Contact Hero is a new web based address book and contact manager optimized for mobile devices that I have developed. Please try the service and give me your feedback. Using Contact Hero you can:

• Keep track of all your contacts from any PC or any Internet enabled
  mobile device at mobile.contacthero.com
• Link calls to make with contacts, and keep a Contact History
• Use Blackberry or iPhone optimized versions
• Import your contacts from Outlook, Google or Yahoo!
• And more…

You can find some here at http://www.duphotography.com under portfolios => weddings.

I finally got to play with one yesterday for about 10 minutes. Honestly, I was not blown away. The screen is beautiful. The device is thin. And yet it is just huge compared to my Blackberry Pearl. I would really worry about dropping an iphone and damaging the screen. I wasn’t excited about the onscreen keyboard. I tried the safari browser. It is cool. I tried out the phone, calendar, camera and other features. They are nice but I didn’t see anything so revolutionary that inspires me to run out and spend $500 to $600 for one. Maybe if you never had a smart phone this would be amazing breakthrough, but otherwise for me I think it is just a fashion statement.

I am launching a new social website about phones, headsets, carriers and accessories at http://www.5thbar.com.

Please check it out. It has YouTube and eBay integration plus a news aggregator. I would love to hear any feedback or suggestions you might have on it. Thanks!

For those interested, this site was developed using Ruby on Rails.

The team center is very nice relative to its environment. It’s a compound with rooms, running water, air conditioning, electricity, dining hall, and a medical clinic. It’s surrounded by tall wall with barbed wire, topped with broken glass, and with a guard dog. Because outside is not so nice. The homes in the neighborhood don’t have running water. A lot of them are just made up of cardboard or pallets. The people burn old tires to keep warm in the winter. There are gangs walking around which make it unsafe to go out at night. It’s dirty, there is garbage and debris everywhere, tremendous poverty and overall it’s very sad.

The Mission Ministries team is just making an incredible difference. So far this year they’ve built about 45 homes for people in the area. Also and perhaps even more miraculous is the personal transformation of the people around this activity. Several of the local people working with us were former gang members, drug addicts, killers, etc. now they have devoted themselves to helping others.

Mission Ministries also provides free medical care to people in the area out of their clinic which is staffed by volunteers. We had a dentist who came with us who worked out of the medical clinic there while we were building the house. We only had one doctor with us, but other teams come with several doctors and nurses. In the afternoons, we were done building at the house (it was 105°F at the construction site) we came back to the medical clinic to help out. My daughters and some of the ladies on the trip gave manicures to the local women who were waiting to see the dentist. We also did some arts and crafts projects and played sports with the local kids.

If you have the opportunity to go yourself, or even to take your children, I highly recommend it. It was a tremendously rewarding personal experience. You will see the difference God can make in action. My kids left inspired to help out and anxious to return again. I posted some photos of the construction and time we spent at the clinic here.

I made complete copy of my C drive using DriveImage XML (freeware) in case something went wrong and I needed to revert. I ran the Vista Upgrade as I had read this totally wipes your Windows directory and copies over your XP stuff into Vista and there was no performance benefit from doing a fresh install. I got a lot of programs so I decided to try to save time doing this. In retrospect, I might do a fresh install next time.

• One of my 2 video cards didn’t work at all under Vista so I had to throw it away and buy a new one $$.
• Norton Antivirus doesn’t work either so I had to uninstall it and reload a fresh copy from Symantec site. The reinstall lost my license info so I had to reload that too. Annoying.
• My HP 2600n color laser jet was not supported so I couldn’t print anymore. HP says they will have a driver in June 2007. A few weeks later I found the proper driver on another HP site (!) and was able to print.
• QuickBooks 2006 is incompatible with Vista, so I had to order a new copy of QuickBooks 2007. Note: there is no upgrade pricing so you have to buy all over again. Thanks Intuit. $$$
• Two programs I rely on: VMWare and Ultramon didn’t run under Vista. Fortunately, there are betas of these two out which support Vista so I was saved.
• I had to go and download new native approved video, webcam, keyboard and mouse drivers from vendor sites even if the vendor was Microsoft in some cases. That didn’t make much sense to me.
• I synced my Windows Mobile Smartphone using the new Windows Mobile Device Center. It tried to duplicate all my data between the Smartphone and Outlook. Unbelievably bad.
• iTunes 7 will sometimes just stop playing working. No fix.
• Console2 (another favorite) also will just stop working sometimes. No fix.

Overall, it took me a few days of messing with Windows Vista and some $$$ to get up and working again. It wasn’t a disaster but not a great time either. It is no faster than XP on my machine. I am spending less time in Windows these days and more time running Ubuntu 7 which I dual boot with Vista.