The rainy season came to Portland on Friday, and it looks like it's here to stay for a bit. So here are some bright, sunny pictures from around the 4th of July ☺.

The main entrance to Washington Park. In this view, you're looking OUT of the park.

The main entrance to Washington Park again, only this time in front of the column, again facing out of the park. I'm on the first floor of the orange apartment building that can be glimpsed between the trees & the white/gray Vista/St. Claire building, down towards the bottom of the hill.

I didn't take this one (you can tell because it's at a MUCH higher resolution than what my poor camera can support), but my sister did. And I was the one driving the car to get us to this point, so I kind of at least played a part in taking it... Anyway, this was at a viewpoint on US 101 on the Oregon Coast. Sorry I can't be any more specific than that.

Now playing: Emm Gryner – Public – Hello Aquarius

Here's a couple of links I found interesting on the Internet today. I'll try not to just turn this into a link blog, but I've had a few requests to aggregate some of my blog readings for people, so...

Judge strikes down parts of U.S. Patriot Act (go Portland!)

John P. Harvard goes Halo

The Etiquette of Death by Helicopter (okay, this one is kind of weird...)

The first day at Microsoft: A fender-bender

Now playing: Josh Ritter – The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter – Wildfires

"Insane Super Fast Tetris. Click HERE to watch." (well, obviously clicking there wont work, but that was the suggested "improvement" to this post) (clicking on the below links will work. unless the Internet is dead. again.)

Just video links, no actual content...

From Larry Osterman: http://blogs.msdn.com/larryosterman/archive/2007/09/12/got-tetris.aspx

From Emil, via YouTube search reading the comments after showing him the previous vid: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CUoviec-uY

(I've now tasked Emil with following up on his search with a bit of real world research. Right now we're thinking mandatory freshman dorm project...)

Now playing – Amy Millan - Honey from the Tombs - Wayward and Parliament

More pictures from Rose Festival Weekend (these are the LAST, I promise). Next up are pictures from the 4th of July when my sister came and visited.

Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Columbia River, near Rainier, Oregon.

Slightly different angle of the Lewis and Clark Bridge over the Columbia River. Taken from a lookout point on Highway 30 outside Rainier, Oregon (while it was raining/drizzling).

Some beach on Highway 101. For some reason I can't remember which one this was, but it was basically just a spot to pull off of on the road. I think it was between Warrenton and Seaside, but not sure now.

Nehalem Bay from another pullout on the 101. It was drizzling again by this point.

Now playing: Lifehouse – Who We Are – Broken

There's just something incredibly beautiful about being in a high location and looking out over a city at night.

There's also something terribly beautiful about having a clear night and being in a location with no outside light bleeding in, and then looking up and seeing all the stars (& planets & satellites (& planes)).

I should get up to the roof of my apartment building more often.

Now playing: KT Tunstall – Eye To The Telescope – Suddenly I See

I got my first ever iPod today. It's a silver iPod Nano (but not one of the new ones released today). It was a raffle prize from work for participating in a health-&-wellness ("let's try and cut employee health insurance costs by making them actually, you know, healthy to begin with!) program.

So here are my first impressions.

Unboxing

To be honest, this wasn't that intuitively obvious. I've heard all this hype about how easy Apple products are to open up, etc, but this one you had to peel off invisible tape before the plastic shell would open up. Nicer than having to cut it up, but still confusing to me. After opening it up, everything was pretty simple. I can't really say it's any better than opening up anything else…you open box, you remove contents. That's the whole story.

The Device

I like the form factor. Nice and thin. Silver looks good, but I think I'd prefer black. Silver just strikes me as oh-so-2003ish (the only other silver devices I have are my TC1000 and various accessories I've purchased in silver to go with it). The screen seems a bit small, but this generation of the Nano doesn't support video, so that's not really a big deal. The display is more than adequate to display track information and provide basic navigation. To be honest, the UI looks really nice on the screen; probably a combination of a good display and a good UI.

Not so hot on the click wheel design. Okay, let's be honest: I hate the click wheel. Let me get this straight – I have to move my fingers around in circles to actually DO anything with this input method. Umm…why can't I just press something and be done with it. If you don't think you can scroll through lots of stuff, try using the HDD6330. You start an action, like scrolling through your songs, and it accelerates as you hold down. Although WMP Mobile doesn't have functionality like that on my HTC StarTrek…but then again, I don't really need that on a 2GB device (although there are 345 tracks on my SD card, I organize them by, I don't know "Artist" and "Album" and "Genre", so it's still easy to navigate). My other problem with the wheel is that it seems much less accurate to me than using a D-pad. Maybe I've just been trained too well to use D-pads for navigation (EVERYTHING I own other than this iPod uses directional pads: phone, MP3 player, remotes, headunit in my car…).

Haven't taken a look at the headphones, and probably wont, since I really like the ones I have now. Also, I really miss the AC power adapter. It effectively means I can't use listen to these in bed, because I'll have to worry about accidentally falling asleep and not pausing/turning off the device, then find out the next morning that I've now drained the battery and wont be able to use it that day. I guess a lot of other devices are going this route, and it's irritating.

Connecting

The cable is nice – integrated clip to keep it from getting messy. Otherwise, it's USB, just plug it in, even shows up as a generic mass storage device. Nice. So does my phone. And my flash drives. And my MTP MP3 player. I can't really give props for doing the right thing when basically everything else I've worked with does the right thing (but oh the fun I'll have mocking the first device that DOESN'T behave properly!).

iTunes

Up until this point I'd say the iPod was okay. After trying to deal with iTunes for 2 days, I've started looking for an alternative sync program. If I can't find one I like, this device is going in the trash, because it'll be worthless. And yes, I know that's a very strong opinion about iTunes, but it has so many inconsistencies, problems, and is so resource intensive that I really don't see what alternative I have.

Hopefully in a few weeks I'll have a better feel for the iPod as a device, and I'll create an update with those my revised opinions then.

Now playing: Orbital – Live At Glastonbury 1994-2004 – Dr Who? (playing on the Zune software, not iTunes)

Some amusing links… (at least, I found them amusing, even though I don't use Ruby.) In particular, I liked the Java one, especially since I was dealing with a Spring idiosyncrasy at the time my PM pointed me to these…

Rails vs. Java

Rails vs. PHP

Rails vs. PHP

Rails vs. PHP

Rails vs. .NET

Now playing: Terra Naomi – Say It's Possible (Single) – Say It's Possible

For some reason I can never actually find these sites when I need them, and that always happens when I'm away from one of my computers. So here's a few links so that I can actually find this stuff when I need it.

KB917021: Description of the Wireless Client Update for Windows XP with Service Pack 2: Support article pointing to the hotfix needed to add WPA2 support to Windows XP (I sometimes support XP people (still), despite my vowing not to as soon as I switched over to Vista, okay?).

Comparison of different SQL implementations: REALLY useful article comparing SQL with PostgreSQL, DB2, SQL Server, MySQL, and Oracle implementations. I find it mostly useful for figuring out the differences between implementations so that I can get a basic operation to work on DB2 or Oracle (I'm most familiar with SQL Server).

Result Sets from Stored Procedures In Oracle: For some reason I can NEVER remember how to return query results from SPROC's on Oracle. Go figure.

An IKEA store just opened here in Portland (on Wednesday, actually). No, I haven't been out there yet. Waaaay too many people & too big of crowds to make it worthwhile.

But here's an IKEA related link anyway: http://www.boingboing.net/2007/07/28/ikea_opens_free_host.html (gotta love Boing Boing sometimes).

So, I neglected posting pictures (or anything) for a bit. So here's a big batch to make up for it. These are the rest of the series of pictures taken during the Rose Festival weekend in Portland. I have a couple more images from that weekend that were taken outside the city that will be posted back on the regular schedule (hopefully...but I kind of doubt it since my posting pattern seems to be "long silence, then tons of stuff").

USS Bunker Hill & USS Mobile Bay, Willamette River, Portland, Oregon (again)

Yes, they were all real Navy ships, so they had tight security, like the orange net thingy & armed patrol vessels circling.

DDG-83, USS Howard

Steel Bridge, across the Willamette River, Portland, Oregon

Now Playing: Stars - Heart - 09 Look Up