FitBit

So here I am with more time to kill. For several years now, I've been kind of a sedentary person. I moved in to technology, and while I love my work, it's caused me to pack on the pounds while spending my day at a desk staring at a computer screen. In fact, the last time I regularly got up from my desk to walk around was before I quite smoking several years ago. Since then, I seem to be unable to give myself an excuse to get up and walk around throughout the day.
Off and on I've tried controlling my diet which is very healthy, but I just really enjoy eating, and I've been on an on again off again workout schedule. I tend to fluctuate between about 195 and 215 pounds, and I'd kinda like that to stop. The issue is that when I'm working out I'm starving, and tend to over compensate for increased calorie burn. The few times I've tried dieting I end up starving myself because I have no real concept of what I actually need to take in to sustain myself. Recently my wife and I went out and spent about $100 each on FitBit devices. It's a little thumb drive sized device that uses motion sensors to track movement, upload that data to a web site, and based on various personal criteria, it tracks calorie burn. You can also manually modify activities to get more accurate readings, for example, if you do a 40 minute cardio workout you'll track steps and calorie burn as if you had been walking for 40 minutes. Edit that activity to be a cardio workout, and you'll have a fairly accurate reading of your actual activity. We did a little research before buying, and we've found that most people report this thing having similar accuracy to the Body Bugg, but for a much lower price, and access to the data without requiring a paid Web site subscription.
So, why is this information useful? During our research we kept coming across people who, over and over again, would say that these kinds of things are for micro-managers. They don't provide data that's useful for the average person, and on and on. My experience over the last week is that this is simply not true. On the one hand, if you're a fit, active person, you don't have weight or activity problems, and you're happy where you are, this may be true. It's probably information that is more interesting than useful to you. For someone like me, however, who eats healthy, works out but has a profession that keeps me fairly sedentary, and my efforts produce little to no results, this thing is awesome. Yes, there is the pain of having to track calories I eat. It sucks, but once you get a few foods and meals in there, you just have to say I ate it again. Yes, you do occasionally have to update your activity from just walking around for 40 minutes to working out for 40 minutes, but that's really no big deal. The magic is in the data that you are collecting throughout the day. The bottom line is that to successfully lose weight, you have to simply make sure you're burning more calories than you consume. That's it. This little device gives you an accurate enough view of your caloric intake vs. caloric burn that you can easily sit down, look at two graphs, and see why you're still sitting on a fat ass vs. a thin one. It's where most calorie tracking programs fail. They only tell you what you're eating. That is virtually meaningless data if you have no idea what you're burning.
So, how has my first week been? I weighed in at 210 on Sunday. I weight in today, Thursday, at 205. I went in to this with the attitude that I will eat what ever the hell I want, and as much as I want as long as I log it in the system. I've compared that with my calorie burn, enhanced by regular workouts. Seems to be working pretty well so far.
The weekend is coming up, so we'll see how that goes. Weekends are when I really like to pack in the food.

The rules don't apply to me

I'm watching parking wars while waiting for everybody to get ready to go to the store with me to get some missing onion soup ingredients. The onion soup will be awesome, but parking wars is hitting me with one of the major reasons I can't stand the Utah culture.
Sure, everywhere you go you have douchbags. It's part of living in society, but Utah, specifically the Salt Lake Valley, there seems to be a particularly high percentage of these people. The issue isn't that they're generally assholes. My complaint is very specific. These people expect others to live by the rules, but will find nearly any justification for the rules not applying to them. They don't want their kids in a car seat cause they're "just driving down the block," or, as a former boss of mine said, "why can't I pull my boat in the carpool lane? I can go the speed limit" after he got a ticket for doing just that. They think they can talk or text on the phone because they know how to drive while doing it, while the rest of the world seems unable to do it. Their idea of "freedom" is completely out of control. They think that they can do what ever the hell they want when ever the hell they want, and get away with breaking the rules because they had "a really good reason" to do so.
Pull your heads out of your asses and think. Yeah, you're free to do what ever you want as long as your actions don't infringe on the rights of others doing what ever they want. You're not alone in this world, assholes.

That part is over

We've moved across state lines. While packing we learned that the big truck just wasn't big enough...just the first of way too many very painful issues to occur during the past couple of weeks...and we got a very generous offer from someone to drive a second truck, stay with us for a couple of days, and then we'd fly the generous helper back home. Simple plan, then things really went sideways. Without going in to too much detail, we lost the house we had already rented, went totally broke for a couple of days due to money being tied up in bullshit, got stuck wearing the same dirty clothes for a few days cause everything was in boxes, and on and on and on. It was around this point that our generous help started bitching about being tired and dirty, continually asking to borrow clothes or razors (remember we're temporarily broke and everything is in boxes), wanting to take breaks and go out to lunch, missing work (I missed extra work as well), and on and on and on. Finally, just as things started to balance, our help started to come down with bronchitis, or something similar. Sucks, but our generous helper began to insist that there were chemicals in the air in the part of the house that contained not only the helper's sleeping quarters, but also my home office...btw, I'm not sick...
I guess the bottom line is that I was very greatful for the offer of help, and the initial help, but the selfish attitude of this person while my entire family was facing hell, put me off. It pissed me off, and rather than being greatful for the help, I've ended the week glad to be rid of this very uncomfortable burden that was keeping my little family from regaining center after a week of hell and a new start.
I dunno, I guess I just had to get that off my chest.
I'm tired, very disappointed for many reasons in our helper, and looking forward to a real weekend to rest and have a little fun with my family in our new home in our new city and state.

Kirkland

<p>So, we've finally moved. There is a whole adventure there that I'll talk about another time, but for now, I'm just trying to decompress. I'm out on the deck, having a glass or three of chianti, and just drinking it all in, and I'm struck by something. Back home the norm is to work to have the perfectly manicured yard. Time and money is spent on having the perfect shape around the shrubs, money is spent on consultants to choose the perfect shrubs in the first place. All of this to impress the neighbors, and show that you have the best lot in the neighborhood. Of course in utah you have to have automatic sprinklers because it's hot enough to kill the lawn and shrubs in a couple of days, so I can't really complain about that. Anyway, I'm looking out across my yard, and the little bit of those yards around me that I'm actually able to see, and I'm struck by the difference in realities. Nature is in control here. Sure, lawns are cut and watered, gardens produce some food, but give it a month with out fighting the over growth, and nature would take over. People seem to accept that. They accept that they are here for a short time, but everything around them was here before them, will be here long after them, and if nature became sentient and decided to take over, it would simply eliminate them. This place is alive, and in balance. I come from a desert, a place that you have to fight just to keep the lawn alive. Here, you have to fight to keep green things from taking over. I dunno. The reality of this place is amazing.

Can't wait to be there

So, we're moving to Washington. Hopefully for the last time this time.
We've sort of been in denial about the move, so we really haven't gotten as far in to the packing thing as we should have. That means we have a shit load of things to do before Tuesday. I'm starting to think that not only will we make it, but all of our stuff just might fit on the truck. I am not at all happy about selling our house and becoming a renter again, but there are two things that are making that a little easier to deal with. First, this is not where we intended to stay long term. I fact, we've tried getting out of here a couple of times, once going so far as to actually build a new house...our buyers screwed us, we lost the house we built, I'm still bitter. Second, our new land lady seems like she ia a very nice person who will leave us to our own business. Not all landlords are like that. Besides that, we expect to only be renting for the next one to three years while we figure out where we want to plant our next roots, so we won't have to do this for long.
Once we get there, sure we'll have to unpack, but we won't be on a deadline. We'll be able to do what we need when we need, and get our daughter and our dog back to a somewhat normal life.
Anyway, moving sucks.

#GoogleMusicBeta and Ratings?

I'm still trying to get used to the ratings feature.
On the surface it seems to do what it's supposed to do. You can give a track a thumbs up or thumbs down. Once this is set, the track is added to the Thumbs Up auto playlist. Cool, I guess I can get all the songs I like in to one list. The downside is that I share this library with my wife, and what I consider a good tune does not always match up with what she considers a good tune. I can live with that.
Once rated, you can also sort. It looks like you can either sort on rated songs, where thumbs up are sorted first, then thumbs down, or you sort based on unrated. I guess another way to order and view my collection, but still trying to figure out a practical use for this feature.

What threw me, though, was I started building a playlist this morning. I went through, added a few albums, and started playing. A song came up that I didn't want in the list, because not all albums are winners all the way through, and instead of removing the song from the list I gave it a thumbs down rating. The song stayed in the list, but stopped playing, and skipped to the next.
I don't really know what's going on here, if the song will be played again, or just sit there in the list ignored because it's got a thumbs down. The help docs didn't shed any light on what's happened. I guess I'll just have to keep playing the list and see what happens.

#GoogleMusicBeta and #iTunes playlists

When I initially installed, due to an installation bug, I was unable to choose a custom folder from which to upload. I chose iTunes Library for the purposes of installation, and after the installation was complete, I went back and chose custom folders. After an hour or so, I decided to go switch back to iTunes for the first upload pass because, although my music collection exists inside and outside of iTunes, I wanted to import my iTunes playlists. After about a week of uploading, and within the last 1,300 files in my iTunes library, I've noticed something a little annoying. I'm missing all of the playlists that I actually cared to have imported.
There are a small number of playlists imported. Mostly "On The Go" playlists, a couple of lists that I created for the purpose of burning CDs, and the "Party Shuffle" list. I've spent alot of time building custom rules for smart playlists based on ratings, others based on genre, and others based on custom details, and all of these lists are quite large.
There are other static playlists that I've created that are not quite so large, but they are missing.
Initially I thought that maybe Google Music couldn't import smart playlists, but that idea was proven wrong by the fact that I do have the Party Shuffle smart playlist. I then thought that maybe size was an issue, and Google Music couldn't import playlists beyond a certain size, but I believe that is proven wrong by a handful of small playlists that didn't get imported.
I don't really have the time or interest do really investigate why some playlists got imported while others got left behind. All I know is that the playlists that I really actually use did not show up.
Another point for AudioGalaxy. AudioGalaxy has given me full and complete access to all of my iTunes playlists while on the go, and without the need to sync anything.
In the end, it probably won't matter. Android, in general, is giving me a way to get away from iTunes while building a media collection that is portable across nearly any device, which means I'm working towards a world without iTunes, and likely works in a manner different from iTunes. Any iTunes integration is just a shim that keeps me in touch while the transition is taking place, but it's a feature that is a "nice to have" while making that transition.

Time to get back to work.

#TwitterGrader ? Really?

I just saw a tweet from someone I'm following saying that some employers are using TwitterGrader as part of an employee evaluation process. I went over there to check it out, and frankly I'm disturbed that anyone would use this kind of thing for such an important decision as to whether to hire a candidate. For reference, my grade is 82 out of 100. I think this would give me around a B or something like that, but what is this, really.
There are 6 criteria:
1 - Number of followers. Kind of meaningless, because on the one hand, I follow several public figures for various reasons. These kinds of people usually don't follow back. Other people, like me, just nearly always follow back. Totally arbitrary.
2 - Power of followers. Your score goes up if you have important people following you. It's a popularity contest, but really, because I happen to have a few famous people who followed me back, does that make me more employable? I don't think so.
3 - Updates. Really? I'm ADHD, and I use quite a few tricks to maintain focus. One of those is using twitter to direct a short distraction so that I can get back to the task at hand. I also use twitter to "yell at squirrels." Of course, I keep it more clean than my locked down Facebook account, but still, it amounts to little more than 140 character rants. Other times I tweet something that I see as worth while, but does this make me more employable? Personally, I think this makes me look more like a crazy person.
4 - Update recency. see #3.
5 - follower to followee ratio...Again, arbitrary. If I follow lots of public figures, my ratio will be quite low.
6 - Engagement - things like retweeting. Mostly retweets seem to be tweets that are particularly clever. I guess this might fall in to an employability category, because getting people to repeat what you just said could be seen as a leadership quality.
It's kind of a cool site. It lets you rank yourself against other twitter users, and see how good you are about being a citizen of the twitterverse, but to use this as a ranking for employability is absurd, closing in on offensive, and indicates an extremely shallow interviewer. I won't say I'd never work for someone who would do this, because you gotta work, but I think that anybody who would stoop to this level needs to seriously evaluate what they're doing. Employability should be about proven experience, what real people think about the candidate, and what a candidate can provide to the company.
Unless you're up for a job as a professional blogger or online public relations coordinator, a person's twitter persona is irrelevant.

#GoogleMusicBeta instant mix vs. #AudioGalaxy Genie mode

More time to kill while waiting for some real work to do.

I made some premature complaints about the Instant Mix feature in Google Music Beta. Now that I've had a full 24 hours to upload tunes, I'm seeing that it does work better than what I saw with the first couple of experiments. With that said, however, I'm still not excited about this. It seems to be a rip off of Apple's Genius setting, and I don't care for that. What Instant Mix does is it takes a single seed song and creates a playlist of 25 tracks based on that one song. Kinda cool, but it's not that big of a deal. You can only build off of one song, and it's a finite playlist. When it's done you have to go do another one, and sure you can save it, but it's still a static playlist.
To address my complaints from yesterday, I do think the implementation of Instant Mix is wrong. If Google doesn't have enough data to build an instant playlist out of the available data, it should simply say so. Not fail over to unrelated crap.

The reason I'm not excited about this feature is that I've used AudioGalaxy's genie mode. It's similar in concept, in that you generate an automatic playlist. Where AudioGalaxy wins is in the implementation. Your seed data is up to the last 5 tracks played, so you've got a larger variety of data to build from. The playlist is dynamic, meaning that as you are playing your music, your options for the next upcoming tracks are constantly being updated. You have a list of the next 5 options, so you can modify them if you choose, but that's optional. You can let it run indefinitely, and you will have a constantly building music list based on what's already been played. This also causes the playlist to continually evolve. If you choose to save these tracks as a playlist, you certainly have that option.

Wins for Google Music Beta

There are two points where Google Music Beta is a winner right out of the gate that nobody fully offers. Based on the disclaimer that Music Beta is free for a limited time, I don't know if it's enough to keep me on board, but we'll see.

Wireless Syncing
The first point is the wireless syncing. I know, there are others that do it. MusicWithMe, Winamp, and DoubleTwist. For me, these are all fails, and here are my reasons. MusicWithMe requires a Facebook login. This wasn't quite a deal breaker for me ...close, but not quite..., but the unreliable and extremely slow sync pushed me over the edge. I uninstalled, and didn't look back.
Winamp also had several issues. Of course, most of my syncing will be over wifi, but winamp doesn't offer the option. Not only does it have to be over wifi, but last time I used it, I had to sync from a laptop what was on the same wifi network. If the computer was wired, it wouldn't work. The host had to be on wifi. Unacceptable. At the very least, because this setup required my laptop, on wifi, has to have a drive mapped over wifi to the source data, and then the wireless connection to my phone. On top of that, it was unreliable. When I'm copying over 100 files, I can't have the thing just stop, especially when ideal conditions still take overnight to copy those 100 files.
Doubletwist? Why the hell do people keep trying to charge me to access my own personal content and think it's gonna fly? nuff said.
So, here's Google Music Beta. All I have to do is check a box, and my music begins to download to my device. It's slower than I'd like, but it works over 3g if I want, it works over wifi, and because of that, it works anywhere I want it to. And, since it's a static setting in the app, Google knows I want this downloaded. Even if the app crashes or the network drops, the music is still selected to be stored locally. Plus, Google isn't charging me for this. It's part of the Google Music app.
Generally speaking, I don't need my music stored locally. I'm ok with streaming because it usually works so well, but there are times when I like content stored locally. Maybe I'm commuting in bad weather, or travelling in an area where I have no data access. Google lets me put stuff locally, and it also caches recently played songs. We'll see how it works in practice, but in theory, I should never have to worry about being without tunes.


Combines Local and Cloud Music
This is a feature I haven't seen anywhere yet. Feel free to tell me if I'm wrong, I'd love to know, but Google Music Beta is integrated with my native Google Music app, and it integrates my entire music collection in to one single place, and gives me one single interface in to all of it. There is a setting that allows me to see only local music, but by default, local, remote, it's all in the same bucket and theoretically is accessed as if it exists in the same bucket. Genius. I shouldn't know whether I'm listening to streaming music, or my own music. I don't want to know, I just want my music. Soon, I'll see how this actually works in practice, but in theory, this is a killer feature for me. I want to prepare for those times that I'm without a good data connection, but I don't want to maintain two separate collections. I want my music to just work. End of story. 


Possible Failure Point
There is one major possible failure point, and that's the disclaimer that "Google Music Beta is free for a limited time" or however the statement is made. If we're looking at a situation where the current limit of 20,000 files remains free, I'm probably ok with that. It's taken me years, no, literally decades, to build my collection. I haven't ripped everything, and not everything in my collection I always want to have available, and I'm only half way to the 20,000 files. It will be a very long time till I get to that limit. If, on the other hand, Google does what everybody else does and drops the limit to around 5 gigs for free, I'm out. No questions asked. I'll drop the service in a heart beat.
There are other options that could save this, however. For one, Google could offer a service that seamlessly integrates the ability to stream from your personal hard drives. This is why I love AudioGalaxy. All they do is index my music. When I stream it, I'm streaming from my own computer. Really, I love that. I own my content, I own my storage space, I'm not paying a third party to serve me what I already own. If Google did that, I wouldn't care if they dropped their free limit to 1mb. I'd use the service.
If Google did what they were rumored to be doing, and simply index your collection and play what they have in their collection, and only charge you to store the tracks they don't have. I might be willing to do that as well.
Finally, if Google provided a service like Slacker Radio where you have an Internet radio, but add seamless integration with your own collection. That's a service I'd pay for.

In any case, back to the original point, Google really has made two major wins right out of the gate, and ate my iPod's lunch. I don't know if they've killed it yet, but we'll see.

Google Music Beta

Ok, so I'm sure there will be little original here, but I got it, I have time to kill, I'll talk about it. Also, no screenshots. I don't feel like it. Plus, I'm setting up over a remote desktop session, and screenshots are way more trouble than they're worth.

As others have said, over and over again, the install was very straight forward. The only issue I ran in to was that during install I was not able to select other folder locations for music source. When I selected that radio button, there was no visible browse button. I had to choose my iTunes library, complete the install, and then go back and update my settings to search for a different source location.

When going back and changing my music source location, the initial update only located about 500 or so tracks out of over 11,000. Removing, and re-adding my folder locations seemed to fix this, and now google music appears to be aware of my entire library.

It looks like music is uploading at the rate of around 100 tracks per minute. This is gonna take a while.

One interesting item to note, although I haven't actually tried to listen to music, the google music site is not restricted by our very "selective" network rules. I've seen other google services get by network restrictions in the past, and it looks like this is yet another google service that works in spite of the efforts of the local network admin.

As I'm uploading, I'm noticing that I don't have any of my iTunes playlists. I am supposed to be able to sync those playlists, but it looks like that's only available if I choose to only sync my iTunes library. Google, talk to the guys at AudioGalaxy. They have a working solution for this.

My first pass at making an "Instant Mix" was really, really bad. Google, go over and talk to the guys at Audio Galaxy. They have an extremely good solution for this. I'll wait a couple of days for things to upload a little more and try it again. If it's still this bad, I'll be logging an issue report. It's that bad.

Overall, my first impression is that the Google Music Beta solution doesn't match my streaming player of choice, AudioGalaxy. Google beats AudioGalaxy in that Google will allow me to download my music to my phone. AudioGalaxy doesn't offer this. Don't know if it's on their road map, I hope it is.
Sure, Google gives me offline access to my music through the locker, but normally I simply don't care about this. I can easily stream from my own computers to my phone, and I like it that way. The one exception so far is that I'm relocating soon, and my servers will be offline for a few days. Beyond that, though, I have yet to find a reason to really want my music stored elsewhere other than for the sake of redundancy.
Google's locker is ok for now because it's big enough for me to double my music collection for free (for now, anyway), so I can look past the idea of storing my stuff on someone else's servers for now.

I'm sure I'll ramble on about more stuff, but that's it for now. I'm done killing time.

More playing with slacker radio

So, coming in on the end of the second day, and the shine has worn off a little bit. It's become increasingly repetitive in the songs and artists that are coming up. I'm tweaking some settings that will hopefully resolve the issue, but it's pretty annoying. Repeating artists, not so bad, I guess, but repeating songs multiple times in a listening session? Constantly playing only the hits is one of the major things that drove me away from radio in the first place. Give me variety. Give me some obscure shit, and sprinkle in a hit or two for good measure.

Slacker Radio

Slacker Radio is doing a promotion giving away a free 1 month subscription to their new premium service. How is this different from what they had before? I don't really know. For me streaming subscription services have been an interesting novelty, but they've offered nothing that interests me. I have a music collection that I've been building for over 25 years, I'm still building it, why would I want to pay someone to feed me crap that I may or may not want to hear? On the other hand, I like free stuff, so I signed up for the free month of premium service two days ago, and haven't stopped listening. I've temporarily put aside AudioGalaxy, possibly the best streaming service so far, for Slacker Radio, not so that I can burn up my free time, but because I've been blown away by what this new version has to offer. I started off by creating My metal station, which is seeded by artists from my teenage years. No big deal, cool tunes, and it generates new artist suggestions fairly well. Then it started to get better. No commercials. No commercials is good. I found that I could add a news feed in there, so now periodically I have a news update. Also cool. Next, I get a tune by a band that I like, but the tune doesn't belong in my custom station, and I started to realize how much better this rating system is than the complicated stuff I've built in to iTunes. I can simply ban a song from ever showing up in this station, but I haven't removed my ability to automatically add it to other stations. Same thing with artists. VanHalen showed up, banned em. I'm well on my way to building what would have been my perfect high school radio station.

I'm messing around with controls, clicked on an album cover, and what do I see? A track listing of the album to which the current song belongs, and better, a button that lets me play that album, start to finish. Holy shit. An online radio station just crossed the line in to the perfect total listening control that has kept me off of really getting in to online radio. I admit that I may be a dinosaur, but I come from the days of going to the record store, buying a cassette tape, and listening to an album start to finish, just as it was intended. For me, this is a killer feature. The issue is, like everything related to the music industry, licensing. It looks like the album playing (along with the ability to browse to specific tunes to play on demand) doesn't have the correct licenses, you can't play it when you want to.

Sound quality is killer as well. During my commute I've connected my Nexus S to my bluetooth hands free kit, and directed the output to my car stereo. Not a skip, and full rich sounds. Sure, it'd sound better if it were CDs, but still, very good solid sound. It's handled jumping between 3g and Edge without a skip, which has made this service much more enjoyable.

Aside from commuting, I've been working quite a bit from home, and it's been awesome cranking this through the amp attached to old school KLH speakers. I haven't tried it on my google tv yet, but I'm sure that will be quite nice as well. Really, this is just about the ability to listen to the service anywhere I have a computer, and with me, a professional geek, there is some form of computer just about anywhere I go.

Slacker has kindly created several stations for users to choose from, but frankly, I don't care. I may plug in to the news station and give it a run, but other than that, playlists and stations that I didn't create rarely match my tastes.

Slacker has given me the ability to create stations vs. playlists. What's the difference? I haven't got the slightest idea. I may take some time and mess around with the playlist functionality and see how that differs from stations. If it's cool, I'll talk about it.

There are several other features, things I'm sure are more popular, but they don't mean much to me. I can tweet things, more a novelty than anything else. I can send tracks to friends, I can share my station, but really, I enjoy my music because I enjoy it. Not because I can make it a social experience. There are links to buy things, but this is a little clunky. If I click "Buy" it looks up the track's album on Amazon. It works, but it's not cleanly integrated like everything else.

So, what are the downsides? So far, mostly just the price. I've got a hefty music collection of my own, which is available to me everywhere I can get slacker through the use of Audiogalaxy, and I can do it for free. Slacker premium, on the other hand, is gonna cost me $9.99 if I choose to go through with the subscription purchase. I have to admit, though, that I'm impressed enough that I'm actually considering it.

What is it missing? A couple of things. These are important to me, and may not reflect the desires of the general population.
I would like to have this integrate directly with my own collection where the songs will attempt to load equally from tracks I own along side of the catalog on Slacker's servers. I know for a fact that I own things they don't have access to, and I'd like to work that stuff in. Without that, I can't totally switch over.
I would like to have access to my own music through the use of a helper app that I run on my own computer. The reason for this is that I am not willing, under any circumstances, to pay for a music locker to hold my own tunes on someone else's server. If a service was willing to give me enough free space in a locker to hold my collection, that's a different story, but it's not likely to happen. Google Music Beta might do it, but we'll see how well that works once I finally get my invite to the service.
I want customizable caching. By this, I mean I want the ability to tell the custom station to continue to load the next tracks, but download those to my phone, allowing me to specify the amount of space to use. Cached tracks would also allow me the same ability to ban songs/artists, and report that data back to the servers when the servers are available. If Slacker allows this I haven't figured out how to use it.

Anyway, I guess I better get back to work. I'm just killing time here waiting for RIM's stupid licensing servers to become available so I can get to testing and debugging a new driver.

Motorola Droid 3 benchmarks appear, with OMAP 4 processor & Gingerbread – Android and Me

Motorola Droid 3 benchmarks appear, with OMAP 4 processor & Gingerbread – Android and Me

This post will serve two purposes. I'll start off with the primary purpose first. I'm trying out the "BlogThis!" Google Chrome plugin. Kind of a cool plugin that sits in your Chrome add in bar, with a little "B" button. When you click it, it opens a small window with a link to what you're currently viewing, and automatically gives a title to the post. It provides a drop down so that you can choose the specific blog, if you have multiple blogs, and it provides the essential editing tools. Neato. Maybe I'll make more use of this from my Cr-48.

Purpose #2, really, was the original Droid form factor this popular? Are we continuing to provide a slider keyboard because customers really prefer physical keyboard to soft keyboard? I know I don't, but then again, since getting my hands on a Nexus S, I've become a Samsung lover. Anyway, just the looks of this thing make me wonder if Motorola has even tried to come up with an evolved design of the Droid.

Really, though, point number 1, trying out the BlogThis! plug in. Cool.

Working with swype

Ok, I'm sure that for the rest of the cool world this is nothing new, but I'm trying to rediscover swype. I'm doing a blog post from my nexus s, in the official blogger app, using swype. I gotta say that so far I'm pretty impressed. It isn't always accurate, but really it's just about as close as thumb typing. The biggest issue I'm having, in fact, is that right now swype requires me to be concious of the location of the letters on the keyboard. I have to spell out the letters rather than just typing the words. I suppose that typing like this will become more reflexive as time goes on and if I choose to keep using swype. I can really see the value of this type of input on a tablet where the keyboard is really too big for thumbs, and a little too small for two handed typing. I've especially noticed a difference when switching from portrait mode on my phone where thumb typing is very convenient, to landscape where the screen is easier to read, but the keys are just a little too far apart for quick typing. I may keep using this for a while.

Afternoon at the zoo

This post accomplishes two things. First, making a blog post from my nexus s, an opportunity to see how well I can type with my thumbs, and testing keyboard response. Both are good. And second, share a video recorded on my phone of a giraffe licking a wall. Recorded and uploaded on my phone. This thing kicks iPhone's ass.
Enjoy.

Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.6