These past few weeks my wife and I are following season 4 of So You Think You Can Dance. (By the way, our favorite choreographer is Mandy Moore.) Overall I like last season’s performances more, but there was a few good ones this year as well:

We spent half of our 4th July at Carmel-by-the-Sea. We went there because we only wanted a one-day trip, and Carmel is supposedly pet friendly. We were disappointed enough to leave early.

Today’s experience tells me that “pet friendly” only applies to the Carmel Beach City Park. Most dogs on the clean white sand beach were off leash, though I would have liked it more if it was less crowded.

As a visitor I naturally went over to the downtown area for lunch. This was where I found the “pet friendly” description fall flat. Many restaurants do not allow pets inside nor do they have outdoor seating. The pet friendly restaurant we found didn’t have enough space between outdoor seats to really let our dogs stay with us while we eat, so we had to order our food to go.

There was nothing much else to do for pet owners either. I doubt that my dogs were welcome in art galleries or museums. To make the best of it, I took my camera hoping to take pictures of interesting buildings or architecture, but I found nothing I was interested in photographing in the downtown area. I must admit that I didn’t cover too much of Carmel, but that’s because I became disinterested the more I walked. Some residential houses looked interesting, but I didn’t want to take pictures of private properties.

Over the weekend I watched season 11, episode 1 of Top Gear. One of the comparison tests was to see how far a bunch of exotic cars can travel on one gallon of gas. The cars were raced full throttle on a track, so no Prius-like mpg was to be expected. Still, I was amazed to find out in the end that the Ferrari 599 only achieved 1.7 miles. That’s one point seven miles per gallon!

As I was flipping through the latest issue (August 2008) of Road & Track, I couldn’t help but to notice all the mention of power and speed throughout the pages. While I understand car magazines naturally lean towards performance car coverages, it is in stark contrast to today’s reality. I for one restrain from even forcefully tapping (and not stepping) on my G35’s gas pedal for fear of upsetting the mileage gods.

There is an article in this issue related to car gas consumptions though. Titled “The Fast and The Frugal”, it’s a round up of fast cars with ‘good’ gas mileage. Unfortunately ‘good’ means 16 (Corvette Z51) to 26 mpg (Mini Cooper). By that standard, my G35 is pretty ‘frugal’ as well.

I started playing with Liquibase two days ago on June 24. I wanted to take advantage of Liquibase’s ability to generate database schema upgrade DDLs given an existing database and Hibernate mapping files. This capability was new in Liquibase 1.6. I downloaded version 1.6.1 on June 24.

My ultimate goal was to integrate Liquibase into our Ant-based build system, so I started exprimenting with Liquibase’s Ant tasks, specifically diffDatabaseToChangeLog and updateDatabase. The diffDatabaseToChangeLog task kept complaining about not finding the Hibernate mapping file, so I switched over to Liquibase command line interface hoping for more luck. After a few hours of tinkering, including changing command line’s CLASSPATH environment variable and liquibase.bat’s CP variable to include the path to hibernate file, I managed to generate a Liquibase change log. Along the way I realized that Hibernate file needed to be in the CLASSPATH to be visible to Liquibase.

[Continue Reading]

A while back I blogged about Pentax Optio W60. While I still think the Optio W60 is interesting, I think another camera will suit me more: the Richo GX200. It has these key features which I am after in a DSLR complement:

• shoots RAW
• wide angle lens
• compact chassis with relatively large LCD

But at $700? Eh…

[Via Engadget]

[Update @ 2008-06-27T19:18-8:00] Looks like the GX200 fails to deliver on image quality.

Today I filled up the gas tank in my G35 with my own money for the first time. Boy it was painful to pay for premium gas at $4.75 a gallon.

I have been feeling tired at work this past week. I could barely keep my eyes open by late afternoon.

Was it the lack of sleep? It couldn’t be, since I have been getting 8 hours of sleep every day.

Were my eyes just tired? Maybe I worked too hard this week.

Yesterday I noticed that I got some relieve if I dabbed some water around my eyes and over the eyelids, so I guessed my eyes were more dry than tired. Still, I thought the dry eyes were caused by my constant stare into the monitor at work.

This morning I woke up feeling well rested, but my eyes felt dry the moment I stepped into my office. Only then did I start to associate my dry eyes with the office construction happening near by - a lab next door is being torn down and rebuilt as offices. I guess I am sensitive to the dust.