Schmap is a free online travel guide various popular domestic and international destinations.  They source all their photos freely by canvassing sites like Flickr.  Typically I don’t license my images for free, but I’ve done once already with Schamp because I really like the idea of providing a free travel information.  Besides, it’s just plain cool to have my photo in an online travel guide!

A second photo of mine that I took during my Cirque de Soleil promotional shoot just got included in the Schmap guide for the East-side of Seattle.

This is the photo:

On your PC, you can see it in their guide for Redmond Town Center.  They also have an iPhone formatted version for your viewing pleasure.

And also for those that love Bert and Ernie:

(Credit goes to Emerson who actually showed this to me a few weeks ago, and to Paul for reminding how funny this actually was)

For those that want to try out macro photography but don’t have a dedicated lens, here’s a great tip to enable you to try it out with lens you probably already own:

Having tack sharp photos is even more important in macro photography because it’s much more obvious when something is in focus.  This means that both the subject and the camera have to remain completely still.   So if the trick shown in the video is something you want to pursue more seriously, but still want to save coin on buying a dedicated macro lens, you should really invest in the “reverse adapter” that is mentioned in the video.

Here’s a link to B&H Photo where you can find the perfect reverse adapter for your needs:

http://www.bhphotovideo.com/bnh/controller/home?O=search&A=search&Q=&ci=0&sb=ps&sq=desc&sortDrop=Relevance&ac=&bsi=&bhs=t&ci=3065&basicSubmit=Submit+Query

I’m still in the process of authoring a blog post on what it was like to move to an iPhone 3G after nearly 6 years of using Windows Mobile devices.  My most recent phone was a Motorola Q9H which was running Windows Mobile 6.0.

However, in the meantime, I’m getting super frustrated over the crazy bugs and problems I’ve been having with the iPhone so I wanted to spend a bit of time venting.  While Windows Mobile is not perfect by any means, the iPhone is definitely getting a lot of undue accolades in my opinion.  There are features and scnearios that work fantastically such as GPS integration into Google Maps, Yelp, etc, and not to mention the obviously superior web browsing experience.  However, the things that don’t work well, are absolutely horrible.

This writeup is in no way trying to compare Windows Mobile to the iPhone.  Instead, this is isolated feedback on the iPhone 3G.

In no particular order, here are my gripes:

• The UI and Application performance is horrible. There is unacceptable lag in so many scenarios, but the most glaring one is with the Contacts application.  Even after updating to the new 2.0.1 firmware, it can take up to 4 seconds for the Contacts application to load.
• Why does it have to “backup” my iPhone everytime I dock and sync with iTunes?  Even better, why isn’t this configurable?  This is made worse because these “backups” can take as long as an hour for me.
• When the first generation iPhone launched last year, Steve Jobs stated:

“…iPhone’s battery life is longer than any other ‘Smartphone’ and even longer than most MP3 players… We’ve also upgraded iPhone’s entire top surface from plastic to optical-quality glass for superior scratch resistance and clarity. There has never been a phone like iPhone, and we can’t wait to get this truly magical product into the hands of customers starting just 11 days from today.”

When the iPhone 3G launched this year, he said:

“If we compare this to WiFi, we’ll see 3G approaches WiFi speeds. We’re also really proud that we’re doing this with great battery life — standby time is 300 hours.  2G talk time is up from 8 hours to 10 hours. 3G talk time… other phones have 3 - 3.5 hours, we’ve managed 5 hours of 3G talk time, which is an industry-leading amount of time.”

I have no idea how the Apple Engineers have their phones configured, but there is not way I’m getting this type of battery life.  With 3G, push email, bluetooth and Wifi turned on, I can barely get through half the work day with a single charge.  I’ve had to resort to either 15 min email sync’ing on the “fetch” setting, bluetooth off and wifi selectively turned on.  I can now last a full day now, but as a contingency plan, I bought an iPhone 3G dock for my office.  Goodbye $40.

• I get continued errors about applications not being able to install or update, and when that happens I get obscenely useless errors messages. Here’s the latest gem I get from iTunes:

• iTunes still has horrible performance after all these years.  It doesn’t like the fact my music was on a network share, so much so, that there would be a noticeable lag between keystrokes in the search box.  Did I mention I have a gigabit ethernet network at home?
• I get random crashing from applications.  At first I thought this was the fault of the 3rd party application developers, but the biggest offender is Safari.  If Apple can’t even get it right, then how can 3rd party developers?  Something is amiss either in Apple’s hiring competency for developers or the iPhone OS is pure crap.  Either way, the end-user loses.
• Apple gets continually praised for making things “easy to use”, but the iPhone is an counter-example, and a big one at that.  There are weird UI inconsistency exist all over the place, one example is between SMS and Email.  For SMS, why is there no way to delete a message when you’re viewing it like there is with email?  You can only “clear” the message thread, but this leaves an entry in the SMS inbox.  To delete it you have to do it from the inbox.

This is all I can think of off the top of my head.  Stay tuned for a later post on specifically commenting on an enterprise user like myself going from a Windows Mobile device to an iPhone.  That’s where it will get interesting.

Last friday at the Sandpoint Naval Base in Magnuson part, me and Danny took some time to pose for a whack of shots with us stretching, jumping, doing the splits and doing headstands.  Danny stitched together the shots into a video:

I was a little surprised how easy the headstands came to me.. perhaps I will really start 365 one of these days and this can be a recurring theme