UB40 Concert
In celebration of our 11th anniversary, I took my wife to see UB40 last night (she loves them…last year went to Vegas to see them). We were expecting a lot of traffic getting to the venue but surprisingly there was none. Not only was UB40 playing but we got a nice little surprise in Maxi Priest being a part of the show.
The concert was at the Filene Center @ Wolftrap and it’s a nice venue for sitting outside and having a nice picnic and a few drinks. Of course, this is hurricane season so we had box seats which were pretty cool. The biggest shock came with finding out that Ali Campbell (the lead singer since the beginning) had left the band back in February. I guess my wife is not as big a fan as I thought she was ;) Still a great concert but the group’s sound was not quite what it used to be. Other news was that the bands MC’s visa was denied so he was unable to travel to the U.S. for the concert and as Robin Campbell put it "We can all sleep easier tonight knowing this" LOL 
What was really funny to see was the number of iPhones in the audience. After the lights went out, it was pretty easy to pick them out in the crowd especially the delayed shutter animation when taking pictures. I was really excited to finally be able to use the myLite app from doApps.com to help bring the band back on stage.
Not familiar with the myLite app for the iPhone? Check out the video below to see it in action.
The Storm Took Me Out
A surprise storm hit my house a few days ago. The storm came up and went away in about 15 minutes and the havoc it left was pretty bad. OK so not bad like my house was gone by surprise, more like ‘your internet is gone and I left a few other surprises for you to find’. The power didn’t even blink out and there was only a couple really close (wihtin half a mile) lightening strikes that made me jump. Didn’t seem like a big deal as this isn’t our first storm.
I checked my email on my phone as usual and then realized that I wasn’t flipping out of Edge and connecting to my WiFi. Thinking that maybe the modem just needed to be reset (as it seems to from time to time), I headed to the basement to get my house back online. OhNo…no lights flickering. No power to the unit, no big deal I say, storm must have tripped a breaker…nope. Seems as though the only item in my house not connected to a surge protector was my modem. Oh hum…no biggy, there’s a lot of places around my house offering up free WiFi (library, Panera) I did think about asking one of my neighbors to get access to their network for a few days so I could order a new modem. The biggest surprise came from my wife who seemed to be really upset that the internet was on the blink. She needed to get into her Facebook account.
I picked up a new modem (linksys cm100) from my local WalMart since they were $15 cheaper than any other big box store around. I could have ordered it online and saved a few more dollars but getting up and running was far more important.
Oh, so what was the other surprise left by the storm? A few days later I find that my stereo has been blown as well. It was connected to a surge protector but that never even tripped. I’m a little surprised since nothing else blew that was connected to the same strip. The protector is from Belkin and it seems like a fairly simple process of putting in a claim with them (if I can find my receipt for the darn thing). I fill out an online form and send them the claim and the surge protector. I’m gonna give it a try but not sure what they’ll do since the thing didn’t trip (ie. doesn’t seem to show any big power jumped through it).
Wordpress app for iPhone
I just downloaded the wordpress app for the iPhone thinking that “hey this will come in handy some day”. This post is written in the app and overall I’m pretty happy with it. Setup was easy and adding posts is a snap. The bad part is a you can see from my typos is the touch keyboard. I can only type in portrait mode and am spwnind more time correcting than typing. The built in spellcheck does ok but as you can we it doesn’t get everything. I’m thinking that if I could have at least types in landscape, like I can in the browser, then most of these typing issues would disappear. Now that I think about it, I can’t believe that I can’t just turn the phone and start typing. After all that has been a common complaint in the email app as well.
Maybe next time but for now I am happy just being able to simply shoot this post up into the ether. Do you use any kind of mobile app for blogging?
Time Management
If you’re like many who are now wondering where their time goes in a day, a week and even a month, then you know how hard it can be to keep track of the many tasks and projects and other little things you do that suck up your time. You use calendars and lists to help schedule your time in hopes of maximizing each day and making sure you accomplish tasks to achieve goals. Some days you go right through the list, other days it seems like there just isn’t enough time. I spend most of my day online, whether it be designing a site, working on a blog, reading other blogs and news sites …I am online 80% of my day. I can say that I have wondered off into some tangent in my browsing adventures. What I have been looking at are various ways of keeping track of time I spend on my computer in hoes of being more efficient. Rescuetime.com is free web based time management software and it is here to help you and me.
What does it do? Rescue Time’s software collects data on the different applications you use, sites you visit such as the ip address and time spent on application. A snap shot from the day doesn’t typically prove to be very useful. The big deal is the tracking over time. You can log into your free account from any computer and see charts and graphs displaying where your time is being spent. To get started, you download a tiny application that runs in the background to collect data that is transmitted to Rescue Time. What this does is give you a real picture of where you are spending your time. Once you start to see patterns you can set goals to help recapture some of the time that had otherwise been lost. By the way, their software is supported on Windows and Mac machines.