Blog.JonECat.com

As many of you may know, I am a huge fan of Google and all of the wonderful services that they provide. As of late they have done a lot tweaks to GMail and GTalk that I am really happy with.

First and foremost, they have added themes to GMail, I know it is a small thing, but I love it! It really helps me feel at home.

They also recently added video chat to GTalk. I am sure you are going to tell me that other services have had that for years and that this is nothing new. While I will concede that other services have had video chat for years and with the exceptions of iChat and Skype, they are all shotty at best. What impresses me most about Google’s implementation is that it is all contained within the browser, an app that you most likely have open all the time. Not to mention this is the cleanest video chat implementation I have seen save iChat. For me it works well, I always have my GMail inbox open and when I need to chat with a colleague from work this has been the best solution for us.

Last but not least, SMS in GTalk. I have not had a chance to play with this as much, mostly because it just became available to me today. This service allows you to SMS a cellphone at no charge to you, what makes it even better is that they can reply back to you and you will receive the message. That has been the shortcoming of most SMS programs, you can’t get a response back without paying for a service.

Anyways, I just wanted to say to the Google team, keep up the good work, you are leading us into the future! Oh and just one more thing, please don’t turn evil on us, thanks.

I just got done shooting some photos for my sister and her family for there 2008 Christmas cards, here are a couple of the images from the set.

I am currently editing the theme to the blog so it maybe look a little crazy for a few hours or so.

UPDATE: OK, I think I am pretty much done with the theme for now. I have had a minimalist attitude as of late and wanted the blog to represent that.

Carson and all of my kids for that matter love to ride scooters way more than their bikes. So I was out with Carson yesterday watching him and I took some pictures, these were the results.

These images were captured with a D80 and Tamron 17-50 2.8 Lens @ 17mm

I thought I would throw a little video to test out the capabilities. It appears to work just as well as Vimeo.

Update1: You need to go to Youtube to actually watch the HD version, click here. Click on the link under the video that says “Watch in HD”

Update2: Ok, after a little research I found out that you can tweak the embed code a bit to get the HD version to display in an embedded player. I found the code here.

These were all taken with my Nikkor 85mm 1.8 except for Bria’s shot, she was being a stinker all day and only happened to pose for me when I had the 70-300 on, so her’s was shot at 135mm. These were shot in my in-laws backyard. I used my flash for fill lighting.

…it is at Old Navy.

I took this picture the other day when went out to eat.

I will be playing on the PS3 network tonight if anyone is interested. Hit me up, my username is “jonecat”, big suprise I am sure.