Devauld.ca

I'm caught up on my photo editing.  After being in BC for a wedding, I made time this afternoon (and most of the evening) to go through my photos and get some online.  The most notable set is the Ireland photos, from my trip out to Andy's wedding this summer.  I dutifully packed around my GPS as well, so each photo is tagged with where it was taken as can be seen by flickr's map.

I find myself thinking that I should write more stuff down.  The desire this website fills is to have a lasting memory of what was happening at certain points in my life.  It is no surprise that right now, I'm very busy.  I'll try to break down the highlights.

The van Zwaaij family and I went to Peru to finish off May.  The trip ran the spectrum from amazingly beautiful and relaxing to very sketchy and nerve wracking.  Over the time, I filled my Moleskine with notes, and took around 3200 pictures.  The set has been distilled down to a select flickr set.  I was also packing my GPS for the entire trip, and as a result was able to map the photos.  I also merged the track logs from the Inca trail and created a Google Earth KMZ file.  The trip was nice, although travelling outside of Lima means that Canadian Blood Services wants nothing to do with me for a whole year.

Another highlight of the last few months is the new addition to the household: Riley.  Our American Staffordshire Terrier is a cuddly one.  She is very content just being close to us, and quite often we indulge her by sitting on the floor so she can sit or sleep on our lap.  She's decently house broken, although she's good for an accident every couple of days.  Already she tipped the scale at 28 pounds, and judging from her paws she has more room to grow.

In other business news, the Beefyapps guys have released Version 1.1 of the iPhone Soundboard: BeefyBoard.  The upgrade to OS 3.0 was not without it's hangups, and we ended up re-writing the recording portion of the application.  We also added some community type features with ratings and comments, as well as the ability for a designer to link sound boards to skins.  We've ramped up on our next project, which is going to be a game, so stay tuned.

Finally, I'm off to Ireland on Thursday.  Andy and Sarah are getting hitched, and I'm making the voyage to be there.  The camera and kidneys will get a workout I'm sure.  Hopefully this trip won't take a month and a half to get the photography up.

I've been busy lately.  Despite having a dangerously tight schedule at my day job, Sanjeev and I joined forces with Mandrake Industries to create a Soundboard for the iPhone.  The idea was actually an offshoot of a test program that we wrote when determining the feasibility for another application.  After the intial spark, we created an application that is aimed to be social and funny; I'd argue that we didn't miss the mark.

I'm a big proponent of Partnership ventures, and this latest addition to my portfolio is no different.  When work once again reared it's ugly head and demanded more that expected, my partners carried on and continued improving the application in my absence, blogging the entire time.  We are now testing out our v1.1 release, which adds comments, ratings and the ability to match skins and boards together.

The next release of the soundboard will probably be the last for a while, as we have a collection of other application ideas brewing; furthermore, what the current application needs is more marketing, rather than more features.

I hope to get back into the groove of logging why adventures more frequently.  There is hope, as I'm focusing more on planing slack into my schedule.

I've been unusually busy recently. So busy in fact that I didn't even get a chance to look at the Photo Friday website until Monday. The challenge excited me, as the recent aquisistion of a 105 Macro meant that I would have some fresh photos to use for the challenge.