I knew this would happen. I actually thought it would happen sooner. My backlog of pre-written blog posts has dried up! It didn’t take long. I thought my plan of sitting down every few days and cranking out several short posts would hold up (actually, I didn’t really think it would – but it was worth a shot).
I guess I’m getting bored with my iPhone – that seemed to be my main theme launching back into this blog. Now I’m screwed. Actually, tonight brings up another topic for me to talk about endlessly – the Skins season (the real season, not this pre-season nonsense) starts! Now instead of hearing me go on and one about my iPhone you can hear me go on and on about the Skins.
Seriously though, there are other topics I could blog about. Like how I hate U-Haul and Vonage and Verizon and now AT&T. Or how I love Jason’s Deli. Or I could make my mom happy and get back to blogging about my kids on my family blog. I could talk about Google’s new browser, Chrome, and how I think it’s totally lame that they came out with a Windows version before they had a Mac or Linux version ready. There are plenty of topics!
Someone at work had been running a trial version of Office. When it expired we decided to just click on the Buy button to fork over our money and keep the product going. If only it was that easy. About 15 minutes later we gave up and I ordered Office from Amazon, it will be here tomorrow. I’m not sure why Microsoft has to make it that hard to do something that should be simple.
I have a sense for why it’s complex (there are a million versions of Office to choose from, there are some issues associated with buying software without getting anything other than a key, etc.) but imagine I’m just a novice computer user. I decided to give Office a spin because I got a trial CD with the computer I bought. I use it for a month and I’m hooked – I love this stuff. Okay, now it’s time to fork over my money so I can keep using it. I should be able to click on a button, enter my credit card info and BAM – I should be good to go. No chance.
I’m not much of a music buff. I do enjoy the 1976 album Framptom Comes Alive! and obviously the best track is “Do You Feel Like We Do.” The live version clocks in at 14:16 (that’s over 14 minutes long!). Wikipedia claims there is a 7:19 single version and a 6:44 studio version – but I’m assuming neither of those have been played in years.
The other day I was in my car and I flipped on the radio (it was on 94.7 The Globe) and the song was playing. Awesome! After a few seconds of singing along I noticed I was out of sync. Less than a minute later I realized I wasn’t listening to the song that I know and love. And this wasn’t a studio version, or even a different live version. This was the classic version but chopped up – to make the song shorter. What? Why on earth would you bother to play a shorter version of that song? That’s the whole point. THE SONG IS ALMOST 15 MINUTES LONG! Gah. I hold 94.7 The Globe responsible for this – either for cutting it up in the first place and/or for playing it.
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.
I guess I’m getting bored with my iPhone – that seemed to be my main theme launching back into this blog. Now I’m screwed. Actually, tonight brings up another topic for me to talk about endlessly – the Skins season (the real season, not this pre-season nonsense) starts! Now instead of hearing me go on and one about my iPhone you can hear me go on and on about the Skins.
