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.

Paperless on sale until Sunday!

Paperless, the new name for ReceiptWallet, is on sale until Sunday (5/17) for $34.95. It has the new branding on it, but it's still my beloved ReceiptWallet! Additional features will be coming and this is a great opportunity for those that haven't already committed to becoming organized to start.

Running again

I've been running on and off for more than a decade. I've used it as a way to relieve stress and by running 2 marathons, proved to myself that I can accomplish physical goals that we're unimaginable to me years ago. After my last marathon, almost 2 years ago, I haven't run very consistently. My son is now 2 and I feel guilty about running as I should be spending time with him. However, I do need time for myself. To that end, about 6 weeks ago (maybe longer), I started running every other day. I've been doing a decent job keeping this up, only missing a few days which I just made up the next day. While I'd like to run 4 days a week consistently, this every other day schedule is working out quite well. My runs are 3-5 miles and take 30-50 minutes (I'm not back down to a 9 minute mile) which is enough to get my heart going, but doesn't take that much time that I feel guilty about knocking off from work early and still get back in time to walk the dog.

Along with the other changes in my life, I would like to make this a permanent routine as it is going to be the only way I can keep my head from exploding!

Working smarter, not harder

Work has been the focus of my life for a long time, especially the 5.5 years prior to my new job. Being a self-employed contractor meant that every hour I worked, I got paid. Then when I started ReceiptWallet, I had to not only do my contract work, I had to handle support and development of ReceiptWallet which took up more time.

Last summer I started to re-evaluate my life and started my path towards working less and working smarter. Taking a full time job was my first step. Deciding to sell ReceiptWallet was my next step. Now that my work consists of one day job, it's time for me to clean up my act and make better use of my time both during the day and after work. A friend of mine sent me a link to a Merlin Mann podcast about blocking off time and "ganging" requests that people make of me. While the podcast may offend some with the language that Merlin uses, it is definitely worth a listen. Most of my work day is spent in a reactionary fashion; instant messaging is part of work and reacting to issues is another part. Luckily, in the last six months, my IT team and I have been able to turn the constant fires into something that is a lot less frequent. However, I still am finding that I need to carve out time to focus on the harder projects. I need to take the incoming requests, log them and get to them later. Ever since I wrote NotifyMail, I've interrupt driven. (Curse email...I got addicted way too long ago!)

Most of the people I work with are in the central time zone, so around 3 pm my time, the interruptions pretty much stop. I'm going to try to use the time from 3 to 5 pm as a daily time to focus on the bigger projects that take a lot more concentration. The smaller projects, I can do during the day as they don't take as much concentration. I'm hoping that I can really stick to this. Already I've met my goal of working less (my boss probably doesn't want to hear that :-)), so I think it is achievable. While I have handled as much work that has been thrown at me in the past, I'm in a different position juggling more. The key to thriving, in my opinion, is to work much smarter and work less. Some people can work all the time, but I found that I'm not really effective after 5-6 pm in terms of my heavy thinking. Believe it or not, I never pulled an all-nighter in college; the closest I came was staying up to 3 or so working on the school paper, but that was monkey work doing page layout.

I'm crossing my fingers that the changes in my life in the past year will help make me a more balanced person. Next up, finding a hobby and actually doing it! LEGO building is fun, but I'm looking for something challenging as well. We'll see.