Haste and the vanishing pictures

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Last time I touched this blog I ended up killing every picture that was on it. I was trying to clean up some old folders in the back end directories and was distracted for a moment while selecting the folder for removal. Instead of grabbing a blank folder I grabbed the one that had all of this blogs pictures in it.

It was quite a gutting feeling to see that happen and know that they were gone forever.

One thing that is has made me think about is what I want to do with this website. I think that it would be good to go through and get rid of a lot of the idle posts (a bit like this one) and get back to thinking about some of the issues and ideas on the internet that really interest me.

So if you are reading this then hope to see some reduction in the posts that are here something between here and eternity.

new toys – the iPad

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Well it has been a while since I popped out a post here but the arrival of a new tech toy makes it worth a bit of a scribble. Adrienne managed to pick up a spunky new iPad for me while she was traveling in New York last week.

It is my second day with it in my hands and I am not quite sure how well it is going to perform for me. As a piece of technology it is simply beautiful. It is light and thin with a beautiful screen and fast performance. At the moment though it is hard to see that it is a ‘game changing’ as claimed by some of the commentators.

The fact that I am using it before the official launch in Australia has revealed just how much control Apple has over their devices. It only works as an Itunes accessory. I could not even turn it on without first synching it to my iTunes account. Once powered up and synched, I wanted to see what new apps I could find, except the app store doesn’t work in Australia yet. The official launch is not until the end of next week so it looks like i’ll have to wait until at least then before accessing the really interesting stuff. Similarly it seems that I will not be able to use the iBook service just yet either, or buy the Apple iWork applications either, so it’s current utility is rather limited.

One thing that is good, unexpectedly, is the typing on the full size virtual keyboard. I expected it to be quite difficult without the physical response of the keys, but it is actually very comfortable. The auto correct that it uses probably helps me a lot as well too, and the fact that my typing was pretty crap in the first place.

I will keep playing with it an try to generate more output with it than I have done previously with the more mundane PC keyboard.

Being a dad

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The last 5 months have been amazing and exhausting, rewarding and frustrating. For the last five months I have been a dad to my beautiful little man – Jack.

Tonight Jack is having a hard time getting some sleep. We have been pretty lucky lately with his sleep. He has learned to relax himself and sleep on his own in his own bed – most of the time anyway. Tonight however he is sick with a cold. This is making sleeping flat a difficult proposition since his throat seems to fill with goop, causing him to cough and wake himself up.

Right now he is draped across my lap, asleep with the tele filling the empty silence of the dark night. I am going to have to try and get him to sleep before I doze off myself.

Kiva – Giving something back…

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Walking down Martin Place in Sydney every day it is easy to feel like a scrooge as I turn away a host of charity workers asking for money, or a credit card number to help them support their chosen cause.

In the mean time Seth Godin raved about a micro loan project where instead of donating money to a cause that is (at least to me) quite faceless, i loan money to an individual investor to help them achieve a particular goal.

And then they pay it back, which gives me the opportunity to give again later with the same money. So I am going to pledge here that I will invest USD$50 a month to this process.

While it doesn’t payback any interest there is a different kind of return. A human return. I will get to hear how the loan has effected the lives and the family who has less than me but is doing something about it. Now that I am a father, thinking about the future of the world and setting an example in it feels rather important.

I think that this is a great idea and the longer I contribute the more value I will be able to add over time.

Imagine what $700Billion might have done for these sort of people…

Blackberry envy cured

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I have been developing a love hate relationship with Apple. At the moment though I am firmly in the ‘love’ phase again though. My old phone had been gradually getting worse as the screen filled with static.

Adrienne got herself a blackberry and can now get emails anywhere. This is something that I have resisted while working for other companies, but now that we run our own business it is incredibly useful.

So with Adrienne getting email and being able to respond to it anywhere, I started to get more than a little envious. I had to at least consider an iPhone.
I am now continually surprised at just how much I can so with this device.

It covers the obvious basics. It makes and takes phone calls, and synchronizes with my calenders. But that is just the tip of the iceberg. After playing with some of the fun but pointless applications I have started to find some amazing tools.

This post is written entirely using my iPhone. Now that I have this I might actually make the excuse to write some new random stuff.