One Month Later
At the beginning of last month I lucked into an iPhone 4. I had kinda decided not to get one, but my old phone broke and when I went to get it fixed they offered me the phone. I jumped on it. It is far superior to the 3GS in almost every way. The physical shape of it is much nicer to hold, it sits flat on the table, and is actually pretty gorgeous to look at. As for the big upgrades, the screen is absolutely stunning, the camera is a dream, and it has plenty of horsepower to spare.
Now that all the awesomeness is out there, I have to say I would recommend avoiding this phone if you can. At least for now. The antennea issue that has been all over the news has been a bit overblown in my opinion, but does exist. It only bothers me if I am in an area with an extremely weak signal, however I get better signal quality overall. In all honesty, I don't think I've had a single dropped call due to signal loss on the iPhone 4. I have had a ton more dropped calls with the new iPhone however. This is due to the proximity sensor on the device. If this phone had one major problem, this is it. My cheek is in the perfect spot to hit the end call button and does it's best to do so whenever it gets the chance. For some reason the sensor on the new phone is just plain not working right. I never had this issue with my original iPhone, 3G, or 3GS. It is so bad that even though I think this is the best phone/computing device I have ever owned, I wouldn't recommend it to anyone until Apple fixes the proximity sensor issue.
Readers Poll!
I need your help. My new phone is starting to get some little scratches on the back glass, due to the fact I treat it like a phone and not a work of art, and I need to get something to protect it. I think I have decided on a skin from gelaskin.com, but the problem is I really like 2 of them and would like some opinions. Let me know which one you like the most in the comments.
Stealing From the Templemans
I know that Chris and Kellie don't hold a copyright on weekend updates, so I guess it really isn't stealing, but I had a great weekend. Friday I met Brian for an early showing of Inception at the Mall of Georgia. This was a way to hopefully calm our nerves because that evening we started working on shooting a wedding. It was a surprisingly awesome movie. I was really dissapointed with DeCaprio in Shutter Island and went into this movie with that mindset. I know Chris Nolan did an amazing job with the batman series, but could he bring the magic that has been so hit or miss for DeCaprio? Absolutely. I don't think I have ever seen a movie that really had me engaged as much as this one did. After the movie we met Brian's wife Katrina for some lunch and walking for a couple minutes around the mall because Brian needed a UGA shirt for the rehearsal that night.
After getting a shirt Brian and I made a quick run down to Fry's for some batteries and an extra memory card. It was my first trip to Fry's and unlike the movie, it kinda disappointed me. It was massive and had tons of electronic stuff, but it really seemed like it was trying to be way too much. It was like a Best Buy, Cosco, Think Geek, and Amazon all mashed together keeping most of the worst parts and squeezing out the good stuff. I think maybe if I still built computers or needed some specialty things it would be better or if I was looking for some specialty items I needed right now it might be awesome. It just seemed to be a dirty and unorganized warehouse of lower end items.
LANDesk AV Week One
I've been writing documentation for the LANDesk project all day and really wasn't sure I would be able to write a new post. I really wanted to do a quick little recap of the first week using LANDesk AV. It is the first major task we have really done with LANDesk and I have to say, it has been awesome so far. No major issues removing the old AV or installing the new one. One of the minor problem comes from our old AV product not being recognized by LANDesk for auto-uninstallation. We wrote a simple in-house script that checks for the old AV and uninstalls it. It works for most of our systems, but we have had a couple problems with some older versions of the old product. Not a big problem as it doesn't affect the new AV and we are already working on a script to take care of it.
One of the coolest features of the LANDesk product is that we now see in the LANDesk console all files that are on the network that are viral or dangerous. We can also push scheduled scans out to machines as needed to make sure they are good to go. It is an awesome product and has already found about 60 possible dangers. I love how we can see the exact file and even make an exception without having to physically go out to each machine.
Anyway, I have gotta get home to pack up and clean the condo. Later.
HTML EMails
I have always had a backwards view of HTML based email. I say it is backwards because I have felt it was just for spam. Recently I have really started noticing some great benefits of using HTML in the email space. It provides a great way to brand yourself, as well as a a way to consistently show the information you need. A great example of this is how facebook and progressive use HTML emails for their notification systems.
Technology Overkill
Wow, after I started my blog back up I slowly started adding other social techs back into the fold as well. First I went back to Twitter and more recently I have jumped back on Facebook. I have to say that I don't know how folks do it. I feel so overwhelmed with it all. I don't want to lay my lack of posts on Facebook and Twitter, but they are really a time sink. I will continue to try and stay on top of everything but no promises.
Life has also gotten pretty busy for me. Next week is vacation and hopefully it will be just the break I need. No new news on the job front but I have to say it is consuming my mind at the moment. I would love to have some kind of answer before vacation, although I know that I am the only one on that timeline.
Once I get back from vacation I will be 100% into the biggest project I have been in charge of at the HUB. We will be using LANDesk to remove our current antivirus and install our new LANDesk AV. We have a very short overlap time and we have to test deploy and then mass deploy. Messing with AV is pretty scary because of how deep it gets into the OS. All I have to say is thank goodness it isn't norton.
The Future
There are always a few devices that are always used in books, images, and movies to tell us it is the future. From flying cars to jet packs, they all give us the idea that when we see these things we have made it to the mythical land know as Futuria. Today I saw a working prototype of what can only be described as one of those devices...
It a Gala and You’re Invited
This past week was a crazy week for me at work, but I did get a chance to play with one new technology. Gala, the Flash 10.1 beta from Adobe that has hardware accelerated video playback. Flash has been the bane of my Mac experience and it has really led me to believe Jobs & Co have made the right choice excluding it from iPhone OS. I disagree to the extent, but that is another story. Gala is starting to change my mind.
For the first time Flash video no longer pegs my CPU to 100%. This is a major piece of awesome. I can now have a flash video playing while also working in InDesign, Photoshop and Aperture. I think this increased performance has also helped Flash itself to crash less. I loose more browser windows to Flash than anything else. All I have to say is thank goodness for Chrome. Since installing Gala however, I haven't had a crash because of Flash. Maybe it was just a good week, but overal it seems to be a major improvement.
If you run a Mac, I would have to say that this is going to be a major improvement for you. A couple small caveats at the moment however. First, it is a beta application at the moment, so use at your own risk. While in beta, there will be a small white box in the upper left corner whenever hardware acceleration is taking place. This is to test what videos can take advantage of the acceleration. In my testing everything on Hulu and Vimeo showed the box, and most things on youtube did as well. Some of the older videos on youtube did not, but that was to be expected. For the first time in a long time I am looking forward to a new release of the flash player for Mac.
Some Analytics
I love google Analytics. It has some of the most useful information. I check it weekly for my site and since I started back using it in February, I have noticed something really cool in regards to my traffic sources...
The top 1/3rd of my traffic sources in the last 30 days.
More than a third of all the traffic on my site comes from Chris and Kellie's website. That is more than the direct traffic. That kinda blew me away.