yes.  i am behind on updates.  i know.

between being ill, travel, WORK and, most importantly, a complete computer crash…  it has been tough.  i just spent some time building a completely new system from scratch.  something i have not done, believe it or not, in almost 12 years.  all this time, i have been purchasing open box “major brand” desktops and then retrofitting them with new components.

so…

i am up and running again — for the most part.  i am still migrating a bunch of settings and, sadly, it looks like i am going to have to rebuild the entire image database i have on my desktop.  it is going to be a while before i can get photos from the past month and a half up here…

on a good note…  i am totally digging vista.  and my new core 2 duo proc.  and my new kick ass video card.  and the 4GB of RAM.  and everything else i put into this monster…  ahem.

as luck (?) would have it…

this past saturday we were getting ready to leave the house to meet alison’s brother for brunch. i picked up our camera — a panasonic dmc-fx01 that we had picked up just before our wedding last october — and tossed it in my pocket as i usually do when leaving the house. we hopped into a cab to make it to the restaurant and got about 10 blocks before i saw something i wanted to photograph… a man with a high pressure hose cleaning the statue of confucious in chinatown. i hit the “on” switch on the camera and… nothing happened! i tried a new battery… nothing. i then proceeded to pry at it, stare at it, vulcan mind meld with it and finally used a bit of brute force. nothing. gar!

after brunch activity? buying a new camera!

for a while, i had been coveting a new panasonic model that, as fate would have it, came out last week. it is effectively the same “type” of camera as our old one with a bunch of new optics, resolution, an iso mode and a slightly changed/enhanced operating system. the “big” thing for me was the 28mm wide-angle lens on it…

off to circuit city we went… what a zoo! thank goodness we quickly saw that they did not have what we wanted and we hit the subway to go to J & R .

we spent about 10 minutes at J & R .  3 minutes to find the camera and test our current batteries and then 7 minutes to check out.

so… we now have a panasonic dmc-fx100. and loving it!

there are new pics taken with that camera in the photo section — including:

• SI Yankees Game (20070721)
• Night Out in NYC (20070725)

check ‘em out!

a while back, icebrrrg turned me on to a site called “woot“.  basically, it is a once-a-day super special on a random product.  i have purchased a few things — not the least of which was a wireless meat thermometer that…  wait for it…  talks!  it is usually something “gadget like”…

when i logged in today at woot, i saw another woot site that i am sure to love.  woot wine!  it is the same concept as vanilla woot, except with super deals on wine!  kick ass.

erock. simpsonized.

check it out for yourself! get simpsonized!

someday…  i must have this hot tub.

infinity vista tv spa

even better?  costco!  i knew there was a reason that i renewed my card every year…

(thanks to crave for turning me on to it…)

nice.  from the folks at blendtec…

“i think i’m going to press the smoothie button.” bah ha ha ha

(thanks to mike for the link!)

I am not the first, nor will I  be the last, to put my $0.02 in on the iPhone…

I spent a bunch of time playing with one at pool on Tuesday.  Our resident Mac zealot got one on opening day…

The numero uno thing that I was wary about was the keyboard. I am a Blackjack owner and love it long time. It is a familiar interface and I dig the “tactile nature” of devices like that with a hard keyboard (same thing with a Blackberry).

Let me just say… the iPhone keyboard is pretty kick ass. In the 30-45 minutes I played with it, I probably typed better slash more accurately on the iPhone than I do on my Blackjack.

I love the Safari interface. It is intuitive and I don’t have to look at “mobile versions” of websites.  If you were to go my website from most mobile clients I have it feeding a mobile version rather than the full monty.  (thank you, Alex King!) Although my site is not terribly graphics heavy, it is segmented and that can often cause clutter on small screens. What I liked about Safari on the iPhone was that it got the full monty and I could zoom in/out as necessary. Zooming in/out may sound like a “process”, but, again, it was very natural.

The SMS “grouping” is pretty cool to look at – as the messages are threaded in “balloons”. But… No MMS.

EDGE ain’t that bad – if you are in a big city. I would not want to give up my 3G Blackjack to go backwards, though. Connecting through WiFi is nice – especially with so many hotspots out there…

The phone is smaller than I expected – it is slimmer than my Blackjack… It is also WAY sturdier than I expected.

The landscape mode is kick ass. Just turning the phone puts it in that mode. However… It really only worked in Safari.

The voice quality was pretty good, but as I am a Bluetooth junkie, it was difficult for me to tell in “actual use” as I did not connect my headset to it.

Email was something I would have liked to have played with a bit more. (It is tough to “play” with email on someone else’s phone – I felt like I was prying….) There is an Exchange setup app – but it requires IMAP. The POP3 stuff I saw looked nifty.

And, yes, it also plays music. ;P

Which gets me to what is sure to be an annoyance for both Windows and Mac users alike…  EVERYTHING having to do with the iPhone when connected to a computer is done through iTunes.  Music, mail, contacts — EVERYTHING.  I am honestly not sure I am willing to have my life ruled by iTunes.  One of the benefits of the Blackjack is that plugging it into a computer gets me management of certain items through ActiveSync, but, more importantly, the whole phone shows up as a hard drive on my system.  Copy.  Paste.

The 3G thing is a killer for me. I’m with the Blackjack, at least, until they get that running.

Some of the stuff I was reading:

http://www.engadget.com/2007/07/03/iphone-review-part-1-hardware-interface-keyboard/

http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/review_iphone/

http://crave.cnet.com/8301-1_105-9739169-1.html?tag=nl.e501