I turned 26 today. Beyond that, lots of things are going on.
I’m back in school for my 2nd of three sessions of certifications, this time for my MCTS 70-647 and 70-649. I finally got a job doing IT for Burger King Corporation ending my 9 month unemployment streak. I moved out of my parents home and into a cute cottage in the grove. I replaced my iPhone with an android phone (Google’s nexus one). My poor grandmother is gettin g screws in her broken wrist today via surgery. But biggest of all is I am getting married at the end of the month!
So in case you were wondering why things have been quiet, there you have it. I hope to have Comcast installed this week in my new place so I can finally have internet at home. Till then make sure you check out my Posterous site over in the sidebar. Lots of interesting articles are posted daily.
I’m a huge fan of Dan Rather and his work on HDNet. I constantly recommend him and his show’s in depth coverage in an almost mini-documentary format of an hour per subject per show with updates in following episodes and sometimes even entire new episodes of updates. It’s a shame he isn’t more wide spread. If you have the chance to attend, do so. He holds wonderful town halls, lectures, and discussion on his show and I can only assume this will be just as good.
Dan Rather
“Journalism in Crisis”Tuesday, March 9th 2010
Lecture at 7:00pm
Mary Ann Wolfe Theater
Wolfe University Center
Biscayne Bay CampusFor more than 40 years, former CBS News Anchor and 60 Minutes Correspondent Dan Rather has been the embodiment of the intrepid broadcast journalist. From the Kennedy assassination—where he was the first to break the news that the president had been killed—to the Indian Ocean tsunami, he has covered every major story of our time, with distinction and a fierce dedication to hard news.
He was among the first western journalists to report on the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and the last reporter on the air when the Chinese Army moved in with force. He has interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev in Red Square, and Fidel Castro in Havana.
Please join the FIU community for an evening with one of America’s iconic journalists.
For more information please contact SGA at 305-919-5680
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Image by Gizmodo.
I snapped. Weeks of stress combined with frustrations caused by the iPhone made me take drastic measures. I sold the damned thing and won’t be looking back. I’ve had it with all the crap I had to put up with. Phones shouldn’t be this aggravating! I also tend to outgrow things fairly quickly. When someone raises your blood pressure, it’s time to move on. Let’s do a post mortem on this disastrous relationship.
Speed
I outgrew the phone. My reflexes got to the point that I had to wait for the menus and applications to do what were suppose to do. It really reminded me of the Windows 95 days of waiting for the hourglass mouse curser, but since the iPhone has no such animation (depending on the application) it made it 1000x more frustrating than it had to be. I hear the 3GS fixed this thanks to the bump in processor speed but I wasn’t about to go paying for that slight bump. A new hardware revision should be out soon enough but I won’t be jumping into the pool of kool aid because…
Apps
The philosophy Apple has decided to do (for the foreseeable future) doesn’t jive with what I want. Apple has decided for whatever reason, technical or philosophical, to not allow applications to run in the background. While the notification system works well with some applications, it doesn’t for everything. Notifications about high scores in a game or new IM’s are fine. But combined, it can get very overwhelming. Thankfully I didn’t have so many pop ups after I disabled Foursquare and Facebook notifications. What this makes painfully clear is that the notification system in use now is a ghetto rig on something that shouldn’t be. Finding an app is also a mess. The app store was so frustrating to use with all the garbage in it, I gave up on it. I relied on the weekly best of lists from various websites to see if anything remotely interesting popped up.
Network
AT&T sucks and you know it. Slow speeds, dropped calls, failed calls and the most annoying thing of all, being dropped from the tower. During the life span of my iPhone, I had maybe 5 or 6 different iPhones and they all had the same issue. I would constantly, randomly be dropped from the tower resulting in a No Signal message at the most inopportune moment. Do you know how embarrassing it is to have your phone interview dropped because AT&T and Apple can’t get their shit together? A year and a half of working with AT&T network engineers, new iPhones, and new SIM cards and they still have no idea why it’s happening much less how to fix it. Fuck you AT&T, I’ve had it up to here with your shit and I am leaving you for good.
Stability
All software crashes. I realize this. But my iPhone just seemed to do so more often than any other tech I’ve had in years. I’ve gone through more iPhones because the OS wasn’t stable than I have gone through Xbox 360’s, and those will die no matter what. Sometimes I feel as if I am in some bizarre world where Microsoft is the new Apple in some respects and vice versa. MS seems to be loosening up on somethings, while continuing to suck at many others (Games for Windows Live anyone?) and Apple seems to be moving into the 1990’s/early-2000’s era of MS Borg like actions. But enough with that tangent. The point is that the iPhone OS for me was unstable, broke for no apparent reason and the apps also had the same issues.
iTunes
iTunes has been the bane of my existence for years. It all started with the first iTunes enabled phone, the dud known as the Motorola L7 (SLVR). As soon as I got rid of my iPhone I uninstalled iTunes, Quicktimes, Safari and Bonjour with a big sense of relief and freedom. No longer do I have to suffer the slow, bloated piece of junk software known as iTunes. No more freezing while syncing. Love it.
The Future
So what now? Well I ordered a HTC made Nexus One. I’m sure it has all sorts of problems, but at least it’s faster than the iPhone 3Gs and allows background apps. I think the biggest thing I am looking forward to is using my phone as I please without having to jailbreak it. Way to kill a good buzz man. Since I take delivery tomorrow, I’m sure I will return with all sorts of impressions and comparisons to the iPhone. Although if you would rather not wait, just head to any other electronics site as they did this when the phone was first released. Also bypassing the entire non-sense of having apps being rejected (Google Voice, Latitude, etc) will be a nice change. Integration of Google Voice will be a godsend. No more having to deal with crappy web apps. Sorry Google. No matter how much HTML5 magic you work, web apps still suck compared to native apps.
To be continued…
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Hey there. I know we’ve only been seeing each other for a little over a year now. I got you a nice present for our anniversary. Oh you forgot about it. Hhm. Are you not attracted to me anymore? What did I do wrong? Why would you forget our one year anniversary? After all I’ve done for you this past year! Have we not laughed, pondered and cried this year? I want to emphasize it was the good kind of crying. Have I not challenged your perception of how life can be improved with technology here? How about your broadband. Is your AT&T DSL still sucking? Yeah, I know. Well thanks to me (not really) Google is offering a 1 Gbps connection eventually. You know I will totally hook you up with a phat pipe.
Anyways, how about you do me a favor and click that big ol’ image up there and vote for Holy Crap My Hair Is On Fire. I’m broke, unemployed, selling all my stuff and could use the hundred bucks to pay for gas to go to school. I’ll even buy you a burger from Latin Burger. So what do you say? You vote for me and I continue to bring you stuff for you to enjoy while you slack off at work. Let me help you out there. Here’s a link so you don’t have to scroll the mouse up all the way up there. Link You see how helpful I am? How could you not vote for me?
No seriously, go vote then buy my stuff.
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Paintball.
I’ve never partaken before Saturday, but a sudden invite by a friend had me giddy with the thought of photographing the matches. We headed out to HeadShots Paintball Field which has two fields to play on. One is where you will see the majority of photos from while the other is an inflatable field for a faster variety of speedy paint ball.
As you can imagine, this activity/past time/sport attracts a rather young and rough crowd. All walks of life were there. The chunky, angry, cursing like a sailor Kendall/Hammocks gangsta (don’t fuck with him otherwise Mami will be called in to fuck you up), to the fair share of early teen brats that are extraordinarily angry for whatever injustice has happened to them in the life. We truly have a wealth of stereotypes here in Miami-Dade County.
I want to warn the out of shape people who won’t be reading this post. You need to have good leg muscles to do this. Like most combat, real or not, you spend a lot of time running from cover to cover so you can flank and fire on the exposed enemy. That means you need to be crouching behind low cover. A lot. My good friend was sore as hell by the end of the day. I was perfectly fine even today. Wear a long sleeve shirt that you don’t mind losing to paint stains. I was smart enough to wear my Tru-Spec pants that I had bought to trek around the Yucatan jungles. After a quick wash, they were good as new. I love these pants!
Range fee is $15 if you bring your own equipment or $30 if you need to rent. I don’t know how much ammunition is but I was told it was on par and affordable. You are provided a face mask, vest, gun and an air tank for propelling your little pellets of love to the enemy.
HeadShots Paintball Field
13951 SW 184th Ave. Miami, FL 33196
(305) 962-6689 (305) 233-0340
http://miamiraptors.com/HDF.html
(UnofficialWebSite)
Now for the photography.
For this exercise, I borrowed a Canon 20D and used my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Camera Lens
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Image by .suzanna. (CC)
Last June I was laid off from my IT position at a small home automation company. I’m only 25 years old and I’ve always taken pride in my work and taken my career seriously. This is the first time someone has ever told me that I wasn’t needed anymore. I’m not a particularly emotional detached guy, so when I got to the car I cried. Some steering wheel punching was thrown in too for good measure. The strange thing about afterwords, was that I started to feel better about being out of a toxic office environment. It was only with hindsight that I noticed how bad things where. I like most of my former co-workers, but we were destroying each other on a psychological level.
I spent some time after being laid off wandering like a spirit that never had closure and couldn’t move on to the next part of the afterlife (not that I believe in that, but it worked for this metaphor). The job market down here didn’t help. I’ve written about before how bad things are in South Florida. We are after all, rated the third worst job market after Detroit and St. Louis. It’s awful. My dad has been out of work since March 2009 when Bank of America laid him off. I’ve seriously considered leaving South Florida to find work to come back at a later time to finish my bachelors at FIU or just plain transfer elsewhere. So for the past seven months I’ve been going to some interviews, polishing my resume, going back to school for my certifications (MCTS, MCP, MCITP, CCNA, A+) and wondering what I am going to do next.
Then my fiance sent me this post from Seth Godin’s blog.
I have a unique opportunity to do my own thing and I am failing to take advantage of it. Thanks to being laid off, I have discovered my passion for photography, firearms, writing, socializing with geeks and helping others create their dreams. If you’ve been laid off like I have and don’t know what to do yet, watch Lemonade.
You watch that and try not to be pumped.
So what’s your thing after employment? How are you going to be finding yourself? I’m working on mine so let’s see where this goes.
As a bonus, here is how to give a pep talk.
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I like Meet ups. I think they are fun and you meet all sorts of cool people. I especially love handing out my new and awesome calling cards. This meet up though, had to have been one of the best I’ve been to. At least, when it comes to meeting strangers off the internet for the first time.
Due to the Super Bowl, everyone was running late and my car started to over heat on I-395. One parking garage had the balls to charge $40! Thankfully the municipal garage was only charging a $1 an hour. Once the majority of people arrived to Pizza Rustica (which has great food), we schmoozed around for a while before doing our photo walk. From Lincoln Road and Meridian all the way to Hispaniola Way. From there we hit up Ocean Drive heading south till 7th St. making our return trip north via Collins.
Here is my bounty of photos.
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All are welcome.6pm meet @ Pizza Rustica on Lincoln road. We will meet, greet and grab a slice before heading out on the stroll.667 Lincoln Road
Miami Beach, Florida 33139*Parking @ 17th street garage!
Let’s do this Flickrs!
*I will also be leading a photowalk for anyone interested.
It will cover:
Lincoln Road
Espanola Way
Deco Architecture on Wash & CollinsI will also lead people OFF the beach on my way home to show people Watson Island for skyline views of downtown.
Map powered by MapPress
Photo by Minezone. (CC)
Listen up South Florida peeps. I am looking for a creative person to join my team in a project. It’s going to be awesome and fun as hell.
I need someone who has a creative vision and passion. If your pants and brain aren’t burning with creative juices (yeah, I know juice doesn’t normally burn unless it’s ACID) then look elsewhere. If picked, you and me are going to be burning up the streets of Florida and possibly more places on an adventure of a life time so you have to be social-able. Experience in writing, video creation, photography, design, art, gaming, architecture, performing arts, urban planning and music are a bonus. If you are active in online communities, that makes you an even more ideal candidate!
Are you ready for anything? Let those fingers and lips loose. Email me (edwing at gmail dot com) or hit the widget on the side there and call me. I want to hear about your craziest adventure you’ve been on or your wildest moment. Then I want hear what is the one thing you want to do more than anything else.
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Seriously.
That’s got to hurt.
