Today has been a pretty lucky day for myself.  Earlier today I won a bowling party at Frederick Lanes in Kitchener.  This was quite funny because I had just dropped my business card off 2 days earlier, after attending a free bowling party that a Twitter friend had won and invited me to.  This is a party with free bowling for up to 25 people, which is pretty awesome.  I think on any other day I would have been content with winning a bowling party and call it my lucky day.

As it turns out that was just the first thing I won.  At roughly 4pm I receive a direct message from @taptaptap telling me I won an iPad.

My first reaction to this was to source out whether this was in fact a scammer just trying to pull one over on me.  Checked the Twitter account, definitely legit.  I had entered the contest through TapTapTap to win an iPad. It was one of those follow this account, then tweet this message to win types of contests that are so popular on Twitter these days.  I entered once on the first day, then probably would have forgotten to enter any of the other days.  The contest was to promote the new Digg iPhone app that launched this week.

I’m not 100% sure whether it’s a case or some type of skin, but the iPad comes with a custom, individually numbered Colorware exterior which looks fantastic.  I’ve been a daily Digg user since 2005, so this will be quite the awesome item to own.

Once I got that DM from TapTapTap things just pretty much became a flurry of emails and activity.  They had announced that I was the first winner over Twitter, so basically my username got broadcast out to 70,000+ Twitter users.  At this point I started getting a deluge of congratulations from kindly Twitter users about my win, lots of friendly jibes about how jealous people were and how they were going to win one of the other 13 iPads that were up for grabs.  I started getting a deluge of notifications as people started following me on Twitter.  Up to this point I have roughly 40 new followers, which is pretty crazy.

I wrote a blog awhile back addressing some of the perceived shortcomings of the iPad, but never did I anticipate I’d actually end up getting one.  I kinda figured I’d wait until the second generation when the price dropped a bit.  As it is I’ve still got at least a month of painful waiting for my new iPad to arrive.  They told me it’ll be roughly 3-6 weeks after the promotion ends, which means since I won on day 1 it’ll be 5-8 weeks wait.  They have to wait to get the iPads from Apple, then they need time to do the customization, then send it out.

Photo credit to Erich Davies

On this past Saturday Corina, Erich and I made our way to the Personal Computing Museum in Brantford, Ontario where they were having an open house. The reason for the event was that Syd, the owner of the museum had written an application for a Commodore VIC-20, an almost 30 year old computer, to enable it to send status updates or tweets, to Twitter. Essentially it was bridging the gap between ancient and modern computing technologies. I took a video of the historic tweet on my iPhone. Not the greatest quality, but at least you can hear Syd give the explanation of the difficulties of being able to write such an application for such an old device.

This was the first time I’ve been to the PC Museum and I have to say I was quite impressed. They have a wide array of perfectly functional, classic computers that people are allowed to use. Many had classic games like Space Invaders, Arkanoid and even text based classics like Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I personally was fascinated with the back wall of the museum, which featured many of the original boxes from classic video game consoles and computers, and loads of old software boxes, cartridges, tapes and floppy disks for every sort of computer. It was pretty impressive. There was mention that they have a games night there twice a year, which I’d definitely be interested in checking out.

If you’d like to follow the Personal Computing Museum on Twitter, follow @vintagePC

This Halloween costume is one of the best I’ve ever seen. This guy fabricated an entire Tauntaun in painstaking detail for his costume. The part I find crazy is that he’s on at least a 2 foot high platform inside the costume.

I found this sweet little setup for getting Vonage to work on my iPhone the other day. I had looked into using Fring awhile back, which had the ability to add VoIP, but I discovered that it wouldn’t work with my Vonage Canada account. I have just a regular home phone setup with them and wasn’t interested in paying the $12 a month they wanted to charge for a SIP account.

Then I happened upon a forum thread on modmyi.com that covered exactly how to hook up a jailbroken iPhone to VoIP using an application called SIAX.

The issue with using your regular home account is that the password is encrypted, so you have to sort that out before setting anything up. Just copy and paste this URL into your browser and change the bolded parts accordingly.

https://im-config.vonagenetworks.net/config?&login=YOUR_VONAGE_USERNAME&password=YOUR_VONAGE_PASSWORD&type=1003

On that page you will find the ProxyUserPassword. Keep that info for later.

On the iPhone, download SIAX through the Cydia installer. Once installed, just press the accounts button and add a new SIP account and add this info.

Domain: a.vonim.com:10000
Username: YOUR_USER_NAME
Password: ENCRYPTED_PASSWORD

Then just turn the account to on and you should be able to make calls using your Vonage account, assuming you are within range of a Wi-Fi network. Given I barely use my 500 Vonage minutes in a month and I’m on pay as you go with my phone this is so awesome as it lets me use the minutes I pay for already anywhere I have Wi-Fi.

I finally got my 16GB Kingston Data Traveller flash drive from Future Shop last night. I ordered it on Christmas Eve from their website as soon as their Boxing Day sale started and had to wait 32 days for them to actually deliver something that they supposedly had 8000 of in-stock. So now that I actually have 16 pocketable gigabytes I figure I should put it to good use. I’m currently working on making up an ultimate flash drive full of portable apps. My plan is to have a full compliment of Mac and PC portable apps loaded up and ready to go.

Mozilla Firefox: Portable Edition, for Mac too
This is the biggest annoyance of using someone else’s computer, having to use their browser. So many people still use Internet Explorer 6 on their computers still, so having the ability to pop in my flash drive and run Firefox with my own settings and bookmarks is quite handy.

Adium Portable and Pidgin Portable
Being able to pop onto MSN with my preferred apps on a borrowed computer can be quite handy. Saves having to use a friend’s app, log them out and sign yourself in, then make sure you sign off after you’re done.

VLC Portable
No more searching for codecs and trying to get Quicktime or Windows Media Player to play a video off your drive.

You can also get portable versions of Adobe applications, OpenOffice and much more. It turns your flash drive into a swiss army knife of awesomeness. With the cost of flash memory anymore, it almost doesn’t make any sense not to do this. My 16GB drive was $22, that’s like 6 dvds worth of data that you can have hanging from your keyring.

I finally broke down and bought a 60GB Xbox 360 Pro. I got the last of the Boxing Day deals from Toys R Us on Friday and it arrived on Tuesday night. I had been mulling over getting an Apple TV to serve as the new front end to my entertainment setup to go with my HDTV I bought last year. I really hadn’t had anything actually HD setup to it aside from my original Xbox console which was capable of 720p, but did tend to choke on stuff that big. The tipping point that skewed things toward the 360 was simply the ability to play games on it when compared to the Apple TV.

So far I’m quite happy with the setup. I installed a program called Rivet, which allowed me to smoothly stream my media from my iMac over my wireless network. It was working in less then a minute, which definitely impressed me given some of the hassles that were entailed with getting XBMC shares working properly on my original Xbox.

I’m looking forward to using the movie rental service, though I am somewhat disappointed to find that the highly touted Netflix integration isn’t available in Canada and probably won’t be anytime soon. Since I had never used the service I wasn’t aware it didn’t even operate in Canada. Either way, the Xbox does have a bunch of movie rentals already, I guess time will tell whether it will update those movies very frequently now that Netflix is available.

Even though I only have the 2 pack in games, Kung Fu Panda and Lego Indiana Jones, I’m pretty happy with the console as a whole so far. The whole revamped 360 interface that launched recently is pretty slick, complete with the new Mii ripoff avatars. That was one of the first things I wanted to check out, so I setup one for myself and had Corina create one as well. Oddly, even though there were a lot more expressions available then are featured on the Wii, it was less customizable then Nintendo’s iconic characters because you couldn’t actually alter the placement and size of facial features. It’s a minor quibble, but I find my Mii looks more like me then my 360 Avatar does.

I’ve long been a hater when it comes to New Year’s resolutions. They just kinda state the obvious most of the time, I mean, how many people couldn’t stand to lose a few pounds or cut down on their personal vices. A new year really doesn’t change anything aside from having to buy a new calendar. But this year I decided to commit a few things to record with regard to some goals I had in mind, since I’m moving in a few months and my life will just generally be in a state of flux.

1. Set up the ultimate workspace
This is a big one for me. My current office is located in a basement, in a room mostly filled with boxed junk, with no windows. It just doesn’t make for a very conducive place to get stuff done. I have a big Ikea desk which I bought a cord management contraption for awhile back that never got installed, mainly because I didn’t want to tear apart my desk to sort it out. I wouldn’t mind reading up on some Feng Shui to help layout the office as well. I just want to have a much more inspiring workspace in general.

2. Redesign my blog
This design is absolutely ancient and I’ve wanted to redesign it for ages, but for one reason or another it hasn’t happened. I’ve already taken some strides toward getting this goal done so far this year. I’ve started the layout and graphical art that will appear on the site. I’m going to port the site over to WordPress and have started configuring that end of things. I find when I’m happy with my blog design I’m a lot more prolific and willing to put time into improving it.

3. Get some of my various web project ideas off the ground
I’ve had so many ideas and concepts for creating new websites, yet haven’t made any real headway on them in the last year. As I mentioned, my office isn’t the most inspiring place in the world, so I expect once the office is sufficiently pimped this will fall into place. I want to create sites that generate supplemental income, paying for themselves and thensome.

4. Become more engaged in online communities and forums
I used to frequent quite a few forums, but I’ve let much of that involvement lapse altogether. I’d like to get involved in a design forum as well as a good web design and development forum. Got any good suggestions? Leave a comment.

5. Read a few good books
I do a tonne of reading online, but haven’t actually picked up an actual book in ages. I love reading, so this is something that I’ve really missed doing. If any of the various e-readers on the market were cheaper I’d probably get one of those. They are just stupid expensive still.

6. Move away from physical to digital media
This is something I’ve long wanted to do. DVDs, CDs and whatever else just clutter up my life. I don’t plan on buying into Blu-Ray or anything else. It’s just digital content from here on out. No more burned CDs everywhere. Just flash drives and SD cards

Awhile back I wrote a blog about my loathing for the word “addicting”. My general feeling on the word is that it is not in fact a word at all and is simply a bastardization of the English language.

That was until tonight when I was reading a random article about Modern Anti-Semitism that a friend posted onto Twitter. The content of the article was less important to me then what I believe is the first instance I’ve ever run across that the word addicting is used properly.

It was, therefore, no transgression for Jewish tavern-keepers to sell alcohol to whoever wanted it, though some accused them of charging high prices and addicting people to alcohol – presumably by low prices.

While this doesn’t change my loathing for the word addicting, since I know it will very rarely, if ever be used in the proper context, it pleases me to know how the word should actually be used in a sentence.

I was in Waterloo this weekend and happened upon this store Delirium, which specializes in custom clothing and also features odd collectibles. Corina really wanted to check it out and dragged me along. I’m quite happy I went or else I wouldn’t have found this awesomeness. I don’t know about you, but when I discovered there was a bacon action figure there was no choice but to purchase this. Initially I was drawn to the bacon, but the fact I now own a french tofu action figure that has a monocle and a waxed mustache just amuses me to no end. These figures are made by Archie McPhee, which has a whole line of meat and bacon related products, which is both odd and awesome.

I know my blog has been on a weird bacon kick of late, I’ll try and stop, though I won’t make any guarantees. As far as foods go, bacon is among the more humourous foods, up there with mustard in my estimation.

I got a new camera, it’s a Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ2. I saw this camera last year and was totally enamoured with it the instant I picked it up. I found that since I bought a more high-end camera, stepping up from a small, point and shoot to a bigger bodied Kodak Z7590 I had just been left wanting on the whole thing. It made me realize I really needed 2 cameras. One higher end model for more robust shooting options. And another for just popping in my pocket for concerts and parties. I found so often I would leave my camera at home just because I couldn’t be arsed to carry it around with me. The thing that really won me with this camera is the 10x zoom in a very compact body. Since my Kodak has a mega zoom on it, I found I really didn’t want to go back to a 4x zoom like most point and shoot cameras have. This camera is a couple models old, so I was able to get a pretty good deal on it, picking it up brand new off of eBay for $165. I was even able to get rid of my old Kodak for $100 on Kijiji last weekend, which helped offset the cost even more. Corina bought a couple months ago a big bodied Lumix camera, so now we have the perfect 2 cameras for our needs. I’m quite pleased. I can’t wait to go to a couple concerts this summer and get some awesome pictures.