New California City

Last week I was reading in the paper that the local water authority released another $450,000 in consumer rebates; this was after the rebates for the entire month of May were allocated in the first 1.5 hours that they were available. (I had called the first day and tried to get a rebate for the new washing machine we need.) I quickly got online, applied for the rebate and presto, my rebate (up to $135) was allocated! I got the paperwork and discovered that I needed to send the paperwork to a new California city, Sacremento. You'd like that the government that administers this rebate could proofread its web pages.

Paperless in MacUpdate Promo!

Another bundle deal, another set of great apps! This time, however, Paperless (formerly ReceiptWallet), is part of the bundle. MacUpdate is offering a bunch of great apps. You've probably heard of most of them. This is the first time that one of my applications has been offered as part of a bundle.

I have a strange hobby of collecting software, so I'll probably bite on this deal despite owning a few in the collection. It's hard to go wrong for the price. If you decide to buy the bundle, click on the link on the right side of the page advertising the bundle to support my blog (running this blog isn't free :-)).

Honoring our nation's fallen

Lately, it seems that the only words I hear associated with Memorial Day are "happy" and "sale". The word happy definitely doesn't belong with Memorial Day if you actually look at what Memorial Day symbolizes. It is easy to forget the true meaning of Memorial Day when you hear phrases like "the unofficial beginning of summer". Today I spent the day with my parents and my son. When I arrived at my parents' place, I saw that my dad had his flag out at half staff and then at 11 am (he had the time wrong, but doesn't believe me), he raised it to full staff. (The United States Flag Code says to fly the flag at half staff until noon.)

While I don't support and haven't supported the wars of my generation, I do have great respect for those that serve and for those that have given their lives for our country. Memorial Day should once again be recognized for the day that it is, to honor those that have given the ultimate sacrifice for our country and should not be used as yet another excuse to have the day off and commercialize a holiday.

The "modern" age of cameras

My mom has been making movies for us from the pictures and videos we give her of our son and she is quite good at it. As we were viewing some of the videos lately, I noticed the image quality of the older videos was pretty poor. Just over 4 years ago, we got a Pentax Optio S5i to replace our Olympus Digital Stylus. The Pentax as a great camera for its time and was quite compact. However, fast forward several years and then we started to see that the 320x240 videos were pretty bad. After seeing a review of the Flip Ultra, I decided to get one just for video. That brought us up to 640x480. Wow, a 4x increase in resolution! We were still at 5 megapixel for still images, but video was better, not great.

After reading a review from another Mac developer, I decided to start looking at cameras. I remembered that my mom just got a new one and my dad had done tons of research. Turns out my mom got the Canon SD970 which is a step up from the one in the review. I did some digging on the differences between the 960 and 970, handled both (Best Buy had the 960, so I saw its size and I played with my mom's 970) and decided on the 960. I've only had it for a few days, but already I can tell it is light years ahead of my Pentax. I tend to keep electronics for a long time if I like them; I guess I really liked the Pentax as 4 years is a long time in the electronics world!

I'll post some pictures in some other entries.