Florida Supercon

I attended Florida Supercon which is an anime, comic book, blah blah blah geek show all rolled into one this year. It was held at the DoubleTree Miami Mart near the Miami Airport. My wife and I decided to see what it was all about since we're anime fans and unfortunately it was super lame.

The first part of the lameness started by paying $5.00 for parking. I already paid for tickets, the least the place could do was include the parking fee in the ticket price. The next part of the lameness came from the venue. The DoubleTree Miami Mart is not the best place to hold any convention. It looks run down and dirty and it just didn't seem right to hold a convention there. Most of the break out sessions weren't all that good either and the anime they were showing was only ok, nothing earth shattering and most of the anime didn't have ROBOTS!! I mean WTF??

There were a few bright spots. Some of the merchandise they were selling was pretty cool and they were selling robots! haha! There were lots of posters and artists and there were speakers that were pretty decent. The one that I went to was the one with Bruce Campbell who happens to be Sam on Burn Notice. He was really funny and answered a good amount of questions about his career and stuff about the show Burn Notice. There were also some pretty cool costumes too. There was one dude dressed as a Bob-omb and the costume was HUGE. I don't know how he was able to fit the thing in a car. There were the usual school girls and even wizards from Harry Potter but I didn't think they kinda belonged. Oh well. That was my first and last supercon. I'll stick to rock concerts for my entertainment. Watch for the blog post about my concert experience in West Palm this past week! Booyah!

iPhone 3GS

Today was a good day for Apple in the news. For the un-educated today was the start of Apple's World Wide Developer Conference or WWDC for all the tech geeks out there. The new specs for the iPhone came out today and I'll have to admit they do look sweet. It almost makes me want to get one.... but I'm sticking with my Treo Pro. I do like the fact that it has 32GB of storage space now which should leave lots of space for music and movies for Claire (I'm getting her an iPhone once her contract is up with Verizon).

There are tons of little improvements here and there like a compass, the ability to make videos and edit them right on the phone, and all apps can now be in landscape mode. I might be a little envious of Claire once she gets the phone but I'm happy with my choice and I also have my iPod Touch. What I don't agree with is the $10.00 they're going to charge me to upgrade my firmware. Thats just crap! Why should I have to pay for something for my iPod when everyone else with iPhones gets it for free? It's the same thing really except it doesn't have a phone component. I'll give my impressions on it once I get my hands on Claire's :) haha

Problems with Google Maps

I don't know what the deal is but there's something wrong with Google Maps on my Treo Pro. I was using it in Miami Beach yesterday to make sure I could find the Hotel Victor where my friend Ken was staying. I was able to put in the address just fine and everything but when I went to zoom in it just wouldn't render. That was very annoying because I needed to know how close I was to the hotel and how close I was to Mango's Tropical Cafe which is where we were going to eat dinner.

Google Maps never did render correctly yesterday so I had to switch to my backup which was Live Search (I expect MS to change this to BING or something in the near future now that they have their new search engine out). Live Search has its own quirks because it requires more clicks to get things done but it does the same functions as Google Maps. I did also have my GPS with me but thats a hassle to set up if I don't do it ahead of time. I hope that this was just a glitch with Google Maps since I use it for a lot of stuff when I'm trying to find places while I'm on the road. If that fails, I'll just switch between Google Maps and Live Search although I would like to only have to rely on one app to do everything I need. Now if they only made a free flight tracker in Live Search, I would be all set and ready to go for my travel needs.

Mango's Tropical Cafe

Tonight I went with my wife Claire to Mango's Tropical Cafe and with my friend Ken and his girlfriend Vera who are vacationing in Miami for the week. I've never been to this place before but its one of those "must see places in South Beach" so what better time to go than with my friend Ken who happens to be visiting.

The food wasn't bad and we were able to get in and get a table right away. They had a bar that the staff would dance on and they also had some bands playing as well. Most of the time it was a reggae band but they also had some other music playing while they were on break. I had a pretty good time going there and I wouldn't mind going again one day for the fun atmosphere and live music. Now if it only wasn't so far and difficult to park :P

Interweb Radio

Internet Radio seems to be exploding all of a sudden with some hot new services like Pandora and Last.FM being the new golden children. I've been on the internet for a while and I've been listening to internet radio on and off for about a dozen years or so but the latest apps that are on the web are totally mind blowing. I remember having to download Winamp just to listen to Shoutcast which streams radio stations that people create using the playlist feature to anyone who wanted to listen.

Pandora and Last.FM are super cool in that you can pick artists, genres, or songs and then have the website determine what you should listen to. This is pretty neato and so far I've been listening to Pandora but I've just discovered Last.FM which adds even more features and even has a plethora of music videos to watch too. I'm glad to see this stuff evolve and I hopefully it will lead me to add to my current collection of music that I have on my computer.

Hail to the interweb and all the goodness it brings to our lives!

My Treo Story

Just for fun I decided to take a picture of all the Treo's that I've had in my life so far. This chronicles about 5 years of my life living with a smartphone. Before that I was like everyone else and used a regular flip phone (I used to have an LG flip phone and a Motorola StarTAC).

The first and second phones (starting on the left) are my old school Palm OS based Treo's when I was with Verizon. Both of them ran the same version of the operating system, the only major difference was the hardware upgrade. Verizon served me well for 4.5 years and so did Palm OS but I always had problems with syncing my data and dealing with duplicate entries which was an annoyance. I also wasn't able to get my work email or updated calendar of my meetings so it was only used for personal stuff for the most part.

Enter the future, I left Verizon after over 10 years with them and went to AT&T and my Treo Pro (the black device on the right). This one is a Windows Mobile based device and so far I have no major complaints. There are things that my Palm OS Treo did better but for the most part its not too bad of a transition. I'm anticipating that I'll stay on the Treo Pro for at least the next two years until they mature Palm's new webOS thats coming out on the Pre. By that time I'll know if there is wide acceptance of the operating system or if I still need to go the Windows Mobile route. I'm hoping that Palm survives since in my opinion they make some great phones.

No Doubt and Paramore!

Wednesday evening I'm heading off to the No Doubt/Paramore concert with Claire up in West Palm Beach. Claire has seen No Doubt in concert before and she said they were awesome so we just had to go. Paramore is one of our new favorite bands so it was a double treat that they are the opening band for No Doubt.

I personally don't think I've been to a concert since I went to UMass and that was many years ago now. I don't even remember who played at that concert but at least it was free since I was still kinda sorta a student. I'm hoping that its not going to rain tomorrow night or else I'm going to have purchase some ponchos so we don't get totally soaked since its an outdoor concert arena.

WOOO!! And this weekend is Florida Supercon too, ahh what a sweet week.