Weight Loss Demystified

When I originally took this photo in Chicago (on La Salle, near the CBOT) it was a snapshot of a film crew. I took a few more shots of the crew but I was intrigued by the camera. Panaflex, what’s the specs on that then? Turns out it’s a product of Panavision, you know, that name that’s in practically every American film’s credits? Interesting history too although how they consider that big lump small enough to be handheld is beyond me!

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michel v — intraordinaire.com posted a photo:

Rue de Castiglione, Paris, novembre 2008.
(Napoléon is on top of that pillar, unleashing the flying armada.)

No bums on seats in this cafe in Maidenhead in the UK.

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WordCamp Australia at the Red Box in Sydney, and dinner afterwards (including an arm wrestle).

A lighthouse stands guard near Baltimore in Co Cork.

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I was planning to skip the BlackBerry Bold and wait for the Javelin (the updated Curve), but decided to go ahead and get the Bold for a variety of reasons:

1. I wanted 3G
2. I wanted a faster processor for JavaScript, etc. in the browser
3. I played with it a bit and found the keyboard wasn’t as bad as it looked
4. The screen rocks
5. The device I really want (touchscreen WebKit browser with a BlackBerry keyboard and OS) is a ways out still

After using it for a day, I’m pretty pleased with it.

Applications

I run pretty lean on the BlackBerry. I mainly rely on e-mail and the browser, but there are some apps I install. All are free.

• TwitterBerry - the latest version is really nice.
• Google Maps - just keeps getting better. Love the GPS integration.
• Gmail - for quick pruning of my junk mail and web service notifications.
• Google BlackBerry Sync - OTA sync for my calendar, don’t sync contacts (yet).
• Google Mobile - mainly to track upgrades for Google Maps, Sync and Gmail.
• Yahoo Go - this is primarily a Flickr uploader and browser for me, but I should also mention that the graphics look stunning on the Bold.
• WeatherBug Direct - the icon looks like crap on the Bold, but it’s handy.

Notes

Some quick thoughts from the day and set-up.

• Set-up was easy.
• The battery life seems good (70% after a day and in bad coverage for much of the time).
• The included belt-clip case is a big improvement over the classic plastic holsters.
• The GPS really is pretty handy (over cell tower triangulation).
• The keyboard isn’t bad - the ridges on the keys make it work.
• It’s big - wide. It makes the iPhone feel tiny.
• The screen is gorgeous (though I was seeing some weird image banding in places, need to test more).
• The Zen theme seems to have a fatal flaw - the icons on the abbreviated home screen don’t update with status properly so you don’t see the little alert indicators.
• Network speed seems pretty good so far.
• Wifi was easy to set up. I used it until I switched the SIM card into the device, then turned it off. Not sure I’ll be using it much.
• If you’re doing anything that is more than a 1 step process, go to a real AT&T store instead of an authorized reseller. Trust me on this one.

Questions? Let me know in the comments and I’ll try to answer them.

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michel v — intraordinaire.com posted a photo:

Mannequins in Colette's display, Rue Saint Honoré, Paris, november 2008.

Some of the highways in Ireland aren’t quite up to international standards.

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Arriving in Sydney, NSW Art Gallery, and dinner at Sands Bistro on Coogee before WordCamp AU.

Everyone is honored and excited today that Change.gov, the website of President Elect Barack Obama, has turned on IntenseDebate comments to discuss things like health care.

Micah Sifry has an excellent write up of the topic.

Imagine what happens if those numbers–on not just any “centralized site” but the one that symbolically and perhaps literally has the attention of the President-elect–start climbing into the five- and six-digits. Before our eyes, we are witnessing the beginning of a rebooting of the American political system. [emphasis added]

[...]

By using IntenseDebate (and the OpenID framework), the Obama transition is actually enabling a lot of interesting community development to start happening beneath the surface of a threaded discussion. Users get their own “commenter profile” on IntenseDebate, along with reputation points, and they can carry those profiles onto other sites that use the same system. Users can also choose to follow other IntenseDebate users, so if someone is really diligent they could start to gather a group or a crowd around them.

It has even started to make the cable news, as evidenced in this clip.

Pretty exciting! And it’s also a reaffirmation of Automattic’s platform-agnostic approach to Akismet, Gravatar, PollDaddy, and IntenseDebate that although Change.gov uses Expression Engine for their CMS they’ve chose IntenseDebate for their comments.