So I’ve been busy working on a few projects but I thought I’d talk about a few things that interested me lately.

First off wallpaper. I love interesting wallpaper for my computer. Paying for it is our of the question. Actually I used to be a paying member of Webshots since they had a good variety of high res stuff, but since that time I’ve found a few sites with a great selection. And they are:

• National Geographic – National Geographic has been around a long time and one reason is due to their stunning photography. Head over to their site to find loads of high resolution, free images for your pleasure.
• InterfaceLift – With thousands of high resolution images in a wide variety of sizes, InterfaceLift can keep you busy for hours downloading wallpaper.
• Mike Swanson – Back in 2005 Mike (a Microsoft employee) began posting his own high resolution, mostly macro shots of just about anything. Most are worthy of being framed and hung on your wall. 150 and counting.

Apple. Despite problems, Apple seems to be coated in Teflon™ and resistant to anything negative. The new iPhone has major issues (even though I want one I won’t buy one due to AT&T sucking hard) yet sales are stellar. Hell even businesses have been born due to their problems. The iPad has yet to become the magical device Steve Jobs would love you to believe it is and sales are stellar. Looking back a little further does anyone remember the MacBook Air? Beautiful to look at, ridiculous to use. How does a company with so many issues continue to go unscathed? Anyway, getting back to cell phones in general, is it just me or does anyone else think that there are just too damn many models of phone to choose from? And doesn’t it feel like new phones come out and then disappear from the market faster than ever? I can’t keep up anymore. You’ve got the iPhone, Droid variants, HTC, BlackBerry, LG, Samsung, Motorola, Nokia,  and on and on and on. And let’s not forget Microsoft’s recent foray into the cell market with the only-on-the-market-for-seven-weeks Kin fail.

Switching gears. I’ve slowed down my jQuery development a bit and gotten back into more PHP work lately. Until recently, my main server was still running PHP 4 (yes really) however about a week ago it finally got the bump to PHP 5 (yeah, yeah I know, welcome to 2004). What I found funny about making the change from JavaScript work back to PHP was how similar the languages are, as well as the little quirks that make them quite different. The biggest face palm I had was regarding variable scope. In JavaScript, variables outside of functions are scoped globally by default. In PHP that’s not the case. This little difference caused me to lose far more time debugging than I care to share. That aside, I still love PHP and think that it’s the best language to use when developing for the web.

And finally, my favorite image this week: