The Big Giant makes his way past the Reichstag (Germany's pariamentary building) in Berlin on October 3, 2009. (AXEL SCHMIDT/AFP/Getty Images)

See all the rest of the images on The Big Picture

Here is the latest site I worked on, it was something quick I did with Tumblr for something very important to me: http://stephanieandpete.com/

Hopefully this will be helpful to some of you who travel abroad. Internet access to me is often expensive and hard to find in most European cities. Over the last couple years I have used everything from dailup connections to sitting on street corners that I find open wifi on. This year I decided to spend some money on an option that I can use this year and for the years ahead. Many cell phone providers here now offer usb internet sticks that are pay-as-you-go so I can put some money in the account and just use it for the time I’m here. Connection speeds vary depending on the city you are in, but I tried it in Sicily, Rome and about 100 miles outside of Rome and I was able to get a 3G connection (or faster) almost every time. Right now I’m sitting on a cruise ship about a mile off the coast of Sicily without issue.

I got my “Internet Key” from Vodafone for 69 euros and I put 25 euros in the account, 25 euros supposedly is good for about 5 hours of usage a day for a month. I won’t use anywhere near those amounts but I’ll have some for the next time I’m here. Internet on the ship is something around 89 euros for 1 hour, getting the Internet Key from vodafone makes sense to me if you want/need to check the internet while you are away.

Some General Notes

1. The cruise ship Celebrity Solstice is Las Vegas on water, we love it. 99% of the ship is geared to adults; the food, furniture, atmosphere, etc is all top notch. There is a kids level of the boat but it is tucked away, not in your face. We are super happy with Celebrity cruises, everything so far has gone really smooth and we have already talked about how to get our friends to take this same cruise with us again.
2. I floated the idea of moving to Rome to my wife earlier this week, it was promptly shot down. However if we have the money summer months were approved when we have kids.
3. Here are some photos from the trip so far…. we just started on the cruise so these photos were just from the week we spent in Rome and Siciy with my family.

We have been working on a number of things at Flipshake but our recent priority is an embeddable object that will allow our users to display flips all over the net. Now being able to show the Flip is great but Flips are meant to be collected so one of our goals was to allow the user to collect anywhere our code is used.

Now if a user doesn’t have a Flipshake account they can just put their email and we hold the flip for 48 hours then when they are ready they can comeback, sign up, and they will have their flip in their stack.

Here is the larger version of our player with a Flip from one of my favorite Flipshake artists, Shockbolt. I’ll post some of the behind the scenes info in the future but if you would like to embed flips like Shockbolt’s to the right just click on the Flip and grab the embed code from Flipshake.com.

I have been using OS X for development now for the last couple months and one of the apps I was looking forward to trying out was Panic’s Coda. Unfortunately the first version of Coda was missing a critical feature for me, site wide Search. Recently Coda released an upgrade and among a ton of other awesome new features was site wide search.

One of the first things you will notice is that it is fast, I mean really really fast. Now I suspect that it is because Coda is using OS X’s Spotlight. Now on the other hand I have been using Dreamweaver for the last 9 years, starting with Dreamweaver 3. Dreamweaver does a lot of things very well but it has become a very big application, some what bloated. Search has always been really cumbersome and it becomes more evident when you compare it to Coda.

Since Dreamweaver is on Windows & OS X, I suspect Adobe has not got around to optimizing Search on the OS X version. Take a look at the video below to see how much better Coda is in Search.  I’ll continue to highlight the differences in Coda and Dreamweaver, since Coda is only $99 it could save some people money without losing functionality.

Hopefully these make you laugh… Spread them to your friends and be a hero. So in this first edition of “Things that make me laugh” here are two great videos I saw this week, enjoy!

Mastercard – We got the funk

SexDrive – Trailer

So yesterday I posted how I felt the tipping point with geoTagging might come with the new version of the iPhone well like clock work AppleInsider confirms today that it will indeed have it. AWESOME! With the fact that they are going to be rolling this phone out to 40 something countries this time and it has GPS & 3G…. this thing is going to rock.

You can read about it all at AppleInsider