How many of our own problems do we invite in to our lives on our own?  Just think that if we would be more careful to let into our lives only the things that will produce good fruit, it should reduce the amount of self-inflicted problems/drama we have.

I hope something happens to redesign the nutritional information panel on foods.  The current one provides no context about overall healthiness of the food. Some of these submissions are pretty good and others are really off-the-wall.

I particularly like the ones that break down processed versus natural ingredients in the product.  I’m also rather fond of showing percent of daily values as charts/graphs. It conveys the information so much cleaner than a bunch of numbers.

After being on vacation for a week and a half and using my iPhone as a camera on-and-off, the dedicated quick shot button on the lock screen and the ability to use the volume up button as a shutter will be big time savers. Too often I grabbed my iPhone to get a shot and had to swipe, type my passcode, launch the Camera app and finally shoot. Having the ability to press a single button and the iPhone being ready to take pics will be awesome.  The ability to use the volume up as a shutter doesn’t seem like a  big thing but I’ve ruined more shots than I care to admit because tapping the shutter button on-screen moves the camera ever so slightly.

I’m also excited about the new notification system. In the last couple of weeks I’ve been in situations where I’ve been on the phone and received a text message. In this scenario, you can’t hang up the call without first dismissing the text message notification dialog. Not the most streamlined workflow.

The new “Reminders” app will be welcome in our household too.  My wife and I use another app to keep a running grocery list that we can both see.  The Reminders app will quickly take the place of this.  I will likely take a look at this as a replacement for my Toodledo account but I’m not sure yet if it can replace my use of that.  With the location feature, it will be awesome to get a shopping list reminder as I walk into the store.

The iMessage update is going to be great.  This is like having unlimited texting with other iOS users.  This one feature alone will likely seal the deal on my mom getting an iPhone. If she can text me, my wife, my sister and her kids (all iPhone users) for free without a texting plan then it becomes a no-brainer on which smart phone to get her.  This may also be the final nail in the coffin to getting iPod touch devices for my sons if they can send messages to me and my wife and their friends, who all run iOS devices.  This really is a killer feature.

With wireless syncing, my wife’s iPhone may actually be kept up-to-date. I’m in my home office for work all day so my iPhone is synced regularly.  My wife’s iPhone hasn’t been synced since the Reagan administration and only seems to make it up here when I walk it up here and sync it for her.  That usually only happens when iOS updates are pushed out.  One thing she does do is plug her iPhone into a wall charger every night when she goes to bed.  Thanks to the wireless syncing feature, that is all she’ll need to do to keep her iPhone up-to-date.

If you enjoy college basketball and want to see a glimpse of how a major college program is coached, I’d highly recommend following Coach Crean at www.twitter.com/TomCrean.

Go IU!

I’m optimistic about the future of Indiana basketball based on the improvement I’ve seen in the last 3 years and the caliber of recruits that Coach Crean has signed over the next couple of years (2012′s class alone has 3 players in the ESPN Top 60).  The amazing news that I hit me this weekend was that one of the 2011 recruits (Cody Zeller) won his 3rd high school championship.  He has won a state title 3 of the 4 years that he’s been playing in high school.  Let that soak in for a bit…I’ll wait for you.  The future for Indiana looks to be bright.  My prediction is that they will be back in the NCAA tournament in 2-3 years.  I would say next year but that’s going to be asking an awful lot of a team that is adding only a couple of freshmen to the mix.  Granted, one of those freshmen is Zeller but it will take a bit for the new look of the team to gel together.

I’m excited for next year already!

Go IU!

Celebrity Pictures, Lol Celebs and Funny Actor and Actress Photos – ROFLrazzi

via I Declare A State Of Emergency!.

via Take a Look inside an AT-AT.

Doesnt anyone in Mississippi remember what happended the last time the home team wore all gray and played visitors in navy?

http://eyesonauburn.blogspot.com/2010/11/ole-missbcs-reax-sometimes-i-hate-espn.html

War Eagle!

I grew up watching the Star Trek string of movies starting with Wrath of Khan.  Oddly enough, I still have not yet seen the original Star Trek motion picture.  I was familiar with the Star Trek franchise growing up but I was much more into the Star Wars saga.  I remember seeing Star Trek episodes when I visited my aunts and uncles but I very rarely watched them on my own.  Given that history, when I saw Wrath of Khan I was blown away.  The campy series that I remembered seeing was very well done as a major motion picture.

When this new movie was being announced on all the rumor/blog sites, I thought it was going to be another attempt at retelling the same story with some new director/writer spin to the story.  To me, there’s nothing worse than someone retelling a story and changing it without explaining why it’s now different (see my review of Clash of the Titans).  When I actually sat down and watched this Star Trek movie, it was immediately clear that they were changing the franchise and actually made why it was different a major part of the movie.  This was a movie where I sat down after finishing it and thought about what I had just watched.  I was impressed at how well the director/writer did at setting up an entire re-imagining of the franchise.  The best part is that with how this movie was written, this version of the franchise is not obligated to follow most of the original franchise’s timeline.  There is a common history between the two franchises but that common early history is a part of the Star Trek timeline that I hadn’t seen discussed (aside from the “Star Trek: Enterprise” series).

Some background

I feel that some history is necessary to build up to my review of the new version.  When I was a kid spending my summers in Arizona, there wasn’t a whole lot to do during the day except watch this amazing creation called “cable TV”.  My grandfather had HBO at his house, which is where I spent many of my days during the summer.  I remember one summer sitting down and watching the movie “Clash of the Titans” on HBO.  I was amazed.  I loved the movie so much that for my birthday that year I wanted the action figures associated with the movie (I actually did get Pegasus).  The movie was an epic tale containing the heros of mythology.  The driving force of the movie was for Perseus to rescue Andromeda from her death sentence at the hands of the sea creature the Kraken, which was one of the coolest action figures of the set with his 4 arms.  He went through amazing adventures to get to the point of being able to defeat the terrible sea creature.

The remake

Now to the new version of the movie.  I’m going to avoid spoilers here as much as possible in case you haven’t seen it yet (consider yourself blessed).  I went to see this movie at the $1 theater and feel like I overpaid to see it.  While walking out, I had the same feeling that I had after seeing the movie “Congo” back in the 90s.

Back to the remake of “Clash of the Titans”.  This movie suffered from the Crichton Effect but with a little different flavor.  I enjoyed the original movie so much that the new movie paled in comparison.  If you take the movie by itself, forgetting the original (if possible), I would still have trouble finding many redeeming qualities.  They spent way too long on the story of Perseus’ upbringing and they changed the core personality of Perseus.  In the original movie, Perseus was out to rescue the woman that he loved, Andromeda.  In the new movie, Perseus is fueled by hatred of the gods and Andromeda is a speed-bump to getting facetime with the gods to confront them.  The writers worked really hard to paint Perseus as a prideful, vindictive person instead of the passionate hero that the original painted him to be.

When my sons asked me afterward if I liked the movie I told them that it was bad.  They are used to me using that adjective to mean that it had content that they were not allowed to see.  I had to tell them that, in this case, that the movie was just not good.  I want my boys growing up seeing the original version and never knowing that this new one exists.  I’d rather them see Perseus overcoming adversity for love instead of out of vengeance.

In summary, I wouldn’t classify this as the worst movie I’ve ever seen (an honor still reserved for “Showgirls”) but it is somewhere near the top of the list of movies I don’t like.

Anyone else have any sure-fire ways to identify a redtech? If so, post them in the comments.

When I was in college, a group of us at Indiana University (Go Hoosiers!) interviewed with American Management Systems (AMS) to live the exciting lives of IT consultants.  At the time, I thought all of us were interviewing to go to the company hub of Fairfax, VA, where we’d all continue our college lives in a new location.  One of the group, Tim Lockyear, interviewed and accepted a position in Birmingham, AL.  I remember running into him at Lindley Hall (where all of us Computer Science majors lived in the labs our senior year) and having him tell me that he was going to Birmingham.  I tried my best to understand his reasoning for such a decision because the rest of us were going to Fairfax.  His rationale was that he could start out doing Smalltalk, a language that he learned while at an internship.  I was saddened that our classmate was not joining us in Fairfax but he had his reasons and I couldn’t argue with that.

Fast forward 6 or so months (June 1995) to me being in Fairfax, VA.  When I had joined AMS, the company asked me to start a day earlier than expected so I could go through an Object-Oriented Analysis & Design course.  That track had no relationship to coding in COBOL at all, which was what most projects were using in Fairfax at the time.  I was a little baffled as to why I was chosen to take the class but I enjoyed learning about object-oriented development.  After floating along going to various classes and still not being on a project, I got word in July that I was going to be sent to Birmingham, AL (of all places) to participate in a Smalltalk Immersion course.  The class was 7 weeks with no return trips to Fairfax until the class ended.  I thought “what in the world was I doing going to Birmingham?”  By that time, I had forgotten that Tim had chosen Birmingham.  I went to Birmingham and had my class and expected to return to Fairfax and do something cool with my newfound knowledge.  On one of the last days I was in Birmingham, I received a call from a staffing person in Fairfax that gave me a choice.  He said I could stay in Birmingham and do Smalltalk (the language I just learned all about and fell in love with) or I could go to Hartford, CT to join a COBOL project.  The choice was not a hard one.

It wasn’t until years later that I looked back and realized that I was acting just like Jonah.  God had me run into Tim to introduce me to the idea of Birmingham and I turned tail and ran, following my own selfish desires.  Once in Birmingham, I tried my best to still run from being here but God presented me with another option that, at the time, was so bad that I jumped at the opportunity of staying in Birmingham.  Little did I know that God had a plan for me in Birmingham and it involved becoming good friends with Tim, meeting my wife and starting a family.