Wait, What?

Posted: March 21, 2011 | Author: frankarr | Filed under: Personal | 1 Comment

So, I’m sitting in a hotel room in downtown Kirkland, wrapping up my affairs, and getting ready to move back to Australia.

Wait, What?

Yup – I’m heading back down under. Now, I say *I* because the rest of my family already went back nearly 2 months ago.

Wait, What?

Here they are at Sea-Tax airport when they were heading out on their journey back to Australia.

So I stayed behind to get the house packed – it was karma really, since I left Moira alone to pack when we moved from Sydney to Seattle. Hopefully we’re even now Winking smile

We had a lot of stuff to pack. The final tally was 256 boxes and 251 wrapped items for a grand total of 507 items, which took up a 40’ & 20’ container and which weighed something like 20,000 lbs. Yes – That’s a lot of stuff!

Now the boxes are loaded, the containers are full, the house is empty and clean and I’m waiting for the confirmation that the sale is complete.

Soon my second Seattle adventure comes to an end, just as the local weather starts to improve and Spring begins.

What’s next?

Well – I’m heading back to Melbourne this time around. It’s my hometown. I left Melbourne in 1990 with my then girlfriend, Moira Brice. Now, I’m heading back to join Moira and my 4 kids. They are all loving it, so I cant wait to join them.

I’m also changing jobs, but I’ll save the details about that in another post.

Technorati Tags: Frank Arrigo,Personal

The word of the year is ”App”! ?

Posted: March 21, 2011 | Author: frankarr | Filed under: Uncategorized | Leave a comment

I saw a news article recently that the word of the year for 2010 was “App”, as voted by the American Dialect Society

So true.

I picked up a Windows Phone 7 when it launched back in November. I’m a loyal (some say foolish) T-Mobile customer, so I went with the T-Mobile HTC HD7

I must admit I have been pretty happy with the phone (anyone surprised to hear that) apart from one thing.

It was reset by one of my kids when they tried to unlock the phone. He put in the wrong pin a few times, which got an policy enforced to do a remote wipe. I must admit, I did loose my cool for a while. I almost ruined christmas for my family a second time, but cooler heads prevailed.

The experience taught me a few things, which brings me back to apps. The one most relevant to this is that I need a way to remember what apps I have installed on the phone. Since I had installed most of my apps “Over The Air”, there is no way to “automagically” restore the installed apps. If I had installed them via the desktop client (aka Zune Client) they would have be reinstalled. Now, the good thing when I do ‘re-install’ the apps, is that the the marketplace tells me that I have already purchased them so I don’t have to buy them again.Phew!

So, how do I remember what apps I have installed? It seems there is no easy way. However, I found a great little site, developed by an italian MVP, called WP7Applist. It a pretty cool site that is full of reviews, updates, news of new apps etc, but the one thing i L-O-V-E about it is the ability to tag an app you have installed and it creates the My WP7A library.

I took a look at the page, did some scrapping and voila – the apps I have installed on my phone!

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