Normally when I approach a technology purchase, I am able to look at the available options, weigh the benefits of each product, and make a decision that will serve my needs for an acceptable amount of time. Now that my family's Sprint contract has expired, however, I am having difficulty deciding on the best option for a new phone. Looking back at my past purchases, the Canon EOS 20D was an excellent buy that is still serving my photography needs today. I have not had any regrets about my Mac Pro and MacBook Air. The problem with the current phone market is that no device really fits all my needs. The iPhone 3G comes mighty close. The thing I am scared of, though, is that Google's Android platform may come closer…and be more "open," to boot. So far I have been looking at Apple's latest iPhone and the Openmoko Neo FreeRunner. One is slick and capable, and the other is extremely open with lots of future potential. Phones running Android will be both! Now if I didn't have the sticky problem of that whole 2 year contract thing, I would go for the iPhone today.
In the end, I'm predicting that Android will see some slight delays and worries over a rocky first release, I'll break down and buy an iPhone (and succumb to a 2yr AT&T contract for my family), the Android will still be 6 or so months away from its release, it will take over a year to get the platform capable enough to make me drool, and by that time our AT&T contract will be nearing expiration again, and Apple, Google, AND PALM will have fascinating options to choose from for the next great phone down the line. Whew, that was a long sentence. By the way, notice I did mention Palm there…I still haven't given up hope that Palm will be competitive again with a Linux-based OS one of these days. They'll probably stay in the arena of less expensive phones, though, since they have had such great luck with the Centro.
On July 17th Al Gore delivered another speech in Washington, DC. This was one of his most direct, clear, and effective addresses to the American people. The message is simple: we cannot wait to fix the impact of humanity on the environment. His approach: push the lawmakers, corporations, and citizens of the United States to buck up and move to an all-renewable, electric economy within 10 years. As with my last Gore post, I'm including a video of his speech. Watch the short version below, and if you really want to save our planet and our economy, watch the full version as well. Below the video, you will find some quotations I found particularly useful or pertinent to the message. Please take this seriously.
Today I challenge our nation to commit to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
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We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change.
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When we send money to foreign countries to buy nearly 70 percent of the oil we use every day, they build new skyscrapers and we lose jobs. When we spend that money building solar arrays and windmills, we build competitive industries and gain jobs here at home.
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To those who say the challenge is not politically viable: I suggest they go before the American people and try to defend the status quo. Then bear witness to the people's appetite for change.
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I have long supported a sharp reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not what we earn.
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It is only a truly dysfunctional system that would buy into the perverse logic that the short-term answer to high gasoline prices is drilling for more oil ten years from now in areas that should be protected.
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So I ask you to join with me to call on every candidate, at every level, to accept this challenge – for America to be running on 100 percent zero-carbon electricity in 10 years. It's time for us to move beyond empty rhetoric. We need to act now.
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We're committed to changing not just light bulbs, but laws. And laws will only change with leadership.
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Our entire civilization depends upon us now embarking on a new journey of exploration and discovery. Our success depends on our willingness as a people to undertake this journey and to complete it within 10 years. Once again, we have an opportunity to take a giant leap for humankind.
Last night I posted a new gallery to epkphoto.com that contains photos from July 4th. I went with a group of friends to the National Mall downtown in Washington, DC. We sat near the Washington Monument, so enjoy this gallery of photos that you might call friends and fireworks.
For those interested, I am building a new server that will end up hosting epkphoto.com and many other services within the next couple months. I have already put together a decently powerful computer that is running CentOS 5 and allows for multiple virtual machines to run simultaneously. These virtual machines will replace the following existing hardware and server instances: my webcam server, my home web server, my home router/firewall server, and my virtualized web/email server currently hosted by RimuHosting. More info to come on this little project! I hope to share more details on my final hardware and software configuration.
As I parsed through my various news of the day, I ran across this cool description and video of a concept for Firefox on a mobile platform. The post is by Aza Raskin, the Head of User Experience at Mozilla Labs. As you saw in my last post, I'm excited to move to a more powerful pocket mobile device (like the iPhone), so I would love for Firefox to be a part of that. Watch the video…the concept is pretty interesting.
After a couple hours of politely arguing with multiple Sprint representatives a couple weeks ago, I was able to correct an error that extended my family's Sprint wireless contract for another year. So, our current family plan will expire on our three phones by the end of this month. That may mean I will be in the market for a new phone shortly. Thanks to my impeccable technology purchase timing, it just so happens that a newly revised iPhone (the iPhone 3G) will be available in just under than a month from now. Unfortunately, that would require my family to switch from Sprint to AT&T…so we'll see what happens.
Yet another year at RIT has come to an end. After an adventurous time storing furniture in Rochester and loading my car to its brim, my Dad and I are on our way back home to Virginia. Overall, my third year at RIT was an excellent one. Now that summer is about to begin, I am ramping up for a 10 week experience working for the FBI. In about a week, I will be moving again to Alexandria, VA. From there I will be able to commute to FBI headquarters in DC and the FBI Laboratory in Quantico. I am truly looking forward to this experience working for another goverment agency, which may eventually turn into a career.
I also have quite a few personal projects planned for the summer. I want to make a couple of my web development projects publicly accessible, do some more remote work for NASA and the RIT Honors Program, experiment with all sorts of things on my Linux servers, and better develop my photo printing skills and choice of inkjet papers.
As promised, I have implemented a new design on epkphoto.com! The home page is pretty much set for the time being, but many of the other pages have quirks that I will be ironing out over the next week or two. Going from a totally dark, black layout to this new bright, white layout comes with a lot of changes, so I appreciate your patience as I fix everything. Let me know what you think of the new look!
In a couple spare hours recently, I have been working on a total makeover of the visual presentation of this website, epkphoto.com. The new design is nearing completion, so I felt it may be a good idea to post this little warning before I make it live. So, in the next few days, don't be surprised if you come to epkphoto.com and the site looks totally different. This new design will include a white background, so that will likely be the most shocking aspect of the change. Most of the content will be in the same places, so don't worry about me dropping any sections or radically moving around pages. Think of this as a simple visual refresh :).
This past weekend, I upgraded the server that runs this website to the latest version of Ubuntu, aka 8.04 Hardy Heron. The upgrade was not without its flaws, but thanks to some significant planning and test upgrades on my part, I was able to pull it off with limited server downtime. This experience was much improved from my last upgrade about 6 months ago. Fortunately, the server is running smoothly now…you probably didn't even notice the change. In the larger scheme, though, it looks like Canonical, the folks behind Ubuntu, are pushing hard to prove that their Linux offering can hold rank with products like Red Hat Enterprise Linux and Novell's SUSE Linux Enterprise. That makes me happy because Ubuntu has been powering my public web and email server for more than one and a half years now, and I do not see that changing anytime soon.
