ChicGeek Photos

Our friends Joe & Sharon came by our house this weekend for a ChicGeek photo shoot. They are starting out their own photography business and are really talented! They took some fantastic shots of our family and some really nice belly pics. Check out some of the photos that they took in my Flickr set.

Thanks for the wonderful pictures Joe & Sharon!

Free Vancouver 2010 Olympic Journal

Get a free 160-page journal worth $17.99 by filling out this online form. You don’t have to fill in the coupon code (just leave it blank).

Speaking of the Olympics, we are 20 days away from the Vancouver Winter Olympics. We have tickets to see two events. Women’s curling and men’s hockey. Nothing overly exciting (they are like preliminary games) but we wanted to at least be part of this whole event since we live in this city. I mean, what are the chances of us ever living in a city that will host the Olympics?

Anyhow, I will perhaps try to recap how the whole experience was during or after the Olympics. Don’t forget to fill in the above form to get your free journal!

Still a Windows Fan

Hello. Happy 2010!

Well, I finally got my Windows 7 in the mail a few months back and so far I am glad that I stuck with Windows. At least I am glad that I didn’t pay like twice the price just to get a Mac. I have also read some pretty bad customer support for some of the issues the iMacs have been having so I am definitely glad that I didn’t get an Apple product (although I still love my iPhone very much, but that is another topic).

I mostly use my home computer for surfing the internet and uploading pictures from my DSLR. I haven’t really installed any software yet but everything seems to be running pretty smoothly so far. I suppose that since this is a new computer after all, things will generally run faster. My good old tower PC is still mega noisy and takes forever to boot up Vista. BTW, any good recommendations for a good picture navigating software? I am using the Windows Gallery in Windows 7 and I have to admit that it is somewhat crummy. I think the Windows Gallery in Windows Vista was somewhat better.

I also need a good photo editing software. I am used to Photoshop, but I am not sure I want to pay for a pro version. Hey, I just realized that there is an online Photoshop (www.photoshop.com). Maybe I should just use that instead. Amazing how so many web apps can do so many fancy things now! Oh, I also really like Picnik (www.picnik.com) for online photo editing. Nowadays, you probably don’t even need software on your computer if you have a web browser. There are so many amazing web applications out there like Google Docs, etc. Why would anyone pay for MS Word or Excel? One of these days I would also like to try Sketchup (sketchup.google.com) although it looks like it does not support Windows 7 at the moment.

So for the new year, here are a few things I would like to accomplish in terms of techie things:

• create a new WordPress theme
• revamp my existing website (www.gizzypooh.com)
• actually add some content to my other website (www.ghislaine.ca) – I actually purchased this domain a while ago and thought it would be neat to “promote” myself a bit
• improve my photography skills, by either reading up more about technique or just practicing a lot more by taking lots and lots and lots of pictures
• if time permits, build a mobile app (either native for iPhone or just web-based)

Quite honestly, I think I am being optimistic here since this year is going to be a busy one. Why do you ask? Well, there is a baby #2 on the way… Oh yah, we are expecting our second child in May. It is another boy! Yup, I am living in a male dominated household. It is going to be an interesting year indeed.