This news is a couple weeks old, but Tony’s comment on my “I want new camera” post reminded me to share this with my loyal readership.  Aside from appearing to be a bit larger than I would like, the Nikon P6000 appears to cover most of the bases.

• 13.5 megapixel CCD (effective)
• 4x wide-angle zoom lens (28 - 112 mm equiv.) with optical stabilization
• 2.7″ LCD monitor (230,000 pixels)
• ISO 64 - 1600 at full resolution (3200 and 6400 at three megapixels)
• NRW RAW format
• Built-in GPS receiver records location (latitude and longitude for automatic geotagging)
• External flash and lens accessories
• Wired LAN port
• Face-priority AF
• D-Lighting

What this means to me is that the GPS camera market is starting to heat up, and my dream of several options to choose from by Christmas time appears to be coming true.  If they could take this camera, make it smaller, and sacrifice some of the features I don’t need like external flash and the excessive megapixels I think we’d have a winner.

A few choice photos from our camping trip to Letchworth State Park.

I was just cleaning up my blackberry and found a few cute pictures I thought I’d share.  They’re not great quality, but I find the mobile camera good for those “I should capture that moment” times when I don’t have the big camera.

Kids Skating

Butterfly Conservatory

Jaimee and Maggie Flying a Kite

Hiking the Escarpment with Daddy

Snail hunting

Katlyn playing baseball

Slightly overpowered fountain at Letchworth

The Definition of Jackass

Joel’s Sausagefest in Munich

I felt the need to sharpen up my development skills over the holiday, so I locked myself in a room for a couple of days with blatant disregard for my kids and put the coding hat on.  I’ve moved the blog back over to a server in my basement and am about to re-launch a photo album for friends and family to keep in touch with us.  It’s that photo album that’s kept me so busy learning this newfangled AJAX programming and hacking together a site that was a good learning experience (might even be useable).

So for those of you who already stumbled up on the new blog (I’m look at you Ted P) and for those of you who might be curious as to how I spend my free time, your answers will be revealed as I turn on new functions of the website over the next few days.  I know you’re bristling with anticipation.

Web addresses and RSS feeds will not change (and as a reminder, I moved the Media Center blog over to TheGreenButton.com several months ago, which is where it will stay from now on).

Happy New Blog!

One of my coworkers was passing through Zurich and stopped in at a battery and tire store.  The clerk recognized the Open Text logo on the shirt and asked if they knew me.  Apparently he was a reader of my blog.  Unfortunately my coworker didn’t get the name.

So I’m curious to know, if you’re out there and still reading the blog speak up so that I can put a name to this odd connection.

Jodie met someone the other day who lives in the new part of Milton.  There were somewhat shocking directions to get to her house…  once you get to Eager, you want to head for Cumming but if you get to Bonin’ you’ve gone too far.

Think I’m joking?  Here’s the Google Map of the area.

Some urban planner in Milton needs a serious cold shower.

I like Firefox, but I really want to like IE.  The ingredients are almost all there, but the killer missing feature for me has always been Adblock.  The ability to browse the internet free from annoying advertising is the primary reason that I stick with Firefox.

Well I think I’ll be uninstalling Firefox today, because I just found the free plugin that gives IE all of the things I love about Firefox including:

• The ability to block inline ads
• Search while you type
• A few other things that I don’t personally use like mouse gestures, super drag & drop, proxy switcher.

I just installed the plugin, and it looks promising so far.  If there are any major issues with it I’ll post them back here as well.  Let me know what you think!

I just returned from a week-long trip over to the UK, and I can sum up as a week of fortunate coincidences.  It was very much the opposite of my typical travel luck.

Lucky item #1:  I was able to use my aeroplan upgrade certificate on the way over to London on Saturday.  The seat was a good size with a full recline, and I comfortably took in the movies “Wild Hogs” and “The Time Machine” while arriving ahead of schedule to Heathrow.

Lucky item #2:  My brother in law Jason is backpacking in Europe and just happened to be in London for one night on the same night that I was there.  We shared a hotel room in downtown London right beside London Bridge.

Lucky item #3:  The Tour de France was starting in London on Sunday morning, and there was a ceremony over on London Bridge that we went to go see.  We were going to meet Tim Falk on the bridge (Tim’s living in the UK for a few months) and Tim happened to pick “near the band” as the spot to meet.  Turns out that they pulled the starting line out right in front of the band and started the race about 10 feet away from us.

Lucky item #4:  I was in London specifically for a management training course.  One night, we went offsite for a social activity and toured the city of Oxford and its many colleges and universities.  Jodie reminded me via email that my cousin was at Oxford, and luckily enough Meagan was watching her email box when I pinged her with a “I’m on a bus headed your way” message.  I snuck away from the group dinner for a bit and had about 30 minutes to sit down with Bruce and Meagan to chat over a pint of cider, which was a great surprise I think for all of us!

Lucky item #5:  I got an upgrade again on the way back, and spent 7.5 hours flying back in relative luxury.  I only had 2 SSWU certificates and I burned them all for this trip, but it was worth it.

Overall it was a fantastic trip.  The management training itself was something that I have been looking forward to since I joined the support department, and it delivered on my expectations.  I was able to connect to some new people and understand better how to work with some of my direct peers and colleagues.

Tim took me to the grocery store for some souvenir shopping (Katlyn wanted some mush peas) where we walked the aisles looking for the most unique items to bring home.  I came out with a bag full of things like canned lunch tongue, spotted dick, mushroom & bacon toast spread, grilled steak flavour big nuts, as well as some assorted cookies and treats.

Unfortunately I didn’t sleep well at all, and my body slipped more and more into exhaustion with each day that passed.  Apparently I can’t force my body to fall asleep early, so I was up every night til about 2am and up every morning at 7am for the start of class.  By the last day, I couldn’t eat anything with any confidence that it would stay down.

A new pizza place opened in Milton lately, and it reminded me of one of the most memorable phone numbers ever.  Pizzaville has been operating in Toronto for years, and their radio ads are, well, unique (you can listen to them here).  They are loaded with dry wit, but the tagline is what sticks:  Remember the number is NOT seven, free sex, free sex, free sex… it’s 736-3636.

We haven’t lived near a Pizzaville for almost 8 years now, but when they opened up a store in Milton I didn’t have to look up their number at all.

I wonder if women remember that number as well as men?

When it comes to my own industry, I tend to rely quite a bit on financial news by tracking their stocks.  In Enterprise Content Management, that means that I have traditionally kept my eye on OTEX, STEL, FILE, DCTM to see what the analysts have to say and what daily fluctuations are happening in the market.  Tracking the news via Google Finance and Yahoo Finance has become routine, and sitting in on the quarterly analyst calls for these companies has been even more interesting.
But since most of those companies have been gobbled up by larger entities, tracking the ECM market has become somewhat frustrating.  It’s nearly impossible to get any external information about my employer (Stellent) by watching the ORCL news.
So I find my patterns shifting:

• News and fluctuations regarding OTEX have far more weight now than in the past.  If you want to track an ECM company, this is pretty much the only one left of any size and influence to watch.
• Blogs on ECM have been more and more on my radar, but I find that they are specialized in one technology or business problem and don’t help me get a feel for the market.
• With the absence of ECM-specific stock analysts publishing information publicly I find I’m left to making more assumptions than I had potentially in the past about product performance.

I think I’m going to have to figure out how to get more in the loop on Gartner and Forrester research, because I know that they still keep active analysis of the overall market even now that companies have consolidated.