Going Native Garden Tour

On a hot spring day (92F/ 33C) we toured a couple of native gardens in the San Jose area. Every year, since 2003, the Go-Native-Garden-Tour has been organized in spring. This year there were about 45 participating gardens. We visited about 5 gardens.

The common thread is that all gardens use California native plants and are designed for water conservation. This is especially important this year since water levels have been extremely low. Nearby reservoirs were near empty at the beginning of the winter. I have never seen them that low.

My front lawn has suffered over the past years. In part because I have 3 big trees in front which suck up all the water. Secondly, one summer vacation without proper watering and I have a large open patch in the lawn.

I decided not to redo or reseed, but to slowly replace it with a native garden. For one maintenance is low. Secondly a native garden uses almost no water. Some of the gardeners mention they water a couple of minutes every 4 to 6 weeks. That's just amazing.

We took plenty of pictures of the plans and their nametags. Almost all gardens had every plant labeled with both their Latin name as their common name.

So, what's next? Step one will be to dig up the front lawn and install a drip grid water system. Step two: figure out a simple design with a couple of rocks. Step three: lots of mulch. Step four will be looking for plants. Perhaps something for the fall.

The backyard is a whole other story. For years the main role has been claimed by Mr Clover and his viral cousins taken over the entire yard.

Crafting your resume

I've been reading and qualifying resumes for an application engineer in my group. I received hundreds of resumes. I have read every single one of them. Being on the reading side of resumes does provide some interesting perspective. Here are a couple of tips. They are really basic, but nevertheless worth repeating.

• A objective spells it out very clearly why you are applying for the job. Tailor it to the specific job. It is the first thing the hiring manager will read on your resume. Often one of the first questions on a phone interview is "what are you looking for in this job?". The objective should answer that question. Do customize it for the job you are applying for.
• List when you are a US Citizen or US Person. Especially when the job requirement states that US citizens are desired (e.g. in the defense or intelligence industry).
• Send your resume in PDF to avoid the layout being screwed up when the hiring manager opens up a Microsoft Word resume.
• Don't call it resume.pdf. I often saved the resumes in a folder to check later in the day. When you call your firstnameLastnameResume.pdf, I did not have to rename the file plus your name sticks out in the file. Keep your brand up.
• Spellcheck. Seriously! This sounds obvious but I encountered lots of spelling errors on resumes.
• Spend a little time on the layout and readability of your resume. When the hiring manager is reading hundreds of resumes, avoid that he or she needs to take a second pass to understand your profile and capabilities.
• Stick with traditional resume formats, unless you are applying for an artist or graphic designer. 2 pages.
• When a new grad, listing your courses and specific project work is a plus and a great hook during the phone interview. "In my fly-robot project, I was able to demonstrate ..."
• When you apply for a computer engineering job, do not list Microsoft Outlook. If you have to highlight that you know how to send and read an email, you are in trouble. Similarly, it is assumed you know how to use a word processor and a spreadsheet. If you created a novel macro for Microsoft Excel, do list it. But detail that is was more than just using Outlook. That's useful.
• If the submission process allows you to add a cover when submitting your resume, do so. A cover letter allows you to sell yourself. You can use full sentences, rather than the short form often used on a resume.
• If you do get a phone interview, do follow up with an email afterwards. Ask for the email address. This is a nice touch and shows you really are interested in the job.

Ronde Van Vlaanderen

It is over: Stijn Devolder wins the Tour of Flanders (Ronde Van Vlaanderen). This is the most beautiful of the one-day bicycle races.

I woke up this Sunday at 6:30AM. Why would you want to wake up that early on a Sunday my wife asked. What would you do if Argentina was playing the world cup final against England at 6:30AM?

The Sporza live video feed did not work. Thus I could not listen to the legendary commentary of Michel Wuyts. Plan B: pick up a video feed on justin.tv and listen to Carl Bertele and co on Sporza radio. In a side window I was following the #rvv tweets. (Next week, I'll try out http://www.tvtweets.be/)

It was a beautiful race. Great weather, fast pace and every second counted. This picture captures a lot. Devolder, in a group of four, attacks on the Muur van Geraardsbergen. Just take a look at the supporters. That's the face (and scream) I made in the kitchen this Sunday morning. Next Sunday : Paris - Roubaix (get details at Steephill.tv)

In Stewart we Trust

Bush is out of office. Obama versus Palin is long over. I wondered what Jon Stewart would be zooming in on next in his Daily Show. The answer : money; crooked money; mad money and the role the "analysts", "financial experts" and financial news shows played in the hype. 

If there is anything I learned from the dotcom bust, it is how venture capitalists and investment banks shared the same bed. Similarly check how many were sharing a bed in the housing bust. 

Thus Stewart went on a mission to critique the financial news channels and found a great poster child in loud mouth Jim Cramer, who hosts the Mad Money show on CNBC. 

This rest of this blog post is very simple. The video speaks for itself.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 1

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 2

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Jim Cramer Unedited Interview Pt. 3

Daily Show Full Episodes
Important Things w/ Demetri Martin

Political Humor
Jim Cramer

Why I shop where I shop

The newspaper sales guy calling me at night tries to hook me on a San Jose Mercury News subscription because it's Sunday newspaper has lots of coupons. Safeway spams with me items on sale this week. The Wednesday mail contains the promotions of a dozen local supermarkets. But I am not using any of them. That's because I shop at Trader Joe's. Here's why:

Android Exchange support

A key feature missing on my Android phone was direct access to my work email through Exchange. Unlike the iPhone, Android lacks a native Exchange client. 

The Android Market to the rescue! I found a couple of solutions. Some of them were still in private Beta.

• Nitrodesk TouchDown (http://nitrodesk.com)
• Moonrug (http://moonrug.com/android/index.html)
• Aardvark (http://aardvarkforandroid.com/index.htm)
• Roadsync (http://www.dataviz.com)

I tried out TouchDown from Nitrodesk for free and opted to purchase a full license for $19.99. So far my experience with Touchdown has been good. 

• Email works great. I am pulling down my email every 15 minutes. There is no support for push email. But that ain't a big issue since I do not want to be pinged with email every minute.
  
• The current version doesn't allow you to edit or confirm calendar appointments. A killer feature would be to bridge between the Exchange calendar and my google calendar. 
  
• Touchdown does time out when I switch between 3G and WIFI. The error message indicates this is a DNS problem. However I have no issue access the internet via a browser. The error is temporarily as 15 minutes later I am able to pull down my email. 
• Nitrodesk support has been excellent and fast. 

Other applications which I has installed on my phone are (in order of how often I use them) : 

• Twitroid - to twitter from my phone
  
• fBook - Facebook application; not bad, but I find myself regularly going to the mobile or main facebook website to comment or access info. 
• PhoneFlix - manage your Netflix queue from your phone. This is a great application since I typically hear about a great movie from friends, when I am not near my computer. 
  
• Skype Lite - to receive and make skype phone calls. When making a skype call to a computer, you do make a local call and will be billed wireless minutes. But that is a cheap price to pay when trying to call my parents in Belgium, or my parents in law in Argentina. 
• T-mobile HotSpot locator - alerts me of nearby WIFI hotspot locators operated by T-mobile. 
  
• Mileage - to keep track of my trips to the pump. Unfortunately this only supports one car. 
  
• gIRC, an irc client for Android
  
• ConnectBot - secure shell for Android. 
• Shopsavvy - take a picture of the barcode and find where to best buy it. Seriously! This application has potential. I haven't used it much. The only thing I recently bought was a fridge and it lacked a barcode ;)
• ToggleBlu - one click bluetooth on/off

So what's missing? 

• Remember The Milk : my work and personal todo list, groceries and shopping list. The mobile version of the webstie doesn't render well on Android. A native app really would do wonders. (107 replies already on my RTM forum post)
• Pandora : I am big fan of Pandora and listed to it at least a few hours a day. I do get feeling Tom Conrad from Pandora ain't the biggest fan of Android. Pandora is already on the new PalmOS. I am anxiously awaiting a version for my phone. 

Update: Add one more application to the list: Radio.BE. I just received an email from Nicolas Braem who launched a streaming audio application for Belgian radio stations, such as one of my favorite: Studio Brussel. 

Update 01/27/2009: Version 1.4.051 of Touchdown added a lot of requested features: meeting invites and global addressbook

Android

I was pleasantly surprised to find an unlocked HTC G1 phone, also known as the Android Developer Phone (in the box) underneath the christmas tree. 

Timing could not have been more perfect as I had been exploring smart phones. Honestly I had been leaning towards the iPhone, because it has Exchange support, required to access my emails at work. I wish my company had never made the move to the proprietary Exchange technology. 

But when I opened the box with a cool geeky Linux powered opensourced Android phone, I was overjoyed. (I already found a couple Android Exchange connector applications.)

The ADP supports GSM, GPRS/Edge, 3G, WIFI, Bluetooth : connection galore. I was on the internet via WIFI in a heartbeat. Gmail, Calendar, RememberTheMilk, Twitter and Facebook worked fabolously (although I am still hoping for an Android native RememberTheMilk application). 

Since I already owned the phone I thought all options were open for a wireless voice/data plan. Wrong. 

(1) 3G is not 3G . When GSM came to the US, consumers won. You could take your GSM phone from one carrier to the next and shop around. This was true as most phones were able to support various GSM frequencies. Now with 3G, carriers have their monopolies back. AT&T 3G uses a different UTMS band than T-Mobile. It took me a while to find the 3G details about the G1 phone or about the carrier networks: 

Android developer phone specs: quad-band GSM; UMTS on 1700Mhz and 2100Mhz (bands I and IV); works with T-mobile. AT&T uses bands II and V

As a result, 3G for me ment T-Mobile 3G. Let's hope that phone UTMS chips will become quad band UTMS and the consumer will reign again. 

(2) Internet-only plans are not internet-only. With my own phone in hand, I boldly stepped into the T-mobile phone store to get an internet only plan. I still have my old GSM phone and needed to figure out what the best way to transfer my family plan over. Apparently nobody had been that foolish to request this as it was a mystery how to do this. Eventually, after the T-mobile rep spent more than 30 minutes on the phone with their own back end support folks, were they able to set me up for month-to-month internet only ($39.99). If only it were true. I waited for 24 hours to have it all kick in and yet no internet. The reason: I had a G1/ADP. Those require a special internet plan, which is only offered as an add-on to a voice plan. Gotcha capitalism!  I quickly figured out that trying to get internet only was futile (I envisioned the limitations in the activation/setup menus.)

Today I am finally fully empowered: voiceplan, internet, GPRS/Edge, 3G, SMS, and even their favorite five. As we start 2009, the world is at my fingertips!

(Read also Tim Bray's Android Diary)

Gold country

Last weekend, we spent three days in California's gold country, the Mother Lode. We visited the Southern part: Tuolumne and Calaveras counties with towns like Jamestown, Columbia, Sonora and Murphy. It was a fantastic couple of days with lots of interesting sights. Here are a couple of pictures I took.

Rocking chairs in Charleston

A two day visit to Charleston, South Carolina, was my first visit to "the South". Charleston is one of the oldest cities in the US I have visited. This is where the civil war started. This is where you find one of the first submarines, the Hunley. Tobacco, crab cakes, and a slave market. The ocean front is  lined with two, three story old colonial mansions in impeccable restored state where cigar-smoking men in  seersucker suits must have debated the local politics or the state of affairs at the local papermills.

 
You get a feeling that life moves a little slower here. It is definitely not the rat race of the Bay Area. But by no means is this a town stuck in the past. The company I visited is cutting edge and pushing the envelope of computing. 

Although I did read that South Carolina is not a rich state, the center of Charleston gives the impression of an affluent city. Old money perhaps. Big houses, nice stores, and classy bars. I had the opportunity to eat a fantastic restaurant, one of the many upscale restaurants around. Luckily the bill  was taken care of.

Nothing says Southern lifestyle as the lines of rocking chairs facing the runway at the airport.

What I did last summer

Our house was built in the seventies. The ceiling had be sprayed with a plaster to provide sound absorbtion. This acoustic ceiling is also known as popcorn ceiling as it is very rough. It is also difficult to paint, because it is highly absorbant and can not be rolled. The way to go is spray painting it. We decided to remove it before we started painting the rooms. 

Popcorn ceiling is also known as a source of asbestos in older houses as asbestos was a good binding component. We had ours checked an no asbestos was present. This made it easier to remove. There was no need to involve an expensive asbestos removal company. 

We planned the removal of the popcorn ceiling to coincide with the summer vacation of the kids in Belgium. We had emptied the entire house into the garage (tells you we don't have a lot of stuff). We were camping out for a weekend at a friend's place. In three days, all the popcorn ceiling had been removed, the ceilings and walls had been refinished. Now our job was about to start. During four hellish evenings and nights, we primed the entire interior twice! Top to bottom, left to right. The clock had been ticking as we were about to leave to Belgium to meet up with our kids. 

After our "vacation", the finishing work awaited us: choosing colors, painting accent walls, replacing outlets and light switches, redoing the interior closets, choosing draperies (the hardest part), and hanging curtain rods in all the rooms. At out own slow pace, we finished it all in the fall. 

I enjoyed the paiting part a lot. It was a calming zen-like experience: Saturday night, all windows open, listening to this American Life stories. I'll do it again, if asked. 

Now that it is all done, the next home project awaits: redoing the bathrooms.