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Operation Gadget went quiet at the end of August. This is by far the longest break in posts in the five year history of the site. If you are wondering why, consider:
I lost my job in September.
This happened a couple of weeks after my family came back from vacation at Stone Harbor. I was only at that job for seven weeks, so it's hard for me to see the job loss as anything but a function of the deteriorating economy.I started a new audio podcast.
Losing my job was helpful in one way: I was able to get off the ground HockeyRefCast, my podcast about hockey officiating. Episode 1, including an interview with Ian Walsh of the National Hockey League, turned out really well.I found a new job in October.
Freelance writing and blogging took a backseat to finding another job. I was surprised to find that there was as much demand for my services as there was. I actually received two job offers.
A well-known web publishing software company called Six Apart hired me to work for their professional services division in mid-October. I started working with them on November 3. This was a God-send because....My wife was in a car accident a week ago this past Friday.
Kathleen was in a car accident on Interstate 95 just south of Newtown on November 7. [ Photos of the car after the accident ] This was a harrowing experience for our family, because Kathleen is seven months pregnant.
We spent 10 hours at the hospital while tests Kathleen underwent tests to make sure that neither she nor the baby were hurt and that she was not in premature labor.
That was a scary time, and I felt that Twitter was somehow inappropriate.I know what you're thinking. Dave was about as absent from the 2008 Tour de France as Team Astana. More in fact, because Johan Bruyneel appeared on Versus during the last week of The Tour as a color analyst.
So what happened?
I accepted a new job in New York working for a travel-related Internet company. The job started last Monday. Getting into commuting from Newtown, PA has been a huge effort for me, as well as for Kathleen and Jimmy. It has changed our lives and our schedules quite dramatically.
I'm doing the best I can to keep up. It's going to be tough again this week, because I've got a lot of hockey-related work to do in addition to the work at my job.
I did get a post published on Inside iPhone last Thursday. If you have time and are interested, check out Obvious Winners and Losers in the iTunes App Store Rollout. There I talk about an app that I think is a game changer because it makes the iPhone usable by people in a new industry, an app that surprised and delighted me, and a couple of apps that disappointed me somewhat.
I'm planning to post an outline of my daily commuting schedule and my new workout regime over here at Operation Gadget, when I have time.I'm pleased to report that I am contributing to Inside iPhone, a new part of the O'Reilly Digital Media Website. I will be posting over there once a week.
My first post is Dave Aiello's Attempt at Introducing Himself. It explains who I am to people who have never seen Operation Gadget before, and also hints at what I'm planning to talk about in my first real post next week.
There are several other good writers contributing to Inside iPhone, including Derrick Story and Erica Sadun.
I'll point out my posts on Inside iPhone as they get published. Please read them and let me know what you think.We experienced a primary hard disk failure on the Operation Gadget server this weekend. I recovered the site from a backup a couple of hours ago.
I look forward to getting back to posting on Monday.
Happy Birthday Jimmy!: My son
Jimmy Aiello turns the big "2" today.
Here's a photo of the two of us
when we were riding the new
carousel at Sesame Place a couple
of weeks ago. [ Photo: Kathleen Aiello
via Flickr ]
I've been insanely busy this week, but I wanted to take a moment to wish my son Jimmy Aiello, the happiest two-year-old in Newtown, a happy birthday.
Jimmy has come a long way in a year. He looks a lot more like a little boy to me than a baby, and he has developed a real appreciation for trucks and trains. We play with them every day.
I've been fortunate to be able to spend a lot of time with him over the past few weeks, and I see the delighted reaction of complete strangers when he tries to engage them in conversation. I know that most little children get extra attention from nice people at stores and around most towns. But I feel like he's got some combination of personality and cuteness that brings out the best in the people he meets.
Kathleen and I are taking Jimmy to the Philadelphia Zoo in a few hours. I haven't been there in at least 25 years. I'm sure we'll have a blast.
Jimmy's party is on Saturday in the backyard. Lots of friends and family will be there.
We love you, Jimmy! Let's have another great year.I've noticed that the first stage of attracting followers on Twitter (beyond your actual friends) is that accounts that act like bots start to follow you. Not to name any names, but one of my followers is just reporting random things from Google News, another one is just throwing out facts and observations about dog behavior.
The custom on Twitter seems to be to try to follow those people who follow you. I'm doing this, but I'm making sure that the people I follow seem like real people before I follow them.Since I switched back to Mac on February 28, I've started using much more of my photo library. One of the products of this process is a new Operation Gadget header graphic which shows a series of Serotta road bikes mounted on a roof rack.
I've been using the original photo that from which this header graphic was taken as the desktop background for my MacBook Pro since I set it up. I've got quite a few photos that I like enough to make my desktop background. I think a few of them will eventually become Operation Gagdet header graphics.
The original header graphic, a macro-focused shot of the keyboard of a Handspring Treo 180 will probably appear again some day. Four and a half years is a long time to use a graphic like that one.I uploaded a favicon for Operation Gadget a little while ago. I used a program called Pixen to make it on my MacBook Pro. Pixen is donationware.
The "Operation Gadget" title on the Alltop Gadgets Page looked naked without a favicon on its left. I felt like I had to step up and get something reasonable in there quickly.
It's hard to create something original and memorable in a 16x16 bitmap. So many of the most obvious gadget designs are taken already.
I have a really good one on CTDATA.com, but that's because CTDATA's logo is professionally designed, and we just scaled it down to fit the favicon image size.
I'll see if I like this one I made for Operation Gadget. If you have any thoughts on it, email me at daiello [at] operationgadget.com. I think it's important to think about the graphic in terms of how it looks in your browser, not how it looks at 12-times the intended size.I got an email from Guy Kawasaki last night telling me that Operation Gadget has been added to the Alltop Gadgets page. What a great terrific break for us!
Alltop is the new weblog aggregation site that its owners call "the digital magazine rack" of the Internet. Operation Gadget headlines now appear on the same page with headlines from Engadget, Boing Boing Gadgets, Personal Technology by Walt Mossberg, and a bunch of other a-list gadget blogs.
We'll have to raise our game.I'm trying out MarsEdit, a MacOS X blogging client, for a few posts to see if it improves my productivity. It's been recommended by higher beings in the blogosphere like Andy Abramson and John Gruber-- two people whose blogs I read every day.
I really want to see whether a client like MarsEdit can make inserting of photos and screenshots simpler for me. I've got lots of media at my finger tips now that I'm using a MacBook Pro. Operation Gadget should reflect that better.Fellow Movable Type publishing system consultant Chad Everett pointed out that the Operation Gadget comment mechanism wasn't functioning properly. It took a while to determine what the problem was, but I corrected it.
You are free to leave comments on Operation Gadget again.
Thanks for pointing out the problem Chad.
Operation Gadget has moved to a bigger and faster webserver to serve you better. Sorry for the lack of articles over the past few days. We now return you to your regularly scheduled gadget talk.

Happy Holidays from Dave, Kathleen, and Jimmy
Aiello: We spent lots of time this Christmas with
family and friends. We also bought a new car.
[ Photo: Scott Aiello ]
Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, and Happy New Year from your friends at Operation Gadget.
I didn't expect to be away from my keyboard for as long as I was, but Kathleen and I got really busy with the holidays and with car shopping. This is the first real opportunity I've had to wish our readers happy holidays.
This was Jimmy's first Christmas, and he got to see most of his close relatives. We spent Christmas Eve at home with a group of friends and relatives including my father, my brother and sister and their spouses / fiancees and children. My nephew Wes Howson born in early December, so this was his first Christmas as well. Kathleen's parents, her sister, brother John, and her Aunt Jane as well as our friend Jen Colangelo were also here.
On Christmas Day, we opened gifts to each other at home in the morning and then went to Kathleen's parents' house in South Jersey for the afternoon. We met Kathleen's brother Scott and his family there. That was probably the most enjoyable Christmas Day get-together we've had in years.
Over the past week, Kathleen and I spent a lot of time shopping for and buying a new car to replace our trusty old Jeep Grand Cherokee that we put out to pasture in early December. It's amazing how complicated a purchase decision like that is. We are really excited now that it's over.
Hopefully I'll have time to talk more about our car purchase over the next few days.
Over the next few weeks I hope to be able to talk more about the gadgets that friends and relatives got during the holidays, and to talk more about the Nokia N-Series mobile phones that I've been testing during the Fall. I recently got a Nokia N80 Internet Edition phone, and I hope to be able to use it to make VoIP calls using my WiFi network in the next few days.

Wes Howson was born on Tuesday at a hospital in
New Jersey. Everyone's very happy. [ Photo:
Kathleen Aiello ]
Wesley Howson was born on Tuesday evening in a nearby hospital. Wes was 7 pounds, 14 ounces, and 21 inches long. My sister Julie and Wes are doing fine. A number of friends and relatives visited over the two days they were in the hospital.
This is Julie and her husband Robert's second baby. Wes has a big sister Emma who was born in March 2005. Kathleen and I took a lot more photos of Emma than we did of Wes, but the main reason was that we had our own son Jimmy to keep entertained while taking the pictures. That's life in a growing family I guess.
This was the first time we used our new Canon PowerShot A540 to take newborn baby pictures. I still have to compare the images of Wes and his family to the ones we took when Emma was born. The Emma photos were taken with a Canon PowerShot A95 and I thought the pictures taken with the flash supressed came out darker than they looked on the LCD display.
This time we stayed away from the flash-suppressed shots, and it didn't matter as much because Wes slept a lot while we were there. So far the shots from the A540 look great. This is a great use for a point-and-shoot camera like this one.
Attention Operation Gadget Readers: due to a data center migration at our hosting provider, OperationGadget.com will be offline from 11:45pm Central Time on Friday, September 1 to 4:00am on Saturday, September 2.
On Sunday, I took out my in-line skates and skated around the industrial complex near our house in Newtown, PA. This was the first time I had been on skates since January 24 when I broke my left fibula while officiating a hockey game. My left ankle was noticeably more swollen than usual that night, but I felt like I could skate again on Monday if I wanted.
Monday was mostly sunny and 55 to 60 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celsius), so I decided to get my Trek 1500 road bike out for a short ride late in the afternoon. I rode 6.9 miles in 31 minutes and 7 seconds. It was great to get out there and see that I haven't entirely lost the ability to ride, although I've lost a lot of stamina over the past nine weeks.
For those of you who have been following my recovery from a broken left fibula, I saw my orthopedist today and I was cleared to resume physical activity. Surprisingly, this includes the opportunity to try skating again as soon as I want.
My wife Kathleen suggested that I find my in-line skates and start by trying to skate on them. I have to find them and see if the ball bearings and wheels are in good condition. If not, I can try going to a "public session" at a local rink or sneak on the ice after some hockey team finishes practicing. We'll see.
Thank you for your continued support and encouragement.
I hope that I can get back to doing a bit more writing on Operation Gadget now.
For the past two and a half weeks, I've been working on consulting projects for USA Hockey (at least the part called the Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association Officiating Program) and Spot On. This work is done through my consulting business called Weblog Improvement and doesn't have much to do with this website, except that it probably made it harder for regular readers to find something interesting here.
I got a lot out of the project I did to enhance Spot On. This was the first major php programming project I've done that incorporates content from a Movable Type publishing system. The big effort was the Spot On splash page, which weaves the content of 9 or 10 different blogs into a single web page. The focus of Spot On is quite different from what you read here, but I think the way the page works is pretty neat.
I'm hoping that some of the experience I got working on Chris' splash page makes it over to Operation Gadget one of these days. I can't promise anything at this point because finding the time to do development work on my sites has become more difficult as my consulting business has become busier. We'll see.
Yesterday Kathleen and I met with my orthopedist for the first time since my leg was put in a cast. The orthopedist had my cast removed and had my left leg x-rayed again. The x-rays showed that my fibula is healing, but hasn't yet healed 100 percent. The orthopedist decided not to put me in another cast, so I can start physical therapy.
We were all surprised at how swollen my lower leg was after the cast was removed. I knew that my leg was swelling intermittently while I had the cast on it. It's clear that the swelling I was feeling was when my calf was swelling near the top of the cast, and that my ankle and foot may have been swollen much more frequently than I thought.
I need to do two to three sessions of physical therapy per week for the next four weeks, in order to strengthen my leg and regain flexibility. After that, we will meet with the orthopedist again to see the fibula has fully healed and if I can start skating and cycling again.
Kathleen and I had a terrific time at Walt Disney World for the past few days. We stayed at Disney's Wilderness Lodge and spent a day each at Disney-MGM Studios, the Magic Kingdom, and Epcot.
The weather was just about as perfect as you can get in January: mostly sunny and 75 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit (24 to 27 degrees Celsius) each day.
This trip was about relaxation. I needed a break from writing Operation Gadget, consulting on the design of other websites, and managing servers. Kathleen needed to get away from the office and relax. We achieved our goals.
I'm not sorry that I missed most of CES, Macworld, or the Alito hearings. I didn't turn on the TV after the NFL games ended on Sunday. This was the right way for me to relax this time, and I'm going to try to remember this approach for our next vacation.
My wife and I are on a trip to Florida for some rest and relaxation. I probably won't have much to say here on Operation Gadget until Thursday or Friday.
What a week this has been around the Home Office! I thought that having Christmas and the first day of Hanukkah fall on a Sunday (and on the same day) would have made things easier for everyone, but if my experience is typical, the schedule was a bit harder than it has been in other years.
I guess I brought some of this on myself. Christmas Eve was sunny and an unusually warm 55 degrees Fahrenheit (13 degrees Celcius). How could I pass up the opportunity for a half hour ride on my new Trek 1500? I haven't had time to write a review, but Kathleen's verdict is in. After a ride down the driveway she said, "Oh it's so smooth!"
Fourteen people spent the evening in our living room in Newtown, PA last night. The Christmas Eve get-together for our families has become a tradition since Kathleen and I got married. This year there were two regular digital cameras and a Nokia N90 in use, so we almost ought to start our own Flickr Photo Pool. Maybe I'll have time to post a few photos of the festivities tomorrow, but we're at another family party today-- there won't be time now.
Merry Christmas and Happy Hanukkah to all Operation Gadget readers and to my friends and family. Now that we've done most of our gving to others, I hope you all get something you really want from someone special.
Since Operation Gadget has a strong relationship with Amazon.com, I think it's important to point out that today is the last day for Free Super Saver Shipping for Amazon.com. According to Amazon.com's Holiday Order Deadlines for U.S. Shipments, if you place your order by today for items from Amazon.com that are marked Usually ships in 24 hours, delivery before Christmas and the First Day of Hanukkah is guaranteed.
If you place an order with Amazon.com today, read the shipment options page carefully. An order that I placed last night said that I would receive all of the items that I ordered by December 23.
There are other shipping options for products ordered after today, so fear not.
Technorati Tags: Amazon.com, Super Saver Shipping, Hanukkah gifts, Christmas gifts
This is an advisory message to readers of Operation Gadget who maintain their own headline feed readers. As part of our site upgrade that began yesterday, we are automatically redirecting requests for our old RSS feed to our new Atom feed. If you experience any problems, you can edit your Operation Gadget headline feed subscription to choose one of the following feeds:
If you still have questions, please email me at daiello [at] operationgadget.com.
Today is Operation Gadget's second birthday, and we're celebrating with a bit of a site design and infrastructure update. Over the next few weeks we hope to roll out services that will make Operation Gadget an even better resource for fans of electronic gadgets and the technology used in sports.
Thank you to the thousands of readers who've made a habit of visiting Operation Gadget. Please let me know if you have any comments or suggestions by posting them here, or by emailing me at daiello [at] operationgadget.com.
Kathleen and I have been in New Jersey for most of the day, and I didn't bring a laptop with me. I'm posting this article from my Treo 650.
I'll be back in the office on Tuesday, so look for more on Operation Gadget then.
Operation Gadget will turn two years old in a couple of weeks. Overall, it's done really well, and we've established an audience in several different niches:
All of these are worthwhile topics for a weblog, but Operation Gadget's coverage has been a bit inconsistent because I've tended to focus on a specific topic at different times of the year. For instance during July, coverage on Operation Gadget focused on The Tour de France. I was hesitant to go off topic at that time to talk about an electronic gadget even if the story would have been very topical.
I'm not announcing any new weblogs right now, but I want to say that I expect that Operation Gadget will become two or more weblogs by the Spring 2006.
If you have any thoughts on this, feel free to post them or email me at daiello [at] operationgadget.com.
This is the Operation Gadget weekly summary for the third week of September 2005. I'm experimenting with a weekly summary so that readers who want to receive a periodic email with Operation Gadget headlines can receive the links to all of the articles published each week. I will post a mechanism for readers to sign up for this service when I work out the details.
The headlines:
September 15
September 14
September 13
September 12
Does a weekly summary work for you? Is it a waste of time? Let me know by posting a comment. Thanks....
This is the Operation Gadget weekly summary for the second week of September 2005. I'm experimenting with a weekly summary so that readers who want to receive a periodic email with Operation Gadget headlines can receive the links to all of the articles published each week. I will post a mechanism for readers to sign up for this service when I work out the details.
The headlines:
September 9
September 8
September 7
September 6
September 5
Does a weekly summary work for you? Is it a waste of time? Let me know by posting a comment. Thanks....
This is the Operation Gadget weekly summary for the first week of September 2005. I'm experimenting with a weekly summary so that readers who want to receive a periodic email with Operation Gadget headlines can receive the links to all of the articles published each week. I will post a mechanism for readers to sign up for this service when I work out the details.
The headlines:
September 2
September 1
August 31
August 30
August 29
Does a weekly summary work for you? Is it a waste of time? Let me know by posting a comment. Thanks....
In the last two days, it's become clear that the damage done by Hurricane Katrina to the Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama Gulf Coast region is one of the most serious disasters in American history. I told Kathleen yesterday that I think the destruction in New Orleans will have a more lasting impact on the United States than the attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001. There are many reasons for this, but the key reasons are:
All Americans will be economically affected by this disaster, but people in coastal areas of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama have been displaced and lost many of their belongings. These people need our help and we should all step up and make some sort of donation.
I just made a small donation on behalf of OperationGadget.com and CTDATA to the American Red Cross Hurricane Relief Fund. The Red Cross has proven over the years to be effective at directing financial contributions to where they're most needed.
If you are interested in making a contribution in this time of need, you can visit the Red Cross' Donate Now! page at: http://www.redcross.org/donate/donate.html.
This is the Operation Gadget weekly summary for the fourth week of August 2005. I'm experimenting with a weekly summary so that readers who want to receive a periodic email with Operation Gadget headlines can receive the links to all of the articles published each week. I will post a mechanism for readers to sign up for this service when I work out the details.
The headlines:
August 27
August 26
August 25
August 24
August 23
August 22
Does a weekly summary work for you? Is it a waste of time? Let me know by posting a comment. Thanks....
This is the Operation Gadget weekly summary for the third week of August 2005. I'm experimenting with a weekly summary so that readers who want to receive a periodic email with Operation Gadget headlines can receive the links to all of the articles published each week. I will post a mechanism for readers to sign up for this service when I work out the details.
The headlines:
August 21
August 19
August 18
August 16
August 15
Does a weekly summary work for you? Is it a waste of time? Let me know by posting a comment. Thanks....