There’s a thick (.5″ in many places) blanket of ice covering everything in Boerne right now and the sleet has hardly stopped all day. The local news stations have of course all given this storm wonderfully descriptive names like “Winter Blast” and “Winter Wallop” (my personal favorite). We are supposed to get snow later this afternoon.

Stay warm.

Update: We never received more than about 10 minutes of snow but we did loose power yesterday for a little over 9 hours. We did have a full inch of ice everywhere. My new workshop was completely sealed shut as were the cars. Check out our pictures.

First a little disclosure. I don’t currently own a Mac. It’s not that I don’t want one, it’s just that until now a few key tools I need at work weren’t available for OSX (VMWare for example).

That being said, I can’t help but drool over the iPhone. The touch screen looks beautiful and the fact that it’s backed by a OSX sounds very powerful. From a developers point of view this is very compelling to me as Palm development is, well, nasty. I love that there are hundreds of good Palm apps available for download or pay but OSX is just such a powerful platform that I would much rather do OSX development than Palm development. J2ME is fun but I’ve only tinkered with it. It will be very interesting to see how Apple will release the development tools.
Here’s the features that I really want to find a little more about before I think of dropping $500 on one though.

1. Processor. Will it be truly fast enough? One problem with Treos and many other smart phones is that the processor is just fast enough for normal use and dog slow when you need a little more juice.
2. Battery life. Really, spouting stats at Mac World based on lab usage and real world stats are 2 completely different things.
3. Voice quality. Again, the thing that makes people the most happy with a cell phone, first and foremost is the quality of the voice connection. Do calls drop? Is the call clear and free of distortion? I think this hurt the Blackberry early on.

The only other thing that would hold be back would be Cingular. Sorry, been there, dropped them. Their coverage in my neighborhood was horrible. I literally had to stand on my back porch to make a call. So we went to AT&T with not much more luck. I have been very happy with Sprint and it will take a lot to convince me to go back to Cingular.

The bottom line is that I really want one, but I can wait until revision 2 comes out. Hopefully by then it’ll be opened up to more carriers and a few of the early kinks will be ironed out. Until then I’ll just be drooling.

(Yes I’m a week late in posting this, been a litttle busy.)

It’s hard to believe that another year has come and gone. Ben is about to turn 4 in a few months and is constantly amazing us. Amy’s business is growing so much we are converting the garage into her full time studio and office. I had a workshop built in the back yard. We took a few vacations to the coast, the Davis Mountains, Ft Worth
This year we have lots of big projects around the house. Painting the house, a deck, the garage studio, new phone system for Shutter-Happy etc. Per Paula’s suggestion I made a list the other day and was a little overwhelmed as it kept getting longer and longer and longer.
At work I moved to a different project with lots of new challenges and learning opportunities. On a sad note though a good friend is leaving our department. Heather, we’re going to miss you and Darrell (and the cookie crack) tons. Rackspace is growing by leaps and bounds though. I am in a very small minority that has been at the company over 5 years (I hit 6 back in December). Despite the growing pains this is still a kick a$$ place to work.

This year my cousin Seth is getting married, Amy has a couple of photography conferences scheduled and we are going to finally make it up to Chicago to visit Myk.
2007 should be a good year. Bring it on!