September 2007 Archives
Bloggers, mobile afficionados, and media drool over the new Nokia Nseries line at the Nokia Nseries LA party.
Over the course of my life, I have stayed at a wide range of hotels, motels, B&Bs, hostels, from high end luxury hotels for extended family holidays all the way to roach motels in Lost Wages with punk friends. Over the last two years, I have done a lot of traveling and have stayed in a fair share of hotel rooms for business purposes where an internet connection is not desired but necessary.
The Hampton Inn Downtown in Austin, Texas, has spoiled me for all mid-range hotels. The hotel is fun, nice and roomy, and best yet FREE wifi and FREE ethernet. Yes, free. Not $9.95 a day or £5 an hour. Free. Thus, when due to circumstances, I find myself at a Marriott, Westin, or other mid-range business class hotel and I am charged a minimum of $9.95 a day for the internet, I get cranky.
On the other hand, I have had the opportunity to stay at several Best Westerns and a few lower end Microtels as well. While Best Western tends to be about $50 dollars cheaper a night than Marriott, Westin (at its cheapest), and Hilton properties, the rooms are nice, decor a little chintz-y, but the wifi at Best Western is FREE. Now, if you don't mind yellow & white rooms with ugly bed spreads, Microtel will deliver a nice clean sleep and FREE wifi all for about $59 a night! And you get to share the parking lot with trucks!
In May, while in Denver, I could not see why I was paying the Marriott $159 a night plus $9.95 for a bad internet connection, when I could move over to the local Microtel and save $100. I did move and the wifi connection was faster at the Mircrotel.
Expecting the lower end hotels and motels to have free wifi doesn't always hold true, as while I was working on our entry for the Rails Rumble, I stayed at an Extended Stay America. The rooms where cookie cutter, even more so than Microtel, the bed was concrete block hard, and the internet connection was for charge. A recent stay at the Travelodge in San Jose, while the wifi was free, the environs were not so nice.
The upswing is that unless my family is kindly paying for high end accommodation or I am in Austin at the Hampton Inn Downtown, I will be choosing my hotel options based off of whether the wifi is free or not. Sorry Marriott & Westin, your beds, rooms, and in hotel restaurants do not add that much more value to my stay that I will be grateful to pay for an internet connection. Instead of adding value, the for charge wonky internet connection adds anger. Do you charge a surcharge for the FluffyWhiteBed™? No. Do you use the FluffyWhiteBed™ as a way to pull in customers? Yes. Do the same with consistently good internet connection that is complimentary to your paying guests as a distinctive.
Until the mid-range hotels see the wisdom in complimentary wifi in the rooms to accent the FluffyWhiteBed™, Best Western and Microtel have my business for their combination of good value, clean rooms, and their free wifi. La Quinta Inn's have my business for the fact that they are consistently one of the few pet friendly hotels.
Since I will be traveling to London twice this fall and finding decent priced accommodation in a safe neighborhood is a difficult task to start with, I was shocked to find that the mid-range business hotels start their wifi prices at £5 an hour (nearly $10) not a day and even the budget hotels charge a minimum of £5 a day for wifi or internet connection. After much searching, I found a nice studio stay place in Bayswater with free wifi on a street I know is safe and within walking distance to the two Tube stations in the area. I will let you know how it goes...
Fri. 09.21.07 - The Seal Beach pier on a crystal clear morning.
Do you ever search for a blog post you made a year or two ago and can't find it, only to realize that your ranted and raved to all your friends in person about the subject and you didn't actually blog it?
Well, hey, when I lived in Ireland from Sept of 2005 to Oct. of 2006, I ranted and raved frequently about the lack of unlimited data plans for mobile phones from Irish and UK carriers. I thought I blogged about it, but I guess I just tortured anyone who would listen to me...
When I signed up for a monthly plan with Vodafone Ireland, the maximum amount of data I could get was 6 mb for 18 euro! Yikes...
Jen, what do you mean by data plan? All the better to MoBlog with. To be able to send photos from my phone to Flickr or this blog, I need either internet data or email data, both covered under a data plan. I can easily blow through 6 mbs a day, let alone a month! In August of 2007, with my Nokia N95, I used over 152 mbs of data, thus an unlimited data plan is necessary.
Let me compare my plans that I had in the US vs. Ireland...
Continue reading Mobile : Europe & Unlimited Data Plans.
Once again Michele Neylon comes to the rescue by blogging about another feature of Movable Type 4 that I have been too busy to read the posts on Pronet about: Better File Uploader 2.2 for Movable Type 4 by Dan Wolfgang.
Better File Uploader really is better, instead of uploading 1 image at a time, I was able to upload all of these images from the last couple of weeks in one screen. Even better, I was able to set attributes, preview the image, and have the plugin do all the work to make Lightbox work in the same UI screen. Thank you, Dan for saving 15 minutes or more out of my life. You rock.
Using Movable Type 3.x for photo blogs and moblogging was difficult at best. Now with MT4's kickass atom connection with Nokia's Lifeblog on my N95 and Dan's Better File Uploader, Movable Type is once again my friend. Yeah.
@ the Biola Art Dept. Alumni/ae exhibition.
While web usability experts and designers decry the horizontal scroll, I believe that it has its a rightful place on the web. I actually love it when an art or experimental site shakes up the convention of vertical scroll by defying our expectations of usage. Design Melt Down also believes that there is a place for the horizontal scroll.
Banksy's use of the horizontal scroll with big huge images of his outdoor work rocks. Then again, Banksy rocks. The page is even named horizontal_1.htm.
Keep rockin' the guerilla art & web, Banksy...
In the last few months, I have received a few comments from friends and acquaintances about how white the decor in my apartment is and how little wall decorations I have up. Over the last 15 years of having my own places, with or without roommates, I have noticed that while I love American pioneer antique furniture (1790 - 1870, preferably in cherry or mahogany wood) and contemporary art, my interior design sense prefers lots of interior white space, be it white walls or curtains or just plain space.
In my current 224 sq. foot apartment, any space at all is a premium. Half of my belongings and furniture, including my treasured 1820 cherry pioneer carved bed, are in storage. I have worked hard the last four months to make my new cubbyhole of a place appear spacious while accommodating my stuff, esp. my books and corner cabinet. To this end, I have purposely chosen white curtains and cheerful accents, but I have no art up on the walls.
It is scandalous amongst artists to have bare walls, especially when one owns and has in storage as much artwork as I do. Dan Callis has already given me trouble three times now for my bare walls.
But. but.. but... My house is so small and more importantly I have realized that some of my favorite visual moments, the ones that have burnt the images to my brain, are the ones where I am inside, relaxed and looking out onto a visually saturated out of doors, be it looking through a window or a door.
I don't mentally record this visual stimulus when I am inside a visually compelling or overwhelming space nor when I am in an industrial or office space, only when I am in a home space where there is a great deal of white of which to contrast with the colors outside.
Thus, my reluctance to paint or over decorate my home space. Fine wood furniture in shades of brown and red or fabrics of red and gold make nice accents to the white, but the interior white makes the blues, golds and more muted colors outside shine even brighter.
Thus, I wait for the golden hour to record such external vividness whilst inside with my camera. My interior is acting as a blank canvas for the spectacle outside.
More later when I get to my computer...
******
Later...
Sun. 09.16.07 - Yes, it is official. I am staying in SoCal. For now. Mildly settled. Whatever settled means to a lady with family on both sides that is always in motion.
I have now been home from Ireland for 48 weeks and in those 48 weeks, I have searched for the right fitting corporate web jobs in the Silicon Valley & San Francisco, I lived at my brother's house for 6 months, I traveled to Austin, Raleigh, Denver, Chicago, San Francisco 3 or 4 times, I restarted my freelance business, and I moved into my own apartment in Seal Beach, Calif.
When I first moved into my new apartment in May, I perceived it as temporary as I was 1 of 2 candidates being interviewed for a web design position at a large firm up north. At the time, I decided to only move what I absolutely needed for living into my new place and keep the rest in storage and my brother's garage loft. The plan at the time was that if I received the position it would be easy enough to have movers go to the loft and the storage space to pick things up rather than having to unpack and then repack in quick order.
Well, the in-house candidate got the job. I did not. My summer got busy and I kept telling myself that when I had time I would apply for more jobs up North In The Land Of Computer Utopia or that I would go get my stuff out of my brother's loft and unpack it.
The summer came and went. While at the Rails Edge 2007, I met Jim Meyer, a delightfully bright and interesting programmer from NorCal. Jim asked me to join him in participating in the Rails Rumble. I said yes, contributed one of my application ideas, drove up to the San Francisco Bay Area, hung out with friends, drove around neighborhoods with Kelly McCarthy, and coded with Jim for 2 days.
As I drove away from the Bay Area last Sunday evening, I felt relief. Each mile that I traveled south on the 5 fwy, my spirits lifted. Rather than groaning at driving over the Grapevine and back into the LA Basin, I was darned glad. I was home.
Ok, so I probably will move to Europe again for a year or two within the next 5 or 10 years, most likely London, but I have moved away enough to know something really important deep down in my bones: Southern California, for all of its joys and flaws, is home. Deep down home. Roots home.
I may have itchy feet and traveller's blood in me from all sides, but for now I am home. To that end, I went over to my brother's garage and got a round of boxes full of books on Tues. Sept. 11th. I unpacked them and started to set up my house as I like it. With lots of books.
"While it may not always be great marketing, artists should be free to explore whatever quickens their pulse. Over the long haul they will inevitable find a thread that unifies their vision. Finding this revelatory thread ... seems to be one of the most meaningful experiences to come from a life making art."
- Alec Soth, from a blog entry on Richard Barnes
Sun 09.09.07 - Brunch with George at Lynn & Lu's in Oakland.
Anecdotal evidence is suggesting that it is not owners of existing smart phones or high end phones who are switching to iPhone but it is first time high end buyers who are getting iPhones. Has anyone experienced this or seen research on it?
When I was at the Rails Edge conference last week and at dinner the first night with other speakers, Stu Halloway started to tease me that I was the only one without an iPhone. I pulled out my Nokia N95 and asked him where was the the 5 megapixel camera with video capture on his iPhone and where was the onboard GPS for geotagging and mapping? After we verbally sparred for a bit, Stu asked if the Nokia N95 was my first smart phone. No, I replied, I have had Nokia Series 60 phones since Dec. 2004.
Stu then observed that most of the iPhone owners he knows did not have smart phones or had not purchased a high end phone previously. I thought this was very interesting. Quite a few of the iPhone owners I know had Treo's or Crackberries before, so my anecdotal evidence was to the contrary.
Yesterday, I was viewing Elizabeth's daily painting / drawing and saw this on her "beside myself" sidebar:
Video: Purchasing the iPhone becomes an event in Shadyside
I'm interviewed by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette about standing in line to get an iPhone on the first day they were available. It's my first cellphone, and I'm glad I waited until now to get one - I'm delighted with it.
The iPhone purchased at the Pittsburgh Apple Store is Elizabeth's very first cell phone ever! Watch the video for her commentary at the end.
Ok, iPhone owners, what do you know? Is the iPhone your first high end phone or have you had a phone with email, interenet, a camera, et al, that you used the smart phone features? Did you have a data plan with a previous phone? Or is this your first high end phone with a data plan? Let me know in the comments below!
Sat 09.01.07 - At the Orange Street Fair.