8 habits / facts

July 25, 2007

Jason decided to tag me

“list eight habits or facts about yourself, then tag eight more people.”

  1. I walk to work every day. I also usually walk somewhere for lunch as well for probably a total of 2 miles spent walking per day just to get to work, get lunch, and go home (I’m proud of it).
  2. I just got my first apartment/home of my own (no more roomies) this year, I’m 28.
  3. I love eating croutons. Forget the salad, just give me the croutons.
  4. In middle school, during our version of “home room” the teachers let me “tour” around to the other homerooms to perform magic shows. I had a table/carrying case for all my tricks that my dad built, and I actually was pretty good at it. I still have some of my tricks and pull them out at random times for friends.  If you don’t believe this, ask Jeremy, I did a performance for his home room.
  5. I was born in Fredericksburg, but was living in King George (30 mins outside of Fredericksburg) before I was even a year old. I grew up in King George, but briefly went to school in Spotsylvania (where I met Jason). Like Jason, I always just tell people I’m from Fredericksburg.
  6. I’m totally addicted to gadgets. Small list of some of them: MacBook, iPod, iPhone, AppleTV, Nintendo Wii, multiple digital cameras from low to high-end. I bought many of them when they first came out.
  7. I don’t go out enough on the nights/weekends (let’s get a beer sometime Jason!)
  8. I rarely respond to meme’s, but I figured if Jason was doing it, then all the cool kids were doing it, and I didn’t want to feel left out.

I’m going to fail on tagging 8 people, but I will tag a couple and see if they decide to respond:

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Comments Off

July 20, 2007

Well, I didn’t come to the decision easily, but this morning, I read an article about turning off comments over at Joel on Software.  Shortly after that, 3 or 4 spam comments made it through my spam filtering.  Honestly, I’m just tired of having to fight spam at all. It’s pretty rare that one makes it through my filtering, but whenever one does, it just annoys me immensely.

This blog is mainly for me to share my thoughts, post pictures, maybe put up a funny video or two.  It’s not meant to in any fashion be “work.”  Dealing with comment spam is unfortunately, “work.”  I don’t get tons of comments anyhow, which I’m fine with, my close friends leave notes on my posts sometimes, and they can just as easily tell me what they thought in person or on their blogs.

To anyone that might stumble across this blog and want to make a comment, I encourage you to write a post on your blog and link to me.  I’ll be watching inbound links and trackbacks which for now are still open but that too might change if trackback spam comes back in style, and I will make sure to read what you have to say.

If you don’t already have a blog, then I recommend you set up a blog on WordPress.com.  It will take you all of 5 minutes probably, and you’ll have a great blog and you’ll be able to ridicule my posts to your hearts content ;)

Anyhow, take care :)

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Main Street Station

July 19, 2007

I went out and took some pictures of Main Street Station tonight, thought I’d share them:

Main Street Station

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More on Apple & the iPhone

July 7, 2007

Just wanted to comment on two blog posts/articles I just read. The first is from All Things Digital and can be found here. Basically the article is a somewhat condemning look at the iPhone. He comments a lot about traveling with the iPhone internationally and also about the keyboard, etc. Some of the stuff he talks about I don’t really know enough about to attempt a rebuttal, but a fair amount of it is either inaccurate or lacking information to the point that it makes me wonder if I can trust what he says on the things I don’t know much about. Two quick examples are him giving the keyboard a hard time in portrait mode. This is pretty subjective, so I’d urge anyone to try it for themselves. I also have found that mine is truly getting better as time goes on, so I wonder how much time he really spent with the phone and how actively he used it. Another part is he leads the reader to believe that when you need the battery replaced, you will have to go without a phone for a few days while Apple replaces it, however, they already have a policy in place that says they will supply you with a loaner iPhone while your battery gets replaced (the loaner will take your SIM card and will sync up all your information as soon as you sync with iTunes).

Now, if you want to give them a hard time about something, I would jump over to this post from Robert Scoble about Apple’s lack of presence at the iPhone developers conference. I think that Scoble is right on in his assessment. It’s amazing that the developers voluntarily organized and are participating in this conference, with no support or even presence from Apple. Apple is losing in two very big ways on this one. The first of which, as Scoble mentions, is that the developers are having to do all of the leg work. They obviously want to build for the platform and help it succeed, but as in 1989, Apple is doing nothing to assist them. The second part they’re missing out on, which Scoble doesn’t touch on, is that by them not participating the developers are going to do whatever they please, and Apple has no opportunity to help guide them in a consistent and unified direction.

The developers are going to find a way to do whatever they want. Apple is missing out. By making it this hard, there is going to be growing resentment in the developer community towards Apple, so as I see it one of two things will happen. Either the developers will strong-arm their way through and make the iPhone do what they want it to, completely bypassing Apple’s desires/wishes/vision for the product (thus destroying a lot of what people like about Apple), or a competitor will rise which makes development easy, and the developers will stop focusing on the iPhone and instead move to the product that doesn’t require them to fight in order to develop for it. Admittedly, it will be hard, and most likely take awhile for a competitor to hope to replace the iPhone, but if Apple thinks it’s not possible, they just need to look back at 1989.

I guess there is a third option, which is Apple deciding to release development tools for the iPhone and releasing a method to develop for it in other ways then just web and Ajax. I hope this happens, but as of right now, I see no signs of it going this route. For the record in case you don’t know me, I am a web developer that is familiar and comfortable with Ajax. To me, a web developer saying they need to do more, is a statement that shouldn’t be taken lightly.

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Universal Music & iTunes

July 6, 2007

Stories like this are really starting to get on my nerves.  All Things Digital brings us a story about Universal Music deciding to not renew its contract with iTunes, and instead continuing with an at-will style of selling.  From the sounds of it, they want to see things like variable pricing of music put in place, etc.

It doesn’t annoy me that the story is being told, it annoys me that the story is there to be told.  Music companies in particular, and companies across all industries need to learn not to bite the hand that feeds them. It’s not the artists that feed them, it’s not iTunes that feed them, it is the consumers buying the music.  Stop pissing on us or sooner or later, we’re going to take away that multi-million dollar roof sheltering you from the outdoors and the fine foods that you eat (yeah, I’m being dramatic, I know).

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iPhone keyboard

July 5, 2007

The iPhone keyboard is growing on me slowly. I’m able to type with two thumbs in landscape mode and I’m pretty close to it in portrait mode as well. In fact, I’m typing this entry on my iPhone and its not that painful really. I certainly wouldn’t want to write a long entry on it but I can’t think of many mobile devices that I would want to do that on.

Earlier I commented on hoping that blogs and websites don’t start releasing special themes especially for the iPhone. I still agree with that for the most part, but I would like to add a little to the thought — web applications do need to try to offer special interfaces, at least for core functions. Like a good interface for adding a post to WordPress would be nice, and applications like meebo are definitely going to need to tweak their interface if they want to service iPhone users. The key problem in both of those examples is that the input fields are almost impossible to see when the keyboard comes up. Having to close the keyboard and re-center the screen just isn’t going to cut it. I don’t mean to single out these apps though, all web apps are going to have this issue for the most part, and it’s quite possible they and other apps will decide its not worth it to refactor their interface for the iPhone and other small mobile devices (although I imagine some  won’t be able to ignore it).

Unrelated to the keyboard, another item i just realized while writing this entry is also the inability to scroll within an element of a page (like the input area for writing a post in WP or the inability to scroll up into chat history on meebo but some of that is a shortcoming on the part of Safari on the iPhone).

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Ta-da List for iPhone

July 2, 2007

So, I don’t really keep it to myself that I’m not a fan of 37Signals.  However, they did just do something pretty cool.  They released Ta-da List for the iPhone.  One thing the iPhone doesn’t have is a to-do list.  It doesn’t import tasks from iCalendar either.  I do think this is a win-win of sorts.  37Signals released a special version of a fairly simple product that works well on the iPhone, and in exchange they hopefully get some users making use of their service both via the iPhone and through the web interface.  They did a good job of making the interface iPhone-ish.

Anyhow, good job 37Signals.

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More feed wonkiness

July 1, 2007

I’m moving forward some with my previously mentioned feed updates.  So if you’re a subscriber you might get blasted with all of the items in my feed suddenly being unread.  I apologize, but this is more in the direction that I was wanting to go, and gives me more power.  Basically I moved over to Yahoo! Pipes.  This is especially good for the del.icio.us items that get put into my feed because I can filter out the “toread” items until I’ve had time to read them and decide if I want to keep them tagged or not.

Anyhow, just wanted to give a quick explanation in case anyone was wondering what happened to my feed.

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Some further thoughts on the iPhone

July 1, 2007

This is a continuation of my review of the iPhone from earlier.

  • I was able to get an adapter to let my iPhone work with my current FM Transmitter setup in my car. It cost me $10. On the way home from the store I plugged it in and started playing music and it’s just as nice as using my real iPod to listen to music in my car. Then I navigated to the phone and made a phone call. This is very cool, and something I’ve wanted for awhile. Throughout the navigation to making the call, my music kept playing, then when I initiated the call, the music paused and I heard ringing through my car speakers. It basically turned my cars sound system into a speakerphone. So basically, the iPhone replaces those expensive bluetooth car phone kits that you can get which tie into your cars sound system (at least somewhat).
  • On a similar note as the above comment, the integration with the phone and the iPod continues when listening over the headphones. If a call comes in, the music pauses and there’s a microphone on the headphone wire, so you can start talking. You just give the microphone a little squeeze to answer the call, and another squeeze to end. If you’re just listening to music you also squeeze the mic to pause and restart the music. So simple, yet so smart.
  • It desperately needs iChat or some sort of AIM/GTalk/Etc. chat client. I know some folks that are complaining about the keyboard might find this idea horrible, but I wouldn’t be wanting to use it for long conversations, just enough to let me pop online and have a quick IM conversation with someone. You might be wondering why I can’t just do this with SMS, but believe it or not, I am sometimes in places that have WiFi but no cell signal (with how my apartment is situated in the building, my bedroom is one of these places).
  • It would be nice if there was at least some game on the device to kill time with. I liked BrickBreaker on my BlackBerry for this, and I usually put Tetris or something on most other phones I’ve owned. I think something like BrickBreaker would work on the iPhone too, you could just drag your finger back and forth to bounce the ball. The interface is already there for it.
  • The keyboard is nice, but I’m sticking behind what I said in my earlier post. If you’re proficient on a thumb-style keyboard, you’re going to be slower on the iPhone keyboard. I’ve become pretty fast with it, but in an Apple keyboard demo video, they show a guy do it with two thumbs and he flies through writing an email. So I opened notepad and for quite awhile just rambled on, typing out my thoughts, using two thumbs. It was dropping keypresses like crazy. It wasn’t an issue of it being innaccurate or me fat-fingering words, it just wouldn’t register some of my keypresses. So the software never even got the opportunity to try to correct my spelling (which it is actually VERY good at when I just type with my index finger). When using just my one finger, I’ve already gotten to where I rarely have to correct it, and I actually have faith in it correcting me. I might see a type-o I’ve made, but I’ll continue on spelling the word because 99% of the time, it’s going to realize what I meant to type and fix it for me.
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