well our weekly gamenight turned out to be something special this week.
This time we got:

• fantastic food, like always
• a fun group of people, like always
• a new game
  

and,

here it comes,

live music from the touring band "Jen & Abby", which promptly let to an improved photo shoot, while they were performing for us, since they needed some pictures.

Now this put me into a challenging position, how the hell are I'm supposed to take pictures...

• awe full location, a cluttered living room is just plain bad
• not able to move anyone around, since I don't want to interrupt there beautiful music
• no subject/background seperation

well since the girls where young and had great skin, the solution was simple. Just drop a couple of spotlights on them and let the rest of the world go black. I also tried some high keys, but they did not work at all.

Note for later, I could had used a 85mm F/1.4 so badly...

So they are not my best work, but for the circumstances they turned out pretty well.

Saturday we decided to make a 'short' trip to pine lake nearby. The idea was to hike and swim abit.

But for some reason it turned out to be a 10mile+ hike, since we walked around the lake. Which has 10 miles shore and our side trips and shortcut's did not really help. So to judge how I felt the next day, we walked roughly 2500 miles. Which translates into 12 - 15 miles, after some careful consideration.

Anyway it was a beautiful day and I had the chance to take some pictures.

how to describe twain harte, I guess wikipedia gives it a try, but can't say much about it.

My best guess is to look at this picture to the left. I think it tells you all in a very simple story.

Basically it's a small very relaxed and down to earth community. Celebrating the American way of live. Beginning with the old trucks and proud flags to small American dinners with deer heads on the wall and a waitress running around with a classic coffee pot, serving gigantic amount of breakfast for decent prices.
Everything closes by 9.30-10.00 pm and skunks are running around at night, trying (successfully) to escape me an my camera...

after we arrived at twain hart and got the cabin ready, which included hunting down several kinds of different spiders.

Yes gigantic monstrous spiders, the kind which I hate! They decided to move in since the last time the cabin was used. Ok it's been a year, but still they are not supposed to be there.

Anyway we both ended up (Ashley and I, not the spiders and I) relaxing in the cabin and reading a bit.

so this weekend started a bit unexspected with somebody trying to prove he can park. Resulting in hitting my car in the most unfortunate way. Causing no damage what soever, besides a cracked license plate.

Couldn't he hit my rear bumper? I need a new rear bumper...

well last night was fun, we just ended up going for a concert in the park and playing uno with friends.

The concert was, well different. It was supposed to be latin music, so I expected something like Santana style and instead we got some very strange and unexciting acoustic guitar player singing English songs.

Well at least we had fun with friends.

The picture on the left was only taken, because the light was so pretty...

since people starting to complain that this blog is to much about work and coding and so, well there is now a new blog, only about coding.

Coding and More

SetupX Installation under Ubuntu

moved to: Coding and More

Creating Minimum and Maximum date in Java

move to Coding and More

playing a bit with my friend ashleigh and the camera.

But somehow nothing worked as planned, but we got some nice shots of her.

Grails and some annoying default CSS

moved to Coding and More

well after years of grilling tri-tip and pan fried tri-tip we tried something new and involves the smoker (what a surprise)

We made an amazing smoked tri-tip and I think this is the way togo. Well the guest's seemed to be pretty happy too and we ended up making so much food, that I have a whole smoked tri-tip left to my self :)

Anyway the recipe:

• get yourself a good looking tri-tip with some nice marbling and about 1.5 - 2lbs trimmed, or 2.5 - 3 lbs untrimmed (and trim it a bit)
  
• make a dry rub out of salt and pepper and rub it onto the meat. You need roughly a cup of dry rub
• toss in a zip lock bag and leave it in the fridge for 5 - 6 hours
• remove it from the fridge when you are setting up the smoker, ca 45 minutes prior
• fire up the smoker with some hickory wood and let it settle at a temperature of 220-250 Fahrenheit
• toss in the meat, add the remote meat thermometer and enjoy a couple of hefeweizen (roughly 1 hour a pound, so about 90 minutes or 3 -5 hefeweizen)
• do NOT open the smoker and look all the time, that's what's the remote thermometer is for
  
• once the meat reaches 145 Fahrenheit, take it off the smoker and let it rest for 10 - 20 minutes so it's as juicy as possible
• slice it into thins slices, alone in the kitchen (everybody else is outside...) and serve to the hungry pack

the dip

since I like to keep things simple and quick I just made a spicy (for germans) yogurt based dip.

• 1 lbs of yoghurt, not the fat free kind!
• 4 cloves of garlic, minced
  
• Salt, Pepper, Basil, Oregano to taste
  
• half a red onion, minced
  

mix everything together and let it rest in the fridge for an hour. It works really well with meat, since it enhances the taste of it, by adding a slight sour and fresh note.

well today I took of the day to move to my new place for this year and I hope to stay longer here. Depending how everything goes with the roommate and my wonderful girlfriend.

So here are some pictures of the front and backyard and I post pictures of the rest of this house as soon as possible.

My room basically has barley any stuff in it so far, since i need to remodel my bed and so. But once it's done it's going to be beautiful.

The backyard and frontyard are nice and I smoked my first tritip tonight, which was just amaizing and pretty cheap at 20$ for 4 lbs.

I guess I have this kind of sandwiches for the next 4 - 5 days.

Anyway it's late and time for bed.

well this is something new, a very strange behavior in one of my tests cases:


List result = this.getEntityManager().createQuery("from " + LoggingEntityBean.class.getName() + " b").getResultList();
assertTrue(result.isEmpty() == false);

int size = result.size();
int exspected = testSize * addres.length;

logger.info(size);
logger.info(exspected);
assertTrue(size == exspected);


now why do I get this error message...

[17:37:02,007] [INFO ] [main] [LoggingServiceTest] [400]
[17:37:02,008] [INFO ] [main] [LoggingServiceTest] [200]

junit.framework.AssertionFailedError: null
at edu.ucdavis.genomics.metabolomics.binbase.logging.server.LoggingServiceTest.setUp(LoggingServiceTest.java:73)
at org.jmock.core.VerifyingTestCase.runBare(Unknown Source)
at org.junit.internal.runners.JUnit38ClassRunner.run(JUnit38ClassRunner.java:81)
at com.intellij.rt.junit4.Junit4ClassSuite.run(Junit4ClassSuite.java:99)
at com.intellij.rt.execution.junit.JUnitStarter.main(JUnitStarter.java:40)



error in this line:

assertTrue(size == exspected);

ok it's supposed to fail because 200 isn't 400, but not with a NullPointer exception...

now I have been working with intellij for a bit over a week and it have to say it has it's highs and it's lows.

• refactoring is just great
• override/implment function works good
• I hate the code completion, it's just strange behavior wise
• the junit plugin is nice, but a bit strange
• the grails/groovy support is exceptional good
• the performance is good if I work on a single project, if I work on my average 40 projects at once it's impossible to work with
• nice support for for python, works quite well
• uml support is great
• ant based build are a nightmare, but we want to use maven anyway whenever, where ever
• maven plugin is great in therorie, but with complex pom's it's extremely slow.

conclusions:

• python development will be in intellij
• groovy development will be in intellij
• scala development will be in intellij
• java development will be in eclipse
• pom writing will be in intillij and I generate the project directly via 'mvn idea:idea eclipse:eclipse' instead of using the pom as project file
  

ok it's not hot in davis,

it's ridiculous hot, 47 Degree Celsius....

I mean seriously...

lesson:

• do not buy a car with black leather seats...
• do not buy a car with black leather...
• do not buy a car with black...
• do not buy a car with...
• do not buy a car...
• do not buy a...
• do not buy...
• do not...
• do...
• ...
• ..
• .

translation I hid in the office, enjoyed the AC and got some stuff done (Die hard, Die hard with a vengeance,...)

Also no smoked meat today, I will not sit for 12 hours next to this thing fighting with the heat during the day or the roaches at night.

Now time to run for a restaurant and get some tasty food. I'm in no mood to cook tonight.

mocking spring,

moved to Coding and More

ajax and grails

moved to Coding and More

to cancel flight's is fun...

Flight cost summary

Flight cost - 6/16/09

Airfare #XXXXXXXXXXXXX	$679.25
Flight cost	$679.25
Exchange cost - 6/25/09
Airfare #XXXXXXXXXXXXX	$688.78
Previous airfare	-$679.25
Airfare difference	$9.53
Orbitz exchange fee	$30.00
Airline change fee	$200.00
Total exchange cost	$239.53	USD

Grand total itinerary cost to-date	$918.78 USD

boy my checking account truly hates me right now...

so it look's like the raid is now running, so this next step would be an lvm2 layer on top of it.

I thought it would be easy, but...

/dev/sdc1: lseek 10448441413827256320 failed: Invalid argument

Incorrect metadata area header checksum

--- Physical volume ---

PV Name /dev/md3

VG Name data

PV Size 9.09 TB / not usable 3.25 MB

Allocatable yes

PE Size (KByte) 4096

Total PE 2384157

Free PE 2384157

Allocated PE 0

PV UUID 2EQH1i-BIYU-BDvH-sRb3-yruB-V15f-ZCTywN

"/dev/sdc1" is a new physical volume of "8.98 EB"

--- NEW Physical volume ---

PV Name /dev/sdc1

VG Name

PV Size 9.06 EB

Allocatable NO

PE Size (KByte) 0

Total PE 0

Free PE 0

Allocated PE 0

PV UUID 2;??-ƈ+-?m-s?b3-?ruB-V15f-ZCTywN

"/dev/sdn1" is a new physical volume of "64.01 PB"

--- NEW Physical volume ---

PV Name /dev/sdn1

VG Name

PV Size 64.01 PB

Allocatable NO

PE Size (KByte) 0

Total PE 0

Free PE 0

Allocated PE 0

PV UUID 2EQI1i-BHYU-BEvH-sRb3-yruB-V15f-ZCTywN

it looks like I just got promoted to a 64 Peta Byte server on the disk's sdn1 and 9.06 Exta Byte on sdc1.

Guess I got more harddrive space as I ordered...

So it look's like it's adding my disk's to the group instead of only my raid6 devices. The solution for this is to disable in the /etc/lvm/lvm.com the related disks:

filter = [ "r|/dev/cdrom|","r|/dev/sd*|" ]

Time for the next issue...

currently I'm fighting since 4 weeks with a retarded server, well whenever I got some time besides

• fixing bugs
• keeping the system running, because the main server is offline since 2 month now
• helping people with problems
• fighting with power outages
• fixing servers
• and actually coding doing research in the left over time

anyway for some reasons the raid system keeps failing all the time, specially it keeps forgetting it's devices.

So just some small things for me to remember for the next time...

• removing existing raid stuff: mdadm --zero-superblock /dev/sd[c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p]1
• stopping a raid: mdadm --stop /dev/md_d3
• getting some info's about the raid: mdadm --examine /dev/sd[c-p]1
• trying to assemble a raid: mdadm -v -A /dev/md_d3 /dev/sd[c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p]1
• creating a large raid0 for testing: mdadm --create --verbose --force /dev/md3 --level=raid0 --raid-devices=14 /dev/sd{c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p}1
• creating a raid6: mdadm --create --verbose --force --name=data /dev/md3 --level=raid6 --raid-devices=12 --spare-devices=2 /dev/sd{c,d,e,f,g,h,i,j,k,l,m,n,o,p}1
• storing the generated configuration: mdadm --examine --scan --config=mdadm.conf >> /etc/mdadm/mdadm.conf

solution: found here

now just wait a tiny bit for the rebuild...

md3 : active raid6 sdp1[13](S) sdo1[12](S) sdn1[11] sdm1[10] sdl1[9] sdk1[8] sdj1[7] sdi1[6] sdh1[5] sdg1[4] sdf1[3] sde1[2] sdd1[1] sdc1[0]

9765510400 blocks level 6, 64k chunk, algorithm 2 [12/12] [UUUUUUUUUUUU]

[>....................] resync = 0.7% (7591112/976551040) finish=1074.7min speed=15024K/sec

well since this month turned out to be much more pricey than planned

• ticket to germany 700$
• visa fee 200$
• conference fee 200$ (should get reimbursed in the next view weeks)
• smoker 350$ (including needed stuff like coal and wood)

and next month is going to be the same game

• rent deposit 500$
• last month rent 500$
• paying rent for 2 places 750-1000$

well I need a new cheap hobby, which won't cost more than 50$ a month and the eququiment should be also affordable/rentable.

Solution?

I will try to pick up free climbing, which will also help me to conquer my fear of heights. And also will try to survive on 500$ of food (so no more chocolate and soda)

so what's new,

• my experiment to live on 100$ a week worked quite well, only 2 days left and I still have 2 whole chickens in the freezer, which are going to visit the smoker tomorrow
• for some reasons my back is killing me time to try a different workout and I'm looking forward to swimming again
• booking a flight to germany and a visa appointment and screwing it up, now I have only a 2 day window to get my visa delivered
• trying to learn and understand ajax
• trying to work more with groovy and grails
• learning a new IDE (IntelliJ 8) and so far I love it
• switching from firefox to safari for internet related stuff, since firefox is so slow
• looking for a small ultra portable laptop with 10 hours of battery live

just another saturday, well since I decided to skip carmel this weekend and stay in davis, since friends are in town, well I decided to use this weekend and give the smoker a run for it's money.

So today we make trout spread for bagels and smoked trout.

• buy 4 trouts = 10$
• buy cottage cheese and cream cheese = 5$
• buy 12 bagels = 6$

ok now this is out of the way time to setup the smoker, this time we use apple wood chips to see how they work.

First we brine the trouts for an hour in sugar and salt (lesson for next time, brine 2 - 3 hours, they are a bit dry and needed a lot of salt), while setting up the fire. It turned out that the new york times is an aweful starter, so let's try another newspaper the next time.

The trouts are now happily smoking for 3 hours at 220-240 Fahrenheit and I use this time to be productive, equals watching cheesy movies.

Once the trout were done, we had one for lunch, put away one for dinner and mixed 2 for the spread.

• sellery
• onion
• garlic
• cottage cheese
• cream cheese

It turned out that my hand blender is broken, our other blender is not strong enough and a fork is a lot of work. So the spread is a bit chunky, but very tasty!
And I also have about 2 pound of spread now, which has to be eaten in the next 4 days, so 2 bagels for breakfast everyday and if somebody want's some spread, call me.
(It has some fishbones, blame the blender...)

About the smoked trout in general? It's is amaizingly tasty and quite a fat fish. I like it.

so the smoker finally arrived and so we started to cook our first dish.

The lesson of the day? It's not worth it to cook a single chicken, since you need way to much charcoal and wood for it. It was like 5$ worth of charcoal.

lesson 2:

one chicken is not enough, they are so damn tasty you want a second one 5 minutes later

how too?

• soak chicken in solution of salt and sugar for 2 hours
  
• try chicken
• put pepper on chicken
• preheat smoker to 250 degrees fahrenheit
• leave chicken in there for 3h
• try to understand where you need to put the thermometer and figure out why it constantly looses connection
• figure out a way to kill the coals and wood once you are done, since it makes me nervous as hell to leave the bbq on over night and going to bed
• carve the chicken, executed by ashley!

todo:

get more chickens and repeat!

step two:

the smoker is ordered and on its way...
and so is the meat thermometer

(no more dining out this month...)

step three:

get wood and charcoal

step four:

get some ribs and smoke them tomorrow night till the early morning

BBQ season has started and this year I will full fill my desire and buy a smoker.

But first time to read up where I can get what parts of beef and the parts for the smoker. Like wood and so.

You know, the usual...

well I'm back from phillidelphia and the first thing we did was a nice picnic in sacramento. We also looked at some town houses and discovered a small honey store.

It's amaizing how different honey can taste. From delicious to disgusting is just a spoon apart

• orange blossom - yummy
• clover - yummy
• sage - ok and very mild
• eucalyptus - disgusting
  
• several other kind's I can't remember

I only bought 2 pounds of honey, but it was so much cheaper than grocery stores.

...time to make some tea...

the last day in philli seems to follow a trend, it's raining and we are waiting impatiently for our flight and hope to be back in the warms of California soon.
It was a fun week, but pretty stressful. Short a day on the pool in the sun sounds great.

so it's always sunny in Philadelphia? Nah it's a freaking lie! Never believe in TV Shows! Why are I'm surrounded by thunderstorms and rain.

I should had brought shoes besides sandals...

Anyway the poster presentation is done and the response was quite nice. It also looks that everybody starts to agree with our point:

You need a database for your results!

So the last 7 years start to pay off. Several people congratulated us to the software we wrote and are highly impressed. I'm still surprised that I was brave enough to actually participate in the discussion, in front of 300 people about the different approaches to annotate massspecs. Who all have fancy titles and are accepted experts in the field of metabolomics.

What else, the first people which were fun to hangout with already left and so I have to work again tonight to find new people to talk too.

current location: philidelphia
current food: gyros
food of the last days: philli cheesesteaks
busy with: looking so far at 1400 posters, 1400 more are comming
mistake: not staying the weekend here and driving to new york = bad planning from me

why such a short post?

got no time, have to run to a talk and the internet is so damn unreliable...

sometimes things take a bit longer, like create a raid6 system over 16 harddrives 1TB with software raid...

Personalities : [linear] [multipath] [raid0] [raid1] [raid6] [raid5] [raid4] [raid10]
md2 : active raid6 sdp[12](S) sdo[13](S) sdn[11] sdm[10] sdl[9] sdk[8] sdj[7] sdi[6] sdh[5] sdg[4] sdf[3] sde[2] sdd[1] sdc[0]
9765518720 blocks level 6, 16k chunk, algorithm 2 [12/12] [UUUUUUUUUUUU]
[>....................] resync = 0.1% (1393856/976551872) finish=25232.3min speed=643K/sec

25k minutes? I really hope the estimate is a bit off. Cause I'm not going to wait for 17 days after each test of the raid system...

getting up at 5.30 -> arg!
waiting for 30 minutes in the cold -> arg!
spending an awesome day in nappa -> awesome!

basically we had a wonderful winetasting event, thx to the metacancer team, in nappa. The wineries were sterling (Oh I love there pinot grigo and sauvignon blanc) and rubicon (to much red wines for my taste and the chadonay was to sour) Short I'm a white wine person, but it was interresting to taste the different kind of red wines.

And we finished the day with a nice dinner a buckhorn.

Now If I just had a reflector with me, I could had really make some stunning pictures. There was so beautiful light!

well today we went kayaking in sacramento river and had a nice bbq afterward. Short it was fun and fixie performed without any problems. It looks like the car is finally happy and running as it's supposed to.

Well if I get a visa, I guess it's time to get a roof rack for the snowboards and bikes...

after working for more than 10 years with sql based languages I discovered something new again. The case statement, which is pretty damn slow (table of a couple of million entries) but it saves me the time to work with some statistical software.

dinner for tonight?

cedar smoked lemon salmon with arugula salad.

short I love the wood planks I got for my BBQ and going to cook more often like this!

it's been quiete lately, which is mostly related to the fact that I discovered that Alexandre Dumas wrote a complete series about the adventures of D'Artangan.

And so I'm slowly fighting my way throw his books and love my ebook reader more and more and can't understand how I could live without it. I mean it's so great to lay at the pool and read gigantic novels in the sun, in such a tiny device.

done:

• the three musketeers

togo:

• 20 years later
• the man in the iron mask
• the vicomte de bragelonne
• 10 years later
  
• Loiuse de la Valliere

and that's just one author...

so all i can say if you like to read and like to read classic novel, get your self an ebook reader, but be prepared to go missing...

I just created a new blog, just to keep track to the stuff my passat does to me

It starts to get annoying. Now 'fixie' is leaking transmission oil.

Another 150$ for parts and 150$ for labor, cause there is no way I can do this my self. I actually have the tools by now and the procedure is not that complicated. But there is no way I can get the car of ground and it's going to be level.

So far this month:

300$ tools and power steering fluid
230$ parts for transmission and PCV system

Well I wanted to flush the transmission anyway.

while reading at the beach in montery and getting a nice sunburn I discovered a bird of prey. Most likely a buzzard or hawk. 60 Minutes later I finally captured it on chip...

a week now I was thinking about the perfect name for my car...

it was between jasmine and fixie.

Fixie it is! Since it developed a power steering fluid leak now and another leak, which leaks very very slowly a fluid I just can't diagnose....

Work done in the last two days:

• changed the light bulb
• stripped a screw, found a way to get it off and bought a new screw
• flushed the power steering fluid

it really starts to get expensive...

But at least now I can reset the check engine light my self and diagnose it my self. Yes I bought a code reader...

sure a week after I finally bought an eBook reader amazon announces the new kindle DX, which has the large display I wanted...

...but 500$? are you kidding me...

while browsing a toy store I found something which would be perfect for fabs...

Well the last 3 days were spent with ashley at her grand mothers house in carmel and now she is out for a conference and I'm driving down the highway 1 and chasing surfers in the hope to get a nice surf picture.

Current problem, they are all way to far out and I don't have enough reach and it's raining nonstop.

Well at least some pictures of waves and the beach we took...

the good news,

I got my car done today and registered, so I don't have to worry for the smog test for a year

the bad news,

my catalytic recyclers could be really toast and I need to get the car smoged if I sell it or if I re register it next year. So I need to start saving money for this repairs, I need 4 catalytic recyclers...


I also should by a ODB II connector, so I can reset the check engine light my self...

well this weekend we did the first real test with the car...

• going to jack london national park
• hitting the oil pan while parking, lesson: if you park next to a jetta, this thing is roughly 60 cm shorter than the passat, so don't measure the distance by it...
• driving in berryessa with a tip tronic and a strong engine is a lot of fun, Ashley sitting next to me enjoyed it and felt safe. But the car feels extremly heavy in the curves and the back tends to push a bit to much for my liking
• while passing other cars cops were more than happy to check my speed with there laser pistols for me, but did not pull me over. After all I was only slighlty faster than the speed limit and it was obious that I was passing a slower vehicle. You also could say I got lucky...
• the average gas mileage over 250 miles was 23 mpg (10l/100km). Which was highway/city/hills
• the dreaded check engine light came back on, right after I got gas again. I start to hate the electronical system in the passat.

now I really consider taking the passat to the race track on friday and get some track lessons and really learn how to handle this car.

well never mind, I ended up buying the sony and it works surprisingly well and is fast enough after updating it to the newest software version.

Sadly I could only get it in silver = reflects shiny things and not in dark blue, but already filled it up with 20 novels...

Basically a nice mixtures of Alexandre Dumas, Jack London, Oscar Wilde and Jules Verne.

The biggest difference to a book? It seems to read a bit slower and you have no real feeling of progress. Like switching pages and seeing were you are in a book.

---

Why did I buy it?

• cheaper than the kindle 2 by 150$
• i don't need space for 2k books on a reader, 10 - 15 books is all I need and I can always pop sd cards in it
• it comes with a cover
• i don't really like the kindle layout
• supposed to be more stable
• speed is fast enough, as long as the books are not pdf's
• not planning on buying books in the next 5 month
  

after testing several eReaders today with R.E.A.L eBooks (750 pages - 2000 pages) and not the standard 25 page example books on them, I sadly have to say...

- sony prs-505 is just to slow ( 4 seconds to turn a page? come on...)
- sony prs-700 is to shiny and expensive

now it looks like I'm ordering a kindle 2 to see how it works and in the worst case return it. But still 470$ for a stupid reading device, which will be replaced in 2 years.

- kindle: 359$
- protective cover: 44$
- drop it warranty: 70$

The good thing, I only hear awesome reports of the amazon customer service, but still I need to find one first to test it, before I buy it. Which means I'm going to buy books for 25$ for my montery trip.

Yes Ashley is working and I'm sitting at the beach reading. (And maybe renting a surfboard and chase sharks, or was it the other way around?)

so right now it's between the sony prs-505 for 269$ or the kindle 2 + warranty for 410$ (It's fragile and if you drop it you kill it, so warranty is recommended since it refunds the money in case of drops, once...)

price wise it's obvious that the sony wins, but it only works under windows, which means I need to install windows now, if I intend to buy books.

Let's look at some books:

title: clive cussler mediterranean caper
paper back: 9.99
sony: 7.19
kindle: 7.19
ebooks.com: 9.99

title: Worlds without end
paper back: 13.86
sony: 11.99
kindle: 9.99
ebooks.com: 22.99

title: white fang
paper back: 3.99
sony: 0.99
kindle: 0.00
ebooks.com: 3.99

Now white fang is a nice example since it's a free book and can be downloaded at the gutenberg project.

Sony books can be only read on the sony eReader
amazon books can be only read on the kindle
ebooks.com books can be read on both devices

Now I'm currently more interested in reading a lot of classics, which are free under the gutenberg project and to order books while traveling. It happens so often that I was on an airplane or at an airport and just wanted to grab another books, since I read all the other books. With the kindle I can just order it (If I'm in America) with the sony I need to connect to a laptop or so, but I can stock up before and have like 50 - 100 books before I go on the plane. So I could see the me using this feature once in a while.

Design?

I prefer the sony, a lot. Since it's smaller and has no keyboard. If they would produce a kindle without a keyboard, it would be perfect.

Subscriptions, it's possible to have newspaper subscriptions on the kindle, but you can write a program to generate your own newspaper based on websites for the sony, which would be free.

What would I like to have? The kindle, but why does it have to be so damn fragile...

What would be perfect? The sony ready with the connection to amazon.com, since I do all my shopping over this store and frankly like it. Also the sony store is kinda weak on books...

so the 'toy' is finally fixed and ready togo, well the skid plate is still missing, but will be installed soonish.

About the car?

* Volkswagen Passat GLX
* 2.8-liter V-6, 190 horses
* Power glass sunroof
* Rain sensor, automatic wipers
* Heated windshield washer nozzles
* Automatic climate control Air Conditioning
* Multi function trip computer
* Genuine wood decor
* Monsoon Sound System 8-speakers with amplifier - still no ipod connector...
* Driver and front passenger side airbags
* Side Curtain Air Bags
* 8-way driver and front passenger power seats, driver with 3 memory positions - can't figure out how the memory system works...
* Heatable front seats - after all it's cold in ca...
* Homelink with sun visor extension
* Leather seating surfaces
* ABS (anti-lock braking system)
* ASR (Anti-Slip Regulation)
* EDL (Electronic Differential Lock)
* Electronically controlled 5-speed Automatic Transmission with Tiptronic
* 6 disc CD-changer, trunk mounted
* children safety doors, I was successful in locking myself in the car...
* large trunk
* couple of dings, nothing major
* cruise control, to avoid speeding tickets

and it drives so much nicer than my truck. I totally forgot that car's can be silent and not making weird noises all the time...