When I bought my house last year I wanted to get it acid washed but Chris was upfront with me about doing it during the summer.  When the ambient temperature of the air is over 80 degrees, it can cause the plaster of the pool to crack. He recommended that we do the acid wash in the spring and that day finally came.  Chris came over yesterday and hooked up a submersible pump to empty my pool.  He then showed up this morning and made my pool look amazing!!!  Here are some before and after pics of the acid wash that was done today.

Again, if anyone needs a pool guy in the Phoenix area that does weekly  pool service,  I highly recommend Chris Jalovec from Pools by Jalovec!

This is my pool before Chris cleaned it.

This is what my pool looked like after Chris had cleaned it.

APPLE ROCKS!!!

Early reviews of Opera Mini for iPhone praised the “rocket ship” like browsing speed, blazing through web pages up to six times faster than Safari. The high speeds are due to server-side rendering. Opera Mini compresses data by up to 90 percent before sending it to the phone, resulting in faster page loading.

“The Opera Mini for iPhone sneak peek during MWC told us that we have something special,” said Jon von Tetzchner, Co-founder of Opera Software. “Opera has put every effort into creating a customized, stylized, feature-rich and highly responsive browser that masterfully combines iPhone capabilities with Opera’s renowned Web experience, and the result is a high performing browser for the iPhone.”

Opera Mini is the world’s most popular mobile Web browser, and gained a majority of its market share with other internet ready smart phones like the BlackBerry. Its speed, usability and and user friendly design have enabled Opera Software to gain the market share of over 50 million mobile phones worldwide. Creating a version for iPhone will be great for Opera, as well as the iPhone community as this will force apple to improve on its technology to meet and exceed the up an coming competition.

In celebration of the app’s submission and hopeful approval, Opera Software has created a countdown contest for when the app will be approved. One lucky person will be the winner of an iPhone 3GS if they guess the closest time that Apple approves the app on the app store.

Here is a video of a comparison test between Safari and Opera Mini browsing on Edge.

Late last night (Sunday), House Democrats sent legislation to Obama that would extend coverage to 32 million uninsured Americans, reduce our country’s deficits, and ban insurance company practices such as denying coverage to people with pre-existing medical conditions.  This is a major milestone in American Politics and history and there is still tension across the aisle because of this bill.

“This is what change looks like,” Obama said later in televised comments about the bill.  “We proved that this government — a government of the people and by the people — still works for the people.”

Sen. John McCain said Monday morning that Democrats have not heard the last of the health care debate, and said he was repulsed by “all this euphoria going on.”  He appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America,” and said that “outside the Beltway, the American people are very angry. They don’t like it, and we’re going to repeal this.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office said the legislation awaiting the president’s approval would cut deficits by an estimated $138 billion over a decade. For the first time, most Americans would be required to purchase insurance, and face penalties if they refuse. Much of the money in the bill would be devoted to subsidies to help families at incomes of up to $88,000 a year pay their premiums.

To pay for the changes, the legislation includes more than $400 billion in higher taxes over a decade and cuts more than $500 billion from planned payments to hospitals, nursing homes, hospices and other providers that treat Medicare patients.

Daylight Savings Time, otherwise known as (DST), is the practice of advancing clocks so that afternoons have more daylight and mornings have less. Clocks are adjusted forward one hour near the start of spring and are adjusted backward in autumn.

Folks in Arizona have it lucky, we don’t have to adjust anything and we love it.  We do have to be a little careful though…

This morning my alarm went off as usual.  I use my iPhone as my alarm clock because it has a super annoying ringtone that jolts me out of bed quite well.  I got up, showered and got ready for work as usual.  In the kitchen I noticed that the stove and microwave both read 3:25 AM and it confused me. “What the hell” I thought.   I looked at my phone and it read 4:25 AM.  I checked my phones settings and the timezones showed that in Phoenix, it was indeed 3:25 AM.  Then I realized that My phone was set to “AUTO”, and adjusted itself for Daylight savings when it shouldn’t have.  I promptly changed my settings to Phoenix GMT -7 and went back to bed.

Luckily I woke up early instead of late, I’m sure my boss wouldn’t have bought the excuse since I live in Arizona.  Anybody else have any dumb DST stories?