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archive for December, 2005
With my hard earned xmas bonus I’ve splashed out on a new digital camera, a Pentax Optio 60.
It’s a 6 mega-pixel thing with oodles more features than my old skool Fuji 2800. I will miss the mighty 6x optical zoom but I absolutely will not miss the size of the flippin’ thing. It was huge. Get ready for an influx of pictures when my new one arrives.
I got some awesome gifts this year, including:
- Roy Lichtenstein Whaam! prints (both of them)
- Jarhead by Anthony Swofford
- Banksy’s “Crude Oils” postcards (getting framed)
- Shiny new parker pen
- Sin City DVD
- Batman Begins DVD
- Block of kitchen knives
- Smoother Maker
So the tree is dressed, the presents wrapped and the beer is chilling. Kerry and I decided to take the diplomatic route this year and have christmas all to our selves. Neither parents would have to receive us on the big day. This is actually my first christmas away from home, which will be strange, in a good way. Kerry and I have oodles of food planned (just for us!) tomorrow, I’m on beef roasting duty and trifles making. Mmmm, trifle.
Sorry about the ass-ness of the photos, they’re from my phone. I’m going to pick up a new digi-cam in the January sales.
Now that IE 7 is going to use the orange feed icon developed for Firefox Matt Brett decided it was about time to vaguely standardise the thing. Seems like a good idea to me. Accordingly I’ve stuck a grey-scale version in my menu.
Re-reading this again 🙂
Uh-oh, I think I might own an ipod. Not sure how that one happened… It might have something to do with mentioning to my parents that I would like one for Christmas. It is unbelieveably shiny and so small!
I opted for a (ninja) black 4 Gb Nano, mainly for the ease of carrying and for a decent amount of space. I don’t really want to carry around my whole music collection, but then I don’t want to have to rotate albums every day or something (like with a shuffle). As a Windows user I’m allergic to iTunes so I ditched that at the earliest convenience and I’m using mlipod for winamp which is aces-cool.
The screen is great and the scroll wheel is easy to use once you get the hang of it. The UI is the usual Apple slickness and makes navigating around really easy. I haven’t tried any video on it, but the photo album is vaguely useful and has pretty slideshows. It’s usability is limited on a screen so small though. The whole Nano is incredibly easy to scratch, I have a few minor ones after only a week so I’ve ordered a case for it which should help a bit.
More on my adventures in Apple-land in time.
At work Sandy recently implemented Google-esque “did you mean?” results on our site search. It’s pretty neat.
Buy some toys for sick children at xmas.
So, the big Y! makes yet another social-software purchase and buys del.icio.us. I started using delicious last year and while I didn’t find the whole book marking thing that useful I do try to trawl delicious popular once a day to catch up on all the latest trends. It seem that Yahoo! is taking taking a different approach to the big G. Google tend to hire the super-academics and take the “look how smart we are” approach. Whilst Yahoo! are hiring (and buying) the entrepreneurs to broaden their portfolio of online services to provide to Yahoo! users, “look how friendly we are”.
It’s quite a turn around as Google used to be the friendly new kid on the block, with Yahoo the bumbling, messy old guy trying to keep up. Now everyone is realising that Google is not infallible, is making billions of dollars a year, has endless beta cycles and generally wants to index every bit of data, ever. Yahoo are trying to get close to the people who use their products, they’ve finally got into blogging, launched a nicer API than Google and started buying up the social apps that people actually use (upcoming, flickr, delicious etc). I still like Google’s products, Maps is just awesome, but somehow I feel they’ve become more corporatey than Yahoo!