Damn you, AT&T Wireless. So the new Smartphone is finally coming to market and it is being heavily marketed. AWS is going to have a full page ad in the Wall Street Journal on launch day and everything. The new phone is being sold for under $300, which is actually a great price point for the hardware and services being offered. The device is being sold internally to Microsoft at a 45% discount, which is also amazing.

The problem is that AWS plans are so expensive! Internally, the two plans being offered are $76/month and $95/month for 700 and 1,100 voice minutes respectively and 30 MB of data. That is just WAY too much. I thought spending $50 on my Sprint phone was overkill. For unlimited data and 1,100 voice minutes, the price jumps to $109! Come on. Also, get this, those are the Microsoft discount rates! For 1,100 minutes, it is normally $120 without data! I feel like screaming.

No cellular service is worth that much.

Ugh and double ugh. My current project at work has proved next to impossible and the deadline is being to peek over the horizon. Basically, I need to categorize various bug fixes. The difficult portion of this project is that I'm given the updated source code for each bug fix but the report needs to know the final location in our image of these fixes. From what I've seen, there is no way to trace a source file to the eventual binary file in the image.

I thought I had a good idea to build the image, apply the changes, rebuild and see which files changed. I did that to a very small bug fix and 10% of the files changed (~1000)! I figured that had to be wrong so I compiled the full image, made no changes then compiled again. I saw that roughly 10% of the files had changed again. This is going to be tough to figure out.

A few nights before she left, Jamie and I made a great dinner. Nothing quite like steak, red skin garlic mashed potatoes, broccoli and a bottle of Pinot Noir!

I'm starting to enjoy wine for quite a few reasons:

1. If it isn't cheap, it almost always tastes good. There are thousands of varieties and I have yet to find a (non cheap) bottle that I didn't like!
2. It complements the flavors of so many foods. I'm not going to start drinking it with pizza and burgers but it works with most everything else.
3. Maybe it's just my lack of wine drinking experience, but that stuff hits me hard! Two glasses of wine has the same potency as six beers to me.

I enjoyed the first Max Payne enough to complete it twice (which is quite the rarity nowadays), so I've had some interest in Max Payne 2. From the screenshots that were released early on in the development cycle, I wasn't too excited. Now, gameplay videos are available and they have definitely changed my tune. It's like they took all of the good aspects of the original game and improved upon them. Bullet time looks cool and useful, unlike in the first game where it was a necessary evil. Another thing I just noticed is that the object physics seem to be even better than the UT2K3 engine!

Someone recently asked me to suggest a digital camera to these specifications:

• Small/compact
• Expandable memory (at least up to 512 MB)
• 3x optical zoom
• 4 megapixels

My suggestion turned out to be for the Canon PowerShot S400. After looking around for cameras, I realized that the S400 is smaller and has better resolution than my S30 and costs the same price new. Silly technology improvements.

While whale watching, I encountered the only problem I have with my camera: weak optical zoom. Considering that the optical zoom on my S30 is only 3x and very few consumer-level digital cameras offer anything greater, I think I will have to stick with it for now.