Sideling Hill, 1269 ft.

- mike lee - hancock, md

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Amy and I went to the Uptown tonight to catch the very last show of the limited DC screening of the final cut version of Blade Runner. The future noir vision and special effects still hold up by today's standards. This classic endures. My only quibble for the night was that the theater screen brightness was a bit too dim for my taste.

- mike lee - washington, dc

The link to order the XO laptop at http://www.laptopgiving.org appeared at 6am EST sharp and I placed my order without a problem. At $399, this is a great deal given that this funds an a laptop for a child in a developing country, T-mobile is tossing in one-year of WiFi Hotspot access and you can write of half of the cost as a tax deduction. The offer is available for two more weeks until November 26th. Spread the word!

- mike lee - wheaton, md

My Asus Eee PC 701 4G arrived today from NewEgg. This little open source ultra-light laptop is getting rave reviews.

In addition to a raft of useful utilities such as the music player, photo viewer, internet radio, Skype, Pidgin IM and more, the web browser can easily handle Ajax, Flash, Java, and PDFs. I was even able to log into and load our Java-based corporate Citrix server to view time sheets.

There's already a lot of buzz on the forums with people trading tweaks and hacks.

Along with the start of mass production of the other famous laptop, the era of the cloudbook is here.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

After work tonight, I drove up to Baltimore's Hull Street Blues Cafe to have dinner with old buddy Jeff. We synced up on our respective current projects and shared memories of the work we did together during the bubble years.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

My daughter and I are enjoying E.T. on DVD together. She's seeing it for the first time.

It's fun seeing E.T.'s wind-powered Speak 'n Spell hack with foil-covered umbrella data transmission dish "phoning home".

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Leigh, great to see your slide rule on your own XO. I've got an e-mail back to you in the works. I've been on the OLPC Jabber intermittently. But it's hard to sync up via just the chat activity because there's no system alert or sound for when someone enters the chatroom when one is working in another window. At least I haven't found it.

- mike lee - wheaton, md

A box that left a factory in Shenzen, China last week arrived on my doorstep today. In it was the Chumby I've been waiting for a year for it to come on the market.

Chumby is sort of like an alarm clock on steriods with a color touch screen, WiFi and rich media software widgets. Pictured here is the beginning of the unboxing, which I did on my back porch. Since there's WiFi all around the house, I did the activation outside too with the help of an extension cord and my iPhone to do the web account activation steps.

The charms designed by Susan Kare can been seen here. Susan designed the original Macintosh bitmap icons and user interface in the mid 80s.

The rest of the unboxing photos are in a set on Flickr.

Not only is the Chumby happily displaying the time and family photos in my kitchen, I've deployed Virtual Chumby on TypePad and Facebook so people can see what's on screen at any time.

Three cheers for Chumby!

- mike lee - wheaton, md

Cici, in a lime green Disney fairie dress with blinking LED wings, did the sweep of the lighted front doors on our street for candy with her mommy while I greeted the squealing waves of kids at our front porch.

We initially had a convoy of SUVs with child rangers on tactical candy assault. And then a few friendly neighbors on foot. Apparently, I was the only candygiver who came out of the house.

Cici is pictured here inventorying her loot. At just short of 4-years-old, she doesn't know the names of the candy yet. Next year for sure.

- mike lee - wheaton, md