My favorite TED talk

Keith Ferrazzi tweeted his favorite TED clip and asked others which one is their favorite. As you may know, I like many TED clips and post some of them on this blog. Keith’s favorite was Al Gore’s on climate change which instantly reminded me of the TED talk I like the most; John Doerr’s talk on climate change and Genentech. I replied back (2) with this talk, but I decided to take a few minutes and re-watch it and post it here as well.

365 project update

I’ve been on vacation for the last two plus weeks for the holidays and during that time I let my 365 project go by the wayside as well. I wanted to spend some quality time with my family and friends. I still managed to take a lot of pictures, especially with my new Cannon S90, but I really didn’t take pictures thinking about my 365 project not do I really feel like forcing one of these other photos into my 365 project (I’ll shortly be sharing a few of the slideshows of some of the interesting photos generated over my vacations). I did manage to take a few shots for my 365 and will be posting them later today. I will say, it was a nice break from making sure I got a shot everyday, but now I ready to start off the New Year trying to ensure I get my daily shot.

How food shapes our cities – TED

The other day while on a flight I was catching up on some TED episode and watched this clip on how cities impact our thinking of food. While  I think everyone should read Omnivore’s Dilemma or at least watch Food, Inc., people should know more about their food and make whatever informed choices they want. This is a good clip which I encourage you to watch.

My new camera – Canon S90

I just received my new camera, a Canon PowerShot S90, after much debate. Beginning a few months ago I started to think about a new camera. I was primarily looking for a smaller camera (as compared to my Canon 50D), something that I could cary around on a daily or near daily basis, with good image quality, and manual controls. The first question I faced was what type of camera to get. The options I considered were a point and shoot, micro four-thirds, or a specialized compact camera (basically a Sigma DP-1/2).

Unboxing of my latest toy Canon S90

Unboxing of my latest toy, Canon S90. I know I shouldn’t have, but couldn’t help myself. This means I’ll have to test I out some to see if it’s worth keeping. More posts to come.

The peace & quiet of air travel

I don’t travel as much as some, but I do travel more than many people. For as much trouble as it is, I really do find that my time on a plane, disconnected from the world, is quite productive. Even with just my iPhone I’m able to get through masses of email. Google reader and the like. Only problem are the occasional typos which increase with each hour in the air (going on 5 now). However, it does sucks when you touch down and sync up. Oh well. Well it’s not so bad at 1am.

Daylight savings

As much as I like getting an extra hour of sleep on a Sunday morning a few weeks ago I’m really over daylight savings time now. Sure it’s all nice and good to have a little extra daylight in the morning but its incredibly annoying leaving the office in the late afternoon for a coffee break and having it nearly dark out, or leaving the office at normal time and having it pitch black out. It would much nicer to have that extra hour of daylight in the evening in my opinion. End of my rant.

iPhone rant #1

While I love the iPhone there are a few elements of the functionality that I really don’t like.

Bugging me the most lately is the fact that you can not end a call (unless you are using a headset) without first clearing through (selecting close or view) EVERY text message received while on the call.

This may not seem that annoying, but with how often I get SMS messages from twitter and other people cobmined with confrence calls it becomes really annoying. Even for the short calls.  I REALLY JUST WANT TO END MY CALL, I’LL DEAL WITH THE TEXT MESSAGES LATER.  What I don’t want to happen is for me to forget about the text messages just so I can end a call.

Please Apple fix this.

What little quarks about the iPhone aggravate you?

The stimulus and road construction

I’ve been driving in the greater DC metro area a lot more than normal in the past few weeks and have been noticing new road construction projects. Assuming these projects are funded by the recent stimulus plan, I don’t know if they are I would guess they are but I don’t know for sure, I wonder what, if any, thought these “stimulus architects” gave to the externalities of these road construction projects. They certainly don’t speed up traffic and in fact seem to cause more congestion resulting in more wasted time and agerviation and second, the construction tears up ones car resulting in the individual’s car requiring additional maintenance than expected. While yes, that spending may “help” the economy but does it help the individual? Do  the benefits the “stimulus spending” on road construction really outweigh the cost of wasted time and additional car repairs on the individual?

I don’t know what the answer is, but I know I am not a fan of the road construction! Granted, one could make the argument if the repairs were not done than the poor quality of roads would result in wasted time and damage expense. However, in my limited experience thus far, I feel the roads that fall into the later category are not under construction but the roads I never had a problem with are all torn up.

Hopefully it’s better elsewhere, or at the very least someone considered the impact on the individual before starting these projects.

UPS and Amazon are awesome

I love Amazon.com Prime, the service makes ordering and shipping so easy, so easy its dangerous as I end up spending way to much money with it. Case in point, last Friday I was thinking I could really use this widget for my sail over the weekend. A quick hop to amazon.com and within a few minutes I had located the widget, read a few reviews, and selected the right model/ color. As I went to place my one click order I saw the Saturday delivery option for a very small fee and of course I selected the option for instant gratification. Just over half a day later the product was delivered just before I left for the weekend!

Below is the UPS.com tracking, Product shipped and delivered in 11 hours 45 min on a Saturday! Thank you Amazon.com and UPS

Click to enlarge