Category: technology

My first day with the iPhone has lived up to what I was hoping it would be. #1 is that I get great reception in my basement room, Tmobile never did very well with that.

More importantly for me, I was able to listen to LastFM in the car! Ever since my stepbrother mentioned listening to Pandora instead of FM in the car, I have been lusting for the same capability. I have the “higher quality” setting (whatever that means) on LastFM and it sounds pretty good over both headphones and in the car. I’ll try LastFM tomorrow and see how that goes. I might try a navigation app at some point too, can’t imagine what else I would use in the car. As the days go by, I’m sure I’ll find more and more apps that are useful on the go. It’s a different mindset than using the iPod touch. I’m sure I’ll get the hang of it soon:)

At long last I have an iPhone. Maybe now I’ll see what all the kids are raving about with these new fangled things. It is the first real phone I’ve owned, everything I’ve had before this has essentially been disposable. It’s probably not coincidental that I hated them too… I had held out for a long time, but I was finally given too good a deal to pass up.

My first impressions… Wow, the screen really is amazing. You’d think that I would have noticed that by now, but putting it next to my older iPod Touch really shows how much better then new display is. Brighter, better colors, and much much sharper. Pictures look fantastic on it. I’m looking forward to trying out the cameras. Believe it or not, it’s one of the things I’m most excited about. It’ll be nice to carry a camera around again. And… I now have a video camera for the first time in my life! I’ve owned motion picture cameras (both 16mm and 8mm) but never video. Who knows, maybe I’ll get back to making movies now that I can…

I’m also looking forward to the location services and the social aspects of that. I can find out where I am, and what’s around me on the go. We’ll see how much else I’ll do with it, there’s a lot of possibilities.

Got myself a case from these guys. I got the “smart” case for both my iPhone and iPad from them. I have to have a belt case, it’ll keep me from losing it, plus I will use it all the time at work. Between the calculator, reference guides, and mactracker, it will be out all the time. I’m going to get a bumper for it too. I know that it isn’t as protective as some other cases, but it will fit in the case I got and I think it will be adequate in combination with it.

Anyway, exciting stuff. I’ve got a couple of weeks to get used to it before my iPad arrives. I am now officially in the Apple mobile world. Let’s see where it takes me….

I got a catalog the other day from The Great Courses (TGC). I’ve always been tempted by those things, the course descriptions make my mouth water, but the prices! Aha! But this is a sale catalog! There are some really good deals in there so I started to fill up my shopping cart. Even with the sale going, it added up to over $400…

SIGH. I can’t do it, as much as I’d like to I just can’t. Hmm, maybe one or two… I started to wonder about alternatives and I remembered iTunesU. It’s a frequently overlooked part of iTunes, but it’s wonderful. College lectures from all sort of places, including heavy hitters like Oxford, MIT, Cal Tech, etc. I’ve long been a fan of the offerings from Mises.org (still the best things to listen to if you’re interested in economics) but I had forgotten about the other stuff from iTunesU.

The best thing of course is that it’s free. I’ve watched some videos on quantum mechanics and quantum computing so far. I’m hoping to do some more physics based stuff before too long and I’ll probably get back to some economics as well. So what does The Great Courses offer in comparison? Ironically, there may be too much stuff in iTunesU. It can be difficult to find what you’re looking for. Some of the lectures TGC offer on early Christianity sound really interesting, trying to find something similar in iTunesU is proving to be frustrating. There’s lots of Christian schools that have their own lecture series but they tend to be long on evangelizing and convincing and short on academic, historical interest. TGC is nice because it is really easy to find what you’re looking for. Or, at least it is easy to see what they offer and make a decision. That might actually be worth the asking price in some situations. I think I am going to spend more time on iTinesU and see if I can exhaust what’s there before springing for a DVD set from TGC. Check out iTunesU, there’s a whole world of knowledge there.

They’ve done it again. This one looks like they kept all the good things and added a few more. The software they are coming out with is amazing. Garageband is an 8 track recorder with lots of instruments built in. Remember those old Tascam 4 track cassette machines? For 4.99 and a $500 device you can do full 8 track recordings. In college, I would have killed for the video editing capabilities that iMove for the ipad has. It’s 5 bucks, 5 dollars! The new covers for the iPad are ingenious, can’t wait to see how they actually feel and work.

They showed a video during the keynote that really summed up why I love what I do. It showed a lot of people getting a lot out of their iPad. Autistics learning to communicate, kids learning in school, doctors using them to explain things to patients, and a lot of old fashioned fun. You might think it’s corny, but being able to show people the possibilities that these devices have every day is what keeps me going. How many times a day can you blow people’s minds? How many times can you hear “wow” a day? I sell possibilities and fun, what other job can do that?

This is going to be the year that I get my Apple on. I’ve got a new computer in my sights, an iPad will come, and I’m probably going to get an iPhone as well. Every time Apple announces something new, I get excited. Yes, I want the shiny new things, but the real excitement comes from showing other people what these things are capable of. Tomorrow’s another day at work, hooray!:-)

The new MacBook Pros came in today, and they look pretty sweet. The thing I am most excited about is the new Thunderbolt interface. It’s a new input/output interface with incredible speed, and it’s very flexible. Right now, most computers have USB, Ethernet, video, and possibly firewire ports on them, Thunderbolt could possibly replace all of them. You can also daisy chain Thunderbolt devices. So you could bring your laptop home, connect a single Thunderbolt cable to it and immediately get your networking connection, external storage, large screen display, video camera, and a whole host of regular peripherals connected at wickedly fast speeds.

How fast? It uses the PCI express standard which is the same standard that is used in the internal connections of the computer. This means that if you hooked a hard drive to your computer with Thunderbolt, you would get about 20 times the speed of a USB 2 connection. That’s pretty amazing, but there are even more possibilities. Since we are dealing with the same speeds as are found on the inside of the computer, what would stop us from connecting larger RAM or graphics processors? What if we could connect our laptop computer to our home docking station and get a much more powerful machine as well as being connected to our displays, etc. Or imagine having your desktop machine, external storage, networking, etc. all down in the basement and you have Thunderbolt connection, a monitor, and pointing device in your office. You could have your home wired with the stuff and potentially be able to connect your phone from about any room.

The possibilities are endless. True, the only things compatible with it right now are monitors, but it’s only been out one day! Let’s see where this is in a year, Im expecting some great things!

I’ve been doing some online training on how to use the newest version of my web creation program and I have started to experiment with some different looks. Rapidweaver is the program I use. It is designed as a theme plug in type of arrangement. In other words, I pick a theme and it determines the overall look and organization of the whole site. It takes a lot of work out the process, and I’m fine with that.

My problem is that most of the themes I’ve seen so far have been overly… designed. I’m looking for a design that will get out of the way, not wow you with how “polished” it looks.I think I’ve found a candidate, it’s called mirage.

I like how clean it looks, and I like how it presents information. I also like it’s customization capabilities. I’ll ditch the background pattern, change some of the colors, and do something with that header to begin with. We’ll see how it goes. I’ve also thought about going super basic again with the “Sleeker” theme.

I like the basic look and the configurability. There are a lot of layout tools available to me so I think I could do a lot with it. I’ll keep trying to find the look I want. After that, it’s time for a general clean up and purge of useless pages on my site. I’ll let you know when it goes live…

I took a quick peek at the new tablet that HP will release this summer. It’s the first one that looks like it could give the current iPad some competition. Hp’s purchase of Palm may be the best thing they have ever done. Blackberry also has the potential to make something decent, I’ll be interested in seeing what they come up with. I haven’t really been impressed with the motorola tablet, especially at the $800 price they want for it. I’m not so sure what is going to happen with the Android platform. There really hasn’t been a killer tablet announced with it yet. It looks like HP is going to get around one of the big problems that Android can’t seem to lick, different devices having different resolutions. Hp’s “resolution independence” looks like it could have some serious long-lasting effects. All of those folks have a lot of catching up to Apple when it comes to applications though. It isn’t clear how that will be accomplished. Hp might make a go at making their own OS across both their mobile and desktop machines. It might be their best bet seeing as how their long time OS partner is running things.

Speaking of which… One company that is inexplicably missing from all of this excitement is Microsoft. They are talking about having a windows version that can run on the popular ARM based tablets next year. That’s going to be way too little, too late. Everyone but them seems to understand that windows is not a good tablet OS. You’d think they would have caught on to this over the decade they have been making bad selling tablets. By all accounts, their new phone OS is pretty good and it would seem to be a natural platform to make a tablet OS. Instead, they are sticking to their windows  7 guns. I have been hearing about the death of Microsoft for a while, but I never really took it too seriously. But now, their inability to get into the tablet world, their grasping for desktop applications in an increasingly cloud based world, and general incompetence at everything that isn’t a gaming console makes me think I could see the end of them in my lifetime.

I constructed my website, what, 5 years ago? I used Rapidweaver to make it. I was happy enough with it, it did what I thought I needed to. To be frank, it was also the extent of what I could make without a much greater investment in time.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, Rapidweaver is now in the Mac App store. They are on version 5 these days. I made my website with version 3, and later upgraded to 4 but didn’t really take advantage of it. I went ahead and downloaded the newest version while it was on sale (30 bucks!) and then took a look around at what could be done with it.

Holy smokes! There has been a ton of added functionality added to it, and it looks as though it’s easier to use than ever. Looking at some of the themes available these days makes me painfully aware of how tired my site looks. It also looks like some of the things I wanted to do before but didn’t have the patience to learn how to code are now really easy to do. This along with my recent purchase of Pixelmator has made me think that I should tackle a redesign of my site this year.

I don’ t plan on doing crazy stuff to it, but now that no one is on dial up any more, I am freer to add some eye candy and make the site more interesting and dynamic. With all of the plug-ins available for Rapidweaver, the sky is the limit. I hope to add more content as well as cleaning up some of the old stuff. I’m afraid that some of the links to my more popular pages (Profit is important is the #1 page on my site) are going to get changed and my RSS feeds will change as well but I’ll worry about that when the time comes. This should keep me busy for a while, it’ll be good to flex some creative muscles after all this time.