July 2009 Archives

In case you haven't been following the most uncelebrated, unnoticed holiday in the Western World, this upcoming Saturday will be Llew's Day or Lammas or Loaf-Mass. If you are old school celto-pagan, then you will be celebrating Llew's Day/Lughnasadh. If you are Christian of the old school variety or pagan of the new school, then you will be celebrating Lammas - The Harvest of the First Fruits or the First Wheat Harvest - on August 1st or August 7th or sometime between August 3-10th if you are rigorously following the astronomical calendar.

The first of August is one of the Cross-Quarter Days, the most unnoticed one at that, unless you live in Switzerland, then it is a National Holiday. The other Cross-Quarter Days (i.e. half way between a Solstice and an Equinox or vice versa) are Halloween/All Saints Day, Candlemas/St. Bridget's Day/Groundhog's Day, and May Day/Walpurgis Night. For whatever reason, we don't give the same sort of secular-Hallmark-Holiday-love to old Lugh.

Poor old Lugh, you get associated with the Sun God & the First Fruits and everyone in the modern world forgets you because they are on holiday in the sun and the peaches & grapes come year-around at the supermarket and quite a bit of wheat is now grown in the winter.

Even if you won't be celebrating the first fruits or the high sun or astronomical high summer, we here at Black Phoebe will be. Starting with a Peach Jam-a-thon to preserve the First Fruits of the Helms Ave. Peach tree, to Tammy Callis' 30th Birthday on the 1st, to me committing to daily blog about Tomorrow/Future for NaBloPoMo.com for the whole month of August.

A few months ago, I was talking to Nicole at Salon Pop about the recession and I asked her what she thought we should be doing.

"Frequent local businesses," was Nicole's reply. And she is right. So, in the spirit of supporting local small businesses, I am going to start an occasional series here called "Local Places I Like". This will be my opinion about places I frequent. This series will not be supported nor will I receive free goods and services to write about local places, but merely me talking about local businesses I like.

As I have written about before, I have a migraine problem. They are usually triggered by mistaken ingestion of food I am allergic to, or sleeping on my neck wrong, or by fluorescent lights, or a combo thereof. Usually when I migraine arrives, I write a tweet to the effect of "Le Sigh," take some of migraine meds, put myself to bed with my eye mask on and pray that I am not still there two days later.

A few times, after the migraine is over and when my neck/back has seized up, I go and get a massage at Wellsprings to help release the tension and not have a repeat migraine. This usually is a great help.

Last Friday, while at Dog Beach watching the Big Waves, I noticed that my neck was stiff and not really turning well. When I turned it too fast, I would get a shooting headache pain. Oh oh.

I woke up on Saturday morning with the "Oh, shit, not again" feeling as my neck was in a lot of pain, I had a burning sensation on the right side of my throat, and the right side of my face was in pain. I made it to about noon and it became obvious that I really needed to put my self to bed with my eye mask and meds, when my Mom suggested that I go get a massage at my massage place. I didn't think I could get in so fast on a Saturday, but called at my Mom's urging.

Wellsprings was able to fit me in at 2:30pm that day with massage therapist, Sheila Laughlin. What a blessing. Sheila asked some really good questions before she started and I honestly told her that I was trying to fend off the onset of a full migraine due to neck and back stiffness. She did a miracle modified Swedish massage on my face, head, neck and back that loosed up my muscles. By the time I left an hour later, I felt about half way better with much looser muscles, within another hour all the migraine onset pain was gone and I felt almost all the way better.

Big thanks to Sheila and Wellsprings!

Wellsprings
550 Pacific Coast Hwy # 207,
Seal Beach, CA‎90740
562-594-1158‎

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Tue 07.28.09 - And a very Happy Birthday to Mr. Rouse!

Developers and Designers need each other and need to work together. (duh.)

All of the super exciting internet / computer eco-systems of the last 15 years have had developers and designers involved together as a tight team: HTML/CSS - Web Standards, Ruby on Rails, Django, Mac OS X, the iPhone app world, etc.

By exciting eco-system, I mean that the platform, device, or system has grown beyond the company or small core group of folk who created/originated the system, a growing that goes beyond all the usual vendors for the company/core to take a life of its own in a wide range of design & development professionals and hobbyists who expand the ecosystem to a dynamic space that is much greater than any marketing budget could every afford or create.

This is definitely the case of the Open Source LAMP proponents, the HTML/CSS web standards folk, the Ruby on Rails & Django communities that have had designers working with developers from the very beginning. By dint of Apple's penchant for design, designers have been on board fully with developers to expand the iPhone and Mac OS X applications and universe.

While I love using Android and Symbian mobile devices, it has recently become glaringly obvious to me that both of these communities don't have the same co-working / symbiotic relationships with the design community that the above eco-systems have. Yes, Google and Nokia/Symbian can afford high end designers, but what about the community outside of Google, Nokia, Symbian, and their paid vendors?

The Google I/O conference while multiple thousands strong in developers, programmers, and business dev folk, was very poor in terms of designers and any integration thereof.

Android and Symbian dev folk, we need to get designers on board in teams working together from the very beginning of projects to get the eco-system more than just aesthetically pleasing but also to balance the platforms to think outside of the dev/programming box and to grow the eco-systems dynamically as well as spread the goodness.

Design is more than aesthetics, it is an essential part of of balancing the right & left brains as well as the needs of the creators with the consumers. By creating a space for both designers and developers in teams, at conferences, and getting the dialogue moving between both communities means that we build balance applications, devices, and web systems that are usable and delightful.

To grow our communities, to build great apps we need to think of the disciplines of design and development as feeding into each other - feeding ideas, cross polinating, cooperation, and coordination.

Design + Development = Developers <=> Desingers

Ok, Nokia / Symbian and Google / Android, let's figure out how to get more designers and design thinkers involved in community based projects from the ground up. Let's start with design tracks at your sponsored conferences and meet ups between developers and designers at the conferences, why don't we?

Or even better, why don't we all agree to meet up and have a Android / Symbian conference to cross-pollinate between platforms and invite designers of all stripes (web, mobile, interaction, and user experience) to join us?

Update: Sun 07.26.09 - To clarify, I wrote this post because there has been much talk amongst tech bloggers and early adopters that the reason that folks are buying the Apple iPhone is because of the App Store and not buying Nokias or Android phones due to the poor showings on their app stores. I think this point is debatable, as most of the folks I know who purchase phones find out about the App Stores after purchase, not as a point to purchase.

But I do think it is instructive for those of us who are tech folk/early adopters and|or professional developers|designers to examine the web and mobile communities that have been successful, of which my point was that the communities that are growing organically without millions of dollars of advertising & subsidies from the companies behind the technologies are the communities where both developers and designers are both excited about and actively participating in.

To this end, I think that it would benefit Nokia's Symbian community and Google's Android community to draw in more User Experience | User Interface | and good old school Designers. At this point, both of these communities are programmer|engineer heavy. As Mike M. states in the below comment, designers & design thinkers bring an equal set of different skills that are absolutely necessary to the web & mobile site|app|software development process.

To Answer a Few Folk on Twitter: I don't think that Apple has their mental market share amongst designers due to their TV advertising. I know more top end designers who are working on Ruby on Rails and Django projects than Apple iPhone projects with developers. It is not just about big money, but where is it exciting and challenging to create. A place to create where one can make a difference, prototype quickly, and also make money as well.

Tiffany B. Brown's excellent blog post "Black folks is takin' ovah da mobile innanets!" proves Piers Fawkes' "Three Region Theory" research on mobile adoption vs. desktop/laptop adoption rates is alive and well right here at home in North America. Tiffany expands on Piers' theory by giving examples of how folks in North America without regular personal desktop/laptop access are adopting the mobile internet faster than folks with desktop access.

Let's start with Piers' theory:

"OK, so here's a theory about mobile phones and their use: in terms of phones their are three regions: Region 1 where the internet reached most people before mobile phones (North America); Region 2 where the internet reached most people at the same time as mobile phones (Europe); and then Region 3 where mobile phones reached most people before the internet (Asia, South America, Africa). The timing of the adoption of the internet versus the mobile phone within a region affects the relationship that region's citizens have with their phone; and therefore should govern the services that will be used there."

Then Tiffany writes:

Last month, I was in South Carolina for my cousin's wedding. In attendance? Three T-Mobile G1 devices, one Blackberry, and me with my dying, yet WiFi-and-mobile Internet-enabled Nokia N80. That's five internet-enabled smart phones, out of about two-dozen folks under the age of 45.

My cousins are not the same kind of people as the black folks I regularly roll with. My black friends are mostly college educated, almost entirely middle-to-upper-middle class in both occupation and income, and highly tech-literate. It would probably be a shock if none of us had smart phones, right?

My cousins? They're mostly lower-middle and working class folks. College? Only one other cousin has completed a 4-year degree. Most are in service rather than knowledge jobs. Their computing know-how is basic. Some don't own laptop or desktop computers.

And yet, here my cousins were using their phones to check email and update their Facebook status.

One of the things that both Apple and Nokia appear to forget with their desktop/laptop only updates, syncing & other services is that there are plenty of folks both in North America and in many parts of the rest of the world, whether by choice, income, or geography, who are mobile only or almost mobile only. People who have mobile internet access but no to very little computer based internet access or people like my Mom who have very little use for a laptop/desktop computer but loves and uses her mobile phone daily. These folks are the present and the future.

Let's build mobile apps for them. Let's make a great mobile web experience for them. Let's make sure that they can do all internet and mobile updating activities directly from their mobile phones. Let's not make them find someone else's computer, be it work or a PC, to update the firmware on their mobile. Let's make it easy to do everything from one's mobile, if that is what one needs or chooses.

Let's make it a mobile future.

The NYTimes on "Mobile Internet Use Shrinks Digital Divide"

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Tues 07.21.09 - Mom and sister Allison, the birthday girl, on the Tram from the Daisy Duck parking level to Disneyland. Note that Mom is wearing her new|gently-used Nokia N82 (Thanks, Cecily, you rock!) around her neck and Allison is already addicted to her Nokia N97 birthday present.

Disneyland was fun.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Mon 07.20.09 - Hi folks, I realize that not only should I be declaring Flickr Bankruptcy, but also Blogging Bankruptcy. Unfortunately, between my crazy travel schedule of the last month for work, training, work, happy, work (aka San Francisco, San Bruno, Germany, London, Bishop, etc), that I am quite behind on my blogging. But before I can get caught up on blogging, I have to finish some client work. Today I had two back to back meetings, worked on finishing up a bunch of revisions, and now I am done for.

((o.O))

Here is what I plan to blog about before Thursday:

1) The Carl Zeiss Factory Review - w00t!

2) The Camera Phone Equation (more on Carl Zeiss and Nokia) = optics + digital sensor + software/algorithms + computational power

3) Of Tools and Trolls

4) The Future of NASA (I really should write this one tonight to honor the 40th anniversary of the Moon Landing, but Really, I am stressed & tired, so my write up on how NASA is much more than we think and how we should be funding it will have to come later in the week.)

And after all of that, I need to finish up my Booking App on Google App Engine to make Jackie & Alex's work life easier...

((o.O))

A friend, who will remain unnamed, recently went on a fascinating camping trip to Zion with a group o' folks. The folks in question were a motley crew worthy of their very own adventure horror comedy movie. And I heard the whole sordid tale.

It was the kind of tale that made one say, "OMG! Oh, dear. Oh, Wow! I am so sorry! ZOMG! How horrifying!" etc etc etc. As a side note, I was invited to this Zion trip, but I instead went to Germany for the Carl Zeiss Factory Tour. After hearing the first 10 minutes of the Zion trip story, I was really really really glad I went to visit with the lovely folks at Carl Zeiss in Aalen.

But after the friend in question related the tale of the Subway Slot Canyon hike at Zion, while the hike they went on in June was hellish to say the least due to the other party members, I would love to go on this hike as it sounds amazing and beautiful and a true test of one's abilities:

Climb Utah on "Subway - Zion National Park - Canyoneering"

Zion National Park on "The Subway"

Tom's Utah Canyoneering Guide on "The Subway Canyoneering Route" with Maps and the Famed Log and Slot.

My friend recommends that one does quite a bit of bouldering, rappeling, and stamina training before attempting the The Subway at Zion. Regardless, from the descriptions and photos from the web sites above, The Subway is lovely.

Losing my religion for equality : Jimmy Carter leaves the Southern Baptists over the Treatment of Women. "The truth is that male religious leaders have had - and still have - an option to interpret holy teachings either to exalt or subjugate women. They have, for their own selfish ends, overwhelmingly chosen the latter. Their continuing choice provides the foundation or justification for much of the pervasive persecution and abuse of women throughout the world. This is in clear violation not just of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights but also the teachings of Jesus Christ, the Apostle Paul, Moses and the prophets, Muhammad, and founders of other great religions - all of whom have called for proper and equitable treatment of all the children of God. It is time we had the courage to challenge these views."

Of Rum and Raspberries: The Milky Way Galaxy tastes of Raspberries and smells of rum. Milton Basher Cunningham on Smelling the Stars.

The bay of pigs: swine swimming in crystal clear water in the Bahamas. Lovely photo essay of pigs living on a beach in the Bahamas.

Wed 07.15.09 - Photo by Sue Hahn (aka My Mom) with my Nokia N95. It was dreadfully hot in Bishop (97F/36C) and so we went up to about 8,000ft/2,438m to the DWP's Bishop Creek Intake #1 Pond which is used to store water for the hydropower dam. The pond is stocked with trout and there were quite a few fishermen wandering around the lake in their blow up fishing intertubes. We were the only non-fisherfolk enjoying the lake.

Scruffy enjoyed his kayak ride. I was afraid he was going to try and jump out and I would have to capsize the kayak to get him back, but instead he was very calm and seemed to have fun.

Tomorrow starts the Bishop Livestock Fair & Auction, which is why I came. My Mom and I hope to come away with two pigs (organic), 1/2 a grass fed steer, and 2 grass fed lambs to deep freeze and have as our meat for the year. I also plan to make one more prosciutto, some pancetta, and a bit of sausage.

Poor, defenseless marriage, it has been so abused in recent years. Such shocking immoral agendas have been advanced with folks getting married up to 4 and 5 times or more to different spouses, and the attendant equal amounts of divorce to marry the next spouse.

Shocking, yes, shocking.

Here in these United States of America, if you get a more than three DUIs (driving under the influence) your right to have a driver's license is revoked. Folks, if you want to really defend marriage, we need to act now against profligate spending of the marriage vows by poor deluded serial monogamists.

Yes, Americans, we need to protect marriage and revoke the right to a marriage license if even one of the two proposed spouses has been married and divorced three times. Just like a serial drunk or drug addict should not be piloting a car, a serial divorcer should not pilot a marriage.

While we are at it, serial divorce comes from youth being led down the path of sin and perdition by thinking they can marry young and often. To that end, we need to support the youth of America into waiting and abstaining from serial divorce or post-martial sin by making it illegal to marry before the age of 30 without full parental and community consent and completely forbidden to marry before the age of 25, as really, how many pre-25 year olds know their minds?

Now under Ms. Jen's Defense of Marriage if you are a homo sapiens sapiens (a hominid of the modern human variety) and you are over 30 and have been divorced less than 3 times and you want to get married? Get thee to a courthouse or a religious institution of your choice and make it legal, brothers & sisters (or any combo of genders thereof).

America, let's please save marriage. Let's make marriage for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, to death do us part. Once and for all.

*****

Cecily has been "Drinking the iPhone Kool-Aid" this weekend. Wonder if she would sell me her N82?

I don't want to carry a phone, no matter how fabulous the UI is, and a separate camera. I want to carry one device - a great small camera that goes on the internet. Yes, I am a contrarian and I try to limit my Apple kool-aid drinking to the MacBook Pro flavor.

On the other side of the fence from Cecily, Engagdet's editor, Joshua Topolosky, recently tried to use the iPhone to actually get some work done, new media / blogging type of work, while sitting at the doctor's office and found that the iPhone was great for entertainment & web surfing, but stymied his ability to be productive. He writes up his experiment in iPhone productivity in "Editorial: Taking the iPhone 3GS off the job market".

Best of all, Jan Chipchase, recently got to have a real L.A. experience:

There's now a flock of 4 MJ newscopters hovering over UCLA. Could almost be in Baghdad, 'cept no-one has fired back. Yet.

He writes up his thoughts about the percentage of media to actual fans outside of the UCLA medical center on the day Michael Jackson died in "MJ (The Media Experience) Remembered".

This week has been the start of the time of year that everyone else loves but I minor-ly dread - Sun, sun, sun, sun!

The sun starts shining nice and bright and strong into my bedroom windows starting sometime in the 6am hour and by 8am, there is no sleeping even with curtains and a night eyemask on. I am the kind of sleeper that gets my deep REM restorative sleep from 5 - 8am and if I am woken up during that time period, I don't feel as if I got enough sleep.

Thus summer is a time that I never feel really rested and a bit sleep deprived.

Hello, sunshine!

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Sat 07.11.09 - Today was an overly packed day with activities that ranged from West LA to Irvine and Westminster. Basically, a lot of driving, but it was well worth it.

I had the opportunity to attend the Mobile Camp LA held by the N97 24/7 challenge folk at UCLA's Tom Bradley Int'l Hall. I have in the past been a bit fearful of Bar Camps, as what would I talk about? After thinking about it, I don't find university teaching fearful, but instead a good joyful, challenge. I don't have fear speaking at a conference where I have been invited, they why the mild trepidation about a Bar Camp?

While I did have some trepidation about the Mobile Camp today, we all ended up sitting around a large round table and discussing / debating a wide range of subjects in and around mobile, the internet, usage, user experience, mobile ideas, applications, etc., rather than having to present a topic or sit nicely while someone else presented on a topic.

The best part was that all people at the table who were actively participating in the discussion. Very much an iron sharpens iron, get your brain nice and tuned up type of afternoon. The Mobile Camp LA was well worth the drive and I am not the person who drove the longest, that goes to @rogerpodacter (twitter) who drove up from Temecula!

All in all, big thanks to all the attendees, their ideas & thoughts, and to Nokia & WOMWorld for hosting the event. It was like a mini Nokia Open Lab in LA.

Delightful.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Fri 07.10.09 - Purple is the hardest color for a digital camera to get right, particularly a non-DSLR digital camera. Purple requires quite a bit of computational power to take the sensor's red-green-blue/light-dark and translate it into an accurate purple. Most sensors are good with yellows and oranges, but with purple it either is skewed to the blue or to the red depending on the camera model, the manufacturer, and how much time/money were spent to get the image algorithms right.

The Nokia N97 is getting the closest to getting purple right and the color very close to spot on as any Nokia camera phone or Casio digital camera that I have used to date, although the Nokia N95 and N82 were also very good. Good on Nokia for allocating the computational resources to capture a good purple.

Bravo.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Thurs 07.09.09 - Belle in the car on the way home from the groomers with a fresh new hairdo. She looked like a little polar bear before the hair cut. Scruffy also looks very handsome, but he wouldn't sit still long enough to get a good photo.

After today's investigatory adventure with my Mom, which included some shopping at Home Depot and Lyon's Art & Design Supply, I will/should have my painting studio at the Boatyard set up within the week.

Oil painting. Photography maybe my first love, but oil painting is my second. And I have not painted in a long time due to a lack of space and my computer/photo/mobile habits taking precedence. This is all about to shift a bit, in a very good way.

Since the true beauty and genius of the Nokia Nseries 8x line is the camera functions, I will start this review of the Nokia N86 with the photos that I took with the N86 while in Germany for the Carl Zeiss lens factory tour on Mon. June 22 and at the Limes Museum and surrounds in Aalen, Germany, on Tues. June 23rd before I had to hand the N86 back. All of the below photos were taken by me (Ms. Jen) with a Nokia N86 8 megapixel camera phone and later resized by Fireworks with no other retouching before uploading.

The big question that I have had over the last month is should I declare Flickr bankruptcy?

For a variety of reasons, I have not managed in the last 5-8 weeks to post my regular daily photo or two from my phone to Flickr, I have made a valiant effort to keep up here at Black Phoebe, but Flickr has fallen to the wayside.

Part of the problem started back in late April when I returned the lovely little Nokia N79 it its rightful owners and reverted back to my good, old, faithful Nokia N95 camera phone. In early May, after a firmware upgrade, I found that there was no more Shozu mobile application to download unless I wanted to purchase it. Given that I have planned to purchase a new camera phone this summer, I didn't want to commit to any new mobile software until I knew which phone I would be getting, and thus which software or app would be best for the phone in question.

Starting in May, I tried to remember to download my photos to my computer every few days and then upload them to Flickr. Anytime that I involve my computer in a part of the photo upload process, there is failure, as my computer is always a black hole for photos, which is why I started blogging directly from my phone in the first place.

The winning equation for me the last 4.5 years since I got my first internet enabled camera phone was as follows:

Take photo -> Add subject -> Send Directly From Phone to Internet = Win

This is the bad equation:

Take photo -> Save on camera or camera phone -> download to computer -> fiddle with and|or forget != Photo on Internet (quite the opposite actually of photo on the internet, the photos never leave my computer)

Because of the fact that I am not into photo processing on my computer and that photos that enter my computer very rarely leave (Hotel SoCal MBP), for the last 4.5 years ever since I got the lovely Nokia 7610 and an unlimited data package, I have used a variety of methods to daily post photos to Flickr and to this blog (or at least attempt to do it daily).

This spring's camera phone disruption has lead to me getting out of the habit of posting daily photos to Flickr. It has gotten worse. I am not a few days behind, or even a week or two, but five - Yes, 5 - weeks behind in posting photos to Flickr.

I now have 140 - 180++ plus photos from San Francisco, life around SoCal, Germany, Carl Zeiss Factory Tour, London, and Fourth of July that I could post to flickr.

Should I just do it - upload them all, name them, add them to sets, etc - or declare Flickr bankruptcy?

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with the Nokia N97.

Sun 07.05.09 - Both in yesterday's Fourth of July photo essay and in today's close-up/macro mode test, the N97 is consistently choosing a farther away than expected focal point and is not as clear/sharp as the N95 (see my previous test with the N95 & N97). With the Nokia N95 and N82, one could set the camera on Macro / Close-Up mode and get about 4 inches / 10 cm from the subject and get a good clear photo, not so with the Nokia N97, as you can see from the above photos.

The first photo on the left was taken at 5 inches from the bottle brush bloom of which the camera did not auto-focus on the bloom, but on the leaves and stalks behind. In the second photo on the right, I kept the camera about 10 inches / 25.4 cm from the subjects and was able to get a clear photo of the blooms.

Frankly, if the next firmware update comes without a 'manual' touch screen focus option, the engineers in Espoo should be spanked. Samsung has it, Sony has it, now Apple has it, Nokia's N97 needs to have the ability for the photographer to use the touchscreen to choose where the focus should be and the camera should do it.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Sat 07.04.09 - Happy Fourth of July to one and all!

Fri 07.03.09 - Sprouted half of coconuts turning into coconut trees are a sight better than than Trader Joe's usual botanical fare of evil borchids (aka birthday orchids).

Thurs 07.02.09 - Dan's latest installation. Photo taken by Ms. jen with a Nokia N97.

Andrew Sullivan asserts in the below video interview at the Aspen Ideas Festival that blogging is broadcasting. I think it is both and it depends on the writer/blogger in question. Sullivan's style is that he broadcasts his piece as soon as possible from the time the idea or event happened and he broadcasts in his blog multiple times a day. Other bloggers, such as Geoff Manaugh of BLDBLG, publish a few times a week or once a day, in a longer, edited essay form - I would consider this publishing the blog post or some folks might call the longer, curated/edited essay form an article.

What about the moblogging that I do here? Would it be broadcasting via Sullivan's definition or do I mobile publish because I tend to look for the best image or two of the day and only rarely do I moblog more than one or two images as they happen. The evening, a couple of weeks ago, that I went to dinner with Ernie, Jason, and George at Esperento in the Mission was more broadcasting or documenting as it happens, as I moblogged photos of two of the dishes we ate and two photos of the gentlemen, but most days, I do believe I am publishing.

I do agree with Sullivan that blogging is the most exciting thing to happen for writers, as well as artists and photographers, in many a decade.