Yeah, it’s been awhile. My bad. It hasn’t been for lack of stuff to post though, it’s just been the reluctance to sit down and get the thoughts written out.

The end of the semester was really rough for me… probably the worst semester I’ve had school-wise – though not for lack of hard work; I just couldn’t keep up with it all.

I’m a senior now. It’s weird to think about that. My last 2 semesters of Cowboy Band, my last 2 semesters of classes… this will be my last fall semester of college… ever. Well, undergraduate college at least – I’m not sure if or when I’ll take on some graduate studies, but still… it’s an eerie feeling. So many people go into this last year of college knowing (or at least having a clue of) what they’ll be doing on the flip side (grad school, job, etc.)… but I don’t. Not a clue. Part of me likes that, part of me is scared $#!%-less… but I’m sure God’s got a handle on things.

There’s been a lot of good news lately… I’ve wanted to share some of it with you, but again I was too lazy to actually do it… so here’s some high points:

  • The Wachowski brothers’ live-action Speed Racer film begins filming next week in Germany, and they’ve released an image of the Mach 5 that will be used in filming.
  • Facebook introduced “Applications” a few days ago, and they’ve really hit the nail on the head with this one. The openness and the flexibility of the Facebook API is amazing, and the applications that have already shown up are great, though I think it may be a little bit before we see applications that truly harness the full potential of the API.
  • Apple updated the options for the Apple TV to allow for including a 160GB hard-drive, and announced integration with YouTube coming in a software update this June, though only a few thousand videos will be available at launch, with the rest to come in the fall. Reportedly, the reason for the wait is that YouTube is in the process of converting its entire library of videos from flash to H.264…
  • Google’s new application called Gears will enable online applications to function in an off-line mode, asynchronously updating when you reconnect to the internet. Example: A Gears-enabled Google Reader will be able to download news stories for you to read offline, and then when you reconnect it will mark the news stories you read offline as read, without you doing anything.
  • Adobe’s Apollo platform is working closely with Google to make sure that Gears integration into Apollo applications is as easy as possible.
  • Google also released 2 new additions to Google Maps. The first is Street-view; in some major US cities (with many more to come), you can click on a location on the map and be presented with a 360-degree panorama street-level image of wherever you clicked. Also new (though not really released to the public yet) is Google Mapplets – little applications to layer data onto a Google map. For instance, say you want to look up movie showtimes for a movie in your area, but want to actually see on a map where the theaters are and when the showtimes are, or maybe you want to see where cheap gas is with data provided by gasbuddy.com… Google Mapplets provides a way for developers to do just that.