We launched Redfin's online real estate brokerage in Chicago today along with Google Street View on many listings and the ability to post listings to your friends on Facebook. Read more or just come check it out at www.redfin.com. Let us know what you think!

After nearly 9 years, I'm no longer a homeowner. I closed on the sale of my condo in Capitol Hill today. Feels strange, but nice, not to have a mortgage.

It won't last long I suspect. We've already been looking for the next house (in Seattle this time) for a month or so.

With Google Street View cars roaming the top cities nationwide, they're bound to catch some funny events. I've seen cranes and vacant lots where houses are now and ghostly cars zooming by. But I've got a new favorite. It's bad enough you're being arrested, but then to have this happen...

If you want some more Street View fun, check out http://streetviewgallery.corank.com/.

We spent last weekend in the beautiful state of Hawaii for our friends', Eugene and Raven, wedding. It was an amazing day at an amazing place on the island of Kuaui at the Grand Hyatt. Hawaiian weddings really are something.

I've posted the photos from our trip at http://gallery.mac.com/bselner#100019 if you'd like to check out the location, event and, of course, the bride and groom.

We also made a quick side trip to the Big Island to check out the Keck Observatory on the top of Mauna Kea and Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. The geek in me liked the observatory field trip more. The volcanoes were underwhelming because we had to be so far back from the action.

It was a great trip, sunburn and all. I can check Hawaii off the "Vacations To Do" list finally!

Amazon's Kindle forums recently had good instructions on how to convert Microsoft Reader (.lit) files to Kindle's .prc format.

You can also simply email your Kindle a Microsoft Word doc and it'll convert it for you for $0.10 (pays for the Sprint wireless airtime I suspect.) I use this feature whenever I have a long technical document or user manual to read. It's much easier to get through a full document like that when you can do it a little at a time as you have time (and not always have to carry the specific book around with you.)

The one piece of utility software I need to find is a good .PDF to .PRC converter. There's a couple I've seen like PDFRead (Windows) that would probably work, but I'd love something simpler.

I use del.icio.us as my main bookmark store these days so that I can share the the links across machines and tag them. Since I moved to using Safari as my main browser both on the Mac and my work PC, I've been very frustrated by Safari's inability to have plug-in support for del.icio.us.

Fortunately, the "Gooracle" (the Oracle that is Google) was there to help. Here's a real easy trick using the Safari Bookmarks Bar to both post pages to del.icio.us and to easily get access to your bookmarks.

Testing out an upcoming Redfin feature, I stumbled across this home in the West Hollywood Hills. It's a pretty modern decor, but if parking ones car in the living room is modern decor, I'll stick with my current place. :)

Take a look at pictures #6 and then look at picture #5 to see where that car is parked. Crazy.

Side note: The dining room table is pretty cool. Play the virtual tour to see it as a silver/grey counter in one photo and then expand into a dining table and seating in another. Where does one find a table like that? Let me know if you know!

The transformation is complete. WIth the addition of our new Tivo HD, I'm finally able to download the Tivo shows to my Mac for viewing in my office or on the road. With some creative Automator scripting, I've got it converting from .Tivo files to .MPG so that they can be played on other devices.

I have officially retired the last Windows Vista PC in my possession. The Media Center box has been decommissioned thanks to the new Tivo.

I was excited to see a hint on Mac OS X Hints to get your Exchange address book into the Mac's native Address Book application. Unfortunately I struck out trying to get it to work.

I did read somewhere else about AddressX, an address sync engine for Exchange and Mac's Address Book. I tried it out and voila! My first 25 corporate global address list contacts are now in the Address Book under Exchange Contacts. I forked out the $19.95 for the full version and it allowed me to quickly download the full global address list from Exchange into my Address Book.

A quick connect of my Blackberry and sync with Missing Sync, and I am all set. My work contacts, phone numbers and email addresses are all in my Blackberry now. Mission accomplished. Follow-up: Address X and Missing Sync didn't do duplicate detection, so the address I had manually created before had two copies now in my Address Book and Blackberry. Not a huge deal since I only had a view manually created ones. Also, the Company field got strangely filled in with company and city, but again, something I can live it.

Had a rough Mac week a little while ago. OSX would randomly crash or just lock up on me for no apparent reason. After one of the reboots, I was created with a lovely flashing ? icon meaning the Mac couldn't find the startup disk.

After a repair from the Leopard install DVDs, things were back to normal, but a pain in the butt to deal with and cost me at least half a day to get around this issue.

Still no idea on the root cause.

I received one of the new $5 bills in change the other day which prompted myself and a coworker to wonder how they did the rumored anti-counterfitting protection. So I thought I'd try it out. I tossed the new $5 and an old $5 into the scanner we have at work to see what would happen.

The results were surprising. It didn't scan correctly. You can see what I got back here.

Deke McClelland said... "My understanding is that it works like this: In cooperation with governments, security, and software firms, the International Bank has devised an elaborate matrix of recognizable patterns that may be embedded into the design of paper currency. The matrix includes the yellow circles mentioned earlier, as well as a variety of lightly colored waving lines and subtly patterned background images. This matrix has worked its way into the new US bills, as well as all Euros, English pound notes, and who knows how many other currencies. The International Bank petitions tech developers such as Adobe to incorporate its scan detection protocol. Adobe added it to Photoshop, which satisfied all parties, but omitted it from ImageReady and other Adobe apps. Hence the potential for madcap humor in dekePod.

Given the fair-use options, and the many workarounds (the one I show in dekePod is just one of several), I am skeptical of software's ability to limit counterfeiting. Those that have successfully counterfeited money have done much more than scan it, clean it up in Photoshop, and print it two-sided on sheets of 20-pound bond. The real savvy bad boys weave and watermark their own paper and print the ink in layers, frequently using old-school presses. I might recommend spending less effort constraining fair-use activities and more effort looking for guys who are etching lithgraphic plates to resemble real money."

Pretty interesting and cool.

As a product manager and the guy working with the design folks at Redfin each day, I spend a lot of my time looking at "comps" (Photoshop image files for something that will be turned into web pages.) Comps are used to tune up the design ideas and execution until it's ready for developers to crank out the final product.

Most of the time in a comp, there's a minor, trivial error (capitalization, missing underlines, something silly like that) that I notice and point out. This isn't really because designers are all sloppy; they spend their time focused on the minute details of the colors, lines, images and alignment. Often they've stared at it so long they can't even really "see it" anymore; sort of like highway hypnosis, but with Photoshop. I get to come along with a "fresh pair" of eyes and it's easy then to find those things.

My friend, Mike, sent over the Photoshop Disasters blog which takes this effort of detecting Photoshop errors to a whole new level. Some are just creepy, others vampirephone.html">observant and others, just rude.

But in the end, it makes for a lot of fun and realization that we're all human and working too fast to not make a mistake here and there. :-)

I debated switching blog platforms as I really don't like the lack of integration of Live Spaces and OSX. It's bascially a web-browser page that I have to log into and go to in order to post. Before I switch though, I thought I'd give a couple Mac OSX blogging clients a try with my current blog.

I hadn't known that Windows Live Spaces could enable support for Mac blogging clients. It turns out they each basically use the E-Mail Publishing support available in Live Spaces to access the blog. You need to enable that support on your Space (it's off by default.) This Microsoft MSDN article explains how to do it.

Thanks to this great post at Devlounge, I'm trying out Ecto, Blogo and MarsEdit.

Blogo definitely won on website branding and simplicity and the ease of adding markup to the post, but it didn't successfully post to my blog even though it said it had. And then it lost my last version, so here I am re-writing it in MarsEdit.

MarsEdit seems to be more stable on connectivity and blog access, but is far inferior in usability when it comes to markup in a post. I can't believe there's not even a simple toolbar to add a link or bold. Instead it's buried under a weird dropdown menu on the top right. (Additional note: WYSI-not-WYG! It didn't even automatically add line breaks where I had spacing in the original post. It does look like you can choose different editors though, so I might still have good luck.)

Anyway, if you've used any of these clients and have thoughts, let me know. If you know of others I should try, let me know about them too!