Paul Jacobson

I upgraded to an iPhone 4s yesterday (my iPhone 4 home button responds to 1 out of 3 or 4 presses). I haven't compared photos between the 2 phones (plenty comparisons on the Web already) but this sunflower looks pretty good.

The darker photo is as the camera captured the image. The slightly lighter one is with HDR enabled.

Yup, today is Valentine's Day and the regularly scheduled grinches have made their appearances denouncing the commercial exploitation this day has become. If you are one of those people, you're missing the point but fear not, there is hope yet.

Valentine's Day isn't just the overly schmaltzy opportunity to exploit you commercially by guilting you into buying fake roses, heart shaped boxes of chocolates and mass produced furry animals imported from China. For those people who forget the everyday romance V Day cynics suggest should be in your life all the time, Valentine's Day is a little nudge to make a point of letting the special people in your life know you care about them.

There are lots of different ways to express how you care and they don't have to be the fake roses, the chocs and furry animals (but those are ok too). Sometimes all it takes is a seemingly innocuous gesture that let's that special person know you are thinking about him or her. So if you are not the everyday romantic (and so few people are), let Valentine's Day be a little reminder to reach out in your special way.

This is a weird photo and I can only imagine how this happened. This is perfect fodder for a "suggest a tagline" contest:

Ben Saunders, Alastair Humphreys and Martin Hartley are training for an expedition to Antarctica which has never been completed before:

They published this video in which they talk a bit about the expedition and show some of their training in spectacular Skye. The scenery is beautiful and you get a sense of how tough the training there was and an inkling of what lies ahead when they reach Antarctica:

(Source: Om Malik and Rich Mulholland)

I tweeted this fairly facetious complaint this morning more due to a silly mood than any real complaint about MTN's data network coverage. Our DSL line was on the fritz, apparently due to some Internet Solutions maintenance work on its lines, so we switched to cellular data on our phones for our morning data fix. My house sits in an spot on the network and we can't get decent 3G signal there. Some parts of the house have 3G, others have EDGE and others have almost nothing. I'm not sure if its the roof or just location.

Anyway, I tweeted what I tweeted, realising that network technology is probably just not at the point where it is cost effective to truly blanket everywhere with a fast data connection (still dreaming of the fictional and possible worldwide data communications skin that spans the globes with high speed connectivity and costs almost nothing). Generally I am happy with MTN's network and where there is crappy signal, its usually not the end of the world (it would be great if the Drakensberg had more than minimal EDGE connectivity, though – we enjoy going there and still like to stay in touch).

MTN surprised me, again, with a message from an MTN representative asking if he can help resolve my connectivity issues. I explained that I was just being silly and it wasn't anything for him to spend his time on. It was still really great that he took the time to get in touch.

Update: I just received a call from an MTN engineer who is going to look into reception at my house. What started out as a silly tweet and vaguely serious rant has turned into a very solid example of great service from MTN. Short of MTN shutting down one day, I am not moving to another network for the foreseeable future! These (crazy) people rock!

The next movie in the Bourne series, The Bourne Legacy, doesn't feature the character Jason Bourne (or Matt Damon) but it looks like it will be just as good as any of the movies so far, if not better!

I noticed a cool feature on the iOS Evernote app. If you create a note when you have an event scheduled in your calendar, the app auto-populates the title field with the event description.

You can change it but if you don't tap on the title field and just add note content or an attachment, the note will have that title. Very handy!