Josh Moody

Vacation is over and I start back to work tomorrow. We didn’t go on a big vacation, but several small ones instead. The main thing is that I WASN’T WORKING!

Here’s the break-down of the week…

 
Monday:
As I wrote previously, we took the family to the Little Rock Zoo.

Tuesday:
We took the kids to the babysitter so we could have a date! We watched “The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian”.

Wednesday:
We loaded up the mini-van and traveled to Mena to visit the folks.

Thursday:
Today was our 9th Wedding Anniversary! To celebrate, we left the kids with the Grandparents, and went to the Raspberry Manor Bed & Breakfast. This was the best part of the trip. We got to the B&B around 3PM, then sat on the deck or in the hammock until about 5. Then we took a walk on one of the numerous trails in the area before returning for dinner about 6:30. We had a fantastic steak dinner, and lounged for a couple hours before retiring for the evening.

Friday:
Had a nice breakfast of ham and stuffed french toast, then did nothing for a couple more hours before checking out at 11AM.

Later that day, my father-in-law and I went Geocaching around town before my Wife and kids left for Conway with her parents. My Wife & kids, her parents, and her brother & sister-in-law all spent the weekend Greer’s Ferry Lake, while I stayed in Mena to visit with my own parents.

Saturday:
I attended the Acorn Reunion with my Grandpa (he also attended Acorn High School). Acorn is such a small school that they have an “all alumni” reunion each year. This is the first one I’ve attended. Aside from one 8th grader who was probably there with a grandparent, I was by decades the youngest in attendance. Most attendees were in their 70’s and 80’s. It was nice to spend time with my Grandpa anyway. Afterwards, my Grandparents treated me to a BBQ lunch.

Sunday:
We grilled steaks at Dad’s house. My grandmother baked a chocolate cake (with home-made chocolate icing… yum) and made ice-cream.

Now, it’s late Sunday. I’m home again, I’m tired, and I’m going to bed!

I’m on vacation this week, and we decided to take the family to the Little Rock Zoo this morning. It was getting hot by the time we left, but there was some nice cloud cover that kept it pretty comfortable while we were there.

This was Rachel’s 2nd visit to the zoo, and Levi’s 1st. I think Jamie and I had as much fun as the kiddos!

I just posted pictures to Flickr.

If you’re an iPhone user, you’ve probably already read that the iPhone 2.0 software is coming in early July - later than the original June estimation. You probably also know the 2.0 software will have support for built-in applications. While I certainly welcome this new functionality, I’ve been getting along quite well with the various iPhone/mobile web apps that are out there.

Here are some web apps that have made my iPhone experience more pleasant.

IMDb Mobile
http://nolanbrown.org/imdb/#_home

Not officially sanctioned by IMDb, this little web app provides a nice mobile lookup tool

NewsGator Mobile
http://m.newsgator.com/

I live between the worlds of Mac and PC. Thanks to NewsGator, I can sync my RSS subscriptions between NetNewsWire (Mac), and FeedDemon (Windows). I recently found NewsGator has an iPhone version of their RSS reader as well, http://m.newsgator.com/.

Twitter Mobile
http://m.twitter.com

While not strictly an iPhone web app, this light-weight interface does work well on iPhone.

Moviefone
http://iphone.movies.aol.com

Features iPhone-specific interface for finding show times for your favorite movies.

Weather Underground
http://i.wund.com

Not a particularly attractive interface, but it gets the job done with much more detail than you get from the built-in iPhone weather app.

Google
http://www.google.com/m

If you visit the Google home page in mobile Safari, you get the mobile version of Google by default. This interface is quite nice, and is much easier to navigate than the full version on a small screen. I am, however, quite disappointed that using mobile Safari’s search box takes you to the full Google instead of the mobile version. What gives, Google? You are already using browser detection to determine I’m on a mobile device. Why not implement this same functionality when searching from the tool bar?

After being exposed to Flickr for a project at work, I’ve finally joined the cool kids by putting my photos on Flickr. To avoid max upload restrictions, I had to spend $25/year for a pro account, but it’s worth it to get unlimited sets, uploads, and storage.

Some of Flickr’s features I like most:

• Great organization tools
• Easy uploader tool for both Mac and PC
• Multiple Access Levels (public, friends, family, private)
• Post Photos via email (camera phone + unlimited data plan = immediate posts of what I’m doing!)

I’ve spent quite a bit of time on Flickr this week while working on the aforementioned work-related project. Looking at all the amazing photos out there inspired me to get out with my camera.

I’ve taken thousands of digital snapshots over the years, but I’d like to take more than just snapshots. I want to capture things that other people actually want to see, instead of just pictures of the kiddos. Don’t get me wrong, pix of the kids are great to have, and I need to take more of those too, but there are lots of other things in the world to photograph. To this end, I spent a couple hours in downtown Conway this weekend, finding interesting things to shoot.

Here’s one of my favorites from the shoot:

You can view more shots from this weekend at http://www.flickr.com/photos/jgmoody/sets/72157605487590794/

If there’s anyone out there who still subscribes to my blog, you may be surprised to see I’m actually posting new content… yeah, yeah, I know. It’s been awhile. Get off my back already, I’ve been busy.

There was a time when I was really fired up about working on personal stuff like this after work and on weekends. But since I do essentially the same thing at work 10 hours a day (at least), it gets old and I haven’t been all that inclined to work on my blog lately.

I’ve kicked around dumping Wordpress as my blogging platform and writing my own software, but what’s the point? I just updated my Wordpress install tonight, after realizing I was several major revisions behind. It takes about 2 minutes to update vs how long to write my own from scratch? And I haven’t even bothered to do the upgrade?  And why bother if I’m not going to blog anyway?

BTW, while I was upgrading, I also installed a new theme. Hope you like it!

Web-stuff is still my job and my passion, and I recognize the need to spend more time keeping up-to-date on what’s going on in this Web 2.0 world.

In that spirit, I’ve been playing with Flickr and Twitter lately, and have pretty much embraced Flickr as my online photo gallery (I’ll post more on that later).

As for Twitter, I’m not so sure.

For those of you who have been living in a cave, the whole idea of Twitter is a micro-blog to answer the question “What are you doing?”. You are encouraged to tweet (”write”) what you are doing frequently, and a whole host of tools are available to allow you to quickly tweet (email, sms, web site). Your friends can subscribe to follow your tweets, and always know what you are up to at any given moment.

My primary problems with Twitter are:

1. If you spend all your time writing about what you are doing, how do you have time to do anything?
2. Who actually cares to know what you are doing all the time?
3. There’s some serious stability problems with Twitter, causing it to be down frequently.

I’ll probably either find or create a plugin for Wordpress that will show my Twitter updates, just for the experience of doing so, but I make no promises my Tweeting will be any more frequent than my blogging.