Dear Sun

Dear Sun:

I am a big fan of your company. I love Java (so much that I made a career around it), and I love Sun Hardware and Software.

However, I hate Sun web sites. They are slow. Pathetically slow.

How can one of the best companies with the best technologies penalize their users with one of the slowest online experiences on the 'Net?

I feel like I'm trapped in 1995.

Sun: Please fix this.

Poor Puppy

Yesterday Jenn, Neya, and I went to the Penn State Blue-White game. The Blue-White game is the final practice session of the Penn State Nittany Lions. They basically scrimmage in Beaver Stadium, and 74,000 fans go to watch the game. My best estimate is that around 100,000 fans come up the event -- lots of folks tail gate and have fun at the carnival outside of the stadium.

Bailey became the lucky owner of a "I Bark for PSU" extra-small dog sweater.

Cafe Corner - Finished!

Okay... I originally wasn't going to complete Cafe Corner today, but I just couldn't resist. I was too excited to finish the build, and I don't think I could actually go to work tomorrow knowing that there were bags of Lego bricks that haven't been snapped together yet!

Jenn was nice enough to sort all of the pieces for the second and third floors while I gave Neya a bath. The picture to the right shows all of the pieces for the second and third floors, all sorted (thanks, Jenn!!!).

After another 2 hours of building, we finished the model. The details are absolutely incredible and the building was a blast to build.

The final build and sort time was about 5 hours (and that was with two of us working on it in tandem -- and some interruptions from a little girl who wanted to keep stealing the mini-figs and wanted to snap in a number of blocks!).

Overall, this set was a blast to put together... now its time to figure out what project is next. :-)

A Very Lego Birthday

Today is my birthday. My birthday gift from Jenn and Neya was a Lego Set - Cafe Corner.

It's a monster of Lego set. It weighs in at a little over 2000 pieces and stands over 14 inches tall when completed.

As you can see from the picture, the size of the box dwarfs my daughter!

The recommended age is for those 16 years and older (but my 4-year old daughter was able to put quite a few pieces together - with plenty of supervision!).

Unboxing the set yielded a pleasant surprise. All of the bags are labeled "1", "2", or "3" - this corresponds to the floor of the building. This was really nice because we did not want to build the entire set today!

Today, we only built the first floor. Build time was approximately 2 and a half hours. Not bad, since we had a four year old that wanted to help. :-) Jenn did a great job organizing the pieces.

We actually had four instances where we thought we did not have enough pieces:

• 1 piece was accidentally thrown in the garbage
• 1 set of pieces were just hidden from us
• 2 sets of pieces were mistakes between dark gray blocks and black blocks in the instructions (it's hard to distinguish between these two colors in Lego's instruction sets)

Overall, this set has some remarkable features. If you want to see more, check out my photo gallery.

Come on, Apple!

I thought that these guys are supposed to be the Masters of User Interface and Design?

However, I think they dropped the ball on iTunes. iTunes has no splash screen on start-up. This would not be a problem for Firefox, Thunderbird, or even Microsoft Word (which all start nearly instantly). Unfortunately, iTunes takes about 15 seconds to start up. And my computer is no slouch! I have a Dual Core Intel Processor with 4GB of memory!

To me, this is breaking one of the cardinal sins of user interface design - show something to the user as a feedback mechanism for the action they just performed. Granted, I have a large library - around 8000 songs, but this is no excuse for no giving the user some feedback.

Dear Apple: Stop being lazy, and give me a splash screen!