I got back after lunch and pretty much jumped right to the Engadget liveblog to read about the upcoming iPhone software.

I have to say that the 3 biggest features I am looking forward to is the Push Notification, Spotlight, and MMS. I can see how cut and paste will be useful and how Apple seemed to elegantly implement it. I just probably need to play with it to see how much I will use it. Cutting a URL from Safari and pasting it into an email or a SMS is probably where I would see using it the most.

The only downside of course is since I have a first gen iPhone, I can't do the MMS. Undoubtedly the 3.0 phones will come out before July, but I can't see upgrading unless there is a feature I can't live with out. I have already lived without the GPS and the 3G for almost a year and they both were big reasons to upgrade.

The Shuttle kept on being delayed this week. I had it in my head that it was supposed to go at 8:49 pm for some reason.

When I got done with the yard work, I hurried into the shower and thought that when I got out I should double check the time for the launch. About 5 minutes later, my wife ran in and told me that she can see the Shuttle, so I hopped out, threw on a towel and ran to the back door. Sure enough, I could see a pinprick of light to the north east (which was the Shuttle) and a beautiful exhaust with different colors. My wife said I just missed the solid rocket boosters falling back to earth.

I ran inside, grabbed the camera, and tried to take some shots.

Today I finished the novella Debt of Bones by Terry Goodkind.

It was an interesting prelude story to the Sword of Truth. I guess it was either written well or I wasn't putting 2 and 2 together that the ending of the book would be about the boundaries. It was interesting to see Zedd written during the time when he was the First Wizard.

Next up is Book 4, Temple of the Winds.

I love my current job. The work is challenging and dynamic. It also gives me the opportunity to work at home, have irregular hours when necessary, convert commuting time into personal time, and a whole host of other benefits that I often under-appreciate.

The one downside that crops up every once in a while is my company is on the west coast of the US and I am on the east coast. Usually it is not a problem because I like sleeping in and don't mind adjusting my day. But on days like today when the company meeting is scheduled for 6-7p ET, man it can really be a challenge. Especially when you started your day earlier than normal.

I hope to post more videos in the coming months, but to do that I had to nail down what it took to get the videos in a friendly format as well as post them to the blog. Since I will undoubtedly forget, here are the steps to add embedded Flash video to a webpage:

1. You will only have to do this step once. Download the SWFObject javascript (swfobject.js) and player.swf from here and uploaded it to the /swfplayer/ folder on the webserver .


2. Next you need to take a preview image of the movie (mov, .avi, .mp4). The preview image is the image that appears on your webpage before the user starts the video. So you will want to scroll through the movie and pick that one image in the movie that really "sums up" your movie.


3. To take the preview image, open the movie in QuickTime (window mode, not full screen mode), fast forward through the movie, and take a screenshot. (On the Mac, use Cmd-Shift-4). Save the screenshot to a .jpg with the same name as the movie. Also for the sake of consistency, if the movie is mymovie.mov, name the screenshot mymovie.jpg.


4. Before closing QuickTime, show the movie inspector (Cmd-I). For the window you'll want to save off the Normal Size of the movie. (For this example we will use a Normal Size of 360x240)


5. Convert the movie to a Flash Video (.flv) file. I converted the movie using Visual Hub on the Mac (make sure to set the Raw FLV option). Again, for consistency, make sure to name the converted movie mymovie.flv to match the screenshot and the source movie.


6. Upload both the movie mymovie.flv and the preview image mymovie.jpg to the webserver. Preferrably the same folder location.


7. Make a new blog post and then cut and paste the following into the editor:



 
Get the Flash Player



8. To clone this for other movies all you will need to do is two things. First, change all of the mymovie references in the HTML code to whatever you named the movie and preview (including mymoviecontainer). Second, change the 3rd and 4th parameter to the SWFObject() call to the Normal Size of the movie. In this example, it was 360 and 240


9. Publish the post and hopefully that is it. I did have some formatting issues with Wordpress where it was munging the code after publishing, so if that is the case just try and minimize the amount of HTML code that is on each line.

Many thanks to these websites for helping me figure out the steps:

• deconcept
• squareCircleZ

Hi Folks,

I am not exactly sure what kind of stuff I am going to put on here, but hopefully I will have enough to say. I am used to the 140 chars of Twitter so this might be a difficult.