This sweet little girl is Heather Hutmacher, the oh-so-cute daughter of our dear friends Warren and Emily. I took a portrait of her in this outfit for Emily to give to Warren as a V-Day present. Sorry about the day-late-posting. More pics from the shoot are here.
So today will feature a fast update as I’ve been too darn busy with work to post any updates for some time now. Please check out these galleries, and I promise to be back soon with more and more frequent content posts.
In my most recent photo set, we headed out for a walk to the neighborhood playground with Sam in tow this past Sunday. More pictures here.
We hosted a small get-together for the Super Bowl, and Sam was gung-ho for all the action. He, like dad, is sad that we have at least another six months before we can watch football on the tube again. Click here for more photos.
On a recent sunny but chilly day, we headed to Zoo Atlanta with the Silvermans. Check out all the photos, especially this one of a lion’s breath visible as he roars from atop his habitat.
We also finally renewed our membership to the Georgia Aquarium. The pass now allows us to get in without a reservation, and is a big improvement over last year’s system. Sam and Amy have already gone several times during the day – perfect for the cold months here. Anyway, we had a great time on this visit – photos here.
Here’s a cute picture of Kate and Jay Sandhaus’ little guy, Alex. We got together for dinner a few weeks back at the local kid-friendly hangout Dakota Blue. Alex slept most of the time, but his parents were much more alert, even at the end of a long week on a Friday night. More pics here.
Finally, there is this picture from early January and a few others when Sam decided he wanted to play along with Daddy on the Xbox360. Smart little guy – I look forward to years of getting my butt kicked by his much better reflexes than my own!
Although it’s a somewhat soft launch today (shhh – don’t tell anybody), the Turner Broadcasting new venture I mentioned a few months ago when the splash page was posted has gone live today in all it’s UGC and comedic goodness. Get in there, check out the funny stuff (quite a bit NSFW), register and make some friends (I’m JoeBobATL). There are bits of coverage by members of the team (What do I know?), on Fark.com (one of the providers of content, and a great destination on it’s own) and by another one of the content providers, Olde English. Do check out this goofy woman-on-the-street vid (Making Friends by Chelsea Peretti) and the hilarious Sodom and Gomorrah by Brad Neely, pictured above in this screenshot from the launch. My team was involved in the advertising technology for this – and we’re pretty proud of how this came out. Share and Enjoy!
I think they’ve outdone themselves – the new iPhone 
(despite the Cisco product by the same name) looks absolutely killer – taking a completely fresh approach to the UI of the mobile phone, and creating a true mashup of relevant technologies. Apple has posted a great walkthrough of the features including their interesting approach to many of these features at http://apple.com/iphone/ – check it out.
Although I need to see it to really understand and confirm, Jobs keynote speech seemed to describe the new phone as less a touchscreen and more of a ‘proximity’ screen – where your gestures, not ham-handed mashing of buttons triggers responses. So from unlocking it (a side to side gesture over an on-screen ‘slider’) to zooming in on webpages or images by ‘pinching’ the area of interest, this sounds like an amazing step forward. It’s super slim – 11.6mm thick, about the width of the Uniball pen I carry around. It’s running some flavor of OSX, so development of applications will hopefully be straightforward. And it includes some very tight integration with Cingular (exclusive in the domestic market for some time to come) in regards to a visual form of voice mail – where each message can be accessed independently, rather than the typical wading through obscure menus. And it includes robust Wifi and Bluetooth 2.0, with some very smart widget integration from Google Maps (GPS of some sort active here), to Weather (location aware), to Stock Quotes. No RSS shown, but I suspect that’s probably not hard to pull off either. Anyway, at a price of most other ‘smartphones’ like by Verizon PPC6700, this is a strong contender. Too bad it doesn’t include an expansion card slot. My only hesitations here are that although it supports IMAP or POP email, getting to my corporate Exchange server is my top priority, as well as the fact that it’s on Cingular, when I’ve recently moved over to Verizon. I may still be drawn to try this out come June. Price is not bad either, at $499 for the 4gb or $599 for 8gb.
Also announced to day was the shipping date (February) and the final name (Apple TV) of the ITV product mentioned here previously. No big surprises there, although it’s now confirmed to include a hard drive (40gb) as well as 802.11n, the speediest of the current close-to-standard Wifi technologies. These features were both rumored over the last few months.
Not mentioned in the Stevenote was the addition of a new Airport Extreme Base Station, shaped to fit squarely below or above your brand-new Apple TV box. See picture at right. The unit is prices at $179, and includes a USB port for shared devices, as well as a hub to connect other Ethernet devices. Obviously, this is also an 802.11n device. Apple has a new feature built in here to provide extended network storage as well. You can connect an external USB hard drive to your network via the USB port, or attach a USB hub to connect multiple devices. Ideal for network-attached storage of large video, image or music libraries or simply for backups.