I went scuba diving today and nearly died… Twice. Here’s the first story.
I’m in Thailand currently for a wedding in Koh Samui. (Great place BTW) and decided to go scuba diving one of the days I’m here for.
We went to Koh Tao via a speed boat. On my first dive down. I saw this.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bull_shark
A bull shark. It was off in the distance about 40-50 feet away and in murkey water. Pretty cool. I whipped out my camera and snapped a pic. Then it came back a second time and then a third time. Each time getting closer. The last round it was about 20-30 feet away and it was huge, probably around 5-6 feet long.
After the second spotting, I put away my camera and pulled out my knife. This was probably the biggest predator I’ve ever seen while diving.
My scuba instructor seemed genuinely awed and alert, so I was scared. But he didn’t seem scared so I wasn’t too worried. Now that I’ve gotten on shore and looked up the type of shark it was… I feel really fortuneate to have experienced such a creature and walked away from it.
The film industry has IMDB. Now the food industry has ChefDB. What a brilliant idea. It’s a database of restaurants, who works in them, where they’ve worked and related links.
Genius.
Now, you can track your favorite chefs. See when ratings started going up or down.. and why. You can see where else these same people have worked in the past, to find other restaurants that you might want to go to as well. Or where they are headed to in the future, so you can bookmark that as a place you want to try out.
Google asks all kinds of tough questions in their interview process. This is to see how intelligent you are along with seeing how you would solve complex problems. Here’s a selection along with answers.
I’ve been gone for nearly two years now. And things just seem to be getting worse and worse over there. California is bankrupt, banks are failing, People are getting I.O.U.s from the government. GM is no longer around. Then I heard about this story.
The Philadelphia library is closing down. They don’t have enough money to run it. Seriously? Libraries? What’s next public schools for our children? Investing in education and infrastructure is investing in yourself and the future. After living in Singapore for the last two years I now see how an efficient city/country can be. Please fix it, compromises need to be made. It won’t be easy. But, do it for the kids.
I thought this was a great commercial. In this commercial a group of 300 dancers took over Liverpool station and started dancing. It was unannounced and unexpected for everyone else in the train station. They didn’t shut down the station to film it nor did they block off a section of it. They didn’t even use big film cameras and opted for mostly small to medium sized cameras or DSLRs in video mode. They managed to get over 1000 people to join them by the end. Simply amazing. Life’s too short. Seize it.
It seems that though the iPhone and iPod touch are very similar, they are considered different pieces of hardware to iTunes. I’ve had my iPod touch for a few months now and have been merrily installing and running apps from the Apple app store. As such, I’ve got a lot of data from those apps on my touch. Such as:
Game Saves
Wallet information
Shopping lists
Custom Conversion tables
I found out the hard way that when you sync an iPhone to iTunes it’ll install all the same apps, but won’t transfer the application data. I called Apple support only to have that fear confirmed.
What I managed to hack together and stumple upon is a loophole, I think. Here are the steps I did to get my application data from my iPod Touch to my new 3G iPhone.
1. Backup iPod Touch on iTunes
2. Setup new iPhone on iTunes on the same computer
3. Make sure all the same apps are installed on the new iPhone that were on the iPod Touch
4. Make a backup of the new iPhone with all the apps
5. Restore iPhone to factory default
6. Restore iPhone with iPod Touch Backup
7. Next time you Sync again, the iPhone will ask you which backup to Restore from, once it realizes that the iPod Touch restore is not correct.
8. Restore from the iPhone backup.
You should now have your iPhone with all the apps and all the application data from your iPod Touch.
There are a few reasons I think this worked for me.
1. The iPhone has all the same functions the iPod Touch has and more.
2. I have a suspicion that when you do a restore from a backup when you already have the Application and it’s data (my iPod Touch backup), It wipes the applications but keeps the data if the backup you’re restoring from has no data to write over it (the fresh iPhone backup from the initial sync).
3. I am installing the same applications.
4. I am installing the same same application versions.
5. I am on the same computer.
6. I am using the same firmware for both the iPod Touch and iPhone.
Obviously, you do this at your own risk. Installing firmware from one device to another is always a very dangerous thing to do.
