Contact Hero is a new web based address book and contact manager optimized for mobile devices that I have developed. Please try the service and give me your feedback. Using Contact Hero you can:

• Keep track of all your contacts from any PC or any Internet enabled
  mobile device at mobile.contacthero.com
• Link calls to make with contacts, and keep a Contact History
• Use Blackberry or iPhone optimized versions
• Import your contacts from Outlook, Google or Yahoo!
• And more…

You can find some here at http://www.duphotography.com under portfolios => weddings.

Today I became a Facebook developer and released my first Facebook application. My application is called “Trump Quotes” http://apps.facebook.com/trumpquotes. It is a collection of quotes by Donald Trump that you can paste to your Facebook profile and spread around the social graph. It’s nothing earth shattering, but a start. I wanted to get a feel as to how these apps work. The documentation on how to make a Facebook app is not so great at the moment so it actually took quite of a bit of experimentation to figure this all out. The app is build using Ruby on Rails, RFacebook, FBML and Mysql. If you are on Facebook, please connect with me if you have not already, and add Trump Quotes if you want.

It seems everywhere I go today, I see people showing off their iPhones. Of course, I know it is because of where I live, but they seem to be lying out on restaurant tables everywhere in the valley. At Mashup Camp 4 which I am attending this week, of course, there are a bunch of people with them.

I finally got to play with one yesterday for about 10 minutes. Honestly, I was not blown away. The screen is beautiful. The device is thin. And yet it is just huge compared to my Blackberry Pearl. I would really worry about dropping an iphone and damaging the screen. I wasn’t excited about the onscreen keyboard. I tried the safari browser. It is cool. I tried out the phone, calendar, camera and other features. They are nice but I didn’t see anything so revolutionary that inspires me to run out and spend $500 to $600 for one. Maybe if you never had a smart phone this would be amazing breakthrough, but otherwise for me I think it is just a fashion statement.

I am launching a new social website about phones, headsets, carriers and accessories at http://www.5thbar.com.

Please check it out. It has YouTube and eBay integration plus a news aggregator. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have on it. Thanks!

For those interested, this site was developed using Ruby on Rails.

Last week I took my two daughters on a mission trip to build a house for poor family in Juarez Mexico through our church. The typical family we saw was headed by a single mother with three or more small children and surviving on $7-$10 per day. It was a really eye-opening experience! Our team of 13 people (half of which were under 14) flew to El Paso, Texas. We got picked up by a bus then driven over the border to the Mission Ministries “team center” located in one of the poorest parts of Juarez.

The team center is very nice relative to its environment. It’s a compound with rooms, running water, air conditioning, electricity, dining hall, and a medical clinic. It’s surrounded by tall wall with barbed wire, topped with broken glass, and with a guard dog. Because outside is not so nice. The homes in the neighborhood don’t have running water. A lot of them are just made up of cardboard or pallets. The people burn old tires to keep warm in the winter. There are gangs walking around which make it unsafe to go out at night. It’s dirty, there is garbage and debris everywhere, tremendous poverty and overall it’s very sad.

The Mission Ministries team is just making an incredible difference. So far this year they’ve built about 45 homes for people in the area. Also and perhaps even more miraculous is the personal transformation of the people around this activity. Several of the local people working with us were former gang members, drug addicts, killers, etc. now they have devoted themselves to helping others.

Mission Ministries also provides free medical care to people in the area out of their clinic which is staffed by volunteers. We had a dentist who came with us who worked out of the medical clinic there while we were building the house. We only had one doctor with us, but other teams come with several doctors and nurses. In the afternoons, we were done building at the house (it was 105°F at the construction site) we came back to the medical clinic to help out. My daughters and some of the ladies on the trip gave manicures to the local women who were waiting to see the dentist. We also did some arts and crafts projects and played sports with the local kids.

If you have the opportunity to go yourself, or even to take your children, I highly recommend it. It was a tremendously rewarding personal experience. You will see the difference God can make in action. My kids left inspired to help out and anxious to return again. I posted some photos of the construction and time we spent at the clinic here.

My fiancée and I recently bought a house in Sunnyvale. We close and move in at the end of this month. It was just a surreal process. In the news, you might hear that it is a good time to buy, and prices are down. Not here. The bay area housing market is just crazy. People think that the market is down, so no one wants to sell their house, and everyone thinks it is a good time to buy and wants to buy one. This created a supply and demand problem causing housing prices to continue to go up in my area. This was the 4th house we offered on. We were outbid before. One house before this one that we bid over asking on, we lost to someone who bid more than $100K above us. The house we finally bought had two other bidders to contend with.

Over the past year, friends have emailed me many videos from YouTube. This is the 21st century version of emailing a cartoon, joke or inspirational quote. I decided to make a playlist with 10 of the most interesting or funny ones I have received. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my desktop PC to Vista. In my experience, Windows needs to be wiped and reloaded about once a year to get rid of built-up crud and it was about time for my XP installation to be reloaded. Since I had a copy of Vista Ultimate and was going to have to reload XP anyway, I gave it a try. A couple of friends who are also considering this and asked me how it went.

I made complete copy of my C drive using DriveImage XML (freeware) in case something went wrong and I needed to revert. I ran the Vista Upgrade as I had read this totally wipes your Windows directory and copies over your XP stuff into Vista and there was no performance benefit from doing a fresh install. I got a lot of programs so I decided to try to save time doing this. In retrospect, I might do a fresh install next time.

• One of my 2 video cards didn’t work at all under Vista so I had to throw it away and buy a new one $$.
• Norton Antivirus doesn’t work either so I had to uninstall it and reload a fresh copy from Symantec site. The reinstall lost my license info so I had to reload that too. Annoying.
• My HP 2600n color laser jet was not supported so I couldn’t print anymore. HP says they will have a driver in June 2007. A few weeks later I found the proper driver on another HP site (!) and was able to print.
• QuickBooks 2006 is incompatible with Vista, so I had to order a new copy of QuickBooks 2007. Note: there is no upgrade pricing so you have to buy all over again. Thanks Intuit. $$$
• Two programs I rely on: VMWare and Ultramon didn’t run under Vista. Fortunately, there are betas of these two out which support Vista so I was saved.
• I had to go and download new native approved video, webcam, keyboard and mouse drivers from vendor sites even if the vendor was Microsoft in some cases. That didn’t make much sense to me.
• I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone using the new Windows Mobile Device Center. It tried to duplicate all my data between the Smartphone and Outlook. Unbelievably bad.
• iTunes 7 will sometimes just stop playing working. No fix.
• Console2 (another favorite) also will just stop working sometimes. No fix.

Overall, it took me a few days of messing with Windows Vista and some $$$ to get up and working again. It wasn’t a disaster but not a great time either. It is no faster than XP on my machine. I am spending less time in Windows these days and more time running Ubuntu 7 which I dual boot with Vista.

I will be heading to RailsConf 2007 in Portland this week. If you would like to meet up, drop me a line.

Today, I can finally tell you which smart phone you should get. I resisted getting one of these because I didn’t think the keyboard was going to be usable and I wasn’t sold on the trackball. I’d had my Blackberry 8700 for over 1 year and I really liked it. On the recommendation of a friend, I got a Pearl last month. This is probably the most perfect smart phone device I have yet seen. Very little about this device needs to be improved. After about 30 minutes, I decided the 8700 was no more.

Typing on the keyboard is quite usable albeit not as good as with the full keyboard on the 8700. I don’t particularly like the predictive typing but it performs much better IMHO than T9 and some of its other precursors. It’s just good enough that I can deal with it.

The screen and industrial design are great on this device. It is super slim and small. The trackball also works surprisingly well. I didn’t expect that. The fact this Blackberry has a camera and accepts microSD cards are huge pluses and erase some of the only advantages that other smartphones had over the Blackberry. All the Blackberry’s awesome email capabilities and applications are in full force on this device. The essential free, third-party applications on the Blackberry right now are Gmail, Google Local, and Blackberry 411.

If you have a Sony Reader device, please check out my new product called “Readerette Transferrer.�? It downloads RSS/Atom feeds and webpages and saves them automatically into PDF files optimized for the Sony Reader device display. This is the first of many new products I will be releasing this year.

Wednesday night my girlfriend Tara and I got engaged. I spent the last month planning a very special evening that fortunately caught her totally by surprise! I posted some photos here of the proposal at my house. One of the highlights was the performance of mystressfyre on my front lawn. Our thanks go out to all who helped me because I could not have pulled this off without the help of several of my close friends.

We are all very excited. The wedding will be in 2007 with more details to follow.

Update: November 17th, 2007 is the date!

I just think there is an amazing amount of good educational video now available on the web. I was talking with a friend a few months back who is starting a business to sell videos online to teach simple tasks like tying a man’s tie, and other common tasks. I am not sure if you could really sell something like that with all the videos on YouTube but anyway…I can see where he was coming from. Here are some videos I found interesting.

Google Tech Talks (Google engEDU) The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less and The Graphing Calculator Story both of which are non technical but fascinating. Other good ones IMO include An Introduction to SQLite and Beyond Test Driven Development: Behaviour Driven Development

I also like Peepcode has good software engineering videos on Ruby on Rails programming. These are not free however.