I love snow, bad weather, long dramatic newscasts, and everything around it.  I was at home all day today making sure a puppy was well cared for, and was able to take some pictures of the snow up on Queen Anne in Seattle.

The wind is now blowing so hard that the light poles outside and in the Safeway parking lot across the road are making horrible noises, and the snow is blowing vertically.  I wish photos would capture the snow in the lights, but it never seems to work…

My short walk home tonight was so cold because of the wind – at points I had to stop and turn away from the wind it was so powerful and full of stinging snow.  I hope it keeps snowing and blowing so I don't have to go into work tomorrow …

Full set of pictures is here on Flickr.

This is a test post – a bunch of folks have let me know that my link to Google Reader (provided by FeedBurner) isn't working.  I'm trying to test that out …

I have a Roland KR-7 digital piano that I purchased back in 2004 and have been very happy with it for a long time.  I haven't used the built-in sounds for a long while because they've become pretty dated, especially the piano sound which I use constantly.  Instead, I've used the MIDI-out to my Mac and Mainstage as the sampler/sound end of things.
I bought the KR-7 used from a local piano dealer, and got a huge deal on it.  They fixed all of the problems that I found during the inspection, but it had been used in their teaching school for almost a year before I bought it.
Lately, it's been having some problems, and about two weeks ago, it stopped working altogether.  MIDI output became unreliable, and then the keys weren't firing anything at all, whether it be MIDI or internal.  After contacting the local company, and Roland, it was clear that fixing it would cost several thousand dollars, and there was no guarantee.
So, I pulled out my trusty Korg M3, dusted it off, and fired it up.  It's been a while since I used it, but it's action is actually a bit more preferable than the KR-7.  I ordered the RAM upgrade and tried out a few new sampled sounds – now I have to re-learn how to use all of the on board stuff.  One of the first things I want to do is sample the Steinway piano from Mainstage – I really like that particular sample and sound, and hope the RAM upgrade for the M3 will help.
I'm sad that the KR-7 didn't last longer, but for the price I paid, I felt I've gotten my money's worth.  And the M3 isn't that bad either!

For a while I have been planning a new system on my sailboat for navigation.  I started out back in 2007 with a Garmin GPSMAP 5208 which worked great at the time.  It was a touch screen system, and a bit on the small size for the display.   Over time I found many errors with the charts, problems with it keeping up with the amount of AIS targets I had (the fan would spin up and the UI would slow to a crawl) plus a few other things.
I have been watching the developments of broadband radar via panbo.com and other places online, and wanted to add that to my boat for safety reasons.  After a lot of research, I choose the Simrad NSE12 multi function display, and BR24 radar.
One of the reasons I'm writing my thoughts up here is that while there is a lot of info on manufacturer's sites, they don't let you delve deeper into their products without (a) buying them, (b) seeing them at a store, or (c) reading their entire manuals.  And what most of us care about, the user interface, isn't something you can see except for (a) and (b) which are either short term (a) or a purchase.  I've taken a bunch of screen shots and written up my thoughts to help anyone else interested in Simrad's stuff…
Click on any of my pictures for a larger version on my Flickr site, or you can see the whole set of pictures on the NSE12 here.
Background
I already had a Simrad TP32 tiller pilot, and a Brookhouse NMEA multiplexer (more on this soon), Icom M504 DSC capable radio, plus Tactick wind, compass, and depth instruments, so integrating these were a priority.  Having the Simrad TP32 made the choice even nicer because it can interface with the NSE12 over a SimNet connection.
I considered Raymarine, Garmin and Simrad before choosing, and Simrad was the only one who had a broadband radar that had been around longer than the others, and had a very well designed interface on the MFD to charts, radar and all of the components.  Some of the other vendors had broadband-like radar, or MFDs that would support something similar, but they hadn't been around as long, or had similar interface problems that I had found in the Garmin that I was trying to avoid.  They also didn't have the depth of features, nor the Navionics charts, which ended up playing a bigger part in my decision than I thought it would.
Why did I choose an MFD over running something like Coastal Explorer on a laptop?  Well, I do run Coastal Explorer on a laptop, and use it a lot for planning and investigation, since it's much easier to do that at home than on the boat.  The concern with using something like CE as a primary navigation aid is the PC itself. Having a deep PC background myself, and watching simple non-marinized components degrade after a winter of disuse, and looking at the exorbitant prices for a marine PC, I chose the MFD route.  I think in 2-3 years PC components and cases will have gotten to the stage where MFDs will have a lot of serious competition.  For now, I wanted something that was completely protected from the elements, took a small amount of power, and offered something as close as possible to a PC experience as possible.
In a week or so, I'll write up an experiment I did with a semi-marinized PC and Coastal Explorer with a Planar touch screen.  Not quite ready for prime-time yet!
My configuration
I have an NSE12 connected via NMEA0183 @ 38400 baud to a Brookhouse NMEA AIS multiplexer.  Connected to the multiplexer as well is my Icom 504 radio, Tactick NMEA gateway, Simrad TP32 tiller pilot, and ACR Nauticast Class-B AIS transponder.
Connected directly to the NSE12 is the BR24 radar, which I mounted on a Scanstrut self-leveling pole (more on that in the future) along with the add-on GPS extender for the Simrad GS15 GPS Antenna.  The TP32 and GS15 are connected to my SimNet, which is also connected to the NSE12.
NSE12 screen, case and user interface
The NSE12 is very well built – the case feels like you could hit it with a sledge hammer and it would still work.  The cabling and all other aspects of the outside are similar to many of the other MFD's.  The control interface is well designed and easy to use, and backlit very well in all conditions I've used it in.
What is really amazing is the screen – it's so crisp and clear from all angles, and can be adjusted a wide range of brightness.  The other fun thing is that the NSE12 draws between .2 and .3 AMPS less than my smaller Garmin GPSMAP 5208!  Most of this I assume is due to the LED backlit screen on the NSE12.

Touch or No Touch?
I really liked the touch screen interface with the Garmin, and in choosing the Simrad NSE12, I gave that up.  The best part of that interface was to move around on the chart and find a new point of interest or AIS ship.  Navigating menus via the touch interface always had it's problems/challenges.  There were drop down or scroll bars that were extremely hard to use, if not impossible.  And if it happened to be cold outside, you had to lose one of the gloves to get it to work.  Many people have asked if rain was a problem – I didn't see too much of a problem with the water, but it was down below in a sheltered location.
Simrad did an excellent job of providing controls to the user – there's a scroll wheel that you can click with as well as scroll, a directional pad, and an in-out button.  I use the directional pad most of the time to move the cursor around.  It's still new to me and I'm not anywhere near as good as I was with touch, but I am sure I will get there.  There's also a numeric keypad, which at first glance seemed a bit dated.  After having used it a number of times to enter waypoint names, navigate quick menus, and the like, I can say it's a step up from the on screen keyboards or messy scroll keyboards that other solutions have.  It works similar to cell phone text entry, and is pretty fast for entering names and letters.
I really like the menu system that Simrad has put together.  Things are ordered logically, and organized in large blocks – I hate user interfaces that hide everything that isn't relevant, or require many clicks to get to what you want to see.  Simrad has simplified some things, but generally speaking the menus contain everything you could want to change or see in one place.  And navigating with the click wheel is a breeze.
Night mode
Night mode on the NSE12 is one highlight in their design.  Not only does the chart or other object change colors that are more conducive to night navigation, but the unit's backlit keys change to red as well.  The only odd thing is the gradiated colors at the top of the instrument panel which you can see in the screen shot below.  I like the colors they've chosen for the maps more than the Garmin and Raymarine interfaces I've seen.  They're easy to read in low light, and easy to identify the same key areas as the daylight lighting.  In many other MFD's, night light is a lot of red text and colors, which are hard for me to see.
The most disappointing thing with night mode, and for that matter, the general mode is that it is not auto sensing or driven based off of GPS time, as far as I have seen.  Both Raymarine and Garmin did this in past systems, and I found it to be a nice convenience.  Whether it simply switched to night mode at the right time, or changed the brightness on the screen based on ambient light.  That feature seems to be missing from Simrad.

Charts
The charts on the NSE12 really shine.  I purchased the Navionics Platinum Plus charts for the Puget Sound area, and have been very impressed with their level of detail.  It was a bit hard to find the option to enable them at first, but once turned on, they are easy to use and fast.
This choice turned out to be one of the cornerstones in my overall selection of MFD solution.  I had seen Navionics charts a few years ago, but there wasn't anything that, to me, set them apart from what I had with g2 Vision from Garmin, or some of the options that Raymarine offered.  In the last year I had a lot of time to research and see Navionics charts and was truly impressed.
Speed is one of the areas that Simrad's marketing talks a lot about – how fast redraws are with chart options enabled.  I've done a lot of testing on this, as it was one of my bigger complaints about the Garmin technology. According to various sources, Simrad has a 1.6Ghz CPU in the NSE12 allowing for the graphics speed.  I would imagine it's an Atom-based CPU or other low power consuming chip.

In my screen shot below, I have the charts in 2D mode with all of the options turned on.  Redraw zooming in and out is nearly instantaneous.  I have never seen an MFD keep up that fast.  I use Coastal Explorer on a laptop for trip planning, and it has problems zooming as fast as the NSE, and it's on a pretty fast system with beefy graphics hardware.
Enabling 3D mode slows things down, but only a small amount.  3D mode to me is a nice-to-have, but so far it hasn't solved any urgent problems I've had.  It's very interesting to see some of the places you frequent in 3D mode and fly through them – a completely different perspective as you can see from the screen shot.

Photo charts are even better.  The digital imagery they used here is very clear and crisp, and scales very well when zooming in and out.  You can see the detail in the screen shot below of the Ballard Locks.

Again, moving around and zooming with photo charts is pretty fast – the photos do take a bit longer than anything else to show up if you are panning.  If you're zooming, it's near instant.

Where things start to slow down is when you turn 3D chart mode and photos on at the same time.  Part of this in my case was because the photos didn't exist in all areas, but much of it is the system having to render not only 3D charts, but find and render the photos in pseudo-3D as well.  I don't think it's a showstopper at all – after all, I am asking for it to do the hardest thing it can while tracking 100+ AIS targets and dealing with all of the other things going on.
Overall, the charts functionality is what you would expect from a top end MFD, and faster than any other system I've seen out there.
Utilities
One of the areas that I think Simrad doesn't talk about a lot is in their utilities and pages areas.  Here you can do things like have a display of instruments, navigation headings and XTE stuff, as well as manage your saved files, screen shots (yes!) and do the usual sun/moon/tides interactions.  I think these interfaces are surprisingly well done – most of these on MFDs are after thoughts and scattered all over the UI.  In Simrad's case, they are centralized and easy to use.  You can see screen shots of tides and other interfaces in my Flickr set on the NSE12.

Alarms
One area in particular that shines for Simrad is in their alarms management page.  I can't tell you how many times I've hunted around in an MFD interface to disable an alarm that was going off over and over (AIS targets are a big one) and found it buried in some sub-screen.  In Simrad's case, they give them all to you on one page – extremely convenient and fast to figure out.
Radar
A lot of reviews have been written on the BR24 broadband radar – I won't re-hash all of that here.  I am still impressed with it's clarity and ability to pick out really small objects with high degrees of accuracy.

In the screen to the left you can see nearby buoys right outside of the marina entrance which are only about 3-5 feet tall and pretty narrow – the BR24 found them though…  Not to mention the detail it shows of the marina and boats themselves.
I haven't yet found out how to customize the list of vessels on this page, and in many cases it seems to be pretty random what shows up on it – for instance, it's showing three vessels that are between 6 and 10 NM away from me, when there are clearly marked AIS targets that are much closer than that.
The controls on the radar page are, as many other reviews highlight, very well done.  Being able to use the click scroll wheel to change the gain, sea clutter, and rain clutter is very well thought out.
I also appreciate the ability to change the colors used for the screen – I've tried the yellow and green options (instead of red) and they can be useful in certain circumstances.
There are a number of other great settings and details here in the radar menus – maybe sometime in the future once I learn more about them, I'll post here.
One of the features I really like is being able to overlay the radar data on top of a chart.  You can really begin to see the power of the whole MFD solution when using it this way.
In the screen shot to the right, you can see the AIS vessel leaving the marina, and the radar echo that is quite a ways ahead of where AIS is reporting it.  You can also see the buoys I mentioned further up in the channel, and many other landmarks that the BR24 is picking out.  Seeing it overlaid on the chart is extremely helpful.
For the ultimate in all features enabled, here's 3D charts, photo overlay (land only) and radar overlay.

AIS
The NSE12 has good AIS support.  It doesn't seem to lag or slow down like my Garmin did the moment it starts to discover more than 15 AIS targets.  I am not particularly fond of the large triangle shapes, and bold for dangerous targets.  I liked the Garmin shapes and colors better, but I assume this may be refined in newer versions of software.  There's a lot of configurability here that I didn't see in Garmin or Raymarine in terms of how long you wanted the line out in front of the AIS target, and alarms settings as well.
One of the more annoying things that always seems to happen with any AIS solution is the alarms for the AIS enabled boats in the marina that are not moving.  They all pop up in the first couple of minutes of powering on.  I am not sure if there is anything that could be done about that – i.e. see if they aren't moving and not alarm, but I bet that would be a bad thing if there was a dangerous target that wasn't moving
On first startup the NSE is very quick to acquire all of the targets, and the screens for viewing the data on a vessel are very complete.  Alarms themselves are well organized and clear when they occur.
Data Panel
One nice touch is the ability to customize the data panel at the top of each screen.  You can see that I have something different on the chart screen, versus the chart+radar screen, versus the radar screen.  You can add just about any of the data you would think is relevant, and have two bars stacked like I do, or have a rotating bar.  I really like vendors who choose to do things this way and give the power to the people who are using it, rather than fixed options that might contain 80% of what you want.
The other nice thing is the status icons at the top right hand – they show the radar status (standby/transmit), GPS status, and if there are any outstanding alarms.  It's very easy to see the status of your entire system at a quick glance.
Boot up time
Out of everything, this might be one of the biggest drawbacks from any of the new MFDs.  The NSE12 takes a good 2 minutes to boot from the time you turn it on.  I don't think there's much that can be done to change this.  If you have flaky power, or if when you start your engine, things drop below normal voltages (you really should fix that – I did 2 years ago) then you might not like any of the newer MFDs.
Power consumption
Power consumption on a sailboat is always important, and was one of my design concerns as well.  The final system, with all of the instruments on, including the NSE12, draws about 2 AMPS.  If I fire up the radar, I go up to about 3 AMPS, which is unheard of for radar power draw.  If the tiller pilot is really working, and I've got all of these  components up and running, I might get to 5 AMPS.  That's within the tolerances of what I set for a goal on power usage.  Of course, I could shut off the radar, turn down the screen brightness on the NSE12, or even put it in standby (this saves about an amp).  I could even shut it all off, and just use tiller pilot and solar charged Tactick instruments at about an amp of usage.
Several of the other MFDs I looked at drew considerably more – especially those with similar screen sizes.  Many of those are tailored towards power boats and video displays that suck a lot of power.
Integration with other instruments
This turned out to be far more complicated than it should have been.  The TP32 was easy – SimNet found it instantly, and it worked.  Same with the new GPS antenna that I bought with the system.  The NMEA0183 stuff was far more difficult.
I've used NMEA0183 stuff for years, and had several multiplexers that help with this.  In this case, the NSE12 only has one input/output port for NMEA0183, and for some reason, even though I had turned off many of the sentences from being transmitted from the NSE, it was still sending them.  This created a headache for about 2 hours until I powered everything off and back on again, and magically things began to work.  I will be writing up more of this in a separate post on integrating with the Brookhouse NMEA multiplexer I have.
Conclusion
Overall, I'm very happy with my new system.  I think the NSE12 has been very well designed from top to bottom, and has enough flexibility for end users, as well as a platform for Simrad to improve upon going forward.  There are some areas that could use some improvement, but nothing that prevents me from using all functionality in a way that improves my voyage.  Combine that with top notch charts, and an amazing new radar technology, and I feel that I have far more information at hand when navigating that will keep me safer on the water.

The last few days I've been "commuting" from our place on Vashon Island into downtown Seattle.  Part of it was a trial to see how it was to commute, and part of it was for fun – if you call getting up at 6AM fun.
Monday I took the passenger ferry, which I've done hundreds of times, and it was no different than normal.  Of course, I'm doing this during a week when traffic is light due to the holidays, but that's OK for me.  It was nice seeing the sunrise, and the drive was nice on the Vashon side.  The Seattle side was less fun, but still not horrible.  On the return trip, I had to wait a while to catch a ferry, but nothing hugely long.
Tuesday and Wednesday I took the King County Water Taxi from Vashon directly to downtown, and then walked 45 minutes down the waterfront to work.  Both times were excellent – the ferry trip was super fast (~20 minutes) and smooth, the crew very efficient and polite.  There were a few problems with the new ORCA cards, but that's expected with something new.
The walk from Coleman dock to work was nice – the first day it was freezing cold and I didn't dress right, so I was a bit unhappy there, but the walk itself was nice.  The sun was rising during the walk, ferries and ships were moving around, and of course a few trains went by just to keep me awake.
I think if you have to commute, this sort of commute is pretty nice – a bit of exercise to start and end the day, and efficient mass transit in the middle.  Of course, I am not doing this during a normal day (holidays and all) so I am sure it would be less fun if the boat was full/late/canceled.  Nevertheless, commuting just as long in a car offers up the same style of interruptions and inconveniences with traffic problems and sports games
I think it would be great to be able to ride my bike from the place on Vashon to the ferry terminal, and subsequently into work, but in talking with several others that commute regularly on the Water Taxi, those bike rack slots on the boat are hard to come by – maybe just cycling one end would be OK, and walking the other (Seattle side for walking!).  Of course, that would mean actually getting back into shape since the ride from the house on Vashon to the ferry terminal is super long (11 miles), and has a huge amount of hills.
It's good to know that commuting isn't that bad, though…

Barely used marine-grade touch scree 17" monitor.  I bought it for a project on my boat, but it ended up being the wrong size and shape for the area I was originally thinking of.  I used it for all of about 2 hours, and it works great.
It's got a lot of input options, as well as picture in picture, which is pretty useful if you have multiple video feeds.  The touch screen is very responsive, and I was able to navigate Windows easily with the interface.  It requires a serial port for this option to work with your computer.
It has two screw down connectors for the DC power, and I tested it from about 10VDC up to 16VDC and it worked flawlessly.  It comes with a 110VAC power wart that you can use to test things out, or permanently if you prefer.  It has a thick lip around the entire edge of the monitor for mounting in a bridge or wall.
Overall the quality of the screen image is good, given that the system is designed to be viewable in sunlight, and it's covered by a protective layer for the touchscreen.  I just can't fit it in where I need it, and I can't return it.
Link to manufacturer's page online.
Specs:

• 17" screen
• 1280 x 1024 resolution – pretty hard to find
• Touch screen – transflective
• Flush mounting
• Marine grade – shock and water resistant
• 8 to 36 volt DC supply
• Multiple inputs – VGA, DVI, S-Video, composite
• Wide dimming capability – easy to make it very dark and take up less power / not lose your night vision
• Picture and picture

I purchased it for $1900 new from AIS Industrial Innovations.
Below are some of the documents included with the monitor:

• Spec sheet
• Users manual
• Transflective LCD User Guide

Here's a closer picture of the resolution:

After only a few weeks, I've found a number of things wrong with the Palm Pre I posted about back in September.  I know, I know, I switch phones a lot and have been pretty impatient the last few years with these sorts of things, but I really made a bad choice with the Pre.
Initially I was OK with how cheap the phone appeared to be because of all of the webOS features, and the speed that I got from Sprint's network over AT&T.  But that waned quickly with the other things that started cropping up.  Sure, the Sprint network was better than AT&T, but it still sucked at home much of the time, and at work as well.  When it worked, it worked very fast – the fastest download times I've ever seen on any phone or aircard.
webOS was initially very exciting – being able to have multiple running apps, and the whole card concept.  But the lack of apps available, and the quality of the apps really made the phone only useful for a few things.  It also was extremely slow to do basic things, especially the calendar.  On top of that, the basic PIM apps were missing key features – most notably the Tasks functionality for my use case.  It was very basic, and didn't have any of the  features that tasks in Outlook has.  Being able to create tasks on the phone when I'm out and about or in a meeting, and then having them on my PC is important so I don't forget something.
The most irritating thing was how poorly the phone was made.  Initially I thought it was something I would be able to live with, but it became a big problem.  The phone would shut off randomly at different times.  There were a lot of posts on the 'net about the battery being loose, and how to fix it.  It never worked for me.  Additionally, the power on/off/sleep button fell off on the first phone I had.  The second phone had the same problem as the first with randomly shutting off.  It also had keys that would occasionally stick, and the slider would never open or close completely.
webOS still looks very intriguing to me, and I'm sure in a year or two it will be developed enough that it will be a reliable alternative to the iPhone and Andriod, but for now, it's just not ready for prime-time, and especially on a network that has a lot of issues, and on hardware that is buggy.
So where did I go?  Off to Verizon and the Motorola Droid…but more on that later.

NOTE:  I no longer use the Palm Pre – please see my updated post here.
After having to deal with a bunch of rate increases on my AT&T iPhone 3G, I decided enough was enough, and went over to Sprint and the Palm Pre.
I was pretty worried at first, mostly with the provider – Sprint.  I had heard a lot of bad things about them over the years, and folks in the Seattle area just don't seem to be that Sprint-savvy.  I had been on AT&T and T-Mobile for the last 9+ years, and had become used to their ways.
Suffice to say, after a bit over a week of use, the Sprint network has impressed me – much better call quality, and much faster 3G access around town.  Of course, part of that, I believe, has to do with the Palm Pre itself – it seems to be much snappier whether on 3G or Wifi for web browsing and other data-centric apps.
I used a T-Mobile G1 and iPhone for the last 2 years, and always hated that I couldn't have more than one application open.  Flipping back and forth always required the app to reload or relaunch completely, and slowed things down.  The design always felt like you were in a different world every time you opened up something new.  Very inefficient, especially when you're in a meeting killing time by reading emails, and then need to look something up to reply.
The Palm Pre's webOS is definitely far superior than any of the others I've tried out there for this reason alone – having "cards" running in the background with whatever app you've launched is a great breakthrough for a smart phone.
I haven't run up against the maximum application limit that so many folks have talked about, but then again, I don't open up needless things like Twitter or Accuweather and leave them running – I only leave the most frequently used things open all of the time.  It's so convenient to flip between things quickly to check on status – the Google Reader page with the most recent items of the day, Email to see what's going on at work, and the calendar to see the day's events coming up.
The other really cool feature is Synergy – glomming all of the calendar and contact information into one unified view.  I only have one calendar, but I experimented with my Google Apps Calendar and it worked flawlessly.  One neat feature is to turn on the weather info on your Google calendar, and have it appear at the top bar of your Pre's calendar app.
Synergy really shines in the way it combines contact information.  It found several folks in my Google Apps mail account and also in my work Exchange account and combined their contact information together.  That combined with Universal Search when you're looking for someone has saved me a huge amount of time making phone calls – this sort of integration was mediocre at best on the G1 and iPhone.
The physical quality of the Palm Pre is a bit disappointing and I think it would be my only negative experience so far.  The keyboard seems cheap and the buttons are shiny, which is nice in the dark, but completely useless in brighter light – they all reflect horribly.  The case itself also feels very plastic, and I doubt it would survive as long as the more robust G1 or iPhone.  Nevertheless, at the rate I go through phones (currently down to 2 a year I think – close friends who are reading this might say different!) it won't likely be an issue for me.
The lack of control over sounds is disappointing as well, but there are apps in the Homebrew store that allow you to get around this, and I expect Palm will have to add this eventually.  Having the same noise for any sort of event, calendar, SMS, or note is just plain dumb.  And the stock sounds on the Pre are so quiet you have to be totally quiet to hear any of them.  Again, the Homebrew apps save the day.
I'm looking forward to the new version of webOS due out in the next few weeks, which will re-instate iTunes syncing as well as add a bunch of new features.  I have found the best resource on the 'net for following Pre news is http://www.precentral.net/ – good articles, excellent forums, and daily updates on Pre related news.
The other thing that has really impressed me is how stable and reliable webOS is – after all, it's only been out in the wider masses for a short period of time, and yet it is faster and less crashy than the G1 was for the first 6 months.  I'm sure as new things are added, it will slow down a bit, but I'm pretty happy with it now, so I expect stability will only increase as more folks use it.
Hopefully this phone and provider will last me a couple of years!  Here's hoping

Occassionally I find things in my inventory that I no longer use, and will post that info here.  Currently, I have the following for sale:

• Kayak – NC Kayaks 17" – barely used