Joshua Tree Under the Milky Way from Henry Jun Wah Lee on Vimeo.

I can’t remember where I found out about Henry Jun Wah Lee’s incredibly time lapse photography, but ever since I’ve been mesmerized viewing the videos. The video above of the Perseid meteor shower and the Milky Way as seen from Joshua Tree. When we were in New Hampshire we were able to see the Milky Way from the Kancamagus Highway like I hadn’t seen it in a very long time. Everyone should have the opportunity to see the Milky Way like that.

The other video/time lapse I fell in love with is the Time Lapse Tour of Yosemite National Park. A place I would love to visit and hopefully will someday with my camera.

Black Point Beach

We spent the weekend, courtesy of friends at a beach rental in East Lyme/Niantic. It was a nice break from life and great times with friends. Our friend’s kids kept Craig busy wanting to play games and go exploring. While at the beach Dunkin Donuts flew their banner over head several times.

It was really peaceful to be in a private community where you can walk around, leave the house unlocked, everyone waves and says Hi, and people follow the speed limit. There was also something rejuvenating being near the water and having the expectations lowered significantly for two days. More photos on Flickr.

No sooner than I post about downgrading to iPhone OS 3.1.3 from iOS 4, did I start having problems with my iPhone. I had a good week with no issues, a speedy phone and life was great.

Then last weekend my iPhone stopped waking up. I have it in a dock each night while I sleep on my night stand. In the morning I turned on the phone, but got the black screen and the silver/white apple logo. I figured ok strange, guess it had a hiccup. I waited and made the doc was indeed getting power. It stayed on that screen for a minute and then went black. I tried a full reset holding down the power and home button, still would not go past the Apple logo.

Into the office I went and opted to restore. Of course last weekend iOS 4.0.1 had been released and iTunes was giving me that as my only option. I’m sure I could have forced it to grab the 3.1.3 ipsw file, but I was very tired and just wanted my phone working again. I clicked ok and waited a good hour while it got reset and it copied everything back over to it.

The Positive

I cringed at the thought my iPhone would again be slow, crashing and not fun to use again. To my pleasant surprise that has not been the case. It’s a tiny bit slow on certain things, but the iOS 4.0.1 update actually improved the speed of other items, and everything I wrote about in my previous post is no longer an issue. I’d like to say that will teach me for being an early adopter but I’ll still do it.

My iPhone 3G now has a second life and my imperative need for an iPhone 4 has been delayed a while longer.

Craig’s cousin Bryan graduated from college this past May. They combined his party with the 4th of July and I brought my camera. It was a lot of fun visiting with everyone and catching the moments on “film”.

Bryan and his dog Anna

Val and Autumn

Fun with cameras

When I first watched the keynote a few months back about the iOS 4, I was very excited about all of the possibilities. Then at the end of the keynote I was a bit depressed to learn my 3G iPhone won’t be able to handle most of the new features. When the release came out I upgraded looking forward to the features I would be able to use.

At first it seemed to be working well. Then as the days went on I noticed it got slower and buggier. Craig pointed me to a post that said to reset it 3 times in a row, so I tried that. Slight improvement but only temporarily. I even tried reinstalling iOS 4, and still the issues persisted. This was the first time in owning an iPhone that I wanted to throw it across the room or through a window. Below are the issues I ran into.

Typing
The keys would be severely delayed and act as if they were sticking, making it extremely frustrating to work on the phone.

Maps
This became also completely unusable. The locate feature which worked excellent before, would now take upwards of 2 minutes to find me, and was off several times. The redraw on the maps would hang and sometimes never load.

Mail
Also very slow, when it checked mail in the background it would bring the entire phone to a crawl.

Safari
This was a first ever on my phone. I was loading a website in Safari and the entire phone crashed and reset.

iTunes
Anytime any process was running in the background, especially Mail, iTunes would skip and stutter through songs. It would also hang while trying to move to the next song, it would take a second or two audibly but then the artwork would not change for another 10 seconds and if I pressed the next button again it would completely hang.

All of these were enough for me to say mercy, and downgrade to 3.1.3. I found the .ipsw file from my back up and followed the instructions on Lifehacker.

I have successfully downgraded and restored from a back up I did two weeks ago. My apps all load quickly, no crashing, typing works again and Maps finds me every time and updates very fast. At some point in the future, I’ll upgrade to the iPhone 4.

ttown992, originally uploaded by Lloyd Dangle.

Brilliant. (Found on Richard’s Notes)

While I’m not a huge kei$ha fan, I love the mash up of all the old Star Trek episodes.

It’s hard to believe it’s been 10 years. It doesn’t feel like 10 years and so much has happened and yet many things have stayed the same. I’m incredibly lucky to have married someone who I love to spend hours talking with, makes me laugh and if I do say so myself looks very good. My best friend and only person I trust everything to in life. I look forward to many more years. Happy Anniversary Craig.

We cancelled our land line in the beginning of May, bringing us to just using our cell phones. After reading a friend’s experience with the new AT&T MicroCell, we decided it was a good option for us. Even though we live close to the interstate and in a city area, we still have mediocre coverage inside our home.

The MicroCell is $149.00 as a single cost. It uses you’re existing minutes and hooks up to your internet connection which does not have to be an AT&T specific connection. We have Comcast and it’s hooked up via the cable modem. The setup does take about an hour for it to register and set up the MicroCell to be a tower in your home. It’s secured and only available to the numbers you program into it via the website. You can add up to 10 lines to be authorized. Only 4 can be on it at the same time though.

The Pros:

• We now have 5 bars of service everywhere in our home, even in the basement two levels down and in the parking lot
• We were able to fully get rid of a land line and save $80.00 a month

The Cons:

• Recently I’ve had a call get dropped
• We have a slight echo/delay on some calls
• We’ve also recently had static / air noise on calls, the other user doesn’t hear it but we do