iharley's blog

I'm just going to come out and say it, I have a bag fetish. You wouldn't know it from meeting me, but I LOVE organization, and I'm picky about what I use to organize. Sure, a bag is a bag is a bag; you put your stuff in it, take it to point B, take your stuff out and repeat. But good bags make the putting and taking out of stuff easier, and the finding of specific piece of stuff simple through organization. Bags can also be user friendly, or a user nightmare. In particular the laptop bag; It needs to protect a fairly expensive investment and tool, and then all the stuff that goes along with it, and the other stuff I need.

A while back, when I started shooting more often, I wanted to coordinate (with a map) where I was shooting. I thought that as my skill improved I could go back to some of my favorite spots and take shots to see this improvement. Also, I like seeing on a map where I've been, and with Smugmug I can share that map with people. iPhoto 09 also allows me to do that. So I had one side of the equation all set, I just needed to get the GPS coordinates. I was telling my friend about this need and he told me about Eye-Fi. I was stoked! No new camera, no GPS thingy with somewhat complicated software to merge GPS data with photo data; it was all done on an SD card! That day, many months ago, I was ready to put down the cash for one, until I read the fine print; it only gets a location through wi-fi networks that are registered with some 3rd party. Great if I'm shooting around in a city, but not so great when in the middle of nowhere. So I forgot about Eye-Fi. Until MacWorld where I won an Eye-Fi Geo.

Lent kind of snuck up on me this year. I was thinking about it a couple weeks ago and preparing my list of things to give up, and then it hit and I was a little late. Lent, in a nutshell, is the act of giving up something/s to prepare oneself for Easter and Christ's resurrection. 

Pretty busy weekend, this past President's day 3 day weekend, with Macworld winding down on Saturday and some fun events opening in the City my Saturday was booked from breakfast to dinner. Sunday was again spent in SF doing some photography, picking up some delicious goodies from Sugar By Ida, (delicious stuff, by the way) and a stop at the Apple store to make sure a couple things were still good on the ol' Mac Book Pro, and finishing with a disappointing dinner followed by the events in the previous post.

Pretty busy weekend on the tech front coming up. Saturday I'll be at the Apple-less Macworld expo. Truth be told I wasn't planning on going to it. Apple isn't going to be there, and most of the big name companies in the Mac world aren't going to be there either, but apparently there's going to be some kind of iPad demonstration, so I'm hoping for some hands-on time with it to help with the whole iPad vs. Nook thing.

The iPad has landed, and I'm left wondering if there's a place for it in my arsenal of tech. First, what does it do? Got an iPhone or iPod Touch? Well, basically it's one of those devices super sized. That's both good and bad. The good is that all that money you spent on your apps can be used on this thing, in either the native size (small), or using pixel doubling it can get blown up full size, which has mixed results. iPad tuned apps (calendar, mail, etc) do look very nice and take full advantage of the nearly 10 inch screen, and devs are going to be given the tools to re-write their apps to take advantage of the extra real estate. The bad news is that there is still no multi-tasking, and no camera on either side of the device to either take pictures or to video chat. 

So tomorrow Apple will unleash on us the not so unsuspecting masses, a new product, which is generally believed to be a tablet like device that will do... My thinking is it will be larger iPhone/iPod Touch, which is kinda cool I guess. I'm more interested in an e-reader though, which, if rumors are to believed, this device will also handle. I wonder how good it will be for reading though, as I was under the impression that e-ink is the best for reading, and this tablet won't be e-ink. 

A year ago the Palm Pre was announced at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas, and I was hooked; a slick operating system with matching slick hardware. But what I liked most about it was that it was a cloud phone. There was no need to dock it to my computer to sync contacts between each other, or calendar events it all happened between The Cloud (my Google Accounts) and the phone. Which is what's so neat about The Cloud, my information centrally located and easily accessible by any internet enabled device. I love it. 

Ok, this one is going to be a boring/geeky post. You've been warned. So what do I use daily for work and fun on my mac?

I'm trying a couple new things (WYSIWYG editor, feed thingy) to make posting a little easier. Other than that, it's been a busy day today, and I'm looking forward to the Sharks game tonight. Planning on making better/more use out of Goodreads.