Here's a music video that's making the rounds of web sites I read:

The movement away from Windows and toward the Mac is still in it's early stages, so lots of people haven't seen all of these Mac applications before. My question is, does it make more sense as a music video or an ad for Leopard?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here's a follow up to last week's article about Smart cars on the road in the Philadelphia area. The Boston Globe published an article on Tuesday that indicates that many owners of SUVs and pickup trucks in New England are trying to sell their vehicles because of fuel costs.

Near the end of the article the reporter relates the following information, attributed to Herb Chambers, a prominent auto dealer in that part of the country:

At his Mini dealership, Chambers said people have been turning in Chevrolet Suburbans for the tiny British car in recent weeks. He currently has a one-year waiting list for the coveted Smart Car, an 8-foot-8-inch vehicle that gets more than 40 miles per gallon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Yesterday on my way to the Philadelphia Airport to drop off Kathleen, Jimmy, and a couple of other relatives for a weekend trip to Atlanta, I saw two Smart ForTwos on the road in less than an hour.

Smart ForTwos like this one that was seen by
fleur-design in Louisville, KY are
appearing more frequently in the Philadelphia area
too. [ via Flickr ]

I saw one in Newtown coming on to the Newtown Bypass. I saw another headed south on 95 toward Center City before the Franklin Mills Mall area. Neither of these cars were Philly CarShare vehicles.

I'm really surprised at how quickly I'm starting to see these cars popping up around here. We live in a fairly affluent community here in Bucks County, but I don't really consider this area as trend setting as places like Manayunk or Conshohocken, or some other place where more city-oriented people with money live in this area.

I guess the fact that I saw these Smarts is an indication that people with disposable income are reacting to gasoline prices, concluding that the price trend is a long-term phenomenon, and adjusting their capital spending accordingly.

These cars cost as little as $11,600 if you want a completely stripped down model. I would never buy one that's low on features because you don't even get a radio, but you can get something reasonably equipped for under $15,000.

My friend Ramona Morel used to own a Smart. I rode in it in Zürich a few times. I didn't feel unsafe in it on the highway there. I wonder what it would be like to drive one in the USA?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Merlin Mann came up with a great idea a few minutes ago on Twitter:

Craving some kind of existential regular expression that could give me one week without hearing a single syllable about the primary race.

I'd love it if this concept was embraced by Google Reader. Imagine if you could use regular expressions to filter content out of feeds that you don't want to see? Or if you could use regular expressions to help you discover new feeds you might want to subscribe to?

The possibilities seem endless to me.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I was chosen to officiate at the 2008 USA Hockey Girls' Nationals last week in West Chester, PA. This was a marathon tournament that ran from April 2 to 6 and covered four different age groups:

• 12 and Under
• 14 and Under
• 16 and Under
• 19 and Under

The tournament was structured so that 12 teams could participate in each age group, and they were divided into two six-team pools for round robin play on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The quarterfinals of each age group were Saturday morning. The semifinals were Saturday evening. The final game in each age group took place on Sunday.

Amazingly, a total of 15 overtime periods were needed in the four age group finals on Sunday. This included a remarkable 8 overtimes in the 12 and Under game where Assabet Valley, Massachusetts beat the Pittsburgh Aviators.

I was impressed with all of the teams I officiated in this tournament. I was selected to work the Girls' and Women's Nationals five years ago in 2003. I must say that it's clear that the number of players and the overall skill level of each player has dramatically improved since then.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Beginning Wednesday, April 2, I am officiating the USA Hockey Girls' National Ice Hockey Tournament in West Chester, PA. I may not have time to post very much on Operation Gadget until the tournament is over on Sunday.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• For the Phinney Family, a Dream and a Challenge on NYTimes.com: This story came out last week, right before Taylor Phinney raced in the Individual Pursuits at the Track Cycling World Championships. Taylor finished eighth. His father, Davis, is a legendary U.S. cycling champ who has struggled with Parkinson's Disease in recent years. This article summarizes their recent struggles and successes.
• ScreenFlow: The Killer Screencasting App on MacTips: "ScreenFlow is the application I've been waiting for on the Mac. I've been using it recently for the MacTips Videos and I love it! It's saves me so much time because I'm able to focus on creating valuable content rather than editing videos."
• Dash’s Car Navigator Gives Smart Directions, if Others Participate, Walt Mossberg on AllThingsD: "As smart as in-car navigation devices are, they could be smarter. They could talk to each other via the Internet and share information on how fast traffic is moving on the roads they have just traveled.... Starting this week, just such a smarter navigation box is hitting the market. Called the Dash Express, this $400 product looks a lot like units from better-known firms... But, unlike any other in-car navigation device I’ve seen, each Dash Express... becomes part of a network, connected to the company via the Internet. "
• Windows XP: Going, going ... gone? on Computerworld: "The approaching death of Windows XP may upset you, but it shouldn't come as a surprise. Microsoft Corp.'s product life-cycle guidelines have foretold the fate of XP since 2001. In fact, Microsoft has been killing off one version of a product as it is replaced with another for years now. But this time around, the approaching demise of XP is getting more attention than, say, the final passing of Windows 2000."
• Coming Soon to a Phone Near You on WSJ.com: This article summarizes forthcoming developments in mobile phone voice control, improved web browsers, enhanced storage, and video sharing. [ Subscription may be required to read this article. ]
• How To Use Nokia’s Sports Tracker as a Photo Tracker on The Gadgets Page: "Ms. Jen was part of Nokia’s Urbanista Diaries Relay, which means they sent her to India to promote the Nokia N82 in all its glory. While on the trip, she realized how well the Sports Tracker (a typically exercise related feature) could be used to track the geo-locations of your photos"
• Note to readers: Today would be my grandfather James M. Lynch, Jr.'s 95th birthday. He died in 1982. He is one of the inspirations for this site, since he bought and tried every important electronic gadget that existed in the 1970s. He owned the first digital watch, desktop calculator, and personal computers I ever saw.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 9:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy mistook Windows XP for
Teletubbyland: Does your toddler do that
too? [ Image: Dave Aiello, in my Flickr
account ]

I started building a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Fusion on my new MacBook Pro the other day. My 21-month old son Jimmy was really excited when he saw it and came running over, pointing, and saying "La-la, la-la".

Suddenly I realized he thought the "Bliss" background was Teletubbyland. I started howling with laughter.

Although I recently returned to the Mac community, I always felt like an expatriate in the world of Windows. As such I never set up a Windows machine to look this way. I always made it look like the "Windows Classic" theme on Windows XP which kind of enhanced the backward feel of that operating system for me.

In this case, I was just part way into installing Windows so I could run a couple of legacy applications that I'll need for a while, like Microsoft Office and QuickBooks. This was just the way the screen happened to appear when it caught Jimmy's eye.

I switched over to the "Red Moon Desert" background so Jimmy wouldn't be distracted.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 3:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I never met Sheldon Brown, but I learned a great deal from him.

Sheldon developed a website, SheldonBrown.com, that had an incredible amount of technical information about bicycles and cycling. If I Googled for some information about one of my bikes, I often ended up consulting his site.

Sheldon passed away on Sunday, February 3, 2008, reportedly of a massive heart attack. May he rest in peace. [ via spare cycles and BikeRadar.com ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

• RPI Plays Princeton tonight in the 31st Annual Big Red Freakout. RPI needs the win. In other news, the White beat the Red in the Alumni Game 9-8.
• Kipkay's Video Tips & Tricks on Instructables: "Here are 5 easy and cheap tricks for anyone who uses a camcorder. Total cost for all 5 is under $10!" [ via Lifehacker ]
• New Devices and Applications on the Wi-Fi Front on Web Worker Daily: "While many Mac-based users already have next-generation, draft 802.11n Wi-Fi technology in their homes (because they use Apple’s Airport Extreme routers) lots of other folks still use slower 802.11g Wi-Fi. This year is when official certification of 802.11n Wi-Fi is supposed to arrive, and the month of January brought some product announcements that point to what the widespread arrival of 802.11n technology might mean...."
• Review of the Nike Amp+ iPod Control Watch: "... the Amp+ isn't designed to be an all-around running or fitness watch. It's specifically designed for runners who already have the Nike + iPod kit. Similar to the Timex iControl we recently reviewed, the Nike Amp+ is a remote control for your iPod Nano, however unlike the Timex, the Nike Amp+ uses the existing Nike + iPod gadget that plugs into your iPod, so you're actually adding the iPod remote control to the Nike iPod system." [ via TUAW ]
• Crazy Apple Rumors on Hiatus on TUAW: CrazyAppleRumors.com is a site I just found out about recently. It's articles are what you might read in The Onion if they covered Apple more aggressively. Sorry to see it go dark.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sunday's New York Times had a terrific article about fighting a weight loss battle while working a full time job which resonates with me. What was most interesting was the fact that two of the three people profiled work at very athletically-oriented companies.

• Steve Madden, the editor of Bicycling and Mountain Bike magazines is 44 years old, 5-feet 10-inches tall, and weighs 198 pounds. In other words he's almost exactly my size.

  The shocker in this story is that Madden rode his bike 4,451 miles in 2007. No question that he could have journaled it all using a heart rate monitor like the one I use. How can you ride 85 miles per week, year round and not lose weight? I know. You eat what you want and never commit to a serious eating plan.

  There's no question that Madden is both fit and overweight, as I am at the moment. He demonstrates how far you can take this lifestyle as an amateur athlete.




• Marcello Aller, National Athletics Account Manager at Polar USA is 34 years old, 5-feet 8-inches tall, and weighs 218 pounds. He says:

  My colleagues think I look fine, but it’s become more of a challenge to become lean.... I’m not an endurance athlete, like a small cyclist or a runner. I have a typical, square football-player build. Sometimes it’s more difficult to regain a hard body; my metabolism has changed with age.

  Aller is an inch shorter than I am and weighs over 20 pounds more than I do. I weighed this much when I worked on Wall Street. He needs to realize that he'll have to both change his diet and work out in order to achieve the results he wants.

  I think a warning sign in his behavior is that he thinks his metabolism has changed at age 34. This may be the case to a small extent, but he'll do a lot better if he admits that the quantity and type of food he eats is a substantial part of the problem.

These two men work at athletic lifestyle companies where it should be easy for people to lose weight, keep the weight off, and stay in shape. Yet, it's obvious that doing the right things is not as easy as it should be. Most overweight people cannot lose weight by exercise alone. They have to watch what they eat and control the size of their meals and snacks. That's the key to achieving significant fitness and appearance goals.

I can completely relate to their situations. I can be an even better athlete if I have an eating plan. I made the commitment to plan what I eat again a couple of weeks ago. It's a struggle, but I hope to see the benefits by the end of the hockey season.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 8:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Wednesday morning 6:30 A.M. There's an eerie silence in The Home Office.

Over the next 10 minutes I come to the conclusion that the power supply on The Blogging Workstation, my four year old AMD Athlon 2500XP+ ATX Tower Machine that's the fastest PC in the house, has breathed its last.

This is the machine I use to sync my iPhone, and I'm only days away from buying a new MacBook Pro (or another high end Mac notebook, as soon as Steve Jobs tells us what the product line is for 2008). What do I do now?

Luckily I had a PC at the office that has been cannibalized for parts. I brought it home, took out the power supply, and initially thought that it wouldn't work with my motherboard. I found out that the 24-pin main connector for the motherboard was modular and could be divided into a 20-pin main connector and a separate 4-pin connector. I tried this and the machine started.

The Blogging Workstation still failed POST because I didn't connect the floppy drive and a few other minor things. I can fix those tomorrow. Hopefully then I can sync the iPhone and backup as much of my synced data, iTunes library, and other irreplaceable data on that PC to another machine on my network.

What a relief.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I came down with food poisoning on Wednesday night, and that threw many of my plans for this week completely off. There are few weeks during the year where a one day illness like that would be more disrupting. I was able to get most of my work done but the extra stuff that I normally do, like writing articles for Operation Gadget fell by the wayside.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:52 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I updated Operation Gadget to Movable Type Version 4.01 a few minutes ago. So far so good, but the website still says it was created by Movable Type 3.33. I'm sure I'll get the kinks worked out in the next few days.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Shortly after midnight last night, I was thinking about all the good ideas I get for stories for Operation Gadget that never make it on to the site. I get them while I'm busy at work. I'm right in front of or close to a computer, but I don't have time to write the story there and then. So I try to commit them to memory and often fail.

The thought occurred to me: Instead of coming up with a new information management strategy, just start a new story in Movable Type, type what you want to remember, and save it as a Draft.

Duh. How long have I been doing this?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Here are the FedEx Tracking Details
from the $30 Apple Store order
that got shipped from China.

I crushed one of my iPhone earbuds the other day in the parking lot of BJ's Warehouse Club in Langhorne, PA. I dropped my headphones while trying to load the car during a shopping trip with Kathleen and Jimmy. I apparently ran the earbud over with at least one of the wheels of my 2007 Honda Accord.

It stinks to have an iPhone with headphones that don't work properly. I don't have the money or the time to decide which aftermarket headphones are actually better than the Apple headphones. So, I took the easy way out and ordered a set of replacements from the Apple Online Store for about $30.

Here's where the story gets interesting.

A lot of times when I order something from the Apple Online Store it ships from a warehouse somewhere in Pennsylvania, so I get it quite quickly. This time, however, Apple decided to vend this item from their supplier in the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in China. I have the FedEx Tracking Data to prove it:

• Nov 14, 2007
• 12:29AM | Package data transmitted to FedEx
• 9:45AM | Picked up | SHENZHEN CN
• 2:11PM | Left origin | SHENZHEN CN
• 3:55PM | In transit | LANTAU ISLAND HK
• 1:51PM | Departed Fedex location | ANCHORAGE, AK
• Nov 15, 2007
• 12:10AM | Arrived at FedEx location | INDIANAPOLIS, IN
• ...
• 6:13AM | At dest sort facility | PHILADELPHIA, PA
• 7:59AM | At local FedEx facility | BRISTOL, PA
• 8:07AM | On FedEx vehicle for delivery | BRISTOL, PA
• 9:39AM | Delivered | NEWTOWN, PA

Of course the packaged gained a day crossing the International Date Line.

FedEx delivered the package to my house in Newtown, PA before 10:30AM on Thursday, one day before they promised. All this package contains is a set of iPhone replacement headphones. I got free shipping on this order.

Imagine how much it would normally cost an individual to ship a package of any size via FedEx from Shenzhen to here at this speed?

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:12 AM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

November 6 is Ernie Aiello's 75th birthday. I want to take this opportunity to wish my father a happy birthday and many more.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I took an unplanned, long vacation from writing on Operation Gadget. It began when I unexpectedly changed jobs back in September. I don't want to go into what happened. I'm glad to leave that job behind and move on to a new one.

Shortly after I left my job, I participated in a tryout for the ECAC Ice Hockey Officiating Staff. I was chosen to work in the ECAC West Conference, which is NCAA Division III ice hockey for men and women. Getting the opportunity to officiate at the college varsity level has been a big goal of mine since I graduated from RPI. Kathleen and I are very happy that it happened.

I found a new job and started work in mid-October. At the time I was still finishing the paperwork from the end of my old job.

The combined effect of the job change, new officiating situation, and my normal duties as part of my family were enough to occupy all of my time. I'm coming back to writing now because I see the dust settling a bit, and I think there's room for me to write at least a few articles a week.

Stay tuned for news about how I used my iPhone to find a new job and other exciting stuff.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 11:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

My father-in-law George Kuykendall pointed out an interesting article in The New York Times called The Bicycling Paradox: Fit Doesn’t Have to Mean Thin. It talks about the types of cyclists that go on European cycling trips that follow the route of The Tour de France and how older and/or heavier riders often turn out to be more successful than most people might expect. The article says:

... cycling is a lot more forgiving of body type and age than running. The best cyclists going up hills are those with the best weight-to-strength ratio, which generally means being thin and strong. But heavier cyclists go faster downhill. And being light does not help much on flat roads.

The article goes on to say that Dr. James Hagberg, a kinesiology professor at the University of Maryland, thinks that cycling is not as physically demanding as running. Anyone who uses a heart-rate monitor in their training can easily see this. There is a significant difference in average heart rate and estimated calories burned between running and cycling for 30 minutes.

This is a popular article in my office, where the all of the cyclists can more easily identify with Thor Hushovd than they can Michael Rasmussen, at least in terms of BMI .

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Jim Courtney over on Skype Journal reports that Andy Abramson and Dr. Helene Malabed got married today in France. Andy and I have only met virtually but we've both worked as administrators of the Atlantic District of USA Hockey. We have had a lot of experiences in common, including the good fortune to have each married Medical Doctors.

Andy is one of the most influential bloggers around, through his blog VOiPwatch as well as being the brains behind the Nokia Blogger Relations Program. I think the Nokia Blogger Relations Program is responsible for 99.9-percent of the buzz around the Nokia N95 in the USA..

Congratulations Andy and Helene, and we hope to see you in the Philadelphia area soon.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:22 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry I haven't updated Operation Gadget since my son Jimmy's birthday last week. There was a lot going on that took me away from my computer:

• Jimmy's first birthday party: We had what I consider a small scale party for Jimmy when he and Kathleen got back from the Shore-- only 25 or so of our closest friends and family attended. The preparation for it was very time consuming, but the day itself was great fun.
• Jimmy's surgery: A lot of this past week centered around preparing for and surviving Jimmy's hand surgery at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia. Jimmy had minor corrective surgery on both hands on Friday. This was planned a long time ago for around his first birthday so there would be fewer possible issues with anesthesia. The surgery went very well, but it was an all-day effort for the whole family. Preparing for this over the past few days was much more time consuming than I had expected.
• Major DNS problems at CTDATA: I did a big DNS server migration on Memorial Day that didn't go perfectly. The problems really started to surface on Friday morning, while Kathleen and I were at the hospital with Jimmy. (Operation Gadget and 10 or 12 other websites were affected.) Fixing the problem took up all of my time on Friday afternoon after we got home from the hospital.

I think we're back on track now, and I'll probably have more time to post the stuff I've been working on recently.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 1:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy at Age 1: Jimmy is
one year old today! [ Photo: Kathleen
Aiello ]

My son Jimmy Aiello turns 1 today. Tonight we're having a small family celebration dinner. The larger party for family and friends is this weekend.

Jimmy and Kathleen are spending the week at Sea Isle City, NJ while I am up in Central New Jersey working. It's a long drive to get down there for dinner, but I'm leaving the office shortly so I can be there.

I loaded several podcasts on to my iPod before I left home. This will allow me to catch up on my web development best practices while I'm in the car.

I forgot what it's like to drive long distances while I was working out of The Home Office. I'm getting back into listening to audiobooks and podcasts again, now that I spend at least 8 hours a week in the car by myself.

Happy Birthday Jimmy! Mommy and I love you very much.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 12:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the more interesting articles I've read recently is the reflection of a French Internet community leader on his role in the Nicolas Sarkozy presidential campaign. Loic LeMeur is one of the founders of the LeWeb3 who decided to invite the three leading candidates for the French presidency to his annual blogging conference that took place last December. Two of the candidates showed up, including Nicolas Sarkozy the eventual winner of the election.

The Sarkozy campaign subsequently asked Loic to join the campaign as one of their advisors on relating to the Internet culture. He said:

Sarkozy's team contacted me and offered me to become an advisor on Internet topics, I gladly accepted to participate in an Internet committee every week, a couple of hours, but that was all, I did not even take any membership in the party, and this is still the case today.

What's interesting about this article is the way the Sarkozy campaign ended up using the Internet to engage younger French voters. The effort included:

• taking questions from instant messaging and "live bloggers" during campaign television broadcasts, and having Sarkozy respond to the questions in real time, and
• creating an island called I'lle Sarkozy on Second Life which was enhabited by volunteers who reportedly survived attacks from virtual political opponents.

There was some Internet outreach in the 2004 U.S. presidential campaign, but nothing like this. Is this the sort of thing that we will see take place in this country in 2008? [ via VoIP Watch ]

Posted by Dave Aiello at 6:59 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I worked on the migration of a cPanel server almost every working moment from February 27 to March 6. This was an effort to give my Weblog Improvement clients a better, more stable hosting environment.

The first stage of the migration was intended to be the only stage, but the server that I migrated the clients to started having primary hard drive problems almost immediately. That eventually necessitated a complete re-migration of the same clients on the weekend of March 3 to 4. The dust didn't start to settle until March 5 or 6.

I was really fortunate to be were working with a hosting provider with as many resources as ServerBeach. When the first server I got from them started developing problems, they gave me a second server almost immediately. This gave me the opportunity to get the migration started during the weekend and minimize the amount of misdelivered and delayed email.

From there, I had to jump almost immediately into the Time Zone change from Hell. I want to write an article about all the problems I stumbled onto in Red Hat Linux, Fedora Core, Windows 2000, TiVo, and the PalmOS, but I'm not sure when I'll have time. I guess the bottom line is that I'm shocked at:

1. How poorly most of these operating systems designed their time zone change mechanisms considering that time zone changes are determined by governmental organizations that are subject to politics.
2. How little operating system designers learned from the U.S. government reactions to the oil crises of the 1970s. If they had remembered the way that Congress futzed with the time zones back then, they could have designed a patch mechanism that could have affected the tables that drive time zone changes.

After I got done with that, I was so shell shocked from burning the midnight oil that I wanted to stay quiet for a few days.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Sorry I was away from Operation Gadget for the past few days. This weekend I officiated games in the playoffs for the Great Northeast Collegiate Hockey Conference and the Atlantic Amateur Hockey Association. I spent most of the weekend at one of the rinks in Pennsylvania where these tournaments were being held.

We had another mixed precipitation storm in Newtown over night. I spent a good part of this morning shoveling and spreading rock salt on my sidewalk and driveway.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 5:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's been snowing or sleeting in Bucks County, PA since noon on Tuesday. The snow that was falling yesterday afternoon and evening didn't amount to very much. This seemed really odd to me because the weather has been below freezing for at least the last two weeks. We've also got frozen lakes and ponds in New Jersey and Eastern Pennsylvania which is always the hallmark of an extended streak of cold weather.

We awoke today to the whispery sound of heavy sleet. Unlike most sleet events in this area, however, there was no thick ice on cement and asphalt surfaces. Instead we had very fine ice pellets everywhere. I later learned that this occurred because the air temperature at ground level was well below freezing while the upper atmosphere was quite a bit warmer. This is the opposite condition from the typical sleet or freezing rain event in this part of the country.

I shoveled a three-inch deep mixture of snow and fine ice pellets from the sidewalk and driveway in front of The Home Office. In our typical mixed precipitation events around here, this would be back-breaking work because wet snow would fall first followed by sleet, followed by an icy rain. Today we had very fine, light snow and ice mixed together. All of it was moved quite easily.

Kathleen drove our new Honda Accord SE to work with no real problems, but a lot of slow going. She told me that the road crews (known as PennDOT around here) didn't plow the roads the way they normally do. Instead, they put down a mixture of road salt and fine sand or gravel to increase traction. According to a news report she heard on the radio, PennDOT was concerned that plowing would have caused conditions to deteriorate because the roads would be more suceptible to icing.

They might have been right about that. I think the sidewalk in front of my house is a bit more slippery now than it was before I started shoveling.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Kathleen and I are going to see Tutankhamun and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs at the Franklin Institute Science Museum in Philadelphia. Kathleen's alumni association from Middlebury College arranged a group tour.

Febe Armanios an assistant professor of history at Middlebury will give a presentation on what we will see. Her focus is on Middle Eastern history and comparative religious history.

This is the fourth and final U.S. city in which the exhibit will appear. The last time the treasures of King Tut's tomb where exhibited in this country was from 1976-1979.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

I've spent four of the last five days in arenas in Delaware, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey, and that's reflected in the lack of new content on Operation Gadget.

It's amazing how little of this type of car travel I remember from when I was in college. In those days, I used to officiate games between Rome and Albany, New York along Interstate 90, and between Albany and Glens Falls, New York along Interstate 87. I would drive hundreds of miles a week because that was my way of earning enough money to pay my expenses at RPI not covered by financial aid and scholarships.

(For those of you who really know officiating, this was well before USA Hockey instituted the Junior Officiating Development Program and my mileage pales in comparison to the amount driven by those dedicated guys today.)

In one 24-hour period this weekend I drove from my home in Newtown, PA to Newark, DE via my wife's office in Ambler, back to Newtown, then to Rahway, NJ, back to Newtown, to Aston, PA, and back to Newtown. That's 361 miles according to Google Maps multi-point directions, and it should have taken me 8 hours of that 24 hour period.

When I started this article, I was going to say that I've become soft with respect to doing the traveling that you often have to do as a hockey official. But looking at the map, I see that anyone would have been taxed by driving those roads at the times I did.

Anyway, now you know why I've been so quiet lately.

Posted by Dave Aiello at 10:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jimmy at the Christmas Meeting
of Kathleen's Book Club: Here's the
picture of my son Jimmy that
everyone in Kathleen's Book Club
wanted.

Kathleen took our new Canon PowerShot A540 to the Christmas meeting of her book club on Sunday. This is always a really nice affair, and it got everybody who was able to attend in a festive mood.

When I got home from my hockey game on Sunday night, Kathleen showed me the photos she had taken, using the LCD screen on the back of the camera. When she got to this photo of our six-month-old son Jimmy, she said that this was the photo that everyone said they wanted a copy of.

I thought a few of Operation Gadget's regular readers would want to see it as well. Seeing it puts me in a little more of a holiday mood myself.

I think that this is the kind of photo that shows the PowerShot A540 at its best: a snapshot of a person or a small group of people where the subjects are relatively still and well within the camera's flash range. We keep the PowerShot A540 in the "Pets and Kids" scene mode most of the time, so that we get the best possible photos when Jimmy is part of the picture.

This is a very good camera for the money, although it isn't as good at stopping subjects that are in motion as our old Canon PowerShot A95 was.

Technorati Tags: Canon PowerShot A540, digital camera reviews, Christmas gifts, Hanukkah gifts

Posted by Dave Aiello at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

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 w