I was looking for an iPhone App to take notes last week. I wanted to have the ability to organize my notes into folders and keep a journal of sorts but I did not want something Evernote, I found it a bit too much. I found a product called Awesome Notes which is exactly what I was looking for the only thing that it does not allow me to do is incorporate photos but that’s coming soon. Awesome Notes offer beautiful theme backgrounds, ability to add a quick note (sticky type note), you can search your notes and organize them into folders with icons and view your notes on one screen by list view, icon view as well as offer password protection. There are loads of other features. I really like it because it is easy to use, it even has some GTD to-do and checklist features. For those of you who use Google Docs you can sync with that as well.

A few weeks ago I came home to a swarm of cluster flies buzzing around my kitchen light. I had no clue why there was a convention of flies in my kitchen since I don’t keep food out and I’m quite anal about keeping things clean. The house is also new so where did they come from? They were most annoying because they buzz around with fury. Anyway after some research I decide to call in the Pros. They showed up and sprayed my windows and doors for a nice chunk of $$$. My Mini Vac has been busy ever since picking up the victims of the spay fest ever since. I’ve got a few confined spaces left to Vac, hopefully I’ll be able to do the job in the next few days assuming that my ankle is all healed up. Below is what I found from Dr. Bug’s Urban Pest Control about these buzzing bundle of annoyance.

cluster flies do not:

• breed inside homes
• feed inside homes
• lay eggs inside homes
• present a health hazard in the same way that house flies and other filth flies do.
• enter through the windows ( in most cases)

They simply enter structures in the fall in order to try and over winter. Once inside, while it is cold they remain dormant. Unfortunately on sunny days, even in winter, they will become active and end up coming out inside the house. They are often found at windows because the light from outside is attracting them. Late fall and early spring are when the flies tend to be most numerous in homes.

Hope that I can help someone out there who might be having this problem. According to the good Doc the age of your house don’t matter. In my particular situation I should have had the house sprayed in Spring and early Fall. It has been unusually warm this Fall so they were trying to get out of the house I suppose…

A few months back a friend of mine gave me some popcorn. I did what I normally do when I’m given pre-packaged foods flip it over and read the ingredients. There are a number of ingredients I have to watch out for like peanut oil, HSC, MSG in its various renditions and dairy and related ingredients such as whey, lactose and the like. So I flipped the package over and there were about 15 ingredients in this thing including sucralose. I threw it in the trash instead of my stomach. I had a craving for some popcorn today and found a some at the local health food store. One brand called Bearitos and the other was from Garden of Eatin. I’ve had garden of Eatin chips and taco shells as well. I was really happy when I flipped the boxes over and noticed the ingredients Organic Popcorn, Real Salt. Now they have other ones with butter but because I’m dairy sensitive I was just looking for popcorn with some salt and no oil which I can’t seem to find in the regular grocery stores. I bought Bearitos Organic No Oil Added Microwave Popcorn because it was slightly cheaper than the other brand. I came home and popped some up and is sniffing the cornage as I type. It has a nice light corn on the cob smell. None of this disgusting weird stinky smell you get with other brands. The taste is light and fluffy and melts in your mouth without messing up your hands. You get 3 bags for a little over $3.50. Not bad for what you don’t get in your popcorn. I tried looking up the nutrition facts for Orville Redenbacher’s organic popcorn and I could not get to it from their site.

Today is GIS Day. To celebrate, I went to watch my colleagues give some lightning talks (each presenter had five minutes to demonstrate GIS projects that they are working on). The presentations were held in the Cornell Mann Library and the room was quite packed. There was quite the list of presenters and they ranged from students working on various projects to some professionals from the Ithaca community as well as some visitors from nearby counties. I enjoyed it and found the whole thing informative. By far my favorite presentations were the one by Chris Yenkey- “Using GIS to understand the spread of investor capitalism in Kenya,” “The New York State Compost Facilities Map ” by Mary Schwarz, and the “Cornell Campus Tree Inventory” project where Fred Cowett went through 65 slides in 5 minutes. There were a lot of chatter after Karen Edelstein’s talk on “Careers in GIS. Many of us professionals in the audience were feeling quite underpaid for our years of experience after seeing some of the salaries of GIS pros in NYS. Anyway, it was a fun-filled event and I’m glad I went to see the talks as well as hiked back down-hill. It was a beautiful day.

I’m at home resting today as its labor day. Its kind of interesting that we take labor day off as opposed to do some labor. Well, although I’m at home I’ve been busy catching up to the bits and pieces of stuff that I needed to do around the house that I’ve been unable to. Catching up on sleep which I lost a lot of the past few weeks is also a plus. Odd i don’t smell any BBQ around these parts. Probably because its a bit cold out there today. My we are having some unusually cool temperatures for this time of the year. Guess winter is making an early appearance.

I was browsing around and found some cool icons and wallpaper from one of my favorite sites (vladstudio.com). I haven’t taken the leap to Snow Leopard yet but I hear the benchmarks have been positive so far. Not bad for $29.

Have a restful labor day!

  I’ve been using Xtools before it became Xtools Pro Extension for ArcGIS and have been happy as pie with many of the free tools that were offered. I had some major table restructuring to do back in June/July and decided to download the latest version (5.3.) I found the table restructure and other tools quite useful so I took the plunge and decided to order the product. Infact, I was so excited about the new tools, I ordered one copy for me and another for my colleague. I went about doing my work and found some other useful tools there and was sending an email to someone who was interested in some of the tools there so I went to the site to copy and paste the URL and noticed that version 6 had been released.  Thinking that this upgrade was free after all we had just bought the previous version beginning of June, I downloaded and upgrade. 45 days later I got a message that the trial period had expired and that I needed a new license key. I contacted tech support and they told me that I needed to purchase an upgrade for $65. I emailed them and told them that we had just purchased the product in early June. They sent me the note from their website “ Users purchased XTools Pro 5.x after June, 22 may apply for free upgrade to XTools Pro 6.0.” which was not there at the time I downloaded the update to my knowledge. They must have had other customers asking for updated keys and posted that little note recently. The product was $175 per license and now they want another $65 per license which means that we would have paid $240 per license within 30 days of the original purchase.  Sounds like predatory pricing to me! The least that they can do is give customers who purchased the product in the last 30-90 days a free upgrade to the next release.  I use another product (ET Geowizards) by a company called ET Spatial Techniques and their upgrade policy includes free upgrades to current release within  a year of purchase. That policy makes more sense to me and I think that I will be sticking with them from now on. I will miss the extract map tool and the ease of the table restructure tool although ET Geowizard has a similar tool for restructuring tables. The new metadata tool was also helpful. I hate it when Software companies do this sort of thing to their customers.

Update: On Friday I received an email from the company informing me that most of their customers don’t have an issue with their upgrade policy and reminded me that I had missed the deadline for the upgrade offer (I still think that they released the product less than 30 days after I had purchased it). They offered me a "free" upgrade for one of the license if I bought the upgrade for the other one. So that means I would have to give them another $65. I thanked them for the offer and informed them that my software budget is basically frozen for the year due to the economic situation in our organization and elsewhere. Haven’t heard anything else yet!

Here I am sitting and waiting in an airport at least I have the garden view. My Mom’s plane is a little late so I’m sitting here listening to all the chatter at the counter watching people go by and waiting for the plane to touch down. What is it with airports there is this weird adhesive smell that’s driving me nuts. Hah I’ll go look at the cute pictures on the wall… I’m so wiped out 2 more minutes until this thing is supposed to arrive only I don’t hear anything gosh it’s late… What the heck yep it’s late or my Mom went somewhere else.