I like the little Apple iBook I bought in 2002 (just before Anthony was born), but the iBooks have a design flaw that causes a wire leading to the screen's backlight to become frayed and fail. It manifests itself with a “flaky” backlight that flickers when the screen angle is adjusted, getting worse and over the course of days or weeks until the screen just won't come on anymore.
It's a common problem.
My iBook had this problem while it was still under the extended warranty I'd bought, and was fixed, but then started acting up again a few months ago. I was busy [...]
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I haven't posted lately because I've been traveling.
We arrived in Ohio (for my brother Alan's wedding, on Friday) after a two-hour trip to the Kansai International Airport, checking in, an 11-hour flight to Chicago, half an hour of taxing on the runway, three-and-a-half hours of immigration/customs/layover, another hour and a half to get to Cleveland, then the 45 minutes to the hotel, and then another hour sorting out the room (there was the small matter of water dripping from the ceiling in our first room). In all told, it was about 24 hours between leaving Kyoto (at 2pm Kyoto time) and being able to hit [...]
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(L-R, Rear) Natalie Raiti, Alan Friedl, Bill Houser (best man), Michael Friedl (L-R, Center) Anthony Friedl, Kenneth Hartley (Front) Fr. Paul Schindler
My baby brother Alan got married yesterday (July 14th), to Natalie Raiti. “Baby brother” may be somewhat of a relative term, though, as he turns 35 next week. Natalie, though, was definately worth the wait.
Anthony was a ring bearer, along with a new friend, Kenneth (nephews of the groom and bride, respectively).

The bear that Anthony holds is Tuffy, Alan's best friend prior to meeting Natalie. Notice how Anthony tries to help out Tuffy by covering, with his right (our left) index [...]
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Yesterday was another day of travel, as we moved from Ohio to California.
Due to jet lag, I got about three hours of sleep and awoke at 3am. Fumie didn't do much better. Anthony awoke at 7am just as we were starting to drift back to sleep. Oh well, it looks to be a loooooong day ahead.
In the end, we arrived without too much trouble, but it was somewhat of an ordeal at times. Leaving Ohio
We called the hotel's front desk for luggage assistance (we had a lot) at 11am, but it was a busy time and they had no carts available (as [...]
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I want to give a big “thumbs up” to Pro Window & Carpet Cleaning of Mountain View, California (1-888-470-6623). A real-estate agent friend who uses them to give the houses he lists a thorough cleaning recommended them to clean my long-vacant house (full of dust and spiders and cooties).
I met the foreman at my place at 8:00 this morning, and he gave an estimate for cleaning all the floors, counter and furniture surfaces, wiping down the doors and baseboards and moldings, cleaning air vents, and a full workup of the bathrooms and the fridge. For all but one room (which was too full of stuff [...]
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Can anyone recommend a good preschool near Cupertino, CA (ZIP: 95014) that's open now and has availability through to the end of next month? The phone book is full of them, so we've started checking around, but by the time we get through them the summer will be over.
Besides the basics of clean, safe, caring, blah blah blah, it's important to us that the environment be predominantly Amerian English, since Anthony's English development is one of the reasons we're here. If most of the teachers and kids have thick accents with improper grammar, it wouldn't be the best environment for his English (his English might end [...]
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“Yuck Hwe”, that is.
Today we ate dinner at one of our favorite Bay-Area restaurants, the decidedly low key (one step above “hole in the wall”) Secret Garden Korean restaurant in Santa Clara. Although we hadn't been there in years, the waitress recognized us and immediately guessed correctly that we wanted to order Yuck Hwe (also written in other ways, such as “yukhoe” -- our menu had “Yuck Hwe” -- but in any case, pronounced similar to “YOU-kay”).
Yuck hew is raw marinated beef served very cold, with a raw egg on top, and julienned apple or pear (the beef itself is julienned as well). [...]
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(wow, my third post of the day -- rare for me)
My parents and sister have used TracFone prepaid wireless phones for years, so I thought I'd give them a try to fill my cell phone needs while in America. We'll be here for six weeks, and then from time to time in years to come.
There are three cost components to using TracFone: you must buy a phone, buy service time, and buy minutes. The latter two are combined into minutes that expire some months or years after you buy them.
Last weekend, while still in Ohio, I stopped by [...]
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I've finally finished the writing and production of the Third Edition of my book, Mastering Regular Expressions (published by O'Reilly Media). I'd been working on it since the early fall, and finished the day before my travels started earlier this month.
This third edition is 58 pages longer than the second edition, and now reaches 542 pages in length. The main changes from the second edition are a new, 48-page chapter on PHP, and a rewritten/expanded Java chapter taking into account the many java.util.regex changes between Java 1.4 and Java 1.5/Java 1.6.
I've not yet updated the book's web site to reflect MRE3 changes, but I'll get [...]
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It was HOT today, hitting 103°F (39.5°C) here in Silicon Valley, staying there much of the afternoon. Opening the door to the outside felt like what I'd imagine opening the door to a blast furnace might feel like. At least the humidity was low, and, as an added bonus, there were no rolling blackouts, as we had a few years ago.
Today's heat set a new record high temperature for the date. The previous high was a relatively chilly 96°F (35.5°C).
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Today it's much cooler, only 79F (26C) in the shade at the moment. The last few had been very hot, surpassing 100F (38C) and causing the threat of rolling blackouts. (Some places did have blackouts because local transformers couldn't handle the load.)
When bought my new MacBook, I opted for the 80 gig drive, rather than the standard 60 gig, to give myself plenty of space. Thus, it is with great shock that I find it's already getting full.
Part of it could be the 20GB of videos for Anthony, the 21GB of images from my brother's wedding last week, or the 12GB of unprocessed photos that piled [...]
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(This post is mostly for the search engines, to help others looking for the solution that this post provides) Note that some of the details presented in this post, such as the database filename and the actual schema itself, are for the "beta 3" version of Lightroom, and don't apply to Lightroom Version 1.0 or later.
Lightroom, Adobe's high-volume photo workflow application, stores all kinds of user-preference and per-image data in an SQLite database. As of the Beta 3 release, the database is stored in one file, the Mac filename being “/Users/username/Pictures/Lightroom/Lightroom B3 Library.aglib”
If you're technically-minded and want to peek at the database directly, you might try [...]
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I wrote and still maintain Yahoo::Search, a Perl package for accessing Yahoo!s Search API. It's included as part of SDK, and also available on CPAN.
Just a week ago, Yahoo! pushed out a new version of the SDK, including the most recent version of Yahoo::Search. A few days later Yahoo! made a perfectly legal change to the XML they send back that is, unfortunately, incompatible with the mini XML parser I use in Yahoo::Search. To make matters worse, my package's error handling was ungracefully horrible, and the error messages were worthless.
I've pushed out a new version of Yahoo::Search, 1.7.10, to correct these problems. The next time [...]
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For the week we were in Ohio for my brother's wedding, we stayed at the Sheraton Suites in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio. The hotel was memorable, both for its good experiences and bad. The Good
The lobby is clean and nice, but not gaudy.
There's an indoor pool, which, while not spectacular, was plenty fine for Anthony to enjoy himself in. Towels were provided, which was a nice plus.
It's the most expensive hotel in the area, and has a reputation to match. When you mention to [...]
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