Finding time to family time...

"Family Time"....well, the lines are sorta blurry! I work from home, I have an office that is right next to my 3yo son's bedroom, right beside the family room (you might call it a lounge?) and generally within ALL the noise in the house, which with Mr. 3 .6 is quite a lot... He wants to be a drummer, he loves trucks and is the most epic at Dinosaur noises of any kid I've ever had sit on my shoulders at a Justine Clark show.. ever..

And this is Seb watching Justine get her Dino on... A quiet moment from him.. next frame though... well...

Anyways, sidetracked, my point is I work from home and it is VERY noisy sometimes... Skype calls with overseas clients... forget it... I need to run a disclaimer that says "a child may burst in at any moment to see who you are" ..and before you all comment (like nobody does!) "why don't you lock the door?" Well... one day when Seb REALLY wanted to come in, after I had to turn him around and send him out, he slammed my old victorian door so hard that the lock broke proper like... Yeah...

Don't get me wrong, there are GREAT parts to working from home, too... I mean, sure, I need to stay up late if I want to concentrate on an article or statistics or Farmville**

The great things are this... If I want to, at any point during the day, I can walk out and give my little man a cuddle, I can chat to my missus, I can sit outside and watch master 3 go around and around on his bike... I've got to learn to put the iPhone down more often and spend more time listening to Seb though... it will come! at least I'm aware... Oh, and I can make my own coffee

Get my coffee table here..

I have started looking passively at collaborative work spaces around the area... Any thoughts on the collaborative work space?

**if I ever mention Farmville again, and I'm serious... slap me

The Coffee situation...

Well "situation" is a bit dramatic really, isn't it... I don't have a coffee situation though some of you may say I do...

I've been wondering "why is coffee so expensive in Australia" and that thought coupled with "should I be buying locally to support local growers and a slowly dying market" has added up to a tiny bit of research... ongoing research... but research that start here. Tonight.

I thought I'd start by working out what I was paying, roughly but you know.. work it out.. So, 1kg of Coffee Supreme "Supreme Blend" beans costs me $40.00 (AUD) and that bag of beans lasts me almost invariably two weeks... I worked out (And I say roughly as I'm sure I missed a couple and a couple of them were consumed by Kate, too, so it works out even) that I made around 51 cups of coffee. Of those cups, I'd say about 10 contained milk, mostly though - this month - espresso. (looks down at stomach, waves)

I won't go down the machine depreciation, water, electricity, milk and time costs in this blog post (but will at some point) ....however, just based on beans alone, my coffees cost me around $0.78 each...

How much does your regular coffee "from the shop" cost you?  Answers below, please!

HTC Sensation - The Final Word

Well then, I've had this HTC Sensation from (Thanks) Telstra, for a little while and I'm about to have to give it back, sadly... (I never thought I'd say that)

I honestly didn't know what to expect, as I've had a HTC before (HD2 // Windows) and the experience was very very flawed (Hello, Windows!) I've had every model of iNQ phone (Brew Os with a terrible camera!) I've had almost every model of Blackberry up until the Storm and I've also had a LOT of the Sony Ericsson phones, which in their time, I think, had the best camera on the market...

So, I collect the Sensation and the first thing I notice when I take it from its little box (before the train had pulled out of Melbourne Central station) is the MASSIVE looking screen! It's big... It's sleek... It's big... (Did I mention big?.. More on that later)

Four point Three Inches to be precise... But it doesn't feel that big... Anyway, I've got this HTC Sensation because I use my phone a LOT for my work, and derivatives of my work.. I'm a 'social media type' which means, in short, that I manage communities, I write content, I post stuff, I Facebook, I Tweet, I Skype, I Flickr, I generate content in video and audio and image and I use my phone whilst out and about to do a lot of this -  the HTC could do all of this stuff with its little bitty hands tied firmly behind its sleek body... It's got its own little dual core 1.2ghz processor and is faster than the proverbial drain pipe bound feline... But, there's one thing the little gem can't do, with all its hard-core tech, with all its stunning good looks - it couldn't Instagram!

What the heck IS Instagram I hear you click... Well, it's a photo sharing application for iPhone, in short. It has cool filters and simple sharing that you set up once and can choose each time you take and upload a new picture where to share it to... For example, the picture above, I shared that on Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr and FourSquare.. I can also share it to Posterous, but I'm not using Posterous, currently... You can also configure to email the completed images directly from the app, so I have my mum's email in there and send her copies of the images via email... She likes that (I have a two year old who she likes to knit for etc etc)

So what? Well, that's what I use to share my day... I Tweet and so on, but with Instagram, I can send an image (as I'm a very visual person) and I can use the Instagram interface to be a Tweet, too... I can @ people, I can # it out if I like... It's all in there - and, if I want, I can even use a service like Blurb and make a book, directly form my Instagram account! (Starting to see why so many people are using it, yet?)

The Applications that make it all the more fun.

A phone is only as good as its next app, right? So, what apps did I choose for the HTC? Well, here's a list... I'll slap them down for you and let you know what I thought...

Photoshop ExpressFxCameraLittlePhotoRetroCamera (Thanks @MeansBlue) Lightbox PhotosMagicHour FreePudding Camera (I was hungry OK!) Another good option is Instasize

...and, yes as pointed out by  @_Disco // Disco stu from the internet // Vignette (The trial version) which has become my favourite in the shortest time...

disco-stu-from-the-internet

I thought about this, and I even started noting down what each app does.. Aside from Photoshop Express which is more aimed toward the "Crop, rotate, adjust color, and add artistic effects" market... Oh, wait, that's pretty much what they all do! Most of the camera apps that you see listed above do some pretty similar things - They use the onboard camera to take a photo, they allow you to apply many filters to that photo so that it looks either old, or vintage or retro or dark or vignetted or ...you see where I'm going with this - there are literally hundreds of filters across the various apps, most of them look pretty same same...

When it came down to it, the phone could do all that my iPhone could do, and, in most case it did those things easily as well as the iPhone, sometimes slightly better / faster, sometimes I wanted to smash it on the nearest rock.

Here's some of my favourite images from my time with the HTC Sensation

HTC-Sensation-Channel-Nine-Melbourne-Image

red-shoes-gtvone-htc-sensation-telstra

HTC-Sensation-Depth-of-Field-Camera-App-Telstra

Steve-Irwin-Likes-Coffee-HTC-Sensation-Telstra

Swan-Street-Richmond-Evening-Golden-Hour-HTC-Sensation-Telstra

Ask-Yourself-Why-Gtv-Nine-Sensation-HTC-Telstra

Rancilio-Coffee-Latte-HTC-Sensation-Gtvone-Telstra

That pretty much brings me to the end of my time with the HTC Sensation.... (Well, until @Telstra decide to send the boys around to pry it from my cold, dead hands!) But, before I go - just a shout out to the social media team at Telstra, they work 24hours a day and manage to keep a sense of humour despite a million "my internet doesn't work" complaints... (and my "I can see the tower, but ain't got no NextGen coverage...ugh (Which they speedily fixed, thanks) Here's that coffee I was talking about at 2:33am

lindy-telstra-social-media-team-coffee-gtvone

Jingle Bells, Batman smells...

It's getting closer, that fun time when we spend too much, eat too much and some of us even make resolutions we'll never keep despite trying... Do you even remember what yours was from last year? I want to see how many of you managed it... List your resolution (If it was "listable!") and let me know, did you keep it or not?... Best kept resolution wins an ExpoImaging - expoaperture2 depth of field guide... I was going to give it out with my newsletter (Coming later this week!) but I've not been able to write it as yet due to some training I'm doing. SO... Let me have it...

By the way, My resolution was to lose weight and stop spending money on Starbucks... I've lost weight, finally, and I make my coffee at home / work now - and very rarely have Starbucks, though, I did find a way to "Have a Starbucks" if one was required... I stole one of their mugs!

Happy Coffee and Cake - Please comment (even anonymously!) with your resolution and outcome!