The fantastic Mercedes Benz museum in Stuttgart

The highlight of the trip so far was my visit to the Mercedes Benz museum. It is designed similar to the Guggenheim in NYC where you ride an elevator up to the top and walk down in a spiral around the perimeter.

Pictures from Germanz

Here are some pictures from Germany ... 1. the Mercedes c200 Kompressor rental car (this is like getting a chevy malibu in the US). 2. The kappelle in Wurzburg which is the birthplace of Dirk Nowitzi. 3. Tiny parking garage with a car elevator. 4. View of Wurzburg from the chapel.

Kitchen Update Part 7 - Progress on the left wall

The left wall is where the new fridge, freezer and pantry will go.

Kitchen Update Part 6 - Why a professional drywaller is better than Tbone

Check out the quality job done by the dry waller...

Kitchen Update part 5

Progress being made on the upgrade. Framed out the wall, added support for the hood, and the drywaller is working his magic.

Kitchen Upgrade - Part 4

Here are some drawings of the kitchen upgrade. Compare them to this post for the before look.
Before pictures

Nike + Ipod

Vinh's raving about the Nike + Ipod kit convinced me to get one too. I used the 30% off at Champs coupon when I was visiting my bro in Dallas. Ended up getting the kit for $20! Since I have not done much running, I decided to try the kit out when I was cutting the grass on Sunday to track the distance traveled: I traveled 1.2 miles in 55 minutes of mowing. :-)

Kitchen Upgrade Part 3

Prepping the house for the construction. We put up plastic sheets to enclose the work area and covered the furniture to help minimize dusting. We also covered the hardwood floors with thick paper to help protect them.

Kitchen Upgrade Part 2

We removed the fridge and some cabinets on Friday.

Kitchen Upgrade Project Part 1

We are in the process of upgrading the kitchen. Here are some pictures of the current kitchen.

SONOS in the house

I switched from the Roku Soundbridge (for whole house audio) via a Panasonic receiver and the Slim Devices Squeezebox 3 (for the Home theater/2 channel set-up) to the SONOS system. Selling the SB3s was very easy (sold them in about 4 days) and that covered most of the cost of the SONOS system. The SONOS system is great for setting up a wholehouse audio system. The system consists of 3 modules: the ZP-80 zoneplayer which feeds a source system (in my case the P1A and Lite Audio DAC-60 to the Emotiva Pre/Pro and amp), the ZP-100 which has it own built-in amp so you can just connect it to speakers (in my case the in-wall speakers in the dining room/family room area), and the CR-100 which is the remote control with LCD display. One of the Zone players has to be connected via ethernet your network. It thens sets up a MESH wireless network so all the other players and the controllers connect to it. The controller can control any of the zone players without the need for line of sight. Last, it does all the stuff you would expect a network music player to do (plays music off your server (Flac files for me), plays internet radio, and if you wish can play premium subscription based music services too like Sirius, rhapsody etc).

Resealed Driveway

Asphalt driveways are nice in that they are cheaper to construct vs. a concrete driveway. However, they do require more maintenance to fill in cracks and to reseal. Our driveway is till in very good shape, but I have spend several weekends filling in cracks. I was ready to seal the driveway myself when Linda convinced me to hire it out. This was a good move cause the total area to be sealed is over 6000 sq ft.

The before picture shows the gray surface of the asphalt -- a sure sign that it needs to be sealed. The after picture is the nice black surface.

Real world benchmark of the super fast PC

You've read about the PC upgrade I did during the summer. SuperPC Well, things have been going great with that upgrade PC and it has been super stable which is not guaranteed when you are overclocking. The other thing that have be en doing off and on is converting all my CDs into FLAC which a lossless (no data discard format, unlike MP3 which is lossy). The goal is to have the entire CD collection on a server so I can access the entire collection via the Squeezebox 3 network music player. On the old PC, it would take nearly a minute to convert a song from WAV to FLAC. On this new PC, it takes about 7 seconds and that is just using one of the cores. WOW !. Now it takes more time to extract the WAV off the CD (rip) than it does to convert. With the new PC, I should have the entire collection ripped and converted to FLAC by the end of the year :-)

Crazy Hot in the Nati

Temperatures hit 100+ for the thrid time this summer in Cincinnati. Crazy hot ! No relief until Saturday.

Tomorrow
Partly Sunny
High 100°
Low 73°

Friday
Partly Sunny
High 99°
Low 73°

New "Old School" Racquet

I have switched from the Pro Kennex Kinetic 5G to the Prince Graphite Oversize aka the POG. This racquet design is over 20 years old and was the racquet that Michael Chang and Andre Agassi started their pro careers with. Agassi switched to Donnay and Head racquets that were made to be very similar to the POG and Chang stuck with the POG until he switched to the extended length version of the POG.

So far I like the POG better than the Kinetic 5G on my groundstrokes (I can hit a "heavier" ball and can hit with more topspin). However, I am not serving as well with POG so I need to make some adjustments there.

The wonderful thing about ebay and internet forums is that I got this POG for only $46 and will be able to sell some of my Kinetic 5Gs (not all of them) to get additional POGs.