We went to the Sunset party on Treasure Island tonight.  The music was good, and the sights were amazing … let me just tell ya  I spent more time taking pictures of San Francisco, but sadly I wasn’t happy with any of those pictures.

Here are the pictures that I sorta approved of.  Nothing epic or anything, just some average pics.

Click the image for larger version, than click again to return to normal view.

Fire dancers 1

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I was invited to be a guest panelist on Cranky Geeks. With John Dvorak, Cade Metz and John Markoff. Not going to give away the topics, you will just have to watch.

I am still really annoyed over the whole AT&T iPad data plan bait and switch. Over the course of the day it has started to upset me more knowing I am locked into paying $30 a month as long as I want unlimited 3G. I will be calling AT&T tomorrow to express my hatred for them, their service and pricing plans. Anyway will rant about this on twitter for now.

I had a lot of fun doing this and look forward to being invited back in the future.

Tonight I was playing around with my Canon S2 IS using long exposure mode.  The scenery wasn’t all that amazing, I was primarily playing around with the F stop and ISO setting.  I honestly really don’t know much about photography, this is totally uncharted territory for me.  However, now that I have a better idea of what I am doing I am going to go for a bike ride this week and see what I can shots of.  The netbook will come in handy here so I can preview things in full screen to see how I am doing.

You can click the picture to get a full size version.  Clicking it again will return you back to the site.

Shot of San Francisco from inside our apartment

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In celebration of 2009, I will be releasing 2.15 of Linkped which includes the new my sent links and new home page.  This is a feature that has been in beta for a while now, and new years day seems like an excellent time to release the new feature to the masses.

This post was created the day before, so the new version won’t actually be released until later in the day.

After using the default theme in Wordpress since like version 1.x, I decided it was finally time for a change. Amazingly, I found the theme I am using on the first site I went to.  This theme is very customizable and the snow flakes is a swapable image.

This is great because it will allow me to change up the theme a bit without working out a total replacement theme.  They also provide a plugin to modify colors and what not without touching the CSS.  That is also excellent because I would rather re-write someone elses CSS then try and work around it.

Hopefully, the new theme will encourgae me to spend a little more time creating the posts that I really wanted to but was too lazy to do.

This trailer was leaked at some point yesterday.  The quality is really terrible but gives you an idea.  Supposedly, this will be featured tonight on Entertainment Tonight. I won’t be watching it because I honestly can’t stomach that show. Hopefully, they will post the HD version soon.

Fairly random and not that exciting, decided to do some sky diving in WoW.  Just flew up as high as I can and jumped off.  Yes, my graphics are turned down since I am boxing.

Not sure why I didn’t post this sooner, however I have moved to using Twitter instead of identi.ca.  Although identi.ca worked well, it was missing far too many features and none of the iPhone apps tie into it.  There are so many twitter applications that its hard to ignore.

At some point when I get time I will post my twitter feed on joped.com.

I just finally got checked into my hotel and its been an adventure already.  Except for my shuttle not showing up and taking a cab, the trip started out ok.  However, when I got into Vegas I knew something had to go wrong.  Yep, US Assways lost my bag.  Its amazing how an industry that goes to great lengths to create some annoying levels of security and policies, can’t seem to keep track of baggage.  That really frightens me, how is this possible ?  I can understand it happening once in a while, but its just far too common.

Needless to say, I need to sleep in dirty cloths tonight and need to wear them tomorrow as well.  With some lucky maybe my bag will appear tomorrow morning.  They have a limited number of flights here per day, and I was on the last one of the day.  Great.

What pisses me off more then anything is that I have no clean socks.  After wondering around my hotel for a while, I was able to purchase some dress socks.  Guess what, that is good enough for me. (For now)

I asked what the airline expected me to do about brushing my teeth and what not.  They responded with this small bag of stuff to get me through the night.  I am happy they provided it for me, but not happy I needed to beg for it.

So far Circus Circus has been an annoying hotel.  It took far too long for me to find my room.  I love how they have maps all over the place, and none of them indicating “You are here”.

I was told they have internet access in all the rooms, however I can’t find a jack and no wifi signal.  Good thing I brought my EVDO card.  The connection speed is far faster then it was last year, so I am just going to stick using it.

I am off to find something to drink and maybe a light snack.  I have a bit of a headache that I need to shake.

Stephanie introduced me to Pandora Radio on the iPhone.  This application allows you to search for music you like, then recommends music based on your vote of the music.  The voting is a very simple thumbs up or thumbs down.  However, pay attention to the information of why you are being asked to vote on that track.  Remember, its tring to figure out what music is fitting you.

The great thing is this application has a channel model.  It allows you to create multiple channels for whichever mood you are in that day.  This is great because I am into a large range of music.  Everything from The Doors, to Aerosmith, Type O Negative, Robert Miles, Led Zep, Disturbted, Guns N Roses, etc.  For those that don’t know, I absoultly hate country music.  The very thought makes my ears bleed.

Yet, I also suck at categorizing music.  Robert Miles is very sweet coding music, he has pulled me through some complex coding headaches.  The problem comes down to, I have been in a “club” a total of 3 times in my life.  Each time more uncomfortable then the other.  I don’t dance, so I will never attempt to.  Trust me, the world is better off if I don’t.

Pandora allows me to find new music that I like and didn’t know existed.

Its not limited to the iPhone, they also have the same service on their website.  I have not played around to see if there are any “syncing” features.  NetNewsWire has an excellent syncing feature that syncs my RSS feeds on the desktop to my iPhone.  I subscribe to a large number of RSS feeds, some of which are critical for my job.

I can pretty much guarantee I will be using it at work.  My limited music collection is starting to get a bit tired.