A Whole Lotta Nothing

Superbowl

2010-02-08T22:14:23-08:00

Yesterday's Super Bowl was great. A perfect come from behind win that ended the way everyone wanted it to, with the Saints on top.

In the past, I've watched the game mostly to see the ads, but this year was pretty bad. Aside from the Letterman ad and the great Google ad, the rest were a mess of misogynistic garbage about supposedly manly men stuck in terrible marriages.

With that in mind, I present my version of the Google Paris Love ad, done as a continuation of the original, in the style of all the other terrible ads that played throughout the game.

This is kind of awesome

2010-02-08T13:11:40-08:00

I didn't feel like copy/pasting

2010-02-06T23:41:26-08:00

I made what would have been today's blog post over on MetaFilter, about Phil Gyford's fun project Pretend Office.

Movie Poster Font stream

2010-02-05T23:17:12-08:00

I love this flickr stream for the Belgian wing of The Font Shop mostly for the font identification in all the movie posters. Scan through a few pages of the archives and maybe you'll learn like I did that if you want a movie to seem serious, you gotta go with Trajan.

My photo workflow

2010-02-05T09:08:44-08:00

Friends have asked how I manage photos, so here's a breakdown of my typical process, whether that's shooting for 15 minutes in my backyard or several hours across the country, it all follows a similar pattern.

1. I set my camera on the highest burst mode, run 16Gb and 32Gb CF cards, and shoot all day (in JPGs, not RAW for speed, laziness, and disk space). For bike races especially, I'm bursting out a dozen shots a second as riders pass in the hopes one of them is in focus, capturing the light and action well. I typically shoot 300-1500 photos in a day depending on the activity. If there's a huge lull in action I sometimes review and toss out the obvious bad ones.

2. Go home (or to my laptop if traveling) and dump them all to iPhoto

3. Skim through the photos full screen in iPhoto, with the Information and Adjustments floating panels showing. Delete blurry/bad ones directly (which automatically advances to the next shot so it's quick), leave so-so photos, and mark good ones as 5-starred using the info panel.

4. I have a smart album in iPhoto set to photos taken in the last couple days that are also rated 5 stars.

5. I go through the best of photos again, weed out any that aren't up to snuff (simply clear the stars), and optimize the remaining.

6. I used to dump into Photoshop at this point to fine tune every shot, but now I'm lazy and there's so much content so I just use iPhoto's adjustment controls and often it's just hitting the auto-enhance button for most shots to get them 90% of the way there.

7. After I have my best photos all brightened up, I usually run the Flickr Uploadr and dump them to my Flickr account as a new set.

I've been working this way for the past couple years and typically it's pretty quick. Even going through a 1500 shot day, the time from when I start reviewing photos to the time I upload the best to Flickr is less than an hour. For smaller (300 or less) photos, it can be completed in about 15 minutes start to finish.

Just put it on repeat

2010-02-04T20:18:40-08:00

I've watched this six times and for some strange reason I could watch it many times more.

Imaginary iPad conversations with critics over the last week

2010-02-04T09:33:16-08:00

But you can't program on it! It's locked down. I'd never be a programmer if this was my first computer.

There are thousands of programmers working in the world of gaming, making tomorrow's next big console hit. Heck, most every web professional knows at least one old buddy working at EA or doing texture mapping at Blizzard.

What does a new xbox360 do these days besides simply play a disk you paid $60 for? Sure it's got some networking but doesn't come with a keyboard and you can't see the source code for any games, but you know what? The industry seems to be healthy and doing fine, and those kids that grew up playing black-box consoles with no root access still decided they wanted to make new games and found the tools and job to make that possible.

It doesn't support Flash!

A lot of ink has been spilled on this one and it baffles me. Aside from the rare times I waste some time with flash games, this is really no big deal. In 2.5 years using an iPhone, I've learned that missing out on content thanks to being in flash is a rare event and usually only found on badly designed restaurant websites (where I end up getting the info from Google instead) or advertising. I've never been stuck somewhere due to flash blocking my way to information, plus thanks to sites like YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo adoptiong HTML5, I can even view web video directly in my iPhone. The iPad will be just fine without Flash.

The app store and OS are too closed, you can't run any program you want on it!

My first thought when seeing web browsing in the iPad demo was delight that this was more of an appliance than a computer and that it could just plain Get Shit Done.

I have a Mac Pro as my main machine at home but I travel occasionally with a MacBook Air. I pull out the Air once every couple weeks and realize I have a whole other computer I have to manage, with multiple Software Updates to download and install, programs to keep in sync with my desktop, and applications I need to download and install to match my desktop work environment. It's a hassle that adds time to packing and preparing for trips and often I wish the Air worked more like an iPhone where everything was in sync all the time and I could just pluck it off and shelf, and head to the airport.

Also, have you ever used an unlocked iPhone? There are good reasons why closed systems like the App Store work. Unlock your iPhone for a few days and find that battery life turns to absolute shit, programs randomly crash and lock up your phone and are generally unreliable after you load more than 3 or 4, and finding new apps on the unlocked app directories is all about needles in haystacks. In the end, I gave up on unlocked iPhones when I installed a display theme that bricked my phone. Let me repeat: changing the appearance using a springboard replacement app made my phone inoperable and had to be fully restored from scratch. I began to appreciate controlled closed programming environments after that.

No support for multitasking!

Again, I have to refer to my 2.5 years on an iPhone where I've found this a problem only once or twice, where I needed to switch from an app to the web to look up info, went back to the app only to find it reset itself and lost my state. Among the tens of thousands of times I've launched and used applications on my iPhone, I've only run into this a handful of times and managed to figure workarounds out anyway. This is not a problem, especially for the kind of simple email/web/etc apps run on the iPhone/iPad.

So far, the iPad looks like the ultimate device to have on a plane (no pesky keyboard to get in the way of cramped coach seat spaces + 10hr battery life while watching movies?!), it's the ultimate web surfing device to use on the couch and around the house, it'll make toddler games with my four year old even better than an iPod Touch/iPhone, and it'll be great to have in the kitchen to look up recipes without the huge footprint of a laptop (while also being easier to read than a phone). I'm planning to get one (wifi only) and looking forward to how it'll work when traveling versus a laptop. I suspect it will be a laptop replacement for travel in almost all circumstances (photo/video editing is about the only away-from-home use case I'd need a laptop for).

2009 Favorites

2010-02-03T14:19:59-08:00

My favorite shot of the day, originally uploaded by mathowie.

I made a gallery of my favorite photos taken in 2009 for my Mobile Me account. Do check it out.

Popular Culture Through the Lens of the Literary World

2010-02-02T23:55:37-08:00

This is my new favorite blog.

Fun with Foursquare

2010-02-02T21:36:47-08:00

I know I'm about two years late to this, but I'm really digging Foursquare. I remember meeting the guys behind Dodgeball in NYC before it was acquired by Google, and seeing how people used the service, but it seemed like an idea that could only fly in a densely populated place like Manhattan with its plethora of choices of things to do.

Fast forward a few years and I load up the foursquare client on my phone for the hell of it and notice that most of the downtown restaurants in my little neck of the woods an hour from Portland, Oregon are all listed with mayors, tips, and everything else. As I've driven around Portland and flown down to Southern California, I've been constantly surprised at the depth of coverage and wealth of tips available in larger cities.

The app is fun and using it is very much a game, but what I'm most interested in is how it's both a useful utility, but also has personality because it's basically crowd-sourced information from regular people. Similar services like Yelp feel more like a yellow pages with comments thrown in, where Foursquare is the exact opposite: it feels like a giant community blog with some maps thrown in.

As their database fills out, I'm interested in all the ways it could be harnessed for other applications. I could totally see a Fuelly/Foursquare mashup where you both check-in at a gas station you're fuelling up at and you can add your mileage stats to Fuelly at the same time.

Anyway, I know it's been around a while and is old news to every friend in San Francisco and NYC, but the app is useful even in the 'burbs and rural places now that more people are using it. I'd say it's officially hit mainstream.

Oh also: two quick tips. Connect your profile to Twitter and Facebook, but be sure to turn off automatic status update check-ins. Those are almost always annoying to your followers. Second tip: only add friends you've dined with in real life. The app automatically exposes your mobile phone number to your friends list which is a new level of intimacy for most social software. So unless you want to get rung up by random internet strangers from every other social network you're on, keep your friends list tighter than usual.

Portland, Oregon's 1st Annual Tweed Ride - a set on Flickr [del.icio.us]

2010-02-01T14:14:57-08:00

Nice!

Vans and the places where they were. [del.icio.us]

2010-02-01T10:38:58-08:00

Hot!

Air New Zealand Seat Debut - a set on Flickr [del.icio.us]

2010-01-26T21:48:51-08:00

This makes me want to go to New Zealand

Well, that's all right then | MetaFilter [del.icio.us]

2010-01-25T12:10:20-08:00

There isn't anything about this story that I don't love.

[FAQ] Boxee Beta on ATV - A Step by Step Guide! - boxee :: forum [del.icio.us]

2010-01-21T10:32:43-08:00

Super easy instructions to load the latest Boxee beta on a previously Boxee'd AppleTV. Took me five minutes to complete.

Joshua Benton | Writer [del.icio.us]

2010-01-18T15:50:23-08:00

Simply beautiful layout here.

Cool Hunting Moma Design store picks [del.icio.us]

2010-01-17T06:54:18-08:00

Cork Umbrella!

Remembering Brad L. Graham - Anil Dash [del.icio.us]

2010-01-13T10:35:39-08:00

Great remembrance of Brad. Thanks Anil.

Looking Into the Past - a gallery on Flickr [del.icio.us]

2010-01-02T19:36:25-08:00

I need to dig up some old shots and go back to the locations someday

Back in Racing Form After Dropping the Fork - NYTimes.com [del.icio.us]

2009-12-31T09:07:40-08:00

This is every old man cyclist's dream: to be tapped for a pro team at age 34, going from a desk job to pro bike riding.

Decade of DVR [del.icio.us]

2009-12-29T13:22:10-08:00

My retrospective for PVRblog

Physical keyboard for my iPhone (and other iPhone de-wimpifying) - mehack [del.icio.us]

2009-12-27T18:21:19-08:00

This is what I've always wanted. I may just finally jailbreak my iphone to get it.

iPhone add-ons are going for a spin - TwinCities.com [del.icio.us]

2009-12-27T10:03:48-08:00

Can't wait for this.

Pedal Brain [del.icio.us]

2009-12-27T10:02:27-08:00

Finally, a real honest to goodness cutting edge app to turn the iPhone into a bike computer (with ANT+sport network support via hardware). via bikehugger