I’ve been pretty happy with my Nokia 7610, there are a few quirks, but nothing too annoying, and truth be told, I use it more as a camera and PDA than for voice calls…

After about 5 months, the SIM went bad and it just stopped working. Cingular sold me a new one for 5 bucks, which was just slightly annoying since I think it should have been free. Still, it was about 5 minutes and 5 dollars, so not too bad, though it could have been more annoying if I had really needed to make or receive a call.

Then just the other day the memory card (and RS-MMC) became corrupted. This was a little more annoying because I lost some photos, and my applications, and the ringtones I created. I removed and re-installed the card, and tried it in my Mac, but no luck.

Losing the applications and ringtones doesn’t matter too much, I can easily reload from my Mac, but losing the photos kind of sucks… Since I did not have another RS-MMC card lying around I had to order one, the good news is that I had a 64mb card, but will soon have a 128mb card. The bad news is that I have wait about a week for the damn thing to get shipped to me.

I still have a love/hate relationship with these phones…

I don’t usually do this sort of stuff, but Mike at nomadic_audio hit me with the Four Things thing… (As did Aaron)

Four jobs I’ve had in my life:

1. Dish Washer
2. Serigrapher
3. Digital Media Specialist
4. Corporate Lackey

Four movies I can watch over and over:

1. Lord of the Rings (all of them!)
2. Star Wars (almost all of them…)
3. The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie
4. Office Space

Four TV shows I love to watch:

1. Seinfeld
2. Futurama
3. Arrested Development
4. Curb Your Enthusiasm

Four places I’ve been on vacation:

1. Wisconsin
2. Maryland/Delaware
3. “Down South”
4. “Out East”

Four of my favorite dishes:

1. Pizza
2. Burritos
3. Egg and Cheese Bagel
4. Cookies

Four websites I visit daily:

1. del.icio.us
2. Google
3. Wikipedia
4. RasterWeb!

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Hawaii
2. New Zealand
3. Outside
4. Somewhere else…

Four bloggers I am tagging:

1. Chris
2. Mike
3. Drew
4. Czeltic Girl

Damn, that took a while…

I don’t think I’ve admitted this, but I really enjoy the Olympics. I generally do not like most professional sports because I think most professional athletes are overpaid cry-babies and criminals. (The exception is surfing, which is the classic battle of man (or woman) versus nature!) Anyway…

Those control-freaks at the Olympics once again are banning the participants from blogging.

I’m still not sure what they are afraid of…

Did you ever wonder how del.icio.us got it’s name?

Joshua explains it:

When .us became available, I wrote a quick script to figure out the shortest prefixes that would allow me to generate the most number of names:

$ grep us$ /usr/dict/words | sed 's/.*\(....\)\(us\)$/\1.\2/' | sort  | uniq -c | sort -n | tail
    6 aceo.us
    6 mino.us
    7 ario.us
    7 onio.us
    7 urio.us
    8 aneo.us
    8 orio.us
   10 itio.us
   14 icio.us
   18 acio.us

I’ve used /usr/dict/words in the past to find strange and unique words. I’ll really have to remember to do that more often…

We’re all familiar with digg, the web site that lets the readers “digg” or vote on stories, which then get top billing on the front page… Well, check this out:
Wisconsin paper lets its readers choose news:

The Wisconsin State Journal allows readers to go on its Web site every weekday from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. and vote for their favorite out of five story ideas. Barring late-breaking news, the winning story typically will appear on Page 1 the next day.

Interesting, hmmm?

I know open-source is all about scratching the itch, submitting patches, and being open about things, but sometimes I feel like the devs in charge of certain projects aren’t visionary enough. Meaning, they don’t see the coming trends and what will be important in 6 months and poo-poo things that aren’t of concern today.

Maybe that’s ok, but I like to think that I’m as bleeding-edge as the next geek, and when projects hold back what you want to do, or others see no value in it, all you can really do is hack at your own copy of the code, maybe submit a patch, and hope people catch on in the future… Sure there are plugins and extensions, but sometimes you need changes to the core, or to things that no one else would ever think needs a change. Change… Change…

I used to accuse Microsoft of developing things in a half-assed way just so they could add it to the checklist and say “Yup, we got that feature!” but on occasion I think some open-source projects are doing that too. Users also tend to get in the habit of working around things that aren’t quite right, and not complaining about it, but just “get used to it” and eventually become blind to it, thinking “that’s how it works” even if the usability is poor and the users suffer.

Don’t get me wrong, I believe open-source is the way to go, and how software should be written, but sometimes I just feel like some of the leaders need to be more risk-takers in looking to the future.

Of course we sometimes see people who are visionary, but have a hard time convincing others that there needs to be code to realise the vision, so, well, let’s just say when everything lines up right, good things can happen. We need more good things happening…

Joel talks about Great Design and, um, lack of Great Design… He brings up the Motorola RAZR and it’s on/off keys…

Upon first looking at them, I figured the green key was a phone held vertically and the red key was a phone in the “hung up” position. Mind you, the icons look like the old time phones, not a modern mobile phone of today… (Well, sort of, if you stretch the imagination…)

This brings up an issue I’ve always wondered about… In my car is a little icon for when the level of fuel gets too low. It looks like a gas pump that existed back around 1970 or so. You know, the kind with the single hose and handle that hangs on the side of the pump. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those, except maybe in a museum.

It’s the same thing with the icon of an old time oil can, and numerous other examples. I still see systems that use an hourglass to represent having to wait for something. I doubt my kids have ever seen an hourglass, but the know that’s the symbol for “wait, this will take some time…” Do we need to worry about using icons of things that we no longer really use, or that don’t look familiar anymore? Is it just a matter of knowing what the icon currently represents and we should be ok with that? I dunno…

Back to issue of buttons doing things, when I used my Rio 500, I was happy it had a button for volume, and another one for on/off. With the iPod, I often try to turn if off, and it doesn’t seem to work. And the volume is accessible only if you are in the right mode, with that option available. I was happy when I got a Mac keyboard (like the old NeXT keyboard) with a volume control on it, because grabbing a mouse and trying to navigate to a tiny on-screen volume control can be a challenge you don’t need at 3 AM when something comes out of the speakers at full blast…

With the RAZR, I would have guessed as Joel did, that green turned it on, while red turned it off. I can pretend I’m superior with my Nokia, where it has a single button for on/off at the top, but to be honest, I almost never turn it off, because the boot up time is ridiculous. Sure, it’s more computer than phone, but still, I’d rather just change the profile from ‘Normal’ to ‘Silent’ than deal with turning it off and turning it back on. Oh, do you know the easy way to change the profile? Obviously you just push the off (or on) button quickly to change the profile, but don’t hold it down too long, or the phone will turn off, and you’ll be forced to wait for it to go through it’s long boot process to turn it back on.

Some days I feel like we have dozens of modern equivalents to the blinking 12:00 on the VCR’s of yesteryear…

In a recent email newsletter from Jakob Nielson (no link, since it does not appear to be on the web, ponder than one for a while…) he talks about Steve Jobs’ Macworld keynote, and even makes a joke!

In my last newsletter, I complained about the webcast of Bill Gates’ CES keynote: we didn’t get to hear the speaker until 8 minutes and 57 seconds into the video. Too drawn-out (thus boring) for Web video. In contrast, Apple’s video of Steve Jobs’ recent Macworld keynote had him talking after only 36 seconds of intro. They could have tightened this a bit, but basically, that’s the way to go. The video image was the same size as Microsoft’s (320×180), which is too small to see demos well. For long videos, better quality is needed to keep users’ attention, even when you are webcasting from a reality distortion field.

As for the Macworld keynote, Drew mentioned that it would be a most excellent idea for Apple to make the keynote available via the iTunes Music Store. What Mac-fanatic wouldn’t pay $1.99 to download all the Stevey goodness with “Oh… and one more thing…”? Isn’t it the perfect content for that shiny new video-capable iPod?

What’s up Apple?

Hmmm, this seems weird…

Go to this Flickr page: /photos/tags/water/ and this Flickr page: /creativecommons/by-nc-sa-2.0/tags/water/

The first one, which is all photos tagged with ‘water’ regardless of license, has an RSS feed you can subscribe to. The second one, which has photos tagged with ‘water’ made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, does not…

Seems to me that you would want an RSS feed of by-nc-sa license photos, eh?

(Update: I may or may not have heard that RSS feeds for the CC stuff should happen in the future. Yay!)

You know how you search, and you get a results page and it says something like:

12 results found!
Displaying 1 - 10 of 12

And then you need to go to the second page to see the last two results?

This is due to some programmer deciding (or more likely not deciding) that you should always display a list of 10 items per page, and the last page will have the remainder. Why not just round the number of results properly and display 1 - 12 of 12, or 50 - 66 of 66, etc?

Yeah, ok, Rocketboom is nice and all, sort of funny in a geeky way, but really, for a true alpha-geek you need more, you need Geek Entertaintment TV.

I know, people go on and on about Amanda this and Amanda that, but she can’t compete with Irina Slutsky.

The Macworld Expo 2006 Wrap Up is especially hilarious. ("S. Kelly" indeed!)

I have seen the future of videoblogging/videopodcasting/vlogging… whatever you call it! It’s Geek Entertaintment TV…

That Zeldman guy does go on, doesn’t he? This time on Web 2.0 3.0…

Here is my favorite bit:

If Steven created the site with CGI and Perl and used tables for layout, this is the story of a boy who made a website for his own amusement, perhaps gaining social points in the process. He might even contribute to a SXSW Interactive panel.

But if Steven used AJAX and Ruby on Rails, Yahoo will pay millions and Tim O’Reilly will beg him to keynote.

So that’s what I’ve been doing wrong all this time!

There are plenty of comments on the article, but since you can only view 10 on a page at a time, well, blah, blah, something about usability, blah, blah…

I know that 2006 is the year of “User-Contributed Content” but it has come to my attention that we all need to hire our own personal laywers before we submit anything to any website. Ok, if not lawyers, we at least need a watchdog group… failing that, a bunch of know-it-all bloggers should suffice.

When someone announces a new video hosting service in the Yahoo! Videoblogging Group, the first thing someone does is checks the Term of Service to see if it looks good, and by ‘good’ we’re referring to maintaining the rights of the creator. You may be surprised by how many sites that accept user contributions have these little bits about how they own the content you’ve submitted and all rights to sell it to others throughout the galaxy until the end of eternity. Ok, it’s not quite that bad, but it can get a little weird.

The sad thing is, most of these are either written by lawyers who have no idea how the web works, or were just copied from another site, and only the names have been changed. 98% of the users never read these things, it’s the 2% that do and make a fuss about it that you have to thank. And the thing is, if you alert the folks in charge of the weirdness, they’ll often try to accomodate you in some way. Well, that’s what I’ve seen happen so far…

JD Lasica has a nice post about this, with my favorite part being where he cites Ourmedia’s Terms of Service:

You own your own material. Ourmedia claims no intellectual property rights over the material you provide to our service.

Now, Ourmedia is pretty enlightened, and they let you choose the license you want to release your work under (though the seem to favor Creative Commons, as that jives with the whole idea behind Ourmedia) but the blip.tv Terms of Service are also pretty good with words like “…you own or otherwise control all of the rights to your content…” That, coupled with the fact that they’ve had open dialog with the community about the “who owns what rights” issues makes me feel pretty good about them.

So folks, before you sign up with any site that will be using content you provide, check the terms. There are ways around some of the terms as well, which we’ll get into next time. I’m pretty sure we won’t even need to break the law to do so.

I started to browse through the podsafe music network site recently (even though I am not a fan of their licensing terms) because, well, because it had some music I wanted to hear. I was getting bothered by their interface that presented these little play buttons for each audio file, and since I couldn’t just run it through Webjay’s Play This Page feature, I hacked up some code to do a little transformation to expose cleaner URL’s for the MP3’s first.

So this means what? It means I can browse to a page like this one for Scaterd Few , then click on a bookmarklet to run it through my hack, and get a simple page with links to the MP3’s.

But wait, there’s more! I can then click on the Webjay Play This Page bookmarklet to send it to Webjay and, you know, Play The Page!

And last but not least, as I said to Lucas “I will now patiently await cease and desist letters from all of the parties involved…”

I was always bothered by the scene in Return of the Jedi that shows Boba Fett falling into the Sarlacc pit. I mentioned this back in 2001:

I watched part of Return of the Jedi yesterday as well. I’m still waiting for the director’s cut where they show the scene where Boba Fett flies out of the Sarlac pit and kills Luke Skywalker…

Well… While browsing the Star Wars Databank, we came across this bit about ol’ Boba Fett:

The airborne Fett slammed into the side of Jabba’s sail barge before tumbling into the Sarlacc’s mouth. With a sickly belch from the desert creature, it seemed as if Fett’s career as the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunter was brought to an end.

Emphasis on seemed is mine. I knew “the galaxy’s most notorious bounty hunter” could not be so easily eliminated.

(Oh yeah, Jane Wiedlin loves Star wars.)