Brian-Foley.net

A humorous view of the financial crisis

Brian Foley — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 15:44:53 +0000

I stumbled across these Bird and Fortune clips. If you enjoy British humor, you’ll like this. It’s broken up into two parts.

Part 1:

Part 2:

In case you missed it…

Brian Foley — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 13:40:36 +0000

In case you weren’t sitting in front of the boob tube Wednesday night, here is the Obama infomercial that aired on the major networks. Make sure you vote Nov. 4th! We took advantage of early voting and got it out of the way already.

Our quick trip to San Francisco

Brian Foley — Wed, 15 Oct 2008 15:15:51 +0000

We just returned from a quick vacation in San Francisco. We went there for the Dida-berger & Horn-aleusky Wedding, which was a lot of fun. The flight was long, and I have to say, I don’t think I’ll fly on Frontier again. For the flight there, we had horrible seats (last row, next to the bathroom), and we hit some crazy turbulence. Coming home our original flight was canceled so we only had one flight back, at 6:00am, so we had to leave really early.

Mandie and I flew out Wednesday evening with her parents. We arrived in San Francisco really late, after checking in at the Handerly Hotel in Union Square, we crashed, since it was about 3AM our time.

When we finally woke Thursday, we had a chance to meet up with Mandie’s brother Louis, who took us around to run some errands, and to show us his kitchen and bath design business, la Dimora Design. In the afternoon, we joined Matt and went out for lunch. They had made reservations for us at Yank Sing for Deem Sum, which was fantastic. Later on, we went to the market and got some steaks and fish to cookout and just visit for the evening.

Seven stories of shopping!

On Friday after breakfast we went and did some shopping. Mandie is in love with the seven story Macy’s (that’s ALL womens clothing)! In the afternoon, we met up with Mandie’s other brother, Kris, and his wife Robin, her cousin Fran, and our niece Addison (who just turned 1!). We went out to lunch and then hung out afterwards, driving around sightseeing and shopping.

Cupcakes!

Saturday we all met up for breakfast, and then walked around shopping afterwards. The wedding was later that afternoon. We all met up on Treasure Island, where we had a chance to watch the Blue Angels air show. I took some video with my iPhone, you can watch here on qik.com, and the photos are here. Right after the air show was the wedding ceremony. The “secret” Las Vegas performer was Bud E. Luv. He performed the ceremony and later did a Las Vegas style show for us. We had a delicious buffet with steak and salmon as the main dishes, and for dessert, CUPCAKES! The photos are here.

Overall we had a really great time. We love hanging out with family, and wish we could spend more time on the west coast with Louis and Matt. It’s a trip we’ll have to do again sometime soon!

Adoption process started…

Brian Foley — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 20:17:01 +0000

This afternoon I dropped off the home study paper to the adoption agency. The home study is the first part to the adoption process that includes a very thorough background check. Now we’ll wait to hear back from a social worker as to the next step. I must say, the home study was not a simple questionaire, they ask a lot of personal questions, some of them more difficult than others. For example: Describe your childrearing philosophy.

photo credit: Jurischk

Cruise Photos

Brian Foley — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 20:30:43 +0000

I finally got around to uploading our photos from the cruise we recently took. It’s taken me a little longer than I was hoping to get them posted as I have a boatload (heh, no pun intended) of digital photos that needed to be sorted and organized in iPhoto. I’m hoping in the future it should be quicker for me to get photos from the camera to the web, especially with the new Eye-fi wireless memory card (Thanks ma!). Click here to see the cruise photos on smugmug.

One hundred Push-Ups

Brian Foley — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:50:22 +0000

It seems like the latest rage on the net is the hundred pushups training program at hundredpushups.com. Iâ€™m now on week 5 of the program and itâ€™s definitely getting harder! It seems to be working, as I can do more pushups now than I could a month ago. When I complete this program, Iâ€™m thinking of trying to apply the same principles to pull-ups. Iâ€™ve also been using the treadmill a lot more lately. The hardest part of getting or staying in shape is finding time to workout.?

Welcome Back!

Brian Foley — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 10:16:32 +0000

So I redesigned the website. Itâ€™s going to be a little easier for me to maintain now, plus it looks cool. Iâ€™ve also decided to just use smugmug for displaying and storing our photos online. Iâ€™ll add more to it as I get time.

Update 10/30/08: I figured out how to move over most of the content from my old website. The posts are here, but many of the images that were in the posts are missing. I’ll try to fix that when I get time.

Reviewed: All-New Plaxo Online

Brian Foley — Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:02:43 +0000

Plaxo has been around for a long time. I signed up with them many years ago when they were first starting out. The main idea behind Plaxo was to have your contact information available on the web. When someone you know also signs up with Plaxo, you would be connected, much link LinkedIn. When someone you’re connected to moves, changes jobs, gets a new cell phone your address book will automatically be updated. Likewise if you change your profile, their address books will also be updated. It’s a fantastic concept, but in my case, wasn’t very useful as the majority of my contacts were not online. Let alone signed up for Plaxo.

Recently Plaxo underwent some changes and have released a beta of Plaxo version 3. They still provide the same functionality of keeping your address books up to date online, but now they’ve taken the concept even further by including more sync and sharing functionality. The new Plaxo includes a Sync Dashboard which provides multiple sync point on one centralized location. You can synchronize with Yahoo!, AOL, Google Calendar (and Gmail contacts soon), LinkedIn (with subscription), Thunderbird, Mac OSX, Outlook, Vista Mail and Hotmail. Also they have an application for your mobile phone.

This is such an invaluable tool for me as I have some contacts in my address book in Outlook that I use for work, I have some contacts on my Mac at home, as well as contacts stored in Google Gmail and Yahoo! mail. I primarily use Google calendar for scheduling, but also have events stored in Outlook (meetings and such for work). With the use of the new Plaxo, I can now have all that information automatically synchronized.

I’ve used different sync tools in the past, some have worked, many have not. I must say I am very impressed with the Plaxo beta. Aside from the lack of Gmail contact support, which is still being developed, I haven’t had any problems syncing.

The address book includes some new features like Find-as-you-type search, Yahoo directions, and Jajah Click-To-Call buttons. The new calendar is based on HipCal, which Plaxo acquired last year. An “Upcoming” view displays Yahoo weather, Countdowns, and Flickr photo mash-ups and the ability to share your calendar. I tend to prefer this over my old Google Calendar. Plaxo also includes a Task list and a place for Notes. Personally I prefer to use Vitalist for tasks and Google Notebook for notes.

The latest feature to be added to Plaxo is what they call Pulse, it’s an interesting way to share RSS feeds with your connections. You set up your feeds in Plaxo and control who can see what information in your social network.

Overall the new Plaxo has become an invaluable tool that I’m now using daily. If you use multiple PCs or online services and need to sync contacts and calendars, I think Plaxo will fulfill your needs.

Speed Racer’s Mach 5 comes to life

Brian Foley — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:27:18 +0000

Oh My God! Speed Racer had to have been my MOST favorite cartoon when I was a kid. I used to watch that and wish that I was a racecar driver. I’d wander around the house singing the theme song “Go Speed Racer, Go Speed Racer, Go!” According to CNET, the cartoon is being brought to the big screen and should be out sometime in May ‘08. I’ll be there!

Apple iPhone release date set

Brian Foley — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 16:30:02 +0000

Apple has announced the release date for the much anticipated, highly acclaimed, shiney new iPhone! Set your calendars for June 29th! Steve Jobs has commented that if your looking to get one one the release date, that you might want to go to your local AT&T store first, as the Apple stores will be very busy.

I would LOVE to have one of these phones, except for the fact that I would have to switch my cellular service to AT&T (Cingular). I know that AT&T service is not very good around where I live, so I’d be getting less than stellar phone service on a (hopefully) fantastic phone. Perhaps AT&T will get enough new contracts that they can start investing more on improving their service. By then the iPhone might have had a revision or two out, until then I’m sticking with Sprint.

Check out the iPhone commercials Apple has released!