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It’s a phone. It (sort of) does what a phone should do. I like the weight of the phone – heavier than any phone I’ve had in the past seven years. It feels solid, unlike the lightweight plastic feel of a BlackBerry Pearl, or even a Motorola RAZR v3. The screen is bright and crisp. I’m not quite sure how much better the screen is than on my 2nd gen iPod touch, since I only have the glossy packaging film on the iPhone, whereas I have a matte protection film on the touch.

When I get home, I’m going to spend a bit of time syncing the phone with my computer, and installing all of those apps that I had previously found useless on the iPod touch. After the jump I’m including a short recap of my iPhone saga from the past couple of weeks. If you’ve followed it on Twitter or Facebook, you can probably just ignore it.
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It’s been a long two years, but the big day is almost here. Tomorrow, all of the many days without seeing my wife, the hard work, the study group meetings, the pre-presentation nausea and the drinks after class will have finally concluded with my graduation from Northwestern’s MSIT. I will be graduating with twenty-four of my newest friends and colleagues, joining an elite group of the country’s best and brightest IT professionals. Come noon, we will be adorned in purple, black and orange (for Engineering), awaiting our entrance into the Ryan Family Auditorium. And by 1:30 pm, we will have received our degrees and flipped our tassels.

If you’re so inclined, you can watch a stream of the ceremony at mccormick.northwestern.edu/videostream (go figure that an engineering school would be streaming its graduation ceremony on the web). If you’re looking to hire an IT manager, let me know

I’ve pulled the trigger. I am committing myself to this for 2010. I am going to take 52 self portraits this year, one each week, starting with this one:

I really want to put the T1i to good use, and I think this is a great way to do it. I hope to develop my photography skills throughout the year. I was inspired to do self portraits, rather than just general photographs, by Lauren Randolph and her 365 in 2009.

I have wanted to do Project 365 for the past couple of years, and I have failed miserably at each attempt (like this one). My failures were mostly rooted in forgetfulness and a lack of creativity. We’ll see how this goes. I think I have a much better chance at succeeding, needing to only come up with about 1/7 of the photos needed for Project 365.

Wish me luck!

After upgrading the blog to WP 2.9, I decided to do a little virtual housekeeping. For cleaning up post formatting (and some terrible writing), I am done with posts through May 2003. That leaves me with just under 8,990 posts to finish cleaning up.

I have also cleaned up my tags and categories a bit. I have rethought how I will use categories. At one point, I had completely dropped them (with the exception of the general category) in favor of using tags. I think I am not going back to having a few top-level categories, and then I will use tags to add some more info to the metadata for each post. In cleaning up the tags, I have ensured that any tags consisting of multiple words will include spaces between those words; I am no longer going to use camelCase.

For now, I’ve got to put the housekeeping aside because I was supposed to go shopping for presents while Chris was out of the house. With that, I am leaving for Target.

If you’ve got a WordPress blog, you should upgrade to 2.9. And if you’re like me, and you’ve had a blog running for a while, you may want to consider doing a little housekeeping.

Aside: I was sidetracked for about an hour after editing my early post on West Wing. I started reading about the line of succession.

So, yesterday was Mother’s Day. I got my mom a chocolate gift basket-type deal from Hersheys.com. Pretty good chocolate, which included a one pound bar of chocolate with a custom message hand-written on it. Way early in the morning we went to the Mother’s Day brunch at Chandler’s for Chris’s family. That was pretty good, with a hell of a lot of food. My only problem was the one and a half hour maximum seating time, which, thankfully, was loosely enforced. Also, the waffles were a little chewy, rather than light and fluffy.

And then came the attempt to have a nice dinner at Pappadeaux Seafood Kitchen. Read on to read more about my mixed feelings about that experience.
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I guess somebody out there is reading this thing. I just got an e-mail from an old friend at the e-mail address I setup for this blog. I haven’t talked to her very much in the past five years, but I did get a chance to visit with her once while I was still in school at IWU. Anyways, she’s graduating from U of I on May 18th and she’s invited Chris and I down to celebrate her accomplishment.
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Yeah, I guess I’m still being pretty damn lazy about posting. I’ve just been pretty swamped with stuff. OK, that’s another lie. Honestly, I’ve just been tired and haven’t gotten around to posting anything. Some recent news is that we’ve pretty much narrowed down our wedding photographer search to Grabari Studios and Edward Fox Photography.
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