Heritage Dr. Pepper with Real Sugar and Vintage Design
Posted on January 30th, 2010Those that know me know that I love Dr. Pepper. If I ever needed a blood transfusion, you could literally pump me up full of Dr. Pepper and that would keep me alive. So while at Albertson’s tonight with my dad, I saw a bunch of vintage looking Pepsi products. Apparently they’ve released Pepsi, Mt. Dew, and Dr. Pepper products made with real sugar in some sort of “heritage” series with vintage designs on the packaging. Edit: I believe they are calling this “Throwback” or something along those lines.
I’m not an expert at soda but a lot of it today is made with high fructose corn syrup. But “back in the day”, soda was made with real sugar. Not sure which is worse for you, they might be equally as bad for you. But after a sip of Dr. Pepper with *real sugar* I could feel a slight kick – my mouth tingled. It was like a blast from the past although I never experienced growing up on soda with real sugar. I thought this was neat that Pepsi and Dr. Pepper are doing this and I am a huge fan of their vintage designs they are using with this heritage “series” of soda.
By the – Dr. Pepper is celebrating 125 years of awesomeness. Note to Dr. Pepper – PLEASE make your downloadable wallpapers in much higher desktop resolutions. 1024×768 just doesn’t cut it anymore.
My dad is pissed – he’s a Coke fan and has been writing to Coke telling them to use real sugar (and glass bottles) officially in the U.S. (instead of relying on imports) and he even received a response to one of his emails that is along the lines of “thanks for your idea but we get too many ideas”. He emailed them back tonight asking why they let Pepsi beat them to doing something cool in the soda market.
I took the above shot of the Heritage Dr. Pepper 12-pack packaging with my HTC HD2 and uploaded it to Flickr. Having a 5 megapixel camera in a mobile phone is absolutely awesome!
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Interesting discussion regarding using HTC Sense VS Not
Posted on January 25th, 2010Yesterday night, I posted a photo of my new HTC HD2 Windows Phone to Flickr. You’ll notice from the shot, I’ve turned off HTC Sense and gone back to the default UI seen in Windows Mobile 6.5 (Professional).
Nothing against HTC’s hard work at providing a fantastic looking UI to run in Windows Mobile but I find that the Sense UI is overly complicated and too “busy” for me. I feel like its information overload. I would much rather have a much simpler UI. I hate to use this as an example but if you look at the hottest phone on the market today in the eyes of consumers – the iPhone – it’s UI is very simple and easy to use. I bet if you gave a consumer a phone running HTC Sense, they might find it complicated too. But again, I applaud the hard work HTC has done in this space and look forward to seeing where they take it. They have done a lot of great work here.
There is an interesting discussion taking place within the comments of my Flickr photo about running with HTC Sense on versus not.
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Testing sonething out
Posted on January 23rd, 2010Just testing something out. Sorry for pointless post.
Check out gadgets I have, I want, and I had via my gdgt list
Posted on December 26th, 2009Peter Rojas and Ryan Block (of Engadget fame) created a website called gdgt which is literally a social networking website around gadgets you own.
Through gdgt, you can share lists of gadgets you currently have, gadgets you want, and gadgets you used to have. You can also contribute by adding reviews of gadgets or even adding new gadgets to the gdgt “network”. For you gadget geeks out there (such as myself), this site is a fantastic site to belong to. I encourage you to sign-up and give it a go and starting your own gdgt list.
You can check out my gdgt list here.
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Seesmic for Windows 0.5.2 released with bug fixes etc.
Posted on December 23rd, 2009Tonight, Seesmic released Seesmic for Windows 0.5.2. This updated build is primarily bug fixes. You can get the low-down on on what this release consists of (on top of application performance) here in their blog post on the Seesmic Blog.
Download: Seesmic for Windows 0.5.2
If you have Seesmic for Windows already installed, you can update it by clicking the download link above.
Seesmic announced that they are moving to the Windows Platform (essentially Seesmic for Windows is a “WPF app”) at PDC in November. You can read my blog post from The Windows Blog on Seesmic’s announcement and the first release of Seesmic for Windows.
Loic tells me that in early January, we can expect another release of Seesmic for Windows with new features and further improvements. I can’t wait!
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How I would run a cloud service
Posted on December 19th, 2009So Rackspace had troubles at one of its datacenters today. It took down a few major websites including TechCrunch. This got me thinking about how I would run a cloud service.
What I would do is have super high-end Internet pipes that would connect all my datacenters together. Each datacenter would have the exact same data. That means if one datacenter gets taken out, the others will be able to keep everything up. Kind of like server clustering. I would refer to this network of Internet pipes pumping huge amounts of bandwidth between all the datacenters as “SkyNet”. The service would be called “Brandon’s SkyNet”.
Who could resist a hot new cloud service called that? Eventually, “SkyNet” would be self-sustaining. Eventually, it could think and do whatever it wanted. I could then take lots of vacations while “SkyNet” did it’s thing. And no one’s blog hosted on “SkyNet” would ever go down!
Oh, wait…
Ok sarcasm aside, there has got to be a better way to do redundancy for a cloud service spanning multiple datacenters in different geological locations. Redundancy is key. If one datacenter goes down, something should kick in that keeps the services and websites up and running. While I was being funny about the whole “SkyNet” thing, I do think operating a service with datacenters as “nodes” isn’t such a bad idea. And when a note goes down, another one picks up the slack.
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Iron Man 2 Exclusive T-Shirt from Marvel.com
Posted on November 24th, 2009I seriously can’t wait for Iron Man 2. Marvel.com is running an exclusive t-shirt where on the front it shows Tony Stark’s “glowing repulsor” (in the first movie this was a mini “arc reactor” designed by Tony to keep shrapnel from his heart) and on the back it says “Iron Man 2”. You can order the shirt here.
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Testing Seadragon from Microsoft Live Labs
Posted on November 19th, 2009Thought I would give Seadragon a try. Seadragon is a technology from Microsoft Live Labs that lets you zoom in and pan around images from the Web. Images could have lots of text or just really big photos. This technology could be extremely useful in rendering large images with lots of text. Imagine a single image with the entire text of a book and using Seadragon to read that book.
In testing our Seadragon here, I uploaded a panoramic shot I took while visiting the U.S.S. Hornet in Oakland, CA this summer. This panoramic shot was created from a series of shots using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
Pretty damn cool.
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Interesting changes for FeedDemon, more to come?
Posted on November 2nd, 2009Steven Hodson did a interview recently with the creator of FeedDemon Nick Bradbury. In that interview, a few things of interest were revealed for the first time. Mainly, that Nick is no longer with NewsGator:
What we haven’t mentioned before (yes, you’re reading it here first) is that I’m no longer employed by NewsGator. FeedDemon remains a NewsGator-branded product, but I’m 100% in charge of it now, and I’m once again an indie developer. FeedDemon is my sole focus – and my sole source of income. Given that so many people find the idea of paying for software to be alien, having ads ensures that I can earn a living.
Those who have followed me for a while know I used to be a heavy FeedDemon user for a long time. However, because I use multiple PCs and need quick access to the same feeds and their read/unread states – I was forced to ditch FeedDemon as it just wasn’t cutting it. I kept getting into a state where some feeds were not updating weeks at a time and never knew it. I couldn’t tell what feeds I was missing out on. I ended up using Google Reader as many of my fellow geeks recommended that as the best route to take for an online RSS reader I can access anywhere.
Based off Steven’s interview today, I learned a few things about FeedDemon that I didn’t know since FeedDemon sort of fell off my radar. First off – FeedDemon is now ad-supported. Last time I used FeedDemon, it simply was free without ads. What do I think about this? Not sure yet. I’m currently giving FeedDemon 3.0 (the latest version out) a try. If I don’t like the ads, I can purchase a ad-free copy of FeedDemon for $14.95. Depending on the level of intrusion the ads have within the app, I may end up just paying the ad-free version. We’ll see. Secondly, FeedDemon no longer syncs with NewsGator Online since NewsGator killed the service. I knew they killed the service but did not know of the heavy effort on Nick’s part to integrate Google Reader sync into the heart of FeedDemon. My biggest concern about using FeedDemon is that its hard to tell what’ is updating and what hasn’t updated. When I was using it before, I had so many issues with “sync” and seeing the same feeds updated with the same content over and over again it just wasn’t worth it. Will it behave the same way with Google Reader sync?
After a few days with FeedDemon, I’ll post back how I feel about using the app again.
Read Steven’s above mentioned interview! Nick does hint out some interesting changes coming to FeedDemon. Could FeedDemon become more like a TweetDeck-like app? One thing I will say right off the bat – Nick, please give FeedDemon a much needed UI overhaul!
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Anybody got any WordPress CSS suggestions?
Posted on June 20th, 2009Anybody have any WordPress CSS suggestions? I’m having a bit of some difficulty with my site theme. In IE8, when navigating between blog posts and pages the site “jerks” quickly to the right then left when you go back to the homepage. Not sure what is causing this issue. Seems the site looks different in IE7 too but.
Any suggestions would be great! Thanks!