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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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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The History Channel’s UFO Hunters show is just too much
Posted on April 25th, 2009The History Channel has this show called UFO Hunters featuring 3 “investigators” taking on supposed UFO sightings they call “cases” and trying to prove the evidence associated with each case.
I’m certainly someone who believes there are UFOs. But I like the ground things based on scientific fact.
That’s why I love SciFi Channel’s Ghost Hunter series. In Ghost Hunters, Jason and Grant (who ran TAPS) try to “debunk” everything they possibly can with science and technology. Even if they discover something that is unexplainable they often are sometimes very hesitant to label a place as “haunted” but will admit they can’t explain some activity they have caught. For them, just because something is unexplainable at some location doesn’t mean that location is haunted. They want require really hard evidence.
With UFO Hunters, the biggest problem I have with the show is their “lead investigator” Bill Birnes (who is also the publisher of UFO Magazine). He apparently also runs The History Channel’s UFO Hunters Blog too.
Bill always has some far out explanation on every show that supposedly proves UFOs are real and extraterrestrials are involved. He never looks at the reasons that disprove anything – he always tries to do everything he can with any explanation possible to prove the whole UFO/extraterrestrial connection. Even his colleagues like Pat and Kevin sometimes appear frustrated on the show because no matter what, Bill has a explanation even if facts say otherwise. In one episode of the show Bill says he considers pilots reliable sources because “they are pilots and are trained to report strange things they see”. Uh, that doesn’t mean what they are reporting is reliable. Give me a break. Ultimately I believe Bill hurts the whole UFO thing with his attitude of 100% acceptance UFOs are real and are from extraterrestrial origin with any fact he is represented with. He’s not credible.
I will admit, they have shown off some interesting evidence on UFO Hunters that really make you go “hmmm” and really think about possibilities. But it’s not enough to make the kind of statements Bill is making. While Kevin and Pat express their skepticism on many of the cases against the crap that Bill says – it’s just too much crap coming from Bill that hurts this show.
I want them to take people’s reports of UFOs and do shows where they say “these are the reasons why this isn’t a UFO”. Disprove things.
Oh and is there a reason why Bill can’t take off his sunglasses on the show?
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