Ok so my loving girlfriend recently did an amazingly awesome thing and bought me an HTC Dream (more commonly known as the T-Mobile G1) for my birthday.  As a geek these kinds of things make your skin stand up on end, as well as bring about manic depression as you bunk work early during the week of it’s potential delivery, hoping to be at home when the item arrives.  Depression kicks in naturally as the item is more than likely late, leaving you devastated and without your new toy in hand.  Yup, while we geeks do grow up and become evil geniuses with the capacity to rule the world, when it comes to new toys we pretty much turn into mindless kids.

So, after a few bouts of depression and three missed deliveries, my new mobile was finally in my hands.  I had a guilty sense of delight watching that little green android glow on the screen as the device booted for the first time.  Actually, I still get that same warm feeling, not that I’d openly admit it to anybody.

Wait, why not an iPhone?  It has more applications, a smaller footprint, a higher resolution screen and supports 3G in Canada already!

Well, to sum it up:  I want to develop applications, and with Android being open source and Linux based I figured it would be the preferable development environment.  From a business perspective, if I ever wanted to sell said hypothetical application Android would be a better platform than Mac to sell on since it will inevitably reach a vastly larger audience than iPhone ever will.  (Do you see DR Congo getting iPhones anytime soon??).  Smells like 1984 all over again, except this time Google will take a turn kicking Apples butt for being ignorant.

Anyway, I actually bought my device on eBay from the US so I can’t buy paid applications right now.  Hopefully Rogers new addition of the G1 / G2 will change this though!  I was going to buy a US sim card to trick my device into thinking it was a US based device but perhaps I won’t have to anymore.

Note: I just want to mention here saying that this post was substantially longer as of yesterday, but with this news this morning, my whole blog post was pretty much nullified!  I was writing a beautifully informative article on getting my G1 working in Canada, but since the darn thing is coming here via Rogers next month anyway it doesn’t really matter!

Found this when reading reviews on the Firefox Tab Sidebar plugin.  Aligns well with what I’d love to see in a web browser.  Instatiatable web launchers (think OS X dock launchers) and built to maximize real estate.  Can’t wait!  I think Mozilla is aiming to get Firefox here in the nearish future??

I know this isn’t a professional blog, but it’s somewhat professional! First of all, this is just a quick post to show a bit of the Diwali show I went to last night at the University of Victoria. AWESOME show, and I’d love to go see more of this dancing. This video is just a snapshot of some of the action.

Second point, I’m posting this blog entry directly from flickr using service integration I’ve never seen before. Very cool (if it works) and a nice and easy way to make quick blog posts of your photos and videos.

There was an option under the sharing feature called ‘Blog It’ and it must have been put there from some flickr extension I installed on my wordpress blog perhaps? We’ll see if this works anyway! If it does, SO cool!

Ok, I’m no political guru, and I find it annoying to follow politics period.  Social media though is making this a lot easier.  I’m not sure if the parties were always setup in the key tools like Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook etc but they are for this election coming up and it makes it very easy to follow their updates.

Public Timeline Tweets Canada Election 2008

I whipped this pipe up this evening to track all of the tweets happened related to the election coming up this year.  I’m going to spend some time tonight trying to aggregate more election data in an easy to understand way.  There is loads of RSS links from the parties websites, and it would be nice to be able to follow some key items like election promises, commercials and other media.

Let me know what you think!

Here’s a video I made using a wicked cool SaaS animation studio called Fuzzwich.  Animations were all created using the minivid tool they provide, and then stitched together with iMovie on my Mac.  Music was borrowed from the Katamari Damacy OST (just so that attribution is properly given).

RMS Idol from llawliet on Vimeo.

On a side note, I CANNOT wait for this to be released in public beta!!!  It’s going to change the way we do presentations in business and how we create epidemically popular TV shows and movies!

Welcome to 2008.  Many people often use 2-3 different computers everyday.  Some use Mac’s, some use PC’s, some use a Mac at home and a PC at work, or a wide variety of other permutations.  The common factor being all of them can likely access the internet.  My question is, in the age of SOA, why are we still stuck with a plain Jane local installed browser application that carries nothing of itself online?

Continue reading Why don’t we have roaming profiles for Firefox?

Here’s a somewhat quick video blog showing some random thoughts on how things are beginning to shape up with mobile internet, and it’s impact on current technologies.

Last.fm and the mobile internet revolution video from llawliet on Vimeo.

If you don’t already know, I recently relocated to Victoria BC, from Halifax NS (literally from the east coast of Canada to the west coast).  The 4500km move has been comsuming most of my time these days, with me starting a new job and living in a new city etc.  This is why I haven’t really had time to post much about what’s really interesting me these days, like Amazon Web Services, OpenSpime and Metaverse technology.

What I will briefly mention though is my fairly positive experience with Socialtext wiki, and Clipperz. Continue reading Quick update on moi