Matt's Blog

Archive for the ‘Me’ Category

Birthday

Saturday, July 18th, 2009

17.

I’m not sure why so many people ask “do you feel any different?” on your birthday. Seems like a silly question to me. Why would I suddenly wake up and feel different just because my age has been incremented? Humans are, by nature, curious beings. As such, we often seek explanations and answers to events that we can observe around us. Age and time are something we created to explain why things occur the way they do (I would say “over time”, but that would defeat the point of my argument). Time is simply an arbitrary value. By extension, age is as well.

Matt, Around the Web

Thursday, January 22nd, 2009

As I’ve been a little busy recently, I haven’t really gotten around to posting on this blog. But, eventually, I’ll resume posting a bit more often on here. Until then, you can find me elsewhere around the net. I’m currently writing four times a week over on the BlueFur Blog about Web Development, PHP, Developing for WordPress and Setting up a Dedicated Server. Here are my posts for this week:

Web Dev: Putting it all Together
Everything PHP: Echo versus Return
WordPress Development: Filters
Moving Beyond SSH: Installing a Web Server

You can also find me hanging out on Twitter and posting some of my photography over on Flickr.

My Birthday

Friday, July 18th, 2008

It’s my Birthday today, and I’m 16 now!

Hello iPhone

Sunday, March 30th, 2008

iPhoneSo, I got an Apple iPhone! It’s pretty awesome, more awesome than I had imagined it would be. I got it unlocked/activated/jailbroken with firmware 1.1.3, but that wouldn’t do (:P), so I restored and upgraded to 1.1.4 and then unlocked/activated/jailbroke it using ZiPhone, which worked perfectly. I got the 16GB model.

This phone is definatly an upgrade from my old RAZR V3i. Sure, they both have iTunes (never used it on the RAZR though, it sucked), but the RAZR has physical keys and no touchscreen, I mean, what’s with that? 😛

Went down to the Apple Store in Seattle to buy a case for it (bought the iPhone in Canada and the case in the US…) and bought the Speck ToughSkin and Power Support Screen Film to protect my iPhone. Something I don’t like about this case is that it collects dust easily and there’s an outdent (is that a word?) for the sleep button, but on the inside, there’s no indent for it, so if the case isn’t positioned correctly on the phone, then the sleep button will be held down, causing the phone to ask you to “Slide to Power Off”. However, the iPhone just look as sexy with a case on…

iPhone without case

iPhone with case

The only problem I’ve encountered with the iPhone is that when listening to some songs, part way through the song will be cut off, and it’ll skip to the next song. However, this doesn’t happen to all the songs and quite a few iPhone/iPod Touch users have reported this problem. I’m not sure what’s causing this, possibly something while syncing, or maybe when I imported my music into iTunes. I noticed that the latest songs I added to it don’t have this problem. The only difference is that these were MP3s to start (with bit rates around 200kbps), compared to most of my music that was WMA (with bit rates around 1000kbps).

This is definitely a sweet device! 😀

Using Shaw’s 10 mbps Internet

Saturday, March 15th, 2008

Sweet, we’re now trying out (we fully plan on ordering it) Shaw’s Xtreme-I Internet plan! It has a 10 mbps (megabytes per second) download rate, and a 1 mbps upload rate. It’s definitely fast. Here’s the results of a speed test at SpeedTest.net:

Speed Test Results

Also, the average transfer rate while downloading files is usually around 1-1.2 mbps, which downloads a 100 MB file in about a minute and a half. 😀