I've always found the Pemco ads about different people types in the Pacific NW to be very entertaining. They hit on great stereotype personas in a really well done campaign. I can't imagine how many hours of brainstorming went into each one of the personas in these ads.

Well, I think they're even more clever now. Checkout this picture here where she's labelled with "Bloodshot eyes from late nights on Redfin"

It's a pretty cool shout-out to get; thanks Pemco from the team at Redfin.

There were a couple 5 hours lines still on Saturday that I could have stood in, but honestly, would it really be worth that much time?

Ordered mine through AT&T; it should be here Friday.

I'm debating switching blog platforms off Windows Live Spaces. Does anyone have suggestions for the best platform to go to? pros? cons?

email me.

I use Del.icio.us for my bookmarks so that I can always access them anywhere. It's always irritated me though that there was no plug-in for Safari. I used Firefox more often simply because of that handy feature.

Well, it turns out someone figured out how to make it work in Safari as a menu item. Check out Delicious Safari.

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.