The iPhone and I have parted ways

The wonderful honeymoon came and went, and a couple of weeks ago it was time for the iPhone and I to sign the divorce papers (hey, we were together for almost six months, a record for a phone and I). Don’t get me wrong, I loved her, dearly, and will forever cherish the bright future she showed me, but even in light of all the pretty and polish, she just didn’t fit in as well as I would have liked.

This little rant is by no means an indictment of the iPhone; it is the phone for the majority of the population,¹ and will be for the foreseeable future.² Furthermore, I appreciate — more than just about anyone — what the iPhone has done for the mobile world. However, as it stands right now, it just gets in my way more than it should, and given that I go through phones like most people go through a gallon of milk, I didn’t see the point in waiting any longer to move onto something else³ (though we all know I’ll be back).

Corporate e-mail

I’m an IP attorney. IP attorneys e-mail. A lot. Like every other large entity, my firm uses Microsoft Exchange for its e-mail, and while I could “do” work e-mail on the iPhone, it was kludgy, annoying, and generally impractical.

For one thing, e-mail was not “pushed” to me.⁴ To check it, I had to launch MobileSafari and head to the Outlook Web Access page (IMAP wasn’t an option). Could I get my e-mail through OWA? Yes. Could I respond to e-mail through OWA? Yes. But, the entire process was unbearably slow (and user-hostile), not least because there was no mobile implementation of the site — you always got the same page (i.e., same markup, same size) no matter your browser or connectivity.

Moreover, the message body area was a fixed size, which meant that if I needed to read an e-mail containing a sentence(s) that spanned more than the width of the message body area, I had to either zoom in and use a magnifying glass, or zoom out and scroll back and forth. It couldn’t have been more aggravating.

Is any of this Apple’s fault? Of course not. Do I expect Microsoft to create an iPhone-only interface? Of course not. Would it be nice? Maybe, but the core problems would persist, namely e-mail would still not be pushed, and contact lookup (if you needed to add someone to a reply or a new message) would likely still be so annoying as to be unusable, or at least unpleasant.

Yes, I’m well aware of the recent opening at Apple for an Exchange engineer, and this looks very promising (i.e., I think it’s safe to assume that any support would be baked into MobileMail, which would be great); however, I just don’t see whatever comes of it wooing me away from the BlackBerry.

General day-to-day use

I enjoyed using the iPhone, don’t get me wrong, but as far as day-in, day-out operations went, it just wasn’t for me.

Before getting into this section, let’s go back a few months and look at something I wrote just a few days after I got the iPhone (I apologize for quoting so liberally, even if from myself, but I feel it’s warranted):

I’ll likely get rid of my iPhone sometime in the next few months; just like every mobile phone and PDA (remember those!?!) I’ve ever owned, I’m guessing I’ll tire of it rather quickly and soon be on the hunt for the next best thing []. However, the difference this time around, and for the foreseeable future, is that there will be no hunt — the next best thing is going to be the next iteration of the iPhone. Can any of us go back to a pre-iPhone phone after playing with this thing for a few days? Everything else is kind of laughable at this point and I think it’s going to be at least a couple of years before the iPhone begins to see any legitimate competition.

The best part about Apple making mobile phones is that I no longer have to scour the earth looking for the “new hotness” and then hoping that it’s unlocked, uses GSM, and costs less than $1000. The worst part about Apple making mobile phones is that I’ll now be the rule instead of the exception (and I think part of me kind of enjoyed being the exception).

A lot of what I said there still holds true; that is, the iPhone still makes almost every other device look silly when it comes to sheer sexiness and the ability to get people to imagine what’s possible going forward. If you want to argue that, I’d like to hear from you. Furthermore, its interface and the [usually slick] handing off between applications (e.g., when you get a phone call while browsing or listening to music) is always going to invite a “wow” from its users. That said, it isn’t yet as useful as some other devices.

I kind of hate to say it, but one of the things that annoyed me most was the touchscreen. Sure, everyone wants to get behind this technology and herald it as the holy grail of device interaction, but for some things it just doesn’t work. I think the only things I truly enjoyed doing with the touchscreen were cycling between photos, zooming in and out of them, and zooming in and out of sections of a web site; realize that the first two things I mentioned were only ever done when showing the iPhone to someone who hadn’t yet played with one. It annoyed me in almost every other context (you know, like making a phone call).

Take, for example, scrolling in MobileSafari. If I was reading an article that required me to scroll, there was no way to simply page down. Instead, I had to start scrolling and pay close attention to where I stopped reading so as to not lose my spot and scroll past it.

Typing with the touchscreen was OK, and infinitely better than I thought it would be before I actually used it, but I didn’t particularly like using it. In fact, I didn’t much like it at all. It was totally usable, but never felt quite right (even in the face of me trying hard to convince myself that it did).

Sadly, there probably won’t be a non-touchscreen iPhone for a long while, if ever, because the interface has proven to be so popular. Indeed, there may even be a BlackBerry “touch” on the horizon (not to mention the countless others who have followed the iPhone’s lead).

Another thing that I found terribly annoying after just a few days was the lack of copy/paste. After having used a few BlackBerry devices, I came to rely on this quite a bit, and missed it dearly in the iPhone.

Finally, the last day-to-day thing I’ll mention is the speakerphone, which was essentially useless given its lack of volume. It’s very rare that I hold a phone up to my ear — I’m either in my car using whatever Bluetooth headset I bought that week, or I’m at a desk using the speakerphone. The iPhone required me to always remember to bring my Bluetooth headset to and from the car, lest I be made to actually hold the iPhone while talking.

There are surely other niggling things that started to grate on me after a while (e.g., couldn’t use headphones without an adapter, couldn’t SMS to multiple people, couldn’t voice-dial (especially egregious in light of RIM’s tagless voice-dialing) etc.), but I digress.

What will I miss most?

Tabbed browsing, without a doubt. MobileSafari wasn’t perfect, but one thing it got right was tabs (even if switching between them always seemed to take more time than it should). It was so nice to have the same few sites I always have open on my desktop, open on my mobile phone (i.e., Gmail, Google Reader, Vitalist, and Twitter). And the best part? Session restoration. When MobileSafari crashed, as it was prone to do, it relaunched itself and brought me right back to where I was, tabs and all.

I’ll also greatly miss the idea of having OS X in my pocket.

Will I buy the next iPhone?

What do you think? Have I ever not bought the latest and greatest mobile device? Ever? To be honest though, I may not buy the next-gen model if the only real changes are under the hood (e.g., 3G, bigger flash drive, etc.). The fact is, I’d really like to see a hardware keyboard, but something tells me that this, like a proper two-button mouse from Apple,⁵ is a pipe dream.

OK, enough talk about the iPhone; all I’m thinking about right now (and indeed all I’ve talked about for the last year and a half) is the “ultra-portable” MacBook [Pro], hopefully to be announced at MacWorld in less than a month. I. Can’t. Wait.

Canon PowerShot G9

First of all, thanks to everyone who e-mailed me regarding the initial post about point-and-shoots — your comments, suggestions, and questions were much appreciated.

About a week after I published the aforementioned post, I picked up the FinePix F50,¹ and a week after that I bought the Canon PowerShot G9, which I’m here to tell you is awesome. I’m in love with this camera. Plain and simple.

It’s built like a tank and comes packed with “pro” features, and this combination combats well the inescapable thought in the back of your mind (if you shoot mostly with a DSLR) that you’re taking throwaway shots on some shoddy point-and-shoot; indeed, you feel like you’re taking legitimate photographs on a DSLR-in-the-making (save the shutter lag). Canon gets it right in its ad copy when it says something to the effect of, “It doesn’t know it’s not a digital SLR,” a phrase buttressed by the camera’s many features and niceties, including:

• RAW support
• Full manual shooting mode (plus aperture-priority mode)
• 12.1 megapixel sensor
• Available wide-angle, telephoto and macro supplementary lenses
• 3-inch screen (which just looks wonderful)
• Flash hot shoe
• Optical image stabilizer
• Face detection
• Brilliant build quality (had to mention this again)
• Optical viewfinder (not always the easiest thing to find in a point-and-shoot these days)

If you can’t afford a DSLR, simply don’t want something that large, or just want a less cumbersome complement to the DSLR you already own, and you are OK with not having the smallest camera on the block, then the PowerShot G9 is probably a good choice (assuming you have at least a moderate understanding of how to operate a camera outside of “auto”).

Overall, it’s a great little camera that I’m happy to have with me when my DSLR just isn’t practical.

Various reviews you may find helpful: Digital Photography Review, PhotographyBLOG, and LetsGoDigital.

Smart Archives v1.9.2

There are two main “fixes” in this release. The first has to do with trailing slashes in URIs. Up until this point I had been kind of forcing my aesthetic preference onto users of the plugin by manually chopping off their permalinks’ trailing slashes (if they didn’t do it on their own). However, this posed a problem for those that insisted on using a non-future-proof URI structure (e.g., “?p=129”), among other, fairly uncommon setups.

Also, it seems WP is now a bit smarter regarding the URI structures defined by users (at least that is what users of the plugin have told me). In light of these issues, I decided to remove altogether the code that nixes trailing slashes; if you want/need it going forward and you can’t figure out a way to get WordPress to automatically build it into your permalinks, please e-mail me and I’ll explain how to do it.

Another issue brought up by SA users was that some posts weren’t always showing up in the order they were posted (within their respective months). Turns out, this was due to changes I made some time ago (for reasons I can’t remember now), but it seems the changes are no longer needed with WP v2.3+.

Have at it.

Google Reader mobile removes an annoying step

At some point in the last few days Google fixed one of the most annoying things about Google Reader mobile, namely that it didn’t automatically take you back to your list of feeds after you clicked “mark all as read,” but instead just reloaded the page sans posts (if no unread items remained). That one extra step (i.e., having to load an effectively empty page) could make you want to pull your hair out, especially when without fast connectivity.

Also, the 20-item “mark all as read” issue has been remedied as well.

nXZEN nX6000 Bluetooth headset

(Yeah, here I go again, but I promise to keep this one short.)

A couple of weeks ago I quickly reverted to the ever-reliable Jawbone after being disappointed by the Motorola MOTOPURE H12; never giving up the fight, I decided to give yet another headset a shot at the crown (there’s two levels there, think about it ;), and so I purchased the nXZEN nX6000.

When I first heard about this product earlier this year, I kind of dismissed it without much thought, but repeated high praise (and from people presumably in the know) compelled me to give it a chance. I wish I hadn’t.

It felt OK in my ear, but it couldn’t decide if it was an on-the-ear or an in-the-ear device, which made long talks quite uncomfortable.

It will come as no surprise that I liked its super-plain looks; I thought it kind of steampunk’ish actually. A negative side-effect of the simple look is the lack of buttons — the “multi-function” button does everything, and uses a hard-to-learn hold/press/tap system that only Samuel Morse could love. Overall the buttons felt nice and had a good action to them, but I would have liked to have seen at least one more button take the load off the multi-function hero.

And now, the noise-cancellation. Every headset I’ve used since the Jawbone has disappointed me in this department, and sadly, the nX6000 is no exception. I knew it wasn’t going well, when, as I was talking to my girlfriend while walking outside, she said, “I can hear all the cars and the wind.” There were no cars and no wind to speak of (and as far as I know she’s not that kind of crazy). Further, she could hear everything I was doing while wearing the headset — opening my car door, turning the car key, typing on my keyboard — and could even tell me what the TV was saying in the background.

I’d half a mind to think the headset was broken — could this really be what FrontWave Extreme was all about? I seriously doubted it, but didn’t care enough to order a replacement to find out.

My girlfriend, and everyone else I talked to with the device, told me there was a faint echo to everything I said. It was also noted that it sounded like I was talking from inside a closet or a bathroom, and my voice was repeatedly described as “tinny” (a complaint not uncommon of Bluetooth headsets).

On the positive side, the nX6000 could get quite loud, and so being able to hear the person on the other end was a non-issue.

Should I quit, or try out the BlueAnt Z9?

200,000 words

It’s just been brought to my attention that this site’s entries now contain over 200,000 words. Damn.

Gmail’s filters now support “mark as read”

Not sure when it happened (my best bet is that it came along with Gmail “v2.0”), but Gmail’s filtering system now (finally!) allows you to automatically “mark as read,” something I’ve been clamoring for since jump.

I get various e-mails that I never really need to see, and before this recent addition, I couldn’t automatically mark them as read, which meant I needed to manually perform some action on them even though I didn’t care at all about their actual content.

For example, I get a weekly e-mail from WordPress containing a complete backup of my posts (using the WordPress Database Backup plugin); I take it on faith that the plugin is doing its job each week and so I don’t need to see these e-mails. The same goes for student loan payment confirmations, which, until now, required me to constantly go to their label/folder and manually mark them as read.

You can understand how this inefficiency could drive me up a wall (OK, maybe you can’t understand that, but no matter!). Now I can receive, skip inbox, apply label, and mark as read, all without ever having to see or even know about the e-mail.

I can’t make this stuff up

So I’m at McDonald’s late one night ordering one of their newfangled iced coffees (which are great by the way), and this is how the transaction went down:

Apathy: Hi, how may I help you?
Justin: Hello, does the regular iced coffee come with cream and sugar?¹
Apathy: OK, anything else?
Justin: No, I’m sorry, I was asking if the regular iced coffee came with cream.
Apathy: Yeah, I got it, anything else?
Justin: Huh?
Apathy: $2.19 at the second window.
(at second window)
Apathy: Large hazelnut coffee, $2.19 please.
Justin: No one ever said the word hazelnut.
Apathy: You don’t want hazelnut?

I swear, between this and that other McDonald’s experience, I just don’t get how the world turns.

Motorola MOTOPURE H12 Bluetooth headset

So the MOTOPURE H12 headset was released on Tuesday, and I, of course, picked one up on Tuesday.

The six word review: I’m not giving up my Jawbone.

I’ll be honest, I’m kind of tired of buying these things and always being disappointed (what is this, like my 20th Bluetooth headset?). Here’s to hoping Aliph can use its recent $5 million cash infusion to remedy all of the original Jawbone’s shortcomings; if they make it smaller, louder, and impervious to wind, it’s going to be untouchable.

The good

First off, I quite like the design. Though I could certainly do without the black tip (why not just use the metal grate for the length of it?), it’s not too bad, and I’ve no complaints about its size, which allows it to take a decent fit to my ear. Save the ear hook, I really like the materials used, especially the “diamond-cut” metal (whatever that means).

The microUSB-powered desktop charger looks cool, has some heft, and uses magnets to couple the headset to it; you just set the headset near it and it sucks it down and begins charging. The package also includes a useful travel charger/case and a micro-to-miniUSB converter.

The multi-color LED is unobtrusive, and as far as these things go, is done quite well; I don’t quite understand it, but manufacturers are convinced that Bluetooth headsets need blinking, public-facing lights (the Jawbone’s is horrible — very distracting). What amounts to a small dot on the H12 indicates various things, such as an incoming call, call status, battery status,¹ etc.

The one overriding problem I have with the Jawbone is its low speaker volume. I’ve never had a complaint from the other side, but more often than I’d like the volume just isn’t loud enough on my end. The H12 is definitely better about this, but noticeably clips the audio if you push it too far — one step forward, two steps back.

Overall, it’s quite easy to use (not least because it has dedicated power, volume, and talk buttons) and performs moderately well.

The not so good

There was a lot of hype surrounding this headset (mostly from Motorola), but unfortunately the device just doesn’t live up to it, especially when it comes to the most hyped bit: noise-cancellation.

This is Motorola’s first headset with CrystalTalk, its newfangled noise-cancellation technology. Like it or not, companies need to realize that the Jawbone has set the noise-cancelling standard — if your device can’t at least compete with its abilities in this regard, then you probably need to return to the drawing board.

Everyone I’ve talked to while using the H12 has either asked me what’s wrong with my phone (because they’ve been spoiled by my Jawbone (seriously)) or responded negatively when I’ve asked about background noise. I don’t mean to say that CrystalTalk doesn’t work, or even that it works poorly, but to even try to compare it to the Jawbone seems silly; this performance disparity is the main reason I decided to not hang onto it.

The final comment I have concerns the ear hook, which despite its appearance, isn’t rubbery at all; it’s hard plastic that can rotate around the earpiece, but doesn’t change shape. Save its ability to rotate, it offers zero customization, and unfortunately, the way it connects to the headset reminds me a lot of the fragile ear hook on my Jabra JX10 (which, to Jabra’s credit, they tried to make right).

Fixing Safari + Saft on Leopard

Update: Jeff Harrell and a few others have e-mailed me to let me know that Safari does now have some form of session restoration; see “Reopen All Windows From Last Session” in the “History” menu. Kind of a weird place to put it if you ask me (why not mention it in the preferences?). In any event, there seems to be some slight delay before it “saves” a newly opened window/tab to the restoration ‘list,’ but it does seem to do this even without a valid “quit” signal, which is great — I killed the process, and it restored the tabs I had opened since I last “quit.” I’m assuming it works the same way when the browser crashes (i.e., if the windows/tabs have been open longer than whatever the delay is, they’ll be put in the restoration list). The only thing this implementation doesn’t seem to account for is the case where a malignant site is causing Safari to crash; will Safari continue to load this page when you restore the session, or will it give you the option of skipping it?

Update: Hao Li has released a new version of Saft (v10.0.1) that likely fixes the problems outlined below (and conforms to the Input Manager requirements introduced in Leopard).

I finally started messing around with Safari 3 on Leopard¹ this weekend and was kind of surprised and disappointed to see that it still doesn’t have native support for window/tab restoration (for much more on this multi-year omission, please see Browser session restoration on Mac OS X, which I penned three years ago).

Warranted(!) griping aside, I looked to see if Saft (which I first mentioned in the article linked to above, and which takes care of the restoration issue) had been updated to support Safari v3.0.4 (the version that shipped with Leopard). Turns out, it has been updated to work with the new browser, and so I happily paid my six bucks to upgrade it, even though I could never really use Safari as my primary browser.²

If you didn’t already know, Leopard kind of does away with Input Managers,³ which means that for Saft to work, it now has to launch Safari. OK, fine, but when I launch Safari with Saft I get no windows. None. Asking for a new window produces nothing on the screen. However, asking for a new tab does give me a window (with two tabs!), but takes away the address bar. Huh?

I played around with various files and preferences, but no matter what I did, the result was always the same: either no window or a window without an address bar. Finally, out of pure frustration, I just decided to scrap my com.apple.Safari.plist file and start over. Funny enough, this actually did the trick, and now Saft is working as it should.

Gmail “v2.0”

Google is in the business of answering Gmail prayers, and business is good.

Nearly two years ago, in On using Gmail exclusively, I said the following:

If you are reading a “conversation” and see that a new e-mail has arrived, it would be nice if when that new e-mail is part of the conversation you are currently looking at, it would just refresh your conversation instead of requiring you to go all the way back to the list of conversations and click it again.

That request has been fulfilled (as have many others from that post), because, as I noticed earlier tonight, Gmail now displays a small rectangular box in the bottom, right hand corner of the browser window when the above-described situation occurs.

Inside the box it says “New Message from John Doe” and offers you two choices: “Update Conversation” and “Ignore.” As you might expect, when you tell it to update the conversation, it refreshes the message-body window with the new e-mail. It works great.

Speaking of working great, it would be remiss of me to not mention the speed bump this version has received. I mean, wow.

[W]e [now] prefetch messages in the current view, so when you open an email your browser doesn’t have to talk to Google’s server; it just displays the message. These techniques really shine on newer browsers and computers. […] We’re seeing sub-200ms times when opening messages — pretty quick.

Pretty quick indeed. I’d call it instantaneous. If you didn’t know you were working from within a browser, you couldn’t be certain either way.

Unfortunately, even in light of these big improvements, I’m still forced to use the “old” version (which is available by clicking “older version” in the menu at the top) because the Gmail Macros Greasemonkey script isn’t yet compatible with the new version, and I can’t live without it.

True, the keyboard shortcuts were updated in the new version, but they still won’t let me add/remove labels and quickly move back and forth between them. My workflow depends on that sort of functionality being there; without it, I feel horribly inefficient, which negatively affects my mood.

Google has “contacted a number of the developers behind some popular extensions and provided them with an opportunity to create fixes,” and so I’m sure I’ll be able to really enjoy the new version soon enough.

Google Reader mobile, you’re killing me!

You now allow me to view 5, 10, or 20 items at a time through the Google Reader iPhone interface, yet when I choose the 20-item option, you take away my ability to mark items as read (except by actually clicking on them individually); the “mark items as read” link literally disappears (though I still get a “more…” link).

Anyone else seeing this? What gives?

Dust in the wind

I’m always telling myself to stop writing about the minor behind-the-scenes goings-on here, but of course I never do. I guess I’m OK with only a couple of people finding it interesting as I like this sort of thing when others do it.

So, without further ado, I present to you more banal and trivial nonsense.

After a week with the ‘new’ layout, I decided I needed the menu back at the top. Not only was I finding myself kind of annoyed by its new location in the side menu, but I also felt there was no real navigational “anchor” (even though the links were in essentially the same location on every page).

I spent a good part of the day trying to make IE 6 play nice (yeah, the story of every web developer’s life, ridiculous) with a dynamic rollover thingy I whipped up in JavaScript,¹ that produced a menu when you hovered over a “+” symbol in the top right corner of the site (have I mentioned I’m a minimalist?). After getting everything working on every major browser, I decided to scrap it. Surprise.

Long story short (oh trust me, I could write a lot more on this), the old menu is back at the top, though now, for the first time in this site’s history, it’s a client-side image map instead of plain text (I just can’t get enough of DIN Schrift MittelSchrift).

Speaking of wasting unbelievable amounts of time, I spent nearly 10 hours this weekend migrating the entire site from WordPress to Movable Type (for no overriding reason). However, and probably not surprisingly, all the work was for naught — I’m still using WP.

About a year ago, I wrote a three-part (one, two, three), 3,400-word piece regarding a possible move back to Movable Type. A lot has changed since then — Movable type just released version four and now both systems support a common import/export format.

Though I ultimately decided to stick with WordPress, I thought I’d discuss some of the issues I encountered during the migration.

Importing

Movable Type now supports the importation of WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR) files, the format through which WP exports. Importing was far easier this time than last, but it wasn’t perfect. The biggest problem I had was HTML entities in some of my post titles; they completely broke the import script. Luckily, not too many of my titles had entities, so it wasn’t that difficult to manually swap them out for their character equivalents.

The bigger problem was that each time I tried to import the file, it would import every post until it choked on a post it couldn’t read, which meant that I had to delete all the imported posts multiple times before finally getting a clean import (after removing all the entities from the titles). It would have been nice if the import script validated the file before it actually attempted to import entries.

Another problem with the import was that it seemed to ignore my plea that it not format the posts’ text (there’s a “text formatting” drop-down, and one of the options is “none”), and instead chose to “convert line breaks.” The problem is that I don’t currently wrap the “bits” in paragraph tags until they are displayed, which means they were getting nested paragraph tags at the output, and there was no way for me to batch-change the format option on every bit to “none.” Yes, I could have removed the double paragraph tags at the output, but that would have required me to change the way the bits are saved, something I didn’t want to do.

The import also broke all of my post slugs. By default, Movable Type limits slugs (which it calls “basenames”) to 30 characters; if your slugs are longer than this, they get truncated. Sure, this is easily remedied by deleting the weblog, creating it again, setting the basename value to some larger number, and then re-importing, but it would be easier (and logical) for the importer to ignore the defined basename length so as to not break URIs between systems.

After getting everything imported, I decided to divide the posts into two separate weblogs — one for regular posts and one for bits. To do this, I had to delete all bits from the weblog (100 at a time — the max allowed), export the remainder, delete the weblog entirely, import everything again, delete all regular posts from the weblog, export the remainder again, delete the weblog entirely again, create two new weblogs, and import into each. I realize this is probably a niche need, but it would have been nice if I could have simply selected a category (or tag, or whatever) and created a new weblog with only those posts. I guess I could have “cloned” the weblog and then deleted from each those posts that no longer ‘belonged,’ but then my post IDs would have been all over the place.

Publishing

Once everything was imported correctly into the two weblogs, I set out to use the now baked-in multi-blog feature to enable the weaving of bits and regular posts on the main page. Without too much fuss, and with Google’s help, I was able to get interleaved posts working on the index page fairly quickly.

After most of the major issues had been worked out, it was time to decide how I was going to serve the pages. If [processing] time weren’t an issue, I’d prefer the pages be built statically, but that no longer makes real-world sense given the current number of posts here. No, I don’t have comments to deal with, but full rebuilds would still take more time than I could probably stand. In light of this, I decided to try out the dynamic options.

I was quite surprised that once I turned on dynamic publishing (for everything), it just worked. Well, sorta. It worked on all archive files (including individual entry archives), but threw a 404 on the main index page. I could not resolve this to save my life, but to be fair, it could have had something to do with my 775-line htaccess file (which is part of the reason I was so surprised it worked at all). Regardless, I gave up on trying to find a solution and instead chose to “publish only archive templates dynamically,” which seemed to fix the issue.

After jumping through all these hoops (and many more), I completely scrapped the installation, but I guess I now know it’s still a viable option should I want/need to ditch WordPress at some point.

Body Worlds

The girlfriend and I recently experienced Body Worlds at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose. At the risk of sounding a bit melodramatic (me? never), it was probably the coolest exhibit I’ve ever seen, and if I’m being completely honest, quite moving. While the $22 admission price may seem a little steep, I assure you it’s worth your time and money. In fact, I may go again, and will certainly go to the various other Body Worlds exhibits should I find myself proximate to another hosting city.

Speaking of our bodies, you may want to have your TiVo grab National Geographic’s Incredible Human Machine, which airs October 21:

NGC takes viewers on a two-hour journey through an ordinary, and extraordinary, day-in-the-life of the human machine. With stunning high-definition footage, radical scientific advances and powerful firsthand accounts, Incredible Human Machine plunges deep into the routine marvels of the human body.

Dear Twitterer, I have access to ESPN

Further to my earlier rant, I’ve one more small request: please don’t mention [relatively] current sports scores on Twitter. If I want a sports score, I’ll go looking for it. I’m so sick of thoughtless fans blasting things like, “gators up by 27 at half,” as I wait for the TiVo to finish recording the game (with the 30-second skip you can get through college football games in ~1.5 hours).

I’m not sure what drives your compulsion to tell the world the score, but from here on out please try to refrain. Thanks!

Dear Twitterer, I read your weblog

For whatever reason, it’s suddenly become common to draft a “tweet” linking to just-published weblog entries. This practice makes me crazy, because if you’re following someone on Twitter, you’re obviously also following their site — that’s how you found out about their Twitter account in the first place!

In case you haven’t made the logical leap, these discourteous time-thiefs hit us twice with a notice that they’ve just added new content to their site. We’ll see your latest post in our news aggregators — we don’t need to see it in Twitter too! Sure, your admiring public will be in the dark for an hour (or less), but I promise they’ll make do.

Unless you’re warning me of imminent physical danger, please refrain from telling me about it more than once.

I realize that Twitter’s “what are you doing?” inducement fell away almost immediately and that the service is now used predominantly to communicate random, immediate, and ephemeral thoughts, but that doesn’t mean it need also be an extension of your weblog feed!

Please respect my time.  ;)

Who do you read?

Why do I ask? Because you no longer list that information on your site. It used to be common practice on personal sites to list those sites frequented by the author (my list), but over the last few years this convention has waned and it’s now pretty rare to see such a list.

I always enjoy seeking out new, interesting sites to add to my daily routine, and it used to be that the best way to do that was to look at the list of sites suggested/pushed by those I already read. These days however, the only way I seem to find new sites is through “via” links, or similar. It’s all a bit more organic now, which is fine, but sometimes I just like to flick through all the sites enjoyed by a particular author.

What makes the increasing paucity of these lists infinitely more frustrating is the ease with which they can be maintained. For example, I currently use Google Reader for feed aggregation and perusal, but still perpetuate my Bloglines account so that I can use its blogroll feature to publicly share my feed list. When I add a new feed to Google Reader, I also add it to Bloglines (if it’s a site I don’t put in my “personal” or “non-public” folders), and the rest is done automagically.

Going forward, I think there should be some sort of unspoken rule that bloggers publish their feed lists at a pre-determined URI (e.g., /blogroll); that way, authors who don’t want to link to it don’t have to, but others who want the information can still find it.

Beating minimalism over the head

I’ve been “refreshing” the site a bit over the last few days and am quite pleased with the ‘final’ result; it seems every time I look to redesign the site, I inevitably want to make it simpler, even when that seems impossible.

How much more bare-bones could I get? Well, I found more wiggle room than you might expect. You’ll notice that I redid the header and stripped from it both the menu and my name. I snuck the header menu into a side-menu paragraph. Regular visitors will probably find this a little confusing at first, but will obviously figure it out; I think new users will take to it immediately as they’re compelled to read the side-menu paragraphs — there’s no other place to look!

The impetus behind the ‘new’ menu consists of more than just my personal aesthetic predilections; it’s also drawn from observations I’ve made regarding visitors to this site. My various stats packages make clear that almost no one clicked on the menu at the top, and after I really thought about it, it kind of made sense. I mean, I hardly ever click on menu items myself. I think the only time I do is when I’m linked to a site I’m not yet subscribed to; if the piece I read is interesting, I may skim the site to see if there are similar pieces to be found, and if I’m convinced the site may produce something I’d like to read in the future, I’ll likely add it to my aggregator. Save that, I get in and I get out, and apparently most others do the same.

Please don’t think I’m trying to make a case for the Internet-wide removal of horizontal/vertical menus, which are about as common as web pages themselves. In fact, I’ll likely re-add the top menu at some point — statistical evidence be damned — but I just thought I’d try something slightly more “conversational,” and a little less rigid. At the end of the day, I don’t feel I’m sacrificing any real-world usability by toying with the menu’s ostensible relevance; if you think otherwise, please let me know.

Quite a few other subtle changes were made, but they’ll likely be appreciated only by anal-retentive types. For all you typography nerds out there, the font used for the menu headers on the right is called DIN Schrift MittelSchrift (at 16pt with a tracking value of 25/1000 ems).

The only thing I’d still like to do is work out a way to more effectively funnel visitors to the photography section without detracting too much from the site’s simplicity.

Best raw oysters in Silicon Valley?

I’ve lived in the Bay Area for four years now and have yet to come across decent oysters for less than $2.50+ a pop, and even those are usually small and unmemorable. I realize I’m not going to be able to get them for a quarter (like on a good day back home), but seriously, there has to be a reasonable in-between somewhere in northern California. I’m growing a bit tired of this four-oyster appetizer crap (half dozen? not around here) and would like to make a full meal out of them for less than $70.

I’ve been told to check out Half Moon Bay, but haven’t been given the names of any specific restaurants there.

If you’re sitting on an oyster goldmine out here, please let me into the club (I promise to not give away your secret on this site).

Smart Archives v1.9.1

As a lot of people seem to know, WordPress v2.3 was released early this morning, and not an hour after the package went live was I flooded with e-mails about it breaking Smart Archives.

Looks like there are new “terms” tables that overwrite some of the older category tables, including post2cat, which is why the plugin was failing miserably under v2.3.

In any event, I’ve resolved the issue; after nailing down the problem, the solution was quite simple and required only a slight modification to the code.

Note that there are now three different versions of Smart Archives (one each for WP v2.0-, v2.1-2.2, and v2.3+).

Help, I need a point-and-shoot camera

I came to the realization a few months ago that my dSLR just wasn’t going to cut it for all occasions and that I needed a smaller option, something a little less cumbersome. I’ve been on the fence about the Leica D-LUX 3 for a while now, and just can’t seem to get myself over the hump. While I’m willing to spend $600 on a point-and-shoot, it’s hard for me to justify the cost in light of every reviewer’s warning that it produces noisy images. I’ve no doubt that mechanically, the D-LUX 3 is second to none, but if they can’t get the electronics right, I can’t spend that kind of money, despite its ability to save to RAW, which is rare for a compact camera and something I really want.

For the past few weeks I’ve had my eyes on the recently-announced (though not yet available) Canon SD950 IS, and just when I had somewhat resigned myself to pre-ordering it, Scott Beale got me thinking about companies other than Canon and Leica when last week he gushed about the brand new Fujifilm FinePix F50se.

There’s no question that I’ve a certain affinity for Canon — I’ve owned a few PowerShots, currently use a Canon dSLR, only buy Canon glass, recommend their products to everyone, etc. — and would love to add another of their models to my collection, but the FinePix has me doing a double-take; it’s at least $150 cheaper than the Canon and supports full manual and aperture priority shooting modes (I generally shoot in aperture priority mode on the dSLR, and would like similar control over the non-dSLR).

Thoughts?

Working too hard

You know you’ve been working too hard when you start writing a piece for your personal website and find yourself routinely checking the clock so as to figure out how much time to bill. Ha!

Dear media application developers, are you deaf?

Can someone, anyone, please tell me why 99% of the media players out there start at maximum volume (this goes for both native¹ and flash-based web players)? Surely the developers of these applications have started playing a song or video, been blasted out of their seats, and thought, “you know, maybe we should have the volume set to 50%, or less.”

I can promise you that if I start a song/video and can’t hear it well, I’ll turn up the volume. Yeah, really, I’ll just reach over and crank that bad boy up a bit. Trust me, your media won’t go unheard because you don’t initially blow my speakers.

Seriously, I’d love an answer from someone out there.