Where is your Life?

Well it's over, sort of, anyway...

I haven't been posting a whole lot lately, on purpose.  I have been involved with a side project called LifeAware.  It is a mobile application that is designed to help people keep tabs on their busy lives.  It does a lot of very cool things.   You can read about it on the LifeAware blog and the website.

Here is a screen shot of the main screen on the phone:

 

 

 

 

 

 

I was invited to help out by some co-workers back in February; so, in the last 6 months we have been working like crazy with every free moment we had, to deliver this application.  LifeAware is one of the ADC Round 1 finalists, and the results just came out for round 2.   Unfortunately, we were not in the top 20 - you can see the list of all the finalists on Google's Code Page for Android, you can check us out as well.

We were definitely disappointed, but with the new Dream coming out soon, there is still work to be done....

Congratulations to all of the winners of  round 2.

-Aaron

Enough! Time to get a new one!

I think to some extent I had gotten tired of my Ford Taurus.  I bought it used at CarMax and had been relatively content with it.  Even though the air conditioning has broken every summer for the last year, ongoing alignment problems (in the 5 years I had it, I had gone through at least 3 sets of tires, 4 if you count the set that it came with).

When I bought the car it already had 24,000 miles on it.  When I traded it in today it had 97,000 miles on it.  The final straw was that at soccer practice last night it wouldn't start.  I had to try 3-4 times to get the car to start and keep running.  I'll be the first to admit I don't know a lot about cars, except that when the AC stops working, it doesn't start and it has almost 100,000 miles it's time to get a new one.

So that's what I did today.  Here is a picture of my new car...

And it is new, I test drove it with 5 miles on it.  So why new you ask?  Honda Civic's are crazy cars, it is about as expensive to buy a new one as it is a used one... I got this one for around $20,000 (still a lot of money) before my trade in.  If you go out to CarMax and try to find a low mileage Honda Civic you're going to pay that much anyway.  Like I said crazy...

So, after years of people telling me I should get a Honda, I finally did.  I will say the buying experience was one of the best I've ever had.  They offered us refreshments and they had Internet available for research (or goofing off), all in all it was a very nice experience.... 

Except that now I have a new monthly payment.... But I do have a dependable car that gets 35 miles to the gallon (on the highway).

-Aaron

Back on windows... Sort of

Today I just dropped a couple of hundred dollars on Windows Vista and Microsoft Office 2007.  I've spent all evening messing around VMWare fusion trying to get vista installed and now that it is done all I can say is... Wow.

I know I will lose points in the Mac World but I kind of missed it.  After working over a decade on just Windows (and Linux command line) it feels like coming home.  There are definitely things that work better on the Mac but my comfort level in Windows is about 1,000 times higher.

Vista does look pretty nice too... I'm thinking that VMWare running Vista may be the best way to  run windows.  I'll let you know how it goes but so far, it's pretty dang cool.

Oh yeah, it's awfully nice to have Windows Live Writer back.  If you haven't tried it it is the best Blog Writing tool available on any platform...

-Aaron