blog.ulfw.com

European stays European. One thing that I haven’t and don’t plan to give up since moving to the United States is my desire to have things in walkable distance from the place I live. My first residence in Berkeley was in walking distance to Campus and all the crazy shops out there. It stayed somewhat similar with my stay at Schwab Residential Center at Stanford. And when I moved out from there in 2005, the first thing I was looking for is a place with shopping and other possibilities nearby. My first home in Mountain View had a Whole Foods store, a Target, a fresh grocery retailer, a Trader Joe’s and Safeway – everything in less than half a mile. Even my next home in San Mateo was kind of walkable, though the choices were a bit more restrictive.
When first moving to Los Angeles I thought okay – it doesn’t half to be walkable, but at least I should be close to major attractions. So when I found my first apartment on Mid-Wilshire I figured the relative vicinity to West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Hollywood and Downtown would be cool.
It wasn’t. I realized that taking your car out the garage in Los Angeles is an exercise in frustration. Traffic moves slooooooowly.
Thus when I moved to my new apartment in Santa Monica, I specifically looked for walkability and having a lot of stores, restaurants, cinemas and other things to do nearby.
It turns out, this might very well be one of the best places to walk in all of Los Angeles county!

(Map from walkscore.com)

In a fun turn of events though, I did decide to buy a bike yesterday and can’t wait to take it out for a spin.

Wow – is all I can say about the release of Palm’s new pre smartphone. So far (having not personally played with it yet) I love the UI (as I’ve seen from reports and pictures/screen grabs) and think the device does look pretty nice. Not Apple nice, but nice.

I have to admit I really thought Palm would not be able to pull this off after years and years of out-of-date offerings.
Now – will this save the company? Or will it be too late? – I don’t know. But they do have a shot! A real good shot!

It seems that US carriers are aligning themself with their unique high-end touch device:

at&t – the iPhone carrier
Verizon – the BlackBerry Storm carrier
T-Mobile – the HTC G1 carrier
Sprint – the Palm pre carrier

Frankly – out of those, I don’t think Palm/Sprint got the worst deal. Sprint will make sure to market the hell out of the device and if it’s priced right, they might have a killer offering for once. It will be interesting what strategy wins at the end:
- the integrated approach with beautiful hardware/software in one hand (iPhone/Palm)
or
- the open approach with hardware/software from different sources (WinMo, Android, Symbian)

For now, I for one welcome our new Palm overlords! Competition never hurts.

At the beginning of the year some blog statistics from January 1 2008 through January 1 2009. It turns out that readers of this blog are more tech affine than the general population and are happy to use alternative web browsers:
1. Firefox 51.9%
2. Internet Explorer 26.2%
3. Safari 11.8%
4. Chrome 6.8%
5. Opera 1.9%

The overall web statistic for Internet Explorer seems to be more like 70%.