My kids (9-year olds) each got a Kindle for Christmas (thanks Gramma and Grampa!). It looks like even for them to "buy" free books, this is how I had to set them up:

  • Create an Amazon account for them
  • Manage Account, 1-Click Settings
  • Turn on 1-Click for the account
  • Add an address
  • Click the link to make it the 1-Click default address
  • Make this address the billing address

After this, my kids were able to "purchase" free books (and gift cards can be added to their balance), all without requiring a credit card number. Thanks, Amazon for making this so simple! ๐Ÿ™‚

§1049 · December 31, 2013 · Kids, Tips · Comments Off on Set up your kids with a Kindle ·


I want to believe. SVG as an image format.Boo. I ordered some fruit arrangement from "Edible Arrangements" in Los Gatos this the morning. I got home in the evening and it hadn't been delivered all day. So much for surprise...

I called, they said the driver had the order and was delivering it now. It arrived 45 minutes later with no apology.

I won't be using them again.

§1018 · September 2, 2011 · Life · 2 comments ·


I want to believe. SVG as an image format.It appears that comments on my blog have been screwed up now for probably at least a month. When you try to post a comment it 404s. You can no longer see comments on a post. I simply don't have the time to look into this at the moment, so my apologies up front. I don't know if I've been hacked or if something in my theme broke in an automatic update of WP.

If you need to get ahold of me there's always email, Google Chat, Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz. Least those don't get hacked... much.

§1000 · January 21, 2011 · Life, Technology · 1 comment ·


I want to believe. SVG as an image format.Happy Holiday season to y'all! This is our first Christmas in California and it's a bit of an adjustment. A wet Christmas is not a white Christmas - but at least there's no snow shoveling for me this year.

I hope you all have a successful new year in twenty-eleven. Build more! Code more! Write more! Do more! Those are certainly my goals! ๐Ÿ™‚

By the way, I found that Christmas Tree image by Nicu on Open Clip Art Library using Google Image Search, opened it in SVG-edit, moved the star to the top of the tree and changed its color to yellow, scoured it and then saved it to my web server. Took about 10 minutes in total!

Speaking of Christmas trees, it's probably high time for me to update my own red and green online decoration. Soon!

Oh, and as I write more posts on my blog, you should be able to see Google indexing the SVG images from my site here. Note that these are not raster fallbacks. Hope that means something to you. ๐Ÿ™‚

§986 · December 19, 2010 · Life · Comments Off on Happy Holidays 2010 ·


[clipart]Nope!

I would love to tell you that I was able to install and test IE9 Platform 3 tonight. There seems to be a lot of good things in there (SVG improvements, canvas, audio, video) but the main problem is that it's built on the fragile Windows stack. That's not to say that other OS stacks aren't fragile, but this is just tonight's frustration. Read the rest of this entry ...

§904 · June 24, 2010 · Entertainment, Life, Microsoft, Technology, Windows · 3 comments · Tags: ,