I love my 60GB Video iPod. It fits my entire music collection on the device and when combined with my playlists, it allows me to listen to my favorite tunes at all times. At home I use iTunes, but I decided that I needed access to my iPod in the car since my daily commute is about an hour.

CNET did a review of the DLO Transpod , saying it was the best FM Transmitters out there and that the sound quality was “excellent”.

After using the product for the last two months, I’ve come to the conclusion that I will never trust another review from CNET, ever!!. Although the DLO Transpod works as advertised and the fact that I now have my playlist available in my car, the sound quality is terrible.

My entire music collection is ripped into .mp3s sampled at 320kbps which is lossless. On my PC they sound great. On my iPod playing through my Shure headphones they sound great. Pop the iPod into the DLO cradle and I lose my low end, “p”’s pop and the overall quality of sound goes through the floor.

Small price to pay for the convenience I guess, but I’m going to insure that my next car has built in support for my iPod.

I’ve read quite a few books on photography and in terms of praticality and offering tips that you can use immediately, Bryan Peterson’s book “Understanding Exposure” is fantastic.

I was already familiar with fact that correct exposure is the result of matching shutter speed, aperture and ISO, but Bryan helps you to see that it is much more than that because technically every shot has many 5+ correct exposures (due to various combinations of M,A, ISO). The question is whether it is the right “creative” exposure.

You can easily make it through this book on a long flight or weekend. Highly recommended!

So I took Nathan to his first t-ball practice today. I’m having serious issues with the fact that he’s actually old enough to play. What’s scarier is that Ian isn’t far behind and then I’ll blink and Cole will be playing too. Hope the parents are cool, because the next 16 years are going to be filled with kid related events. I knew there was a reason for preparing the Harley for sale…..

I did get some good pictures of Nathan today. You can check them out here Oh, and MIX06 went well. I still have my little bouts of anxiety before I speak, but I’m happy with how it turned out. They are going to post videos of the session within a month. If I remember, I’ll post a link to it when it is ready.

Last week I went to Las Vegas to speak at the MIX06 conference. See my blog if you care

Today, Nathan had his first T-ball practice and I couldn’t resist taking a couple hundred pictures. I also used Nathan’s practice to try out the “high speed mode” on my Nikon D2x. It is amazing. You can take 8 shots per second! I posted 5 sequential shots from one of Nathan’s at bats. Pretty cool… Those shots, plus a bunch of others are now on in the photo gallery so you’ll have to check ‘em out! Hope you are all doing well! We’re just counting the days until Springtime….wait, it is springtime. Where’s the warm temps already?

Tomorrow I’m leaving for Vegas to present at MIX06. My session covers the Sidebar, one of the projects that I’ve been working on for the last year at Microsoft.

Out of all the products I’ve worked on over my 11 years at Microsoft, Sidebar is my favorite. We have designed a feature set which I think is visually stunning and which will benefit users and businesses alike. End users will have instant access to targeted information on their desktops. And it will be information that they choose. We will build a huge ecosystem around gadgets, so I expect there to be thousands of gadgets to choose from after Vista ships. For businesses, the Sidebar represents an opportunity to extend their reach beyond the browser or application. FOX Sports has already created a cool football gadget that allows me to monitor football games in real time. If I want additional statistics on the game, I can click in the gadget and be taken to the FOX website. There’s a similar value with applications. You’ll be able to monitor high level data in a gadget instead of having to run the full blown application. When something catches my eye and I want the full set of data, I can click inside the gadget and instantiate the full application. The scenarios are only limited by your imagination.

Sidebar is also a platform in that you can easily (if you know basic HTML, XML and script) build gadgets, which are single purpose mini-applications that are hosted in the Sidebar. If you want to stay abreast of the the platform and possibly build your own gadgets, you can follow our progress on our gadget website.

MIX06 should be a great experience. The conference is going to attract web developers, designers and business decision makers. Sidebar should be pretty interesting to all three types of folks. I can’t wait to see what professional designers can do in terms of building and designing Sidebar gadgets.

Anyhow, wish me luck and I’ll let you know how it goes!

-David