or

Here’s how to choose: Picture a quiet Sunday evening. Would you rather spend an hour reading a book, or watching TV?

or

If you answered "TV", then you’re an iPad. If you chose the book, then you’re a Kindle.

So, continuing on the theme of wishful thinking, here are my 2010 predictions:

• Google Library: the Google Books project will be expanded to allow for book rental, with appropriate payments to the copyright holders. This will not only give access to hard to find books across borders, but will also make this access reasonably priced.
• Google Europe will move to Switzerland to further optimize taxes
• Google Voice will introduce European numbers and make my life easier

Happy New Year!

We chose a red roof to match some of the red tile and rusted steel roofs of some chalets in Switzerland. G. also provided some sample-size windows – two on the South side and one on the North side.

For the finish, I sided the walls and the “basement” with fence boards, and designed the deck railing based on my ancestors’ house in Switzerland.

I added a wooden ladder (on the right) and the kids stacked the obligatory firewood below the deck.

Inspirations

I followed a lot of google.ch searches to find a number of chalets of all sizes to get ideas on proportions and details. Some of the noteworthy ones:

Rustic; Fantastic; Bucolic; Commercial; Nice Kit; My brother’s fiancée’s family chalet

Early Sketches

Based on these inspirations, I drew a few sketches. I had 10 ft of total height to work with, 12 of depth and 7 in width. I wanted the roof pitch and overhang to match the Swiss types, and some of the final touches to highlight Swissness (balcony, flowers)

In the next post: construction

Google Cache:

This questionable service – finding out who has blocked and deleted you in MSN is either:

1. a social VIRUS, preying on your deepest wish to find out who doesn’t like you
2. a phishing scam,
3. a hacking exploit into MSN
4. a reverse My Space – to find out “who doesn’t like me”
5. all of the above.

Don’t trust it!

powered by performancing firefox

One effective technique for basic PDA smoke testing is to use browser spoofing, in effect making a desktop browser lie about its identity to the server and thereby requesting a PDA version of a page.

Spoofing Advantages & Disadvantages

Spoofing is useful to look at pages and track basic functionality, but it is not subsitute for device or emulator testing, becaus spoofing will not necessarily render the page as intended for the target device. 

On the other hand, spoofing has its advantages:

1. Allows a tester to make sure a PDA version of a page is present on a test server (since PDAs can’t usually access the internal network)
2. Allows easy screenshot capture (when the problem is not a rendering issue)
3. Much faster to go through a set of links
4. Can test server scripts rapidly, ensuring that the right versions of pages get shown

How to spoof using Firefox

1. Get Mozilla Firefox.
2. Firefox can be enhanced by extensions (read more about it). In Firefox, go to this page to install the extension “user agent switcher” – http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/useragentswitcher/
3. (note: the same developer has also created a “Web Developer Extension”, which I highly recommend). Once you restart the browser, user agent switcher is available as a menu item under “tools”.
4. You can now add specific user agent strings in the Options. The user agent string is the text that the browser passes to a Web server to identify itself

1. Colorzilla, a Firefox extension which places a color picker in the status bar, and helps determine the color of any item in a Web page in Firefox.
2. Cpick, an amazing freestanding utility that allows the same for anything on your screen.