Love this:

Found at Pegasus Coffee Bar, the coffee shop on the first floor of the Dexter Horton Building (where Redfin’s HQ is located).

I’m still geeked over my new iPhone.  I can’t believe I went this long without an internet-capable phone and a data plan.

The other day while riding the bus to work I downloaded the iPhone Photoshop application.  I took a random photo looking out from the bus and messed around for a few minutes trying to spiff it up.  I’m not really any good with graphics, but this turned out nice IMO…

Before:

After:

Although I have to say that I’m still not a huge fan of the iPhone’s camera.  I have a really hard time holding the iPhone steady enough to get crisp pictures consistently.

Some Ayn Rand books would fit really well between these book-ends:

Found in Kasala.

Pnina and I used to live in downtown Seattle, in a condo with a partial water view (of the Puget Sound).  We really liked that place and we got to see some beautiful sunsets from our balcony.

Now we live in a different apartment outside of downtown.  It’s located up on a hill and it faces east, so now we have views of Bellevue and the Cascades.  Instead of sunsets, we now get some incredible sunrises.  I’m not sure, but I think I prefer this eastbound view over the westbound view we had before.

Our view early in the morning:

Our view in the afternoon (during fall when the trees were changing colors):

Pnina and I have a two cats: Wesley and Buttercup.  In general they are pretty good cats, but they do have nails and they use them.  In particular they like to scratch protruding edges/corners: the corner of a couch, the corner of a wall, etc.  We used to have a set of black leather couches but we donated them before our big trip because they were in pretty bad shape (not worth storing).  The cats have even removed some layers off our dry-wall!

When we returned from the big trip we bought a new couch, and this time we decided do something to protect it.  Of course, one possible solution is to declaw our cats, and I have to say that we really thought about this option a lot.  Declawing is a highly contentious issue.  People who are against it think you are truly evil if you declaw your cats.  I don’t see it quite that way.  After all, if you have a male cat it’s considered perfectly OK to chop off his balls, so how bad is declawing in comparison?  But anyhow, I’m not going to get into that debate here.  I will say that if you’re interested in the topic you might want to read this article: http://www.veterinarypartner.com/Content.plx?P=A&S=0&C=0&A=568.  And I will also say that Pnina and I decided to spend a little more time trying some alternatives first, before going the declawing route.

So the alternative that we’ve been using for the last couple of months is to put these plastic caps on our cat’s nails.  The product is called Soft Claws (http://www.softclaws.com/).  For just under $20 you get a package that includes 40 plastic caps and two glue tubes (yes, you actually glue the caps onto the nails).  It’s kind of like Lee Press-On Nails for cats   Minor note – as far as I can tell, cats have 18 nails (10 in the front, 8 in the back) so it’s a little strange that the package contains 40 nails, but whatever.

Do the cats like the nails?  No, not really.  Here’s a video of Buttercup just after we put new caps on her nails:

Note the way that she shakes her paws – hilarious!    (is that mean to say?)

And I  guess the big question is – does it work?

Well, kind of.  We haven’t seen the cats actually trying to scratch our couch yet.  This might be partly because, in addition to using these nail caps, we pretty much surrounded the couch with various cardboard-style scratchers.  We have seen the cats trying to scratch walls and doors, and the nail caps certainly help – the cats can’t really damage anything with the caps on.

But therein lies the problem.  The cats spend a lot of time trying to lick and bite the caps to pull them off.  Sometimes we find the caps lying around on the carpet, and at other times we don’t see the shed caps at all (which leaves us to assume that the cats swallowed them, and we’re not sure if this is a good thing – swallowing plastic and glue).

At first we took some time every couple of days to replace the shed caps, but that really takes a lot of dedication.  Lately it’s been more like once a week.  Because we’re lazy, the cats generally have one or two exposed nails, and that’s the cause of the damage we still see.

Oddly enough, the most apparent damage comes from their rear paws.  The damage comes when the cats are lounging on our couch and they hear the front door opening (which indicates that we’re home and therefore that food will soon be served).  As they leap off the couch, they sometimes leave scratch marks from the nails whose caps have been shed.

So the problem has been reduced, but certainly not solved completely.  At this point we’re getting used to the idea that we’ll keep these couches until our cats pass on, and then we’ll get new couches.  Is that a morbid thought?  What can I say?  We’re practical people.

This is an interesting story about a gal, Lily, who traveled overland from Egypt into Israel.  The border police asked her a bunch of questions and grew suspicious at her answers.  They asked her to wait while they verify her information.  Moments later they made an announcement on the PA telling people not to worry if they hear gunshots – they need to blow up a suspicious item.  Then they came back and told Lily that they had to blow up her laptop.  Only they didn’t exactly blow it up – they just put three bullets through it, and amazingly, the hard drive survived:

The police later apologized and offered to reimburse Lily for the damage.  But of course the damage in PR/image is much harder to repair.

So the big question is whether they were right to do this.  They did find evidence that made her look suspicious.  To quote Lily: “an Arabic phrasebook, a journal entry that mentioned a Palestinian(yes, they even flipped through my journal), stamps from Syria, Qatar and the UAE, Palestinians in Palestine guidebook, and a map a friend had drawn with a main street in Jerusalem, the central bus station and my intended hostel”.  Also, it sounds like Lily found their no-funny-business interrogation technique kind of funny, and maybe they didn’t appreciate her lack of seriousness.  Lily says that they did not ask her for her username/password, to check for evidence in the computer.  It’s not clear to me if they were worried that the laptop contained a bomb (they had already run it through a scanner) or whether the worried that it contained bad data.  Also, I’ve heard people say that she left her bag unattended, something that you definitely never do in an Israeli border, though Lily contends that they asked her to leave the bag in place.

Altogether, it seems like a situation gone wrong.  The Israeli border people were overly nervous because she looked suspicious and they’d probably seen/heard enough horror stories about real terrorists at the border.  Lily probably didn’t address them in the serious tone they would have preferred, and she probably wasn’t up-front about all the suspicious items she was carrying (perhaps she was thinking that she’ll get through the border faster if nobody notices those things).  And there was probably a breakdown in communication about whether or not the bag should be left unattended.

More about this story:

Engadget article: http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/16/border-security-guards-kill-literally-kill-a-macbook/

Lily’s own blog post: http://lilysussman.wordpress.com/2009/11/30/im-sorry-but-we-blew-up-your-laptop-welcome-to-israel/

An interview with Lily about her experience:

I have a friend who traveled in Israel and also had a bad experience crossing overland borders.  She didn’t have her possessions shot, but they did keep her at the border for a long time asking her questions.  In her case they were suspicious because she had traveled to Iran (the birthplace of her religion – she is Zoroastrian).  It’s really a shame that good people have these bad experiences trying to get into Israel.

The Microsoft Office team announced that in the 2010 version of Outlook, emails will be displayed using the Microsoft Word rendering engine.  This means that many HTML-formatted emails will be severely broken (they will look all messed up).  A group of people decided to take action and try to convince Microsoft to change their plans by putting together this beautiful website: http://www.fixoutlook.org.  In the background they have a constantly updating wall of tiles showing twitter posts supporting their cause.  It’s very well done.

Credit: heard about this from Kevin Jonson at Redfin.

Credit: image from http://www.osnews.com/images/comics/wtfm.jpg, heard about it from Kevin Jonson at work (http://www.linkedin.com/in/kcjonson).

http://stewdio.org/pong/

This fun little app spins up 3 small browser windows, one for the puck and two for the paddles:

Credit: heard about it from Sasha Aickin at work (http://twitter.com/xander76)

I meant to post this one a while  ago, but better late than never…

This is a video simulation showing what might happen to the Seattle viaduct (highway 99) when the next big earthquake strikes.

http://www.autoblog.com/2009/10/30/video-seattle-earthquake-viaduct-simulation-released-timing-po/

Pnina and I own a condo just a little further down Alaskan Way from the location shown in this photo — the viaduct runs right behind our building.  So the people in our building have taken a deep interest in the city’s plans for solving the viaduct problem.  The interesting thing is that there’s no consensus.  Everyone knows that the construction period will be long and painful, and that during that time it will be difficult  to sell or rent units in the building.  It seems that the people who are thinking about selling in the short-term want a quick-fix solution, while the people who plan to stay longer want the “right” solution.  Of course, there are also the usual liberal/conservative viewpoints about spending money.  Anyhow, Pnina and I are in the tunnel-camp.  We’re not saying we trust the government to deliver the tunnel under-budget or on-time, but we think that the end result will be worth the short-term pain.  Oh, and by the way, it sounds like people who live near the viaduct will be expected pay higher property taxes because they will be most likely to benefit – property values will probably take a nice jump if the viaduct is put underground.