Boise

A busy evening in Boise

August 14, 2008

A busy night in Boise tonight. So many great meetings and opportunities to choose from. The Idaho Press Club has a forum on the impact of the internet on television. Meanwhile over here at the Washington Group building the Boise Web Technologies meetup is hearing about PHPUnit testing and Zend Framework from Brad Benner and Rich Benton.

Boise needs an Apple store

July 31, 2008

An Apple store is so very desperately needed in Boise. Please Apple if you're listening don't leave us stuck between long drives and our unsatisfactory local choices. Sure we have Boise Mac Life which looks like a great store. When you look a little deeper, though, the advice has been suspect (should one really wait six months to start using Leopard?), the prices are inflated (the "cash discount" price is the list price and the list price shown is higher) and the service leaves us wanting.

Earlier this week we returned home and the MacBook hard drive promptly died. When it came back today it had the wrong OS on it -- a problem I've never encountered with Apple's service directly. Sure it had a nice embroidered Marware keyboard cover, but the time I'm left looking at that waiting to reinstall the operating system on a blank disk just so I can then do the file recovery is making me not like it so much. (Though I sense there are some Drupal keyboard covers in the offing).

Solar Green Lawn Care

May 6, 2008

Solar Green Lawn CareHow does one green up their lawn while being true to keeping their carbon footprint small? We've got the push mower but it just doesn't leave the grass quite long enough and is tough to keep the blades sharp for really clean cutting. There have been times we've thought about going the lawn service route, but the noise, exhaust and annoyance factor is quite high.

Enter Solar Green Lawn Care. We recently signed up with this great new service. What's so different? Solar Green uses battery powered equipment that is charged from their solar-powered trailer. A few times a year they plug in to the house to run the edger, the one piece of non-battery powered equipment they have. It's a terrific concept and I'm quite happy to have such a service here in Boise.

On top of all that they have very reasonable rates and should be able to keep them reasonable even when the price of gas continues to spiral upwards.

The second third of life

April 5, 2008

Cannondale F5Singing Phil Vassar's song Tim McGraw tells us:

I think I'll take a moment, celebrate my age
The ending of an era and the turning of a page
Now it's time to focus in on where I go from here
Lord have mercy on my next thirty years

I'm measuring not in 30-year spans but in a third of life spans. Having just put up the score card on the first third it is time to turn to the second third. My family was very nice and procured some long-desired toys that will help focus my next third on staying in better shape. The Cannondale parking area now has another member. Sadly, it is also the first Cannondale that I have owned which does not bear the "Made in USA" label. The last Cannondales I purchased came with a manual declaring their proud factory and a video telling the company's tale. Granted the video was a VHS tape which I would have to hunt for a way to play now days but it remains a sad marker on the changing of the times and I contributed to it. Cannondale and Trek among others do still make bikes in the USA but they are the higher end bikes.

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