Category: Personal
December 4, 2009
A Random Entry After Months?
I know! What's up with that?
Truth is, I've been really busy with lots of other stuff. I also have other outlets for writing that are soaking up a lot of my writing energy. Check them out:
- Developer.com Articles on Android Widgets (written with my wife, Lauren Darcey):
- Creating an Android Widget
- Handling User Interaction in a Widget
- Handling Lengthy Operations in a Widget
- Working with Android Calendar Entries
- Writing on our Android blog
- Guest Blogging with my wife at Network World
- Writing a new Android Book, Sam's Teach Yourself Android Application Development in 24 hours, also with Lauren Darcey
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(0)December 21, 2008
Happy First Day of Winter
Happy first day of winter! May your days get longer. May your winter be filled with cold, snowy, ski-season-bringing weather! We are enjoying it.
If you're in the warmer environments, but still winter: There's plenty of snow up north -- go skiing and enjoy it. :)
If you're just starting summer: You can always fly north to find some snow to ski on. :)
October 25, 2008
Tip: Staying Warm in Autumn
The temperature is dropping. The long sleeve gear is out. The slippers are near by. But youre still chilly. Go out and chop some wood!
Seriously. Its great exercise and really gets the blood flowing. Youll be shedding the sweater outside in no time.
When winter really sets in you wont have to worry about the wood supply. Not only is it chopped, but you saved burning some by chopping some. Cool!
You can rest easy on the environment, too. It an only release as much carbon dioxide as it absorbed while growing up, so wood burning is considered carbon neutral and renewable. Nice!
October 23, 2008
Expendable Gerbils
This season's TV shows have been hit and miss. Thank goodness we don't pay for cable.
Despite the fact that we haven't had cable television in almost ten years, we keep up on TV shows just fine. It used to be, we had to wait a while for the good shows to come out on Netflix, but nowadays, with Hulu.com and Abc.com and such, we get the shows a day after they air on TV, which is pretty awesome considering we pay nothing.
Daily Show & Colbert Report
Every weeknight, baby! These shows just never get old.
Fringe
We're really liking this show. The mad scientist's got great lines and there's no character we would want to kill off. Interesting premise, rather like an X-Files/Alias premise-with Lost music and writing. We weren't Dawson Creek fans, so Peter hasn't been too weird.
Life
Again, one of our favorite shows. The main character is a cop and an ex-con and the tension of when he will snap under the pressure of resuming his duties at the police department keep things interesting. They've got a good setup for conflict, but they really need to work in the partner better, since she's got issues but really she's pretty vanilla right now.
Bones
Bones is awesome. It's gotten a little bit sappy lately and the season premiere in England was grating, but the whole forensic anthropology stuff stays interesting.
Pushing Daisies
Still an amusing show with the best narrator on the planet-Jim Dale. I hope the writers can keep this going for longer than a single season. I really like the private investigator who knits.
Tudors
I love a good lighthearted historical drama. Tudors provides.
Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles
Hubby likes this show, but Wifey couldn't care less if Sarah Connor bites it, she's too annoying. And John Connor makes dumb decisions too often, just because Hollywood only knows how to have young teenage heroes. They should have made him more like Veronica Mars.
Ugly Betty
We've lost all interest in this show. Even last season, the whole story arc with the two male leads was irritating.
Heroes
Or I should say, Villains. The jury is still out on this. We're still watching but we got really upset in this latest episode. They killed off our favorite character (We still call him Sark) and its getting complex having to go back and constantly save the world. Now that Suresh is a reincarnation of Stephen King's It, we're waivering on this one. The one interesting thing is the Sylar story arc, it's always nice when they swap good guy/bad guy roles.
Crusoe
Just started watching this. It might be ok, we're going to give it a couple more episodes before we decide.
Grey's Anatomy
This show is fading fast. The characters aren't particularly interesting and the latest episode with the flood was ridiculously unrealistic. Fire them all!
Private Practice
The health-related plot lines can be pretty interesting, but we'll see how it goes.
Chuck
Hubby likes Chuck. Wife says meh.
Torchwood
Doctor Who-like show. Amusing in its location, but the alien artifact collecting needs a new spin.
Knight Rider
The new one. Hubby finds silly and stupid yet insists on watching it. Wife avoids. (Wife ACTUALLY is just avoiding the treadmill, not the show. She hasn't seen it yet.)
Shows we will probably check out soon
Life on Mars
September 1, 2008
About Me - 2008 Edition
My name is Shane Conder, as youve probably already figured out. This is the third About Me page Ive written. Youll see some familiar parts, some new parts, and some parts that are missing either because they dont apply anymore or arent important enough to list at this time.
I'm married to the wonderful Lauren Darcey. With her I've had many pleasant and wonderful experiences that have made my life much better. We've enjoyed each others company for many years now among a broad diversity of hobbies we share, including traveling, gardening, road tripping, hiking, photography, writing, and watching movies among many other things.
Earlier this year, we finalized our move from California to New Hampshire. We now live in the Mount Washington Valley area of the White Mountains. This location provides us with a great environment for pursuing our hobbies and work. Bit, our rabbit, made the move out with us and is happily enjoying one of the best rooms in the house and considers it hers. She enjoys sitting in the sun and eating fresh herbs and berries from the garden.
Were both working together on a variety of different things, including mobile software, writing, and photography. All of this work lines up will with our hobbies. This makes both of us happy.
Im a gadget freak. This manifests itself in wanting shiny, new, electronic doodads. Usually, this means I want the latest phone or laptop, but is not limited to such ordinary items.
I enjoy reading tech and gadget blogs and listening to related podcasts. I also enjoy fiddling with the latest new technologies, such as Amazon Web Services, Android, iPhone, Google App Engine, and other shiny, new technologies that activate the creative side of my brain.
Im still not very active within the amateur radio community despite blogging on a URL that is from my call sign. Ive been threatening lately to be more active, though. Maybe some day.
Feel free to contact me via email: 
You can also post a comment to get in touch with me.
This is by no means complete. My interests are both diverse and very dynamic. Someone who reads all of my blog entries on all of my sites still won't get some of my interests correctly. Hey, after all, this is all public -- I'm not going to give every detail away!
May 26, 2008
The Playmobil Experiment
So, a few months ago my wife begged for a Playmobil set. I looked over what she wanted and thought it seemed fine. She ordered it. When I got out here, I got to see it all set up. It was a great, happy forest scene across two pieces of furniture.
Then her brother came out to visit this weekend. And, without prompting, made some changes. This prompted Laurie to create a collection on Flickr, in my account, for our Playmobil Expirement. Her text on the collection sums it up best:
A tranquil forest setting comes into contact with household visitors...
So here's how it works.
We have this great Playmobil set that looks a lot like our house, yard, etc. We set it up in the spare bedroom, which will eventually be a kids room, but for now is a guest room. Then we invite our houseguests to customize it as they see fit. And we document the results in picture and video form, as well as do an exit interview to make sure we understand what we're seeing...
The normal configuration will be available later. Laurie had to reset it and we haven't had a chance to take those pictures just yet. These are more entertaining, anyway.
June 24, 2007
A Month Goes Fast
Once again, things have gotten very busy. This has been true more so with stuff outside of work than stuff in work. That is to say, work is keeping me busy but personal life is overwhelming my time.
That's not to say things aren't going well. They are. Very well. Now, you'd think that this would give me lots of good stuff to blog about. It has. It just hasn't left me with the time to blog about it. So, many things go by without comments.
Speaking of comments, the comment spam has been enormous lately. I've got the protection turned up pretty high, but a bunch still gets through. If you try to leave a comment and it never appears, it may have gotten lost in the mix. A direct email can fix that, for now. I'm hoping that Movable Type 4 will actually do more to allow valid comments to get through.
Read the rest of "A Month Goes Fast"May 15, 2007
Birthday Cake Video
Below you'll find a video showing the birthday cake that Laurie made for herself for her birthday party. She had some help from one of her friends during the final decorating. The cake inside is a carrot cake, but I'd call it more of a spiced carrot cake as its quite flavorful. The critters are made out of fondant while the frosting is orange butter cream and the cake was encased in marzipan. About 2/3rds of the bottom section fed about 20 people at the party. We still have leftovers.
April 11, 2007
Beijing: In Retrospect
Well, I'm definitely late in getting out a Beijing post. It's now been about a week over six months since we were there. We were only there for a few days, though, so there really isn't all that much to it.
When we got there, we did the typical: we went shopping! Like Hong Kong, haggling is the norm in Beijing. 
We went to many of the markets, including the famous Friendship market. Apparently, it used to be the only place foreigners were allowed. These days, we can go almost anywhere.
We also went to see Tiananmen Square as well as some of the other nearby sites. Although full of formal guards, we were never bothered.
All over the city were signs and displays for the Olympic mascots. The Olympics are definitely a huge event for any city, but they seem particularly so for Beijing.
On the last day we had planned to go out to the Great Wall. Unfortunately, I got sick. 
We decided that Laurie should still go on her own. After all, we had already scheduled for a car to come to pick us up. So, she did go on her own. She had a really good time, too, even though I couldn't go with her. :o
She did find that it was nice enough that we will return again so I can see it and she can see more of it.
The hotel would give us fruit, which was great. One day we got a piece of fruit that we did not recognize. I spent the next hour searching online for it before we even cut in to it. Eventually, we determined it was a dragonfruit. Turns out that the taste is much less strong than the looks. 
It was like a weak melon in flavor, but stil tasty and quick to eat with a spoon.
. . .
Well, that concludes this series of memories on our trip around the world we took last September for our honeymoon.
I hope this didn't bore too many people, but it has helped both of us remember more of our trip.
March 19, 2007
Journey to Beijing: In Retrospect
Alright, so this is a little silly since we never left the airport on our way from South Africa to Beijing, China. However, the travel time was a good chunk of our trip and is still quite memorable in part because of the length and in part because we have no pictures. (Sounds ironic, huh?)
We left South Africa many days after we had planned on leaving. Our travel changes only included the times of the tickets and not the route. So, our first hop dropped us back in to the Johannesburg airport. We didn't spend much time there and I hardly remember it.
Not long after, we were off on a decent length flight to the Kuala Lumpur International Airport. Here, we spent about 12 hours waiting for our next flight. We didn't have to leave the secure section of the airport and we decided not to. As it turns out, this was in the middle of the day and Ramadan had just started. Our guide books told us that the most likely place to find food would be in the Chinatown section. Well, see, we were headed off to China anyway, so we decided to go get some slept -- we had already been up a long time.
There was a transit hotel in the security section that rented by the hour, although mostly in four hour blocks. I forget if we stayed four or six hours, but it went very fast and only marginally helped our fatigue -- but we did get to shower, which was nice.
After that, we headed out in to the great KLIA which, like any modern airport, is basically a shopping mall. This proved to be entertaining so we went around looking at things and grabbed a couple of trinkets and ended up with some of the local money.
Our next flight was quite short since it was just going to Thailand. We landed and proceeded to have the next eight hours to wonder around the Bangkok airport. This was not quite as good of an experience as KLIA since we had to exit security, pay the taxes, etc. Then, we couldn't check in right away so we had to make do for a couple of hours on the external section of the airport, which didn't have quite so many shops to kill some time. However, we saw plenty of the military presence we had heard about.
The coup, as it turned out, was mostly non-violent and we probably would have been fine had we not changed our plans. However, there were a few issues that made us very glad we did change our plans. First, banks and ATM's were closed the first few days, so money would have been a problem. Many other shops and sights were also closed. Finally, the weather was absolutely terrible the whole time we would have been there. We didn't leave the airport because the middle of the airport had a very large enclosed courtyard where we could see the massive amounts of wind and rain, even though it was protected on all sides by a many-story building.
Our next flight to Beijing was a bit longer, at over five hours, but that wasn't the interesting part. This turned out to be what felt like a very budget flight. The plane was noticeably old and hadn't been retrofitted with new seats or signage. It still had ash trays on the seats and other signs. This was also a flight between two non-English speaking countries and with a destination that is relatively rare for English speakers. That didn't prevent them from speaking in English on the announcements, when there were some. The rest of the flight was uneventful and we got some needed rest.
I recall choosing the local breakfast rather than the western breakfast that didn't look all that good. As it turns out, it was this huge thing of rice porridge that was both quite good and very filling. I say it was good mostly because I like rice and it can be spiced up some. It was relatively bland, though, but after being in transit (including driving to the airport in South Africa) for over 40 hours, food was food.
We landed and had a decent drive in front of us to our hotel. That's another story, though.
