I lost my iPad last month: stuck it in the seat pocket on the plane coming back from NASA Tweetup and forgot it there, only realizing the loss well after we had disembarked. It’s gone now.
NASA Tweetup: Juno
In early August 2011 I attended a NASA Tweetup at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, for the launch of Juno, JPL’s new probe to Jupiter.
Upstate NY Adventures
We went up to the Albany, NY area at the end of July to see Amy’s cousin Jason get married, and also visit her grandma. Along the way we saw some exotic northern destinations like Schenectady, Niskayuna, Guilderland, and Rensselaer. Continue reading Upstate NY Adventures
Fourth of July 2011
We had a lazy, lazy Fourth of July and simply viewed fireworks from the condo parking garage rooftop. There was a lot going on, though, and I was able to get a decent timelapse of this show going on just a couple of miles away:
Set to tinny 1913 Sousa, as always.
Car
We got a car. Having a car is probably normal for a lot of you but it hasn’t always been for me. Continue reading Car
Visiting Charlottesville
We went to Charlottesville in April to see Amy’s friend Heidi get married. I rarely go south of the DC area and was interested in seeing that part of historic Virginia, so this was something of an adventure. Continue reading Visiting Charlottesville
Cherry Blossoms 2011
Full photoset is here: Cherry Blossoms 2011, part of the DC Cherry Blossoms Collection.
DC cherry blossom season was a bit unusual this year, with peak bloom starting unseasonably early in the last week of March, then going through a couple of mild freezes at the start of April which put the blossoms in a kind of stasis, prolonging the bloom for a bit. We just had to bundle up more for our yearly Hanami. Continue reading Cherry Blossoms 2011
iPhone
My gateway to iOS was a second-generation iPod Touch gifted to me by Mom for Christmas in 2009. For a while that served as my music player and secondary mobile device alongside the Nokia 5800 and later the HTC Magic, but more and more I found myself just wifi-tethering the iPod Touch to the phones to use for handheld computing, to the point that I decided to dispense with the unwieldiness of a double-device lifestyle and just get an iPhone. Continue reading iPhone
HTC Magic 32B AKA T-Mobile MyTouch
First off, I refuse to call it the “MyTouch.” Starting a proper noun with such a strong possessive pronoun just confuses the use of any article — or any other possessive pronouns — preceding the name. “A MyTouch.” “The MyTouch.” “My MyTouch.” “Your MyTouch.” Plus, it sounds like the setup for a bad “your mom” joke. No, I will refer to it at all times by its actual model name, the HTC Magic. I bought mine at a Costco cellphone stand for about $200 and a 2 year contract extension on my T-Mobile account. (This turned out to be a mistake, as the contract price dropped to $99 not long after.) Continue reading HTC Magic 32B AKA T-Mobile MyTouch
Nokia 5800
(I wrote this review years ago but forgot to finish it. Though hardly relevant these days, I am posting it backdated now just as a reminder of the earlier days of Nokia’s decline.)
By mid-2009, my old Nokia 6120c had descended into unusability with random shutdowns and blank-screen wakeups, so I decided it was time for a new phone. Out of continued brand loyalty I decided to try the Nokia 5800, purchased unlocked from Amazon for $339. (Update: down to $279 as of 2011.) Continue reading Nokia 5800