Enjoying an Apple iPod Nano

Once again, Santa was very good to me and brought me an extremely nice present, an iPod nano. This is my first mp3 player, and it is excellent. Throughout the years friends have told me about the excellence of Apple products, now I am finally experiencing it. The iPod nano was extremely easy to setup, itunes was simple to install, and both of them sync superbly. Buying media is a breeze, basically you setup an account and with a few clicks of the button, you can have something purchased. Besides handling music and media, it can store photos, has neat accessories such as a calendar, and can also play some basic games including my all time favorite Sonic the Hedgehog; this will definitely make those long nites in the lab pass by a lot faster. I am so impressed with this product, that I am considering buying an iMac as my next computer. If you are interested in purchasing a mp3/video player, you should definitely take a bite out of this Apple.

Google and Goggle

I was at a "tire store of Canada" today and I saw a package that I thought read clear google, upon a second look it was clear goggle, at this moment I realized that Google had taken over my life. First of all, I absolutely love gmail, if you haven't tried it, you should, it will change your life. Besides having a storage of 2.9 GB, which means you never have to delete your emails, you can access a wide range of Google products. Picassa is a versatile photo editor and is extremely user friendly, photos can be uploaded to the web, and these can be accessed through Gmail. Google Docs can also be accessed within Gmail, and consists of a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentations application. These three are all very basic, but they are done online as opposed to offline which eliminates those nasty file transfers between computers. I usually compose my documents using these three and "spice" them up with other applications. Google Calendar can also be used within Gmail, and is excellent for staying on top of one's busy life. This can be added to Google Desktop to easily see the reminders set for a particular day. Google has many other products (like Google Earth, totally amazing), you should definitely check them out at Google Products, Google is da bomb!!!

Drive-Thru

I can't believe its been over two months since my last blog, I'm a slacker. Anyways, as I was riding home from work on my bicycle this afternoon, I passed by a fast food place (beginning with the letter M and ending with D) and a coffee shop (first word begins with T, second with H), both of these had long lineups for the drive-thru. Two major things wrong with this practice are the burning of soon to be precious gasoline and the release of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Gasoline prices are constantly rising, and it is expected by 2012 that supplies will be short, why not save some gasoline and actually walk into the establishment. Earth's average temperature is increasing, which is linked to anthropogenic and natural causes, with increased carbon dioxide levels belonging to the former. This can be minimized by simple things like avoiding drive-thru lineups. Those of you that are pro drive-thru will argue that its faster to get drive thru than park your car, walk into the establishment, and get served. In some cases this is true, but when drive-thru lineups are long, it is actually faster to avoid drive-thru. About 2 weeks ago, I was in the town of Stephenville, NL, and I had seen a large lineup at a local coffee shop. Before the cars at the end of the drive-thru had been served, I had time to walk into the coffee shop, use the washroom, buy a coffee, and return to my car (a 50 mpg beast). Remember, ANTI DRIVE-THRU, ANTI DRIVE-THRU.

Toronto

Toronto is an amazing spot. The first thing that we noticed was that everyone had nice dress shoes, no one was wearing running shoes or hikers. Everyone was well dressed and very "in-style" and had extremely nice cellphones. Prior to the trip people had warned us of the unfriendly people in Toronto, as we discovered, this is definitely not the case. People were very friendly, we would ask people for directions, they would tell us and then have a chat. The weather was really nice, but the type of heat was sort of different. On Sunday, April 22nd, the temperature was 25oC, but it only felt like 15oC in Newfoundland. The air was really dry, therefore more water was evaporating from our bodies and thus keeping us cool, in Newfoundland evaporation rates are lower because of a higher humidity (moisture content), thus 25oC would feel warmer. The food in Toronto is superb, we ate some delicious Thai and had an excellent German sausage. We did the usually tourist things, and upon recommendation of a friendly Toronto person, we spent 2 hours on the street cars (which we were amazed by) and got to see part of the city. My favorite part of the trip was the MEC store, it was huge, prices were really good, and staff were friendly. Next post will be about our Kitchener-Waterloo experience!!

Raving about R.A.V.E.

I've been attending and then working at MUN for approximately 11 years now, and over this time span I have become interested in many things. My latest interest is the Corel product R.A.V.E. The letters in this acronym stand for Real Animated Vector Effects, and is a very useful piece of software for making animations. The interface is very similar to Corel Draw, which I am very familiar with and use for any drawings/figures required for the Science 1150/1151 lab manuals. I am just at the tutorial stage of this piece of software, but it appears very powerful. In a 10 minute tutorial I have made a logo of the planet earth with words rotating around it. These files can be exported as .swf files and are commonly found as flash animations on websites. Check out my website at http://sheldonhuelin.googlepages.com in the near future for some of these animations. Cheers to everyone out there!!!