Thieves Like Us">

So – after the dust has settled, here is my impression of the thing:

Yes, it is an iPod touch on steroids and that is the perfect thing for it to be. It is not for replacing your laptop or your phone. It is simply a media delivery device with some extra computing power.

Right now, I am not its target market. My mom is. I gave her an iPod touch and she loves it. She’ll check her email from the living room, play some games, etc. Giving her a larger platform to do so on is going to thrill her. It can turn into a digital picture frame? Perfect! Electronic photo album that she can hand around to people and not drag out the laptop? Awesome! Color ebook reader? Sweet!

Yes, we the cognoscenti are picking it apart. With all the hype how could we not be disappointed by some aspect of it. And yes, Apple is famous for features driving revisions. I’ll bet they have a cameraPad already in the works, along with multitasking, just waiting for the better power consumption the new A5 chip will have next year.

Will I buy one? I don’t know. Definitely not right now. But I have a feeling the evolution of it, along with the new apps it is going to spur, will be pretty tempting…

tags: Apple Inc., iPad, Technology/Internet

tags: mischief, plans, status, update

Oxford University Press is running http://savethewords.org to promote literacy by giving people a chance to adopt older words that have fallen out of use.

I am all for adding meh and wonky and email to the dictionaries, but it shouldn’t be at the expense of older words. It’s not like there is a letter shortage and they need to be repurposed.

So I adopted two words. Yeah, I roll like that. Use them in your daily life, and adopt a couple of your own.

sevedical – speaking cruel or harsh words

and

magistracide – the killing of a master or teacher

tags: dictionary

tags: atheist

As Halloween approaches, let us all remember that putting clothes on an animal for any reason other than protection is 100% immoral and flat out wrong. I would go so far as to say that putting costumes on an animal is a small step away from sexualizing them.

Besides, your faithful companions are humiliated by this. Exhibit A:

What if Sparky gets loose and hit by a car? Is this really how you want him going out? Dressed like a Spongebob bitch?

Exhibit B:

Cmon now! Goofy has spent his entire career carefully walking the line between canine and human. What does this say?! Does this clear up the issue? Does it out Goofy?

Finally, Exhibit C:

If I catch you dressing your dog like this, I will call the Humane Society and I will have CSI inspect your crotch for evidence of dog hair.

(inspired by this)

tags: Halloween, pet costume

I was working today on something similar to boombox. Mostly as a side project to understand some concepts better, but also as a proof of concept. Anywho… I have been investigating discovery techniques.

The first is simply scanning directory structures and building data from that (ie. folder name at artist level gets read as artist name). The second is to use the metainfo from the file itself (ID3 for mp3s, Field Keys for MP4, etc.).

Both have pros and cons. Scanning doesn’t require tags (duh) and is slightly more forgiving. Tags otoh allow for far more information to be processed. Case in point, the compilation flag.

in iTunes, there is a nifty little checkbox on the Get Info dialog that allows you to indicate that a track is part of a compilation. This has the benefit of allowing you to capture the true artists name in the appropriate field, but have it be grouped by the album. Otherwise, each artist in the compilation would have their own album entry with one song in it.

Funny thing about that checkbox… its not a standard ID3 tag. Apple creates a new tag (TCMP) and sets the value to 1 for comps. If its not present, or value is 0, then its not part of a comp.

This is all “legal” – the standard allows for custom tags to be created and used. But Apple gets even tricksier.

The format of this tag requires that the tag be version 2.3 or higher, as the previous versions had different encoding schemes. If the tag isnt at the right level, apple stores the information in the xml dump of your track info instead of upgrading your tag.

All well and good when you are just using itunes. But makes for crappy data retrieval when trying to scan the items themselves.

Moral of this story? Be good netizens with your music tracks. Make sure to upgrade tag versions before transferring files. Also, my pet peeves, use the Of fields ( i.e  Track 1 of 17 not just Track 1 ), use the Compilation checkbox. If its mostly one Artist but one track has a “Featuring Another Person” use the Album Artist field to group them all together as the main artist.

At least according to this article. I have to agree. I have a landline that is predominantly used to buzz people in to my place. Other than that, I rarely, if ever, even pick up the phone. A quick look at the caller id, and if its not my front door, the caller is sent to voicemail hell, where I never check the messages.

My mobile is a slightly different situation. Again, I usually only pick up if I recognize the number, and voicemail can sit in there for days or weeks before I clean it out. Even then, a few seconds to figure out who it is and it usually gets dumped.

I wonder if my behavior would change with Visual Voicemail, like the iPhone has, although I doubt it.

Between Twitter, IM, SMS, and email, there are plenty of ways to get information to me that are integrated into my normal routine. Calling an external phone number and dealing with a linear menu system just isnt one of them.

Despite a string of money finishes, it seems our destiny now is to languish near the bottom of the pack. Maybe the break last week should have signaled our retirement. Are we now like Sugar Ray Leonard in 1991 when he was knocked down twice by Terry Norris? Or are we like Larry Bird in his last season shooting only 20 points per game? Heck – Bird could at least claim back injuries; what can we claim? My abstinence from diet coke and alcohol may have made me a bit cranky, but the rest of the team more than made up for it. And yes, one of our key players was spun off from us to help a splinter faction. But these are no excuses, they are the whinings and snivelings of losers…

Perhaps it is time to sunset SparkleMotion… leave what little glory there is for the history books.

In Cities and Ambition, essayist and hacker extraordanaire Paul Graham puts forward the idea that a city sends cues to its inhabitants on how to behave and what to strive for: New York says you should be richer, Cambridge says you should be smarter, etc.

So what message does Portland send?

For me, I think Portland tells its citizens that they should improve themselves. We should be greener, we should be more active, we should be weirder.

What do you think?

giving up diet coke.

you are forewarned.