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My Dad's Garden

When I was a kid, I spent a couple of summers with my Dad in Central California in between the Central Valley and Yosemite National Park. It was rural California at its best. He and his girlfriend bought a plot of land in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains near a spot in the road called Cathay’s Valley. There, surrounded by dusty, rolling hills with the mountains in the backdrop, they threw their sweat, creativity and personality into building a little bungalow. I still dream of this house and all of those windows. I recall the shower in the greenhouse, the vegetarian dinners and doing dishes outside since there was no running water in the kitchen. When you entered the house, you were greeted by artwork he etched in the glass door (another etching is in the photo below). And, the smells--pine trees, native grasses, wild flowers mixed with the heat; the desert aroma I still love when I visit out West. It was central California during a major drought. There was a water well on...

Life is Good vs an Apple a Day

For my livelihood, I spend all day reading, writing and researching the wireless phone industry. It's a sweet gig if you are a curious person like me and enjoy digging through articles, perusing earnings reports and essentially "spying" on the wireless carriers, manufactures and other major players. Unfortunately, there are also days filled with Excel overload aka spreadsheet haze. One huge perk, however, is that I get to test tiny little computers known to us as smartphones. Today, I am sharing my thoughts on two of those groovy gadgets. I recently upgraded my from an "ancient" iPhone 5 to a shiny, new LG G 3  (on Sprint). In addition my employer provided me a new iPhone 6 (powered by AT&T). So, for the last two weeks or so I've been acclimating myself to these two very nice, high-end devices. The following are my personal thoughts--free of a lot of techno babble around specs and processing speeds--and more around the practicality of these devices. ...

Sell back your old smartphone; it's worth it.

Over the weekend, I decided to finally sell my old work phone, an iPhone 5, white, 16 GB Sprint device. I had some videos and photo content on there so have been procrastinating getting the phone ready to sell. This, by the way, is one of the top reasons folks have told us in the past why they don't sell back or recycle an old phone. They don't want to lose the data on the phone. I was no exception to this. However, cloud-based storage platforms like iCloud, in my case, are (sort of) easing some of the concerns. For instance, I was confident that my photos and contacts were being saved to the cloud, but I was less confident about my videos. Therefore, I ended up moving all of the content to an external hard drive--to be on the safe side (Note: my World Series videos from October were on that phone and are more than priceless to me.)  So, after about an hour of fiddling around and moving content, I was ready to "clean" the device. I had to ensure he Find My iPhone fea...