 8 x 10 photo on copy paper looks a bit more 'yellow' than the original image, and you see some banding effects, but this thing is not designed to print photos.

So far I'm completely happy with the purchase. We'll see what happens as the supplied toner starts to run low.

I'm an early adopter. And on the day of a rant post about the price drop of the iPhone and about how bad Apple sucks, how they stick it to their customers, blah blah blah.... I'm posting just the opposite. I know being an early adopter comes with a risk, price, features, models, etc. can all change in the blink of an eye.

Yesterday, Apple announced a $200 price cut in the Apple iPhone just 69 days after release. So after instant messages from friends all day long chastising my early adopter mentality, and laughing at my loss of $200, My favorite IM was this "You got powned by steve jobs".

Today, Apple steps up and announced a $100 in-store credit for people that purchased the iPhone at the release price, and that were not getting some sort of rebate or retail discount. That's me! So now I can load up a $100 iTunes card, or put it towards one of those new Nanos.

Let's be honest here, Apple really didn't have to do anything. They offered a product at a price I was willing to pay (and stand in line for all day). They had no obligation to make any concessions. Let's face it, typically the ultimate goal of a company is to be profitable. I'm sure this move will not be appreciated by shareholders and investors.

It's nice to see the gesture, while it's not $200 cash, it's really better than nothing, and will keep me as a continued customer.

Just dial 1-800-466-4411 and you're connected to the Google voice search technology. Just say your city and state, and then say the name of the place you're looking for, or a category like 'Home Improvement Stores'. The Google voice search service will repeat all of your input so you know it's correct. Once you've decided on a match, or if it matches your criteria exactly, it will connect you to the business/person for free. You can just say "SMS" or "Text Message". Before I could even put my phone down, a SMS message was delivered with the following information:

"Bethany Village Grill"
503-533-7736
4876 NW Bethany Blvd. #L1
Portland, OR 97229
Google Map Link that linked it to a map!

This screen protector is simply the best I've ever used. Over a month of use, in and out of my pockets several times per day, and not a single sign of impending failure. No peeling, no scratches, nothing wrong. This thing is as clear as day one.

Sounds really simple huh? I was creating a little tray application that did some screen scraping of HTML pages.

I ended up with a large string (scraped HTML data) that I needed to display on a Form.

This is what I came up with, use the WebBrowser control, but it does not take a string as input, I ddin't really want to save the string to a file on the disk.

   this.webBrowser1.Navigate("about:blank");
   HtmlDocument doc = this.webBrowser1.Document;
   doc.Write(strHtmlString);