LCD Segments of Death

By | April 5, 2008

Just over an hour into my bike ride today while I was slogging up a steep hill, my Polar CS200 heart rate monitor rebooted. The screen went blank, a few cryptic symbols appeared on the display, and then the display filled with a union of all possible characters and symbols that it ever displays. And… Read More »

Proactive Flight Check In

By | April 3, 2008

Nancy Jamison posted a nice write up on her blog about a recent Voxify webcast where Voxify presented with Continental on a new outbound voice app we just rolled out for Continental that calls customers up to 24 hours before their flight and offers to check them into their flight. It’s an especially great app… Read More »

SpinVox Takes in $200 Million

By | April 2, 2008

SpinVox certainly has come a long way in the last few years since I checked out their service for converting voicemails to text. They launched at nearly the perfect time. Large vocabulary speech recognizers have been around for a long time, but in the last few years they have become particularly plentiful and cheap. Also,… Read More »

Bio Break

By | March 29, 2008

And I thought it was just women in restaurants that went to the bathroom together. via BoingBoing, photo by Roberto Bettini

Russian River Barrel Tasting

By | March 9, 2008

We went up to Sonoma County today for the 30th annual Russian River Barrel Tasting. This time, we visited Christopher Creek, Trentadue, Coffaro, Michel-Schlumberger, Wilson, Mazocco, Hawkes, Stryker and Murphy-Goode. The Barrel Tasting event has really grown over the last few years. When we first went about five years ago, the event was just one… Read More »

Yamahai at Ozumo

By | March 4, 2008

A good friend had a birthday dinner this weekend in the sake tasting room at Ozumo in San Francisco. The sushi was wonderfully fresh and delicious. We also ordered a few items from the Robata grill that were fantastic. The real standout for me was the seared Dayboat scallops on shimeji mushroom risotto. I could… Read More »

Don’t be a Hood Ornament

By | February 23, 2008

Someone on my bike team sent out a link to bicyclesafe.com, which has a great article by Michael Bluejay on how not to get hit by a car when you’re biking. I found I do a lot of these things intuitively, especially when bike commuting to and from work, but there were some other good… Read More »

MySQL Support from Python on OS X

By | February 19, 2008

It was more work than it should have been, but you can get access to a MySQL database from Python on OS X 10.5 by following the instructions at this blog post. If you’re using Pydev in Eclipse, be sure /Library/Python/2.5/site-packages is in the System PYTHONPATH. Bring up the Preferences dialog, open Pydev in the… Read More »

Voxify Funding Round

By | February 16, 2008

Earlier this week Voxify announced a $15 million funding round that was led by a new investor, Intel Capital. This is pretty exciting news for us, as it allows us to accelerate some internal investments that will broaden the scope of the speech applications we currently deliver. One area we’ve been focusing on is making… Read More »