Thursday, January 26, 2006
A little bit awkward.
A wonderfully succinct (and accurate) story about the complexity, nostalgia, and joy of using a Newton by Marcus Hammerschmitt.
Monday, January 23, 2006
Four things.
I was tagged by the indubitable Mr Hoy to participate in this metadata-gathering meme. Who am I to go against the grain of the in-crowd? Since I haven't been posting much of anything here of late, and the only other thing on my agenda this evening was casting my ballot, here goes...Four jobs I've had:
- Wire wrap circuit board assembler - University of Calgary
- Technical assistant - ABC Television
- Typeface digitizer, technical writer, graphic designer - Image Club Graphics
- Web developer, interface designer, QA specialist - Adobe Systems
Four movies I can watch over and over:
- The Muppet Movie
- Blade Runner
- Raising Arizona
- The Blues Brothers
Four places I have lived:
- Calgary, Alberta
- Edmonton, Alberta
- Calgary, Alberta (Northwest quadrant)
- Calgary, Alberta (Southeast quadrant)
Ok, I obviously don't get around much...
Four television shows I love to watch:
- The West Wing
- The Amazing Race
- Myth Busters
- The Office
Four places I have been on vacation:
- Puerto Vallerta, Mexico
- McKenzie Beach, British Columbia
- Saint Claire, Michigan
- North Kihei, Hawaii
Four of my favourite dishes:
- Split pea soup with ham chunks and little pancakes
- Spicy noodles
- Fried rice
- Beef tenderloin with blue cheese butter
Four websites I visit daily:
Four places I would rather be right now:
- Home
- Traveling somewhere with my family
- Away and alone with my wife
- On a deserted beach along the west coast of Vancouver Island
Four bloggers I am tagging:
Hey, you four... consider yourself tagged. Have fun with this. I certainly did.
Tuesday, January 10, 2006
Mama? Kodachrome here. You can take me away now.
Between Kodak's recent corporate banality upgrade and the best Christmas toy ever, I'm very close to letting go of my flexible substrate-based exposed emulsion habits once and for all. The reason? My (insert appropriately flattering adjective here) wife surprised me by stuffing a brand-spanking new Canon EOS 20D under the tree. Eight-plus megapixels worth of single lens reflex fun and full manual override hijinx. She most certainly snapped the "Holy mother of crap, you got me a what?" award out of my hands for this year's present - easily besting the 12-inch iBook I managed to knock her over with last Christmas. Ok, I'll admit that the 20D won't convince me to turf my old hard-body Canon F1 or the parallax-prone Mamiya C330 twin lens or my Horseman L-series 4x5 view camera - but damn, it sure is nice to be shooting digital through the lens again.
One more thing.
Enough about the keynote already. Ok, maybe not quite yet. I have to get this out of my system... MacBook Pro? What kind of lame-butt, patronizing brandsludge is that? Feh. I guess Jonathan Ive doesn't sit in on the product branding meetings. If somebody nonmenclated one of my hardware designs like that, I'd have to bust some chops. At least the internal workings kick some serious performance ass, but please. Other sites can debate and fuss about the rest of today's announcements all they like... I have other things on my mind. It's less than a week until the 2006 Worldwide Newton Conference starts up in the city by the bay. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I'm beginning to get excited. Syncing up with a room full of like-minded Newton aficionados is frankly a bit intimidating. I've known many of these people electronically for years, but finally meeting and matching names to faces in person always throws an exception into my personality loop. I suppose I could muster up a bit more excitement if I still didn't have to put my presentation together for the conference. At least an outline... yeah, that'd be a good start. Say... I can probably use my Newton for putting that together. Go figure.