Month: December 2007

Ice dream

I woke up and went downstairs to look out the window, expecting to see new snow from last night’s expected storm. The sidewalks were black and looked wet, and I thought, ice. I put my boots on, put on the dogs’ collars, and stepped outside. Two steps down the brick walkway and then… the dogs pulled me down the sidewalk like I was on skates. Oof.

Fortunately there is some time until I have to get to Symphony Hall for the opening of the Pops rehearsal. Yes, it’s that time…

Ass-kicking Bible verses

Cracked.com is kind enough to provide a listing of the Nine Most Badass Bible Verses, an idea that sounds really silly unless you know your Old Testament. Yep: Samson and Elisha, Original Gangstas. And I have to admit that the verse about David is pretty darned good, too.

I can’t help but think that some of my seminarian friends would be able to flesh this list out considerably. Ideas?

iPhone day 2

A few quick impressions of the iPhone over the last few days:

  1. I spent most of the first night I had the phone cleaning up the address book. My old Sony Ericsson had made a mess of my addresses because it didn’t support separate first and last name fields, and synced a bunch of duplicate contacts back with a blank first name and the full last name. I was finally able to clean that up on the new phone.
  2. Walking the dogs outside our house takes on a whole new aspect with a pocket Web browser. In related news, our WiFi hub is reachable down to the corner and across the street.
  3. Interestingly, the iPhone doesn’t sync the playcount of tracks that were played on it back to iTunes. This could be an advantage or disadvantage.
  4. The unit gets very warm when it’s doing data operations over the AT&T EDGE network. I used it to delete 30 or 40 email messages yesterday and it was quite warm to the touch.
  5. It worked with my Monster iPod car FM transmitter, though it warned me that there might be some noise and offered to switch it into airplane mode. I ignored the warning and heard no noise. It also behaved very nicely when a call came in, fading down the volume in about a second and resuming iPod playback immediately upon hanging up. It would have been cool if the sound came through the car speakers and not the iPhone speaker, though.

And yes, it is a very very cool phone.

Everyone is agog over … absinthe?

The title of this post is a reference to an old Bloom County strip in which Opus, promoted to the “Lifestyles” section (then a new concept) of the local newspaper, does an article on eggnog (“Everyone’s agog over eggnog!”), inadvertently starts a trend, and picks up a check for a couple thou from the U.S. Eggnog Association. He closes in the last panel with an aside to the audience: “I knew this was a racket!”

The thought crossed my mind after seeing articles about absinthe in the Boston Globe and the New York Times today (the latter owns the former). Hmm. If one were to follow the money, would one find a big absinthe concern behind the apparent coincidence?

I’m encouraged by the honest discussion in the latter article about the quality of modern absinthe prior to this latest revival. I tasted the stuff in the late 1990s—a former Cheeselord brought back a bottle from Europe. I thought it was interesting, but ultimately not something I would want to drink much of, thanks to the overwhelming licorice-like flavors. But I knew the drink’s reputation and was curious about how it might have been better in its heyday. Looks like I won’t have to wait long to find out.

(Oh: and regarding “agog over eggnog”: if you are a lifestyles editor yourself, don’t use this phrase in a headline. It’s been done.)

iPhone Market Share; doing my part

Interesting report (via Fake Steve Jobs, of course) that the iPhone has a higher market share (as measured through browser usage) than Windows Mobile. Of course there are lots of caveats with such a study, such as whether browser usage is the right metric to measure smartphone penetration (hint: how often do you browse the web on your phone?). But it’s still broadly suggestive of one thing: Apple got the mobile browser experience right.

And starting tonight, I will be doing my part to grow that market share. I picked up my iPhone this morning and will be activating it tonight (when I get to my home computer). It’s very cool, even turned off sideways smiley.

URL enabled Leopard Mail

Apparently, as of Mac OS X 10.5, Apple’s Mail client provides a new URL protocol: message:. Good article at Daring Fireball that explains the message: protocol and how to get the information from it. What use is it? Well, any third party app that wants to index and point into the mail store can simply use a URL, which really opens up the types of development environments you can write those things in and the portability of the data.

Bottom line: the format is message:%3cmessage-id%3e, where %3c and %3e are the encoded values of < and > respectively, and the message-id is gotten from the Message-ID header and can be viewed by dragging the mail message to TextPad or another drag-compatible client, or by using AppleScript.

Cool stuff.

Presidential

No, not the actual candidates; more the realization that today I am of the age where nothing could stop me if I were to decide to run for the highest office in the land.

No, not American Idol judge.

A nice day—got a fair amount of house cleaning done. Amazing how being a little domestic feels really good from time to time. Also had Niall and his fiancée Julia over along with our next-door neighbors Ross and Heide, which was fun.

The big news, of course, is that I’m now within striking distance of getting an iPhone. And at this point I have to be honest: I’m more excited about getting rid of the old Sony Ericsson right now, which is a total boat anchor.