September 1st, 2007
I stayed up until 2 AM jumping through a ton of hoops to get my phone running Windows Mobile 6.
I purchased the HTC 621 from Rogers when it was first released a few months ago, and was extremely happy with it. My previous phone was an Audiovox SMT5600, just another rebranded HTC phone (I really dig HTC phones). It served it’s purpose for the couple years I have it, but I must say, the 621 is leaps and bounds better than the 5600.
As with most things in the wireless communications industry in Canada, the phone is lagging behind in terms of Windows Mobile 6 support. I hear it may or may not be coming as an update to what is on it now, which is Windows Mobile 5. I decided to take the leap and update the phone with HTC’s official firmware that was just released in the last couple days.
I must say, I’m pretty impressed by it overall. HTML e-mail support works great, especially in combination with my RSS feeds inside Outlook 2007. Yahoo Go is another app that came installed on it. It’s beta but it feels like a polished app, I really dig the flickr functions in it (I just wish data plans didn’t suck in Canada, I’d be using my phone for far more in regards to internet usage. Who knows, I would even start building applications specifically for the platform.)
As I explore functionality, I will be posting my opinion about it in the following days.
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August 13th, 2007
I’ve finally gotten through the last batch of photos that I took in NYC. I’m glad I took as many photos as I did, so I could have lots of material to play with. All in all, I think I need to pick up a prime lens to mix things up a bit. I’m a novice at the whole camera thing, but I think either a 35mm or a 50mm will do the trick for what I need to do.
World of Warcraft has been eating up most of my spare time in the last week. I’ve forgotten how much fun it can be, even though at it’s core it’s a experience treadmill (not anywhere as close to some other MMOs). I think the real draw is that it is the type of game you don’t typically think of as something anyone can pick up and enjoy. I’m not saying that grandparents everywhere are playing WoW, but it is a supremely well designed experience in my opinion. Of course I still get pissy when I get ganked while doing questing, but that’s the tradeoff of playing in a PvP environment. You are almost never truly safe just minding your own business. Anyway, here’s my Armory Link.
Tags: New York, NYC, Photography, World of Warcraft
Posted in Gaming, Personal, Photography | No Comments »
August 7th, 2007
Well it looks like everything in the WordPress update went OK, nothing broken so far. Keeping my fingers crossed that it stays working 
.
Valve Software (more specifically, the team that does the Steam platform) recently started the public beta offering of the Steam Community service. If you’ve used Microsoft’s Games for Windows Live service before, it might feel similar in what it does. I gave it a shot today, poking around the web app they have as well as the updated interface to the Steam client. At it’s very core, it beefs up the Tracker (aka ‘Friends’) features significantly, making it a far more reliable IM service than previously offered.
I must say, it feels sort of like a cross between a messenger and a social networking app. A Facebook tailored for gamers. I’m intrigued as to how it will pan out. I’m all for better experience when it comes to matchmaking features. At the very least once it’s rolled out to the entire population of gamers that use Steam, it will be a good user profiling tool for Valve 
. I really dig the closely tied infrastructure between the Steam Client and the web app, it makes for a pretty seamless experience moving between the two.
P.S. I’ve added a few more photos to my NYC trip Flickr set. It looks like I’m about half way through culling the best of the best of what I took.
Tags: New York, NYC, Photography, Steam
Posted in Personal, Photography, Technology | No Comments »
August 6th, 2007
Haven’t really kept up my promise to myself in terms of regular entries. I want to make sure to make a full entry tomorrow (Lots of stuff I want to write about, shall we say!). Just wanted to make sure the upgrades to the blog template and WordPress itself went off without a hitch
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July 19th, 2007
What can I say? I can’t wait for Friday to come! The weather is going to be great and as an added bonus everyone at Critical Mass gets out at 3PM to start the weekend in style. I hope to get through the huge pile of photos tomorrow, I just installed Photoshop Lightroom from the guys at Adobe. I was pretty impressed with it when I installed it on my Mac from a recommendation of a colleague at work. Albeit, I just messed around with a few photos at the time. This time around is a different story, I’ve installed it on my (gasp!) Vista desktop and plan on checking out how it handles big batches of images. I have high hopes it will work out for me.
I picked up a copy of Weeds season 1 and Crash on Blu-ray today, both of which got absolutely stellar reviews. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to get through one of these on the weekend.
Tags: Adobe Lightroom, Photography
Posted in Personal, Photography, Technology | No Comments »
July 17th, 2007
So I’ve been putting off sorting through the 800 odd photos that I took over the seven days that a colleague and I were in New York City for hands on training on a new piece of software that Critical Mass had purchased to use on some upcoming projects. The guys at RedDot Solutions did a great job of putting us through training for LiveServer. Coming out of that training, we both felt we came away with a good understanding of what we can accomplish for LiveServer, as well as an added bonus we got some long standing answers for their CMS product that we’ve been mulling over for a while. I’d say it was definitely worth the trip with all that we’ve learned.
As for the photos, skimming through them when I first got back, I’m glad I fired off as many photos as I did. I am by no means a good amature photographer, and it was quite evident when some of the photos ended up being pretty blurry. I also have a bad habit of not checking the camera settings before I go off and take a whole bunch of shots. For example, I had bracketing enabled for a couple dozen shots before I realized that it was on. Of these, 1/3 of them are exposed correctly. I’m going to try and sort through most of them over the weekend, and upload them to my newly “pro-ized” flickr account.
Tags: LiveServer, New York, NYC, Photography, RedDot, RedDot CMS
Posted in Photography, Web, Work | 1 Comment »
July 17th, 2007
Well, I’ll try not to be long winded in postings moving forward. As a colleague at work said, and I’m paraphrasing to the extreme because of my usually terrible memory. “Having a blog with the only the intial post makes it look like you never finish anything.” That did make a whole lot of sense as soon as I heard that. What’s the point of going through all the hoops of setting up a blog interface if it’s never going to be used?
I’ve decided that the blog thing is worth the investment (Hey, I build serious internet business apps in my day job, I might as well immerse myself with the . My plan is to post at least twice a week, and I’m going to hold myself to that. Maybe just postings about random things I find interesting, or something new I’ve learned at work, or a rant about some obscure bug that plagued me for an entire day.
Anyway, on to the first (or second?) update to this blog.
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May 5th, 2007
Finally reinstalled WordPress with an up-to-date version. I hope to have things completely up and running as soon as I can. Stay tuned!
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