Author Archives: dpkworldwide

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About dpkworldwide

Native Californian, water rabbit, aries, lover of travel, trains, history, music, wrestling, anime, minimalism, stoicism, objectivism and things Japanese.

Get together and Farewell

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I had a small get together at my place and invited Alia-san and Leslie-san, two of my fellow Japanese study students from both Pierce College and the IJP 2006 program. We had fun hanging out, playing video games and chatting. We also had a lovely dinner—though I ate far too much—across the street at Stuart Anderson’s Black Angus (thanks for treating us, Leslie-san!). Alia is departing for UC Irvine to continue her Japanese studies there, so this was also to wish her luck and say farewell.

It was good seeing them and it’s still hard to believe that our time in Japan was already more than a year ago. Time sure flies…

A Sort of Vindication…

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Today my former employer, Amgen Inc., announced for the first time in their history a layoff of employees. They’re cutting 2,200-2,600 or up to 14% of the workforce.

I feel a couple of things about this. As much as I enjoyed working there—I did spend the bulk of my career and over 12 years with them—it had truly become an entirely different place from when I started. It also had became an unfulfilling job in some ways. I also knew that there would be a rough road ahead for a while and it felt like the time was right to leave and move on.

Of course, the other thing I’m feeling right now is that if I had actually seen these layoffs coming and had stuck around for another two months, I probably could have left with a nice severance package. Sigh…

I’ll be interested in hearing from all the many, many friends I left behind how things have changed, and I expect a few of them will take the path I’m on (but with lovely severance packages…sigh)

More iPhone Wants: iLife/iWork Integration

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Now that Apple has put a lot more polish on their iLife and iWork suites, it’s now time to integrate them even more with iPhone.

One of the best integrations is through the new .Mac web galleries and iPhoto. Having the galleries on the web means you don’t need them right on your iPhone which saves storage space. It’s also really easy to take snaps on the phone and directly upload them via email to galleries, so I created an “On-the-Go” gallery specially for that purpose.

But now I’m hoping for even more integration like:

  • Direct viewing of Pages, Numbers and Keynote documents on my iPhone. I think that right now I’d have to convert them to other formats like Word, Excel and/or PDF to view them. This should be a no-brainer.
  • A way to submit entries to my iWeb-created Blogs from the iPhone. I mean, that is the main reason why I’m staying here on blogger: so I can post entries from places other than my Mac. An email-it-in function like with the photo galleries would be stellar.
  • Of course, that would also necessitate a better text editor on the iPhone, the biggest thing I was lamenting in an earlier post. Just give me TextEdit and I’d be happy…

There was a posting on the MacRumors.com website about most wanted iPhone apps, and someone went so far as to propose an “iMovie Lite” application that would let you take vids shot on the iPhone (also something you can’t do right now), do simple editing and then share online through galleries and YouTube. I think that would be really fun, though again I doubt I’d want to turn my iPhone into a video creation tool. But you never know…

I also very much liked his idea of being able to have a book reader to access your eBooks on the iPhone. He mocked it up with the Delicious Library GUI which I would also like to be able to access on my iPhone—it’s frustrating when I’m out at a bookstore and I can’t remember which volumes I’m missing. It would be nice to be able to access my library on the go (and, incidentally, as much as I love Delicious Library, its reporting/exporting/publishing functionality sucks at an abysmal level).

So there you go—some more observations on what I’d like to do with the coolest piece of technology I’ve ever owned.

New iApps: First Contact

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Incredibly, I received my upgrades today! The wonders of modern commerce…

In the meantime, I went online and viewed the excellent iLife ’08 overview video and several of the tutorials on Apple.com—well worth the time. The new features really are astounding, especially the new iMovie which will make it so much simpler to edit movies quickly. Maybe I’ll finally get around to doing my Japan videos…

The features are pretty awesome, but not without their lumps:

  • The new iPhoto is cool, but disorienting when you first convert your library. All my film rolls disappeared to be replaced by the new Events. Suddenly, nothing was where I left it, though I didn’t lose anything. The albums all seem the same.
  • I really like the idea of the online .mac galleries, but I’m not sure when to use them vs. regular photo pages in iWeb (but see below). The galleries seem pretty mysterious still, they’re not as flexible as I wish they were, I seem to be having some trouble uploading & syncing them and I’m not sure how much space they consume on my iDisk. I suppose I’ll get it sorted…
  • Magic Garage Band is so much fun! You basically choose a music genre, click to create a song and audition the various instruments at will in real time as the song plays. I may have a lot of fun building movie soundtracks!
  • iWeb—some cool stuff, but has caused me a lot of grief. The first thing is that after converting, all my photo albums were destroyed! There’s a new kind of “My Albums” index page—which is really neat, but I think may be why everything got messed up. In trying to rebuild the pages, they are not working either. This is causing me a great deal of consternation. I’m even having to go back to find a backup of my domain file to try again. I really do like the ability to change themes on existing web pages, but it’s inconsistent and involves quite a bit of rework because the various page parts don’t always directly correlate to the other templates. The web widgets & snippets seem like a good idea, but I can’t even get a simple Google Map widget to work right (I can’t seem to get a selected address to stay in the widget). This may be a case of having to start anew from scratch, which is a truly onerous prospect.

Sigh.

I suppose—just like everything—even Apple software has its bugs and teething pains, but this is a little higher level of that than I’m used to. Hopefully I’ll get things worked out.

I haven’t played around much with iWork ’08 yet, but Numbers seems to be able to read my existing Excel spreadsheets with no problems, so that’s cool. Maybe I can indeed have my Macs become “Microsoft Free Zones”!

At Last: iLife & iWork ’08!

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This morning was an “Apple Media Special Event” that turned out to be quite big. Steve Jobs announced and demoed:

  • All-new Aluminum iMacs – very sexy
  • iLife ’08 with completely reworked iMovie and lots of iPhoto improvements
  • iWork ’08 with the completely new Numbers spreadsheet app
  • Serious upgrades to .mac services: 10GB storage and new Web Albums

I didn’t get to watch it live since I was at the Ventury County fair with my family, but I did read all about it from my iPhone. That was enough for me to go online to the Apple Store and place my order then and there (I absolutely love my iPhone!). I should have them shortly, so stay tuned!

Art Class

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When I was at Anime Expo in Long Beach last month, I went to a panel about manga/anime drawing being taught by a teacher from the Montecito Fine Arts College of Design in Arcadia, CA. I filled out the requisite form to enter the drawing for a full-tuition scholarship and enjoyed the seminar.

Later on, I got the requisite phone call from their salespeople, and went down to have a look and then signed up for a free demo class—which happened today.

Now, I’ve never done anything artistic in years. I did take some brief oil painting lessons when I was a kid (did 2 canvases) and did the usual kid stuff. But nothing in years. The class I attended was sort of the “Ground Zero” for new students: Drawing 101. I was given a set of artist’s pencils and told to do some shading bars, which was a lot harder than it sounds. Then, I was to sketch and shade a lighted sphere—way more difficult than it sounds. I ended up being fairly pleased with my efforts, too. It actually got my interest up to learn how to draw, though I don’t think I could afford to at their prices…

I also met the same anime/manga Sensei that taught the someinar and chatted with her—she even gave me a set of her handouts. I think I might start practicing on my own a bit and maybe take some more lessons down the road. I’m also keeping my fingers crossed that I’ll win the contest for free tuition!

Later, mom & dad came over for Sunday dinner, and I made a fairly convincing Japanese meal for them—they were quite impressed. We finished by watching yet another amazing episode of Planet Earth on my BluRay player—this series alone made it worth upgrading all my AV equipment.

Apple’s Bluetooth earpiece for iPhone—COOL!

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Amazingly, when I went to the Pasadena, CA Apple Store on Saturday, they actually had the BT earpieces in stock. I bought one, of course, and it really has to be the best one I’ve ever had.

The earpiece has essentially the same shape as the regular Apple earbuds, so it’s comfortable to wear. The body is black aluminum like the iPod Nano with only a single button on the end to answer/hang up calls. The microphone end also contains the charging pins which fit into the dock magnetically like the MacBook power adapters—very smart! The good part is that you get BOTH the deluxe dock (charges both iPhone and earpiece simultaneously) and the travel cable in the box. And it’s in a beautiful, sturdy box just like the iPhone itself.

It’s very comfortable to wear, it’s easy to hear (because the earpiece actually sits in your ear like headphones) and it’s so lightweight you forget it’s even there. There was absolutely no trouble pairing either: you simply place both the iPhone and the earpiece in the dock and—ba-da-bing—you’re good to go. Just another piece of gorgeous design and engineering from Apple’s masters!