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.

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!