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October 29, 2007
Oh really?
I've been wanting to take a picture of this sign for about 5 years. It really makes me laugh.
Posted by mark at 10:38 AM | Comments (1)
October 25, 2007
Gmail supports IMAP!
At some point this week, Gmail started supporting the IMAP protocol for remote email retrieval. If you own the iPhone, this is great news. Back when the only supported protocol was POP, there were only two options: Leave a copy of messages on the server (or not), and remove deleted messages from the server (or not). You didn't have access to your labels (aka tags, folders), and all of your email regardless of configured filters, showed up in one big Inbox (thankfully with the exception of the Spam label). This allowed you to read your email, but not really manage it.
IMAP is true synchronization between a client (iPhone) and a server (Gmail). On the iPhone it gives you access to your labels as IMAP folders, and your Inbox contains what's truly in your Inbox. You can effectively label an email by moving it to a folder, but it doesn't seem to be possible to move it to more than one folder so you're limited to one label per message. All labeling, deletions, and sent items are synchronized with your Gmail account in real time. If you want to access your mail from more than one location via IMAP, the synchronization features make this a lot less error prone. I noticed that if you decide to click cancel when composing a message, it asks you if you want to save it. If you do save the message it ends up in an iPhone Drafts folder instead of the Gmail Drafts folder, so it won't be synchronized. I've only used it for a day now, but it's a huge improvement over POP, and makes using my iPhone even cooler.
Update: I found a new label in my list of labels called "[Imap]/Drafts" and in that label was my draft that I had previously saved on my iPhone.
Posted by mark at 8:45 AM
October 22, 2007
Future pro bikers
This weekend I was out riding bikes with my kids. James learned how to ride over a mulch pile. He fell the first time, but tried again and nailed it. He also started riding with one hand on the handle bars. Emma decided to start riding off curbs on her own, which is pretty funny since she still uses training wheels. I was really proud of them, and glad that none of their stunts ended in tears ... this time. I was also thrilled to have my 2 megapixel iPhone with me, which takes pretty good shots.
Posted by mark at 12:39 PM | Comments (1)
October 17, 2007
Giant sand castle of suck
So I just opened up Parallels to test a website on IE6, and was annoyed by the stupid little task-bar icon bubbles that pop up every time I login to Windows. You know, one's like "Your computer might be at risk," and "Your computer is out of date. Check for updates." I should probably do what they are asking me to do, but that's beside the point. Upon seeing their arrival for like the 50th time, this is what came out of my mouth,
"That's just one of the many grains of sand that make Windows a giant sand castle of suck."
I know it's bad form to laugh at your own joke, and it's even worse to then blog about said joke, but I thought it was pretty funny. But then of course, maybe you had to be there.
Posted by mark at 3:44 PM | Comments (5)
October 8, 2007
Amazon Mp3 store
If you're not living under a rock, you'll know that a couple weeks ago Amazon launched an mp3 store that portends to compete with Apple in the digital music sales arena. I was initially skeptical because the Apple store is easy to use and tightly integrated with iTunes. You buy a song or TV show, and voila, it's in iTunes. The major difference between Apple and Amazon is that all songs purchased from Amazon are DRM free. Apple only sells some of their music without DRM, and I'm not sure it's possible to tell which ones are and which ones aren't -- I have no idea. For many, DRM is completely transparent. If you purchase from the Apple store (into iTunes) and only ever listen on your laptop or sync to an Apple device, then you'll never care about DRM. For me, I use a 3rd-party device that allows me to wirelessly stream music from my computer to my stereo. This works great unless you have DRM protected music. The device I use doesn't support DRM. Whenever I purchased a new, DRM protected album from iTunes, I had to first rip it to a CD and then re-import it into iTunes as mp3 files in order to remove the DRM. I then felt compelled to keep around two copies of the album, the purchased DRM version and and the non-DRM version. Needless to say, it was a pain.
As for my concern about ease of use and integration with iTunes, Amazon's service works great. You have to download and install an Amazon MP3 Downloader to help manage the download process. I'm not entirely sure why this is necessary, but I'm guessing it's to help ensure that your downloads were successfully downloaded, how many times they've been downloaded, allow you to pause and restart, etc. Since the Apple store is browsed only from within iTunes (read proprietary web browser), this sort of thing wasn't necessary. Since iTunes is such a good music player, none of us are mad that we have to use iTunes to browse their store. We weren't so happy when Microsoft did something similar with Internet Explorer, but I digress. Once the music is downloaded it's immediately available in iTunes, so integration with iTunes is seamless.
There were a few small hiccups with the store, but they weren't that big of a deal. After purchasing my first album, I tried to use the back button to browse for more albums and ended up downloading the album twice. When this happened, the first time download of the album was still processing so I had plenty of time to cancel the accidental re-download. Surprisingly, there wasn't a way to delete queued downloads in the Amazon Mp3 Downloader, so I had to let it download and then manually delete the second copy of the songs. Also, the installer didn't register the amz extension with the currently open Firefox window; perhaps that isn't possible. On restart Firefox recognizes the new extension fine and correctly launches the downloader.
From this point forward, if Amazon has the album, I'm going to purchase it there, I would suggest you do the same. If not, I'll still use iTunes. Oh yeah, just so Amazon gets the in the last word, many songs and albums are cheaper on Amazon. $0.89 cents a song versus $0.99 and $8.99 an album versus $9.99. The Crane Wife by The Decemberists was a full $2.00 cheaper.
[Update: If you enable iTunes Plus in the Apple store, you will always see the DRM free versions of songs/albums if available. The DRM free iTunes songs are more expensive individually at $1.29 a song, but it appears that you can still get the DRM free version of The Crane Wife through Apple for $9.99.]
Posted by mark at 12:30 PM | Comments (7)
October 4, 2007
Eighteen year old children?
Thanks to a friend, I was able to attend the UVA vs. Pitt college football game this past Saturday. The game was awesome and has absolutely nothing to do with this post. While walking back to the car with the throngs of people after the game, I saw two completely wasted college girls standing on the road next to the curb. I'm quite liberal with the word drunk. I can drink two beers on an empty stomach and will joke that I'm drunk. I don't use the word wasted lightly. These girls could hardly stand. At one point, while trying to stand still, they managed to be tripped by the curb and both fell ungracefully backwards onto the sidewalk. One of them was talking on a cell phone and simultaneously trying to flag down cars. She managed to get about 2 cars to stop in the 30 seconds I was walking by. These girls were both cute and wearing short skirts. It was like watching a CNN headlines abduction story unfolding. As a typical American, I watched it like reality television, and did nothing -- subliminally I'm sure I was thinking about getting some chips and salsa. Regardless, I'm about to segue into something only marginally related.
What's up with the legal drinking age being 21? We've all heard the age-old complaint of most sub-twenty-oners, "I can die for my country and can't buy a beer, what's up with that!" We treat our college students like children and then expect them to act like adults. I'm not saying that if we move the drinking age to 18 that it will mature this age group overnight, but I think we have to do it. It's one step to solving a much deeper problem of lowered expectations and standards. Our society doesn't really expect our 18-20 year olds to make wise, intelligent decisions -- heck we don't even expect most people to make good decisions. Eighteen year olds are adults -- In truth, most 13 year olds are adults. We've coddled our children so much in this country. They were doomed to make poor decisions the first time we gave in to a fit in order to keep them quiet. When we failed to teach them delayed gratification by spoiling them in the name of love. When we failed to model appropriate adult behavior. We need to raise our expectations for good behavior and start being surprised again by bad behavior. At the very least, I will hold my kids to a standard that should make them stand out amongst their peers, even if I only partially succeed.
I should point out that my children's behavior is not a point of pride. If my son is anything like me, and my daughter is anything like my wife than we're in for a roller-coaster adolescence. I even thought twice about using the word adolescence. Implicit in that is the notion of not quite an adult; and possibly lowered standards for their behavior. My 4 year old daughter and 6 year old son are already capable of adult-like manners (not that we don't constantly need to remind them). Regardless, I think we should expect great things, and try to prepare them for those great things as best we can.
Next week, I'll vent about the government requiring adults to wear seatbelts, and my tax dollars paying for public service ads about getting fat people to take the stairs instead of the elevator.
Posted by mark at 8:14 AM | Comments (1)