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Don’t get me wrong, I use and generally like the dictation abilities of iOS6, but Siri continues to be pretty useless to me. Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon. Ok, so I am a curmudgeon. But whatever. Anyway, I’ve discovered that Siri is terrible at doing what I ask, but seems to have no problem understanding Mallory and her non-word babbling. Sometimes she gets a hold of my phone and has already learned how to cue up Siri, and that she should “talk” after the sound and that Siri will understand. A recent exchange:

It would seem Mallory likes Siri’s voice birthday and some real estate person in Orlando and knows something about Android 10 or at least wants to know something about Android 10. Which is impressive since the current release is only 4.x. I hope she’s not getting confused with Blackberry’s latest offering.

And with that, I present to you the effects of low humidity and fleece blankets.

For those of us who have to work tomorrow, boo! For those of us that get to celebrate Washington’s birthday with a day off: yeah!

Too dark to be useful. However, here’s a webcam from the NY Times building in NYC. It’s pretty nice because along with being able to see the Empire State building and Chrysler in the background, the tall building on the left with the antenna mast on top is the home of WBGO’s primary transmitter.  Still there and doing it’s job!

Ok, doing streaming video maxes out our mac mini, so I’m doing a static shot (refreshed every minute) instead.

With beautiful weather on Friday, we hopped down to nearby Branch Brook Park to check out the cherry blossom trees.

And more and more Mallory is loving jumping up and down in her, uh, jumper thingy.

I’m sitting here listening to Bruce Springsteen sing about Santa Claus coming to town as I type this…

First official winter Nor’Easter hit last night, bringing snow to the area – before Halloween! The state of NJ declared an emergency, and the concert I was to record last night was cancelled (albeit 20 minutes before it was to start, meaning I still had been there for 6 hours of setup and soundcheck). Lots of trees down on my way home, so I suggested we go out for a walk to check the neighborhood. Naturally, we all had to get bundled up:

(from here on known as the purple starfish cosmonaut outfit) (sorry for the blurry photo, very low light + fussy baby…). Had some large-ish trees down, closing down streets.

Interesting to see the Halloween displays covered in snow and mush. (Click the photo for the big version so you can appreciate the detail of the setup.)

With most of the leaves still on trees and bushes, they were bearing a lot of weight and looking pretty sad.

This morning’s light gave us a better look at everything. Looks like we only had one big branch snap off the big pin oak in the front. The neighbor’s bushes to the left are about as half tall as they should be.

Here’s looking the other way down our street.

Here’s our patch of bamboo as seen from the train tracks. There’s still some standing, but most of it is bent over under the snow.

We’re still having large clumps of snow come off trees and hit the house, so it sounds like we’re being bombed. But otherwise we seem to have survived pretty well. Time will tell how the trees regroup. A nice practice for winter!

Update – I’ve stopped for the night, dark = not much to see.

Just for the fun of it, I’ve set up the webcam to look out the West-facing office window. You can view the (right now rather unexciting) live video below (be warned, you have to deal with advertisements in the video below). Oh, and I killed the sound, visual only.

Went to the store last night to get some provisions, and off all the things there, it was only the bread aisle that was completely picked over. No bread whatsoever. The flour in the baking aisle was still well-stocked. I think to myself: I’m just going to make some anyway. Don’t these people know how easy it is to make bread?

Turned on the ACs tonight. Scoping the long-term forecast, looks like they may be on for a while.

Today I was doing some work outside the house (specifically looking into how to get rid of some pesky squirrels that have finagled their way into our siding) and noticed two trees severely leaning. These trees have been dead since we moved in, and it’s been in the back of my mind to get them down at some point. But while the trunk is on my side of the fence, the trees go through the fence and the whole of the trees are on my neighbor’s side. And they were leaning so much so they were depending on support of other trees and the neighbor’s house. It appeared one of the windy days this past week was enough to uproot both trees. I talked to the neighbor and asked if he minded if I took the trees down. He didn’t so I got to work with my bow saw. Heh heh. Without too much trouble I got both trees down (we’re talking six to eight-inch trunks here, 30-40 feet height. But here’s the weird thing: I figured the fence was cut around the tree. No, it appears as though the tree actually grew through and around the fence! Check it out:

Here’s the shot before I went and rented a chainsaw:

And after:

Now, you may wonder: where was Adrienne to help you during all this? She, of course, was out in Oakland, getting her picture taken with Santa Claus!

Well, she was in San Francisco for work, then flew up from Oakland to Portland (then home to Goldendale) for the weekend for a surprise visit. Then she’s back in San Francisco on Monday for more work, and flies home Tuesday. I think. I guess Microsoft was running some promotion for Live(.com) where you get your photo taken with the Jolly Old Man at the Oakland airport. And she had some time to kill. Kinda bad lighting, if you ask me. But it was free!

So needless to say I had to fend for myself for dinner, so pizza it was! I tried out the recipe from the latest Cook’s Illustrated, which was supposed to be akin to what we’d call a New York slice.

I thought it was decent, but Adrienne would think the crust too thick. Eh, to each their own. And since she wasn’t here…

Happy Weekend, one and all!

I’ve spent the last 5 days in Vegas for two conferences. We had one day off, so a colleague and I drove the 45 minutes to Hoover Dam and took the detailed tour. Photos:

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And here are a couple photos. This is a morning shot outside of my hotel window (at the Riviera). The weather was very nice the entire time.

You can see the mountains from the convention center:

And here’s one for Adrienne, a sign in the airport: