In no particular order these are some of the things I want to focus on:

BuddyPress
I’d like to write some plugins and/or themes and really get back into the BuddyPress scene as well as emersing myself more fully in the WordPress community.

Develop and Release!
I’ve been sittting on a number of personal projects for far too long that I want to get off the ground this year so watch this space.

Blog
Yes, this blog! I plan to be a better blogger and blog more regularly. If I start to achieve some of the other things in this list at least I’ll have more to talk about!

Photography
I’ve had my Nikon D80 Digital SLR for nearly 3 years now and I’ve yet to spend any time experimenting and learning to really use it for anything but point-and-shoot style photography, mainly of my son which to be honest was a large part of the reason for puchasing the camera in the first place! This year I’d like to get back to my creative roots and really start to push the envelope a little.

Piano
I started learning Piano (for the third time) last year and while I’m still on the folksy beginners stuff I’d like to be able to play some “real” music before the end f this year… music like this.

So there it is… there are a few other things I’d like to do such as learning Italian but I think the list above will keep me more than busy enough, and there are some other upcoming developments that I think might consume rather a lot of my time… but more on that later

So as you can imagine, I was so frikin’ happy when I stumbled upon CTRL+Shift “N” in Windows 7! I’ve been using the RC since it’s release, and the Beta prior to that and while I cannot speak highly enough of the OS generally this is, by far, the single best feature in my mind.

Another features in I’m loving is window snapping. The ability to snap windows to various parts of the screen, eg. left and right  halves for file copying. You can also cycle through all available positions via keyboard shortcuts (Windows key + arrow keys).

While some may consider Vista to have been an abject failure, Windows 7 is in my mind the polar opposite, a well thought out, fast, stable and get this “Mature” operating system…  arguably the most compelling upgrade in Windows almost 25 year history.

http://pinkforoctober.org/

Well for various reasons I delayed the actual purchase until a couple of weeks ago by which time Dell had released the much slimer, sexier, dare I say “cooler” XPS M1530, the big brother to the M1330 that I had drooled over some months ago. So I’m pleased to say I am now the proud (ok, MAC fanboys, as proud as a PC owner can be!) owner of a top of the line Tuxedo Black XPS M1530.

It arrived a couple of weeks ago, the day I was scheduled to leave for a 10 day holiday in the South Island and having just returned I am yet to really get to put it through it’s paces, but it looks pretty nice. It weighs less than it’s Insperon and Vostro cousins and has a much nicer finish. The build quality is a little suspect in places, the camera bezel above the screen is fairly flimsy and looks like it is a prime candidate for breakage and I actually had to remove some screws and refit one of the bottom panels when I first unpacked it as they hadn’t been slotted in correctly. It performs pretty well and battery life seems good for both the 6 cell and 9 cell batteries. I’m still not convinced about the glossy screen but it seems that the non-glossy versions are getting fewer and further between.

I’ll post some more thoughts as I get the laptop setup and start using it but I’m pretty pleased with what I’ve seen so far. I wouldn’t call it “Legendary Design” but hey, it’s designed and it looks pretty good amongst it’s competition so I’m not complaining.

The year started with a new job, then in February I was my friends best man and in March we moved into our new house. We spent a couple of months travelling in Thailand, the UK and Italy through June and July and have spent the remaining months working on our new home. I have a new niece (in NZ) and a new nephew (in the UK) and am soon be a father myself.

Work wise, I have been busy improving my CSS and JavaScript mojo and have spent a lot of time wrangling MOSS.

So here’s looking forward to 2008 and all the new challenges and discoveries it will no doubt throw my way. Hopefully I’ll be able to devote a little more time to maintaining this blog!

Provoke Solutions, where I work, won the premier ‘Partner Solution of the Year’ award last Thursday at the 2007 New Zealand Microsoft Partner Awards. We also took out the “Business Productivity Solution” award and were narrowly edged by IGA Systems in the ‘Microsoft Technology Advocates’ award.

Congratulations to everyone that worked on the projects and behind the scenes to make this possible. It’s stuff like this that makes me proud to be a Provoker!

Congratulations also to Rod and the team over at Xero who took out the ‘Small Business Partner Solution’ of the Year and ‘Software Solution of the Year’. It’s great to see another Drury start-up doing so well so quickly having been involved in one myself.

Well anyway…

I’m in the market for a new laptop and as such I’ve been out on the interwebs diligently doing my research, trying to find that ideal (read: perfect) candidate. I have fairly simple criteria, needing a higher than average spec machine (cutting rather than bleeding edge), large fast hard drive, plenty of ram and a WSXGA screen… that’s 1680×1059, with a decent GFX card.

First up, you have no idea what a tough ask the screen seems to be! Most manufacturers, Apple included, seem to limit this resolution to the 17″ models which are, to put it mildly, rather less than portable and hardly “laptops”, anything in the 13″ – 15.4″ realm is generally limited to the lower 1280 x 800 WXGA resolution which just doesn’t cut it when you live in pallete intensive applications like Photoshop, Fireworks and Visual Studio. I would also like the exterior to be reasonably attractive… or at the very least not ugly!

With the above said I can already hear the cries of “Buy a Mac!” coming from every corner. It seems most of my colleagues are indeed using Macs when not at work but I have long since accepted my fate as a Windows user, and to my surprise, with a few glaring exceptions Vista really isn’t as bad as I imagined it would be (No really!).

The unfortunate downside to looking for a Windows based machine however is the total lack of focus on the hardware design. When compared to the latest Apple hardware, with it clean sleek lines, beautifully beveled edges and spectacular attention to detail I find even the nicest looking PC’s are left desperately wanting.

Compaq‘s have been trying to copy the Apple design formula for a while now with absolutly no success, the HP and Toshiba lineups are, well, neat and tidy (read: boring!). Acer and Asus have both tried branding partnership with Farrari and Lambourghini respectively, the results of which are amusing if nothing else. Sony seem to be trying with their Vaio’s and as for Dell… lets just say if you put lipstick on a pig… it’s still just a pig. Dell have made one move in the right direction however, with their new XPS1330 but they seriously need to start applying that design thinking across their mainstream laptops and not just the ultra portables.

So what did I settle on you ask? I caved and I’m going with a Dell Vostro 1500. It’s not pretty, even among some of it’s competitors, but the bang for buck ratio is good, it meets most if not all of my other requirements and it was a more favourable option than its ugly step-sister the Inspiron 1520 with it’s clown makeup… I mean “colour faceplates”.

I’ll let you know how it works out!

***NEWS FLASH***

It is!!!

When the plan was conceived and cast upon the public only a couple weeks ago the fair use policy stated that you could not download more than 700MB’s during the peak hours of 4pm and 12am which is indeed “Fair”. I download reasonably heavily via Bittorrent and am more than happy to keep this downloading outside these peak hours. The policy also stated that traffic such as this may be limited which again is fair enough, I don’t mind that downloads take a little longer within reason.

Well, two weeks in and the policy has been updated, for wholesale at least and I imagine Xtra will follow suit in the next few days. The policy now states, along with the existing restrictions, that you may not download more than 200MB’s in any one hour. Is it me, or does that sound like an overall limit? Rather than having a monthly limit you now have an hourly one! Fantastic!

The new limitation doesn’t appear to be tied to peer to peer downloads either so Mums and Dads this means you too! Want to download that 400Mb game demo? better make sure your download manager keeps it slow!

Full Speed ADSL on the Telecom network, assuming you are a reasonable distance from the exchange is 300Kb/s – 400Kb/s at which speeds you could effectively download between 1.1Gb’s and 1.4Gb’s an hour. This would no doubt put an intolerableable amount of strain on the network most probably crippling other users, so some limitation is only fair. 200Mb’s an hour however, equates to a download spead of just 55Kb/s which is about one 6th of the product being sold (and that you are paying for). So what Telecom are in effect saying is that you can use the network at full spead, but only for about 10 minutes in any given hour. In reality this is all moot as the best speeds I have seen even outside the peek periods are not even close to what the network should be capable of and I’m close to the exchange!

What annoys me most about this is not so much the draconian limitations, that I at least expected, but the fact that Telecom are alowed to sell the service as being “unlimited”, making a huge song and dance in thier sales pitch when in fact the service is VERY limited. If it’s not unlimited don’t call it unlimited!

I know it was the middle of the night here and that this was no doubt "breaking news" on the evening news programs in the northern hemisphere but I was stunned by the complete lack of coverage provided by the NZ media. The only news I was able to view to find out what was happening was BBC World and Australia's Sky News (and they're at least 2 hours behind us so that kinda kills the "middle of the night" argument!).

While I don't subscribe to the CNN theory of taking next to no information and recycling it for hours, it would be nice if the media here actually took enough interest to keep people informed… all we got was a brief "there was an earthquake near Tonga and we may have got a tsunami" on the 6am news!

As it turns out thankfully there was no tsunami, well not a big damage causing one at least, and the warning was cancelled, but this highlights just how vulnerable we are on this little rock in the South Pacific. Makes you stop and think…