The Apple iPhone is finally on the shelves. Well, I doubt you’ll find any on the shelves because most stores probably sold out already. I knew it was going to be popular, but I didn’t really think about how much so. It turns out one of my nieces drove 90 minutes in the early morning to line up at the Cleveland Apple Store. Her and her friend, Nick, were second in line and managed to get 2 iPhones each. Apparently they were paid for their efforts. The iPhone line up was blogged about on Cleveland’s The Plain Dealer.

I guess it’s been a while since my last post here, three weeks to be exact. I’ll use this post to catch up on things…

I’m still pursuing a new career in the Clean/Green Technology space. I’ve attended a few events sponsored by the California Clean Tech Open, which I have mentioned a few times on my Green Blog. In one of those posts I mentioned that I met a recent graduate from UC Berkeley who is working on energy management using wireless sensor networks. I’ve met with him a few times now, and it seems like there’s a good possibility that I will join him in starting a new company based on his research. I’ll keep you posted on that one. I’m also still working on the food review site, dishAdish.

We’re still following the Peregrine Falcons in San Jose. The three young have all fledged and seem to be doing pretty well. They seem to be exploring all over the city. They are starting to fly more and more. We go down town to look for them once in a while. It’s pretty hard to tell the 3 apart from a distance, but we can usually pick out the parents pretty easily. The picture on the left is of one of the young, a female named Spirit. She was sitting on the front side of City Hall a couple days after she fledged. There are more pictures of the falcons in my gallery.

The one way door excluded I ordered to help with my squirrel problem finally arrived late last week. I had intended to install it over the weekend, but that didn’t happen. The biggest issue is covering up the rest of the hole, especially due to the roof tiles at the bottom (see picture from my last post). Hopefully I’ll get to that soon. In the mean time, we’ve been sleeping downstairs to avoid the noise.

I’m still managing to get to the gym at least 3 time per week (though I shoot for 4). Some weeks I manage to hike up Mission Peak during the week as well. I’ve also played soccer a few times in the evenings with some of my old coworkers. Maybe I’ll try to keep that up.

This past weekend we had a birthday barbecue at the beach for my friend Ashish. We had about 17 people at Seacliff State Beach in Aptos, CA (a bit south of Santa Cruz) for food and volleyball. By the time we go there, the tables and grills were all taken and the weather was still chilly and overcast. One group there let us have one of their tables and a grill. A bit later the clouds burned off and we had a beautiful day. I’m still a bit sunburned. There are more pictures in my gallery.

Sunday we hiked up Mission Peak, since we didn’t have a chance to do so on Saturday. After hiking we went downtown to eat some lunch and look for the falcons. In the evening we had a Father’s Day dinner at Mary’s parents house. It was a pretty full weekend.

I added a new logo to my blog page (see above), my gallery, and my main Blue Valhalla page. In addition, I registered a new site, Green Valhalla. I have a new logo there as well. I don’t have any content for the site yet, but I’m thinking about moving my Green Valhalla blog there and expanding it to include more Green related news and information. I’ll let you know when I get that up and running.

Dell is selling the Ubuntu based computers now. They have a web page describing them (as well as their FreeDOS versions) titled Ubuntu Has Arrived by Popular Demand. My friend Ron got an Ubuntu laptop already, and is pretty happy with it. It came with Ubuntu 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) installed, and at the time was $50 cheaper than a similarly configured Windows Vista laptop. At the moment I think they cost the same.