11/21/2009  VS  First things first. I realize that this “review” is about a year late as these two phones are one rev back from what is currently on the market or in the case with the blackberry bold, the bold “2” or 9700 is due to launch any day now on ATT (it already has launched on the T-mobile network). I wanted to give my impressions of the two devices at a higher level with regards to the two product lines and not so much the individual units themselves. iPhone: I have had the iPhone 3G for about 9 months. My previous phones before the iPhone were a couple of Winmo devices like the Samsung blackjack II and before that the Cingular 8525. Both of these phones were actually pretty decent devices. The 8525 was probably the closest to what I would call phone nirvana as it had it all at the time. It was starting to show its age and the fact that I had to use the stylus for pretty much everything other than making phone calls got annoying quick. It also didn’t have a built in GPS and being a geo-caching nut, I really wanted a device that had a GPS in it. One day while logging into geocaching.com, I noticed they had an iPhone app for geocaching. I resisted purchasing the iPhone on principle, but finally gave in after about 3 months. I know, I know, I am weak. One of the reasons I didn’t want an iPhone was the lack of a physical keyboard. The blackjack and the 8525 both had a physical keyboard (the 8525 was a delight to type on for such a small device). It took me quite a while to get the hang of the iPhones virtual keyboard. The predictive typing helped out quite a bit. I can still type faster on a physical keyboard though. The user interface on the iphone is pretty slick. The capacitive touch screen is a real engineering feat. It allows for multiple fingers to touch the interface at the same time and allows for things like “pinching” to allow for zooming in and out for example. The ability to finger swipe on the menu system allows for quick menu action. Apps for the iPhone are done very well and is in my opinion one of the main selling points for the iPhone. It is brain dead simple to find apps, buy them, download them, and start using them. The camera is pretty decent for a 2MP camera. The colors are good and consistent. Call quality is very good on both ends of the phone. The music player on the iphone is somewhat confusing. It just seems like it is trying to do too much. Some people like it, I am not one of those people. Email/SMS is done very well on the iPhone. Exchange support is there if needed along with POP and SMTP. Web browsing is outstanding on the iPhone. With its large screen, it is easy to view web pages. Some things I don’t like about the iphone are that it doesn’t have some sort of light to allow for notification of new messages. I really wish they would have included this as I often set my phone in quiet mode and just want to visually look at the phone to see if I got a message or not. I am really surprised they didn’t include a light around the circular button at the bottom of the phone that pulsed like on a Mac computer. For me the jury is still out on the virtual keyboard. I don’t like having to rely on a proprietary cable for syncing and charging. The blackberry uses a standard USB charging cable and since I have a ton of those from various gadgets, there is always one at hand. Blackberry: I got a new job about 5 months ago. Part of my new job responsibilities is being an Exchange/Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) admin. I haven’t played with a blackberry since they were a text only device. I was able to get a blackberry bold 9000 and a blackberry curve 8320 for doing some testing. These are the two most common devices deployed in my work environment. The screen on the bold is incredible. While not being as large as the iPhone and lacking the touch screen capabilities of the iPhone, it is absolutely beautiful. I don’t care how good your vision is, I dare you to find a pixel on the screen. It is like looking at a miniature hi-def TV. I don’t know if I care for the scroll wheel. On the newer blackberries, they moved away from this type of input device which is probably a good thing. They keyboard is really, really good. I had forgotten how much I missed typing on a physical keyboard. The keys have the right amount of play and are spaced the right distance apart (at least for my somewhat large hands). The apps are OK. Nothing special here, but there are some decent ones out there and blackberries “App world” is no Apple App store, but it does the job. There aren’t as many apps for the blackberry as there are for the iPhone, but the most popular ones like facebook, twitter, etc are there. The camera is not as good as the iPhone, but the phone does take videos. Call quality is quite good and very comparable to the iPhone. I like the fact I can use add on memory cards to the phone, so there is technically no limit of how much storage that is available. With the iPhone, you are locked in to whatever you purchased (in my case 8GB). The music player is quite nice. The audio sound quality was superb. Web browsing is just so-so on the blackberry. Navigating isn’t as easy as the iPhone because you have to use the scroll ball and the screen is smaller, so there is a lot of zooming in and out. Email/SMS is the bread and butter of a blackberry. It takes a while to become used to the combined inbox where your different emails and even facebook updates are kept. Things I don’t like about the blackberry are that the screen is somewhat too small. If it was just a 1/4 of an inch bigger, it would be so much better (the newer blackberry 9700 has a somewhat larger screen.) The build quality could be a little bit better. The battery cover on the back comes off quite easily and while using it, I have had it pop off more than a few times and the battery falls out as a result. Again the newer blackberries have addressed this issue (so the spec documents say). Conclusion: I wouldn’t mind using either phone as my primary phone (with google voice, I can have both phones ring depending on which one I have with me at the time). Both have their positives and negatives and in the end they end up being equal. Now if I could only get my hands on an android device…..hmmm….. 6/21/2009A long time ago I wrote a blog post about how I was progressing with my GTD (Getting Things Done) system. I thought I would circle back to see how things have progressed. I still don’t follow the GTD method that is laid out by David Allen. I just couldn’t get it to work right. I also found I was just making more time for me to do more work. Not what I want to do really. For one thing, I gave up on OneNote. For me it is just to unwieldy. I also now have an iphone and there is no OneNote client for the iphone. Also, I could never get the OneNote mobile client to work the way I wanted it to when I had a windows based smartphone. I do like the Evernote application. It is a really nice desktop and iphone application that can do many things and does them well. I use evernote to type up my notes and take pictures of things I want to remember like business cards and things like that. It is easy to search for my information which is a key requisite in my system. I also use the “Remember The Milk” (RTM) application. It is a web based application. It also has a really nice iphone application (paid version only). I started to use the RTM application because I started to work somewhere where I didn’t have full control of my Outlook tasks and couldn’t sync to my iphone. I use RTM to set up reminders and to remember things I might have to do for work or need to be done around the house. I can be alerted via several methods whether it is an SMS text, email, or even by twitter. I have started using a moleskine cahier as my catch all “to do list”. I take a cahier with me everywhere. I don’t always carry my iphone with me wherever I go (I know blasphemy!). I still haven’t gotten used to typing on the iphone and can write faster in the cahier. I protect it with a leather cover from Renaissance Art. The cahier has a very flimsy cover and while that makes it easier to carry in your pocket, it will tend to fall apart without this protection. I have a large moleskine notebook that I use to take notes in. I keep the notebook in a Rickshaw folio. I like this folio a lot. It holds a few of my pens and pencils and some other odds and ends and isn’t too big. I also keep a journal. It is an Oberon Design Lotus Icon journal. This is starting to go with me everywhere. I might do a post later about this journal in more length. All in all this system works for me. Yes, there are a lot of “inboxes”, but it allows me to be flexible. I have successfully dealt with the “What should I use, digital or analog for my GTD system?” by using both ;-). I might have a few minor tweaks like using the new extra small moleskine volant’s instead of the larger cahiers for my catch all notes. 3/28/2009Cassandra’s computer has been starting to show its age. It is about 6+ years old. It has started locking up recently, so time to get something new. Since there was no money budgeted for this project, it would have to be done fairly cheap. I set the original target at $300. We already have a working monitor, so we didn’t need to buy that. I also had confidence that the current hard drive (IDE Western Digital 160GB) wasn’t the cause of the system issues, so I could probably save some money and use that. Cassandra uses the computer for surfing the web, email, and chat, and we have a few educational games for the kids on the system. The system isn’t taxed very much with her normal usage. I tried to load Vista on her old machine and it would run, but not very well. I didn’t expect it to with it being such an old system. After a lot of research, I came across a few articles about the Intel atom processor. This dinky little chip is 
VERY small as you can see with the picture at left (I believe this is the 230 single core chip). I purchased the Intel 945GC Mini ITX motherboard for about $80. The motherboard comes with the CPU already attached. It is using the Intel 330 atom processor which is a dual core 1.6GHz processor with hyper threading and is 64bit capable. I also purchased a single stick of 667Mhz DDR2 2GB Kingston memory for $20. I had a couple of old ATX cases around the house, but this motherboard uses the ITX form factor cases. I purchased the Rosewill, RS-MI-01 BK for $55. The case comes with a 250 Watt power supply which is more than adequate for this size of a system. I also already had a DVD ROM from the old system to use with the system, so I didn’t need one even though I could have just used my system’s USB DVD to build up the system and then removed it. It took me about 30 minutes to put the motherboard/case/hard drive combo together. For testing, I first loaded Ubuntu 8.10 64bit. The system was very responsive with full Compiz desktop effects. Since I had a copy of Vista 64bit to use, I installed that next. Again the system is very responsive with full Aero glass effects. Some forums state that Apple OSX runs on this setup as well. All in all, I am absolutely amazed how much grunt this little computer has. It is light on the power requirements using 55W when fully cranking along and 8W idle. It does all of the things Cassandra needs and does them very well. The case is small and unobtrusive too being only 8.7”x5.1”x13”. It is fairly quiet as well. This setup would make a great home server. I am quite pleased with the results of this project. I only spent about $170 total for the project and came in way under budget. Cassandra is pleased with the system’s responsiveness even though after building it up and asking her what she thought, she said, “It is just a computer”. Yin and Yang we truly are. I named the computer “pea-brain”, but that isn’t quite fair as it actually is more of a “mighty mouse”. 1/18/2009 Lately I have been bitten by the photography bug. At first I couldn’t explain why. I really enjoyed photography when I was younger in my teens and 20’s. Looking back on it, I don’t exactly know why I gave up on photography. Sure, I take pictures of family events and things like that, but I don’t necessarily get into the artistic facet of photography anymore. In my meditations, something started to emerge. I have wrestled with the notion that I had become jaded with life. Why is this? Well, I guess it is due in part to that whole mid-life crisis thing. At this point in life, you become a machine. You go to work 40+ hours a week and just try to have enough energy to make it to Friday so you can collapse on the weekends. Everything is pretty much the same as the day before. Nothing really changes. Remember being a kid and it seemed like the days lasted forever (in a good way) and there was so much to learn, do, and see? You became fascinated with everything around you. Maybe I am different than others here, but that is how it was for me growing up. I could sit and stare at an ant colony for hours at a time. Again, back to my meditations, I noticed that I needed to “wake up” (again). I needed to change my perceptions on how I saw things. I needed to rip the veneer of life off and the cruft that had built up over time and return to seeing things differently. I wanted to not just see a bird, but really SEE that bird. The colors of its wings (well, the colors I can see), the shape of its beak, the look in its eyes. Sure, it might be just another black capped chickadee, but this particular one that I am looking at has a story to tell if I would just pay attention. I realized what I was looking for was to put my photographer’s eyes back into my head. I wanted to see the glint of sunshine on the gossamer wings of a dragon fly or the dew on a spider web early in the morning as if I was seeing it all for the first time. Photography has a tendency to make you slow down and take it all in and study the subject matter and then try to capture that instant of time. In the very least, I am hoping this will be a step in the right direction. Now it is time to grab the camera and go sit and stare at that ant hill for a few hours. 12/5/2008Ok, I am about to bite the hand that feeds me. Specifically my being predominantly a Windows Server system administrator. I have always kept an old system around running some sort of UNIX/linux/BSD type OS to keep my *nix skills up to date and do some *NIX administration at work. For the most part, the linux distros have been OK for use on the desktop. With regards to being a server OS, I see merits for all of the above OS’s and Windows Server. Each has their place in the datacenter. This post is more about linux on the desktop. I have tried quite a few of the distributions over the years. From Red Hat 4.x way back about 12 years ago to the former Mandrake now Mandriva, Debian, Suse, Slackware, Damn Small Linux, Puppy linux, Ubuntu/Kubuntu/Xubuntu, PCLinux, Mepis, and a few others. I have tried quite a few. I have always liked distro’s based on Debian. I like how Debian is set up and I like the apt-get package manager. About a year ago, I saw a blurb about a new distro called DreamLinux from a group down in Brazil. It certainly was nice looking, but it didn’t seem to have any direction with where it was going. Many distros are like this. They are someone’s pet project, but they don’t seem to be kept up or worked on. I was worried about becoming interested in DreamLinux because of that. Since I needed a new distro to test and becoming disappointed with Fedora 10 not being able to get the wifi driver working even with the wpa-supplicant drivers, it was quickly deleted from my hard drive. I decided to give DreamLinux a try. Setting it up was simple from the “Live” CD. After it booted, it quickly found all my hardware including the wireless antenna that Fedora puked on. It had a nice “Quick install” feature that did just that and quickly installed a bunch of commonly used apps like Firefox, Skype, etc. Since it was based on Debian, apt-get was there as well ready to go. It took me about 30 minutes to get the desktop set up and running the way I like it (I switched on Compiz and did a few other tweaks). All in all it is a pretty good distro. It is fast and fairly user friendly. It comes with a lot of software already pre-installed and was generally a no brainer. This isn’t to say it has been all peaches and cream. Like most linux desktop distros, it has its rough spots. As you can see in the picture below, the video of Thomas Dolby bleeds over onto the file manager. I believe this is mostly a Compiz artifact, but none the less it is annoying and most people wouldn’t put up with it. 
The system has also shut itself down a few times. Now I don’t know if this is a power settings issue or what as I have not seen it actually happen and haven’t gone through the logs yet to determine what is going on. Anyways, pretty cool distro and I think I will keep it around for a while as I think this distro has a lot of potential. Microsoft – you guys had better start delivering on the next desktop OS (Windows 7). It is pretty amazing that you can get a fully functional desktop OS with lots of productivity software for free. 11/25/2008A while back I mentioned I was trying to figure out what email system to use. I have been forwarding my two domains (bitflipper.com and clanmacdonald.com) to my Windows Live Mail (hotmail), GMail, and Fastmail accounts. All three were locked in a dead heat and then something happened. I was upgraded recently to the latest version of Windows Live hotmail mail email system (or whatever the heck they are calling it these days). I noticed that SPAM seemed to like my inbox now more than ever. Where I was only getting maybe one SPAM email a day in my inbox, I am now getting dozens. I keep hitting the “junk” button, and it seems to have no effect whatsoever. It is a joke. As of today I am officially throwing in the towel on hotmail. I will stop forwarding my domain email to hotmail and set up a rule in hotmail to forward on email to my Gmail account and let GMail filter it. I have had my hotmail account for about 14 years now (hard to believe) and am a paying subscriber to the service, but it is time to give it up. It is simply too clogged up with SPAM that it takes too much time to get through it and get to my real email. It is too bad too. I was really enjoying the “push” email feature to my blackjack II Windows smartphone. The battle continues between GMail and Fastmail. I plan on using each exclusively for a month at a time and make a decision after then. Here is what my typical inbox looks like. Emails labeled red are SPAM: 
Goodbye hotmail. It has been a good run. 8/3/2008I am an email freak. There, I have said it. Email was one of the first services I got into when I first got on the internet. For what seems like forever, I have been trying to figure out what email system to use. In a perfect world, I would be running my own mail server here at the house. I used to do that as a matter of fact. When I had DSL, I ran my own Exchange server here at the house. Then I switched over to Comcast for my ISP. I started noticing that my emails were getting blacklisted when I tried to send them to people. Come to find out only the IP's for the authorized Comcast email servers are good to go. Because of issues with DSL, it wasn't possible to go back. I also have two domains that I use for my email, so I am not tied to any email option as I can easily point my domain email to whatever provider(s) I want. My email needs are fairly straightforward. I use it here on my workstation at home, my work laptop, and my workstation at work. I use both web email and email clients like Mozialla's Thunderbird and the Windows Live Mail desktop client. I also connect via IMAP with my smartphone and have it sync every 5 minutes. The Comcast email services sucked hard, so that wasn't option and still isn't an option. GMail About the same time I lost the ability to roll my own mail service, Google came out with its GMail service. It has been pretty good for the most part. I have had it die on me a few times and have had weird bouts of tons of SPAM filling up my inbox. Lately, I have seen some lag in my service. Nothing too bad, but noticeable. I really don't care for the ads, but I am too cheap to do the full version of GMail Apps and don't need all the features. Sometimes Google just freaks me out. They know too much about me. They might be good with my info, but what happens if they are ever compromised? They do have a little of interesting features and there is a lot of community support around the service which makes for some interesting ways to check your email. Hotmail/Live Mail I have had a Hotmail account since before Microsoft purchased the company (remember 2MB caps on your email storage?). Honestly I have not had any issues with Hotmail. It has pretty much worked like it should. A few false positives with good email going to the SPAM folder, but not too bad. The only downside is that it is $20 a year. I don't like looking at the ads and having the ad tagline going out in my email on the free version. I don't care for the proprietary nature of Hotmail. They don't open it up to POP or IMAP clients. Their site also reverts to a "classic" version in Firefox. Fine when I am running Firefox on Windows as there is the IE tab option, but not so great if I am running linux which I do use on occasion. I have been using a free promotional account for the last year which makes it kind of hard to let go of the paid service. Yahoo Mail I have tried a year of Yahoo Mail and I didn't like it much at all. No IMAP means no real access on my smartphone. POP is OK, but again it costs $20 a year. Yahoo to me is a mess with how their SPAM filters work. I also had significant delays in my emails both arriving and being sent out. To me, this one isn't a contender. Inbox.com This one has a pretty slick web interface. They used to have a 5GB for $10 a year plan, but they don't have that anymore. They also don't have IMAP which again is pretty much a necessity. They allow POP, but after using IMAP, you just don't want to go back. FastMail.fm I purchased a subscription last year for FastMail's enhanced account. The reason for it is that I was working with someone overseas that we would need to send large files and executable files back and forth (since then things like dropbox and Windows skydrive allow for easier file sharing) . GMail and Hotmail don't allow this (and neither do many email providers), but Fastmail does. They aren't cheap. $40 a year for the enhanced account, but since I paid for 4 years in advance, it brought it down to about $23 a year. They have so far been a pretty good service. IMAP, custom whitelisting of email addresses, plus many more features. Their web email looks kind of like something straight from 1993, but it works. There are plans to get this upgraded soon. The biggest shortcoming with fastmail is the price. I have tried a few other smaller providers and they weren't very good (GMX Mail, Lavabit). Right now I am a bit undecided between GMail, Live Mail, and FastMail. They all have their pluses and negatives. GMail is pretty good, but it just has enough quirks to make me wonder about using it (I don't really care for how the messages stack up like index cards in a recipe folder. Perpetual beta?, what is up with that?). Hotmail makes me think it is too proprietary, but it is a solid service. Fastmail is spendy, but has some great attributes and I am paid up until Nov 2011. Time to mull it over a bit more to see which way I want to go here. 5/4/2008 I saw the Iron Man movie today with Steve. Michelle bought us both Iron Man T-Shirts to wear, so we were there representin' geek style. I have to say the movie was pretty good. The dialog wasn't the typical cliched one liners and were actually nuanced and witty. The special effects were excellent and there was plenty of them. The main character Tony Stark was played by Robert Downey Jr. I thought he did a good job playing Stark. He wasn't quite as angst ridden as the comic book character, but nonetheless, he did a great job. I think he and Christian Bale who is the current Batman are the best actors ever to play superhero's. They both play very believable characters. I can't wait until the new Batman movie "The Dark Knight" comes out. Stan Lee's trademark cameo was very funny. All in all a great movie.
Be sure to stick around after the closing credits for a cool little teaser trailer.4/7/2008Today I received the error below on my Ubuntu Linux workstation. I just love error messages like this. The Unresponsive script isn't responding? Really? You don't say..... 
3/21/2008
Here is the latest screenshot of my desktop. Going for the minimal look here. I actually have the taskbar set to autohide. It stayed in the up position for some reason when I took the screenshot.
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