Matthew Botos

The tail end of a Tivo-skipped commercial informed me that Match.com is now guaranteeing you’ll meet someone special in 6 months, or they’ll give you another six months free. Though I’ve pretty much given up on Internet dating at this point, I was curious enough to check out the fine print.

It’s actually pretty reasonable: write a profile, post a picture, and email or respond to 5 people a month. The only tricky part is the time frames you have to get setup and then to claim the guarantee: 7 days on either end.

From a business point of view, it’s a good move to shed the perception that they could care less if you meet anyone as long as you keep shelling out $20+ a month. Statistically, I bet few people can stomach more than a few months of Internet dating (myself included), or remember to come back during that one week to claim the guarantee, so the real cost of the promotion is pretty low.

The one upside to the offer is to encourage people to be more active participants, which some other niche sites have explored by letting you rate others based on responsiveness and even actual dates.

I Netflixed Warren Miller’s Cold Fusion and have to say it does feature some sick skiing and boarding. Their itinerary also read like a resume of some of my own trips: Whistler, Alaska, Telluride. Kenya and Iran will have to wait for another day, though.

Warren’s getting old though, and the film and audience seem to be going the same way. The narration is mellow and music, though modern, lacks the punch of the hard-charging alternapunk that fuels any snowboard DVD. It is a reflection on the population, though: skiers and boarders are increasingly an older crowd and it’s tough to get younger folks to join ski clubs. Shorter lift lines would be nice, but you still need some company on the ride up.

I haven’t yet made the leap to HDTV, but occasionally check prices looking for a good time to jump. The good news is that HDTV sets keep getting cheaper; the bad news is that they’re still going to cost you extra to feed.

$2000 seems to be enough to get you a decent 42-inch flat panel (LCD or plasma), making less expensive DLP sets seem antiquely bulky. Upgrading Comcast cable to get some HD channels is about $15 a month including an HD box. It’s another $10 for their HD-capable DVR, though Wired recently panned the interface as having “all the user-friendliness of compiling a TCP/IP stack”.

Any Tivo-junkie would naturally want the superior interface of the Series 3 HD Tivo; though it comes with a hefty $800 price tag and $13 monthly fee. There are lots of PC and Mac based DVR solutions, though all seem more like glorified VCRs than Tivo’s comprehensive solution.

In summary, end-to-end HDTV with a 42-inch flat panel and Tivo DVR will cost you $2800 in equipment up front, plus about $30 a month in additional service fees. And that’s before you even touch the competing HD DVD standards and the additional power consumption of a plasma set…

As the batteries in my Sonicare toothbrush have died a slow death, I’ve been looking for a way to replace them. P. Flindt’s Philips Amazon review of the Sonicare 4100 finally provided a promising solution:

Since the warranty expired, I took a Dremel tool to the Sonicare and opened it up. To my delight, I noted that the batteries employed by the unit were two standard, albeit unbranded AA NiCad cells. I removed and replaced them with two 600mah Sanyo cells, closed the handle and sealed it shut with silicone. It’s been over a year now and my Sonicare is working as well as it did the day I bought it.

Hearing the magic word Dremel, I resolved to spend a bit of Sunday afternoon in the basement seeing if $5 of batteries could save a $50 toothbrush. Cutting through the mid-line groove of the handle took a few passes to gauge the 1/8″ depth of the plastic. The top joint, inside the threading for the brush head, isn’t easily reached for cutting, but came apart with a twist of a screwdriver from the side just below.

Inside, the unit is quite densely packed. From the base, there’s a charging coil, the two AA NiCad batteries as described, and another coil to drive the head, all covered with a small circuit board. And it’s quite solid: the whole thing is cemented into the back of the handle with a hardened Soylent Green epoxy. The batteries were not only soldered to the board and each other, but mired themselves in a good 1/8″ of epoxy.

Cutting off the portion of the back housing attached to the batteries made them more accessible. But even after drilling out some of the epoxy, they were still firmly attached. Faced with the remaining tasks of detaching the batteries, soldering in a new set, and resealing the handle and its new battery door, I admitted defeat to the integrated obsolescence of Philips’ engineers. I’ll be buying another one because it does a good job and lasted a healthy six years, but still shaking my head at the design.

View the Sonicare photos

It’s benefits election time again, which provides an opportunity to take a first hand look at the real costs of health care and insurance. Aetna provides a great web-based tool called Navigator that shows you what charges doctors submitted, what Aetna paid, and what you paid. In a sign of the times, you can now even download the raw data to do your own cost crunching. Some interesting findings:

1. Having insurance gets you a significantly discounted rate from the “list” price
2. My primary care physician only gets my copay for an office visit
3. I pay more of the small bills, insurance pays more of the big ones

The last point is the most poignant reflection on health care today and into the future: it really only kicks in when you have major events. With higher deductibles, it also means customers are going to demand more up-front pricing information. I think greater personal responsibility and choice in health care are a good thing, though the system needs to be more transparent to really make it work.

I was down in Philly last night for a Cornell Club happy hour well-attended by some of the younger grads from ‘04 and ‘06. Talking with them brought back some good memories of what was like to be just out of school, still feeling like you could do anything. Not that I feel like I’ve given up on my dreams as I’ve gotten older. Rather, I’ve developed a much more accurate sense of self and found where my strengths lie and what really makes my life rewarding.

I’ve actually been enjoying my work the last week, which has become all to much of rarity the last couple of years. Part of it is the project: developing slick web applications to help us share knowledge better within the company. AJAX, web services, blogs, wikis - all the things the cool kids have been doing on the open Internet recently. The other part is the people: the rest of the team are also fellow cutting edge technology disciples. Not only do they understand when someone says, “maybe we should do it like Netflix or del.icio.us”, but they aspire to that same level of advanced functionality. Maybe there’s hope for career satisfaction after all…

While Googling someone, I stumbled across a different kind of search engine. ZoomInfo attempts to summarize your web presence and relationships. It’s interesting to see a commercial approach to gleaning the relationships of people from less-structured documents; similar projects have gotten a lot of attention (and money) from government counter-terrorism efforts.

For my own profile, they managed to find this site, albeit as an outdated RSS feed. Their guesses as to my relationships are interesting, apparently drawn from the captions of my many photos and the occasional blog quote:

• William Kent, deceased founder of Muir Woods, which I visited a few years ago
• Cheri Lowre, a UCLA medical professor I quoted in Babies and Life on Demand
• Paul Graziani, CEO of a local software company, who spoke at my masters graduation

At least online, I’m keeping some good company!

You can now view smallers sets of my favorite photos from any album or trip, for example:

• Favorite London photos
• Favorite Oregon photos

You can use “favorite” in any search to see the photos I think are the best or most interesting.

If you’re interested in the details, this is now possible due to an extension of my custom photo tagging system. Albums now have tags, allowing multiple albums to be joined as a single trip. These tags are also included in the search for individual photos to help narrow the results to a single trip or album.

Overcast skies quickly cleared on Sunday, making for another great day in London. I first returned to the London Eye for a nice ride and some great views of the city. The Eye itself is quite an impressive engineering feat with security to match: metal detectors, x-ray machines, and a sweep of each capsule before it’s loaded.

On Brian’s recommendation, the one museum on my must-see list was the British Museum, home to artifacts from around the world. Also, after the rest of London’s high prices, it was nice to get something for free! The museum didn’t disappoint, with interesting religious pieces from Asia, Greek statues, and Egpytian mummies. The Great Court and Reading Room also boasted some jaw-dropping architecture.

Behind the museum, I relaxed with a tiramisu ice cream cone in Russell Square. The grand Russell Hotel overlooks the park with its layer cake facade. Yet another Tube ride took me to Oxford Street for some shopping, though nothing really grabbed my eye. There was no shortage of nice, tempting suits, but I knew I’d have few occasions to wear them. Riding back to the hotel, I mused how the diagram of Underground stops reads like a catalog of Rolling Stone’s lyrics.

While in line for the Eye earlier in the day, I had scoured my guidebook for a dinner recommendation and found a good Indian place. Dinner at Kennington Tandoori offered me a chance to check out a quieter residential section of south London and enjoy some great Indian food before packing up to go back home.

View the British Musuem photos