If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Created with flickrSLiDR.

Here are some unpacking photos of my new Timbuk2 Commute bag. I’ve been using it for about a month now and I actually love it more than my Blogger.

I recently got an invite to Paul Stamatiou’s new startup service Skribit. Skribit in its basic form is a widget that allows blog readers to make suggestions or vote on what topics they would like to see covered. One of my new year’s resolutions was to blog more but I usually only write about stuff that catches my interest. I’ve installed the widget in the sidebar and have added some idea’s I’ve had floating around. My readers, thats you guys, can either vote on what you would like to see or even better, make your own suggestions. I have a decent readership but I’m not sure its big enough for Skribit to work for me. I’m going to leave the widget up for a few months and see how it works out.

With Macworld 2008 wrapping up, I thought I’d touch on some of the announcements made this year. I took the week off hoping to go to Macworld again this year but no such luck. Somethings came up, good stuff which I’ll touch base with in a future post, so I couldn’t make it this year. So like millions of other geeks, I loaded up my browser tabs with as much coverage as I could. Which didn’t go as well as planned. Iphonealley’s Ustream didn’t work out, Twitter buckled under the pressure and even Engadget had its share of hiccups. Macrumors was once again the winner with up to the minute coverage.

Macbook Air

Lets start with the biggest announcement, the Macbook Air. New ultra-portable laptop that falls in between a Macbook and a Macbook Pro. Well, first off, I’m sure it’s a gorgeous piece of hardware (I haven’t seen one up close yet) but I’m just not the target market for this product. If maybe I had a Mac Pro or even an iMac as my main computer, the MBA would be a nice on the go laptop but thats not the case. So I’m going to pass on this one.

Time Capsule

Now something that is right up my alley is the new Time Capsule. Since upgrading to Leopard I haven’t had a backup. Superduper isn’t compatible with Leopard yet and my only external drive is a 120GB WD Passport that’s too small for Time Machine to work. I’ve wanted an Apple Airport Extreme for sometime now but never made a move due to have a rev 1 Macbook which didn’t include 802.11n. I’ll probably opt for the 500GB one as I only have my Macbook to back up and 500GB should be plenty. As soon as they are available, I’ll be picking one up.

Apple TV and Movie Rentals

While iTunes movie rentals is no big surprise, the fact they have all major studios on board and HD movies was. I’m all for renting movies and I think Apple will do fairly well. Unfortunately I think only the people with AppleTV’s will really use this. Watching a movie on my iPhone or iPod just doesn’t appeal to me. When I had my AppleTV i loved it. The only reason I sold it was my HDTV died and I wasn’t planning on getting another one right away. I think once I get another HDTV, I’ll pick up a AppleTV again. The software update was nice and the ability to run without the need for a computer is epic.

All the rest

It seemed to be very quiet otherwise at Macworld this year. The iPhone update nice but expected. I would have liked to see something about the iPhone SDK that’s being released next month. Eye-Fi announced iPhoto support. Too bad my camera uses XD cards. Office 2008 was released which is finally a Universal Binary. I installed it this morning and its a nice upgrade to 2004. Other than that, I didn’t hear anything else that really caught my attention, well except a rumor than Panic is working on blogging software!

One feature missing from the iPhone and iPod Touch is Flash support for MobileSafari. Go to a page with an embeded YouTube video on it and all you get is a broken plugin icon. iTransmogrify! is a browser bookmarklet that allows embedded YouTube videos to play in the native YouTube player on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can see it in action in the video above. Until Flash is officially supported, this is the best way to view embedded YouTube videos.

The MacHeist II bundle sale has been underway for the last few days. I purchased last years bundle and it was well worth it. This years apps seems less appealing to me but I made the purchase anyways. Pixelmator, which is still locked at the moment, and AppZapper are the only ones I’m really interested in but the donation to the Humane Society is well worth it.

If you plan on purchasing the MacHeist bundle, I’d appreciate it if you could use my link.

I’ve been tweaking the site for the past few weeks with some small but noticeable changes.

1. I finally fix the nasty IE6 CSS bug that was causing the sidebar to be pushed all the way to the bottom.
2. Since my Project 365 is over, the photos in the sidebar will now reflect my current photostream from Flickr.
3. Thanks to a suggestion by Rick over at Bent Corner, I’ve turned off comment moderation and installed a Captcha plugin for comments.
4. Updated sites under “The Social” section to be current.

Please let me know if anything is not working correctly. More specifically, how the captcha plugin is working out for everyone.

With 2007 as nothing more than fading memory, 2008 rolls on. I thought I had one of the best years in recent memory last year. I did a lot of stuff I set out to do, and even more I didn’t expect.

I feel 2008 is going to be a slow year for me as I have some very specific goals that I plan on obtaining. The most prevalent is to become debt free. I’ve been working on this since 2005 and I hope for it to culminate this year. Unfortunately for this to happen, I have to be tight with my budget so I don’t see a lot going on this year for me.

That being said, this year is already taking a few left turns. I will be starting a new job this year as mine is currently in the processes of being outsourced. I’ve already been on a couple interviews and there is one job I’m still interviewing for that I’m very excited for. I don’t want to jinx myself but if I get it, I think its just what I need to start off the year right.

On the tech side of the coin, I’m not sure what to expect this year. One product that I would love to see with some changes this year is GrandCentral. The Google owned product has been stagnant since they purchased it and I can only hope thats due to a major overhaul going on. Some of the features I would love to see is better iPhone support, SMS support and the ability to have calls auto-answer instead of having to accept them. I was also thinking about getting another computer this year but my Macbook is still going strong and I have no real reason to upgrade. Maybe when my living situation settles down, I’ll look at a new computer. Other than that I’m just going to sit back and see what happens.

Overall I think this is going to be a year of focus for me. I’m turning 30 this year and need to start thinking about what’s ahead. The past few years I’ve taken a lot of steps to declutter my life, straighten out my finances and set some goals. I plan on focusing on tying up any and all loose ends this year and starting off my 30’s brand new.