Tennis Serve: The Slice

A few notes from my coach on how the hit a slice serve.

1. Continental grip
2. Toss to front right, i.e. towards the far corner towards your front right. (In 1 o'clock direction a few inches into the court).
3. Pause in trophy position
4. Rotate shoulders, horizontally, first
5. Follow with arm and wrist motion; be sure to add speed with arm and wrist.  Don't just use your shoulder rotation to whip your arm.
6. Follow through in the direction that you would like the ball to go.  

Things I Like: Mountain Hardwear Kelvinator Down Jacket

I have avoided down gear most of my lift based on a suspected childhood allergy.  Realizing that most of my childhood allergies have disappeared (except Mountain Cedar!!), I decided to give down a chance.

My first piece of the down gear:  the Mountain Hardwear Kelvinator Jacket.  I love it!  It fits me perfectly, and the Cherry Bomb color is awesome ("Great Balls of Fire" by Jerry Lee Lewis pops in to my head every time I put it on).

Disclaimer:  I'm not a very good judge of down gear, obviously, since this is my first piece.  But I won't every be without a down jacket again.

A Letter to Amazon on Sales Tax

If anyone knows how to easily generate a sales-tax-paid report from your Amazon account, please share in the comments below.

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Dear Amazon,

Would you add a feature in the “Your Account” section of the Amazon website to generate a sales-tax-paid report?  The goal is to provide your customers an easy method for deducting sales tax paid through Amazon from our federal taxes.

Benefits:  

• Your customers are happy that their tax bill is reduced.
• You earn more money as customers view taxes paid at Amazon as less than taxes paid elsewhere. 
• It is completely legal.
• The cost to implement is tiny; you have already provided the capability for generating annual purchase reports.

I look forward to hearing from you, and seeing this new benefit.

Best Regards,

Will

SSD impact on Boot Times

My work laptop (Dell D630) was frustratingly slow and an upgrade was still a year away, so I invested in my own SSD.  I'm a little worried about the longevity since it's Windows XP and the company monitoring tools are always hitting the hard disk, but the performance boost is beautiful.  Boot times fell from ~4:30 to ~1:30 and the system in much more responsive during everyday use.  Here's a screenshot of Soluto's boot-time log -- the big drop in boot time is from installing the SSD (exact copy of the previous disk).  Side note -- I love Soluto!

I had been having trouble accessing a Dell 960w wireless all-in-one printer from my Windows 7 Professional PC, but my wife's Windows 7 laptop always worked fine.  I was troubleshooting another problem (same symptoms, but for NSLU2 network drive).  Turns out that one solution solved both problems:   http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-networking/5323-mapping-network-drive-windows-7-rc.html

Here's the content from that answer:


- Click Start
- Click Control Panel
- Click System and Maintenance
- Click Administrative Tools
- Double-Click Local Security Policy
- In the left pane, click the triangle next to Local Policy
- In the left pane, click Security Options
- In the right pane near the bottom, double-click "Network security: LAN
manager authentication level"
- Click the drop-down box, and click "Send LM & NTLM responses"
- Click OK

NSLU2 with Windows 7 Professional

I was having trouble accessing my stock NSLU2 through Windows 7 Professional, and found the following link solved the problem:  http://windows7forums.com/windows-7-networking/5323-mapping-network-drive-windows-7-rc.html

Here's the content from that answer:


- Click Start
- Click Control Panel
- Click System and Maintenance
- Click Administrative Tools
- Double-Click Local Security Policy
- In the left pane, click the triangle next to Local Policy
- In the left pane, click Security Options
- In the right pane near the bottom, double-click "Network security: LAN
manager authentication level"
- Click the drop-down box, and click "Send LM & NTLM responses"
- Click OK

Things I Like: Adidas Barricade Tour II 3-Pack Bag

This is the first post in a series titled "Things I Like".   My family often laments how picky I am when it comes to "gear".  I decided to post these in case anyone else out there had the same "specs" that I had.

Tennis Bag Required Features

• Holds 2-3 rackets
• Shoe tunnel

Really, that's all I wanted, but had a hard time finding it.  This struck me as odd as I know many players who carry two rackets and tennis shoes.  Everyone I asked said to get a smaller 6-pack bag, but they were too large for my needs.

Solution:  Adidas Barricade Tour II 3-Pack Bag (Adidas Barricade II Tour 6 Pack Tennis Bag)
 
Perfect fit of my stuff:

• 2 Wilson Six-one:95 rackets
• 1 pair size-11 shoes
• Water bottle
• Tennis clothes
• Sunglasses (in the microfiber-lined "media" pocket)
• 2-3 canisters of tennis balls
• Assorted small items (vibration dampeners, sweat towel, etc.)