It seems that most of the time on my quest to find­ing excel­lent appli­ca­tions, my jour­ney to a prod­uct hap­pens upon chance. Case in point; while skim­ming through Nick Bradbury’s blog I found a track­back com­ment to an arti­cle deal­ing with soft­ware piracy.

The track­back com­ment described how one soft­ware devel­op­ment team had to uti­lize prod­uct activ­i­ta­tion to thwart the ongo­ing dillema of soft­ware piracy. That team was the guys at Con­stant Time and their prod­uct was the won­der­fully pol­ished appli­ca­tion Elec­tric Shoe­box.

Con­stant Time describes E-Shoebox as the “eas­i­est way to share your pho­tos online. Share pho­tos with friends right from your PC and broad­band con­nec­tion. You don’t need to deal with upload­ing pho­tos to online ser­vices, like Ofoto, with size lim­its and slow upload times or strug­gle with send­ing emails with large attachments…”

One of the best aspects of the soft­ware is the built-in image edit­ing capa­bil­i­ties. Within a few moments after import­ing my pic­tures into the soft­ware I noticed a few of my pho­tos (due to the lack of using the flash) were either too dark or for that mat­ter, too light. The process of tweak­ing pho­tos is sim­ple. You just adjust the bright­ness and con­strast slid­ers until you’re happy with the results.

Elec­tric Shoe­box is hands down a solid and pol­ished piece of soft­ware that already shows great potential.

Rat­ing:  

I?m typ­ing this entry from the hotel (free wire­less con­nec­tion), so please bear with any spelling mis­takes or incoherency.

Some things in life are bet­ter left unsaid, or for that mat­ter you should always keep at least one thing to your­self that no one knows. More or less, I?m refer­ring to not reveal­ing too much of your­self to a stranger.

You see, it all started after we (my brother-in-law and I) boarded the train for Chicago. The first part of the trip con­sisted of a bit of game­boy play­ing, mag­a­zine read­ing and the occas­sional nod off ? con­sid­er­ing the trip would result in a 12 hour trip. The sec­ond half of the trip, how­ever, was some­thing strange and at the same time intriguing.

On our train were these two women in their mid-twenties. They had spent the last 5 months vis­it­ing the ?states? and were eager to return to their home­land of Aus­tralia. They were con­vers­ing with the cou­ple in front of us, who looked to be in their late-50s. The cou­ple seemed to be curi­ous and were ask­ing sev­eral ques­tions in accor­danance with the Aus­tralians? trip.

After a cou­ple of hours of straight chit-chat, one of the Aus­tralian girls informs her Amer­i­can audi­ence that on their trip to Yel­low­stone they saw a weird-looking crea­ture. They described it as a cross between a cow and a deer and then after a few moments she paused and laughed to her­self say­ing, ?I sup­pose it was a Dow.? Of course, this wasn?t funny in the least but who­ever said writ­ers travel alot to obtain mate­r­ial for their lit­er­a­ture were correct.

”…too much infor­ma­tion, espe­cially given to strangers can result in dire con­se­quences.“

On the way to Glen­view, IL (which admit­tedly had a bet­ter train with awe­some hos­pi­tal­ity from the crew), we were just sit­ting there enjoy­ing the scenery when we noticed something.

A col­lege stu­dent was car­ry­ing on a con­ver­sa­tion with a stranger, reveal­ing every­thing about her­self ? includ­ing where she worked, her love life, her school, address and every­thing else that is stalker wor­thy. At which point my brother-in-law and I both looked at eachother and shook our heads. Some peo­ple should not be so naïve.

Granted, being naïve to a cer­tain extent is a part of our nature. We as humans are some­times pulled into some­thing, hook line and sinker, with­out think­ing twice of how we got there.

How­ever, I believe that some­where in the law of the land ? or soci­ety at that ? too much infor­ma­tion, espe­cially given to strangers can result in dire consequences.

Yet, it does make for good obser­va­tion material. 

Tonight I begin my trek to The Windy City to cel­e­brate my brother’s Naval Boot Camp graduation.

This will be my first trip on a train, let alone an Amtrak train. From those that I’ve talked to about train expe­ri­ences in gen­eral, they’ve all said the same thing — long, cold and quiet. From this bit of infor­ma­tion I can’t help but imag­ine that I’ll be trav­el­ing in an over­size sar­dine can.

I’ve equipped myself with my trusty Game­boy Advance (with The Leg­end of Zelda: Four Swords), an issue of Enter­tain­ment Weekly and a pil­low. Here’s hop­ing that the com­part­ment is a sleep­ing one because we won’t arrive in Chicago until 10:40am the next morn­ing — which means plenty of time for some mul­ti­player Zelda via the con­nec­tion cord.

Chicago, here I come. 

While brows­ing the ‘Under $15′ DVD table at the store a lady walks by and gasps. I watch as she pro­ceeds to the used DVD cart and hugs a used copy of Sea Bis­cuit. She flicks through the rest of the videos and then slides Sea Bisquit into the cart.

Gasps — as if Sea Bisquit is the final piece to her DVD collection.

New cat­e­gory, Wit­nessed, inspired by robotjohnny.com 

“Punc­tu­a­tion marks that look like smi­ley faces express hap­pi­ness on a new com­mu­ni­ca­tion tool known as “Inter­net.” The com­puter net­work is already being used by 15 mil­lion peo­ple world­wide — to chat or do impor­tant research. Com­mu­ni­ca­tion may be anony­mous and iso­lated, but there’s always some­one to talk to about sports, recipes or politics.”

A broad­cast orig­i­nally aired Octo­ber 8^th, 1993 describes a net­work of debates and open com­mu­ni­ca­tion called the “Inter­net” (aka: The WWW). Accord­ing to one user at the time, the Inter­net “has more soul than any human being I know!” and yet another user describes it as lib­erty and infor­ma­tion — “part of our every­day life”.

It’s inter­est­ing that much of these philoso­phies exist today.

Detail | http://tinyurl.com/2g2nd 

An arti­cle on Scrip­ty­god­dess describes how to imple­ment a ‘Quick and Easy Link Page’, a portable solu­tion pro­vided as an alter­na­tive to a Favorites or Book­marks folder, which is only stored remotely.

For my own ref­er­ence I’ve cre­ated kar­tooner tid­bits, essen­tially an easy access por­tal with a hodge podge of links I’ve found rang­ing from polit­i­cal to CSS references. 

The weather in New York has been a mixed bag.

After a few weeks of per­fect weather the snow has finally reared it’s ugly head. Last year, when I moved here I refused to drive think­ing that any­thing I would do would increase my chances of get­ting into an acci­dent. My wife drove me all over, since she had expe­ri­ence liv­ing in New York. I was a home­grown Cal­i­for­nia guy, used to the con­stant weather, smog and 2-hour com­mutes. When we first moved here I was a fish out of water placed into a Ziploc bag and stuck into the refridgerator.

This year, how­ever, I’ve put on my valiant shoes and started dri­ving in the win­ter. Going to work in the morn­ing has been an expe­ri­ence since the com­mute con­sists of a speedy 5 MPH, not to men­tion the count­less amounts of peo­ple who either drive too fast or drive too slow. Case in point; tonight while dri­ving on the main road we were stuck behind a man who couldn’t decide what lane he wanted to be in. After a few min­utes of swerv­ing side-to-side, we decided to pause for a moment and at that point he put his right-hand turn sig­nal on and con­tin­ued to turn in that direc­tion gradually.

As far as esti­mat­ing how fast I should drive I’m about in the mid­dle for the moment, try­ing to fig­ure out the right amount of speed to brake ratio. 

While watch­ing the tele­vi­sion tonight, the news­caster spoke of a local man who received a 300-year prison sen­tence. First of all, why does the court of law appoint a sen­tence that extends past the 100-year mark?

Do they believe this spe­cific pris­oner has taken a sip from the Well of Mor­tal­ity? Maybe Ponce De Leon needs bet­ter recog­ni­tion for his pro­posed Foun­tain of Youth.

It’s under­stand­able why a mass-murderer should receive a life sen­tence, but when they spec­ify the exact amount of years in mul­ti­ples of 100 it’s beyond me, even if the sen­tence is concurrent.