September 2010 Archives

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Thoughts on Teabaggers, Groupthink, The God of the Burgess Shale, and for the Love of Blogging

1) In case you are like me and have spent more than a few hours wondering where all the Teabaggers were during the Bush-Cheney big government spend-a-thon, Mr. Taibbi answers a few of those questions in Tea & Crackers.

I am still in awe how most of those folks spent 2001-2009 asleep, only to wake up after the Obama inauguration. Odd but true.

2) For all the commentators who have been writing on Nokia's corporate culture and supposed Finnish 'groupthink', the Finns may be on to something bigger in the democracy department than we, individualism obsessed Americans, can even dream of, especially if they aren't afraid to combine research & risk with consensus.

3) Making Light on "The Secret Lives of Fossils": TNH's handmade rosary of fossils has landed in the Vatican Observatory's meteorite case. Go read all the links and the comments. Wonderful.

4) Lori Hylan-Cho receives the award for the Best Sentence in a Blog Post in 2010, even though 2010 is not over yet:

"I guess this also proves that this blog really is just a personal memory store for me, and not a mechanism for promoting my professional reputation through blowhardery."

I struggle greatly with the pressure that I should be daily/weekly writing a hard hitting professional posts to promote my reputation in mobile or web worlds when what I really want to do it post beautiful photos and blog about things that interest me today - be they professional, personal, ideas, whatever. I continue to feel strongly that this blog is both a canvas and a gallery.

Bravo to Lori for posting about what she loves rather than caving to the pressure to post professional blowhardery.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Wed 09.29.10 - The sunset, fleeting, was fantastic.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Mon 09.27.10 - This shot of my car's outside temperature was taken around noon in east Irvine - 108F. When I pulled into the shaded parking lot at Scruffy's vet, North Tustin Vet Clinic, an hour later it was 111F!

 Today was the hottest recorded temp in Los Angeles history - 113F!!!!

The good news is when I got home to Seal Beach a bit later it was an almost chilly 91F.

When did LA switch weather with Las Vegas & Phoenix?!?! Blast furnace day.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Sunday 09.26.10 - The first day of real summer heat occurred on the fourth day of autumn. Welcome to SoCal's fire season.

via: Good Ideas, The Four-Minute Version

Reuters on Special Report: Welcome to Nokia, Mr Elop: "The company is six months past the point where things looked most hopeless, Linardos says. An injection of new blood that has been going on beneath the surface has helped to lift spirits. Just as long as everybody understands Nokia's in it for the long haul."

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 09.24.10 - Dog Beach at Low Tide.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Thur 09.23.10 - As seen on this morning's walk.

At 8:09pm Pacific Time, 3:09am UTC, it will be the second 'equal' day/night of the year. In five minutes we, here in the Northern Hemisphere, pass from Summer to Fall / Autumn, which starts my favorite time of year.

Ok, not really fave time of year in SoCal due to our usual fall fires, but when I visit other places, I love autumn.

Enjoy.

In March of 2003, I heard Ben & Mena Trott talk about their blogging software that they started in 2001 after both lost their jobs in the DotCom Bust - Movable Type - and their new company named after the fact that their birthdays were only six days apart, SixApart, at SXSW 2003 and decided to try it out in April of 2003.

Seven years later I am still here, still blogging with Movable Type, still using it as a CMS for clients, and still hoping against bizarre hope that Movable Type and SixApart will continue to innovate in the blogging space. A silly hope now that WordPress has clearly won many hearts and minds, but I do like MT better for a variety of reasons.

Today TechCrunch leaked that SixApart had been bought out by VideoEgg for its advertising network and both would become a new entity known as Say Media.

Various bits of the blogosphere are a bit up in arms about this, although many SixApart / Movable Type veterans are warily watching what will happen next.

For a few months, I have been planning on moving my blog to a VPS, upgrading to MT5, and using HTML5 for templating. All of this planning would also include a major redesign to better integrate my mobile photo blogging with text blogging that I do.

Now these plans will be on hold. I will wait and see what is up. I don't want to spend 40-80 hours on a major redesign and upgrade 7.4 years of blogging only to have the software be unsupported in a few months.

Just in case the new Say Media, formerly VideoEgg formerly SixApart, axes Movable Type, I went an purchased an Expression Engine license today, because I know EE already supports mobile blogging. Due to the complexity of a move and a whole new platform, as EE's templating is rumored to be a pain, versus the free time I have to spend on such an endeavor right now, as well as loyalty to my favorite blogging engine, I will wait and see.

In the meantime, I would like to say a Big Thank You to all the SixApart employees, current & former, who over the last 7 years have made my blogging life happy: Ben & Mena Trott, Anil Dash, Mie Kennedy Yaginuma, Byrne Rese, Jay Allen, Tim Appnel, David Jacobs, Arvind Satyanarayan, Ginevra Kirkland, Beau Smith, and many others. As well as the whole community of Movable Type bloggers, developers, designers, and other enthusiasts who have weathered a great many storms together.

Thanks for a great 7 years, y'all rock.

**********

Update from 9/22/10 at 8:10am : Maarten Schenk at Movable Tips reports that Six Apart in Japan will continue with the development of Movable Type. MT is very popular in Japan and as Maarten reports it has been the most active hive of MT dev and innovation for sometime, so it makes sense that they will continue on. Go read: Movable Type and "Six Apart" live on... in Japan!

Update from 9/22/10 at 8:48am: A tweet from last night as I was writing this article:

I really wish @sixapart had sent an official announcement out to bloggers, devs, & customers before the tech press leaked the buyout.

Actually, this morning this is the part that makes me the most frustrated, is why didn't SixApart send an email to licensees and the ProNet mailing list before letting this get leaked to press? If everything is alright, then longtime customers and developers should be the first to know so that the rumor engine doesn't get started.

Update from 9/22/10 at 12:59pm: Today at 10:33am, David Jacobs, the VP for Services and Products at SixApart, sent an email to the ProNet mailing list entitled "The Future". I won't reprint it here, but basically he reiterates that SayMedia will be continuing to support and develop Typepad and Movable Type, which should have been sent before Michael Arrington scooped the story. Don't say to me, "How could they have know that Tech Crunch would have printed in the night before the announcement?" Companies need to tell their own story first before the press hears it from their sources and tells it for them, particularly in the Echo Chamber that is known as San Francisco/Silicon Valley.

Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore Sanity: Taking it down a Notch for America.

And as a counterpoint, Stephen Colbert's March to Keep Fear Alive

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Imagine my surprise when my RSS feeder shows the Gruber has an opinion about something other than Apple and an iThingy... Gasp, Shock, ... Hey look he blogged about Nokia and give major link love to PPK. Per usual, Mr. G. is cranky.

PPK's article on "Nokia's problem" is informative and not cranky.

In the second paragraph, PPK links to mobile business analyst and marathon blogger extraordinaire, Tomi Ahonen.

Upon seeing Tomi's name, I remembered that I had seen that he tweeted about blogging about Nokia's New CEO Stephen Elop.

Tomi is quite the opposite in every way from Gruber. Gruber is cranky. Tomi is cheerful. Gruber usually likes to only give his readers bite sized links and posts with an occasional 3-4 paragraph post. If Tomi were only to post 3-4 paragraphs, folks would get very concerned for his health & safety. Gruber takes himself and his opinions/analyses very seriously. Tomi thoroughly enjoys his opinions/analyses to the point where he will insert a funny sentence mid-paragraph and end said sentence with haha.

Go read all three articles and I will conclude by saying that I agree with PPK's closing statement:

Nokia's basic OS strategy is sound: MeeGo for the high-end, Symbian for the mid-range, and S40 for the low-end. But now it has to actually execute this strategy instead of fooling around.

Nokia, release a MeeGo phone. Before Christmas. But don't bother with Android or Windows Phone 7.

Sat 09.18.10 - Ruth and Erika looking out over the pond and lilies at the Chinese Gardens at the Huntington Library and Gardens.

Fri 09.17.10 - As seen on this afternoon's walk with Scruffy and Belle.

Thur 09.16.10 - Test. Test. Test.

Thurs 09.16.1 - Will it post?

******

Update 5 mins later from my computer: Yes, yes it did. Major milestone #1 in my effort to write my own mobile app to moblog directly from my phone to my blog without any stops at a 3rd party server has been achieved!

It has been two years and two days since the master of a good humorous poke at and romp with obfuscation died and his publisher will be releasing the novel he was working on at the time of his death as an unfinished work.

David Foster Wallace's novel about entry level employees at the IRS, The Pale King, will be released in April 15, 2011:

"Set at an IRS tax-return-processing center in Illinois in the mid-1980s, The Pale King is the story of a crew of entry-level processors and their attempts to do their job in the face of soul-crushing tedium. "The Pale King may be the first novel to make accountants and IRS agents into heroes," says Bonnie Nadell, Wallace's longtime agent and literary executor."

If one has a history of depression, why, even for reasons of sussing out the black comedic gems, would one write a novel about the IRS?

The other day, while driving north on PCH near Long Beach State, I saw a beater of n car driving towards the university with a bumper sticker that said, "Eschew Obfuscation".

I had a good laugh and thought, "That must be a grad student in the humanities, criticism, or literature."

For those of you who are scratching your heads, basically it means "give up making things unclear" in opaque language.

From the nice folks at Dictionary.com:

Eschew /ɛsˈtʃu/ [es-choo] -verb (used with object) - to abstain or keep away from; shun; avoid: to eschew evil.

Origin: 1300-50; ME eschewen < OF eschiver, eschever < Gmc; cf. OHG sciuhen, G scheuchen, shy2

Obfuscate /ˈɒbfəˌskeɪt, ɒbˈfʌskeɪt/ [ob-fuh-skeyt, ob-fuhs-keyt]
-verb (used with object), -cat·ed, -cat·ing.
1. to confuse, bewilder, or stupefy.
2. to make obscure or unclear: to obfuscate a problem with extraneous information.
3. to darken.

Origin:
1525-35; < LL obfuscātus (ptp. of obfuscāre to darken), equiv. to L ob- ob- + fusc ( us ) dark + -ātus -ate1

On another amusing word usage tip, Languagehat parses out the oldest known word in English for wedding: bridelope.

Last but not least, a good quote from a 19th Cent. British physician, H.G. Bohn:

"Nature, time and patience are the three great physicians."

Mon 09.13.10 - Testing mobile blog posting to the Atom Protocol. Photo of one of my roses today with my Nokia N95.

Mon 09.13.10 - Testing mobile blog posting to the Atom Protocol. Photo of Scruffy a few days ago with my Nokia N95.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Sat 09.11.10 - Autumn is approaching, the neighbor's backyard persimmons are starting to turn orange and the air is by far crispier than the usual SoCal September hot & humid.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 09.10.10 - Since my Mom is fond of going swimming with her mobile phones, two Nokia N82's lost to water in the last 14 months, I ordered from Expansys a water resistant little battle tank of a feature phone for her - the Nokia 3720 Classic.

It arrived this afternoon. There have been a few bumps, as going from a Nokia Series 60 smart phone with an excellent camera to a Nokia Series 40 feature phone was a bit rough for Mom from the software/OS usability perspective, but it is water resistant. Did I mention that the phone won't die if Mom takes it swimming or surfing?

Dear Nokia, my Mom, Surfer Sue, respectfully requests that you all make a water proof Nseries smart phone with a great camera, preferably a water proof camera.

;o)

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Wed 09.08.10 - Or entitled: "The Future of Electric Ave."

What I want to know is why does the city start on six months of big road construction just before the rainy season? Particularly road construction that will be to improve the storm drains?

I have tried to write this blog post at least 4 times over the last 5 months, and have several very different drafts littering my "To Blog" folder. I started this April when I was able to directly upload photos and blog to this Movable Type blog using the Nokia N97's web browser and not a mobile app. Go little N97 go! I was so happy.

Then in early May, another attempt at writing this post, as I was about to retire the the Nokia N97 in favor of my new Nokia N86 and I wanted to write about after nearly a year since its release, the N97 had really changed my mind about it and that I did like it, really like it. But I was very busy with work and didn't have the time to spend to write a quality post beyond, "Hey, the N97 isn't that bad after all."

Then came late May and early June, I had a some down time of which to think & write, and then the great N97 inspired blogger meltdown of June 2010 occurred: Dan, Micky & Jay, and then the big boom: Ricky & Rita. I watched over a period of 3 weeks in astonishment and wrote two whole drafts in response to their blog posts that did not leave my "To Blog" folder.

I was astonished for a variety of reasons, but mostly if one was going to meltdown about the N97 as a icon for Nokia's failures of the last three years, why not point a finger that the two phones that were much greater actual failures at being flagship devices: The N96 and N85. But those two posts didn't leave the draft folder, as I couldn't really sum up without anger what I wanted to say, as I wasn't angry at the bloggers in question but more the overall techno-cultural situation that has lead all of us to a place where we get frustrated with our relationships with a piece of plastic/metal/silicon&rareearths.

By late June, early July, I realized that I really had two blog posts in my head and in draft forms in my folder: One on how I do actually like the Nokia N97 and another on our evolving relationships with brands, devices, and blogging. Work was once again intense and I had even less time and creative energy to write two long posts about mobile devices and our relationships thereof. I did change the title of the draft post from "Nokia N97: Nearly One Year Later" to "Nokia N97: One Year Later".

For the last two months, I have two to do items in my notebook, my Google Tasks, and on my whiteboard: Blog: Nokia N97, More than a Year Later; Blog: Brands: Fans, Relationship, or Cult? Have either of these gotten written? No. I have designed & launched 2 websites, I have coded like mad on another one, I have done various other bits of client consulting stuff in internet promotion & social media. I have taken lots of photos and worked on developing my personal mobile application. I even upgraded my computer to Mac OS X Snow Leopard and my "To Blog" folder now lives on an external hard drive and isn't even on my desktop any more.

Let this be a lesson. Of what, I will let you all decide.

I popped my sim chip back into the Nokia N97 the other day, and other than photos being a bit washed out, I was very happy all day long. For the rest of the week, I flipped back and forth between the N97 and my N86. I love the N97's form factor. I love the touchscreen that tilts up to reveal a whole Qwerty keyboard. I love the solid thwack of the marvelously engineered mechanism that opens and reveals the keyboard, I love this in the most primal, inner five year old with new Christmas presents sort of way. Do it in public in SoCal and you get a crowd, "Oooh, what phone is that?"

Maybe I have been lucky to not have the memory and crashing problems that have greatly frustrated others with the Nokia N97. Due to the lack of Lifeblog and official Sports Tracker for the N97, I was not running multiple processes that drew heavily on memory or battery. The only time I had memory problems was early on with my Gmail, so I just put my email in the E: drive and not the system drive. Basically in my six plus months of full time plus the trial usage before that, the Nokia N97 was very good to me.

I understand having a good blog meltdown over a device, a brand, or the like. My own frustration over Nokia dropping Lifeblog in 2008 was my moment of "Nokia, I am so over you." But much like a really good fiery fight, in autumn of 2008 I expressed my anger in a series of blog posts, tracked down the last PM on the project and gave him a piece of my mind (Sorry, Danny, I am so sorry.), then nursed my grudge for a bit, but I was not going to give up Nokia's camera phones as they are still the best.

After my anger subsided, I did something that I had been meaning to do for sometime: teach myself to program in Python and Python for S60 so that I could write my own mobile apps rather than grouse about the lack of what I wanted on the marketplace.

All of this to say, Nokia N97, I like you. You are cute, you worked for me, and we had a lot of fun together. Thanks, you rock.

Yay! Andrew is back from his three week blog holiday and has a trifecta of articles on summer in Ptown, Terrorism "Humility and Humiliation", and Obama "Game On". If you have only a little time, read the Obama post.

Zombies and the political philosophy of Hobbes : Christian Thorne on "The Running of the Dead, Part 1"

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with Thomas's Nikon D300.

Sun 09.05.10 - Today I drove down to San Diego to meet up with Erika, who is currently in San Diego for a month. She is staying in a back house of a very cute 1920's spanish bungalow in the North Park section of San Diego.

We walked over to Ranchos Cocina for a lovely, albeit a bit late lunch. The food was very fresh and tasty. I had an excellent shrimp chile relleno and Erika had the asada tacos.

Around 4pm, we meandered over to the Golden Hill section of San Diego to visit with Peter Schrock, a good friend from college and beyond, who showed us his photos from a recent trip to Dhaka, Bangladesh. Peter is one of my favorite street photograthers and his Dhaka photos are wonderful.

The best part of the afternoon, after lunch with Erika, was having geeky photo talk with Peter and Thomas. Getting to hang out with Erika, Peter, and Thomas all together was well worth the drive to San Diego.

And getting to shoot photos with Thomas' Nikon D300, above, and Peter's Canon 5d was also very delightful. More on this tomorrow.

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Sat 09.04.10 - This afternoon Julie Wanda, Wes, and I went to the annual Labor Day weekend Orange International Street Fair. Per the usual, the weekend of the Street Fair is/was the hottest weekend of the summer. It was 72F degrees when I left Seal Beach, 86F at Julie Wanda's house, and in the 90s when we were out at Street Fair. Dang it was hot.

We wandered around all four streets plus the Orange Circle, said hello to Dave Mau, and watched the Altar Billies, before the heat got to be too much. Upon arriving at the car, it was 97F and we drove back to Julie Wanda's to enjoy the air conditioning. Living in Seal Beach has made me even more of a temperature wimp than I was before.

;o)

Photos taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N86.

Fri 09.03.10 - This afternoon various members of family Callis decided to hang out in the Vanagon.