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My gen3 Ipod has served me well on many a long plane trip across the world or within Australia but after several years the battery has lost it lifespan. I had simply assumed it would spend the rest of it life in its dock until I came across this do-it-yourself battery placement kit at Jaycar.

The instructions were clear, read step 1 before step 2 . I almost stuffed up but laying on it back it is actually quite easy to pop open an ipod. For AU$30 my ipod has new life and is ready for our trip to Thailand.

Ok..couldn't help myself...we did a dash to the Gold Coast to grab me a new 70-200 f4L IS lens for the trip.

It's really light and really sharp.  Took a quick snap of the dog at ISO800 and still very sharp.  If you look really close you can see me in his eyeball

We just came back from a weekend in Canberra where i took the opportunity to take some pics in the little spare time we had.  As the Sunday was very grey it showed up lots of "spots" in the some of the pics.  Assumming we'd gotten fluff on the lens I gave them a good clean and then took a few test shots to discover the spots were on my sensor!!!!

So we opened up the camera used the "puffer" and gave it a good blow and wiped the visible dust with a cotton bug (yes I know it's not recommended). So took a few more test shots at F22 only to discover still had quite a few spots



So my dilemma is..We leave for Thailand on Friday.  Do i leave the spots as they are since they're pretty small and not really obvious except when you know they're there.  Or..do I take the camera to Canon and get them to give it a clean and hope they give it back to me before we leave. 

So what did i decide?  For those who know me will know i'm not the "luckiest" person..so was pretty much betting on Canon ending up with my camera for 3 weeks and if i try to fix it myself I'm likely to make it worse.  So now that there's only a few spots I took a few shots at f5.6, f8 which are the apetures i use more often.  At this apeture you really don't see the marks so I've decided to live with it till we get back and just be mindfull of taking landscapes at anything about f13 with very plain backgrounds.  Again, if it's grean and leafy/varied you don't see it.



So hopefully it won't ruin too many of my photos.  In a conscious effort to reduce the weight of my camera bag which at the moment is heavier than my clothes, I've decided to leave my external flash, it's batteries and battery charger at home.  Heaps more space now :)  Now to resist the tempation to buy a new lens..I've been eyeing off the 70-200 IS USL L F4...it'll fit really well now the flash is gone :)

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 For anyone who cares...we're off to Thailand for 2 weeks on Friday.  When and if we get to and internet cafe or two we'll be posting our adventrues here...so stay tuned.

Our itinery is posted earlier here.  If you're only interested in the holiday then best to just read this feed rather than the feed for the whole blog.

In preparation for our recent presentation on Virtual Earth I made a few "backup videos" of the demos we were going to show.  We've tried a few different screen capture tools before and most of them seemed to kill your pc so made the video pretty useles.

The 2 I experimented with and found pretty reasonable were:

• Wink - It's free and simple to use.  It can create PDF's or output the result to flash.
• Windows Media Encoder - It's free and simple to use.  It outputs (funnily enough) Windows Media files so good for upload to things like YouTube, SoapBox etc.

After playing with them a bit I ended up useing Windows Media Encoder.  You can capture whole screen, specific window, or an area of the screen.  You then pretty much hit play and stop.  It flashes a red border around the area you're capturing just to remind you and so you know it's recording.  It was super easy to use and didn't hog my computer resources. Afterwards you can use something like Movie Maker to add commentary, edit it etc.

We did our presentation of Virtual Earth for Scalable Applications last night.  John spoke tirelessly for 1.5 hours and we only had a few minor glitches and even had an internet connection so we didn't need the "backup video demos" we'd made just in case.

For anyone who missed the presentation of for those who attended and wanted to see the slides, code or demo again we have put all the content into an article here.

For those who attended, we'd appreciate any feedback (good, bad, indifferent) so we can refine this talk and know what to concentrate on for next time.

We just got back from Age of User Experience Brisbane session.  It was great to see an event in Brisbane.  Overall, I found the session disappointing..felt like it hadn't been properly prepared and parts of it seemed like it hadn't been run through at all before.  Maybe some of the presenters were nervous or hadn't had a good chance to go through what they wanted get across.

I was really interested in the Expression Web and Expression Blend sessions.  I totally missed most of the points being made in the Web session as it jumped all over the place...but it seemed like they've improved a lot of the CSS, HTML integration in Visual Studio to make it a bit easier if you prefer to drag and drop etc.

Expression Blend session was good and it looks like it has some very cool features and will be very useful etc. but a few important features are lacking atm (IMHO):

No integration with VSS / or TFS checkin policies - So you'd have to get a dev to check out files for you, or have access to directly checkin/out from VSS or also use Visual Studio.  Would work ok if you're using a source control system like SVN but a bit disappointing from a Microsoft product. No easy way to veryify /  help along the UAT stage.  There doesn't seem a good way to tell if what the designer/UI designer originally designed actually ended up in the solution.  There's now a "common language" so makes it easier for the "two sides" to communicate but seems to be still a case of manually checking every screen and user flow.  Changes from Blend etc. can "accidentally" remove develops work.  So the designer person doesn't like a button so they delete it and add a new one that does something slightly different....Doesn't tell them that the dev team already went and implemented a lot of functionality.  So it would appear you could easily be left with a whole pile of dead code. So to me it appears there that for now at least there will still be some sort of intermediate step when changes have to be made to existing forms etc....

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Just sitting here looking at my injuries from my "fun" activities for the week...and realised how we simply accept them and think no more of it.  If i got the same injuries at work...would I be so forgiving...don't think so...

I played soccer and got my toes stomped on with studs at least 2ce in that game.  It hurt, I expressed my pain and went on playing and now look at the big black bruise on my toe and think "that's why it hurt so much".  Now if I was at work and a co-worker stepped on my toe in a stilleto shoe, there's no way they'd be just walking off and me say..."ouch" and go back to work.

When I played volleyball this week I ended up getting a very nice egg on my head from being below a team-mate up at the net blocking, then coming down and smashing their elbow into my head, and apparantly kneeing me and stomping my foot.  I don't remember the other bits...was too busy trying not to pass out.  After that I was seeing green dots and it's been painful brushing my hair where the lump is.  After the injury i went into the hall to get some fresh air for about 5 mins and went back and played another couple of sets.  Now if I was at work, and a co-worker lifted something off the shelf and somehow managed to whack me that hard in the head with their elbow...I'm pretty sure I'd be going home to rest for the afternoon.

I'm sure in some environments any injury like that would involve workplace health and safety, doctor's certificates and probably compo.  Funny how we just accept it when it's for "fun" hey?

Our holiday plans so far....

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The other day I wrote about my new toy - LED tap light and promised some pics.  So here it is...isn't it cool .  Unfortunatly, it's probably a water wasting device...since you just look for an excuse to use the tap...but i guess eventually the novelty will wear off