My parents and I visited Ellis Island last weekend.

My grandfather Michael (Mike) Barich was born in Yugoslavia and immigrated to America in 1933.

He’s listed on the Wall of Honor (you can search for him or anyone else on the Wall of Honor on the site).

The view from his name is beautiful. Here are some pics.

I’m back on my bike after way too long. I haven’t ridden with any degree of regularity since July 2004, and the last time I rode at all was sometime in August of last year. Pathetic.

I rode six miles (the loop around Central Park) at 15.6 MPH average speed. That’s a lot slower than my old average speed (18.5 - 19 MPH) for a much shorter distance (I used to ride 40 - 45 miles). Sigh.

I’m at least on the road back (no pun intended).

I made some UI updates. These updates are inspired by this Publishing 2.0 post.

The suggestions Scott Karp outlines make a lot of sense to me. In retrospect I’m a little embarrassed I didn’t handle this better previously.

To summarize:

• The Syndication section in the right sidebar is now labeled Subscribe.
• There’s a new About Subscribing link directly under the Subscribe section. This link describes readers and provides links to readers on the RSS Compendium site.
• The RSS 2.0 URL has been moved to the bottom of the Subscribe section and relabeled to make it clear this link is for techies.

My camera got a good review in PC Magazine.

The camera’s nice, but I’d be happier if it was smaller and if the shot-to-shot times were faster. The shot-to-shot times are better than my old PowerShot S110, but I still miss shots. If I turn off the flash and use manual exposure mode the shot-to-shot times are near-instantaneous, but the pics are often blurry.

I may be able to do more with this camera once I learn more about how to use the ISO settings.

My old friend Mike visited last weekend and we hit a variety of places around the city.

A quick belated recap:

Isola
This was my second visit in the last few weeks. Mike had the Gnocchi ai Funghi Selvalici and enjoyed it. I had the Pizza Margherita (no artichokes), which is quickly becoming a standard for me.

Prohibition
Despite the cool name and exterior decor this is the lamest New York bar I’ve visited. I was really surprised.

I can’t bring myself to link to it.

I’d say it was the lamest bar I’ve ever visited, period, but I recall having been dragged to piano bars in Wisconsin.

Kinsale
Good as far as sports bars go, though I’m not a sports bar fan. The flat-screen TV to person ratio was about 3:1.

Fred’s
Not cheap, but probably the best Cobb salad I’ll ever have. Mike and Laura enjoyed their dishes (neither of which I can recall) as well. The atmosphere is okay and the multitude of dog pictures is neat.

I’ll definitely go back.

Flor De Mayo
A Chinese/Cuban place I’ve visited few times. I always enjoy it. I’m a simpleton, so I had pork fried rice and won-ton soup (Flor De Mayo’s has some of the best of each of these).

Mike had the Pollo a La Brasa (Puruvian Special Chicken), which is a Flor De Mayo signature dish. He enjoyed it a lot.

Some cafe I can’t remember
It’s around 84th. I’ll check and update this post.

Le Petit Cafe
A smallish place in SOHO. I had a simple pasta dish; Mike had a Caesar salad. Both were fine; neither were life-changing. A good afternoon stop.

Maz Mezcal
Good food. The crowd was 30-plus and kinda family-oriented. The wait staff sang happy birthday to a customer at a nearby table, which made me feel like I was at Chi-Chi’s or another lame chain. Not a bad joint, but I won’t be returning.

Sarabeth’s
I finally made it in after having tried three other times over the last year (I’ve never been willing to wait an hour). The food (breakfast) and service were excellent. I’ll definitely be back, but I still won’t wait an hour.

Jeremy Zawodny provides some perspective on work-life balance.

The “X weeks of vacation per year, no ‘lapses’” standard is ingrained in a lot of us. I know a few people who have taken different tacks on this, some of them similar to the approaches Jeremy describes.

We should all respect them for being bold enough to do things differently, and thank them for showing us there’s more than one way to handle this.

To anyone with nothing more than a digicam and a dream, here’s proof you might just have a chance. Inspiring stuff.

It will be interesting to see how the film fares.

Apparently laptops are now more popular than desktops.

I find myself posting less than I’d like due to the fact WordPress’s editor is not entirely efficient. I’ve tried it in Safari, Mac Firefox, and IE and am underwhelmed.

I’ve tried posting via email as well, but I can’t easily set tags and Gmail introduces line breaks I don’t like.

So, I’m trying ecto, which seems to be popular with the Mac crowd.

I’ll need an editor for Windows as well. More on that when I get around to it.

I’ve been writing a lot about Mac stuff lately, but the truth is I use Windows as much or more than I use the Mac.

I always own at least one personal Windows machine, and in my professional life I use Windows exclusively.

As I’ve evolved I have less and less tolerance for excess stuff. I reached the point a couple years back where I owned four computers (two running Windows, one running Mac OS, and one running Linux).

I owned all those machines because I wanted to (and still want to) run all the major operating systems. However, I have a decreasing tolerance for the clutter. Computers take up too much space.

As a start I’ve migrated my Mac and Windows machines to laptops, which at least are compact. My Linux computer is still a desktop, though it’s a small OptiPlex I can run headless (thanks, VNC), so at least I don’t have to look at it every day. (For the record, I tried to replace my Windows machine by running Virtual PC on my PowerBook. It’s useful in a pinch, but it’s not a replacement for a real Windows computer.)

So nowadays I still have three machines (actually four, but my Windows desktop is going to my aunt and uncle soon). I’d like to reduce those three to two as quickly as possible.

I really like my PowerBook and have no love for my Dell Latitude D610, so I’m hoping the Intel Macs will be my solution.

There are a lot of discussions happening surrounding running Windows on the new Macs (and running the Mac OS on non-Apple Intel machines). The discussions are centered both on dual-booting, which I don’t want to do (I’ve done it and it’s a pain) and running some sort of emulator.

On the emulation front I was happy to see on MacWindows there are at least two developers talking about this: iEmulator and Microsoft (VirtualPC).

The difference between the current emulation scenario the potential new emulation scheme is the elimination of the PowerPC-to-Intel translation overhead. So, in the new world VirtualPC or another emulator should hypothetically run at near-native speeds.

So, it sounds like in the near future I might be able to run both Mac and Windows at native (or near-native) speeds, on the same sweet Apple laptop (albeit one with a lot of RAM), simultaneously. I wouldn’t have to reboot to change operating systems.

I’m crossing my fingers.