I don’t watch too many movies - and the ones I do get to see are almost always seen at home (DVD or download). In fact, in the past four years (since my first kid was born) I think I’ve seen 3 movies in the theater… maybe 4..
Since I’m sure everyone cares about what I think about the movies I watch I will review them here. I’m wondering if I can strike a balance between being too long (nobody will read them, I won’t bother to write them, and my opinions generally aren’t that strong anyway) or too short (just a thumbs up or thumbs down).
This movie looked cool going in. Turned out to be very Cast Away-like. Parts of the movie were either really slow and somewhat boring, really scary (I’m easily scared by movies), or really interesting. Unfortunately there wasn’t enough of the interesting parts. In fact, the last 10 seconds of the movie seemed really cool and as it ended I thought, “man, I want to see what happens next.”
I previously posted about the cool remote desktop iPhone app that lets you connect to and control a Windows machine. The other day I tried to take a screen shot of it (because it seemed like a cool thing to get a screen shot of) but when I launched the app it would show the start up page and then poof, it dropped me back to the main screen.
At first I thought it was just that app but pretty quickly I realized it was happening with every app that didn’t come loaded on the iPhone when I got it. The iPod part of the phone also didn’t recognize any music, podcasts, video, or anything else. Ugh.
I tried a few quick things hoping it was just a temporary problem. No luck. I then followed the first four options on this helpful list from Apple. Still no luck. I was wary of options five and six so I decided to search the Apple forums for help.
I searched on “all apps crashing” under the iPhone section and was surprised to find this entry titled, “All Apps crashing” from July 14, 2008. I thought for sure I had hit the jackpot since this sounded exactly like my problem. Of course there were about 8 different suggestions for how to solve the problem and I tried most of them. The idea that seemed most promising, completely removing the apps and pulling them down again from iTunes, is mostly what I tried but it didn’t work.
At that point I was basically ready to start from scratch with the phone. So I tried option five from that Apple help page, the Reset All Settings command. That did the trick! The phone started working again. Of course at that point I had already yanked all my added apps so it was almost like resetting back to factory condition.
I recently mentioned grabbing photos from Flickr to use in blog posts. That got me thinking about photos in general (hey, you’re getting insight to how primitive my thought process is) - something that I’ve always had a lot of interest in and never seem to have enough time to pursue. Maybe someday I’ll post some photos I’ve taken (don’t hold your breath - I’ve thought about blogging my own photos for years and I never get to it).
Most of the photos I take these days are snapshots of the kids. Don’t get me wrong, I love those photos but sometimes I wish I had a half day here or there to photograph other things. I do get to sneak in something semi-creative from time to time. Even though I don’t have much time these days to take my own photos I’m still a fan of photos so from time to time I’d jump on a photo site of some sort or another and just check out some pictures. Of course I’d get sucked in and time would pass and suddenly I’d be late for something so I had to find a better way.
My current approach is to have a few photo feeds in my reader and I try to satisfy my photo quota that way. It seems to be working fine now - although I might swap out some feeds for new ones at some point.
So the point of this post was to mention one of the feeds I have and why I like it. The feed is from Shorpy - The 100 Year Old Photo Blog - and I love it. The photos aren’t always 100 years old - but a lot of them are really old and almost all of them are really interesting.
I think everyone probably agrees that including a cute or relevant photo or image with your boring blog post makes it less boring. There are tons and tons of images available from Flickr and many that even give people the right to use the images (sometimes with certain conditions). So it seems like a natural fit to include an image in most blog posts.
It’s kind of a pain though. It’s not too hard, once you know how (start at this page), to track down cool images with appropriate permissions. Just today I also noticed a Share This link which gives you the option Embed it which seems to include some attribution to the image (one of the normal requirements for using it). I’m not sure what exactly qualifies as appropriate or enough attribution - I should look into that. Anyway, this Embed it option gets me pretty close - but in this case the image size that it gave me the code for wasn’t what I wanted. I had to manually track down the smaller version of the image and update the HTML code that I got from the Embed it feature. Not a huge deal but still a bit annoying.
I’d love a WordPress plugin that would let me punch in some search terms and then it would go out and search for images with the appropriate permissions. It would then let me pick the one I want, and the size I want, and it would stick it in the blog post with the correct permissions. Now that would be cool. Actually, maybe something like that already exists? I haven’t even looked.
One fun thing about the iPhone is all the applications. Many of them seem fairly useless - so it’s good that a lot of them are free. When I get bored with my iPhone I surf around the app store and download some free ones to play with. As you can see, my phone is currently full of a bunch of crap.
Of the 96 or so apps I currently have on my phone I probably only use about 15 of them - ever. So, I need to put my phone on an app diet. One of these days.
Maybe in a future post I’ll even say which apps I like/use the most. Maybe.
I recently noticed the VPN option on my iPhone. It took only a minute to plug in the info for our VPN at the office and my iPhone connected up with no problems. Then I cranked up a new app I had downloaded: MochaSoft’s Remote Desktop Lite. That too only took a minute to configure and BAM I was remotely viewing my Windows PC.
There are obvious limitations with this kind of setup and I doubt anyone would ever do anything too complex with it but it seems like a great way to quickly access a remote Windows machine (maybe to check a local file or something like that). I only tried it over wifi - I suppose it would work over 3G or EDGE but I assume the performance would be so bad that it would basically be unusable.
Update: I went back to grab a screenshot of the app in action and it crashed my iPhone as I was trying to connect (it didn’t just drop me back to the home screen - it got me all the way to the shiny apple screen) and now that the reboot has finished the app won’t even launch. Oh well.
With my new iPhone comes my new AT&T bill. I had been on Verizon before so this bill was totally new to me (how exciting). The first thing I noticed is that they don’t make it too clear on the bill that I can pay online and where I might go to do that. I’m pretty clever though so I guessed the URL and tried to regiser so I could pay online. No dice. For some unexplained reason, they’re not currently able to allow me to register my account online. No big deal I guess. Instead of quickly jumping on a web site, punching in my credit card info, and being done with the thing instead I’ll write out a paper check, rip off the stub from the bill, stuff both into a tiny little envelope, stick a stamp on it (what are those going for these days? $1.95?), wait for a postal carrier to walk up the two flights of stairs to our office (okay, she’ll take the elevator), pick up the envelope, carry it out to her truck, drive it back to the post office, sort it, put it on another truck, drive it to Carol Stream, Illinois (or maybe to an airport and then fly it up there?), and give it to some AT&T dude there. He’ll rip open the envelope, punch some numbers into a computer, stick the check somewhere, and at some point AT&T will get some of my cold hard cash. Seems inefficient.
Anyway, the best part is that I was looking through the bill to see if I was missing something about how to pay online and I noticed this section on the back of the first page. The last line in the Electronic Check Conversion section says, “You agree to pay a fee of up to $30 if your check” - and that’s it. That’s how it ends: “if your check” - no period, no additional words that would make it into a sentance. It cracks me up when big companies make dumb misakes like this.
It’s becoming clear to me that the main reason I blog is to give myself a platform for complaining about things. So, here I go…
I won’t bother complaining about Twitter going down all the time. Maybe it doesn’t even go down that often anymore. Anyway, it never bothered me that much - I figure you get what you pay for. However, when Twitter’s down and they throw up the now famous Fail Whale what gets me in the little message that says that they’re having a problem but that they should be back up within an hour. An hour from when? Each time you load the page the hour starts again? An hour from an unknown point in time when Fail Whale popped up? I understand that they don’t actually know when the problem will be fixed but does the “we’ll be back within an hour” really fool anyone? Just leave it out.
Here’s another thing that bugs me: undated web content. The web is cool. I really love it. People put stuff up on the web all the time. There’s a ton of stuff out there (seriously - try “surfing” around for a while and see if you can ever get to the end of the internet). Anyway, here’s my bit of advice: when you write something and put it up on the internet please put a date on it. It’s going to be up there forever. Future generations (or a guy 3 years later) will read your crap and wonder when it was written. Give that guy (me) a hint by putting a date on your crap.
If you know me (and if you don’t why on Earth are you reading this?) then you know I’m a huge fan of the Washington Redskins. Growing up I never thought much about the name. I often was annoyed by the logo on the helmet, not because it might be offensive to anyone but because it was impossible (for me anyway) to sketch. The dreaded Dallas Cowboys had a super simple logo that any nine year-old could draw. How unfair!
Over the past few years (okay, maybe things got started 16 years ago according to the wikipedia page I link to in a second) there has been controversy related to using the word redskins - which when you think about it isn’t too surprising. I haven’t read up on the specific origins of the word but I’m guessing it didn’t get started as a term of endearment.
Of course the team uses the word now with a lot of pride. I’m guessing that even back in 1933 when they first started using the word there were positive thoughts associated with it.
But for me it’s still a tough issue to get around. If the term is offensive to some folks then it seems like a good reason to maybe pick a new name. It’s just a game - changing the team name shouldn’t be a big deal (heck, Danny could sell a ton more crap like the Bullets did when they became the Wizards). But lots of people don’t want to change the name and they don’t see what the big deal is. I guess this survey from 2004 even suggests that most Native Americans don’t mind the name. Actually, that’s pretty comforting to me - maybe I shouldn’t worry about the name so much anymore?
Honestly though, I have only good, positive thoughts when I think of a person called a Redskin. I’m not sure if that makes the term less offensive or not - but it makes a difference to me.
Now that has to be one of the most used blog post titles ever, right? At least it doesn’t have “iPhone” in it.
Yes, football season starts soon. I’m a huge Washington Redskins fan and have been ever since I can remember. I have found over the past few years that my interest in pre-season has dropped to almost nothing. So, I don’t yet know much about the team yet.
The fact that the season starts soon means one thing: I need to call and get cable hooked up in the new house.
Up first, I Am Legend.
