It's now so easy to get on Starbucks wifi

I often go to Starbucks with my MacBook Pro. It's now so easy to use their wifi. Just 2 clicks. I no longer need to log in with my username and password.

iPhone programming with MonoTouch

The book just arrived... Aight. Let's get it started.

MIX10 in Las Vegas

The Underground @ PDC 2009 Review

It was a pretty good event considering that it was free. I was lucky enough to get an RSVP code to register for the event. Food and drinks were good. Sponsor stations with Surface, touch screen PC's with Windows 7 on them and etc were pretty good. Don't want to talk about cigars though. Hated that. Speaker presentations were generally good, but it was hard to hear them speak. Wireless mics weren't working so well and crowd was a bit too loud drinking and talking during presentations. They gave away a lot of good free stuff. I, of course, didn't win any...
It was a good event! Thanks to people who put that event together.

Have GPS-enabled and My Location-enabled Google Maps for mobile?

Google Maps Adds Traffic Conditions to Major Roads [Google Maps]

By Adam Pash, 10:00 AM on Tue Aug 25 2009 [lifehacker]

Arterial traffic available on Google Maps [Google LatLong]
The bright side of sitting in traffic: Crowdsourcing road congestion data [Official Google Blog]

via lifehacker

If you say yes, Google is crowdsourcing your data. Google knows where you are and how fast you are moving.

I'd normally say "Opt in by default. Take action to opt out" is bad. But for more accurate live traffic information on freeways as well as major roads? Hmm... Given that I drive in LA traffic and I will continue to do so for more years to come, I think I'm fine with sharing my data with Google for this matter.

I do 50-mile round trip commute to work everyday and I do drive off freeways quite a bit, so I love this major road traffic data on my iPhone 3G. I hate it when I get stuck in a local street and have no idea why traffic is jammed. Sometimes it's an accident and sometimes there are constructions going on. If you run into this in the morning and you only have 5 minutes left to get in in time? You'll be frustrated.
Now, I can see traffic data on most, if not all, of local roads that I drive on. This is great.

I have one request for you though, Google.
Can we make the road names visible even when traffic is turned on? You could make it semi-transparent, can't you?
I have to turn off traffic info to see road names. I find this kind of annoying when I'm driving in unfamiliar areas.

My favorite old tycoon games

(Image from Wikipedia)

Transport Tycoon is one of the first games I've bought in DOS days. I think I bought Transport Tycoon Deluxe in late 1995. I remember playing this game for hours and hours during my junior high winter vacation. I was hooked.

I'm sure many people know Railroad Tycoon series. I also played those game series, but I actually enjoyed Transport Tycoon more.

With help from Owen's Transport Tycoon, I still play this game once in a while. I was able to play the game on XP with TTDPatch, and on Vista with OpenTTD.

This is such a great game. I'm still enjoying it even after 13 years.