Instagram is one of my favorite iPhone apps. It’s sort of a visual twitter. People post images instead of short messages. Your followers can then “like” and comment on them. My Instagram username is “JoshHighland”, follow me

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I don’t work with Java, but I do like Lady Gaga, I’m not ashamed to say it.
Lady Gaga + Computer programming, YES PLEASE! I love this.

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Last month I had the honor of being a presenter at CFUnited 2010.
Luis Majano and I gave a presentation on creating “ColdFusion Powered iPhone Applications”. Specifically, coldfusion apps running on the ColdBox Framework

The volume is low, so you need to crank it up. You can download our demo source code and slides here

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hands down the best mobile device I have ever used. If you have an iPhone 3g of 3gs, you will want to upgrade to the iPhone 4

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The sony piiq head phones sound awesome for for a low price tag

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• www.piiq.com
• twitter.com/JoshHighland
• Contest ends July 1, 2010

In my quest to embrace all things geek, I’m surprised that is has taken me so long to fall in love with this staple of geekdom. I am of course talking about the Rubiks cube.

I never had a rubiks cube growing up, sure I played with them but never at any length of time, or the intention of solving one.

The company that I currently work for had a developers conference and had some rubiks cubes with the company logo printed on them. After the conference, some of the left over cubes made their way into the hands of @BoringGeek, @LMajano, and myself. Nothing could have been crueler then handing some engineers a puzzle like a rubiks cube. I’m not going to lie, I physically lost sleep trying to solve the cube, but I had fun doing it.

I eventually broke down and started doing research on the rubiks cube and how to solve it. The more I learned about the cube, the more interested in it I became. I realized that solving the cube required pattern recognition and the implementation of algorithms through a series of motions. It was at that point in my mind that my computer science mindset kicked in and I started to make the cube do what I wanted instead of being surprised by what happened. I was in control of feeding the variables into the function and the function would produce a predictable and consistent result.

I can now solve the cube consistently, and typically around 3 minutes, a far cry from the speed cubing champions of the world, but I’m still proud of myself and continue to have fun solving the cube.

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This is a quick and dirty video of my first impressions of iPhone 4.0

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I have entered into a relationship with a new piece of high tech equipment, Drobo. Drobo is a self proclaimed “Data Robot”. In technical terms its a ASD (Attached storage device) running a custom version of RAID 5. When coupled with a DroboShare, it becomes a NAS (network attached storage) device.

In non tech terms, its an external harddrive that is expandable (up to 16 terabytes!) and can keep your data secure. The droboshare allows your computers to connect to it over your home network.

In the past I have blogged about how I love backups and how having good backups have saved my ass. The Drobo is the next evolution in my backup strategy.

I have recently moved away from my Windows Vista desktop and started to use my new Mac Book Pro as my main computer system. I eventually want to retire all the desktops on my network and run only laptops. I wanted to find a solution that was robust, expandable and allowed all of y computers to share a pool of data. After doing some research on popular NAS setups, I decided to go with Drobo.

One of the things that I liked about Drobo was how mindlessly easy it is to add more hard drives to the system. It’s so easy that I shot a video of myself adding a terabyte of storage in less then 30 seconds.

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Right now I’m just testing the Drobo / DroboShare out. Once I get acquainted with it I’m sure there will be more blog posts.

So Apple has announced the iPad. This is a follow up to the predictions  I posted last week.

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Things I was right about:

• Apple will announce a tablet device
• new version of the iPhone OS, 3.2.2
• iPad will run on the iPhone OS
• iPad will run iPhone applications
• The iPad will have a 10 inch screen (9.7 inches is close enough)
• 16, 32, 64 gig versions
• Verizon will not be involved

Things I was wrong about:

• There will be a new iPhone
• The new iPhone will have a new camera. The iPad doesnt have any cameras!

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I really suggest that you read this book. I’ve been leveraging social media for years but this book has recharged me and changed the way that I think about several things. It’s a great read.

Order Crush It from Amazon.com for $10!