January 25, 2012

On My iPad

Fraser Spiers, the god of iPad in Education, wrote a great post about the amazing apps out there on iOS and how he's using his Mac less and less. I wouldn't go so far as to say I'm using my Mac less, but his collection of iPad apps intrigues me. And my recent discovery/use of many apps seems to mirror Fraser's: Flipboard: I loaded Flipboard for the first time about 2 months ago after watching...

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January 11, 2012

Caption Please: iPad Camera

When we were in New York City back in November, we went up to the 86th floor observatory of the Empire State Building. We were 320 meters high. And we saw this guy. I had to get a picture of him, and I didn't care if he saw me, because this is priceless. Caption Please.

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January 1, 2012

Books I Read in 2011

One of my 2011 goals was to read at least one book every month. Audiobooks (denoted with a *) qualified as "reading", and since I was commuting a long way in my car for much of the year, I read a lot of books this way. I managed to pull off reading an average of a book a month, and I hope to read just as much or more in 2012. Here's the list of books I read: • Digital Fortress* by Dan Brown...

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December 31, 2011

Will With Trains

Over the Christmas holiday, I had the chance to take some photos of my adorable nephew really enjoying himself playing with his Thomas the Train set. Later that day, I set up my HO scale electric train, and he went crazy over it, thus giving me another great photo op. These pictures are shot with my Canon Rebel XTi with the nifty fifty lens. Enjoy!

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December 24, 2011

Achievement Unlocked: Read the Bible Through in 2011

Last year I wrote about some goals that I had for 2011. While I didn't achieve all of them, I did finished reading the Bible through this morning. I am proud of this, but I don't say it to boast about what I've done. I just want to share some of the things I learned through the process and where I went wrong. There are countless reading plans to guide you through the Bible in whatever timeframe...

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November 2, 2011

How to Change Lync Server File Store Location

I recently had to move our Lync Server 2010 File Store to another server, and I ran into problems. We had it on the SQL server that was running our Lync databases. That wasn't particularly a problem, but we noticed sometimes there was a delay when people would dial into a conference. It would take 1 or 2 minutes to admit a dial-in participant into a meeting. My guess is that it was because we...

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September 11, 2011

Skydiving at Skydive the Farm

Skydiving was on both my bucket list and my wife's bucket list, so we put together a skydiving trip for her birthday this year. About a year ago at CocoaCamp, I heard a guy over lunch talk about going to Skydive the Farm a lot, and after a bit more research, I discovered that it is probably one of the best places within reasonable driving distance from us. So we went, and it was awesome. My...

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July 26, 2011

Public Transportion in Greater Atlanta

Ever since I came to Atlanta, I was always convinced that public transportation here is pretty terrible. This is evident to anyone to takes a quick look at the map of MARTA. Just compare the MARTA map to the T map in Boston (I recently went on a family vacation to Boston, and the MBTA has quite and impressive transportation system). After spending a few days in Boston, I began wondering if I...

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June 13, 2011

Henry Ford on Learning

I came across this quote while reading my devotional from June 9th (yeah, I'm slightly behind). "Anyone who stops learning is old, whether at twenty or eighty. Anyone who keeps learning stays young. The greatest thing in life is to keep your mind young." -Henry Ford That's pretty brilliant, and a motto I hope to keep. The devotional had an interesting perspective, saying that we can learn so...

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April 28, 2011

On Learning...

Over the past few months I did a little bit of iPhone programming at work, and being such a novice in the area of Cocoa programming, I looked around for a more focused selection of podcasts to listen to during my long commute. I came across the Build & Analyze podcast over at 5By5, which is hosted by Dan Benjamin, but the majority of it is Marco Arment spewing his thoughts about iOS...

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March 21, 2011

Digital Retina Exam

I recently got my eyes checked so that I could get new specs. This practice was pretty cool for a couple of reasons. They are open late on some weekdays to accommodate more people who don't want to take sick leave from work, which is something I think a lot of doctors should consider doing (as well as closing on a week day and opening on Saturdays). This eye doctor also used an iMac outfitted...

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December 31, 2010

Goals for 2011

I decided I should make a list of pseudo-resolutions for myself for 2011. Life has changed a lot recently (for the better, by far), and I need to focus on doing fewer things better. By posting the list to this blog, hopefully that can help me hold myself accountable. I'm open for other suggestions/modifications, too. Update: The ones I have already accomplished are struck through Travel to two...

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October 2, 2010

I Just Saved Blue Like Jazz

Ok, I didn't save Blue Like Jazz, but I helped out a little bit. In short, a friend of mine, Zach Prichard (actually, he's one of my brother's former roommates), and a friend of his recently read on Donald Miller's blog that lack of funding had cancelled production on a film version of the book Blue Like Jazz. They pulled some all-nighters and put together an awesome campaign on Kickstarter to...

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September 26, 2010

iPad Car Mode

I have been enjoying the beta of iOS 4.2 on my iPad for a while. Ever since the audio jack on my 2nd generation iPod Touch went bad, I have been using my Droid Incredible to listen to Audible audiobooks and I've been using my iPad as a (very large) iPod in my car to listen to podcasts. This iPad as an iPod idea works great until someone tries to call me while I'm driving down the road. I've...

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September 24, 2010

So Long, Clear WiMax...

I shipped my Clear WiMax devices back to Clear today. It was fun while it lasted. See my previous post about my experiences with them. Overall I say that Clear is great, except you start to feel its slowness when you want to download anything more than a small file, and you also feel it when you need to upload anything. VoIP works, and video chat works decently. My final comment about Clear, and...

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September 15, 2010

iPad iOS 4.2 Beta - First Impressions

I've been playing around with the new iPad beta of iOS 4.2 a little bit today, and thought I'd share my first impressions really quick on some of the new features (and bugs). • Folders I already knew this was what i was most looking forward to, because i had about 3.5 pages of apps on my iPad, and I have already enjoyed the benefits of folders on my iPod touch running the iOS 4.0 beta. Now i...

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