This weekend I took a short trip to California to visit the family and a couple friends. As you may know I’m currently living in Austin, Texas but I’m originally from California so it was great to be back. I haven’t been back since Christmas time.

While I use my Bose headphones at home and at work, I finally had the chance to put them into use on the plane. I have taken flights before this but last time I forgot my MP3 player. They really helped on the plane and made the trip much more pleasant. I was riding ExpressJet airlines and they have XM radio in each of their seats. I was able to easily plugin my own headphones without any special adapters which was really nice. On my return flight I used my headphones on my laptop to watch some videos. If you fly often I definitely recommend a pair of these.

I rode ExpressJet for the first time as well and I was pleased for the most part. My flight was direct, and I love direct flights. Also they pay their pilots bonuses for having their flights on time, so it’s equally as important for them to get you where you’re going on time as it is to you.

Cheers

I like keeping my outside lights on during the evening. One problem with this is that sometimes I forget to turn them off in the morning which really wastes electricity.

Recently I was looking for a solution for my problem and I came across this switch. Don’t get confused with the name, it doesn’t use Solar panels or anything, it still connects directly to the electricity in your house.

The switch is made by a company called Aube. The product works great, but I called their tech support to ask a couple questions about the wiring and they were extremely rude. They are based up in Canada and I had to specify for support in English, default is French. Regardless of their rude and useless tech support I was still able to figure out the wiring. My lights are configured with a 3-way switch with two switches and two lights which required me to use a jumper wire on the second switch. I called to ask a couple clarifying questions, but it didn’t help. I’m not an electrician, but I play one on TV.

I purchased my switch from smarthome.com. The price was reasonable, and they got it delivered to my house very quickly.

This is the switch I bought:

http://www.smarthome.com/4257W.html

Here is the replacement cover I had to get a long with it:

http://www.smarthome.com/8572w.html 

I took a snapshot of my finished product which is posted above. Now my lights automatically come on in the evening and turn off in the morning. I’m liking it!

I made this new category called Home Improvement and will be posting various things I do to my house to upgrade it. Other than some landscaping this is the first official thing I’ve done to my house.

Cheers

If you’re interested in checking out the office workspaces of other companies you should check out http://www.officesnapshots.com/.

This site mainly tours popular tech companies and gives a little tour around the offices. I always admire nice office setups because most of the offices I’ve worked in haven’t been that nice.

They also have videos in some of their posts.

This is really funny. I had to deal with the pain of card catalogues and encyclopedia sets.

As little as I’ve blogged in March, I’m surprised to see that it had the largest number of visits of my site history. In March of 2008 the site received 15,427 unique hits. It keeps growing which is always a good thing.

Recently I’ve been more interested in focusing on personal experiences with technology, and reduced the amount of tech news that is simply regurgitated which most tech blogs are about. Although I still share things that I’m really interested in, such as the news of the new Dell notebooks coming out.

For a period of time I was doing a lot of sponsored posts which were written blog posts on products or services. I’ve recently stopped doing those posts for many reasons:

• They’re very time consuming. Typically I’d have to research what I was going to write about, and sometimes coming up with 300 words on a topic was a struggle.
• Money was dictating what I was putting on my site instead of what I really believe in. Sometimes I would see an opportunity to make 35 dollars or so based on writing only 100 words and I’d just do it. I feel this really reduced credibility of my site.
• While these extra posts didn’t hurt my site traffic (It actually helped), I lost readership. I would notice people that subscribed to my blog were starting to unsubscribe.

The money was great. In 2007 I made close to 3,000 dollars doing this type of advertising. The extra money was great, but it’s not where I want to take my site anymore, plus I need to utilize my time differently. I have removed all the advertised posts I have written in the past from the site. I still plan on leaving my pay per click advertising up. It’s not too intrusive in my opinion and covers the basic costs such as having paid hosting.

Thanks for visiting the site. Cheers.

This post is only for people that speak LOLspeak.

Well I’ve been growing some grass in my backyard and mice love grass seed. This fat mouse has been terrorizing the seeds. I could easily kill this mouse because it’s fat and slow. I’ve literally stood over the mouse with a shovel in my hands, but I can’t do it. I’m hoping eventually it will just move on.

I snapped this picture this evening, and added some LOLmouse to it. :)