This is my 1976 Triumph Spitfire

From 2000 to 2004, I drove this 1976 Triumph Spitfire. My dad got it for me for $1000 and it needed a lot of restoration.

I got to drive it around San Diego in my last two years at UCSD. I absolutely loved that car. It was so much fun to drive. I never had a problem parking since it was so small. Being an old fixer-up, it often had problems. One time there was a hole in the gas tank. I learned to fix it using soap shavings. Another time the muffler almost fell off.

The worst was on a rainy night in November of 2003. I was in San Diego working at a Pokemon event. On the way home, the Spitfire stopped working. I was stuck in San Clemente and had to wait for a flatbed tow truck. I ended up waiting until 5am in a Jack in the Box parking lot for a truck to show up.

After I got sick in July of 2004, the car was sold in December of 2004. I miss it dearly.

No traffic ahead with Ovi Maps

I was on my way from Sylmar to Burbank and had Ovi Maps 3.3 running on my N97. For the first time, I was prompted about a traffic event ahead. I pushed the corner of the screen to take a detour and I was on my way. I saw no accidents or traffic on my way to Burbank.

Another cool thing about Ovi Maps is the language selection. There's a few great voices available now. I first discovered the surfer dude voice about a month ago. He's a lot of fun, its like having Sean Penn from Fast Times at Ridgemont High in your phone. Nokia has added a lot of great dialogue to make driving fun. There's also two English voices that can announce street names, one with a UK accent, the other an American accent. These are highly useful, as they help you find your upcoming turn.

Ovi Maps is constantly impressing me with new features. I'm looking forward to Apps on Maps. A Sportstracker successor is on the way and I'm hoping there will be an app like foursquare or gowalla in the oven. Best of all, Ovi Maps is free.

More ado with the Nokia Booklet 3G

I've been using the Nokia Booklet 3G for a couple of weeks now and I love it. My favorite thing to do with it is watch video. With its 1280x720 screen, I can watch HD content with no black bars.

I haven't found a suitable way to download my daily podcasts. I started out with Miro, but it doesn't use hardware acceleration for playback. I tried a few other downloaders before I settled with Get Right, since it has resume support.

I had trouble getting video to playback in Media Player Classic, which has an option to open video in fullscreen. It doesn't quite support the Booklet 3G's Intel GMA 500 graphics chip set and plays back via the CPU. With the Booklet 3G's Atom Z530 processor, this turns into a sad experience.

I'm now using Windows Media Player. Video plays back perfectly, as WMP has great hardware support. Get Right feeds each download into a playlist for me. Only problem is that Windows Media Player won't playback in full screen automatically.