Fog!

It's foggy in Oxford!

Droid Camera Wipedown

I have seen some tips that the Droid's camera can be improved by wiping it down.  It seems to do better, but my tests here wernt very scientific... the room is the wiped down lense and the box is a day before.

I never ment to be so bad to you...

I have the best friends ever!

Tic Tac's

Tic Tac's are the most amazing things of minty goodness ever. 'Nuff said.

Breakfast

These strawberry poptarts are not as good as the normal variety, I was drawn by the pictionary gimmic.  Oh well, they work.

Dinner

Before and after.  Yum.

Why Google Wave is Revolutionary

I'm gonna keep this short cause the world series is on, but my point is that Google wave will revolutionize communications.

I just had a lengthy discussion about Chinese politics with someone in a university in China.  It did not dawn on the significance of this until he said "cya, I have to go eat lunch."  It's midnight here.  I challenge Facebook to do that!

My iTunes Ordeal

A few days ago I acquired a lot of music, and I mean a lot of music off an old HDD.  Sadly the music was horribly unorganized, so I have spent the better part of the last two days deleting duplicates and editing song info.

The first thing I would like to cover is the "Show Duplicates" option on iTunes.  It's pretty much a worthless piece of crap.  When I first clicked it after importing the music, it game me something around 10,000 registered duplicates.  This overwhelming number was compounded by the fact that it gave me duplicates, the originals, as well as songs that had no duplicates!  It also tagged as duplicates songs that were the same, bu from different albums.  I was expecting the ability to do a Ctrl-A -> Delete -> Done! But I was shown a daunting mess of information.  After initially reviewing the library and cleaning out a significant amount of duplicates, a faced another annoying challenge.

Around 7000 wma files had been queued for converting, 6000 were already in my library.  I had to wait out a 2 day long conversion process only to go through through another manual duplicate hunt.  My point is iTunes, please give people who don't exclusively but from your overpriced store some actual options to manage their libraries.  Or free my iPod and let me convert the m4p protected music files to mp3's, your choice.

Google Twitter Search Already Implemented?

I just did a search on Google for "Twitter Hump" (the current trending topic) and the first results are a bunch of tweets! Has Google already implemented twitter search or has this been there of a while?

Facebook is Broken

Facebook is broken.  There I said it.  Now some Facebook fan boys are probably going to come and make a snit.  They can stuff it though, cause Facebook is broken.

Let me start with the simple problems, my Facebook is literally broken.  When ever I click off the homepage I somehow lose all my friends.  So, for example, if I click on a friends profile to write on their wall, I am suddenly not friends with them anymore!

a return to the homepage then shows a homepage without any of my friends updates.  Rather useless I would say, not to mention that this is the situation that happens when the pages actually load.  The past few days for me on Facebook have been a series of broken links and database errors, along with the ocasional "your account is undergoing maintenance.

Really? Maintenance? So why can I log in now?  I think this is revealing the bigger problem with Facebook, it's bloated.

Bloated, Boated, Boated.

All the applications and PHP graphical crap they have shoved into the site have left it a beached whale swimming in a sea of it's own features.  They need to stop trying to make the site an all encompassing user experience and stick with what their good at, status updates, wall posts, and pictures.  Imagine what Google would be like if everyone of their services were on the homepage.  It would be a slow hulking mess.  Instead, Google's homepage has the Google logo and the search bar.  If you want to do something else you click a link at the top.

Facebook needs to take a page from the Google play book and separate their services into different, interconnected entities.

They need to get their act together and streamline the homepage, or I may start using Twitter a whole lot more.

Can Wave Get Better?

As Google Wave tutorials continue to poor in, the hype seems so be turning against Google.  In this post, Scobleizer gives a brutal representation of the innovative new service.  I frankly have no idea whether this is true but his arguments make sense.
"But it’s a productivity sink if you are trying to just communicate with other people," he says. 
 The main problem right now seems to be that most of the people you know are not on the service.  The implications of this seems to be that most activity will have no relevance to you personally.  Scobleizer gives this advice, "Do not everyone," in all caps for emphasis.
He says that that will cut down on the volume of crap that gets pushed to the top of your inbox.  Sadly that means you'll have to wait for your friend invites to go through, but that seems to be a small price to pay for sanity.


That got me thinking about how we can improve Wave.  Wave already has been hyped as a merger of email, IM, docs, etc.  I think that we need a another integration of email.  You should be able to send a wave to someone's email and either have that wave embedded in the email with the ability to fully interact with the wave client, or have email messages get sent to wave.  
The later would be the less favorable option, but much easier to implement.  these changes would have the effect of opening up the wave client to every friend of the users on it.  It really would replace email.  The version as it stands only has the potential of displacing email if EVERYONE gets on it, something which cannot happen.

Apple Tablet?

Apple recently filed this patent that describes a hand-gesture recognizing multi-touch interface.  If this is the technology behind the rumored Apple Tablet, I'm exited.  This means that the whole thing will be much like the muli-touch table interfaces we have seen on various windows platforms, and hopefully not just a very large iTouch.  The display also looks promising for things like user-profile specific keyboards and and very customizable interfaces.  Nothing is confirmed yet, but the tablet at least is in the 90% probability range!

Apple insider link: http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/10/01/evidence_of_apples_tablet_like_input_interface_reappears.html

Farmville Economics

I geeked out yesterday and decided to do an economic analysis of Facebook's Farmville.  The econ system is very basic, I was disappointed that I didn't have to use calculus to factor in variable costs, maybe they'll include those later!

Farmville Economics (Google Doc)

Windows 7

Just pre-ordered Windows 7 with the student discount here.  Ordering process was very easy, on par with something like amazon.  The only catch is you need a college email, but that shouldn't be a problem for the enterprising college student.  The buy is for a digital download, as soon as I get it i'm backing the sucker up on my external HDD.  It of course comes with the expected "pay extra for backup disks and that jargon, but I think that stuff is worthless.  Here's to Windows 7 when it comes out!

Chrome Downloads

Ok, so now I know of some interesting implications of Chrome's handling of downloads.  I downloaded Chrome a week ago or so, I am trying to optimize my workflow and use Google docs, et al. So far it's been great, but it scared me for about an hour or so.  I was searching for a key for CopyTrans and I hit a site called wareseeker.com and downloaded what turned out was supposed to be a keygen.  Thankfully I was thinking and I scanned the executable before running it, and you guessed it, wareseeker.com gave me warez!  I deleted the file and ran a sweep of my laptop using the new Microsoft Security Essentials (which works very well by the way) and killed the virus.  Being a paranoid person, I ran the check again and much to my surprise found the virus again in chrome.  I panicked, told the scanner to delete it, then ran the scanner again.  Same result.  Apparently Chrome keeps a compressed copy of things you download in the cache, luckily I was just able to delete the file with no ill effects so far.  The lesson here seems to be double check for cached files and stay a way from questionably legal websites, which I will stay FAR away from from now on.

iTunes ripper

I'm on the hunt for a good iPod ripper, CopyTrans is great but it only lets you copy 100 songs, which is not nearly enough. I checked source forge and came up with nothing, I'm going to expiriment with
some hidden files things I saw a while back, hopfully with some success.

Muse: The Resistance

Muse: The Resistance

First impression of The Resistance: Not as good as Black Holes and Revelations, but it still has the Muse sound, although I feel as if the album has a more "flat" feeling to it.  I feel that the ups and downs are not as sharp as the previous release, for example you could see the same thing in Beck's Guero and Modern Guilt.  Both are good albums, you just have to listen into the background a lot more in Modern Guilt to find all the little things in the song.  I do wish there was a song like Invincible from BHaR, maybe I'm missing it, it hasn't jumped out at me yet.  In conclusion The Resistance is in essence more complex than BHaR, and only slightly less superior. I bought the album off of iTunes to check out their new "iTunes LP" feature, and my feelings are generally positive.  I doesn't seem as if the price was higher than normal, with the damn $1.29 price point taken into consideration.  The LP features lyrics, comments from the band, three videos, and ten photos.  The video's were cool, a trippy live performance of Supermassive Black Hole, and the making of videos were fairly interesting.  I would recommend the iTunes version if you can't get it from somewhere else for cheaper.  I didn't check anywhere else, but a dollar less probably would have swerved me away.  I guess if your Muse crazy you would enjoy it a lot more, I just find it to be an interesting piece of eye candy to look through. Judgment Zone! Rating: ★★★★☆ Good: Keeps old Muse feel, interesting undertones                                              Bad: Not as epic as BHaR, less ups and downs

Cheez-it's

z-it

Cheez-it.  It's in the name.  "It" Deffined as a thing, and cheese, which is cheese.  Cheese-thing.  And thats what they are, cheese things.  Magical wonderful cheese things.  The small size easaly fits in your mouth, the square is the perfect size to sit on your tongue, the little ridges on the side give you a good grip on the delightful snack.  The cheese flavor is infused into the very soul of the cracker, you taste it the second it enters your mouth.  The salt on one side perfectly accents this, the preferred method of eating is to place one Cheez-it salt down on your tongue, and then just enjoy. Cheez-it's are great, the only problem is that they are the crack of snack foods.  Have you ever eaten just one Cheez-it?  The answer is no.  From experience, a box of Cheez-it's cannot last more than a day without extreme self control on the eater's part.  I can down a box in an hour, if let go.  A wonderful new addition to the Cheez-it family was the addition of grab bags, the resealable zipper keeping your Cheez-it's fresh for days, if they are still there. Judgment Zone! Rating: ★★★★☆ Good: Cheezy goodness Bad: extremely addictive