You can read the list of issues in the Groundspeak forums, so I won't go through the complete list of issues. One feature that I was really wanting was integration with Google Maps on the iPhone, which you'd think would be relatively simple since the iPhone has built-in support for Google Maps. Any application worth its salt uses the Google Maps API on the iPhone since it's so readily available to developers. Well... the implementation of Google Maps is finally here! But it doesn't work.

Let me show you an example as I zoom into GC2A748:

Oh... it's in that field!

No, it's on the tree line to the north of that field!

Oh, ok... it's at the back of that store.

Never mind, it's at the front of the store.

OK, we're getting somewhere - it's in the parking lot, about the 5th spot from the front of the store.

Nope, it's at the half-way point in the parking lot, to the left of the grass.

OK, this is getting ridiculous. Is this one of those moving geocaches?

Finally - full zoom. I sure hope it's there.

Now at this point, many people might say, "Just shut up and use the OpenStreetMap or Bing! Maps that have always worked on the app!" My point is that they should have never released the Google Maps feature in this version of the application since it doesn't work - I mean, your position marker doesn't even update when you move while using Google Maps in the app!

Don't get me wrong, I like the guys at Groundspeak, despite the fact that all their data is completely closed and their development platform for their site is not my cup-of-tea. They were innovators of the Geocaching hobby, but releasing this half-baked sorry excuse for an application update was a bonehead move. It seems to me that the application was not beta tested very well, if at all.

I would downgrade to the previous version except for the fact that version 3.x has a key feature missing on the iPhone4: map orientation using the compass. The old version that had the feature for the 3GS looks as if it is checking the device identifier string to determine if the compass feature is present (and only enabling the feature on 3GS devices) instead of checking whether or not the the device has compass capabilities - so on the iPhone4, the compass rotation doesn't work at all, when it should since the hardware capability is there.

Don't get me started about the buttons in the interface being images - pixelated on my display...

Basic idea: they take some of the fantastic photography from Boston.com's "The Big Picture" section and apply hillairity to them in beautiful typefaces and in witty ways.

A few of my favorites so far:

It is tough finding a consolidated source of information about the Downtown plant, and having only lived in the area briefly, I'm not schooled in the history of the area as much as I would like. Here are some archival photos from the construction of the plant in 1960.

I finally got tired of it and started using Google Chrome for my day to day browsing. It launches and quits almost instantaneously on my Mac and the rendering engine is fast. There are developer tools, but I find that they pale in comparison to Firebug for Firefox (I know that Firebug Lite is available for Chrome but it's not nearly as feature-rich).

So I have completely switched to Chrome for day to day browsing, but still use Firefox during the day to develop web sites.

My only gripe so far is the 1Password plugin is not as good as their Firefox and Safari plugins. It should also be noted that the 1Password plugin is still in beta.

Charlotte, NC Skyline

I spent the night at the office and woke up early to go Geocaching around the Charlotte area. Grabbed this great pic from the top of a parking garage while finding GC1W2N7.

I went for the beer tastings since I'm not a big fan of bourbon (or Tennessee whiskey). I was pleasantly surprised at how few people were there for the VIP event. There were no lines and the folks manning the booths were friendly and chatty. The folks at the Saranac Brewery table (from my home state) were having troubles with their CO2 canister.

We were given tasting glasses when we entered the festival so that everyone had the same size glass. It's not like I was pounding back pint after pint of beer, the tastings were probably about 3-4 fluid oz each.

The Tasting Glass

There was some great food and some great beer, although I was a little disappointed by the half-rack of ribs I got. They were chewy and tough, a sure indicator of being cooked too quickly. But the mac & cheese, brisket, and pulled pork were all excellent.

One of my favorite beers had a booth set up: Heavy Seas - Loose Canon by Clipper City Brewing Company. The booth was all pirate themed, but sadly, the beer maid was not wearing an eye patch and didn't have a peg-leg.

By the middle of the day, the tents started getting really full and I had tried all the samples I really wanted to so I loaded up on some more carbs and sat around for a while with @jameshartsell and his wife enjoying the live music and beautiful day.

Overall, I had a great time, though as expected: the crowd started to get pretty rowdy.

Crowds are fun to watch, not fun to be in trying to get a sample.

The Live music was good, not great.

I'll probably go back next year, making sire to purchase the VIP ticket like I did this time. It's totally worth the extra $15 to avoid the crazy crowds.

However, I do still keep in touch with by good friend Ben. We knew each other in Florida and were both part of a Church plant startup there. He's from Canada (America's hat) and was living & working in Florida at the time. We became good friends and stayed in contact when we moved to NC about the same time he moved back to Canada.

Ben and his fiancé came to N.C. for a wedding last weekend and we were delighted to be able to put them up for a night. After their 14 hour drive (which included a 2 hour wait at the border), we took them out to Foothills Brewery in downtown Winston-Salem and then stayed up way too late talking once we got home. The next morning, we went out to Chick-Fil-A for breakfast before they headed over to Asheville for the wedding (there's no Chick-Fil-A's in Canada at the time of this post).

Props to the CFA employee for being willing to take our pic in front of the cow, however, he didn't do a very good job - the lens flare from the window is kind of annoying.

Check out Ben's Twitter & his blog (he's an awesome artist).

The Hacker's Code

"A hacker of the Old Code."

• Hackers come and go, but a great hack is forever.
• Public goods belong to the public.*
• Software hoarding is evil.
• Software does the greatest good given to the greatest number.
• Don't be evil.
• Sourceless software sucks.
• People have rights.
• Organizations live on sufferance.
• Governments are organizations.
• If it is wrong when citizens do it, it is wrong when governments do it.
• Information wants to be free.
• Information deserves to be free.
• Being legal doesn't make it right.
• Being illegal doesn't make it wrong.
• Subverting tyranny is the highest duty.
• Trust your technolust!

*A good is public if the marginal production cost is lower than the marginal billing cost.

Discuss.

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Here's a easy way to output the current and total pages in your post (in your theme file):

<?php
if(isset($pages) && count($pages) > 1)
{
echo '<span class="page_navi">(page ' . $page . ' of ' . count($pages) . ')</span>';
}
?>

We only display that code if there's more than one page. The $pages variable contains an array of the_content() broken into their individual pages, and the $page variable is an integer of what the current page number is.

This little snippet will output something like: (page 2 of 5) - if there's 5 total pages.

I enjoy being outdoors and on the golf course so I try to play as much as I can. Golfing has now become something my father in law and I do to "bond" so we usually wind up playing courses in the Florida Panhandle (where they live), North Carolina (there I live), and Atlanta (near a friend's house, approximately half way).

So Dana's folks were in town for the Easter weekend and I was going to get reservations to play at The Grandover. I'd played there once before and enjoyed myself - especially the GPS systems in the golf carts that tells your exact distance to the front of the green and to the pole. I called too late and they only had an outrageously early tee time available. So I decided to try Tanglewood Championship course in Clemmons, NC.

It was great getting up early to this beautiful sunrise. I knew it was going to be a great day!

First things first: you shouldn't have to pay a $2 park entrance fee if you're going to spend money on golf at a municipal course... especially when you're a county resident.

Now that I've got that off my chest, the course was beautiful! For this time of year, I understand the roughs being a little brown, but the tee boxes, fairways and greens were all beautifully green and very playable. The only issue I had was that they had just aerated the greens, so there were divots that slowed down the ball and sometimes jolted its course. But again, I don't really keep score so if you're close, it's "in" in my book.

There were all sorts of Canadian Geese on the course and I actually hit one with a golf ball. I was actually trying not to hit it which, again, tells you how good of a golfer I am. The trees were in full bloom!

And with it being springtime, there is pollen everywhere. Had I not known better, I would have thought some of the water on the course was polluted, but the pollen (which wreaks havoc on my wife's sinuses) created a beautiful series of concentric rings on the surface of the water.

Over all, I had a great time golfing. The weather was beautiful, the course was great, and I only lost 3 balls! I think the ball-loss was substantially under normal because this course featured sand traps and very few water hazards. I'm used to losing 20 balls a game at courses on the coast of Florida that have a water feature on every hole.

Okay, okay... if you want to make fun of me, here's my scorecard (with Phil's column blurred out to protect his ego... but I'll tell you that I beat him, even if by just a little).

This was one of the more conspicuous cache containers I've found before. I was on a fence to a cell phone tower restricted area. It was the first container I've found that required a screwdriver to get into and I was hesitant to do that simply because of the placement (padlocks are a different story). This would go on my list of places NOT to place a geocache.

Cool sticker on a payphone that said "THIS PHONE IS TAPPED. Your conversation is being monitored by the U.S. government courtesy of the US Patriot Act of 2001. Sec. 216 of which permits all phone calls to be recorded without a warrant or notification." More info here.

Cool entrance to a large underground sewer system in Winston-Salem. Found with @JoshuaDCombs. I would have explored it, but the bars kind of hindered that... probably there because it was near a bank.

The date is offset higher than it used to be. It is no longer centered in the white part of the icon, but centered vertically on the whole icon.

So I started up iCal in hopes that it was a one-time issue and that it would correct itself when it launched. Too bad that didn't work.

What's up with that, Apple? It looks horrible!

UPDATE:
Thanks Brent. Turns out I had multiple versions of Helvetica Neue installed and they were conflicting with each other. The installation of these fonts just happened to coincide with my upgrade to 10.6.3.

Coffee bag from Sunny Caribee

Dana and I went on a 7-day eastern Caribbean cruise and had a wonderful time! We visited some of the most beautiful places that I've ever seen. We didn't do much shopping, but did buy a few things to have as souvenirs.

We visited this neat little shop in Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands called Sunny Caribee.The unfortunate thing was that the shop was one of the Norwegian Cruise Lines "recommended" stores and was therefore crawling with people. There were so many people in there that it was hard to move around... that should have been my first clue to get the heck out of there. Looking back on it, it stunk of "tourist trap."

We bought a few jars of "authentic" (yeah right) Caribbean jerk sauce and I decided to purchase some whole bean coffee. Being a coffee lover, I wanted to try some coffee from a region that I'd never tasted before. 12 ounces was $16... ouch! But I paid it, feeling that I'd probably be getting a unique and high-quality product. Boy was I wrong.

I tried it as soon as I got home. Opening the bag, I immediately smelled the beans. They had a bit of a "grassy" smell. Then I looked at them - they were unusually small. It wasn't till later that I noticed the incredible inconsistency in the roast. Some of the beans were extremely light and others looked burnt. Great.

Well, the first brew didn't turn out too bad, but it was definitely not a great tasting coffee. As the days went on, I noticed that the brew was less and less to my liking. By the 4th day, Dana (who puts so much flavored creamer in her coffee that I'm amazed she can still taste any coffee flavor) finally said to me, "I don't really like this coffee." You know that when somebody who doesn't drink black coffee complains about the taste that there's something funky about it.

So today I resigned myself to the fact that I was taken for a ride and sold some crappy coffee at a tourist trap in the Caribbean. Expensive, poorly roasted, small-beaned coffee.

Here's some shots of the coffee as compared to some of our normal bulk "8 O'Clock Coffee" that we buy (and is delicious). I think you can clearly tell the difference between the good and the not-so-good coffee:

Hint: the crappy coffee is at the bottom of the photo.

Here's a closeup of the beans, again with the crappy expensive beans near the bottom of the photo. Note the extremely inconsistent roast.

Don't believe the lies!

Downtown Miami and the Port of Miami:

Biscane, South Beach, and part of the cruise ship as we were leaving port:

Another shot of the Port of Miami, including a Carnival Cruise ship (we were on Norwegian Cruiselines):

Key Biscane and the Marina:

A Two-level panorama of the pool deck. I know the color is a little off, and I love how photoshop made the buildings look like they're leaning:

St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, as we were entering the port:

St. Thomas, overlooking Megan's Bay:

Tortola, British Virgin Islands:

Road Town, Tortola, British Virgin Islands:

Tortola, British Virgin Islands:

Pool at the Biltmore Hotel, Miami

And I know this one isn't a panorama, but it's a great photo of us from the cruise:

It's not completely accurate seeing that I work with two monitors and this little app only supports the primary screen. so that's why you see a lot of horizontal movement near the right side of the image: it's me moving my mouse to my secondary monitor. The large black dots are where the mouse was not moving for a period of time.

Check out the cross-platform java applet here.

function getQueryStringVar(queryStr:String, targetVar:String):String
{
	var pairs = queryStr.split("&");
	for(var i:String in pairs)
	{
		var splitStr = pairs[i].split("=");
		if(splitStr[0] == targetVar)return splitStr[1];
	}
	return "";
}

Usage is easy. Just send it your query string as the first parameter (make sure there's not a "?" at the beginning) and key you want to know the value of.

// myVal is set to "example"
var myVal:String = getQueryStringVar("val1=test&val2=example", "val2");

Let me know if you find this function useful or if you improve upon it.

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This little 27 minute cartoon introduced me to topics such as music theory, the golden ratio, geometry, and I feel most importantly: the concept of infinity.

Thanks to the wonder of the internet, you can now watch the program in its entirety on youtube, but I've conveniently embedded it here for you to watch!

Mathematics is the alphabet with which God has written the universe.

-Galileo Galilei

Mo·hawk

Etymology: of Algonquian origin; akin to Narragansett or Massachusett Mohowawog Mohawk, literally, cannibal

Date: 1634

3 : a hairstyle with a narrow center strip of usually upright hair and the sides of the head shaved

Here are some examples of a mohawk haircut fresh from the tubes of the Internet:

Since "fauxhawk" isn't really a word, it's not in the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, we must look to urbandictionary.com.

fauxhawk: A full head of hair combed into the middle to fabricate the look of a mohawk.

As you can clearly see, fauxhawks don't have a defined line from where the short and long hair meet. It's basically just combed straight up into the shape of a mohawk. Fauxhawks are generally associated with pop-culture and general douchebaggery. Mohawks are generally associated with anti-pop-culture.

And for my final exhibit: a photo of me. I have a mohawk, not a fauxhawk.

If you're going to do something, do it all out. fauxhawks are a cop-out for people who don't want to make the commitment of shaving the sides of their head.

Sorry to say, that this wasn't the case in 70%-80% of the music I downloaded. I've always been a pretty fanatical completionist (are you an incrementalist or a completionist?) so I'd keep the bad songs around with the good ones, "because then I have the whole album," or "I might like that sometime in the future."

No More!

You may know about my obsessive iTunes star ratings, so I know what songs I don't really like. However, I'm not going to blindly delete all my 1 and 2-star rated songs. I'm going to delete songs as I come across them during my normal listening schedule for each day. I don't expect to delete any more than 4 or 5 songs a day from my 4,000 song, 20 GB music library.

Do you think I'm going about this the right way? Am I stupid for deleting songs in this age of extremely cheap storage mediums? Let me know. The deleting begins today.

First song to bite the dust and see the inside of my trash bin? "Full Moon" by The Black Ghosts.

I now have a problem: I have a bunch of glass bottles with different styles of beer in them. The majority of these bottles are unlabeled. Luckily, I have two different color bottle caps that I've used, but that's really the only differentiation between the bottles at the moment.

I've decided that whenever I create a new batch of beer, I'm going to create a custom label for it. just like commercial micro-breweries do. I'll print out the labels on my inkjet printer on plain paper, cut them up, and adhere them to the bottles using Elmers' Spray Adhesive (the stuff schoolkids use to tack things to display boards for presentations). With the type of spray glue I'm using, it shouldn't be too hard to remove the labels once the bottle is empty. I understand that the inkjet printer won't produce the best and most lasting results, but it'll do for now.

So, I proudly unveil my first-ever label. It's for my latest batch which I'm calling "Bitter Old Lady IPA" (India Pale Ale).

I'll be printing, cutting, and adhering the labels tonight. Who knows... if this turns out to be way more of a hassle than its worth this may also be my last label!

Bitter Old Lady IPA

And here is the label on a few test bottles: