It looks like I am going to get to go to WWDC again this year.

It happens about a month after my daughter is born, but I already asked my wife and she wants me to go. I think it should be OK since my wife’s mom should be in Orlando for most of the summer.

Looking at the sessions, I think I am actually looking forward to the iPhone sessions this year. Last year since it was my first WWDC, I went to a number of the Mac sessions. However, I did get some cross-training because a number of the sessions were both Mac and iPhone.

This weekend I was actually bored and so I decided to fire up a couple WWDC 2008 session videos that I downloaded last year but never watched. I have watched about 6 of them, but I have 4 left to watch. One of them was about scripting your application. Because of the session video, I decided to try and implement some new functionality that we are trying to add to our application.

I need to talk to my manager tomorrow to see if I should book the hotel. Last year it was difficult to find a reasonably priced hotel room.

It took me about 4 nights, but below is the 3D star puzzle that my wife got me all the way back at Christmas.

It is a Ravensburger puzzle that my wife found at a puzzle store that is now unfortunately out of business.

Today I deactivated my Facebook account. I did it for a number of reasons.

Ever since I joined I was always kind of leery that the information that I posted there didn't seem like it was mine. I didn't want to get to the point where I was posting pictures of my daughter with some entity besides me owning the rights to distribute her pictures any way that they choose.

I was also getting to the point where the service had run its course. Yeah it was fun to post status messages and links there, but I can do the same thing at Twitter in an easier UI. I think the quizzes and applications also get kind of grating after a while.

I hope I don't upset some of my friends from high school and college, but I also went through both a friend purge and a wall purge before I deactivated my account. I did that as a security measure on the off chance one of my old friends tried to contact me via the wall and my work colleagues potentially see all this stuff I'd never respond to.

I was also getting to the phase where I had already met up with most if not all of my close acquaintances over the years. While it was nice to see what the friends were up to, I know that I'll never reconnect with many of them in real life. Our circles just go in different paths now. I know it is rather harsh and maybe even egocentric, but the people who took the time to get my email address are the ones that I will continue a relationship with.

Another thing, the recent friend requests were from people I either never talked to in high school or college, or that I maybe had one conversation with. Those people I never had a need to add. Facebook isn't a faux friend race.

I probably would have done a full deletion of my account if I didn't have some past work colleagues still online. If one day I need to contact them, I'll probably reactivate my account. In the meantime I am glad to have broken a tie to something that was taking much more time than it should have. More time and effort to put to my daughter when she comes. :)

The other movie we got this weekend was Seven Pounds with Will Smith and Rosario Dawson.

I wasn't always the biggest fan of Will Smith until I got married. I thought he was too cocky and arrogant in Independence Day and that impression stuck with me for a really long time. And then I saw both Hitch and Jersey Girl and it totally changed my opinion of him.

Rosario Dawson is a different story. I have always liked every movie that I have seen her in. She left an indelible impression on me in 25th Hour and brought the necessary humanity to Clerks II, but at the same time could "roll with the boys".

This movie while told out of sequence still had that spark of interest for me. I unfortunately figured out the main twist at the very early part of the movie. Maybe I remember something from the trailer, but the whole medical thing was just way too transparent.

I am always a fan of redemption stories though. This one didn't disappoint. I was worried about the "Happy Hollywood Ending" in the last 20 minutes, but the people behind the film had the courage enough to not change it so everyone lives happily ever after.

It was a good weekend for movie watching. Along with Sunshine, I give this movie 4 out of 5 stars. I'd watch it again.

Tonight I watched the movie Sunshine (2007). I picked it up because I like Cillian Murphy in a couple other movies.

The basic plot is that the sun is dying and a group of 7 astronauts have to lob a nuclear weapon the size of Manhattan into the sun to re-ignite it to full brightness. Preposterous sounding I know, but after watching the movie, there is some back story that isn't presented in the movie. Apparently there is a Q-ball in the sun, that must be destroyed. The nuclear device is an experimental weapon where the mass of the moon is contained in the size of Manhattan. It is still a rather preposterous concept, but at least they tried.

The ship was named Icarus II and is a character itself in the movie. The first Icarus was also tasked with the same mission, but was mysteriously lost 7 years earlier. Why I think the ship is a character as well is because I was trying to figure out the ship's form and what things did on the structure. As things get worse throughout the movie, the ship also gets worse.

The movie itself was pretty interesting and gripping. I thought it was going to go to the hackneyed places that most modern sci-fi movies try to go, but it didn't really do that.

I give it 4 out of 5 stars. I'd watch it again.

I have been in a Depeche Mode mood for most of the day.

It started when I fired up iTunes to organize some audio books this morning. Usually when I start iTunes I go straight to my "Top Rated" playlist and bounce around to songs that I haven't heard by sorting the list by Last Played. It usually finds some stuff I haven't heard in a few months. Today I just so happened to have two Depeche Mode songs play back to back and caused me to switch over to my Depeche Mode-only playlist. I pretty much have every CD before Violator, so my playlist goes on for hours.

I still remember the first time that I heard Violator when I was in college. My freshman year roommate, Greg, was a huge Depeche Mode fan. Interestingly, I really thought it was crap music at first. The early 90s was all about Guns N' Roses and Nirvana for me. And then one night, Greg and I had some drinks and the music really started clicking for me. I first bought Violator, and then 101, and then just continued working my way back.

While their newer stuff doesn't seem to have the same edge as it did almost 20 years ago, I still have a listen. DMs new album comes out April 21st, so I'll have to check it out.

I was pretty skeptical that it would work, but Skype runs pretty great on the iPhone.

Today when we were out and about we went to a mall that had a Barnes and Noble / Starbucks. We jumped on their wi-fi connection, logged into Skype and my wife was able to have about a 10 minute conversation with her Mom in Europe. All free.

The app looks great too. Calling looks just like making a call on the phone. It is a real nice UI.

I am a couple days late with this one, but on Sunday we watched Australia.

It was a long movie. My wife made it about an hour before she got bored, but I made it all the way to the end, fast-forwarding a couple of times through some of the slow parts.

I thought Hugh Jackman was good in it, but I am really not so sure about Nicole Kidman. She doesn't seem to have the same fire as she did in her earlier films like Dead Calm. Maybe I wrongly hold up actresses to a different standard than men, but it almost felt like she dialed in the role. Maybe she just makes the acting look easy.

The plot was rather mildly interesting in parts. I thought the droving was good (but poorly CGI-d). The landscape shots were awesome. The way the movie handled the aboriginal persecution was also interesting.

There were just some bits that were really slow, like the setup to the Japanese attack of the island. By this point the movie has been already going 2 hours and they had to do all of this story setup on how Nicole Kidman's character now works in the communication department. Obviously that was necessary for a plot point, the movie just seemed to drag.

I am also tired of the movies where the guy does something really selfish or stupid, splits up the relationship, and then has to fight his way back to his woman and in the process saving her life. That plotline is so hackneyed and predictable it also causes me to fast forward. Don't get me wrong, guys do stupid stuff to women all the time, but the way it typically plays out on screen is so formulaic that it feels like a time waster. I know that the script writer has to do it to try and make it suspenseful, but it has been overused so much that it really takes me out of the drama. One of two things will inevitably happen:

1. Guy rescues girl, happy ending
2. Guy rescues girl, he dies just as he saves her

It is rare that the girl ever dies. The cynic that I am, I guess that wouldn't be romantic enough.

I give it 2 stars out of 5. Formulaic and not worth ever seeing again. I don't recommend it unless you can make it through 3 hour movies easily.

After a brief time away, I have got back to face tagging my photos in iPhoto. It is really addictive. Last night I had over 1700 pictures to tag and now I am down to around 750. It is such a monkey type of work that I was even doing it during two of my phone meetings today at work. It was very easy to listen to the conversations and click-click-click.

I am not done yet, but my wife is definitely leading the pack with the number of pictures in which she is tagged. She's at about 1350 right now. I am a close second with about 1100.

Some of the pictures are really difficult to tag because iPhoto doesn't find all of the faces. So our wedding photos in that small-ish room with a number of our friends and family was really difficult. Sometimes 10-15 people need to be tagged in one photo.

The cool thing is that it is already worth it. Going into the Faces view is really neat. Sliding over the my wife’s group from left to right shows a nice timeline view of what she looked like from 2001 to the present.

We got Into the Wild on Friday night. We started watching it pretty late so we only caught about an hour of it. We finished it today (Saturday).

The movie itself was pretty interesting, but we had to fast forward through a couple of slow parts. Also, when he was slaughtering the moose we had to blow right past that. The images weren't good for a pregnant woman to see.

Good acting. The imagery was nice. Bouncing in time type of movie. Hal Holbrook and Catherine Keener were excellent in the movie.

I think my wife and I both have adventurous spirit when it comes to traveling, but not that adventurous.

The one part of the movie that I thought was pretty interesting was about having to pay $2000 to go down the Colorado River unless you hooked up with a commercial venture. It did put a sense of silliness to what this country puts laws and fines on.

As a movie I give it 3 out of 5 stars. Thought-provoking, but not re-watchable.