Saturday morning we hit up the Outdoor Living Tour and were both quite impressed with the setups of some of the homes.

Another great thing about going out to these Home Tours is discovering cool little neighborhoods in places you wouldn’t expect.  We left inspired with ideas for our own backyard but they’ll most likely have to wait until after the wedding

On Sunday, we also attended the Hill Country Food and Wine Festival in Driftwood.  Apparently, this was held near the grounds of Salt Licks new vineyard.

They have a huge amount of land, and the vineyard itself looks to go on for acres and acres.  We presume the Salt Lick BBQ restaurant will soon be serving up their very own branded wine in the not too distant future.

The festival itself was a lot of fun, and Christy and I enjoyed sampling new wine varieties and blends.  Definitely something we’ll do again next year.

Pictures of both events are in the photos section.

Now looking forward to next week, when my friends from Plano come into town for a visit.

Christy and I planned quite a few different scenes for the session.

Christy loves coffee, and part of her morning ritual at IBM Rochester was to walk to the cafeteria and get her plain, skinny, latte with no sugar.   The Jo’s Coffee pictures tell the story of how we met at IBM and I’d pretend to LOVE plain coffee just so I could take that walk with her in the morning.  After a while though, I had to come clean and tell her my preference for more sweet drinks like mocha latte’s.  The people at IBM cafe always did my mochas up with whipped cream, sprinkles, and a pirouline.   We thought it was a funny contrast, and offers quite a bit of insight into our personalities.

The lady and the tramp pics convey both of our love for food, and how our relationship grew making and planning meals together.

Other pictures hopefully show some other sides to our personality….from being active and enjoying life as if we were kids, to being young professional engineers in Austin.

Pictures turned out really great in our opinion, and love the look and feel Erin was able to achieve. I’m really excited about having her photograph our wedding in her unique and brilliant style.

Click the Photos or the Wedding link to see the gallery with a few of our favorites.

I also added an HD version this time around.  Hope you enjoy!

They design nice products for me to look at …have cool, clean stores, staffed with overly-happy tweens….and lately have been on a real hot streak with bringing us products with real innovation.

I was all ready to order up a few all-black mock turtlenecks, and try growing some scruff so I could look more like Steve Jobs and the guy from the Apple/PC commercials.  But you know what happened?

The iPad announcement.

Yeah, I was really looking forward to this (as were countless others).  Ever since we bought our iPhone, secured a snazzy case, and filled up our phone with apps, we’ve been waiting for another reason to give Apple more of our money.  Recession?  Pffff…..my gadget budget is untouchable.

I sifted through article after article, rumor after rumor, of what the iPad announcement was going to entail.  I had a mental note that the big iPad announcement was  happening on Jan 27th, during MacWorld.  I set my Engadget bookmark to auto-refresh day-of so I would catch the latest announcements, live, as-they-happened…..then reality hit.

Steve Jobs walked on stage, waived his hands, and if you would have walked in my office at the time you would have caught me hunched over with a “WTF” expression of my face.

This is THE iPad?  Really?

I had to retread through my blogs, and make sure I didn’t miss anything.  But nope, that was it.

That’s when it hit me….THE iPad is nothing more than a oversized iPod Touch.  Not even an oversized iPhone!  An iPod Touch!  You know, the things that you see 10-year-olds carrying (with no camera or phone-call capabilities).

Innovation-wise…this announcement brought nothing.  What can I do with the iPad that I can’t already do with my iPhone?

You can view your webpages BIGGER!  And because its BIGGER its “MAGICAL!”  I couldn’t believe how many times Jobs threw around the word “MAGICAL.”  Has his head really gotten so bloated over all the accolades and praises for his hand in developing the iPod and iPhone, he now believes the stuff he makes is MAGIC?!

iPad sucks.

But you know what?  People are still going to buy it.  People are going to line up in drones and exclaim how “MAGICAL” it is, just because Steve Jobs told them so.

My mom, even called me up that day “Did you hear about that new iPad?  You can read books on it.  Are you going to get one?”

Ummm…Hell NO!  The hype is unreal.

Actually, if one thing about the iPad announcement pissed me off the most….it was Steve Jobs touting it as a legitimate e-Reader.

The damn thing has an LCD screen!  Before iPad, an “e-reader” was a term reserved to things that actually had some technological innovation in reading…..things like the Kindle, Sony e-Reader, and the Nook.  You know things with E-ink technology.  Displays that are less harsh on the eyes than LCD, and actually look like pen and ink.

The iPad doesn’t make the electronic reading experience any better than the LCD monitors we’ve been staring at everyday for the past 10 years. It’s not an e-reader.  But people are eating it up and the ignorance kills me.

What really irks me though, is that iPad had so much promise.  It could have been so much more.

Consumers really do want a device that slots between their desktop/laptop and phone.  So much so that most will naively believe that this IS the answer.

What Apple really should have done though, is developed an OS that fell in that same region.  More powerful than the iPhone, but more snappy  and resource-friendly than a desktop.

Instead Jobs just put together a rebranded ARM processor, powered by an iPhone OS in a 10″ LCD package and called it “magic”.  I call it lazy.

iPhone OS only goes so far.  And now-a-days, to be honest, it doesn’t even live up to the competitors.  You know the same competition Steve Jobs claimed the iPhone technology was 5 years or more ahead of.

Well, its 2010, not even 3 years after the famous 2007 iPhone announcement and your competition has not only matched you.  But surpassed you.

WebOS is better. Android OS is better. And Windows 7 Mobile is going to be better.

All of those OS can multitask, are more open, and can or will do Flash, in addition to everything else iPhone OS does.

And don’t downplay those two omissions.  Heck, even Steve Jobs himself couldn’t go 10 minutes in a prepared demo without stumbling across a blue block “missing flash” icon.  How often you think a casual user is going to stumble across that in a sitting of an hour or two.  Seems magical, alright.

It seems ever since Apple came up with the really great App Store concept, they’ve been getting lazy.  Just putting together hardware, and telling Developers to do all the work for them.

The only thing that is going to distinguish iPad from iPod Touch is Apps.  Plain and simple.  So much so that long term sales of an iPad are going to hinge on the developer’s innovation.  Not Apple’s.

Apple has an impressive amount of pre-orders for iPad to date, but they better have some tricks up their sleeve in iPhone OS 4.0

Because, if not, I know when my 2-year contract expires next year I’m going to be buying a device that doesn’t have a big apple logo on it.  And I don’t think I’ll be the only one.

Christy and I are both real impressed with how these all turned out.  Can’t wait to get the full set of high res pics in about a month.   In the meantime, check these out….

http://eephotography.squarespace.com/ee-photography/2010/3/8/chris-christy-engagements.html

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The concept is pretty simple, and actually pretty smart for the retailers.  Everyday they have a ’boutique’ from a handful of designer labels that opens up at a specific time (usually 10am CST). The boutique is basically a collection of wares by a specific label (clothing, shoes, jewelry, home furnishings, etc) that are steeply discounted for a limited time, and in limited quantities.  Discounts are usually in the range of 50-70% off.  And by limited time, I mean like 1 or 2 days.  And limited quantities means most popular sizes, and/or styles sell out within 10 minutes.

If you find something you like, you quickly put it in the cart and hold the item for about 10 minutes.  This is particularly clever for the retailers, as the running clock ticks in the corner and basically forces you to make a buying decision quickly. I read an article (which is how I learned about these) that explained this idea solves a major problem online merchants have with customers leaving merchandise hanging around and being abandoned in their virtual shopping carts.

From what I’ve seen the original prices don’t really seem to be marked up (unlike Amazon at times), and the merchandise ranges from common brands to extremely high-end designers.  On their site, you can see all the designer that will be featured in a boutique that week.  So if you’re looking for something in particular, it probably is worth checking out.  However, like other sales sites (think slickdeals.net), you have to be careful and exercise restraint, or you can easily get caught up a whirlwind of great deals.  Spending money on things you don’t need, rather than saving money on the things you were planning to buy anyway.

Here’s some links to some of my favorites.  You can use my referral code to get the invite….

We both took the day off to get our engagement photos taken by the amazing Erin Woolsey. We started the day with some breakfast I had prepared for all of us. Then we went out all around town for our session.

The day was absolutely gorgeous, sunshine, bright blue skies, and it eventually even warmed up to a cool, comfortable temp. We went to a lot of sites, and just had a lot of fun being ourselves and talking to our photographer. Christy and I are both really excited to see the pictures she puts together.

Afterwards, we just lounged around the house for a little while and unwound. We then met up with Jethro at Golfsmith driving range to officially start golf season for the year. Had a few good shots, more bad ones, but we’ll be working on it.

Finally, ended the day at Cru for Austin Restaurant Week with some friends. We drank through a great bottle of wine (Decero Cabernet Sauvignon) over a great 3-course meal that was just right.  How can a meal that ends with a chocolate chip cookie cake go wrong?

Went to Gingerman for a few more laughs and conversation with friends before calling it a night.
Overall, just another great, no-worries day in ATX in the books.

You always seem to tempt me into taking you out to dates that cost hundreds of dollars, require driving somewhere hours away, and your rude friends always show up.  You reel me in with promises of a “once in a lifetime experience,”  but it never quite lives up to my expectations.  Sure, we have a good time when we finally get settled.  But its all the things you put me through before and after that really get me flustered.   And I think after last night, I’m finally going to muster up the courage to call it quits.

I can’t believe you made me wait outside for over an hour (in 32 degree weather) to get into the place.  You managed to put 80% of the people through one set of entrances and the rest through all the others.  When you have thousands of people waiting in one line and no one waiting in the others, something is wrong.  I thought you had an event planner for this type of thing?

Finally, when we did get into the place, I came to realize that your friends could care less about the party itself and are more interested in just saying they got in.

I thought we were all getting together to watch the superstars of the NBA play a basketball game.  Seems like all anybody wanted to do was walk up and down the aisles, stand around in the common area and block as many people from moving to their assigned seats as possible.  I seriously think half of your 108,711 friends had their faces turned away from the event and towards either their cellphone or the outfits each other where wearing.  These are the type of people you invite?

Yeah, I know you think its cool to impress people by saying you happened to be in the same room with all these famous athletes.   But, does it really do anything beyond that?  It might come as a surprise to you, but I really enjoy watching those athletes perform and showcase their talents, and it just seems like watching them live isn’t the best place for that.

Maybe when I’m older and I can afford a more exclusive and intimate setting.  You know something like courtside seats, I’ll be able to say different.  But as of now, my theory stands.

It really was a good show though, anyone who saw it on television or the few who saw it at the stadium can attest to that.  And I did have a good time, don’t get me wrong.  But I think I could have had just as good of a time by watching the spectacle from afar, in the comfort of my own home.

So until teleportation is invented, your friends learn some manners, or you offer to pay for my dinner.  I’m settling down with someone that doesn’t require as much maintenance, or attention.  Hello Sofa.