I have been a fan of Panasonic wet/dry electric shavers for many years. Just in time for the holidays, Panasonic came out with their latest and greatest (and priciest) shaver, the Arc5, Model ES-LV65s. I treated myself to one for Christmas.

The two main new features of this device are a motor that keeps a constant speed when it encounters a tough stretch of beard, and a foil that has tapered holes. And yes, this is indeed the best shave yet for me from a Panasonic razor.

Update 2:

My NordicTrack model no longer works with iFit! They require Bluetooth instead of WiFi. It took 3 hours of frustration to figure this out. Furthermore, iFit has a replacement part to fix this, and they never informed me, and the part is no longer available. So I have a treadmill with just boring workouts.

Update: (10 July 2017)

I am currently very dissatisfied with every browser available for OS X (a Mac). A firm requirement for any browser I use is that there is a version of Last Pass for it. This limits my choices to just four options:

I recently went on a birding trip to Scotland with my camera and a long lens, but this was not sufficient to see most birds. On the trip, I tried many different binoculars, and discovered that I absolutely needed to have image stabilization. Without it, my shakey hands make the image bounce about. The image-stabilized Canon binoculars that I tried worked well, but were heavy. The all-weather image-stabilized Canons all cost almost $2000 and are quite heavy (2–3 pounds). In addition, I am a photography nut and want to take pictures of what I see in my binoculars.

I am a firm believer that having the government support or run many areas of endeavor is not a bad thing. But there are ways to dramatically reduce the overhead involved in administering these programs.

What should government be involved in, and why?

I had a 2005 Honda Accord Hybrid, but after 7.5 years, the main battery died. Luckily for me, the $3500 replacement was covered by an 8-year warranty. However Honda advised me to get a new car because I drive less than 5000 miles a year, and that is not enough to keep the new battery healthy.

I have installed Windows 8 Enterprise in a Parallels 8 virtual machine (VM) on my Mac Pro. I give each VM 4 CPUs and 4 GB of memory. I still have my Windows 7 VM configured with the same resources. The good news is that Windows 8 is noticeably faster, both in booting and running. The Windows 8 Windows Experience score I get is 6.9 vs. 5.9 for Windows 7.

The bad news is that the now user interface might be great for a tablet, but it sucks for a desktop machine with a 30" monitor. Without the Start Menu, which has folders, everything is a total jumble:

I have been a fan of the Micro 4/3 format for years now, having bought a Panasonic GH-1 camera and four extra lenses (multiply focal length by 2 for 35mm equivalent):

I have just returned from what was supposed to be an idyllic 12 days on the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. But United Airlines ruined a lot of it for me.

Day One

Yesterday, on May24, as promised by Sprint (after a customs delay) I received my new HTC EVO 4g LTE. I love the phone. It has every whistle and bell that I can imagine.

Here are some of my observations in no particular order: