Kathleen McGivney

Blogmonkey strikes again

iMonkey, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

Those of you familiar with my other blog, Susan Bulloch's blog, or Paul Mooney's blog will probably recognize the blogmonkey. He was born in a small bucket in a Lotus Stuff Store at a Lotusphere conference a few years back, and ever since then has traveled the world, usually with Susan but sometimes with Paul or me when Susan has to stay home. He's been involved in many adventures, most of which involve him getting extremely drunk or stealing tech gadgets. This time, he tried to steal my husband's new iPhone while we were at dinner with Susan last night. Fortunately, we caught him in the act and were able to distract him with food and sake.

The blogmonkey is in Boston right now with Susan at a conference, and I'm sure he's getting into more trouble as we speak. Hopefully Susan will catch him in the act a few times, because if there aren't photos, it didn't happen.

The Vegas Experience

Holy crap, how did I end up in space?, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

My husband's birthday is the day before mine (his is August 11, mine is August 12). Last year, we went to Las Vegas and celebrated our birthdays with Team Leo (you know who you are!) and also got engaged; this year we decided to reprise our Vegas birthday adventure and headed there for a long weekend. Our plans included eating at Nobu (where Atom popped the question the previous year) and playing poker. Nothing too fancy, just a weekend in Vegas with our friends.

We stayed at the Las Vegas Hilton for a couple of reasons - Hilton points, their poker room, and easy access to the monorail. We will not be staying there again, for a couple of reasons - the room was pretty crappy, they removed the poker room, and they are no longer going to have the Star Trek Experience, which included two fun motion-simulator rides and a space-themed casino. The lack of poker room and rides, combined with the poor quality of the hotel rooms, leaves the hotel with exactly zero draw for us.

We did have fun while we were there, and I shot a few photos with my trusty Nokia N82. The photo above is of the Enterprise that is hanging from the ceiling above Quark's restaurant and the entrance to the rides. There are a few more photos after the jump.

Nokia N82: a very unscientific review

Camera cat with cameras, originally uploaded by kmcgivney.

As I mentioned last week, I picked up a Nokia N82 smartphone after an unsuccessful experiment with a Nokia N95. I have been using it pretty much nonstop for about a week now, and have a review and summary of it. My review concentrates on two things: usability compared to a Blackberry Pearl and photographic capabilities.

First, usability: I had a Nokia model before I had the Blackberry Pearl, so I was able to get used to Nokia's interface again very quickly. I found that moving around the interface was intuitive, and there are many things I liked over the Pearl, including the gallery interface (much slicker on the N82, with a rotating menu, and much, much faster than the Pearl). I also very much like that the screen tilts if you turn the phone on its side, much like the iPhone, but I think that is mostly beneficial for scrolling, as typing in that position is quite difficult. The browser on the N82 is approximately one billion times better than the limited browser on the Pearl, but that can be worked around by using Opera for the Blackberry, which is much better than the native BB browser.

What I found lacking on the N82 versus the Pearl are: predictive text, ease and feel of button navigation, and a couple of minor "number of clicks" issues. Predictive text on the Pearl is amazing and can figure out most words very easily (though I had to train it to cuss; when I first used it, I said "duck" and "shut" a lot). The N82 uses T9, which gets things wrong enough that I just turn it off and resort to multi-tap. I was very fast at it before I got the Pearl, though, and it's only taken me a week to get close to my pre-Pearl texting speeds.

Button navigation on the N82 is easy, but some of the buttons are very close together, which makes it very easy to accidentally press the wrong or multiple buttons. The Pearl's scroll wheel is much easier to use than the Nokia's scroll buttons. And for some apps like Gmail, I have to tell the phone that the application is allowed to access the internet every time I open it on the N82. Not so with the Pearl. Annoying, but I can work around it.

What's really special about the N82, and my main deciding factor in keeping it, is its camera. It packs a 5 megapixel camera into a fairly compact phone, with a Zeiss lens, real autofocus (with an assist light for low-light situations), and a real Xenon flash. The camera in this phone is enough to replace your casual point & shoot camera. The flash is much more powerful than any LED flash on any cameraphone I have handled in the past and works well in low-light situations (see bar images below). All of the photos in this entry were taken with the N82 and I am very happy with the image quality. Also a bonus are the Flickr and Vox integration features that are included out of the box; once configured, I can post a photo directly to my Flickr photo stream via the internet instead of sending it via MMS. And since the phone has built-in WiFi capabilities, if I am near a wireless access point, I can use that instead of my cell phone data plan to upload the images.

All in all, I think that the Nokia N82 is an excellent phone for someone who likes photography and is a heavy web user. If your primary use of your mobile device is work-related e-mail, the Blackberry is better suited for what you are doing. But for someone like me, who needs a fully capable multimedia device, the N82 is perfect.

More photos after the jump.

NYY vs Toronto

Field level, section 20, row D

This was a great game. We saw Derek Jeter pass up Mickey Mantle's 3rd-place record for most hits with the Yankees (only Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig have more), Mussina pass up the 7th-place record for most strikeouts with the Yankees, and we saw some great plays and got to see the Moose AND Rivera pitch. Oh, and our seats were stupid good. It was awesome to see such a good game in the last regular season at Yankee Stadium.

Another photo after the jump.

Sunday, in a Manhattan

Playing dominoes with friends on an overcast, lazy Sunday.

Sandal weather!

See, I told you I couldn't stop buying shoes.

A beautiful day in Firenze

Taken with my Blackberry Pearl.