Steinhart Ocean-1 Vintage

New running shoes, or a gift certificate to the local CDA Fleet Feet for new running shoes.

Before my Creative Vision:M dies, an iPod Classic 160GB (even refurbished would be fine)

Another external USB hard drive or two, 500GB and up.

Hell, a new desktop PC would be nice, too.

And just for complete fun, a wi-fi iPad, or an Android based tablet, preferably.

Ran out of gas, no more for now.

My browser of choice for a while now has been Firefox. I used to use stuff like Networker, SlimBrowser and Maxthon which are all built upon the Internet Explorer engine and therefore are basically a different interface plopped on top of IE. The main reason I used them was for the tabbed browsing they offered that Internet Explorer (at the time) did not. However, due to stagnation of the browser engine and security concerns I moved to Firefox and haven’t looked back.

Part of the great thing about Firefox are it’s add-ons, of whcih I have several. Among my faves are: Adblock Plus, Evernote Web Clipper, FaviconizeTab, Tab Mix Plus and the must have Xmarks.

The one downside to Firefox for me is the longer its open the more memory it seems to chew up, so when things get sluggish it’s time to close down and re-open. Aside from Firefox the other way I would consider going is with Chrome, but I have so many add-ons (aside from the above) and Greasemonkey scripts that I’d be rebuilding from start and I just don’t have that kind of energy yet.

News Reader – Google Reader

What website doesn’t have an RSS feed these days? Not many for sure. With so many sites and so many feeds one needs a way to manage them and for me that way is Google Reader. I can organize my feeds by categories of my liking, star those I like or have extra interest in, share items, everything one would need. The mobile site is excellent on Android and there are a few Android apps that will sync with your feed and let you read off line (yes, i-Platforms, too).

But I Don’t Want To Read This Now – Instapaper

Every now and then you’ll come across an article that looks interesting and you want to read, but darn it, the thing is just too long for the time you have allotted to read your feed. What do you do if you want to read it later? Leave the window open for when you get to it? Bookmark it? Nah. Use Instapaper. Instapaper is a quick and easy to use site built specifically for storing things you want to read later. You add the bookmarklet to your favorites (after signing up for a free account) and when you come across something that you need to put off just click the link and like magic it’s saved to your list to read later.

The cool part is you don’t have to read it on your PC. If you have a Kindle you can set up to have your articles emailed to your device (remember that Amazon charges for this) or exported to a .mobi format that you can add manually. Instapaper has an iPhone app and a great option for Android is EverPaper. The EverPaper app integrates with your Android browser so you can send pages to Instapaper right from your phone, which is slick. And, if it is something worth keeping for later you can send it to Evernote straight from the EverPaper app (more on Evernote in a sec).

Notes and Such – Evernote

If you want to really organize your digital life seriously consider Evernote. Evernote is billed as a note taking tool, but it does so much more than you would imagine by reading that line. Evernote can be used to capture your own text notes, which are stored in user defined notebooks with user defined tags. Notes are search-able and you can save your search strings for quickly finding certain categories of notes. Evernote will also capture and save web pages or portions of web pages which is sweet if you come across a great article, say on ancient Mayan armpit hair weaving that you want to save. You can clip the article to your Evernote account denoting which notebook it should go in and what tags it should have, adding your own note along the way. Oh but it gets cooler. Upload a pdf or a photo and Evernote will perform OCR so that that any text inside the picture and the PDF is now searchable. How frickin’ sweet is that? Very, my friends.

I use Evernote all day long. I have notebooks for photography specific topics, watches, music, parenting, travel, recipes and even receipts; for any big purchase, or one where the item may be returnable, I take a pic of the receipt with my phone and send it to Evernote complete with the notebook and tags. Which leads me neatly into, yes, there are Evernote apps for the iPlatforms and Android. Slickness: you can do voice notes with your phone if you don’t have time to type. Ha! There is also a desktop app, which has better editing capabilities than the web app, but you have to perform syncs upon opening and closing to see all your notes. I only use that when I want to format the text in the note into a table. Evernote is free with a monthly upload limit in place, to expand that and upload multiple file types one can pay a monthly or yearly fee.

To-Dos – Todoist

We all have shit to do, face it. Remembering that shit is sometimes the hard part. I know it is for me, so I need help. For that help, I turn to Todoist. Todoist is a slick web-based to-do/task/project manager that lets you define your tasks into projects and sub-projects as needed. You can add contexts (those “@” things made popular by GTD like @home, @work), due dates and times, and priorities (premium features allow for alert reminders on due tasks, $3 a month).

Todoist has a slick view that puts a persistent toolbar type window in the bottom right hand corner of any browser window that when clicked it opens your tasks. It works just like Google Tasks in Gmail, which is where I park mine. Also similar to the Google version is the ability to take a Gmail and turn it into a task, can’t go wrong there. Once again, mobile is everything! mintTODO works great on the iPlatforms and for Android TodoistDroid (at $1.99) is the way to go.

Social – HootSuite

Forget actually going to Twitter or Facebook, who does that anymore? Well, lots of people, actually. Not me. Not anymore. Not since I found out about HootSuite. HootSuite is a social network manger that brings together your favorite (or not so favorite) site feeds into one place. It supports feeds from Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Ping.fm, MySpace, Foursquare and WordPress blogs. You create your own custom views of your feeds on tabs for easy viewing. For example, on my main tab I have my Twitter feed, then Facebook feed, my @ mentions from Twitter, then my favorite tweets. Another tab has all my Twitter list and a third my Watches in Movies feeds from Twitter and Facebook. You can post to any network right from the tool and post to multiple if you want. It has a built in URL shortener, statistics, and a whole lot of other stuff I haven’t even scratched at yet. The HootSute Firefox addon makes sending a hoot (I guess) from any page easy. My favorite part for Facebook is it strips out a lot of the garbage and leaves the status updates from friends and groups, which is nice.

Sadly, mobile is not one of HootSuite’s strong points, I’ve heard bad things about both the iPhone and Android apps.

That will wrap up this installment of my favorite web tools. Guess we’ll call this part one. There’s still photos, blogging and stuff to cover. More later!

(BTW, I’m doing this four months early to allow for time to shop, you can’t just spring this shit on people and expect them to drop everything last minute.)

(Another BTW, it’s a lot of camera gear. So there.)

(Before I forget, the Amazon links are for reference only, lots of places to buy this stuff, like Adorama, Amazon, Calumet, Ritz or J&R. Just so you are in the know.)

(Not that I really expect to get any of this, it’s as much as a “to buy” list for me as anything else. But hey, you never know, right? A guy can dream, can’t he?)

Tamron AF 70-200mm f/2.8 Di LD IF Macro Lens with Built in Motor for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras

Nikon 60mm f/2.8G ED AF-S Micro-Nikkor Lens for Nikon DSLR Cameras

Tamron AF 28-75mm f/2.8 SP XR ZL Di LD Aspherical (IF) with Built-In AF Motor for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras by Tamron

Nikon SB-900 AF Speedlight Flash for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras by Nikon

Nikon 35mm f/1.8G AF-S DX Lens for Nikon Digital SLR Cameras by Nikon

That’s a good start (and then some). As things come up I will probably update and add. Again, it’s a wish list, so I can put about anything I want on it and you just have to deal with that. Heh.

Nikon D90 w/ Nikon 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5
Exposure: 1/60
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 70mm
ISO Speed: 250
Flash: On, Nissin Di622 Speedlight, bounced off left wall

I first came across flickr photographer Olivia Bee thanks to an American Photo magazine from early last year. In the issue they highlighted a handful of talented and diverse photographers on flickr. What makes this photographer stand out is she’s only sixteen (maybe seventeen) years old and has talent far beyond her years. Her photostream is worth a view.

From Easter.

Day 11 – Miranda’s Horse (hand built by her Grandfather, my Pop, Hugh)

Day 12 – Reading

Day 13 – Flights of fancy

Day 14 – Bareback

Day 15 – Clean-Up (make-up)

Day 16 – Dinner (make-up)

Day 17 – Me

Day 18 – Whee

Day 19 – I’d like to buy a vowel

Day 20 – Playing Horsey

This time 50 photos, 50 days using the 50mm f/1.8. I started January 1st and will end…50 days after January 1st. Then I might try another shorter length project. We’ll see. Here’s the first eight. Already I have two days where I did make-up photos the next day.

Day 1 – The new book

Day 2 – Um, shouldn’t I be put away?

Day 3 – Camryn

Day 4 – Sharing her flowers

Day 5 – Tea time (make-up)

Day 6 – Wrist shot

Day 7 – Sunrise (make-up)

Day 8 – What’s happening on the other side?

December 19: Christmas with the Hitchcocks. As is our tradition, we do Christmas Eve with Mandy’s grandparents, however it does not always work out to be exactly Christmas Eve, as was the case this year. We went over early to spend the day with Betty and Bebe (Mandy’s grandparents), Cliff (her dad), and the Woodman clan (Tom, Christy, Hailey and Camryn). We had a great ham dinner (technically lunch since we at close to two) and then tore through presents. We visited and just hung out and enjoyed each others company. We departed around 5:00 PM and were then off to our company holiday party in Spokane while Miranda stayed with her cousins.

December 24: Christmas Eve at the Hitchcocks. Wait, we’re back here? Yup. The gifting of Christmas Eve was done early as the Woodmans had a scheduling conflict (which frequently happens this time of year) but we returned along with Cliff and his “gal” Mary Lou for another dinner, this time prime rib prepared by yours truly (although cooked by Betty). Again we got to hang out and visit and play cribbage and Uno. A truly fun time.

December 25th: Christmas Day Part 1: Christmas at Home. We woke (rather Miranda did) early Friday morning for our Christmas proper. We wore our Christmas pajamas (Mandy and Miranda in Mickey Mouse and me in Homer Simpson) and opened our stockings and then gifts. Miranda wasn’t quite into the ripping and tearing things open; she did a bit but for the most part let us tear into her gifts. Mandy was pleased to see her Back2Life machine and I was surprised to see a Kindle 2 (more on that when I get through the photos). It was a great morning followed by a big, homemade breakfast and then, packing. Wha-?

December 25th: Christmas Day Part 2: Christmas in Missoula. We packed up and loaded the truck and hit the road for Missoula, Montana, where we had a hotel suite waiting for us. We had made arrangements earlier in the month to meet my folks and brother and sister-in-law half-way (about) in Missoula for Christmas. With Mandy’s job it’s nearly impossible to get much (if any) time off around Christmas; December is the biggest month of our year and what time is available goes fast. On top of that, this year we just didn’t have any time off to take by then. Luther and Victoria have teachers time off and usually fly up from Atlanta to spend time in Monarch with the folks. To prevent any one group from having to travel the full distance, we met in Missoula instead.
We arrived early and checked in and settled into the suite. It had two bedrooms on either side (one with a king and the other two doubles) each with their own bathrooms. A smallish living room and kitchenette finished out the suite. It worked perfectly for the seven of us. After we were all there we spread out food everywhere (most of which Luther couldn’t eat) and we grazed most of the night. We did presents, naturally, in our fun slow paced way, watching each person open their present and enjoying the looks of surprise and pleasure on their face. We then watched the Hangover (Unrated) and stayed up too late. We had loads of fun.

December 26th: Post Christmas Drive. The next morning we all went out to eat breakfast together before we packed up to drive back to our homes. Mom and I had a circus of a time trying to get a luggage cart down to the first floor with the rocking horse Pop built Miranda. The cart had a wheel that wouldn’t turn and somehow we went up to the third floor rather than down to the lobby. We got a hell of a laugh out of that. Once loaded, though, it was time for the drive back. We said our goodbyes and went on our way, happy for our time together, however short.

December 27th: The final Christmas of the year was held at Mandy’s mom’s house where we again joined by the Woodman clan. A nice ham dinner (again at lunchtime) and presents of course followed. Miranda got to feed one of the horses a carrot and saw a deer as well.

All in all a successful Christmas season for us again this year. We were able to spend lots of time with our collective families, which at the end of the day is what it’s all about.