that ring of confidence

I'm now Web 2.0 Complient

Thanks to the Web 2.0 Logo generator [wlc] for my new online identity. I'm dropping the vowels and adding meta-data to my person to be fully Web 2.0 ready. I'll be capturing data driven wikis all night long.

In the classroom they have wi-fi

I guess it dates me to say that when I was in high school nobody brought laptops to school. When I got a very old Powerbook to take with me to France, and would use take it in class on my return to Canada, it was a novelty. Even when I hit university the only other students using laptops tended to be the special needs students who the school supplied with computers to aid in their studies. There certainly was not wi-fi available anywhere around campus, and if I wanted to get my laptop online I needed to unplug one of the computers in the Phoenix's office and stick the stolen ethernet cable into my computer.

By the time I left it was more common to see laptops, but university wide wi-fi was still in the future. In the newspaper office we'd finally set up our own private wireless network, simply because we were always short on ethernet ports, and that seemed cutting edge.

These days though wireless internet is the norm in post-secondary schools across Canada. Karen Pinchin wrote an article for The Georgia Straight about how that's taxing student's attention spans in class [tgs], and I guess the fact that I'm blogging as the teacher is trying to get his laptop to display the correct slide, is proof that it does divide attention. Myself though I'm of the opinion that students basically find ways to let their minds go on mini holidays with or without technological advances.

I was generally attentive in high school but when the teacher was having to go over a concept for a third or fourth time for someone my mind would wander. Back then I'd write short stories, work on terrible lyrics to terrible songs that I intended to write one day when I finally learned to play guitar (I never did and likely never will), or came up with names for the terrible band that would never perform my terrible songs.

On notable class was grade eight English. I was an avid reader and would generally finish a novel within a week, which since we studied a novel over a month or two, meant that I had a great deal of time during the class' reading time. Seeing this, and seeing that Curtis Seaman was also reading ahead, Mr. Brooks would send the pair of us out to wander the school and write short stories and plays for extra credit. This never resulted in any great pieces of literature, since they were generally very silly parodies that only really made us laugh.

Still it was the type of thing that made us really enjoy the class, and I think that year was probably the best mark I ever got in English.

So here I am blogging. The projector is almost fixed, and the class is ready to continue so I guess I'd better go. I probably won't get extra credit for this, but at least I'm not unleashing more terrible lyrics to terrible songs to a yet unformed terrible band out into the world.

Vancouver bloggers in print

My most recent article appeared in The Georgia Straight today [tgs] in one of the paper's regular tech focused issues.  I'd mentioned this article awhile ago [jks] when I was talking about advertising on blogs, a subject I am still thinking over.  That part, the role of advertising on blogs, did not really get touched on with the exception of a few words during the interviews but it really did not fit into the article as a whole.

This is the first article that I've done for The Straight that's had a photo run with it.  That photo, which is to the right, was taken by the technology editor Stephen Hui and of the bloggers interviewed he went with a photo of Jeannette Ordas who blogs at Everybody Likes Sandwiches [els], a food blog that Lydia is into.

If you're in Vancouver then pick up a copy of the article on almost any street corner.  The paper's free so you've got no excuses.  If you're not in the lower mainland you'll find a link in the first sentence of this post that will take you right to it's online version.

So far the feedback has been mostly positive.  As always though these sorts of articles are by their very nature incomplete.  I'm sure there's a few dozen other worthy local bloggers around town who deserve a mention, and at least one reason that Vancouver is such a blog-centric city that I didn't touch on.

How to survive my lull in blogging

looking at the incoming links over at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I noticed one from The Province, one of the main newspapers here in Vancouver.  Taking a look at the incoming link I couldn't find anything, but when I did a site search for "Metroblogging" I came up with quite a few times where they've quoted from the Vancouver based blog.  Indeed these quotes go back at least since last year, and since I've never discovered it before today it suggests that we don't get much in the way of traffic from links off of the newspaper's site.

Now I'm pretty sure these quotes were just on the website, and not in the physical paper.

Subjects that I've been quoted on:

• About Robert Pickton [tp]
• About what the nicest McDonald's in the Lower Mainland is [tp]
• The Spice Girls in Vancouver [tp]

Meanwhile I've been blogging over at Metroblogging Vancouver, and a few of those are worth checking out. What should you be reading over there during my blogging lull here?  Well check these out:

• The Canucks win the Stanley Cup [mbv]
• "We Are All Canucks" more than just branding [mbv]
• The Vancouver Sun knows the internets [mbv]

Lastly I thought I'd repost links to my two articles in The Georgia Straight for those who may have missed it:

• Twitter [tgs]
• Location aware social services (Loopt & Brightkite) [tgs]

Five great free iPhone apps

one of the things that sets the iPhone apart from other phones is the iPhone Application store that runs both on the iPhone and through the iTunes desktop application.  It's by far the easiest way of adding applications to a smartphone that I've seen yet.  Though a lot of the applications are crap, the running joke is that half the applications are flashlights and tip calculators, there's some real quality there.  Below I take a look at four iPhone apps that I've downloaded and one online web app for the iPhone.  All five programs are free.

All of that and more after the jump.

Happy Ten Years Google

to celebrate their ten year birthday Google has put their oldest available search index online. Now for a limited time you can search their database that was active in 2001 [g01] as well as my hilariously ugly Matthew Good Band fansite and various student paper stuff [g01]. What will you find if you do? Well for starters you'll find one of my first blogs [g01] as well as the fact that that other Jeffrey Simpson had a slightly larger web presence than I did, even though I kind of figure that he had no idea what the internet was at that point.

Give the search a try, and see what comes up. In 2001 for example there was no iPod. What a backwards age that must have been.

Five applications that have returned to active usage

s

ince the great hard drive crash of 2008 [jks] I've been slowly rebuilding my computer from the ground up. No, wait that makes it sound like I'm doing something complex and technical. Rather what I'm doing is slowly re-installing applications onto my hard drive as I have a need for them. The first things on there was the software that I had on discs, like Microsoft Office and the Apple iWorks suite. From there I've been adding the programs that I've acquired from the internet, though I've been far more relaxed about getting those back on.

What applications have worked their way onto my hard drive and back into usage? Well how about a list of five just so that we can give an uneven number to go along with my uneven track record of regular blogging.

5) NetNewsWire [ng]:

NetNewsWire is one of my most used applications on my iPhone and the fact that both the mobile and desktop version of the world's most popular RSS reader is free is pretty damn cool. It's the best way to follow blogs, news websites and pretty much anything with a RSS feed. I don't use it to feed podcasts through to itunes, though it can do that as well. It's probably the best way to add new feeds, manage them into folders and also read them. The fact that it allows me to create blog posts from incoming content could be useful if i used it more.

4) iTunes [ap]:

Okay, this one is obvious. I figured it was so obvious that it might not be worth mentioning, but iTunes is my most used application by far. Whether it's loading music onto my Apple TV, my iPod or my iPhone or just giving my tunes to type by it's almost constantly running on my computer. I'm really enjoying the new iTunes 8 which seems to have solved a problem I had where, since I am using an external hard drive accessed through Wi-Fi to store my music library, iTunes would lose the library forcing me to spend about forty minutes re-acquainting iTunes with my music once a week or so.

3) Ecto [is]:

I have to admit I don't use desktop blogging software as much as I should. It really makes writing, editing and maintaining a blog so much easier, but because I use multiple computers plus my iPhone to blog I tend never to use it. However through Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] I got a free copy of Ecto and I always give using it a go. It helps avoid having to struggle with HTML, which I often have to use when posting with Safari. Ecto's the first piece of software so far that's not free, but the fact that it's less than $20 should help make it a consideration.

2) Adium [ad]:

Apart from iTunes Adium is the only program that's almost always constantly running on my computer. This free application combines the capabilities of pretty much every instant messaging service known to man into one single app. MSN, Yahoo, ICQ, AOL and others are all there and with the addition of Facebook chatting it's got everything that I've ever used to talk to people online with. In fact between this and the very slick Facebook iPhone application I don't actually ever log in to Facebook anymore.

The one thing it's missing, and I'm pretty sure it's currently technically impossible anyway, is the ability to combine conversations with people using multiple platforms, so that you could merge a conversation you're having with someone on MSN into one you're having with someone else on Yahoo.

1) Handbrake [hb]:

Though it's kind of visually boring, hence the reason for no pictures, Handbrake is so incredibly useful. Basically it's the best, and as far as I know only, way to copy DVD movies onto a Mac. Loading television shows and movies from my DVD collection onto my Apple TV and my iPhone would be impossible without this little piece of software. Having recently loaded the complete series of Yes Minster into my iTunes library I've come to appreciate it even more. Again like everything else I've recommended, other than Ecto, it is free.

Another apology

i t feels like every post I make these days is a post asking for forgiveness after another long period of this blog laying fallow. Each and every entry seems like it's asking for forgiveness for the length of time since I've last blogged and promising to be more attentive to you, my dear readers.  Does it feel that way to you?

Again I've been writing for The Georgia Straight [tgs] and though I haven't been working as much this past week I've been travelling with Lydia.  We took a long weekend and went to Vancouver Island to visit Tofino and Victoria.  Lydia blogged about eating on the island [iatl] and I guess I don't have a whole lot to say beyond that, so I'll leave you with the link. 

One of the things we did do in Victoria was look at venues for the wedding.  We checked a few places, mostly heritage homes and none of them seemed to work for us.  They were either not the right type of place, required us to use their expensive in-house caterers or had the overall feel of a bingo hall.  After already mostly eliminating Kelowna from our list of cities to get married in, it seemed like we were crossing Victoria off the list as well.

I don't know how it came up, but talk turned to the Heritage Hall on Main Street in Vancouver [hh], and since I had been to Curtis's wedding there I sent him an email asking for a rough estimate on how much he paid.  His reply was surprisingly inexpensive and so we booked a viewing for Wednesday and after looking at it and talking to the woman in charge of rentals we've booked the hall for August 9th 2009.

Which is a huge relief, since now that we've got a date and location everything else can slot into that.  I guess the last really big thing is the caterers, and once that's sorted we're just having to deal with a few minor details like the flower arrangements for the tables and whether or not we're going to ask people to sit through speeches or a slide-show or possibly both.  Lydia's for neither and I'm for both.  I figure if we're feeding people the least they could do is pretend to care about us for half an hour, even if they'd rather be watching a rerun of The Office.

You can keep this suit of lights, I'll be up with the sun

i will admit it's been awhile. I got busy writing [tgs], and then my computer crashed and I've spent the last three days fighting to get it working. Thanks to the Genius at the Pacific Centre Mall's Apple Store I figured out my plan of attack, but it's likely that I won't be able to save most of the files that I had been transfering from one computer to another for slightly over a decade.  Though most of it was no big loss, I don't really need a saved game for each of the last three Sim City games, some of it was worth keeping.

Thankfully I'd actually backed up all my photos a few weeks ago onto DVDs.  The last six months or so of photos that I hadn't backed up are mostly on my Flickr account [fkr] so that is not a major problem.  Sadly I've lost a great deal of writing, and while most of it was just scraps and fragments it's still gone.  Most of it I have backups in the real world, with the eVent! articles and a lot of the Phoenix stuff in boxes in storage.  Some of it though is just gone.  All of which makes me wish I'd have been more diligent keeping my writing archive site up-to-date [teotw].

It is though a clean slate, a chance to start again.  My Macbook is running considerably faster with it's freshly erased and near empty hard drive than it was with a nearly full drive with programs and files migrated through three other Apple laptops (an iBook and two Powerbooks). 

My only worry is whether I'll be able to reinstall Adobe CS2.  I've got the actual purchased discs, but for some reason the registration code didn't work last time I tried to install it.

Now though I should be back to blogging on a more regular basis.  Well, hopefully.

The yet unnamed podcast

Nathan and I have been working on a podcast.  Well that's to say we recorded it a bit over a month ago and he's been doing the heavy lifting editing required to bang it into shape.  So now that he's done the hard work of editing, I'm onto the fairly easy work of distribution.  That's right, he's the talent and I'm the manager.  Or something like that. 

Either way the podcast is quite a bit longer than we'll try to have it in the future.  I'm thinking closer to around thirty minutes is long enough, more than that and we start to get more annoying than we naturally are.  My voice in particular isn't something I'm particularly keen on, but since it's the only one I got I'll make do.  If you're wanting to hear the podcast via the internet, then head over to my .Me page [.me] and you can listen to it there. Otherwise you can download the file below, or click on the Podcast feed on the right to subscribe in iTunes or an RSS reader.

Next episode will be in a couple of years at our rate of production. 

Comments are, as always, welcome.

Download Tension.m4a

Photo by Lydia Skinner

Kelowna day 1/2

Despite plans to leave fairly early yesterday, and thanks to my GPS device sending me through Burnaby first, Lydia and I didn't get to Kelowna until about eight last night.  The drive itself was good, especially since everyone on the road was going the other way as they returned to Vancouver at the end of their long-weekend.  It's one of the many reminders that while working Saturdays and Sundays does have its drawbacks, it generally means that anything we do is a little less crowded.

Chad, Doug and Ryan had all made plans to meet-up at Kelly 'O Bryan's which is a Kelowna institution.  Sadly by the time we got into town and tracked down my parents to let us into the house it was well past time to meet-up with them.  Instead we ended up on a late night run to the Boston Pizza that's next door to where I used to work.  It's a place that I used to eat at on a near daily basis, but now since the only ones I know of in Vancouver by Metrotown and somewhere on Broadway, I rarely get to.

Once at my parents' old house, they've bought a new one since the last time I was in town, we played with the dogs a bit.  Well past his bedtime Charlie, my mother's new puppy, ran around the yard like someone had been feeding him Sugar Smacks until he was put to bed.  After that Lydia and I fell asleep watching the 1 am rebroadcast of the Daily Show.

Now I just need to get over my block and actually start the word processing on this article.  It's the opening that's bothering me, and so far all I have is a fairly lame size joke.

Going straight

Back in October of last year I spoke at a Canadian University Press (CUP) conference up at Simon Fraser University hosted by their school paper The Peak.  I'd a long history with The Peak both through CUP and Campus Plus but also because when I'd visit Graham during my reading week I'd often do guest articles for the paper.  They had me in to speak about tech freelancing, which was ironic since it was nearing the end of when I was actually doing freelancing for the Kelowna based publications.

At the same time as my talk, which I'd like to think went well, Charlie Smith of The Georgia Straight [tgs] was also speaking, and we got to talk a little bit after the presentations.  He mentioned that they were looking at updating the Straight's tech coverage and gave me his card.  Of course at the time that was awesome news, and I promptly went around saying things like, "Oh yes I'll be writing for The Georgia Straight soon."

Because I'm a bit of an idiot who career-wise was getting a bit down about not really progressing.  The fact that I'd started my freelancing career at the biggest publication that I've yet to write for, IGN.com which at the time had over 8 million monthly readers, was making everything else seem a little anti-climatic.  The cocktail party explanation that I wrote for papers in Kelowna was getting old and blogging for free over at Metroblogging Vancouver [mbv] is fun but not as impressive as I'd hoped.

I kept persisting but eventually I gave up as I was not making it anywhere near the insides of the paper.  Until Stephen Hui who I knew from CUP, got a job there and then got put in charge of the yet to be revamped tech section and got in touch with me.  I sent him some articles, he seemed to think they didn't suck and this morning we met at Starbucks.

So I'm doing a few articles for The Straight, and that also doesn't suck.  This might be the equivalent of bragging it up at a party back in November, since it's going to be a bit before they actually come out, but I feel good about it. 

My travels in the world of Windows Mobile begin

 

I've blogged about my troubles with getting a phone to use.  Banned from using my iPhone by work, and having sold off my BlackBerry 8800 I'm now trying out a work loaned Palm Treo 750.

I always loved my Palm Tungsten, which was my first PDA, but since the Treo line of phones have embraced the Windows Mobile platform I've been reluctant to try using one.  The main issue being the lack of Mac syncing, which has meant that I've been spending the last few hours trying to get this setup.

Currently though things are going well. I've got Tiny Twitter running on it and I'm blogging this very post on the phone. 

I just have to keep telling myself it's just until the iPhone 3G arrives, or I buy a BlackBerry Bold.

Edit:  As you can tell from the ganky picture, the camera portion of the device is kind of crappy.  Why the mobile posting application decides to put it in so large, thus exposing how terrible the picture quality is, is beyond me.

The cellular conundrum

It's been awhile since I've gotten a new cell phone. I used to get a new phone ever few months so that I always was using a phone that we sold and because in Kelowna my rent was low enough that I could afford to be a little cash mad.  The last phone I got was the iPhone [jks], and I thought it was my perfect phone.  Oh it is, and apart from the fact that I've broken it and repair is going to cost $200 and if I do use it I'll be fired since Rogers is being trying to drive unlocked iPhones off their network.

So under threat of unemployment I'm needing a new phone, and hark there's a new iPhone and a few other options coming out soon.  After loving my first generation iPhone that I bought at the Apple Store in Seattle it would seem a no brainier that I'd get the new iPhone.  It's faster, has the ability to add third part applications and has a lot of new stuff.  It's a better phone and since I loved the iPhone why wouldn't I get it?

The one thing I didn't love about it was the lack of a physical keyboard.  I got as quick at typing on the phone as I think I'll ever manage to get but at the end of the day I did like my BlackBerry better for that.  I could touch type on the BlackBerry much faster than I could on the iPhone.  For blogging on the go that's a big deal.

So which phones am I looking at?  The rundown and my options after the jump.

iPhone in Canada: now with extra Jar Jar Binks

I was working at the Paramount Theatre in Kelowna when the first Star Wars prequel came out.  Everyone knew the movie was going to be big, and the question really was just how big was it going to be.  It had been decades since the original movies first came out, and it was expected that Lucas' return to a land far far away was going to blow everything out of the water.

The demands from Fox and Lucasfilm placed on individual theatres was ridiculous.  For example typically with advertising merchandise once the movie leaves the theatre all of the posters, buttons and what have you are up for grabs.  With Ep1 Lucasfilm wanted physical proof that all advertising materials had been destroyed.  The word was any theatre that failed to provide proof would risk not getting the film.

By the second and third prequel nobody really worried about those conditions.  Lucasarts had lost its clout, at least where Star Wars was concerned, because despite the strong box office numbers it Ep1 turned out to be just another movie. 

Over at Metroblogging Vancouver I've got an FAQ about the iPhone's upcoming arrival in Canada [mbv].  What struck me is that Rogers and Apple are being as controlling as Lucasfilm and Fox were over that wonderful piece of Jar Jar Binks film footage.  Anyone who helps a customer with a grey market iPhone (an unlocked iPhone from out of country) will be fired on the spot with no severance.  This includes existing Rogers customers with American iPhones whose money everyone has been fine taking up until now. 

Apart from the questionable legality of firing someone with no severance for helping out a customer they sold a service to a month ago, it would be interesting to see if anyone believed that was just cause, it's the sort of inane controlling attitude that brought us midi-chlorians [wp].

The sad thing is the iPhone is good, really good and Rogers and Apple have no reason to treat it like Jar Jar Binks shows up halfway through to crap on it.

The Apple TV arrives

  Project 365. Day 8. 
  Originally uploaded by Glenn Wolsey.

It took awhile for the Apple TV to really find it's niche.  Of course being obsessed with everything Apple I got it the first month it was out, but most people held off since it's purpose was not clearly evident. 

I liked it because it let me play all of my music from my iTunes on my living room stereo, and gave me a nice on screen interface to use so I was not constantly having to fiddle with my iPod.  Eventually I started watching television shows and video Podcasts on it as well, but music was still my main use.

When Apple updated the Apple TV to let users (in the US) rent movies I rented a few with the credit that I had on my American iTunes account.  It was fast and easy, much better than waiting a week for Zip.ca or walking down to the local Blockbuster.  But managing credit from a foreign account was not great, and so I've stopped renting them.

Now that movies can be rented in Canada things seem to be picking up for the Apple TV.  Issac phoned me yesterday asking about mine, since he's thinking of getting one.  Sean Tamaki text messaged me asking questions about them, though since he works at the new Apple Store in Vancouver I'd figure he'd be the pro, and Neal just called trying to decide to buy one.

Could the second half of 2008 be the (half) year of the Apple TV, the way that the second half of 2007 was the (half) year of the iPhone?

Flickr video

As you might have notice I've been playing around with Flickr's new video feature. Some people, such as Matthew Good [fkr], have been using it to do short form videos and screen casts. That's something I might do in the future, but for now with a few exceptions I'm more interested in using it to do video photos.

Limited to 90 seconds I'm finding it better to capture motion and sound on a subject that I'd normally take a photo of. For example Winger above. The Vancouver Whitecaps mascot would make a good photo, but a very short video of him trying to rally the crowd behind the home team captures it a bit better. Similarly the video of the steaming noodles two entries below [jks] makes for a much more interesting video, as the bonito evaporates, than it does a still shot. That's not to say some short videos won't be something that I'll do, it's just that right now I'm digging the video still shot idea.

Test of a banner maker

An hour with Flickr video

I've been playing around with Flickr's new video service today and I quite like it.  It's better than YouTube because it's not ugly, and it's more private than YouTube's garish clusterfuck of a site.  The 90 second limit has yet to be a problem, since I've mainly been playing around with short clips that I've recorded with my Canon TXi as opposed to a dedicated movie camera.

Above is a short video of Nathan, and below is some noodles steaming with bonito on top that I ate at Guu in Richmond.

Tags: video, Flickr, Vancouver, Guu

Why I use a Mac: Reason #273

This is an internal company video made by Microsoft to help energize their sales team for selling the, flagging, Microsoft Vista.  Now Rogers Wireless has some cheesy internal training stuff, as do most companies, but this has to take the cake.  It feels like it was made, I don't know when Born in the USA was released in 1984.

Originally posted on jazzlawyer.vox.com