I’ve been rather busy lately and there has been some pretty major changes in my life that have had me doing other things that just seemed more important than updating my website.

A few things that I’ve been up to or that have happened recently:

Yes, this is my backyard in DALLAS TX, if you can believe it!

• I am no longer in Mississippi! I’ve moved to McKinney, Texas which is just north of Dallas. Kim and I bought a wonderful new home and we’re working new jobs and trying to learn a whole new area – boy Dallas is large!
• Speaking of jobs, I am now working at Texas Instruments as consultant for their front end development team. What you see at ti.com is what I am doing. Specifically, I am responsible for site updates, interface elements and overall user experience. It’s quite challenging working on what is easily the largest website I’ve ever been involved with.
• We recently lost Amy, my middle-aged boxer which fell to a sudden heart attack. It has been very tough dealing with her loss but slowly we’re getting used to her not being with us anymore.
• I ended up winning photo of the week on the Canon Photography Forums and then ended up winning photo of the month which means it will be included as one of the photos in a calendar to be published at the end of this year. The photo that won was this one, which is one of my favorite photos.


Now in Texas - wow!

• Speaking of photos, my passion for photography has only grown recently and I am thrilled to have found numerous photo groups here in the Dallas area and I have been attending group events and meeting some wonderful fellow photographers. One of the great aspects of living in such a large metropolitan areas is that there are lots of like-minded people and many more resources available.
• Another photo related item is that I’ve finally launched my dedicated photography website at LambertPhotography.com! I am pretty pleased with how it turned out, but it has just launched and would love any feedback if you’ve got ideas, complaints, whatever, I’d love to hear them.

CSS Naked Day is a day where participating websites remove the css used on their website resulting in a display of semantic markup and proper use of (x)html to help promote web standards.

So you may notice my site missing graphics and not looking like its normal self, do not be alarmed.

For more information about CSS Naked Day, click here.

Apparently the drivers of the Google Street View™ vehicles are so busy twittering while carelessly careening down our roads that one of them tagged an innocent doe that darted across its path recently. The entire event was caught by the camera and became yet another laughable spectacle that can be found on Google Maps.

As this event surfaced on the Internet, Google quickly acted to remove the offending photos of the incident and its corporate spin doctors immediately went to work at downplaying the magnitude of this hit-and-run accident. Not only did they try to minimize the impact, they’re actually lying about the entire thing!

According to Wendy Wang, Google’s Street View Operations Manager the accident did not happen at all like the photos on their own website showed. Wendy said “As some people have noticed, one of our Street View cars hit a deer while driving on a rural road in upstate New York” and “The driver was understandably upset, and promptly stopped to alert the local police and the Street View team at Google”. As tragic and upsetting this sounds, Wendy further explained “The deer was able to move and had left the area by the time the police arrived“.

Apparently, Wendy is not looking at the same photos that you and I are seeing here on this website? Maybe the driver of the Google vehicle was so distraught that they just didn’t notice that the animal only moved from the street where it was run down, to the shoulder of the road where it rolled over and died with it’s legs sticking straight up into the air?

Don’t let Google get away with the travesty of back road justice. Let them know that you’ve seen the truth and that that you don’t condone the slaughter of innocent Bambi-like characters just so that they can easily map the route from your couch to the nearest Krispy Kreme. Tell Google that you’re mad as hell and you’re not going to take it anymore!

Yes, the new all-aluminum uni body constructed models are nice, but unfortunately, Apple has left the 17″ fans out in the cold on this. Even still, I know that the current specs available to Apple do not warrant a major enough upgrade for me.

So I’ve decided to forgo these models and get one of the very last models – a 17″ 2.6hz model with the 1920×1200 LED display. I plan on this holding me over until next year, when hopefully Apple will have the Nehalem-based quad-core versions available.

In the meantime, I stumbled across a few posts on various Apple-related forums that claimed it was possible to shoehorn up to 8GB of RAM into the last model (Santa Rosa chipset). Very eager to have more RAM than I currently have (2GB) I read with quite interest about others who has successfully gotten 6GB installed and running fine.

Yesterday, I purchased 6GB of RAM and plan on putting this into my new baby this weekend. I’ll report back with my progress and hopefully success.

Ah, the trials and tribulations of being best in class. As Apple has experienced today on the launch of the 3G iPhone, being on top brings endless scrutiny and any small foible or stumble is magnified greatly.

I was one of the brave souls who was actively searching for the iPhone 2.0 firmware updates early and in fact found it like thousands did, a day early. I installed the new software yesterday and began downloading software from the new App Store in iTunes. Everything was going swell; I had purchased a few different applications and everything was neatly downloaded to my phone via itunes and the install was quite painless. I even downloaded directly from the phone itself, later “pushing” the downloads from my iPhone back to iTunes without nary a problem.

This morning I tried to connect to iTunes again to download some more applications and found what most in the world found: Server connection could not be completed. It had finally happened. The illustrious iTunes Store had been brought to its knees by all of the adulation from Apple’s fan base and new customers. This is being heralded as a “Catastrophe”, “Disaster” and other choice terms usually reserved for Apple’s competitors such as Microsoft or RIM. But this time, the normally “can-do-no-wrong” Apple was being lambasted by all of the same media who usually fall over themselves to heap praise on the fruit-named wonder.

As I sat and pondered this scenario I discovered another flaw with the App Store and the blissful new software distribution model that has come from it. I tried to access the applications that I had downloaded hours before, only to find that none of the applications would load. The free applications load just fine, but the paid-for applications such as Super Monkey Ball and Texas Hold’em would fail to open each time. Apparently these game which are protected by Apple’s DRM must need to authenticate with Apple’s servers before they will be allowed to run.

So, there I sat with new applications that I’d paid good money for and now could not use because of network issues or because Apple’s servers were on fire, etc..

I did not know that this was the case and honestly I am now a bit leary of relying on applications bought from the new store in the future.

You can bet that once applications become runnable on hacked versions of the 2.0 firmware, I will once again actively seek these versions rather than the officially sanctioned Apple versions.