PyS60 Developers Blog: http://croozeus.com/blogs/

Mobile Lenin on PyS60 ( Mobile PyS60 author) : http://mobilenin.com/pys60/menu.htm

Nokia Open Source on Python for S60 : http://opensource.nokia.com/projects/pythonfors60/

Fri 06.12.09 - Will PostOffice for MT post this cron job email now that I have the correct cron job command?

Update: Yes, it did, but not with the cron job command that my server support team said would work, but with the one that Movable Type said would work.

Update at 4:48pm: Sorry, it ran a couple of times too many before I deleted the test email out of the inbox.

For two reasons, email photos to this blog is going to be an imperfect way to moblog:
1) If one does not delete or move the email out of the inbox, after the cron job runs, then the PostOffice plugin will post again the next time the cron job runs - at least when using Gmail.
2) One first has to resize the photo in the phone before emailing, otherwise there will be a large photo - both in pixels and kilobytes - that is posted to the blog.

With the G2 Ion / HTC Magic phone, I downloaded PicSay from the Android Market to do the resizing and emailing all in one go, as the PixelPipe Android app did not send the photo resized.

Given that a super-user/moblog addict like me spent many hours over days to set this up, no wonder why regular folks don't want to blog from their phones to a blog that lives on one's own server but prefer instead if they do moblog to a hosted service. gah.

Oh, Lifeblog, Oh Lifeblog, why did Nokia discontinue you? You were such a lovely and perfect moblogging app for Nokia phones...

Thurs 06.11.09 - Will PostOffice for MT post this cron job email now that I have the correct cron job command?

Update later in the evening: No it did not. The support fellow at my server gave me a new command for the cron job and it did not work, so I just triggered the script via the command line and it did post. Now back to the cron job drawing board.

Fri 05.29.09 - I have set up the Post Office plugin for Movable Type to see if I can blog from email, if so then the sting out of life after Nokia's great but now discontinued moblog software - Lifeblog.

Update: Thurs 06.11.09 - Two weeks later, I finally have the Post Office moblog plugin for Movable Type working with tech support from Dan Wolfgang at Uinnovations. Big thanks to Dan for the 4 lines of tweaks to make this work.

Now I just need to get my server to help me on why the cron job is not working, I was able to get these posted by using SSH to trigger the task. Once I can get an hourly cron job working then Post Office will make my moblogging life easier from any camera phone that can email. w00t!

The next two weeks are going to be very busy with me flitting here there and everywhere for (mostly) business purposes.

On Sunday, I will drive up to the Bay Area for some Python Rehab. Actually, I am going to some training but it sounds much more fun to say to people that Python and I aren't speaking right now, due to some tuples, and so I am checking myself into programming rehab. No seriously, I keep getting tuple errors (little ass*s)...

If you live in SF or Oakland or South Bay and want to get together for dinner, I am trying to get folks together either Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday evening in San Francisco proper.

And then sometime, not quite sure when yet, late next week, I will be flying to Germany for a big adventure of which when I have a bit more info, I will blog about. Yes, this another one of the WOM World / Nokia adventures. This one will involve Industrial Design + Manufacturing + Photowalks, which means it will be AWESOME. I love factories, esp. if I can take photos and ask lots of questions.

Rather than flying back to LA after 4 days in Europe, I have requested that I get dropped off in London. I plan to be in London until the 28th of June at the very least and I will be attending Tuttle Club at the ICA on Friday, June 26th. Thus, if you are in London-town from the 25th to the 28th and want to go for a photowalk or to dim sum or to a museum with me, let's meet up.

Fri 06.05.09 - At Tuttle Club LA (really LB) this morning, I demo'd the Google Wave Sandbox to those assembled. Vaughan Risher video'd my demo/spiel. Ernie Hsiung and Kyle Ford were kind enough to be logged into the Wave Sandbox and participate in the three of us producing a Wave to demo to the Tuttle folk. It was fun.

Vaughan wrote the following to accompany the video on Vimeo:

"Jenifer Hanen (@msjen) got to go to the Google IO conference this week! She showed us Google Wave up close and personal. I was literally 2 feet away from a computer that was actually connected to it. Crazy.

People you see in the video - Jenifer Hanen, Jeb Brilliant, Al Pavangkanan, and myself. You'll also hear the indomitable Geoff Hickman's voice in the background."

The best part is the preview has me in classic family photography mode - eyes closed. ;o)

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Here is my transcription of two sessions from Day 2, 05.28.09, of the Google I/O 2009. Per my usual, the following is a combination of live quotes from the speaker, notes off the slides, some paraphrase and a few of my own asides.

So far, Brett Slatkin's Offline Processing on App Engine: A Look Ahead has been my favorite of the day. Lunch conversation with Prashant and Bastian was delightful.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Thur 05.28.09 - Google I/O keynote was Lars Rassmussen, Stephanie Hannon, and Jans Rassmussen giving a demonstration on the new Google Wave that is currently in development and the team is inviting the attendees of Google I/O to participate in developing the product and open source code before public release.

Here is my transcription of two sessions from Day 1, 05.27.09, of the Google I/O 2009. Per my usual, the following is a combination of live quotes from the speaker, notes off the slides, some paraphrase and a few of my own asides.

Chris Nesiadek's presentation on Android's Interaction Design was my favorite of the day.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Wed 05.27.08 - Due to my plane being an hour late, I may miss the first session on how to code for Android. Even if late, I am looking forward to the Google App Engine and Android sessions today and tomorrow.

If the folks at Starcut are going to proudly announce that they mobilize brands and media and charge a newspaper to mobilize the said newspaper's website, then they should educate themselves on the standards of the mobile user experience.

Major rule of the mobile web: Give the User a Choice. Don't assume that they want the full website or that they want a reduced site for mobile. Just because a script has detected that the browser coming to the site is a mobile browser, doesn't mean the reader/user wants to be forced into a locked sandbox with no exit. Don't assume that every user wants to reduce their data usage, some of us have unlimited plans. Give the user a choice.

Here are a few examples of Mobile Sites that do the User Experience right by giving the reader/user a choice to either view the mobile version or to switch over to the "classic", "full", "regular" version of the website:

Why does this matter? Well, not every Nokia or Sony Ericsson or Blackberry or insert name of mobile device is a smartphone with Opera Mini or a version of the Webkit or Gecko mobile browsers, but then again, not every Nokia or Sony or Blackberry or other mobile device is a simple device with a simple mobile web browser.

I think it is great that more and more websites offer mobile versions that are stripped down and load fast for mobile devices, but if you are going to strip out choice along with kilobytes, this is not good.

My Nokia N95 has a full featured web browser that renders most websites, except heavily AJAX sites, quite nicely. I have an unlimited data plan. Between my Nokia's browser and my data plan, I want to see the full version of most websites unless I need information quickly and then the mobile version is usually fine.

Not yesterday.

Yesterday, I left the house in a rush to meet up with Lauren Isaacson in Encino so that we could have lunch together before she departs for Vancouver. I was heading north on the 405 and passing the Long Beach Airport when I realized that I left my paper copy of the LA Times Food section. So, I did what I would normally do in this situation, I opened my Nokia's web browser and typed "latimes.com", instead of getting the usual, full web version of the LA Times website, I was forced into the mobile version of the site with no exit out.

No link to the full version. No links to the Food section. No ability to get out of the reduced web version. I then went to Google to search for the article and the Google search took me back to the front page of the mobile site with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com. Here is the mobile site that I saw with no link to the full version of the LATimes.com at either the top of the mobile page nor at the bottom:

I was very frustrated.

I was mad in the immediate situation of trying to locate information that was still live on the full version of the website but I was unable to get to the information because the mobile version of the site did not let me go there. I was mad as a web & mobile user experience designer to experience bad UX design first hand. I was frustrated that Starcut has probably charged the LA Times a lot of money to piss off loyal readers like me.

In the end, I had to use a desktop computer at Lauren's parent's house to search the LA Times' website for the article on the restaurant we were to go to. Itzik Hagadol is excellent, especially their 20 salads for $8.99.

But the lack of ability to exit the LA Times's mobile site from a mobile browser is not excellent. It would be excellent if Starcut would revisit the site and add a simple link at the top or the bottom of each mobile page, giving the reader/user the option to go to the full non-mobile version of the site from their mobile browser.

Ernest over at Darla Mack's S60 News & Reviews just posted a comparison review of the Nokia N97 vs. LG Viewty Smart: Side By Side Comparison. While Ernest didn't have both devices in his hands to do a review, he did use the Omio Comparison Widget to create a tech spec side by side comparison.

About halfway through reading the side by side tech spec showdown between the Nokia N97 and the LG Viewty Smart, I thought, "Wait a minute, this should be a comparison between the Nokia N86 and the LG Viewty Smart, not the N97!" I followed the link to Omio's site and made my own tech spec showdown between the two upcoming 8 megapixel camera phones to be released this summer from Nokia & LG, see below after the jump / below the fold.

Folks, the Omio Comparison Widget is hours of entertainment if you are a deep mobile tech geek who gets off on which specs are better. For me it was minutes of entertainment and I will be waiting to get the camera phones in my hands to take actual photos and see how the mobiles perform under a mobile blogging geo-tagging photowalk photography test.

Although, I will say from the descriptions in the tech specs in the below comparison of the LG Viewty Smart, Well, hello! The LG Viewty Smart will allow for manual focus as well as automatic? Hello! Now we are starting to talk photography!

The nice folks at Amazon.com have opened up the ability for bloggers to add their blog to the Kindle-world. If you are a regular blogger and would like to have the various Kindle reader folk out there to able to download and read your blog on their Kindle's, then go register at Kindle Publishing.

The nice folk at Six Apart alerted their Twitter followers about the new Kindle Publishing option for bloggers this afternoon:

Our friends at Amazon just launched Kindle Publishing for Blogs -- list your blog in the Kindle store: http://kindlepublishing.amazon.com

Why is this exciting to me? Given that I am a big fan of reading, mobile devices and blogs, this is a perfectly easy way to make sure that one's blog reaches what possibly may be a new audience or at the very least it makes current readers of one's blog be able to read the blog anywhere on a mobile device at their convenience.

I signed up for Kindle Publishing this afternoon and within 20 minutes I had this blog, Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen, and The Happy Tastebud signed up as Kindle subscriptions. And in another 20 minutes after that, I had the links to the Kindle subscriptions added to both blog's sidebar Subscribe area right next to the links to Atom and RSS feeds.

It was easy. Amazon did not require anything of me that I had not already had accomplished (description, keywords, screen shot, masthead, etc). I did not have to recode my blog nor did I have to make a device specific app, like many have done for the iPhone, but all I had to do after filling in basic information was to give an RSS or Atom feed to Amazon.

Amazon allows you to see a preview of your content as the Kindle will display it to the reader and it is not optimized for a photoblog or for the design control addicts amongst us, as the photos are very low resolution and in black & white and the typography is serif and fairly large. Also, there is no control over layout. But all of this adds up to an impetuous for me to make sure that my content is compelling regardless of the device or machine that it is viewed on.

Whether anyone actually subscribes to my blog via the Kindle or not really doesn't matter, what does matter is that Amazon is making a wide variety of publications available to their Kindle readership and Amazon is making it easy for bloggers and other content publishers to distribute their work, which is very exciting for the mobile and handheld device ecosystem.

I spent a good chunk of hours today tinkering with and refining the feeds on most of the blogs I author, administrate, and manage.

I had several goals for the altering of the RSS and Atom templates:

1) To make all public facing feeds be excerpted text with a link to continue reading. Why? I really don't have the time to hunt down the evil sploggers who repost rss and atom feeds as their own with lots of ads help augment their copylifting. Thus, if I set everything to excerpt with a link to the post then if the sploggers reblog the text the link goes to the original post.

2) Per the usual, if you are a regular subscriber and you don't want to deal with the excerpted feeds, send me an email (blackphoebe@gmail.com), introduce yourself, give me your blog or twitter URL so I can put you in my feed reader, and I will send you the link to the whole post private RSS feed.

3) Also, if you are a private whole feed subscriber and your feed reader is not rendering the images, let me know via email (blackphoebe@gmail.com) what feed reader you are using and I will try and solve the problem for you.

Once again, thanks for reading this blog and viewing the photos. Y'all rock.

[Photos coming to this space tomorrow when I am not so tired.]

Thurs 05.07.09 - Tonight was the first ever Mobile Geeks of LA at the Cat & Fiddle on Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood. Basically, James has taken the Mobile Geeks of London on tour.

It was good fun. While it was only 73 degrees F when I left Seal Beach, it was 88 F when I arrived in LA at 8pm!!!! Luckily, the courtyard at the Cat & Fiddle is not only beautiful, but has a burbling fountain of which all the mobile folk were gathered around. Somehow the sounds of water falling made it seem cooler.

What was cool and sweet was not only hanging out with friends (Lauren, James, Vikki, Jeb, Geoff & his wife Christine, Amir, Al, Francine, and Matt), but also meeting and talking with new people like the Las Vegas folk who came out for the event and others.

Big Thanks to Whatleydude, Matt Singley, and Jeb Brilliant for putting together a lovely evening.

My Nokia viNe from tonight: http://vine.nokia.com/#/mid=&lc=&vid=965979&cc=&page=home

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N79.

Mon 04.13.09 - I expect too much from Windows. I expect that the operating system should actually work and when it doesn't I try another way, then it throws errors.

Dear Windows, there is a reason I switched to Linux on my old Dell and to Mac OS X for my regular use computer...

Fri. 03.27.09 - Actually the Tuttle Club LA was not born yesterday, but a month ago today, though the super cheap bagels at the Library in Long Beach apparently were born yesterday.

When Steve and Lobelia Lawson were out in the LA area for the NAMM show, Steve told Geoff Hickman and myself that we should start a Tuttle Club for LA. Well, due to the busy-ness of January, February and March, I was out of the picture on any organization, but Geoff and Francine Kinzner did get on top of things and started LA/LB/OC's own social media club, modeled after London's Tuttle Club, four weeks ago on Feb. 27, 2009.

Today was the 3rd Tuttle LA, but it was my first due to my being in Arizona & Texas for the other two. I enjoyed myself. I knew 3 of the 6 folks (Jeb, Geoff, and Lauren) and got to make friends with the other 3 (Francine, Nguyen, and Mark). It was great to get out of the house and away from the computer to talk about computers, mobile, web, extra and et al, during a Friday mid-day in Long Beach.

Jeb Brilliant and I fleshed out an idea that I have had rolling around in my head for over a year now, Lauren Isaacson thought up a great domain name, and Jeb and I made a plan on how to execute the idea, all over tea and coffee at the Library on Broadway & Redondo in Long Beach. Yay!

The only downside was hanging out too long and returning to my car to find a ticket on it for parking longer than an hour. Next time - Tuttle LA #4 - I will ride my bike the 4 or so miles from Seal Beach to The Library.

Next Tuttle LA (really Tuttle LA/LB/OC):
Fri. April 10, 2009
10:30 am
@ The Library
3418 E Broadway
Long Beach, CA 90803

Photo by Ms. Jen at the family Easter lunch 2007.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I would like to celebrate the achievements of my Cousin Lynn and the other women of her generation in tech.

According to family lore, in the early 1960s, Cousin Lynn (aka Lynn Langtry), age 19, took a administrative position at a company in Los Angeles. The company needed people to help punch out cards that ran the programs on the computer and Lynn volunteered, punching cards turned into learning how to program the computer.

From this fortuitous beginning as a programmer, in 1970, Lynn took a position with Computer Sciences Corporation, contracting for the US government, programming computers in such exotic locations as Hawaii, Alaska and Iran before the fall of the Shah.

As a child, I knew that my mom's best cousin was an adventurer and lived a secret classified life. As a teenager, when Lynn returned to California, I knew her as my mom's super cool cousin Lynn who had a job that no other woman I know had. Lynn worked for NASA! But it wasn't until I started to get involved in the web in 1994-96, that I really got to talk to Lynn about programming, tech, and computers.

One of my favorite conversations with Lynn about programming was about 2000, she was grousing about how tediuos XML seemed, in a class she was taking. She, the woman with nearly 40 years of programming experience, asked my opinion on XML. We both agreed that it was a good data structure, but felt that all the hype of the time was just hype.

Lynn has been a big supporter of my choosing a career in tech and whenever we get together at Easter or Thanksgiving we talk about what is up in the web world, even though she has been retired to a serious "career" in golf and the like for the last 5 or so years.

Given how hard it has been to take up web development and programming as a woman in the 1990s and 2000s, I greatly admire Lynn and her whole generation of women (& men) who pioneered the computer programming field, who worked hours on end in windowless basements in government buildings in Alaska, who worked programming in Tehran, who had opportunities to create a new field.

Thanks, Ada. Thanks, Lynn. Thanks to all the thousands of other women who are programmers and have been an encouragement to many women.

---

Update: Will PixelPipe push the photo to my server or will it live on their server just like Flickr does? If PP pushes to my server, I can use it for moblogging when I have a phone without Lifeblog (new Nokias), but if they just send the link to the photo that lives on their server, then why use it over Flickr for the same purpose?

Further update via my twitter: "Huh. PixelPipe is not any different for moblogging than Flickr or others. Photos on their server, not mine. Fail. #ownyourownphotos"

Even more: If Nokia is going to stop putting Lifeblog on their new phones after the Nokia N82, I wish they would open source Lifeblog so developers can iterate and continue to make direct phone to Movable Type moble blogging with no intermediary service or server.

Here you go, the first day of Ms. Jen's panel transcripts:

Sat March 14, 2006 - SXSW Interactive
Austin, TX

11:30am - The Creative Path
Jim Coudal - Coudal Partners
Brendan Dawes - Magnetic North
Gary Hustwit - Filmmaker "Helvetica", "Objectified"

Objectified premier is at the Paramount at 5pm.

Jim Couldal:
Creative Path: show don't tell.
Speaking on Joseph Conrad, literary theory, "we are complicit in our own corruption" By the time you have finished the book or movie, the narrative leads you through your own corruption much more powerfully than if Conrad was to write an essay.

Montessori - Teaching kids to learn.
Layer Tennis - Live on Friday afternoons, two artists swap a file back and forth in real time. Continue to add to the file on top each other's work. Ultimate end is to probably to reduce productivity on Friday afternoon. Restraint and freedom, creativity comes out of the balance between the two. Keep in mind that the act and result of creation is a conversation, not a lecture.

Gary Hustwit - Seventy-five minutes and thrity-six seconds.
I make documentary films, which are linear fixed forms of media. There is no way for the viewer of the film to change the plot line, characters, destination, or duration of the film, unless they get up and leave.
How do you make a fixed documentary film to be interactive?
1. use ellipsis... Intentionally leave out information, that the viewer of the film needs to put in themselves, a moment of discovery is more compelling than if someone tells you what the story is.
What is not there, what is left out. It leave the piece open to interpretation.
Delayed gratification.
2. Make it a game. bring in puzzles.
Dialogue going on between the viewer and the film.
Timing, juxtaposition.
"If all else fails, put a dog in the film." - Gary Hustwit

Brendan Dawes -
Made a flash video editor in 1998 - Pyscho Studio - See if folks could make their own version of the pyscho shower scene.
The danger is that when you give folks things to play with, you get some weird shit. Then you realize that people are weird.
Human beings versus machines. Computer would plot an efficient line from a to be. Critical Mass by Philip Ball is where he had folks walk across a park, before they put in the paths, to see how humans used the park.
Good design is about taking things away. Gives example of traffic calming in Brighton, by having the sidewalk & street be the same space with no directions & signs -> it makes drivers slow down to 10mph and be much more aware.
Makes sketches, as sketchbooks don't run out of batteries.
doodlebuzz.com - We get complacent with interface, why can't we create new interface.
"People think these days that if you can't use an interface in 2 seconds that it is rubbish. That is rubbish." - Brendan advocates making new UIs and making the user work for it.
You can start with Britney Spears and end up with the Pope. Any interface that allows you to do that is good.
"If you don't go out in the woods, nothing will never happen & your life will never begin..." Clarissa Pinkola Estes

If you are like me, you have found your web browsing managed by a feed reader that alerts you when web sites, blogs, and other subscription based web spaces make an update. But not every web site out there in the big wide world of the web has a subscription or a feed available... Shock! Horror! How 1999!

So, I have a few bookmarked that I like to visit but for various reasons they aren't on my feed reader or don't have a feed be it atom or rss or rdf or feedburner.

My favorite non-feed web site that I check every day is the Interactive Global Composite Weather Satellite Images page from NASA. This page allows me to see the most recent set of satellite images from the Pacific and see what weather is coming California's way. It also allows me to see the Pacific Ocean and the nations on its rim as a whole rather than a set of disjointed far away places. Truly fun and lovely.

Best of all, you can animate up to the last 30 satellite images to see how the storms are tracking across the Pacific. The only sad thing is that due to various weather satellite agreements, most of Europe, Asia, and Africa are blacked out. Grrr... Give me the whole globe!

What websites do you go to every day that are not in your feed reader, so you either have them bookmarked or actually type out the URL old school style?

10 years ago today, Alex West, Ben Yau, and I got together at my brother's house in Huntington Beach with several computers and a bunch of scary snacks that Ben brought and we coded & launched Barflies.net to build on the Barflies mailing list that I had been running for the previous year and the SocialD message board that Alex had been running for the 4 years previous.

In the normal way of things, I should have thrown a big party tonight to celebrate 10 BIG YEARS on the internet. I have spent the last two months trying to find where all the early contributors of the Barflies.net have gotten themselves off to (Hey Amber & Erik Jansen, where are you? Email me!), so that Julie Wanda and I could throw a good thank you party and Hey, We are Still Going Strong party.

In typical, Wanda and Jen fashion, we are running fashionably late. Expect a party announcement soon.

Happy 10th Anniversary to Barflies.net!

I have social networking fatigue and I have had it for years.

I jumped on my first alt.music board/list in 1994 and have been full bore ahead on mailing lists, alt.music, bulletin boards, message boards, groups, friendster, myspace, flickr, twitter, facebook, jaiku, ad finitum, ad nauseum ever since. Fifteen years later, I alternately love the online spaces that allow me to really connect and be fed by others, and I am overwhelmed by the ones that sap my attention and energy.

I hate chat/IM/AIM and text/sms is not far behind in my book, as they both demand that one reply immediately and in a shallow fashion. I really do prefer asynchronous communication in which I can take the time to reply in depth if necessary to instant now chat. I prefer to be able to check in on [insert name of service] when I have the time and post / reply at my leisure. It is for this same reason that I only pick up about half of the phone calls I receive. As a bouncy adult who is easily distracted, I have learned that I need to think before I respond.

As a creative who has had her own consultancy / freelance web design & development business since August of 2000, I have learned that if I want to be a good little citizen and pay my bills on time I really need to focus on the task(s) at hand when I am working.

While continuous partial attention may be a great catch phrase for the current cultural zeitgeist, if I practice it at any length it will toss me out of my house and I will be living in my car. My car, while wonderful, does not have a comfy bed & a hot shower. Thus, I need to focus and concentrate on work and the online leisure activities that feed my life and soul - like blogging, researching, creating, and communicating in a constructive manner.

Ok, so that is my explanation for preferring email & phone calls and avoiding chat & texting. Now let's talk about social networks....

I have read up and checked out the Google AppEngine in a cursory fashion a couple of times in the last few months, even to the point of signing up for an invite before it was publicly open and downloading the SDK. But life and work and play were too busy, so I didn't have time to really delve into GAE with any intent and real application.

Until today. Last Friday night, a much admired friend passed away in a car accident and on Sunday I was asked if I would develop a memorial web application for friends, family, and colleagues to post photos and stories up. I said yes and ran through my head quickly all the possible ways we could do it. Given the resources at hand it seemed that PHP, be it hand rolled or Cake PHP would be the only approach to take given the time & server constraints. Yikes.

I really struggle with PHP, I dislike all the verbage, punctuation, and braces. When I am able to make a whole app work in it, I am vastly relieved. But most of the time the butt kicking that PHP delivers is greater than my feelings of accomplishment.

One of the things that I do adore about Python and Ruby is that they both are lean and make sense. There is not butt kicking, only happy writing, testing and deploying. Except most host servers don't like one to run a good Python or Ruby framework such as Django or Ruby on Rails. So if a client or friend already has a server and a domain and wants to move forward fast, much of the time Django and Ruby on Rails gets ruled out. Thus, the evils of PHP reassert themselves.

After sending most of yesterday and this morning debating of how I should plan and construct the memorial site, a meteor of insight flashed through my head... Google App Engine.

GAE is free (for now), uses Python and Django (happy days!!!!), it has great tutorials on top of all the Google resources. No reinventing the wheels with PHP and/or Cake PHP.

So this afternoon I started experimenting with GAE and discovered very quickly that between its webapp extension and the images/Picasa API that I would be able to develop the whole memorial application with very little fuss and stress.

Here is a quote from an email that I sent to the folks organizing the memorial:

Google AppEngine is a dreamy love bug of a dev environment, I may have to marry it. PHP is formally now dead to me. Normally 6 hours into a dev project I am not happy but really really really really really frustrated and writing snarky twitters about how much I *hate* PHP. But no... Love love love love the Google.

Google, thank you for making my life easier today when I would rather be crying than developing.

I know it is much cooler to be wearing a bluetooth one ear-ed headset these days than a two ear-ed wired headset, but I am currently a HUGE fan of the Nokia hs-43 wired headset and don't even know where my fancy pants expensive bh-602 bluetooth headset is (somewhere in the bowels of my purse).

Since July 1st, those of us who live and drive in California are to have hands-free wireless devices whilst driving. You can talk on your mobile while driving, but you have to have both hands on the wheel and your headset on, not that most SUV drivers obeying the law. We won't talk about the lady with her phone glued to her ear in the GMC Yukon XL who nearly ran me off the road today, no, not at all, we won't talk about her nor bailouts for auto companies that build such behemoths.

No, what we will talk about is cute, small, efficient, good design by forward thinking companies.... Nokia, thanks for two good products that make my life easier.

I like the way that the Nokia BH-602 bluetooth headset will shape to the back of my ear, but I don't like how I can't hear in stereo and when I am walking or out in the big wide public my friend on the other end of the call asks if I am in a wind tunnel. I also have lots of music loaded on the microSD chip both in my N95 and in the Nokia viNe loaner N82 mobiles and it is very hard to listen to music in a one ear-ed bluetooth headset. Also due to having a small ear, the bluetooth headset even when properly shaped to my ear, flops around making it hard to hear.

My N95's wired stereo headset died a bad wire failure death over nearly a year ago, so I had been using the wired headsets from my N80 and N800 to listen to music while exercising and walking the dogs. When the black N82 arrived on my doorstep in early September, I pulled out the included in the box wired headset, the HS-43, with glee to see what it would do.

Over the last couple of months, I have fallen in love with the wired headset that came in the N82's box, to the point that I don't use my bluetooth headset unless I left the wired one at home.

Why do I love the HS-43 wired headset so much? Let me list you the reasons:

1) Wires. Good old fashioned copper covered in plastic & cloth makes for a better sonic / audio experience.

2) Stereo. Hey, novelty! I can hear sound, be it music or spoken voice, in both ears!

3) No need to remember charge the wired headset.

4) Friends and family can hear me speak during a phone call much clearer with the wired headset, even when I am walking along the beach in a stiff breeze. Hello, Seal Way, the killer of all phone calls, you don't kill my calls now.

5) Oooh, baby baby... the best feature of the HS-43 wired stereo headset is the one that seems most bizarre when you first pull it out. It does not look or act like your usual wired headset, as the back/top is not a headband but a 1/4 inch wide black fabric that is about 6 inches long that have two lanyard style clamp/unclamp at each end. Thus, when the danged thing gets all tangled up into a wad of wired hell, you just pull the two clamps apart and YAY the tangles are gone. If you by accident attempt to pull it out of your purse too fast or out from under the dog and you think, "Oh Crap! I have just broke the headset!", oh no you have not, the clamps release and you can pull it out nicely and reclamp it.

Oh, lovely HS-43 Wired Stereo Headset, I <3 you.

Bluetooth, who?

Now that video is all the rage, Flash seems to have been sidelined to banner ads, games, and corporate websites.

I miss the days of silly, homemade, whimsical* Flash animations with very little purpose. While I am not a big fan of all Flash websites in which most of the time I immediately exit, I do like fun Flash.

Where have all the silly Flash animations gone? Are art students and high school students too broke to buy the education version Flash from Adobe and don't have a crack code? Are they too deep into WOW/Wii/XBox/etc and celebrating 4:20 to create their own Flash silliness? Are they too used to the Facebook & MySpace communities to put up their own websites?

Do you have a favorite fun Flash that has been created in the last 2 years?

************

* Let's not even talk about silly, off the wall animated gifs...

Sun 11.23.08 - File this screenshot, taken today at 5:38pm, under "Fun with Dashboard" or "How Mac OS X Keeps Me Amused in Little Ways".

I would also like to point out how SoCal is *supposed* to get some real weather on Tuesday in the form of rain. Yay!

Tomorrow I will be voting in person at my local polling station. I did not vote by mail or via early voting in any one of the places that one could vote early in my county.

Early this morning on twitter, Dan Benjamin asked:

"For those of you who are voting but haven't yet (neither early or absentee) I ask you: why? Is it the in-person/on-the-day thing?"

A bit later this morning I replied:

"@danbenjamin it is for me the vote in person at the poll experience."

And just a couple of hours ago, I tweeted to the world:

"Tomorrow is going to be a circus, so I am going to line up to vote at the local poll at 4pm w/ camera & notepad in hand, then go to Walt's."

I spend all day and most evenings in my apartment on my computer both for a living and for the pure, shear joy of my love for the internet. I, the borderline introvert/extrovert who needs both a couple hours every day to myself & time with folks, have had quite enough of being all by my lonesome and doing things "virtually".

Early on in my freelance web design / development career, I discovered that the best way to keep from going completely nuts with feelings of isolation was to spend my mornings, when I had social energy built up, doing errands and then go out to lunch, and then to spend my afternoons and evenings working*.

To counter all this on the computer time, I have made sure that I talk to friends on the phone (not IM) or get together with them in person frequently, as well as attend all manner of fun community events - from the mundane (botany) to the cool (concerts) to the bizarre (house movings & demolitions) to professional events (SXSW and other conferences**) - in person and experience them with all of my senses and all of my person.

The very idea of even more time online or diverting communal activities in real life so that I have more time to "work" or be with my family is rather bizarre and revolting to me. Humans, be we introverts or extroverts, are social creatures. Getting out and about, even if only on a occasion is good. Different folk have differing needs for social activity, but I do think it is important that we gather together as a community more than once every four years or so.

Much as been lamented about the decline of civil involvement and civility, much has also been lamented about the decline of community involvement and the like. I get it if you don't want to go to church/mosque/temple/whatever & teach Friday/Saturday/Sunday school on top of attending every other event on the docket. Neither do I. Or if after a long day of work or school, plus commitments to your family & friends, that you don't have a lot of time to volunteer or attend civil / community forums every week. But I think it is important to get out and about and involved in the greater community, however you define it, at least a couple of times a month.

There is a good reason that we humans have, regardless of culture or religion, a wide range and a rich tradition of gathering together for festivals, holidays, elections, fairs, games, and sports. In these events, we bond in community and build culture.

I am not going to miss the community and spectacle that will be the election tomorrow. I want to go to my new polling place in Seal Beach, The Little Church (whereas our previous elections have been held in a living room on 15th Street). I want to stand in line. I want to participate in my community. I want to have a chat with the folks I know from our mutual dog walking. I want to be inconvenienced. I want to experience this once in a lifetime election viscerally, not virtually.

Notes:
* If you have clients who have a strict 8am - 5pm schedule, it drives them nuts that I don't get to my "desk" until 1pm at the earliest (one savvy client copped on to me and started calling me before he went to bed at 11pm to discuss what was needed before 8am the next morning).

Part Two of my improve Nokia's Communication Idea Set.

One of the frustrations in participating in projects / campaigns with WOM World can be the difficulty in communication and getting timely information. This is not news to the folks at WOM World (we had a big conversation last week about this) nor to other folks who work on campaigns/projects with them. Now let me break this down into the problem, the extenuating circumstances, and the proposed solution:

The Problem:
I love participating in projects / campaigns / whatever you want to call it with WOM World & Nokia but I find myself frustrated that much of the information that is needed to complete my side of the project right either comes late or quite a bit into the campaign. Take the example of the lack of Nokia viNe widget for the last month and a half of that campaign and then finding out about a similar widget by some other team at Nokia via another blog.

The Circumstances:
(please note that the following are not unique to WOM World or Nokia, but happen all over the world in a variety of businesses)
1) Nokia is working with at least 3 external agencies / vendors on any one campaign: Interactive ad agency, WOM World/1000 heads for the outward facing blogger interface & social media marketing, a possible pr agency, etc. This is on top of the one or two or more internal Nokia teams that may be involved in the project (the developers who are making the service, the marketing team, etc). This is a lot of cats to herd. And it is a lot of folks to be informing each other of what each member of their teams is up to, as well as what other teams at Nokia may be up to that might help the campaign/project at hand, all while on a tight deadline.

2) Almost every company on the planet has teams that are understaffed and overworked. It is a reality of the business system. 'Nuff said.

3) WOM World's primary mission is to follow social media and bloggers and then let the world know about what those folks have said. WOM World does not create its own content. At the same time as WOM World is blogging about what we are blogging about, they are also sending and receiving mobile devices all over for trials, and participating in / conducting Nokia campaigns with bloggers and social media folk, as well as interacting with Nokia and other agencies to make sure that WOM World's portion is working. See #1 & #2 above and you get the point.

4) Ok, I could now talk about how different cultures view the dissemination of information or lack thereof, company cultures, and transparency v. Finnish mind reading tricks, but I won't muddle up the subject at hand with more details or conjecture.

The Proposed Solution:
Provide a back channel for each of the projects / campaigns as a way of getting information out there and keeping folks informed, and as a way to build community.

What do I mean by a back channel? Before Nokia Open Lab in Sept. most of the participants had very little information other than initial email invite, as the website for the event was not up yet, so Roland Tanglao set up a wiki to help us communicate and share more info that folks may have gleaned.

By having this wiki, the Open Lab participants were able to share our flight times to meet up at the airport, information about the event, information about Helsinki, and most importantly - after the event - links to our blog posts, photos, tweets, etc that we created about the event.

Instead of talking less in public spaces about the Open Lab because we had our own private place to talk to each other, we talked more in public because we had more information and we felt more empowered.

So, I propose that for each campaign / project that Nokia and WOM World work on (either together or separately) with bloggers and social media folk, that a wiki or Friend Feed or an old school link portal or some other way for us to aggregate all the information we need to share with each other, as well as a listing of all the posts / tweets / etc that we have written about the campaign / project.

Arguments Against:
Since I floated this idea by WOM World's Donna and Siobhan last week, I already have the objections to my idea. Of which the biggest objection is that if a wiki is set up, then the fear would be that the participants would just chat to each other on the wiki / forum / back channel and would not post about the project.

Counter Argument:
In the instance of the Nokia Open Lab 2008, having the wiki did not stop us from blogging and tweeting about it. In fact, we posted more and responded to each other in our blogs because we were sharing information and we had built a community.

WOM World may have posted a few links to our writings during and after the event, but by having a back channel we were able to self-aggregate all of our social media and blog links about the Open Lab and it can be viewed by the public which only increases the Long Tail effect for the event.

When we were talking last week Siobhan suggested that FriendFeed would work within the constraints of WOM World's primary mission, as it could aggregate all the posts for all of the participants of any given project. But, unless FriendFeed has good filters for all of the incoming feeds, we would also see all of the other posts by the same folks.

A wiki or like, either on the WOM World site or external wiki like PBwiki, would also allow us to share links and information that would be helpful during the project, like my finding the Maps + Photography widget last week, it would allow not just the participants but the whole world see a complete or almost complete list of the posts on the project both during and after in one place, as well as build community.

The Conclusion:
Please help those of us without degrees in Finnish Mind Reading out. I would love to know who the other participants in the Nokia viNe project are, I know a few, but it would be great to follow all and not just thier viNe posts but also their blogs and other social media, as well as to share information that will allow all of us to better participate in the project.

Information + Links + Community = a Big Win for Nokia in the long run.

Batteries for Ricky is not a new band playing opening slot the Glasshouse next Thursday, nor is it a new charity telethon, unless Ricky does want us to raise batteries for whatever his cause may be.

Early in September when I posted my Nokia (life)viNe review, Ricky asked about the battery usage of the Nokia viNe mobile app (not yet released, in closed beta as of Oct. 2008). He asked if I would use the Nokia Energy Profiler app to monitor the battery usage and power draw-down of the the Nokia viNe mobile app vs. the native NSeries geo-tracking and photography.

As a dutiful foot solider in the mildly-scientific mobile experiments, I loaded the Energy Profiler on the trial Nokia N82 and ran it as I tested the native GPS/geo-tracking while I took photos and then later started recording with Nokia viNe while taking photos.

The results are....

My own anecdotal experience is that the GPS plus photography = hot camera phone and low battery life, while the Nokia viNe mobile app does not make the N82 go hot and the battery lasts at least 4-6+ hours or more of normal to super usage.

As you can see from the photos above***, using the GPS/geo-tracking with the camera* causes spikes of battery drain over 2 watts while I took the photos or used other mobile apps (top two screenshots of the Energy Profiler), but later in the session using just the Nokia viNe mobile app to track my geo-path and take photos at the same time the battery usage consistently stayed under 2 watts with occasional spikes even under heavy draw (bottom two screenshots).

Nokia viNe plus taking photos* wins for less battery usage.

Update: Mon 10.13.08 - Ricky responds over at this post at the Symbian-Guru, "Ms. Jen Proves NokiaviNe Might Be OK". The comments are the interesting bit, as differing view points get fleshed out.

***
Notes:
* ...as well as using email, checking the web, and other usual bits to relieve boredom while driving to a client meeting in LA**.
** No judging about my mobile use while stuck in LA traffic, until a 35 mile drive takes you over 1.5 hours.
*** Per usual, if you are looking at these photos while on Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen, you will see the nice Lightbox slide show with captions, if you are looking at it on Darla Mack's site, then you will just see the photos without the nice Ajaxy goodness.

Tidbit #1: Is it just me or is anyone else annoyed at the recent trend that companies who want to be taken seriously online provide NO contact information and no real information about them on their websites?

Hello, Corporations & Startups, I have one phrase for you: Conjunction Junction.

Yes, tell me - Who, What, Where, and Why.

If you are a legit company, then giving your mailing address and your phone number builds trust. Get a PO Box if you don't want us to know you are running your company out of your apartment building.

When I go to an about page with no real information, other than PR bullshit, about the company and a whole slew of white dudes trying to look 'casual' - guess what?

YOU LOOK LAME. Be real. Not casual business fake. Tell me not just who you are, but why, where and when, maybe even how.

Where are you based out of? Why are you doing your thing? What kind of company and people are you? When did you start? etc. etc. etc.

Give me context.

Airwide Solutions = Fail.
The Real Republican Majority => Who are you? Why should I trust you any more than the shysters in government in the name of Republicans now? This website asks me to donate to a party I SO DON'T TRUST and the website gives me no reason to do so.

Etc. Etc. Etc. Etc.

Tidbit #2 - We were supposed to have rain today. It didn't rain in Seal Beach or Culver City, the two places I was today. Even though the rain did not come, we had delicious moist mid-60s F temps all day. Yeah!

After a year or more of drought, some rain very early in the season would be lovely.

Tidbit #3 - One of the better parts about life is the eccentricities of one's loved ones over time.

Yep, my parents are weirder than yours.

Both of my parents are 65 this year and are still really surprising and cool. My dad can convince any number of 20-somethings to invite him to a party and give him free beer. Now there is a talent.

My mom has sussed out every Syrian owned liquor-deli in coastal Orange County and has made friends enough with the owners that she knows the particulars of their religion (Marionite, Syrian Orthodox, and Druze) and where they go to worship. Apparently one recently immigrated Syrian uses his Bible as a pillow to help him soak it in better (cashier at the liquor store just SW of the Carl's Jr on the SW corner of Brookhurst & Hamilton in Huntington Beach).

Tidbit #4 - Still on a high from my trip to Helsinki three weeks ago. I <3 Helsinki.

Tidbit #5 - Recently the Pixies have become very tiresome and I want to delete all three albums off my iTunes. Has this happened to anyone else?

The video(s) from the Nokia Open Lab 2008 are now up on the Ovi channel.

For all the attendees who were baffled as to why we were invited and what the purpose of the Lab was, in the part 2 of Jari Pasanen's introduction to the Nokia Open Lab event, he states what, as VP of Strategy, he was hoping to get out of the event:

"How we can actually improve the communication dialogue between guys like your self, because you also are not only leaders but also censors. You have a lot of understanding where this business is going. Nokia is now moving fast into the internet business. We are not saying we are an internet company. We still have our legacy, we are a mobile phone company, even though we call some of our products 'multimedia computers'...."

As I have watched some of the video from the event that is up on the Nokia Open Lab Ovi Channel, it has helped me to more clearly remember was was said, but... and this is a big but, I am even more forcefully struck then I was at the time by the lack of women present. The four of us who were invited did talk about the lack of women during the event and were told when we asked that more women were invited but couldn't make it.

In the video(s) of the Lab, it appears that Nokia's interest in brainstorming and/ or the experts about mobile and the interwebs' is only a guy thing. Yes, Anne, Micki, and I are featured in the videos (sorry, I haven't seen Rebecca yet in the vidstream), but the greater majority of the event invitees are men (4 women, over 35 men).

Where was Darla? Where was Cat? Where was Rita? There are a lot of women in mobile and internet who have expertise that should be shared with Nokia at an event like Open Lab.

If we are to take Jari's introduction seriously and statement that the Open Lab was a way for internet folk to share their expertise with Nokia, then there were many women with expertise in social media, blogging, media, creation, and the internet who could have been invited, such as: Danah Boyd. Lynne D. Johnson. Sharanya Manivannan. Jen Beckman. Anne Galloway. Megan McMillan. Molly Wright Steenson.

Just sayin'. For next time.

Also, next time, 2 or 3 days of workshopping / discussions / brainstorming would be better than 1.5 days. We were just getting comfortable to really get down to the issues when it was time to go home.

Go watch the videos on the Nokia Open Lab Ovi Channel, there is some good stuff there. And some funny stuff as well. ;o)

All Photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82.

The synopsis of the very first ever Nokia Open Lab 2008 is below the "fold" (aka click on the continue reading bit)...

When I walked up to the gate today for my plane between LAX and JFK, I saw several green kiosks that said "GoGo Broadband" with folks dressed in green next to the the kiosks explaining to other passengers what in-flight wifi was.

I overheard one of the green suited folks telling a passenger that it was $12.95 for wifi for the whole flight. The cheap in me said, I have enough to do (client & blogging related) that I don't need to spend $12.95 to Tweet for 5 hours.

My seatmate found out that GoGo's credit card processing is down right now, so they were giving free promos for the day. My cheap won out AND I get to blog while flying.

Also, their brochure read as if only a few websites like the Wall Street Journal and a few others were enabled, but so far I have been able to get on any site I want. Another interesting tidbit, is that the wifi does not work with Firefox for Mac, only Safari.

The good news is that it is fairly speedy, speed tested at 1.1 mbps. Thanks GoGo and American Airlines, y'all rock.

Sun 09.07.08 - Julia Elman at DjangoCon 2008.

Sun 09.07.08 - Day 2 at DjangoCon. Live blogging below the fold. :o)

Sat 09.06.08 - Flickr's Cal Henderson gave the best talk of the day at DjangoCon 2008. Cal's slides were full of win, esp. this one of Steve Marshall.

The transcript of Cal's keynote is in the More / Continue Reading section.

* Lines for the Men's Room and no lines for the Ladies. This makes the ladies happy that the usual tables are turned.

* The loos' seats at Building 40 of the Googleplex are heated! I have never met a warmed toilet seat before. The lap of luxury, indeed.

* Speaking of ladies, out of 200 Con attendees there are over 20 of us here. Better ratios than the RailsEdge 2007 in Chicago or the Rich Web Experience that I dropped into last Sept in San Jose.

Go Django Go! Now go out and get more ladies involved in web dev!

* Speaking of male heavy tech conferences, the upside is that there is plenty of eye candy if you prefer the gents. Slightly geeky eye candy, but delightful nonetheless.

* Translating Deep Geek: In Java all the dense, insider only names for things seem to be about African large mammals and their lifeways. In Rails, they are just dense and opaque acronyms and some names reflecting birds and their lifeways. In Django the dense, insider naming conventions are jazz greats or musical references (Django, Satchmo, Banjo, etc). The question remains will Django branch naming out to the lifeways of jazz musicians (Touring, Heroin, Speakeasy, etc.)?

* The amusing part of the Googleplex is the large number of signs with RULES (emphasis on the EMPHATIC nature of the signs for information that normally should be common sense) printed on 8.5x11" white paper that are everywhere. Some examples:
"PLEASE No table tennis during tech talks" (The ping pong table has 3 signs on it and 1 next to it on a file cabinet)
"No Wire" (This sign is in blue with a white circle and line through it and it is next to a wireless router. Abstractly bizarre.)

Sat 09.06.08 - I am at the DjangoCon at the Googleplex in Mountain View, Calif. Per usual, I will be live blogging the event, please click on the "Continue Reading" link to get my transcript/notes.

I am now off to drive up to the San Francisco Bay Area to go to the DjangoCon 2008 that will be hosted at the Googleplex in Mountain View tomorrow & Sunday.

I am excited to be attending DjangoCon, Saturday night's Django 1.0 Release Party, and to visit the Googleplex for the first time. I had planned on staying up in San Francisco on Sunday night to have dinner with friends and generally wind down the weekend, but...

This morning I got a lovely email invitation asking if I wanted to attend the Nokia Open Lab* this upcoming week in Helsinki. Of course I said, "Yes, yes, yes!"

From the invite:

"The latest [Nokia Workshop] being a new annual workshop that hopes to involve an eclectic mix of the online community in a discussion of what the future holds for everything from mobile technology to media creation."

It will be a great whirlwind in the course of 8 days, all in the name of mobile and web creation! w00t!

* Big Thanks to Charlie for helping me out with the real name of the Nokia Open Lab event. As usual, Super Charlie to the Rescue.

1) No more voicemail.

2) SpinVox converts all my voicemail messages into text form or as an email.

3) Did I mention no more listening to voicemail?

I won't continue to tell you how excited I am that I have not had to listen to voicemail the last month... But I am excited and going to tell you about it. SpinVox, I love you.

Anyone who knows me spent a few years in the mid-2000s remembers being very frustrated with me, as I had my voicemail turned off completely. Yes, I flummoxed some poor defenseless AT&T Wireless employee by calling to request that my voicemail be completely turned off. It took about 15 minutes for me to convince him I was serious and that I wanted it completely deactivated. Turned off.

I happily lived from 2003 to 2006 with no voicemail on my mobile phone. I did have an answering machine at home that I would listen to when I was ready, which was usually at the end of the night & I would return calls the next day. And folks could text me on my mobile or send an email which I check multiple times a day from my computer & mobile. I have had an email enabled mobile since 2003.

Why did I do this? I really love asynchronous technologies and methods of communication. By asynchronous, I mean that the technology or communication that does not require instant response but allows the person receiving to read, process, and to return the communication when ready. Many have written about the stresses of always being on and plugged in, my way of dealing with the expectation that some folks have that one will always be available NOW is to set boundaries as to when I am available.

No, I will not pick up a phone call after 10pm or before 10am, unless it was prearranged. No, I don't pick up the phone when I am in a store or in a meeting or when having dinner. Etc.

Thus voicemails pile up. Some of them are important communiques that one needs the info fairly immediately, some are just "Hi! Was thinking about you!", some are long funny ramblings, and some are random who the heck are you. By the time one has dialed up the voicemail, listened to the messages, wrote down the important bits, deleted the rest, and hung up, I am frustrated by the inefficiency of the whole process.

Thus the genius of SpinVox. Our new best friends at SpinVox have a nice set of computers that record the voicemail from the caller when you can't answer your calls, the nice computers then use voice recognition software to translate the voicemail to a text and/or email, and within 1-4 minutes a nice text arrives at one's phone and a nice email comes down the pike as well.

One never has to listen to one's voicemail ever again. Thank the deities of voice recognition software!

Example a client called me the other day, when I was trying to talk to the Auto folks at the Toyota service area and I could not pick up. Before I finished my conversation with the Toyota service rep, I already had a set of texts waiting for me with my client's message. So, efficient. So nice.

Receiving texts and/or emails with the voicemails transcribed is particularly when folks are giving details that you would otherwise need to write down, like directions or phone numbers, as they arrive already written down.

I have chosen to receive both text to my mobile and emails to my gmail, I have been saving every voicemail to email for later reference. Why? Well, some of them are darned funny as the voice recognition does not get every detail right and does its best to compensate, its translations can be darned funny.

SpinVox does save all the actual voicemails for you if you want to listen to them or if it did not get all the important bits. The parts that the software can't recognize and transcribe is rendered as ________ and SpinVox gives you a reference number for that message. A reference number? Yep, so rather than listening to every danged voicemail to get to the one you want, when you call in the SpinVox system will ask which message you want to listen to. Fabulous!

SpinVox also allows you to verbally blog to your website, as well as send messages and other services, but I am still so excited about SpinVox converting voicemails into text form that I have yet to explore their other services.

My only complaint about SpinVox is that it took me months to get signed up as when one goes to their website it appears from the front page that the service is only for the UK and folks who have UK based mobile carriers. I was under this impression until May of this year when James Whatley, SpinVox's evangelist, corrected my error and let me know it was also for the US and many other countries. It is not until one clicks on the "SpinVox for You" menu item that one sees that one can choose a country other than the UK. The country options should be on the front page so that SpinVox does not lose business.

SpinVox, thanks for the great product and user experience. Y'all rock.

I am currently sitting in the lounge of the local Toyota dealer/service place waiting for my car to be done. And I have my earplugs in, the earplugs that are rated for 34 decibel sound reduction. And it is still loud enough to hear everything clearly.

Agh!

Either my earplugs are failing or my local Toyota dealership is one loud place, piped in muzak, big widescreen tv in the lounge area at full blast, and people trying to talk over all of this. How does anyone get any work done here? How do they cut deals for cars in this noise?

I am one of those folks who can't work or read or code unless it is quiet. I can't listen to music, even low instrumental music, if I want to read and comprehend what I am reading or if I want to code and not make mistakes. If I try to write while a bunch of stuff is going on around me, I will end up transcribing whatever the distraction is, which makes me a great live blogger at conferences but makes it hard to write while there are distractions.

In my immediate family we have a joke about Hanens and TV that basically goes along the line of if you want the Hanen in question to listen to you and look at you and comprehend what was said, do NOT turn the TV on or walk anywhere near a TV.

Yes, people, I come from a long line of amusing, creative, very bright, but easily distractable people. My Dad calls it being ADD, I call it that we are curious and are interested in a wide variety of inputs.

I am constantly astounded that folks can get much done or remember what is said in the noise that pervades so much of modern life. I make a big effort to have a quiet and peaceful house, I don't own a TV or a stereo or radio. Thus, going out in to the big wide world can at times be a aural and visual assault.

Conflicting TVs & piped in music (both at once) are now common while at the supermarket, gas station, car service lounges, outdoor malls, etc.

Does this bug anyone else?

Sorry folks, I have a lot to blog about, but due to a rocky last few days I am just plain tuckered out, so I am about to close Chick-a-Poo the Wonder computer and go read a real live book-type-object and then go to bed.

As a note to me, here is what I do need to blog about before Wednesday (this week, hold me to it):

1) Jabba the Hut, or how I am really over the public fascination with 'girl on girl action'. Bah! What bullshit, esp. when you are the one being devoured by a drunk chick whose friends are holding you in place. Yes, a drunk married woman with kids molested me last night in the name of titillating men, who laughed but no one helped me out. If a guy did this, it would have been molestation, but because it was a girl, everyone laughed. Bah!

2) Write about how amazing and wonderful SpinVox is. SpinVox has set me free from voicemail. Thank God.

3) Write about the Opera Web Standards Curricula. Write about how funny it is that your two articles are not about mobile, but on Tables and Forms. Ha. ha. ha... eek!

4) Encourage folks to vote for my Mobile Creativity panel for SXSW 2009. Go vote.

5) Hubris.

Things that happened this weekend not to write about:

a) Inviting a friend and his wife to a show at Alex's and then they show up with 3-5 knuckleheads in tow who proceed to embarrass me with their trailer of a trailer of a trailer from the depths of Murrieta behavior and throwing gang signs the whole evening. Ugh. Ugh. Did I mention Ugh?

b) The amusing encounter yesterday whilst at a nice restaurant in deep south LA county suburbia with a movie / tv star attempting to be incognito all the while he was staring at me, as if he wanted me to notice him and be impressed. Note to said movie/tv star: Ditch the beanie, Dude. No one fucking cares, Artesia is not Hollywood. Either drive south of the 10 freeway and be a normal human or just stay up in the West Side and be a *star* but leave the beanie and your paranoia at home, esp. when eating at Udupi Palace.

I have spent the last 4 plus days upgrading the Barflies.net from Movable Type 3.36 to Movable Type Open Source 4.2b with a complete update of templates, adding of a few new features (author archives) and a big back end information architecture re-org (only to be seen by contributors). In wanting to update the Barflies.net Movable Type install, I found myself trying to accomplish a few tasks that aren't necessary in a one person blog.

One of the little things I wanted to do was to combine the RSS / Atom feeds from the main blog with the RSS / Atom Feed of the SoCal Calendar to make one feed for folks to subscribe to. When I Google searched this, I could not find any real answers, so I emailed the Six Apart Pronet list had a good simple, elegant answer from LaRosa Johnson within minutes:

"add blog_ids="all" to the MTEntries tag of your Atom Feed and that should do it"

And I did, and it worked.

Now how did I do it? In my case, I didn't want all the blogs on the Barflies.net MT install in the feed, only two. Barflies.net #15 and SoCal Calendar #30, so I set the blog_ids to blog_ids="15,30".

Everywhere in my RSS and Atom Feed templates that there was an instance of the mt:Entries tag, I added blog_ids="15,30", saved & published, and then tested the feeds. Happiness.

Here is an example of one the mt:Entries tag that that I altered in the Atom Feed:

<mt:Entries blog_ids="15, 30" lastn="1">

Thanks, LaRosa!

Due to being deep in my second "Blackout" period of the year whilst working away on a web app, I have no interesting thoughts or photos for you all today. But I do have a few tidbits:

1) Magnus the Pom-huahua (or Chi-meranian) came over to visit and have a play date with Scruffy today. A few notes on Magnus:
a) Magnus dropped off a few fleas and shared them with Scruffy. The fleas bit and then jumped off Scruffy due to his Frontline protection, but now Scruff has a bunch of inflamed flea bites on his tummy. I need to call the vet to ask what to do about this when we are only two weeks since his last Frontline application (minimum time between Frontline applications = one month, maximum = 2 months).
b) Magnus is as bad as Belle about letting me work. He repeatedly climbed on me and my computer trying to get attention.

2) I have made a To Do List breakthrough... The highly detailed list with over 32 points on it that I made a few weeks ago... Well, I checked off the final undone activity today when I washed my apartment's curtains. They are now very clean and slightly wrinkled.

Do I seem like the sort of human to own an iron? No, the iron is loaned out right now. Do I seem like the sort of human to iron my curtains when they come out of the dryer?

((She runs for the hills, screaming...))

3) I have entered, as mentioned above, my 2nd "Blackout" period of the year. This is where I sweep out all distractions and work on an a web application for two weeks. Day one is going very well so far. Am excited. Since my last Blackout in late March, I have been able to piece together a lot of code bits, IA and UI bits, as well as the large picture structure, and am as a result, I am prepped, ready and very excited.

My goal is to have the app to Alpha Testing phase by Saturday. I think I can do it. Why Saturday? Well, I am speaking Saturday night at an Art / Music / Writing / Web Salon and it will be the perfect time to recruit testers. An Art Web App needs Artists to test it, right? Right.

Impetus. Determination. I promise I will not try to procrastinate with housework, as I have got 95% of it done*, well, except bleaching the bathroom ceiling**.

4) After struggling most of last year with trying to realize my application ideas in Ruby on Rails or PHP, I have tossed both to the winds and am now developing in Django and am MUCH happier. PHP is too messy for my minimalist streak. Ruby on Rails really is oriented for the programmer to do web developement, but Django is a lovely framework for web designers to get into development with. With no apologies, I will say that I am having a lot of fun with Django only a few struggles. Yeah.

******
* This past weekend, Erika very kindly helped me completely rearrange all the furniture in my living room & bedroom, except my corner cabinet, bed and 3 bookcases. We did all of this so I wouldn't be distracted this week.

** This is my favorite inside joke, as when I was writing my Master's thesis, I got so stressed out that I stood on the toilet to bleach my bathroom ceiling and thus broke the toilet and dripped bleach on to me. When the repair guy came, he did not believe the truth whatsoever , but thought I was up to some sort of naughty on the toilet. No naughty, just serious out of control procrastination - totally different.

Sat 05.18.08 - The first Geekyoto at Conway Hall in Holburn, London.

Sorry the photo is slightly blurry, but I was trying to get a photo of Ben jokingly doing jumping jacks without the Nokia's flash on.

Twitter is currently out, and not out getting a Flickr style message, but appears to be on a tweaking binge and is not to be found, when found Twitter just might be manically vacuuming your house at 3am.

Yes, Twitter is down and out, so I have not place to post short, 140 character witticisms. Thus, I will actually write a textual blog post.

Several quick thoughts:

1) Am quite tired / jet lagged.

2) Am sad that my flight & budget require me to go home on Tuesday. Can I please stay in London for least another 3 days?

3) As it stands today and Friday are my only two days to pitter putter / bip bop around London, every other day is fully booked. Can I have another 3 days?

4) Bah. Budget. Bah.

5) You know that Ruby on Rails application that I have been working on? After watching Twitter struggle, I am defecting to Django. Ever heard of a Django app having such troubles and outages?

6) Today I had a lovely dim sum lunch with @SteveMarshall at the Jade Garden. Drinks at Villanders with the Carsonified folk & the folk who attended Andy Clarke's CSS workshop. Plus a big walk in between.

7) I really wish that Clark's in the US would carry good and cute shoes rather than icky hippy crap. I have had to buy my last 3 pairs of favorite cute walking flats in either the London or Dublin Clark's stores in the last 3 years due to the fact the US branch of the shoe giant has been beaten with an ugly stick. Good thing that the Clark's store on Regents street had my fave pair of black flats on sale for a significant discount today.

8) Did I mention that I was tired and not thinking well? If the above makes no sense, well then...

Sun. 05.04.08 - Happy Sunday to you from four local iris-type flowers making their May debut into the big bright world.

Last Sunday I made a note for myself of four things I wanted to blog about this week, but due to busy-ness I have not gotten to a single one of them until tonight.

Let's talk about work vs. rest or how to take a day off when you are a freelancer:

I have blogged a few months ago that I have spent the last year traipsing down a variety of career avenues in search of the perfect post-graduate-school career position but there has been no perfect path, only the path to being overwhelmed and over-committed as I have found myself involved in a wide swath of interesting projects and working many days in a row without a true day off. Then I get frustrated with spending all day every day with my computer and then I start to slow down & procrastinate about finishing things up with the excuse that I need time off.

Add it up and you get....

A desperate need to catch up, finish up, and actually take a day off. But the worst part is that when I do take time off, I feel too stressed out and guilty to enjoy it. This is bad.

Enter Ryan's article on the 4 Day Work Week. Carsonified says the 4 day work week makes their office more productive as folks arrive on Monday actually rested.. The 37 Signals folks found that they were honestly only productively coding a certain amount of hours every day so why not distill that time into 4 days and have 3 days off.

There also is the guy writing/talking about the 4 hour work week. The trick to this is outsourcing every task in your life and then writing a book about it and it selling well.

I don't think that I will want to whittle my life down to a 4 hour work week, but I would like to set a goal to a productive 4 day work week rather than a stressed out with productivity falling 7 day work week.

Where to start? Just do it? I love being online and on my computer, my work merges with my passion. My computer is also my main tool, next to my mobile camera phone, for my creativity and art. When I create art with these tools, the Protestant Guilt Ethic creeps in and asks why I am playing instead of working.

How do the Carsonified & 37 Signals folk walk away for 3 days? Or do they separate their job work on their computer with their love / passion for being online and creating?

If you are freelance or your work & love are on a computer, how do you manage the work / life / creativity balance?

Photo by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N82 on Feb. 25, 2008, in London.

Good news, folks! I wrote about it briefly back in March but it is now official and the Nokia Conversations will be launching within a few hours!

When I met up with Charlie Schick in late February at Paddington Station in London when we were both in transit, Charlie told me that he had left the Ovi group to start the official Nokia blog. I was and am darned excited about it.

Charlie and his team will be writing on Nokia, the Mobile / social space, and the like. Most importantly, they will be the continuing to make Nokia more open and transparent to the public. This can only be a good thing.

Charlie alludes to it in this post on his blog. Darla Mack blogs about Nokia invites us to the neighborhood. So does Mobile Jones...

Amy Gahran of Contentious.com's N95 bricked during an update recently and there is no recourse. Nokia needs Authorized Repair Centers that will take Nokia devices from all over the world & repair them, be it under warranty or for charge. Dell & Apple do it, Nokia needs to join the party.

From my first comment on Amy's post:

What do I think, well, Nokia needs to do the following:

A) If they are unable to have retail stores with repair centers in every major city in North America, then they should have authorized repair folks that one can take one's phone to be repaired on the spot or within a few days either under warranty or for charge. Before Apple opened the Apple Stores, they had Authorized Retailers and service centers all over the US and Canada. Nokia needs to do the same.

B) Nokia needs to increase the scope of their customer service to be like Apple or Dell, in that all of there devices can be repaired in any country that they sell their devices in. Don't tell me that the US customer service can't help a device bought in Europe or Asia. If that is the case, then sell the US devices at the same time you sell the European or Asian devices rather than 1.5 years later.

C) Nokia needs fully functioning "Suite" for updating & backup & multimedia for Mac & Linux folk. While the worldwide market for mac is only 4%, it is much higher in North America (17%?). Demographically & psychographically, the folks who buy Apple/Mac computers in North America are most likely going to be the market for Nokia Nseries (prefer design & high end function over cheapness). Folks buying $299 PCs at TigerDirect are unlikely to purchase a $649 Nokia N95.

Today was spent in two ways: the Dog ways and the Interaction Design ways.

Belle was a hair ball beyond Polar Bear status and desperately needed to visit a groomer to get shaved. Given that all the pet salons that I knew of were booked up due to predicted weekend hot weather, it involved me driving up PCH in this morning a bit looking for dog salons and walking into Purr-cision Grooming in Sunset Beach and begging for Belle to get a slot at the grooming table.

I have in the past noted that Sunset Beach has a high percentage of Psychics (2 or 3 in 2 miles), 3 Happy Ending Style Message Parlors (of the Rub & Tug variety), and 3 Tattoo parlours, and one just one dog groomers. Many thanks for Mark Anthony and the crew at Purr-cision for making Belle a dog again rather than a mini-polar bear.

The second part of my day was doing my least favorite activity: wireframing. Wireframing in my book is right up there with doing one's taxes and cleaning the toilet. Just say no.

Now I know that some folks consider wireframes to be the be all and end all of web design.

In my 12 years of designing and developing for the web, I prefer to first think about the task extensively, sketch & makes notes, and then just do it. This is much the same process I use when making art, esp. painting. I think, mull, turn things over in my mind - sometimes for weeks, make sketches, and then start the task.

In today's case, I already had fully envisioned the finished web interaction in my head and worked out the steps, but I needed to explain it to a programmer who would help me with the perl code. First I tried to explain it in an email, but that was not full enough. So I made two diagrams in photoshop with arrows to show how the behavior/actions would happen. But that was not enough either, so I started to make a html/javascript plain version of the interaction, when I realized... gasp! shock! horror! I was wireframing. blech.

Silly me.

Hello New York Times... Uh... the Urbanista Diaries campaign started in mid-January and ended in early March and your article came out on April 7th. Why wait to run the article a full month after the "live" portion is over?

If you are reporting on how Nokia is marketing with a new strategy of "hiring" bloggers and/or the marketing brilliance of the Urbanista Diaries, the why did you not interview one of the four of us?

I was not hired to go on the Urbanista Diaries trip, I was given a really cool opportunity to travel to India with a great camera phone, the N82, and do what I do every day - take lots of mobile photos and moblog them to a website with geo-data.

On the hiring bit? We were not paid, nor were any of the four of us given a phone. In fact quite a few of the phones were 'lifted' by DHL employees or Her Majesty's Customs on the way back to the UK after the Urbanista trip was over*. WOM World (1000 Heads) bought the plane tickets and reimbursed our hotel, food, and local transport. Nokia reimbursed / paid 1000 Heads.

WOM World (1000 Heads) has a policy, that not only do the bloggers get to be honest, but we also return the phones after the trial period. That is a loan, not a hire or a buy.

Yes, Nokia is above the curve on internet marketing, more importantly they are including the mobile community, which in turn creates brand loyalty. Apple or LG or Sony-Ericsson have never offered me to trial a device nor have they asked my opinion on its use or software. Nokia has. This is good.

But, NYT, please do a wee bit more research. kthnxbai.

*****

* Yes, for the record, I am angry about this - crooked business makes me indignant. Given that the phones were to go back to the UK, I would have preferred them to arrived in Oxfordshire in one piece, not the box arriving but missing the phones out of the middle. If I ever meet up with the DHL dude who giggled upon receiving the last N82 for shipment... To the Moon! Fed Ex & USPS have my business from here on out.

About two weeks ago, I received an invitation to join a Flickr beta test. I was intrigued, so I said yes. I had to sign an NDA stating that for the love of a tasty chicken I would not breath a blog, twitter, or in person word that I was beta testing Flickr Video. Yes, Flickr can have my silence in return for uploading 60 seconds of various tasty chickens from India, SXSW 2008, and Scruffy & Belle.

Oh, what a delight. I have had quite a bit of fun over the last 2 weeks uploading videos, really participating in a Flickr group in a way that I have not been interested in or invested enough in before, and watching with baited breath what folks would post as their videos. And then there was the Fridget meme that Derek started...

In all truthfulness, while I appreciate YouTube, Google Video, and Vimeo, I am not drawn into these services. I don't wait to see what will be posted, I only go when someone else sends me a link. If the video is longer than 5 minutes, I don't watch, be it too much work or just plain not interested.

It has been very different with Flickr Video. I am drawn in. I love the short format of 60 to 90 seconds. As the Flickr folk said - think of it as a long photograph. I also love the fact that I can use the same uploader and same Flickr tagging and interface that I use for photos. The user interface is simple and easy to use and not just because I am used to it.

Most of all, I am having fun with video on Flickr in a way that has never been fun before. Thanks, Flickr! Y'all rock.

Purple, people! Purple!

Many blessings upon the folks who approved a purple phone! Purple! Yay!

Do I need to say any more about a purple Nokia 6220? Like the Nokia N82 it has a 5 megapixel camera? Should I mention the Xenon Flash? Or the GPS? ... HSPDA? Huh...

But hey! The Nokia 6220 is Purple! Did I mention it comes in Purple?

Now when will AT&T roll out their HSPDA network that will be compatible with a purple 6220?

;D

Sun 03.09.08 - Elizabeth Perry and George Kelly. Photo by Ms. Jen at SXSW with a Nokia N82.

Sun 03.09.08 - Today is the Big Day. George Kelly and I will be conducting our Web Standards Confession Booth "Core Conversation" in the Ballroom E of the Austin Convention Center at 3:30pm.

Come on down, drop by, etc. to participate in the conversation and/or to give your confession. ;o)

Tues 02.19.08 - Photo of colorful lanterns taken by Ms. Jen on the walk up to the Elephanta Island caves with a Nokia N82.

Due to the lack of reliable internet connection, I am once again using the Lifeblog on the Nokia N82 to post this photo and text to my blog. Go Lifeblog Go. And get GPS embedding capacity while you are out there.

Now on to the subject at hand... If you were to go to the Nokia Urbanista Diaries website and look for my photos from today's expedition to the Elephanta Island caves, you would see my photos going out and coming back, but no photos for while I was there.

Why you ask? Well, if Sports Tracker does not have a data connection it will not map photos. No data connection means that Sports Tracker will think that there is no photos associated with the "workout activity" (yucky sports language again).

From one developer to another, this is silly. I had the GPS positionsing on at the same time, ShoZu was able to map all the photos even on Elephanta Island where there is no data connection to the main land cell towers. [Update from later: I realize that it is good to use the cell tower / data connection for when one does not have satellite, so I would like to propose here that Sports Tracker use both or one when the other is not available, but not to make it so that if there is no data connection that the photos are not uploaded.]

Why is Sports Tracker relying on triangulating one's position from the data connection to the cell tower rather than the far superior native GPS positioning that is already on the N82? I rechecked my settings, with live sharing off I should have the ability for Sports Tracker to rely on satellite data rather than triangulation from cell towers.

Thus, when I went to upload my "workout" to the server, no photos were found. In terms of our photo work flow for posting mapped photos to the Urbanista site, this means that I needed to find a computer with an internet connection that also has a usb port so that I could upload the cave photos manually to the Sports Tracker "workout".

This is when the trouble started: where to find an internet cafe: found; do the computers have a usb port to use: no, too old or already taken with mouse & keyboard; does the ancient computer at internet cafe have flash 8 or 9 installed and/or the latest browser that will support AJAX: no, no, no; does the computer at the internet cafe have connection faster than molasses during a blizzard: no, the frozen molasses is faster. Epic Sports Tracker upload in India Fail.

Being the determined little taurus turtle that I am, I went back to my hotel room and started to see if I could access my Sports Tracker account from the N82. You can, kind of. The site mostly loads, which is more than the nseries.com site does, due to the fixed width layout there is some amusing overlapping. (Did the dev team at Sports Tracker test the site on the mobile device, the N82, that they are co-promoting with their own product?)

Once I was logged into my account the list of workout activities did populate on my profiles page, a grey box with a whirling circle sat down to the right a bit loading loading loading, never to load. Whether that grey box was the flash obect for the photos, map or workout list, I did not know as none of the three ever loaded on the N82's browser.

Now, supposedly the N82 comes with FlashLite. Supposedly.

Ok. Let's talk folks. If Nokia or Apple or any other mobile device maker wants to market their high end devices beyond the US & European markets, then they need to acknowledge that not everyone has access to a internet enabled computer and if they do, it may only be of glacially slow speeds. And in some markets, the mobile is preferred over the computer.

A friend of mine in LA who hates computers recently bought a iPhone and after a month or two of using it realized that she wanted to purchase some music on iTunes and needed to update her iPhone. Only one problem, she couldn't do either, as she does not and chooses not to own a computer and the iPhone requires a computer (Mac or PC) to interface with the Mothership. I have previously blogged here about my repeated frustration with Nokia's PC only focus. Nokia and Apple, what about the millions and billions out there with no computer and whose only connection to the internet is your mobile device? Time to make all activities be functional purely from the mobile device with out having to access a computer.

Given that Nokia has a huge market presence in India and I have seen by far more Series 60 Nokia devices out and about in India than I ever do back in LA, should not all Nokia websites and software / web applications be fully functional on the phones produced by Nokia?

Flash may tell a lovely story to computers on a fast broadband, but what about the rest of the world?

The nseries.com website does have feeble mobile version, but as soon as you click on the links one will either get an error code or a very minimal functioned and designed site. Please look at m.twitter.com or m.flickr.com for great examples of fully funcitoning and well designed mobile versions of the Twitter and Flickr web apps.

It is possible to break out of our preconceived notions that our main work flow occurs on a computer and that the mobile is an additional device. The mobile is the main device for more people around the world than not. Let's move into the present with the devices and the applications.

The method of mobile blogging that we are using during the Nokia Urbanista Diaries adventure to send photos from the Nokia N82 phone to the Nseries Urbanista website is as follows:

1) Turn on Sports Tracker. Start a "workout". Make sure the GPS signal is strong.

2) Start going around on the adventures and take photos. Go lots of new places, takes photos, make sure the GPS signal remains strong.

3) Stop the Sports Tracker "workout". Click on "upload to service". Sports Tracker will find the photos associated with the "workout" route and send them to the ST server with the GPS data and athletic data.

4) The Urbanista Diaries flash app then pulls the photos, geo & route data feed to create a photo map and the slideshow that you can watch on the site.

At the beginning of the year, I blogged that I really didn't like Sports Tracker as a mobile blogging app for the reasons that it is created to be a sports tracker and not a photo tracker, I also wondered why Nokia has allowed Lifeblog to go dormant rather than adding the geo data capacity to that established app.

During the course of January, I tried Sports Tracker out a few times while walking Scruffy McDoglet and liked it as a mobile app to tell me how far we had walked and at what pace, but I still felt that it was not an app for mobile photo blogging.

Urbanistas Devin and Jay both blogged about their frustrations with Sports Tracker while out on their journeys and Ryan has tested it before starting his part of the Urbanista adventure.

I am now at the end of my second full day of mobile - geo - blogging with the Nokia N82 and Sports Tracker has been doing a good job of tracking where I have been going around Chennai, has added most of the geo data correctly, and has been able to find and send without error most of the 200+ photos I have taken. I am certainly not going to complain about how Sports Tracker sent up all 150 photos from today's 4th Chennai Photowalk, no, actually I am going to praise the hard work that the developers have put into improving the system in the last four weeks that the Urbanista Diaries has been going.

What I would like to point out here is what Sports Tracker could do to make the application a little more photo mobile blogging friendly or spin off a sister app that would be 'Photo Tracker':

1) If Nokia wants Sports Tracker to be adopted and used regularly by more than just the athletic or tech geeks then make the mobile and web based user interface be visual with photos and geo data at as the first level of interaction.

Find someone's mom who loves to take photos but is non-technical (I will donate my Mom to the cause) and have her be the UI tester without any explanation, if she can use the app while taking photos and then post them to the server, then everyone can. Take a big tip from Nokia's Lifeblog app for the phone on this. The photo thumbs are the first thing that comes up and then you can do things with them via 2 different menus (one menu with the thumbnail display and one menu for each photo).

How could this work for Photo Tracker, well make the "timing" start when one opens the camera app - this action should be a choice as not everyone will want every photo geo tracked nor the pull on the battery resources that the GPS and tracking app take. Each photo should have a manual (at the time or later) opt out feature, as some photos you don't want geo tracked and some you don't want sent to the Photo Tracker server.

2) Yes, allow the photographer to choose which photos get sent up to the server from each timed tracking activity either before sending the data and photos to the server. The fact that Sports Tracker currently sends all the photos it can find during the interval of the activity is either too much (150 photos from today's photowalk! Yikes!) or some photos should not be sent due to privacy or it is just a bad photo.

3) Now onto the Sports Tracker web based application... The colors and layout of each workout profile may be conducive to sports based athletic training and tracking, but not for photography or showcasing one's mobile photos. Photo Tracker should have the photos up above the "fold" not buried as tiny thumbnails at the bottom of the web page. Don't get me going on the green & black color scheme...

4) Take a tip from any number of social networking applications and allow the user to configure the layout to suit their needs: Sports folk will want the athletic data prominent and Photo folk can make the photos prominent. Also, allow the user to change the stylesheet: ie the colors, typography and minor layout changes (see blogger, typepad, vox, myspace, et al for how folks can customize the look).

5) Take a tip from any number of social networking apps and an allow the view/user to easily find one's friends recent 'posts' / 'activities'. Right now it is very difficult for me to find the most recent uploads from Ryan & Jay and I can click on Devin's username to navigate to his space on Sports Tracker at all. Take a tip from Flickr on this, Flickr makes it really easy for me to see the most recent photos from my contacts and friends.

6) Last but not least: Own your own stuff. Allow the advanced mobile photographer or web dev the option to host and send the data to their own website and make it apart of the settings in Photo Tracker to post to your own blog if you so choose (Atom Protocol anyone?). This person can then take the athletic and geo data via the xml/kml file and with the photos create their own mobile app.

Lifeblog lets me post directly to my website via the Atom Protocol and that is why I prefer it to all the other mobile photo blogging apps out there, but it doesn't embed the geo data. Sports Tracker and Shozu both embed the geo data but they don't let me send the photos and data to my own site but only to their websites.

Frankly, after how Nokia seems to have left Lifeblog high and dry, why should I put up two plus years of photos and geo-data to Sports Tracker if in 2-3 years it will be DOA as well? Data portability and/or stability for long term archival purposes and url links is important.

At the very least, make all the data and photos be exportable, not just on the phone but also on the Sports Tracker / Photo Tracker site.

Some folks may argue that Sports Tracker already does the job of athletic activity tracking well. This is true. Why fiddle with the system and add a full featured Photo Tracker? Well, that is how we are currently using the system for the Urbanista Diaries as a Photo Tracker, not a Sports Tracker.

One could also argue that ShoZu and Flickr do much of the same functions as we are using Sports Tracker to do and that I envision that Photo Tracker could do, so why recreate the wheel? In web world, the first to enter the market is not always the best web app in the long run. When was the last time you used Friendster? Applications developed later can learn from others before them, iterate, add new features or goals and come out with the stronger user base, ie. MySpace and Facebook.

Nokia, how about a full featured Photo Tracker that takes the best of Lifeblog and Sports Tracker mashes 'em up, iterates a bit, and makes this mobile photo blogger darned happy? How about it? Run with it.

Or the attack of the famed Movable Type 500 error code...

This last week in the middle of attempting to finish up my client work and get ready to leave for the Urbanista Diaries adventure, I started to experience 500 internal server error codes when I logged into this blog. Not a good thing to have. But if I refreshed I was able to access the admin interface.

On top of traveling from LA to London to India in the last 72 hours and only getting about 5 hours sleep, I was not able to log into the blog interface at all. Agh! I was able to send mobile photos via Lifeblog, but not login. Odd.

This evening, after trotting around Chennai with Urbanista Jay today, I started troubleshooting and a few emails to my web host folks to no avail. I realized that the trouble started when I upgraded to the MT 4.1 professional, so in a last ditch effort to blog this evening, I deleted the MT 4.1 Pro install and reinstalled MT 4.1 Open Source. All is well and I can blog again.

Now I am too exhausted to say much more. Time for bed, as tomorrow morning is the Chennai flickr group photowalk nice, bright and early. Go over to the Urbanista site for the photos I uploaded via Sports Tracker today and I will put the rest up here with some words on why I think Sports Tracker should refocus and become Nokia Photo Tracker...

***
Update on Sun. Feb. 10, 2008 - Ok, using MT 4.1 Open Source is working in that I can blog. Yeah! But... some functionality is broken: like the links to categories. Please bear with me here, as my first priority in the next two weeks is to photo blog with the Urbanista world, if I get the time I will troubleshoot and fix any functionality issues.

For now, use the archive link to find posts.

One of the things that I love about Nokia's Nseries line of phones is that they are mini-computers with a phone, camera, and internet connection. On top of all of that, one can update the firmware / software of the mobile device just like one can update their computer's firmware or software.

Does your mobile start to get a little slow after a while or have blips & burps or freeze or crash? Well, if it is a Nokia, you can download the Nokia Updater to your PC, plug your mobile into the data cable and then into the computer, back it up, and then Update. Couldn't be simpler, right?

Well, if you are me, an ardent Nokia fan, but also an owner of 2 Mac computers (15" MacBook Pro & a 12" PowerBook G4), you have a wee bit of a problem when it comes time to update one's phone or internet tablet... it is called... how to borrow a PC... Trust me, do not, DO NOT, whatever you do, think you can run Nokia's Updater from the Windows install of Parallels on your MacBook Pro. JUST SAY NO. I have a lovely little N80 brick that no amount of the Kings Men or repair people will put back together again...

Now every time an update is announced for the N95 or N800 tablet, I am VERY VERY VERY reluctant to even think about updating, even though both need it. I call my brother, ask if I can borrow his work PC laptop, drive over there, run the Nokia Updater application and find out if there is an update available. The N800 has had several updates since it arrived in October and the N95 (RM-159) has only had one last July, even though all the other N95's in the world have had at least 3-5 updates since then.

My N95 is starting to sssslllllloooowwww down. It really needs a good firmware shot in the arm or in the patooty. I would love for it to focus and shoot a photo faster than its current stop, focus, focus, focus, pick nose, focus, focus, hey-look-theres-a-squirrel, focus, focus, hey! maybe I should take a photo speed. It is driving me crazy. The lower the light, the slower the focus with our friend the N95 v.1.

Mind you, my N95 is faster than my N80 was, but now that I have tasted the delights of the N82, the N95 is looking and working old & slow. Dang! It is only 6 months old and cost me a lot of $$$. Where is my update? Where is my update that I can do natively from my Mac?

A few days ago, I went and checked to see if there was an update available on the local borrowed PC for my N95. No new update. So sad.

But there was an update available for the N800 tablet. Ok, let's update.
Updating. Updating.. Updating...
Nokia's software tells me to turn off Tablet, disengage the cable, and reboot. Ok.
No go. No turn back on. Oh crap. Oh crap. Oh crap. Look at borrowed PC. Swear. Swear again. Crap.

Google problem. Find that there is a Mac hack to flash the firmware updates for the Nokia 770 and 800 available. So, I download it to my MacBookPro, download the last update and the newest update. Use my Mac to flash the N800 to its last update and... it turns back on... it works... it restores its data. All is well in N800 land, thanks to Mac!

Then I try to use my Mac and the flasher software to update the N800 tablet to the OS 2008 Tablet software. All is well. It works. Birds sing.

Then I use the Mac flasher to send it back to OS 2007 as a test. All is well. Take N800 tablet to borrowed PC, attempt to flash the OS 2008 tablet firmware using the PC. Bricked again. Crap. Use Mac to reflash. All is well again. Birds sing.

Moral of Story? Use a Mac. PC's suck, esp. ones running MicroSquash. (My Dell with Ubuntu Linux is very nice. Linux gets less love from Nokia than Macs do.)

Moral of Story? Hey Nokia, increase your market share and profits by supporting Macs! Give your Mac owning fans some love. Do not accede all the market to Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

Moral of Story? I would like to see all Nseries devices get updates at least every 3 months. If I am going to spend over $500 US, I would like consistent support for at least 2 years.

Moral of Story? I want a Nokia Updater that works with my Nseries mobile device natively on my Mac.

If you want the private complete text & photo feed, email me - blackphoebe at gmail dot com.

Otherwise, it is excerpt time for the rest of my feeds. Must make it harder for the uncreative plagiarists out there. Thanks for understanding.

I worked on refining the design of this website and have started making a Mobile version of the site.

Yep, a .mobi - view on your mobile / cell phone, version of the website. It is almost there, when I have it ready all the way, I will ask for help in testing it on various cell / mobile phone browsers.

I also added the Nokia Urbanista Diaries widget to the sidebar on the blog and as a center piece on the entrance page to the website. If you would like to follow along by adding the widget on your blog or website, here is the widget code to copy and paste onto your site:

<div id="flashcontent"><strong>In order to view the Nokia N82: 
The urbanista diaries you need JavaScript and Flash Player 8+ support</strong></div>
<script src="http://www.nseries.com/nseries/v3/js/swfobject.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">var so = new SWFObject('http://www.nseries.com/nseries/v3/media/campaigns/n82/widget.swf', 
'Nokia N82: The urbanista diaries', '300', '250', '8', '#ffffff');so.addParam('wmode', 'transparent');
so.addParam('flashVars', 'bloggerID=4&copy=http://www.nseries.com/nseries/v3/media/campaigns/n82/data/en-R0/widget.xml');
so.write('flashcontent');</script>

Or you can download the widget from the Nokia Nseries site yourself.

At dinner last night, it came out that various members of my family think I am a vagabond.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, a vagabond.

In my seven years and four months as a freelance web designer and developer, there have been many ups and downs to working as a "consultant" rather than cube farming as an employee at an established company. Over the years, I have attempted to solve many of the major pitfalls of freelancing by purchasing my own health in-sewer-ants (Kaiser), opening my own 401k, and working at even-ing out the cash flow, etc., but I never thought of public perception as a pitfall of freelancing.

In web design and development, I know more folks who are freelance than who work at a company. Of the friends who do work at a firm / corporations, I only know of one who is truly satisfied and the others keep talking of going back to freelancing or at least entertain the idea of it or are jealous of friends who are freelance. Of my freelance friends, many of us toy with the idea of steady cube farming, but instead have started to form informal partnerships with other freelancers or small design/dev firms to have greater reach than just one person could.

But to be called a vagabond. Really.

Now to be fair the person who said this is in their late 80s / early 90s and this may be a generational gap issue and a lack of understanding of contemporary work practices & realitites more than an insult, but I was still surprised.

In the web design & dev world, I am a moderate stay at home freelancer compared to some of my compatriots who are on the conference speaking circuit or have clients spread far & wide. I do get out and about a couple of times a year, be it for conference speaking, conference attendance, or just plain travel. Heck, I haven't even reached the gold status, let alone platinum super-flyer, with my frequent flyer program.

How can I be a vagabond if I am not even recognized by my fave airline as a frequent frequent flyer?

All jokes aside, I have reached the stage of life of which in some folks' expectation I should have bought a house, started a family, and otherwise "settled down". So when the news hit the family that I would be spending a great deal of the month of February trotting about on the Nokia Urbanista Diaries project... vagabond!

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I will be out and about from Feb. 6th to 24th participating in the Urbanista Diaries project / challenge with Nokia N82. Now one of the glories of having a freelance web design career is that I can say "Yes!" to Nokia and not have to worry about not having enough vacation time. As a freelancer, I just need to get my work done, give warning to my clients and folks I contract with, and then off I go.

More on my destinations in a bit... I first need to find my tin cup, red kerchief, a hobo hat, and suspenders of which to deck myself out for my trip!

When I first heard of the new Nokia mobile app shipping with the new Nseries phones, Sports Tracker, I envisioned a mobile stop watch combined with GPS and a how many steps have you taken monitor. Dull. Sigh. Where is an updated, GPS enabled Lifeblog?

Ok, I grew up in a family that was sports obsessed, esp. my first stepdad - my mom's second husband. He was on the Olympic committee, competed in the Pan American games and has won in the Master's division of the some sort of spin off of the Olympics (Allison, help me here). My childhood, from ages 3 to 13, was spent with the stepdad, mom, and various other mom-related relatives who were pathologically compulsive about exercising at very darned opportunity.

Beach volleyball in the evenings? Check. Olympic style kayaking and canoeing? Check. Surfing? Check. Running? Check. Skiing? Check. Hiking with a pace meter and stop watch? Check!

By the time I was 8 years old, I was hiding when the folks were ready to go out for yet another bout of daily evening EXERCISE! Me hiding with my mom yelling at me that it was time to leave. My high school rebellion was to cultivate super-white, never see the sun skin. To do this in an ultra-athletic, sun-worshiping family was even more rebellious than teenage pregnancy or drug use. I kid you not. The cousins that got knocked-up and/or were smoking pot were excused as long as they were in competitive sports and winning.

The cousins have sports trophies and I have a great collection of black vintage dresses and goth jewelry. I also now have great skin.

So, the nice folks at Nokia's WOM World asked me to evaluate the Sports Tracker app, as it will be used on the Urbanista Diaries adventure as our way to track our path and upload our photos to the Nokia server.

After a stressful and full last half of 2007, I decided to go semi-offline in the last week. I have blissfully caught up on novel reading, walking, cooking, cleaning the house, blog reading, going out to see Royal Crown Revue on Friday and the Irish Brothers on Thursday, and otherwise vegging out. I had only one client meeting and I have completed very little of any "GTD" on my computer.

This has been good. But odd.

Before my little love - The Silver Princess - died an untimely death at the Philadelphia airport in late April, it was hard to pry me away from my 12" Powerbook G4 computer. Then when the June Death of my Nokia N80, I found myself a bit soured on technology and machines as tools to create. Yes, I now have *supposedly* superior replacements in the 15" MacBook Pro and the Nokia N95, but I have found my joy in using my machines has dissipated rapidly, esp. with the MacBook, as the months have worn on.

I don't know why, but I don't enjoy using the MacBook Pro as much as my beloved Powerbook. As a result, I don't enjoy designing or coding as much as before. Odd how a tool can effect ones work and passion.

I am not the only one who loved their PowerBook, as Ian Lloyd has Tweeted about it and told me in person that he still loves his 12" PowerBook even with the MacBook as his primary machine.

I don't know what it was. Maybe the 12" PowerBook was smaller yet chubbier and easier to fetishize. Or maybe the small toy-ness of the laptop fooled me into thinking that every activity was a game and fun. Maybe the small screen and heavy size were comforting, I don't know what it was, but I have taken the dead Silver Princess to two different repair places this fall to see if someone can resurrect her, to no avail. And both times I was very upset to find out that nothing could be done. And then spent time on eBay wondering how I could justify the expense of a PowerBook logic board...

I don't have any such affection towards my Chick-a-Poo the MacBook Pro. I wish I did, but I don't. I don't find each day to be a new adventure in computing with MacBook Pro, and thus, I have a hard time getting excited about working on a machine that leaves me relatively cold. This effects my output, trust me.

I love web design and development, but my love for the tool that helps me create and code is lacking. Lately, I have wished for a direct brain to server link, as I have been thinking up code and designs in my head, but have not wanted to open the MacBook to make it happen. When I do open the machine, I don't want to work on it.

In 2003 and 2004, when I was having issues and productivity problems with my digital photography never making it online and my computer's hard drive as a black hole, the introduction of a Nokia "smart" camera phone with an unlimited data plan made all the difference in my life. Instead of frustration at the process of getting my digital photos to the web, the lovely Nokia 7610 allowed me to snap a photo and send it directly to Flickr or a blog with no permanent stop at the black hole of my hard drive.

I am yearning for such a leap in my web design and dev life. A device that so entrances me with its design and its leap in process that I am once again in love with what I do, rather than in frustration and self-condemnation.

Apple, please make a lovely work / life machine that is delightful, possibly another 12" laptop with all of the power and guts of the MacBook Pro but with the cute factor of the PowerBook G4. Add a revolutionary fully working voice recognition system so that I can move about hands free and talk my code to my machine. Help me to fall in love with my computer again. Thank you.

A solar PowerMonkey for recharging one's Nokia N95 or iPod on the go. Yeah!

Guy Fawkes wanted to blow up the new order (the Protestant Ascendency) to return to the old order (Catholicism). Today, I am going to have to blow up the old order (a mishmash of PHP4 & 5) to install the new order (PHP5 with PEAR & PDO). Wish me luck, taking down foundations is always risky...

How is it that England has a bonfire night on Guy Fawkes Night, Ireland has a good bonfire on Halloween, but we here in the US don't have a good bonfire night to start the descent into winter? Extending daylight savings time a week doesn't count.

We could argue that here in California we had a month of bonfires of the wrong sort.

Today is International Be Really Nice to Web Designers and Developers Day, which means that you, lovely internet public, should upgrade your browser.

Still using, Internet Explorer? Consider switching to Firefox or Opera or Safari (yeah, you want to do it, go buy a Mac).

If switching browsers is not your thing, then please, please, pretty please on top, be very nice and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.

Yes, I know, Microsquash makes it hard, you have to find the Update area in the Start menu of your PC and then download about 62 security updates, but do it. Do it tonight before you go to bed, leave the MS update running while you sleep and hopefully when you wake up, your computer is happy and your favorite web designer and/or developer will be happy too.

Spread the love. Switch or Upgrade.

Over the last few days, as I have had time, I have been trying to clean up the Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen Archives, esp. the complete change in directory & naming that occurred from Movable Type 3.3 to Movable Type 4. If you can't reach an entry right now, sorry, I am working on it.

Ms. Jen, .htaccess, and mod_rewrite are in the server solving the problems. Hopefully. ;o)

Update, 9:54am : Solved!

Ok, wordy title, but after doing some reading on WOM World, I decided it was time to plunge in and set up my Nokia 95 to act as a modem for internet connection to my MacBook Pro to be used on the go when no wifi is present.

This frees me up to be able to compute online, albeit slowly, anywhere. No wifi or expensive wifi? No ethernet cable? Anywhere that I can access the internet on my N95, I can now tether my Mac to it for connection.

Thanks to AT&T for my unlimited data plan, even if Cingular's EDGE is slowish, and thanks to The Nokia Blog for the tutorial on How To: Tether Your Nokia to a Mac for Net Access Via Bluetooth.

A note for other AT&T customers who want to set this up, I still have my old AT&T sim chip from 2004, so I am using the mMode settings and my APN is "proxy", no username, no password. If you are a Cingular customer or you got your sim chip during the Cingular era, then your APN will be different.

Since I am at home, now that I have proven that I can use my N95 as a modem and written this post, I shall go back to using the wifi.

Thank you Mr. Greene for the best sum-it-up succinct quote of the last few months:

"The iPhone is for consuming content, while the N95 is for creating it."

Jonathan Green, in his blog post "Nokia N95 or Apple iPhone?" (via Darla Mack), compares the features and approaches of the Nokia N95 and the Apple iPhone as an owner and daily user of both mobile devices.

When my Nokia N80 took a plunge in oblivion this June, rather than rushing out and purchasing the Nokia N95 reflexively, I charged up and put my sim chip into my faithful old friend the Nokia 7610 so that I had time to really research the then upcoming iPhone and the Nokia N95, as well as think about what my dream phone features would be. The conclusion of several weeks of research and thinking lead me to buying my Nokia N95 mid-July and I couldn't be happier.

Since that time, I have been in a number of social situations where I have been teased or questioned by fellow geeks and design folk who own iPhones on why I did not get an iPhone. In every instance, I bring up the Nokia N95's 5 megapixel camera with flash, great video capture, and GPS and the iPhone's complete lack of these features (no video capture, no GPS, 2 megapixel digital still camera with no flash). My friends are entranced with the user interface of the iPhone, I am entranced with the photos and video that I can moblog from my N95.

To paraphrase Madeleine L'Engle, "Fire consumes, cancer consumes, I am a human being not a consumer." To that I add, "I am a creator, not a consumer." So, Nokia bring on the creative-centric mobile devices!

On the GPS note, online and mobile presence has been bubbling up from the geeky underground and this week it started seeping into the internet mainstream when Google purchased Jaiku. Factory Joe weighs in with his opinion on why Google bought Jaiku. Darla thinks that Nokia missed out by not acquiring Jaiku.

Day One - Future of Web Apps 2007
at the ExCel Centre, London, UK

[As usual here is my transcript of sitting in sessions, plus my commentary]

Start of Day - Took longer to get here than I thought. The Circle Line is slow, but it was the right way to go.

9am - Intro with Ryan Carson, Brian Oberkirch, and Om Malik - Lots of chat about Facebook.

10am Heather Champ-Powazek and Derek Powazek
Community
Chelm Sweet Chelm
Confess
Don't Keep Score
Make Real Stuff - Editorial layer- 24 hours of flickr, JPG Magazine, etc.
Rip that Band-Aid - Old Skool Merge (still cranky about this) - announce it, 6 weeks, do it. Don't drag it on.
Community, Manage Thyself - Give people the tools they need to manage it themselves.
Communicate Expectations - "I love lawyers" - Heather. Don't be creepy. You know that guy. Don't be that guy.
Don't Create Supervillians - be creative and personal in dealing with Trolls
Know Your Audience - too many constraints causes rebellion
Embrace the Chaos - Whenever you create a space that gives folks a voice, you will be things you don't expect.

After this went out to see if I could get the MMS for my UK sim chip to work and it was a no go. Then chatted with Thomas van der Wal at the Microsoft bean bags. Then chatted with Family Powazek Champ.

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...

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.

At SXSW Interactive 2006, an acquaintance of mine asked, "What do you do?"

This was not an intro question trying to find out who I was and what I did for a living upon first meeting, but a derisory question meant to belittle by someone who had known me for over a year or two by that time and knew my profession.

I was a bit stunned, "You know what I do. I am a web designer and mobile blogger."

The Acquaintance stated, "No, I am asking what do you do? Have you written a book? What conferences have you spoken at? etc."

What the acquaintance was really getting at was who was I and where did I rank in web hierarchy. I am here to tell you that I did not add up in the acquaintance's book. I did not matter in this person's world because I had not aggressively carved out a territory to have, to hold, and to defend in the new internet bubble known as "Web 2.0".

I was a bit bewildered by the whole conversation and later it offended my flat hierarchy punk rock ethos. I may have forgotten about it, except it happened a couple of more times over the course of the year with several other professional acquaintances.

Since I have finished my Master's program nearly a year ago, I have felt a great deal of pressure, both internally and externally, to carve out a territory, be it web design for developers or mobile design or mobile practices or ... or ... I have spoken to / met with 3 tech publishing house acquisition editors about the possibility of writing a book. I have spoken at two conferences and a few university speaking engagements on web design and mobile practices. While I love speaking and teaching, the very idea of writing tech book leaves me cold.

But most of all, I have been examining my motives and desires. During the third editor meeting last week, I stated out loud, "I love creating web sites and art, I am not sure I want to write a book."

My non-existent business manager would have given me a good talking to and possibly a swift kick in the rear, but I don't care. It is true. I most desire to create.

Be the creations art, photography, ideas, web design, a web app, a great meal, a blog post, or a coptic bound handmade book, I want to make things. I want to share ideas. I want be a blessing to others.

All the carving of territories that is currently happening in web design & development makes me nervous. No, not really nervous, it makes me shy away. Watching the internet that I have loved so dearly the last 13 years go from a wild place with lots of crazy ideas - a place of innovation and sharing - to a place that is slowing hardening into a place of hierarchy and territories, I want to pull out of it and go paint.

Seriously. I have an pdf application on my desktop to apply for a grant for a local studio space for LA area emerging artists. This is not a good response, as in 1994 - 1996 I purposely left the art world and all of its competition for the love of creating web sites.

A better response for me now is that while I don't care about competing for a specific slice of a web territory, I will create regardless. I don't care if the topics I could write a book on or in an article or speak on are currently or concurrently have 3-4 other higher profile web professionals jockeying for the slot as "The Expert ™". I will create. And I will share.

To this end, I will be blogging more of my ideas about the web design / dev and mobile worlds, not to carve out a territory but instead to celebrate a range of ideas. Sharing them with the internet. Hold me to this, I have been posting lots of photos but more ideas need to be flowing from this space.

Next time someone asks me, "What do you do?"

I create.

Hi...

I upgraded from Movable Type 3.4 to 4.0 on Saturday night so that I could take advantage of the kickass new moblogging (Lifeblog) functionality and have been having database / CMS meltdowns every since.

Sunday was spent recreating the database from the backup for multiple hours.

Yesterday, I was showing Ruth around SoCal. And hoping all was working.

Today, all the individual entries have disappeared, but the Main Index page is still showing entries. The MovableType.org instructions on how to Upgrade your 3.x templates to 4.0 are not working.

I was hoping to hold off on upgrading to the MT 4 new templating structure to when I had more time and was not on a deadline for client work. Alas and a lack, this is not the case. So, I am about to refresh all the templates just to get a working website and will have to bring back all the CSS and side bar links later in the week.

Please excuse the construction Dust... We will resume our normal visual presentation later...

In less than 50 minutes, all the folks waiting in line on the West Coast will be buying the first edition of the Apple iPhone. I am not in line, I am not at the Apple store. I thought about it, not to wait for a phone, but to take photos with my Nokia and moblog the event.

As previously documented, I won't be buying an iPhone on this round. I want a competitive megapixel camera, a good lens, and the ability to moblog via email, 3rd party app (flickr, vox, Shozu, Lifeblog, etc.), or MMS. The iPhone only offers a 2 megapixel camera, email, no MMS and not 3rd Party apps.

Since the firmware meltdown of my N80 last week and the fact that I have been unable all week to get a hold of a Nokia Customer Care rep who can help me, I have been diligently watching the iPhone hype / broohaha build to a crescendo, as well as researching Nokia's superior phone / computer : the Nokia N95.

I am more than a little upset at Nokia's inability to provide authentic worldwide Customer Care rather than the byzantine Soviet-style bureaucracy they are currently providing in the name of Customer Care. On top of the inability to get my Nokia N80's repaired this week, I have a choice, either buy a new Nokia N95 to replace the N80 or go to d.Construct 2007 & continue to use my old school Nokia 7610. I love the Brit Pack, but ...

Temptation can be too much.

All of this. All of it. The iPhone hype, the dead N80, the tempting N95, returning to my first love the 7610, the summer sunlight hitting everything in the right light - calling to be moblogged .. all of it is adding up to me asking myself, "What really is your ideal phone?"

Ms. Jen's Dream Phone / Camera, pulling from currently existing mobile phone and camera technologies, or All the Better to Moblog With:

* Carl Zeiss lens or better.
* 8 megapixel camera
* Sensor chip and software that can capture purples and dark blues accurately.
* Auto Focus with a manual option (like the N80) to choice up close or distance focus.
* 10x digital zoom.
* Video capture at the megapixel rating of the lens and digital sensor.
* On board flash.
* Option to add on another flash for night time or concert photography.
* Minimum 256 MB of RAM / Computer memory
* Minimum 8 GB of data storage, either internal or as an external memory chip.
* GPS without any additional software or subscriptions.
* The GPS data will be embedded automatically into the EXIF data of each photo, if the photo is taken outdoors or near a window.
* The ability upon set up of the phone to type in my name, url, and email address into the EXIF data structure that can be added into every photo taken by the the camera automatically.
* Quad band phone so that I can use the phone and data connection anywhere in the world on any network.
* Wifi / WLAN
* Unlocked, so that I can put in a SIM chip anywhere in the world.
* Email.
* MMS.
* SMS / text.
* Full internet browser.
* Ability to turn off images or just receive text on the internet browser if in a country where the data is too dear (hello, Ireland).
* RSS feed reader on the browser so I can keep up with my blog reading wherever I am.
* The ability to make text larger or smaller at any point in the UI.
* The ability to customize the UI by me (wallpaper or even the whole look of the UI)
* Open architecture so that I can install 3rd party apps to add functionality to the phone.
* MP3 player with shuffle and the ability to fast forward and reverse within a song or podcast.
* voice recording and text notes.
* calculator
* Oh, yeah, the phone thing. Bah.

I don't need Office functions or a PDF reader. I don't need calendar functions or an alarm clock. Or many of the other things common to a smart phone that waste memory space.

My Nokia N80 fit most the above bill with the exception of the camera was only 3 megapixels and got purples wrong all the time, it also did not have a feedreader, nor did it have GPS. I could toggle the font in the internet browser, but couldn't in other parts of the UI. The big problem with the Nokia N80 is the on board memory was about 66 megs effectively and my miniSD chip was only 1 GB. The even bigger problem as the time lag that the N80 needed to interface with itself, the external chip, and the camera. Oh, yeah, one would have to reboot every day and some times 2-3x a day to keep it running well. Not so good.

I don't want an office phone, I want a digital artist's phone. I want the quick response of the Nokia 7610 in taking photos and accessing objects in the memory. Give me more on board memory and a bigger logic chip so that the smart phone can be both smart and quick.

Most of all, I really want a camera phone that I can use to access the Internets, post photos to my Movable Type blog without a 3rd party intermediary like Flickr, and the photos are print quality.

A bigger wish, not sure if any of the mobile device or digital camera manufacturers have considered this yet, but it would be lovely if I could choose either by switch or menu whether I want the photo to be 1 or 3 or 5 or 8 megapixels before I take it based on how much memory I have left, what I want to do with it (an MMS would choke on 5-8 megapixels) in the moment or in the long run (moblog immediately, for web later, or for print later).

It would also be lovely to have a high quality camera / smart phone that not only fit well in a woman's hand but was designed as to not cramp up my thumbs trying to type.

Dreaming about moblogging with the best little networked camera phone mini computer.

iPhone, move over. Meet the Nokia N95.

With less than a week from the official start of the iPhone selling season, I say pshaw. Last night at my Aunt Dana's birthday bbq, while talking to Greg Carpenter from Boopsie Mobile Find, I got to hold, view, and take photos with his new Nokia N95. A very sweet little machine. About the size of the N80 but with more screen (rather like an infinity pool), a 5 megapixel camera (!!!!), an interface similar to the N80 but more refined, and a second slider for Multimedia play functions. Did I mention the 5 megapixel camera?

Since I last wrote about the iPhone, Apple has bumped up the on board camera from 1 megapixel (phhhbbbffftt...) to 2 megapixel (be still my non-beating heart). The iPhone requires a 2 year contract with AT&T / Cingular and there is no MMS (multimedia messaging) at all. Touchscreen interface sounds intriguing, but I had that with my previous PDAs. The only big news of the iPhone is the on board memory storage of 4 to 8 gigabytes, compared to the 2 gigs of the Nokia N95 (added miniSD card).

Let's do a side by side comparison using the tech specs of both devices as of June 24, 2007:

I will let my Twitters from this afternoon speak for themselves:

"is finding Facebook annoying. Again. Updating my Nokia N80s firmware. Then off to coding fun."

"It is a very BAD idea to attempt to upgrade one's Nokia firmware with Parallels. Nokia N80 now dead. Nokia - release Mac OS X software!"

"Crap. Now charging old 7610 so that I have a phone. Crap."

Why update the Nokia software? Just like it is a good idea to update your computer's software, it is marvelous that Nokia provides an update for my lovely mini-computer the Nokia N80. But today things went wrong. Very wrong. Be it the Nokia data cable or Parallels, I know not.

I have updated the firmware on the N80 three times in the last year with no problems, but for some reason today the update stopped 90% of the way through and pitched a fit. The phone is not turning on, the Nokia updater is not recognizing the phone or data cable. Argh.

I bought my Nokia N80 in Ireland last June and nokiausa.com is not recognizing my serial number. Will make phone calls tomorrow to rectify the problem or at least find a Nokia Care provider who can resurrect the N80 from the dead.

The silver lining to this particular cloud is that I kept my Nokia 7610, charged it up this afternoon, and even though the camera is only 1 megapixel, I do love the photos from the 7610. Welcome, old friend.

Ryan, Earl and I were talking about the Napoleonic Wars when Ryan recommended Ian Svenonius' book, The Psychic Soviet. The only way that Ryan knew to find it was to go to the Dischord Records website.

Upon reaching the Dischord site, I was more than pleasantly surprised, as the Dischord site is lovely. I can't say that about many websites, as most either follow a specific stylistic trend or are just plain corporate.

Dischord's website is subtle but fun. A sheep is escaping the flock of its kind in the banner. The layout, while in a box, is lightly broken by cut-off corners and individualistic sheep. Good ratio of content to whitespace and great colors.

Thanks Dischord for a beautiful and functional web site!

Oh how I love the Internets. I love 'em, I love 'em, I love 'em.

The fabulous Internets saved me a trip to the evil mall. Any mall. All evil.

Lauren texted me this morning to ask where Dave & Lora were registered. I called her to tell her, "I don't know. I will look on their wedding website for their registry and order online." And I did.

I did for Dave & Lora. I did for cousin Kristin and new cousin Nick. No more harried trips to the Mall, desparately looking for stockings, a gift, and a card 25 or so mins before the wedding is to start (dang, I forgot wrapping!).

Thanks to Lauren for kindly organizing me a week beforehand, but even bigger thanks to all the folks who are registering online these days.

This evening I took the big plunge: I completely wiped Microsoft Windows XP off my 2003 Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop and made it an Ubuntu linux only machine. Goodbye Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates! Goodbye! Hello Feisty Fawn, Hello!

Back in Nov. of 2005, I turned the Dell into a dual boot of Windows XP and Ubuntu's Breezy Badger, thanks to the patient help of Glenn Strong.

I enjoyed using Ubuntu's Breezy Badger install the whole time I was at Trinity College as it helped me to avoid a really crappy networking situation with XP and I learned quite a bit about the Bash shell and Terminal. But when I bought the Silver Princess in March of 2006, the Dell fell out of favor.

A 2003 Dell laptop couldn't compare to a brand new spanking 2006 Mac PowerBook G4. Why use Ubuntu when OS X has a Terminal app and a million other things without trouble or sudo apt-get?

The Dell started to gather dust. I even lost its power cord last fall for a number of months and had to borrow my brother's. Cord found in my recent move. The Dell is still dusty.

The terminal in my new MacBook Pro just gave me this message upon using the sudo command to install MacPorts:

"We trust you have received the usual lecture from the local System Administrator. It usually boils down to these three things:

#1) Respect the privacy of others.
#2) Think before you type.
#3) With great power comes great responsibility."

My response: I am the local System Administrator. I promise to be responsible. In fact, I have a problem with being too respectful and responsible. Thanks for thinking of me.

Happy 4th birthday to this lovely little blog.

As you can see North Carolina was fabulously windy and brisk today. A lovely and perfect day to be out and about rather than in an office doing a programming course. But the day one of the course is good and I am happy.

Here are few notes, bits, and links from today's browsing:

1) More troubles between my phone and Flickr: I had to send the above tulip photo three times before it appeared in Flickr. It showed up first time around on Vox.

2) Excellent article on the truckers of East Africa by Ted Conover. Go read it.

3) Tom on the Tube. Photo by George. Must visit London soon, so that I can go to dim sum with Tom and catch up.

4) Having trouble with MAMP and my Mac. MAMP works with all types of files as a localhost for me, but not PHP. And it is supposed to be Mac-Apache-Mysql-PHP. hmph. Wonder if the additions to the config file to allow for SSI caused a disconnect with the functionality to interpret PHP on my machine.

Update: Solved my MAMP and PHP problem thanks to Splash of Style.

The above photo, "Telephone Poles", was sent to Flickr on Sat. 4/14/07 in the evening, but never received.

I have been having a problem this week between Cingular's mobile network and Flickr. I send photos (via MMS or email) from my phone, I receive confirmation that they are sent, I am charged, but the photos never show up on Flickr.

As a test, I have also sent photos this last week to my Vox account via MMS or email from my phone and they are received about half the time and show up on my Vox account.

Is the problem Cingular's network? But why would it not like Flickr the last week and like Vox half the time?

And to top it off, Cingular's network is working like a charm in North Carolina where I am right now for business. I have sent several test emails to Flickr and Vox and both are showing up on my account directly after sending them from my phone.

Cingular - WHY, oh WHY, do you have such shitty service in one of the biggest markets in the country (LA/OC)????

Oh, Flickr - WHY, oh WHY, do you seem to have massages when I am sending photos? They don't show up in my photostream but Cingular still charges me.

Vox - What are you doing right in moblogging interface land that Cingular and Flickr aren't?

Is this an issue of Cingular and Flickr not playing well together? As I said, it just started in last week. Has it been solved now or will I be able to moblog happily in North Carolina but when I return to SoCal I will be up a creek again?

I love sending photos from my phone to websites. I love moblogging. I am at Flickr because up to this point they have made sending photos from my phone to Flickr a very easy set of steps.

Frustrated.

Yesterday, my great aunt Babe, hosted the annual family "Easter Saturday" dinner at her house in Palm Desert. She cooked a fabulous lunch of ham, green salad, potato salad, and broccoli salad. Great aunt Babe is 94 93 and still goes golfing every week. She is a quiet dynamo.

I had never eaten broccoli salad before and Babe's version was amazing with broccoli, red onion, thin crispy bacon, golden raisins and sunflower seeds in a thin tangy mayo based dressing. Possibly one of the top 5 best salads I have ever eaten in my life. I wanted the recipe. So, I asked for it after lunch.

Great Aunt Babe said, "No."

Me, "No?"

Great Aunt Babe, "No."

Me, "Oh... Are you sure?"

Great Aunt Babe, "Yes, it is for Lynn."

I sat back down on the couch bewildered. My 2nd cousin-in-law, Pat, asked, "Did she give it to you?" "No. She said it is for Lynn," I said. "That way it stays in the family," Pat said. Me, "Hmmph. Well, I will google it. Surely the internets will have the recipe."

I clicked on my Nokia's web browser, opened the bookmark for Google, and typed in "broccoli salad". As I was typing, Pat said, "I always forget about Google. Look, your phone already has all the links."

One by one I read the linked recipes and lo and behold, the first 7 recipes listed were versions the salad we ate that day. I read the recipes to Pat and she said, "That's it, it needs to sit overnight." "Hey, look Elise has a recipe for it with peas." I then sent Pat the link to Elise's recipe from my phone and we were both happy. No one else noticed our conversation, nor my looking up the recipe on my Nokia's browser.

Thirty minutes passed I took the remainder of my dishes into the kitchen when great aunt Babe rounded the corner, picked up a piece of note paper and a pencil to write "1 c. mayo, 2 teaspoons cider vinegar, 1/2 c. sugar" on the paper. She hands it to me and says, "Here is the dressing, use cider vinegar - that is the secret, and then whatever vegetables you want." And walks off.

I went back to the couch and told Pat what had happened. We laughed.

I am of the internet generation. Why not share your favorite recipe? A version of it is most likely already up on the 'net, so no reason not to. But when you are 94, maybe the open source world that I am so used to is not what Babe lived or what she grew up with.

Have you had anyone deny you a recipe when you asked?

First off, I am truly sorry to hear that Kathy Sierra has stopped blogging due to creepy, threatening trolls. Kathy, please do not silence your vital voice due to un-evolved sub-homo erectus scum (no offense to our ancestors).

My first response upon hearing the news via Twitter and then reading Kathy's post on my mobile whilst driving to Las Vegas yesterday was to start singing old punk songs about self-defense and community unity. My second thought was "Let me at 'em with my steel toed panda shoes on..." My third thought was, "Hmmm... Self-Defense...Gun or karate?" Violence does not stop violence.

Here is my final response after a day of deliberation: Kathy, please keep blogging. The trolls win when you are silenced.

In March of 1998, Daniel Glass of Royal Crown Revue called me and asked, nee pleaded, that I take over the RCR mailing list. It was big and brawling. Old school punks plus hardcore swing dancers plus a bunch of tech geeks make for an interesting but at times explosive mailing list. I naively took it on and renamed the list "The Barflies Mailing List" after the RCR song. Up to 500 emails a day on subjects ranging from music to dancing to living to computers to bicycling to .... devolved into many of awful emails a day of 1 punk troll versus 1 swing-dancing-engineering troll plus their various factions warring.

In the first week of February of 2000, I took the list down and fled to Key West Florida and Nashville (Wahoo... BR549!) for a week. Upon my return, over 650 people hated me and not our 2 trolls.

In the 20/20 hindsight of 7 years, I can see that I should have trusted the community to fight for themselves and not let the trolls take over. Or maybe I should have IP banned the two trolls and let the community deal with the aftermath. What I know now is that I should have not taken the whole mailing list down.

Please, Kathy, report the event to the police (check), IP addresses and all. Ask the community of bloggers to help you (check). Wait for the community to rally and get the job done. Keep blogging about creating passionate users, as passionate users become passionate communities. Passionate communities make for an internet worth fighting for.

Black Phoebe the Prius is currently in the service bay at Toyota of Huntington Beach getting her 10,000 mile service.

The best part is that I am blogging to you all from some lovely patio furniture out near the new cars as the dealership has wifi for waiting customers. Yes, they take about half an hour longer than Jiffy Lube but they have wifi. Smart.

Things are heating up on the "Diversity" and conference Speakers front again and I have decided to blog about a few things that have run around my head for awhile.

I will sum it up to start: SXSW Interactive is my favorite conference. It is affordable, it has a great and diverse roster of speakers, and it covers a wide variety of topics within the field.

1) As a freelancer, I do not have a corporate budget behind me. I can't afford @ Media, O'Reilly, most of the Flash conferences, An Event Apart, etc. I can afford the $225 for a SXSW Badge, I can afford the $125 for d.Construct, I can afford Carson Workshops. It is not just the $795 - $2000+ price tags that come with the other conferences, one must also add in travel, hotel, food and entertainment. If it comes off of my credit card or bank account, I have to add it all up and consider it even if I can write most of it off on my taxes.

I know quite a few freelancers who would love to attend a conference and can't. In a world economy, where more and more of us are working freelance or as consultants, this matters. Does this mean that conferences are designed and marketed for folks who work at big corporations?

2) On a diversity of speakers... The best speaker at last year's Carson Workshops Web Apps Summit was Tom Coates. Did Tom speak on Ruby or javascript or api development or how much money it takes to build an app? No, Tom spoke on social networking and the larger idea of design. He was the much needed palette cleanser between the api/dev folk. He fired up the audience, he got us thinking. His slides were large gorgeous images that burnt into my memory.

The best speakers at SXSW Interactive 2003 was not any of the A-list web design or development folk, nor any of the fabulous bloggers there that year, but instead was three women (Ana Boa Ventura, and sorry I don't have my notes here for the other two) who spoke on a panel entitled, "Women who kill Tigers". They spoke on how art informs their design and activism practices. One of the speakers, a South American painter and designer, spends half her year in Paris or Montreal working as a designer for opera companies and half her year in Austin. The ideas on how to kill a tiger or design and make art was amazing. ((Hugh Forest, bring these women back!!!))

I find conferences, be they one day or 5 days, to be dull if the speakers are all the same folks speaking about the same things. Who wants to eat a meal entirely of bread? Not me.

To respond to Eric's post on Diverse it Gets, of which I did in the comments, I could care less about whether a person is racially or sexual diverse from the usual white male speaker, but what about a diversity of thought? Of ideas?

3) Ok, so Eric makes a case for limiting speakers to the A-listers who have published and excelled in web design and development. I say, "Eric, it is becoming a circle jerk." Not literally. But in essence, yes. All of the top 15 - 20 guys who speak on web design standards or the intersection of CSS and code, are all the same guys speaking at all the conferences these days, be it SXSW, or Carson, or @ Media, or any of the Web Directions conferences, etc. By and large, other than the emergence of the Philadelphia folk, the Aussies, and the Brit Pack in the last 2.5 years, the above group are the same folk who have been on the conference and book circuit for the last 4-10 years. It is getting stale.

Folks, it sells conferences out when you get the "known" A-listers or at least the perception that these folks are the rock stars. And maybe corporations want to send their folks to conferences and training with known names or at least published names so that one can justify the expense to one's manager.

The web is still young. Do we want to be so conservative so early in the game?

I say no! Let's innovate. Let's invigorate. Let new speakers in. Let new ideas in. Let's increase the scope to include folks like Tom Coates, Liza Sabater, Maggie Mason (moderated the a great panel at BlogHer last summer), Jessica Spengler (very bright, very thoughtful, someone give that woman a microphone), Jason Toney, Lynn D. Johnson, Ana Boa Ventura, and many many many more.

Want to speak? Want to shake it up? Don't have time for unlimited self-promotion? Do as Tantek suggests and get yourself out there, sign up for a Bar Camp, or send a panel or workshop proposal into a conference (SXSWi and BlogHer encourage proposals).

Make great art/design/code and let's speak out.

((p.s. As for the lack of women speakers at the average web conference, the argument that there are no A-list women to speak, is bullshit. I have had it out with two friends who organize conferences on this matter. Due the insularity of vision on who can and should speak a lot of women are going unnoticed or uninvited. If Jason Santa Maria and Rob Weychert have been allowed to join the party, then I nominate Liza Sabater, Rachel Andrew, and Eris Free. There it has been said.))

*****

Update on Fri. 2/23/07 at 12:58pm:Rachel Andrew twittered this link to her post on Women Speakers from last fall. I recommend reading it as she brings up the issue of childcare and the comments are illuminating. I further nominate Rachel.

Update on Fri. 2/23/07 at 1:43pm: Folks are posting their urls on the subject of Women and Speaking on Twitter, here is Dori Smith's post from yesterday - excellent - go read it.

Update on Fri. 2/23/07 at 9:07pm: Anil shoots and scores.

Ha! It is all Hugh Reynolds from last year's game class's fault... I am now official addicted to Katamari! I called a bunch of game stores this morning looking for one that had Katamari Damacy in stock and only found one in Santa Ana. After my purchase, I came to the conclusion that Game Store Clerks are the New Record Store Clerks. Nice, geeky, willing to chat and very knowledgable. I miss Bionic.

After dinner with my mom at 320 Main in Seal Beach, I took the newly acquired Katamari Damacy, plus some wine, over to Lucky and Greg's house. Wine opened, Play Station 2 console pluged in, one call to Greg at work to figure out what channel was needed on the TV, a bowl of fresh popped popcorn, and off we rolled. Our biggest Katamari was 74cm. Wahoo!

Katamari, we love you!

You inform a person you are chatting with, "Forget schools and neighborhood safety, I pick where I live based on who the online cable provider is..."

As we drove out of the CompUSA parking lot, Joe had me open the MacBook Pro Box and plug the computer in to his car inverter. Off we went, me setting up the machine, Joe driving.

(The CompUSA in Long Beach is having a 10 - 20% off closing sale. My brother Joe has a bonus. We went shopping. What fun.)

Vote for Around Ireland in the SXSW People's Choice Award!

Around Ireland : A Mobile Documentation Project is a finalist in the "Student" category of the SXSW Web Awards 2007!

I am very excited. Simon said via email, "FANTASTIC". Shonagh wrote, "such brilliant news about the website! ". Jasper emailed, "hooray for us."

In case you missed my blogging about the Around Ireland project this last summer, here is a summary from the About page:

Around Ireland is a mobile documentary project completed as part of the MSc in Multmedia Systems at Trinity College Dublin. We have travelled the 32 counties of Ireland, gathering video and images on mobile phones over the course of the Summer of 2006. The mobile content is sent directly to our site, Aroundireland.net from camera-equipped mobile phones in real time.

Rather than sending an image to just one other individual via MMS, Around Ireland aims to act as a central respository for mobile photographic content, allowing visitors to browse submitted mobile pictures from all over the island, geotagged according to location.

A big thanks to SXSW Interactive and see y'all at the 10th Annual SXSW Web Awards on Sun. March 10, 2007 at the Downtown Hilton, Austin, Texas!

The bookmark that came in the Amazon box with Andy's new book.

Ok, so where much of my and other communities are Currently Cranky About^TM Flickr, I am Currently Cranky About^TM PHP.

Yes, PHP. In the past, I have scoffed PHP for being too easy compared to Javascript. PHP has lots of built in functions, PHP scripts are fairly lean and mean next to the intricate mazes of Javascript. But, no, I was/am wrong.

PHP is evil.

Javascript, God or gods bless its all over the place little client-side scripting soul, has very few official upgrades/updates/versions. I have been working with Javascript for over 7 years, and I *think* we are still on 1.5 or thereabouts and best of all, I haven't had to worry in 7 years which version I am working with. Ok, so we have AJAX now to complicate the works, but if you are a proud purveyor of the KISS design and development school, as I am, then AJAX is only used as absolutely necessary (unobtrusive AJAX at that).

PHP seems to have frequent version updates. Thanks, Zend, et al. PHP is now on version 5 and PHP folks are looking forward to 6. But my server and most of my clients' servers are still on PHP 4.3.1. And just like the jump from Flash Actionscript 1.0 to 2.0, there is a big difference between PHP 4 and PHP 5, what fucnctions and coded that will work in PHP 5 are not necessarily backwards compatible.

All my current reference books are for PHP 5. Very delicious ideas and scripts but not so delicious trying to implement them on servers with no immediate intentions on upgrading to PHP 5. My server allows one to append PHP 5 in the .htaccess file and call it in the file extension, but this is not a reliable fix. Add security on top of it... Grrr... Grrr... Grr...

It is enough to turn one back to Javascript and Perl on a regular basis...

Must improve my Perl fu.

Hola, sorry to be MIA around here, but I have been working on several freelance gigs and prepping for the launch of Barflies.net 4.0.

It has come to my attention via email from other friends and via a lack of spam (!!!!), that my personal, private earthlink email account is bouncing emails from sendees have been previously approved and whitelisted. I am not even getting any spam in the "Suspect Email" box...

Sorry. I am not sure why this is happening, but it appears to be random and without reason.

If this is you, PLEASE re-email me at my Gmail: blackphoebe@gmail.com.

The design-o-sphere is in a twitter about the Photoshop CS3 Beta icons, but I am here to tell you that icons be darned, the real problems of the beta version is in the interface with one's Wacom tablet.

The tracking between my Wacom's pen tool and the actual mark made on the Photoshop CS3 beta image is faulty at best. I have spent two nights drawing on my Wacom tablet with Photoshop CS3 Beta and making a lot of messes, as 1/4 of the time the mark is made at least 30 pixels from where the pen was previously. A big jump with no lifting of my hand.. I have cross tested on Fireworks 8 and Photoshop CS2 with no troubles. Hopefully, Adobe will have this ironed out before CS3 goes to market.

On the good side of CS3: the glory and heavy lifter of the Photoshop CS3 Beta is the "Quick Selection Tool". Drool. Knock out whole sections of unwanted bits and then use the "Magic Wand Tool" for the fine tuning of your selection. Happy days.

Per usual, I find out about the "Reveal Your Blog Crush" meme one day late, but I am going to post it today anywhoo...

In no particular order:

plasticbag.org - Tom is smart, funny, and sharp. Tom would also qualify as my top "Hot Brain".

little.yellow.different - Most of Ernie's blog posts make me snort whatever liquid I am drinking out of my nose as I hee haw in laughter.

Ben Hammersley - gorgeous photos, great layout, love it.

Mirabilis.ca - I love the mix of archaeology, historical finds and notes, and brainy trivia. Great blog.

[daily dose of imagery] - My favorite photoblog.

JDD - for his mix of photography and software blogging.

Metafilter - How can you not have a crush on the big blue? At times infuriating, at times baffling, at times extraordinary, but never boring.

The Silver Princess' battery was recently recalled by Apple and they kindly sent a new one. The new battery is performing admirably, lasting much longer without a charge than the old, but it has one flaw... it makes a lousy lap warmer. The old battery would warm your lap quite nicely and it would at times get quite hot, which is why I think it was recalled. Maybe it is time to turn on the house's heater...

Databases are funny things. They can be quite robust and tick along nicely with tons of posts and calls for a long time. Or they can crumble and corrupt out of nowhere for no reason. After last summer's database debacle on a private community blog, I will never use Word Press again (sorry to all WP fans, but WP without a database is a website with NO posts whatsoever. Thank God, for Movable Type's static pages). And after last summer's Word Press database meltdown, I religiously backup the databases for my Movable Type installations, even though I also back up the static files every month. Just to be safe.

Oh let the geeky madness begin....

The idea that it could even happen was planted in my brain by a certain Mr. B in August 2004 at the Movable Type 3.1 Party. This last summer I used the browser of my Nokia N80 to login to my website hosting control panel when I was not near my laptop or a internet cafe. This last week I wondered when some enterprising person would develop a Symbian Series 60 SSH client.

Today while reading blogs, I hit the mother load of future geekiness while reading Mike Rowehl's post on "E61 and Putty." Yes, Ladies and Gentlemen, the nice and lovely open source programmers over at SourceForge have developed PuTTY for Symbian OS.

I have installed it on the N80 and have accessed the shell of my server via PuTTY on the mobile, surfed a few directories... oh the things I can do to entertain myself while stuck in traffic... Wahoo...

In the beginning, was the command line. ;oD

Preach it, brother. Or humor it, as the case maybe.

I am still waiting for one of the dev api wiz boys to develop an internets combine harvester that will help me reap all my data into one haystack. yep.

The 2007 Prius is really a computer on wheels with air conditioning, all it needs is an internet connection...

Today, Six Apart held a Movable Type Hack-a-thon for developers, designers and MT enthusiasts to give folks a chance to work on a plugin, design, or feature.

Today, my sister, Allison, and I went to the Apple store at Satan Coast Plaza where she purchased a new 15" MacBook.

We decided that her old (2001) iBook should be given to Christine, but before it could be it needed to have an OS upgrade as it was still running 9.2. The Apple Store assistant manager, Maki Al-Nooh, told me how to upgrade a non-DVD drive old iBook to Mac OS X Tiger.

This is not for the weak of heart, nor folks who scare easily or lack patience. My PowerBook, the Silver Princess, had to become the Master machine to the old iBook. Using a Target (press "T" on start up of the iBook or slave machine) with a firewire connection, I was able to allow the two partitioned drives (Charlemange & Sparta) of the iBook to appear on the desktop of my PowerBook. Insert the OS X disk, reboot, tell it to install on the drive partition of the iBook with the most space (unfortunately, it did not give me the option to wipe the drives), and then let it do its install thing for an hour or so.

Now comes the hard part... It is finished, it reboots, but my desktop is not mine but the new desktop. Don't panic. Take a deep breath. Put the iBook's drives into the trash/eject. Disconnect the firewire. Reboot both.

Don't PANIC. iBook boots to OS 9.2. Silver Princess the PowerBook boots as the new OS X Tiger. Take deep breath.

Tell OS 9.2 to start up as the New OS X Tiger on the Sparta partition. Reboot. All is well, starts up as new OS X. Use the disk erase to take out all the old files and OS 9.2 to give more room to the old school puny 10 gb drive. Happy, all is well with the iBook. Now need to find a USB wifi dongle or an original Airport internal card for it.

Contine to tell oneself not to PANIC about the fact that the PowerBook is still booted as the new drive and not a lick of my stuff is on it's drive. Reboot with no firewire or connection. Pull out battery for further measure. Breath deep. Reboot machine. Ms. Jen's Silver Princess is back with all of its files and programs.

All is well.

Back in June in preparation for starting the Around Ireland project, I bought a Nokia N80 on expansys.ie for goodly sum of money, mostly for the 3 megapixel camera and the wifi on the mobile / cell phone. By and large, the Nokia N80 kicks serious bootay.

The camera is ok, it is slow and I miss shots. My Irish 6680 was better for average photography. But when I do get a photo with the N80 it is very good and print quality. Night photos suck, even with the on board flash. My Nokia 7610 took better night photos. I need to find the flash that I bought for the 7610 and use it with the N80.

The crowning glory of the Nokia N80 is the XHTML/CSS web standards compliant web browswer. Web sites look good, very very good. The N80's browser also has a zoom function so that you can zoom into various bits to read or see better. Very nice.

The Tipping Point feature of the phone is the WLAN / Wifi. Yes, the N80 has wifi. If you are in a space with wifi, the phone sniffs it and you can set the wifi up as an access point and then browse to your hearts content without accessing the pricey data / 3G plan of your mobile /cell phone carrier.

Second tipping point is that you / I, the owner, can update the phone's firmware online. I have already done it and it made a big difference to get the next version of the phone's operating system.

But what all of us N80 and other Nokia wifi mobile device owners are waiting for is Skype for the Symbian Series 60 phones. Skype, where is the love??? If I have access to a good fast wifi connection and Skype for Series 60, then I don't need to worry about using my Cingular minutes do I? I can just use my Skype account to call from a stationary point that is near wifi.

Today Darla Mack blogged about EQO's new IM and Skype software for J2ME capable devices. Whilst waiting for Skype to make a S60 version of their software, I went over to EQO to try their's out.

Here's the scoop: After installing the EQO software to my mobile / cell phone (easy), I was able to IM Lauren on AIM. Simple and straightforward. I went to EQO's website, registered, gave my mobile / cell number and they texted the download link to my phone. I downloaded the file, installed, typed in my EQO login and password, set up my AIM and GoogleTalk, and off I went.

I first tested the EQO with my Cingular / AT&T 3G connection and IM'd Lauren. Then I used the access point for the wifi at my brother's house and had several lines of IM with Lauren. The only limiting factor was the standard phone keyboard of the N80 (not QWERTY). I am not a fast texter nor am I fast with IM'ing on a phone, as I feel compelled to have correct spelling, grammar and punctuation. Silly me.

Then I installed the Skype Plugin. EQO has one install a separate EQO Skype Plugin on one's computer. According to their website, to use Skype on one's mobile / cellphone, one must have one's computer on, be logged into Skype, the EQO plugin on, and EQO app on the phone on. And then you use the phone to make the call. It kind of worked. As you can imagine, it was like calling a radio station when you are right next to the radio, there is a lot of feedback. A lot of echo.

Using the house's wifi as my connection, I first called Erika, I was within 10 feet of my computer, and the Skype call from my mobile was a no go. Then I left the computer in the kitchen and moved to a bedroom and called Lauren, this time we could both hear each other but with much feedback and echo. I could hear Lauren just fine not through the phone, but on the computer speaker in the other room. She could hear me speaking through the phone, but with echo and noise. But we could do it.

This was an exciting test. Thanks to EQO for the software and to Lauren & Erika to being the test guinea pigs. Even if one could only make this work, imperfectly, with a computer in the vacinity and not out on the road, at least it is a step forward to a carrier neutral mobile world.

Last night I went out to dinner at Utopia on First Street in downtown Long Beach with Lauren and two of her work colleagues from the "Ad Agency". Dinner and the company were delightful. Afterwards we moved two doors west to the House of Hayden where I was to meet up friends celebrating Kimm's birthday and more of the "Ad Agency" folk were having a lovely time.

During the course of dinner and cocktails, Lauren and her friends offered many ideas about my job search, told tales of a career in advertising, made recommendations and offers of help to get a job in the advertising agency world. I stated that I preferred to work at a technology company or design firm, but the others argued that things were riding high in ad world and that I could easily get a job. Stories were told of agencies in New York, San Francisco and LA.

I got home and felt off. Not due to the wine, nor the duck dinner, nor the dogs going crazy upon my arrival, but something was off. I woke up at 4am with Belle wanting to play ball (having a small dog dropping a tennis ball on your chest at 4am is hard to ignore). It was in the time that it took to go back to sleep that clarity arrived.

As I took Belle's ball away, put it out of her reach on the mantle piece, and then turned back to my bed, I realized why I am very ambivalent about ad agency work. Yes, it is creative. Yes, it is a great opportunity to work on high profile websites for large companies with large budgets. Yes, it is an opportunity to work with a team of highly intelligent and creative folk. But... but...

My main reason that I want to give up my freelance business and go to work for a tech company or design firm is that I want to participate in the creation of an interface, device, or software that could impact or make easier a small or large part of someone's life. Whoever that someone or someone's life may be.

I have watched several techno-phobic friends and family members who wanted nothing to do with computers or cell phones come alive to the technologies and possibilities when a program or device came out that helped them do a task easier than they could do before, and they went from hating the technology to loving it in less than an hour.

* Blue would never ever touch her email the whole time I worked with her. I would read her email and call her to let her know that she needed look at it. Then I invited her to gmail, she moved, and now she loves email and uses her gmail account daily.

* Alex hated email and really had no use for computers. His cellphone was the bane of his existence, as he hated answering it. Then he got a Sidekick and I watched him in the course of one afternoon go from a playa hater to a Sidekick lover. And he returned his emails from his Sidekick.

* My mom recently threw her cell phone at the dashboard of her car out of frustration, it bounced and shattered her windshield. She could not see the screen nor navigate the interface even with her glasses on. She went over to Verizon and demanded a new phone, they up-sold her to a smart phone, and now she is moblogging. Really. She figured out MMS on her own and I was stunned to find a picture message from her when I was in Ireland, and when I returned, I set her up on Vox. Even more shocking for my luddite parent, she ordered cable broadband this week so that she can spend more time on Vox: writing captions, making comments and otherwise enjoying her new blogging adventure.

* My friend Shawn in Dublin is fully deaf in one ear and has only 25% hearing in the other with a hearing aid. He is a Ph.D student at Trinity and he conducts most of his non-face-to-face communication via text messaging. One can't leave him a voicemail, as he can't hear it. Shawn would really like it if his voicemail could send him a text or email that is the voice message all typed out. Wouldn't we all?

All that said/written, I want to participate in a team that creates a program / software, an interface, website, or device that changes lives even if in a small way that creates joy. I want to make a difference and I heard Vint Cerf when he spoke to the TCD computer science grad students on changing the world, even if in a small way. Some may claim that an ad agency can and does shape the way individuals and cultures behave and thing, I am reluctant to join that world and ambivalent about it. I would rather brave the tech world with all of its flaws. I would love to work in mobile, as most mobile interface and menus are difficult at best and windshield shattering at worst. I would love to help my mom and Shawn be able to communicate to the best of their abilities.

Everyone has a To Do List. Some items are mundane - do laundry, go buy turkey for lunch, etc. Some are time sensitive - pay car insurance, finish design comps for client, etc. And some are long term - I am going to do that someday when I have some time but somehow the time does not come around - clean out the garage, sit down and learn to program in Ruby and Python, etc.

Over a year ago, I bookmarked "Learn to Program, by Chris Pine" and added learning Ruby to my long term to do list.

Ha! I have now installed the Ruby compiler (Thanks Hivelogic for the excellent tutorial!) on Silver Princess the PowerBook and am ready to start with Mr. Pine and Ruby. Wish me well.

After Ruby is Python and after Python is... no, I will wait until I move to clean the garage... ;o)

Ok, I had great 3G/GPRS connection for moblogging all the way up through the Mojave desert and up the 395 until just before Bishop, and it has been crap ever since. There is a Cingular store in town and you would think they would have better connection if they are selling phones and service plans. Grr grr grr.

If I go stand out with a clear line of site of the White Mountains and point my phone at the Whites, then I get some 3G connection, but not enough to send a whole photo up. Grr... Grrr....

I had a great connection in Bishop and Mammoth at Christmas time, Cingular, what did you do to the network in the intervening 10 months?

Photos TBA...

The students of the M.Sc. in Multimedia Systems, Trinity College Dublin are pleased to invite you to view their end-of-year exhibition at Regent House, Trinity College.

*SENSORED MEDIA 2006* is a fascinating, varied and fully interactive exposition of the multifaceted nature of current digital multimedia art and technology. The show is a collaborative creation by the students of
Trinity College Dublin’s Masters of Science in Multimedia Systems featuring computer games, time-lapse photography, artificial life simulators, wireless and internet technologies and sensor-controlled environments.

For more information and directions go to http://www.tcdmultimedia.com

The Exhibition will be open to the public on:
Thursday 28th September 11am-6pm
Friday 29th September 11am-6pm
Saturday 30th September 11am-5pm
Monday 2nd October 11am-6pm
Tuesday 3rd October 11am-3.30pm

****
Ms. Jen says: Come on down and see our show!

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

Pre-Party, d.Construct 2006, Brighton, UK

First off, go check out Richard Stephenson's Map Maker application that he has been working on all summer. As one of the alpha/beta testers, I have to say that the Donkey Magic Map Maker app really came in handy for Google Map coordinates when my GPS device was off getting a message, as I could put in the coordinates that the dyslexic* GPS device gave me and then use Rich's application to find where it really was and then generate the correct coordinates. Thanks Rich!

If you are going to the Carson Web Apps Summit in San Francisco this month, enjoy. I went to the London summit in Feb. 2006 and it was very good.

As for me, I leave in about 15 mins to go attend d.Construct 2006 in Brighton, UK, tomorrow. Off to web dev land I go...

* The Garmin Rino 530 is a singing, radio, dancing, chatting, mapping, geo-caching, practically will do your laundry for you overkill GPS device made for a man's hand**, but funnily enough it is off by 50 miles east to the real map coordinate about 35% of the time. My brother first calibrated it in Calif, I re-calibrated it in Dublin to no avail. Quirky.

** Ok, so why are so many handheld tech devices made for really big paws? Hello people, can we get a small, medium and large?

Our MSCMM group project is in the last 5 days of "content" collection and Vodafone's MMS system has been spotty for 2 weeks down and down altogether for whole days at a time. This is bad for a moblogging project that is using MMSs to send photos and text to a server....

((AGH!!!!))

Luckily, MMS was working when Shonagh and I did our whimiscal day road trip, jokingly entitled Around Lough Neagh, on Thursday from Dublin to Northern Ireland that included stops in Tyrone, Derry, and Antrim, and drive by photos of Armagh and Down. It was mostly cloudy with peeps of sun that day.

Today I am off to Connaught in the West to see Roscommon, Leitrim, and hopefully Sligo and Mayo. It is supposed to rain all day today. Tomorrow is Waterford and (hopefully) a bit of Limerick. Early next week is County Cork.

By the time I get on the plane to go to d.construct 2006 next Thursday, I will have travelled to and moblogged all 32 counties on the island or Ireland since June.

Hi, My name is Jenifer, I am from the Los Angeles area and I love moblogging and driving.

(( Friends, could you please go take a screen shot of the front page of Around Ireland and email me the jpg of the front page from your computer's point of view? Please tell me the browser and OS. I had the CSS working up until the installation of our moblogging script and style switcher script on Thursday. The front page CSS now is all jacked up and I need to see how bad it looks on your machine. The photo and the Google map are supposed to be side by side. Thanks a bunch!))

Yes, yes, yes, yes... The intensity of my 12 month Master's degree program at Trinity has overwhelmed me to the point where I have yet to write a review of SXSWi 2006 and BlogHer 2006.

Here are the Ultra-Super-Duper-Short versions:

SXSW Interactive 2006 : Ms. Jen spent most of the 4 weeks before SXSW in a stupor of flu induced fever and coughing, luckily for me the 90-something-degree heat knocked it out of me by the first day of SXSW. Unluckily for me, between the reminents of being sick for a month and jet lag, SXSW passed in a beautiful foggy haze, and not of the alcoholic variety either.

What do I remember: hanging out with lovely friends, LEI and the ZenMaster meeting, wine parties in the hotel room, Jeffrey Veen kicking serious panel butt, missing other panels that kicked serious butt (sorry Lynn, George & Jason! I suck, you rock.). Taking lots of photos, missing Kick! dreadfully (Anil come to 2007, bring Kick! back), talking to friends far and wide, and convincing folk to take my Thesis mobile survey.

BlogHer 2006: Ms. Jen spent most of the 4 weeks before BlogHer in a stupor of Master's Project induced planning, development and implementation. Luckily for me, I had a 7 day holiday to California to alleviate any Project induced stress. Unluckily for me, between all the Project stress, the reappearance of IBS and Evil Fire Tummy, as well as jet lag, BlogHer 2006 passed in a beautiful foggy haze, and not of the alcoholic variety either.

What I do remember: Scruffy McDoglet going crazy whilst greeting me at LAX, driving up with Megan, LEI, and Erika to BlogHer, Julie Wanda & Tink joining us for the SoCal Represents at BlogHer 2006 weekend, the Speaker pre-party, a trip to Whole Foods to get supplies for a wine & cheese party, missing Elise speak (sorry, Elise rocks, I suck.), getting to hang out with Lynn & George (Jason, where were you????), the Flickr Meetup, multiple dinners at Sushi Maru in San Jose's Japantown, Maggie Mason's expert panel moderation, and the Red Caterpillar from The Sky during my panel, and a whirl of meeting folk.

What I did not do I either SXSW or BlogHer this year and I regret: getting to more panels that would challenge my world or inspire me and making more of an effort to meet lots of new folk. At both conferences, it was all I could do to just get there and be mildly present. Next year, I want to be fully present and engaged in more than fighting jet lab and sickness/stress.

My Master's degree program finishes on Oct. 3rd, 2006 and I fly home to SoCal four days later, so hopefully by next March and July I will be all rested up and in full possession of my wits and bounce...

In case you have been watching the parade of mobile photos scroll through this site and scratched your head wonder, "What is that Ms. Jen up to?"

For the completion of my master's degree at Trinity College in the MSCMM program, we have to do a summer group project that is 50% of the total course marks. Some groups are creating games or virtual realities, others are working on photo narrative, and my group is doing a mobile documentation project of Ireland.

By Sept. 7th, I and my fellow(ess) group members are trying to take mobile photos or video in each of the 32 counties on the island of Ireland.

Yesterday, I traveled down the road, the N81, that starts a block from me in Dublin to its end south of Tullow in County Carlow / Wexford border. I got to see one dolmen, one ruined gothic abbey, 29 ancient standing stones on an earthen henge, walk through a recently mowed field to see a unique grooved standing stone, meet a nice horse and watch a river overflow its banks.

Today, I am off to County Tyrone in Northern Ireland to visit the Ulster American Folk Park.

As the Lonely Planet Ireland (6th ed) guide book says:

In the 18th and 19th centuries thousands of Ulster people left their homes to forge a new life across the Atlantic; 200,000 emigrated in the 18th century alone. Their story is told here at one of Ireland's best museums the Ulster American Folk Park...

The Exhibition Hall presents many of the close connections between Ulster and the USA - the American Declaration of Independence was signed by several Ulstermen - but the real appeal of the folk part is the outdoor museum, whose 'living history' exhibits include a forge, a weaver's cottage, a Presbyterian meeting house, a schoolhouse, a log cabin, a 19th-century Ulster street and a street from western Pennsylvania...

And off I go...

As a part of the incremental redesign of this website, I had turned non-TypeKey authenticated commenting back on a couple of months ago, although those comments were held for moderation.

My. What a mistake that was. Due to the incredible amount of ringtone spam that this Movable Type installation was receiving amongst other comment spam detritus that was awaiting my approval and causing good comments to go into the junk folder and be lost forever, I have gone back to TypeKey authentication only.

Sorry to folks who really would like to actually comment on a post rather than spam me and the world, but you have to register.

After six weeks of work and documentation, my project group is almost ready to launch our Ireland Mobile Documentation webiste. Almost. Check this space soon for the URL.

We have been working non-stop for weeks trying to get a working system of Nokia mobile phones with Vodafone.ie mobile service with Movable Type weblog. Unfortunately, there have been a few set backs but we are marching on.

I am still a bit jet lagged from my trip to California and BlogHer '06 last week, on top of going out and about Ireland to take photos and videos as well as struggling with MT plugins and css. I love the Movable Type development community, but the plugin documentation is sparse and spotty, or for folks who are programmers and not designers/installers, only to add ontop of a new release of MT 3.3, thus trouble for plugin compatibility with the installation. Let's not even talk about the 1543 lines of frustrating css, I have been keeping quiet for a year about the 3.2/3.3 css, but I hate it. Hello, KISS folks, KISS. Not the rock band, but Keep it Simple...

Why not use WordPress? Free, good community, almost plug and play... Well, I have a whole draft post waiting to be finished on why WordPress needs to be severely spanked and not in a pleasurable way, either. Let's just say, if you by accident delete the database running MT, you still have the static html archive files and posts. All of them. If you delete WordPress, you are FUCKED UNTO THE LORD... (thanks, Annie for the expression)... It is ALL GONE. All of it. Every single little bit. F*^king php.

Note to self, do not delete databases when very tired, hungry and jet lagged. Just say no.

Further note to self, do not ever use WordPress again until there is a back up of all php pages and database as well as an export of all posts function. 'Nuff said.

I got off the plane last Thursday, rented a car, and then headed off to the hinterlands with Simon (Sat.), Denise (Sun.), and Eoin (Mon.). Due to Vodafone's server being down most of the weekend, I was unable to moblog most of what I saw and explored. But I had a grand time and got to see at least a quarter of Ireland in 3 days, 761 miles, and over 1,000 kilometers.

I am now exhausted and want to go to bed. So, I shall. Tomorrow, hopefully we will have the final piece of the development/programming puzzle solved and I will have a link for you all to see 6 weeks worth of photos and videos of Ireland.

Thurs 07.27.06 - Lynne and I at the BlogHer 2006 panelist and blogger party.

I am all packed to leave tomorrow morning for BlogHer. I will be flying from Dublin to LA and then driving up with Lauren, Erika, and Megan to San Jose for BlogHer, with Julie Wanda and Tink joining us later Thursday evening. I am very excited to go home to Calif for a week, to hang out with friends, see Scruffy, and go to BlogHer.

Last year's inaugural BlogHer was a one day blogging love-in and towards the end - a festival. This year is two days. In two days, how much trouble can we get into? Lots.

I will be speaking on Day Two at 3:30pm with Liz Perry and Mrs. Kennedy on "Is Your Blog a Gallery or a Canvas?"

Watch this space for photos and text for the plane trip, the road trip, and the blog trip.

On another note, last friday, I was in the MSCMM computer lab when Trinity College Computer Science Dept. networking / help wiz, Geraldine "Mary" Loftus, who came in to install some software on our machines. We got talking about BlogHer and Geraldine's blog research.

Geraldine is finishing up her Master's degree at DCU in Internet Systems and just submitted her master's thesis on Irish Blog Research. Blogs have not really taken off in Ireland and Geraldine wanted to figure out why. She also wanted to come to BlogHer this year, but it didn't work out given it was so close to her submission date. Check out Geraldine's blog and her research.

We both decided that someone, not us, needs to do research on why women are at least 50% or more of bloggers worldwide but continue to rate their IT skills as lower than men of similiar skills...

Photo taken on Sun. July 16, 2006 with a Nokia N80 camera phone.

Dave & Alexander from Vodadone Ireland's MMS group came to conduct a marketing survey on a group of the MSCMM students.

Vinod Kholsa presents Biofuels: Think Outside the Barrel at Google's EngEDU:

Mon 07.10.06 - For our MSCMM summer project we get assigned to one computer and get admin access, my first act was to install Lavasoft's Ad-Aware and run a scan. At final count there were 863 "critical objects" on the machine assigned to me. Yikes! Dirty bird.

Today Jasper and I were talking about music and I played him a few videos on the Epitaph.com site, of which he liked "Dead American" by Lars Frederiksen and the Bastards.

I realized that I miss a bunch of my cds that are boxed up in my brother's garage, and due to time constraints last September, I did not have time to save each CD I love to my hard drive. Add on to that having to wipe the drive of my Dell Inspiron 8200 once or twice and back up stuff and then add The Silver Princess (12" Mac Powerbook) into my life, what music I had backed up doesn't necessarily play or even be recognized between computers let alone on my Nokia.

Right now my music is limited to Cheap Trick, White Stripes, Throw Rag, The Clash, and Loretta Lynn. Not a bad five-some, but limited. Now I want Lars, the Dropkicks, the Stumbleweeds, and many others. Thus my trip to iTunes this evening.

Ok, we won't talk about the fact that quite a bit of the music I look for is not on iTunes, but let's talk about I did find Lars Frederiksen's first CD, wanted to buy it, and Irish iTunes would not let me.

Yes folks, a large capitalist company would NOT let spend my money on them. Since my IP address is Irish, my credit card and address must also be Irish or I can't buy.

What the F*ck?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!

Right now Ireland has over 400,000 non-natives living in the Republic of Ireland and I imagine that many of them are like me, folks with bank accounts, permanent addresses and credit cards in non-Irish banks.

Hello, Apple, WAKEY UP-EY!!!!

Do you want my money or not? Sorry my bank is in California. Sorry my permanent banking address is in California. Sorry I am in Dublin. Hello do you want my money or not?

What the F*ck?!?!?!?!?!??!?!?!??!

Sorry, Lars, I really do want to support you and the nice folk at Hellcat Records rather than trade illegal files, but Apple won't let me.

My project team and I are currently researching the Google Map API vs. the Yahoo Map API for our summer mobile adventure. I have been looking at sites using the map APIs in various ways. To date, the most entertaining is HousingMaps.

Now how can a mash up Craiglist with the Google Map API be so fun and in some cases laugh out loud funny? Go to NYC or SF and start running searches on high end real estate. The map kindly delivers photos and clickable links for the real estate in question and then you get to laugh at the incredibly ugly housing that is be foisted off onto the overachievers of America at outrageous prices with really awful copywriting as cooked up by Coldwell Platinum or some other real estate agent.

A few weeks ago, Charlie let me know that my images were not coming through on my xml templates. I have now updated my RSS to 2.0 and my Atom template.

Please let me know if you are able to get all the feed you desire from Black Phoebe :: Ms. Jen. Are the images coming through to your feed reader? Please let me know in the comments or via email (blackphoebe at gmail dot com).

I use the Sage extension for Firefox and it renders all the pages for me in the full design, so I am not just seeing text.

Thanks a big bunch! ;o)

Update: I tested the new feeds on several rss feed readers and the photos are coming through. If they are not on your reeder, please email me or comment below.

Ok, whether you are a theist or not, I am voting for the developers of AdBlock Plus for sainthood. I know I am late to jump on this bandwagon, but today I installed the AdBlock Plus extension onto my Firefox and blocked a few common image / swf based advertisting servers.

Now rather than nearly having a migraine triggered by flashing ads, three of my daily visited sites are now peaceful and have a much better content to white space balance.

Given that I don't mind text ads, I did not block any of the text ad servers. I understand that folks need to be able to pay for their servers and the like, but please choose ads servers that are not an insult to the eye and / or that fit with the design of the site (like text ads...).

Yes, yes, I know, my minimalist streak is rearing its head... Images should be content not assault.

From Isaac Asimov's I, Robot:

Three Laws of Robotics:
1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.

3. A robot must protect its own existence, as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Tue 05.16.06 - 59 days after I first reported my internet outage in my room to Trinity College's IS Services networking folks, I now have a working ethernet. Thanks to Colm from Cresent for the speedy repair this morning.

ISServices: 59 days from report to repair?!? Y'all are makin' Aesop's Tortoise look like he is traveling the speed of light...

In March, I had a chat with a friend who I had encouraged to start blogging and set up her blog for her. We talked about numbers. Yes, hits. Unique visitors. The if you show me yours, I will show you mine, weblog hits chat.

I came out with the smaller numbers, even though I had been at it for three times as long. Her assessment was that I didn't blog about sex so my numbers peaked with my Nokia Lifeblog and Photo Friday referrals. Don't forget the random Google/MSN/Yahoo searches (cute+toes), as well as family and friends who actually read this blog regularly.

It was keen moment of junior high locker room shower humiliation. The moment only lasted that and then it was over. I would rather have regular readers who enjoy my photos and writing than the current crop of foot fetishers that are finding my sister and I's toes on Google (Thanks for coming, FF folk, but it was my sister's birthday and I treated her to a pedicure. Nothing more.).

Thanks to Ted at Dogster.com for putting Freckles up as Dog of the Day for May 11, 2006. Dogster rocks.

I just finished my taxes. And it was EVIL.

Not because I owe the IRS lots of dough, I don't. Because I chose to take a larger than necessary withholding when teaching last spring, I had a good padding of paid taxes with the IRS. I was expecting to owe a bit, instead I am getting a bit back. Yeah.

EVIL... because I waited until April 15th to do my taxes? No. I knew with coursework, classes, SXSW, and my thesis that I would not get to my taxes until this weekend.

EVIL because Turbo Tax 2005 has a bad, bad, bad user interface.

I have always liked doing my own taxes, it fits well with my DIY ethic and my love for numbers. I first used TurboTax for my 1998 taxes and have eFiled ever since. The glory years of TurboTax's user interface were 2001 - 2003, they had a nice little running menu that kept you informed of exactly where you were, down to the minute line of your tax form as the program helped you figure out what was needed on this screen. There were nice forward and back buttons. And most importantly, for a Freelance Web Designer, it informed you what you had said last year and kept you honest for this year.

Good navigation makes for happy tax filing. A smart program that can keep track of previous files is even better.

Last year's TurboTax 2004 was not so nice, but I assumed it was because I was cheap and I didn't purchase the Premier version. I tried my best, it worked out even though I had to go back a few times through a bad navigation interface to make sure I had entered the correct values and the return was truthful to all the receipts I had in the event of an audit. I forwarded it on to a tax accountant friend who told me that I was being too truthful and needed to pad a bit, as I did not have enough expenses. I told her that I was only listing what I had receipts for. All was well

This year I purchased TurboTax 2005 Premier to guard against last year's frustrations with bad user interface and navigation. Guess what I got for my extra $30? Even worse navigation and interface!

Yes, TurboTax 2005 has a more streamlined navigation that is very hard to move back and forward through your return. The worst was the navigation through the Schedule C for businesses, and even more troublesome was this year's business automobile section.

In previous year's versions of TurboTax, there was always a "Recalculate" button if you had jumped through the linear order of the navigation to fix or change a number. 2005 does not have the recalculate button and it was frustrating as I was trying to get in all of my business expenses, car expenses, and utilities. l kept having to resave and restart the program.

Normally, from start to finish, I can get my taxes done in less than 5 hours, today it took over 9 hours. Agh!

Intuit, you were not so intuitive this year. Please, get a new UI designer before the release of TurboTax2006.

I keep tripping down the "dangers of fact checking" side road. I write a line or two or paragraph or so in the lovely little thesis and then I need to check a Fact. Yes, make sure it is True and that I have Back Up for it, not just the swell of years of weblog reading and SXSW panels confusing the Facts. Yes.

So, I check a fact. Go the website, I remember reading it on. Google the fact. Google the site and approximate month I remember reading it.

Danger! Danger! Danger!

Do I then quickly note the fact and URL and go back to writing.... No. I find myself 30 - 45 minutes later delighting in George's archives from 2003 or Adam G's from 2002, how delightful, how interesting, more links, more sites. I want to read more.

Snap out of it! Go back to writing. Tomorrow is the big day.

Writing that darned thesis type thing. Until I hand it over to the printer later this week, I will be more than a bit absent from blogging and email and calls. Sorry.

I have decided that I need voice recognition software that works... Any recommendations?

Not for writing this week but for the future. I am good at verbal analysis but when I see a blank word doc, my brain gets stage fright and all the things I was thinking flee far far away. If I could just talk to my computer....

Thu 03/02/2006 20:31 - This evening I had an opportunity to go hear TCP/IP co-creator, chairman of ICANN, JPL/NASA Mars Deep Space Network, and Google Evangelist speak at the Google Ireland cafeteria. Dr. Vinton Cerf spoke on the history and future of the Internet Protocol, as well as answering a wide variety of questions. It was a delight.

Fri 02/24/2006 16:11 - Our Interactive Narrative group, Edel & Vanessa parsing William Carlos Williams' "The Act".

The Act

There were the roses, in the rain.
Don't cut them, I pleaded.
They won't last, she said.
But they're so beautiful
where they are.
Agh, we were all beautiful once, she said,
and cut them and gave them to me
in my hand.

I am currently in London for what I am calling "Geek Week in London." On Wed, I went to the Carson "Future of Web Apps" Summit, yesterday I trotted around London with a bunch of friends from SXSWi, and today is clearleft's "AJAX Workshop" with Jeremy Keith. I will have reviews of both events by Monday, I promise.

Here are two situations that after they happened, I laughed at myself:

1) Talking to someone at the pub after "Future of Web Apps", who asked how long I would be in Dublin for graduate school, frightening myself I replied,
"var i = months_left_in_Ireland;
for (i=0, i<8; i++);"

The person said, "Oh, so you are done in October?"
Me, beaming, "Yes!"

2) The discussion that got started on the boat ride on the Thames River on what Flickr tags should be used for our big day of touring London with all of us snapping lots of photos. Tossed around keithTour, hoponhopoff, clearleftTour, etc. I used keithTour and clearleft.

If any of the other touring/blogging/flickr photographers amongst our group have any other suggestions, email me.

Fri. 02.10.06 - At clearleft's AJAX workshop given by Jeremy Keith.

Fri. 02.10.06 - At clearleft's AJAX workshop given by Jeremy Keith.

Fri. 02.10.06 - At clearleft's AJAX workshop given by Jeremy Keith.

I leave for 6 days in London today. My first excursion off the Irish island to the other destinations in Europa, as going to California for Christmas doesn't count. Wahoo!

Tomorrow, I am going to the "Future of Web Applications" Summit. And on Friday to Jeremy's AJAX workshop. The rest of the trip is up for grabs and I will most likely continue my 2002 walking tour / search for all things London pre-1066.

From the documentation and photos of previous events by both Carson, Clear Left & @Media, it appears that web events in the UK are mostly all male affairs... hmm... this should be interesting. ;oD

And per-usual, I will be one of the few designer types not adhering to the cult of Mac, but instead toting along my 3 year old, way heavier than yours, Dell Inspiron. May be time to upgrade to a smaller laptop.

Regardless, London, masala dosas*, and the musuems, here I come!

*This leads me to the one great defect of Dublin: there are tons of Indian restaurants but not a single one of them serves dosas or idlys.

Besides the perfection of riding an hour plus out to Kildare with the top down in 7 degree C (45 degree F) gray, foggy weather in a convertible all wrapped up in hats, jackets and mittens, today is a perfectly even day. It is February 4th of 2006 - 02.04.06.

If you account days the European way, then you will have to wait until April 2nd, 2006 to have a perfectly even day.

I had it today and it was lovely.

... my yearly post on St. Brigid's Day or Groundhog Day... but this year I will go to St. Brigid's holy well in Kildare tomorrow to check it out. I will post photos here, if Vodafone lets me.

In the meantime, I have been reading Metafilter for years and tried to become a member since 2003, but only got let in last year. I have made a few comments here and there, but today I lept out into the swamp of MeFi alligators and made my Very First Post.

p.s. My classmate, Vicky, encouraged me to resurrect my LiveJournal.

p.p.s. I have started a new website. Currently it is a school work site, but over the next few months it will evolve into my design, photography, and client work portfolio site.

p.p.s.s. St. B. has favored the fam as today is WTLSLD!!!!

p.p.p.s.s. Furthermore, I am listening to Cheap Trick's Live at Budakan and dating myself. Wahoo!

Ok, one of the wealthiest corporations on the planet owns MySpace.com, Rupert Murdoch's Media Corp, can they not buy a few more servers and a bit more broadband pipe to run the fuckin' website for whose users' data they are harvesting?

Really! If you are going to exploit the user, at least give us a nice, relatively fast experience...

How did you spend your weekend? I spent mine re-installing Windows XP. Again. And Again. And Again. And Again. If it weren't for so much recent investment in Photoshop and Macromedia, I would throw Windows into the bin and just use Ubuntu Linux.

AAAAGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Tues 11.29.05 - The work continues on my laptop.

Wed 11.16.05 - Steve McCormack of WildWave came to speak at our course today.

No, not the title to my zombie movie due in March 2006, but Lauren's new Virtual Gallery of Hot Brains, riffing off of Mena's Wall O' Brains. So, far Lauren has blogged about Ira Glass and Jon Stewart.

Now, I would love to join this blog thread, but the two hot brains that come to mind quickly are my two fave hot web/computer crushes. And since I know both men in person, one in Calif and one in Dublin, I am not going to out myself here. All my other fave hot computer/creative brains are married men.

Lauren, are we allowed to cite hot married brains?

Update: Ok, Mena is right. This is one hot brain. I did love Plastic.com....

When I woke up less than an hour ago, I decided to see if I could set up my Linux network connection to the school's network point in my room all by myself. Here I am online. It took less than a minute. A stark contrast to the 2 hours plus that it took to network Windows XP plus all of the draconian stinger/logging/follow me crap that we had to install on our machines to get access to the ethernet point in housing.

Now I am free! Free with Linux. Tonight I shall reinstall the Windows side of the dual boot so that I may have a clean install and sweep out nearly 3 years of built up gunk. Think of it as Fall Computer Cleaning.

I also installed Sage this morning and all my blog feeds are working. Best yet, I just discovered that my fave cartoon has an XML feed.

Today I did something, with help, that I have been meaning to do since March 2003 when I partitioned the hard drive of my brand new Dell Inspiron 8200. My laptop is now a dual boot Linux / Windows machine. Yeah!

I have been wanting to explore Linux and the possibilities of Open Source Software as a complete alternative to MicroSquash for sometime now. Now I am at the mid-point with a foot in both camps.

A big giant thanks to our Intro to Programming Prof/Lecturer Glenn Strong for taking two hours out of his time this evening to help me with the install of Ubuntu Linux to my laptop. Thanks, Glenn.

Now to explore...

Thurs. 11.03.05 - How to survive lab in the afternoon.... look at Flickr photos while listening to Throw Rag while attempting to get one's javascript only loop for 6 wrong tries.

After an hour and a half phone call last night with Dell's tech call center in India last night, Black Phoebe the laptop will be going off on Tuesday via DHL to Dell's Irish Computer Spa for a week of treatments.

If it is a fried motherboard, Dell covers it. If it is from the fall my laptop took 5 weeks ago, I pay for it. Regardless, in about two weeks all will be well.

Now I am off to Vodafone to find out why after I have configured all the GPRS stuff correctly, why my phone will not send or receive any emails. Hopefully, within the hour or so, I will be able to moblog to this space. Cross your fingers... otherwise, I have a few photos on my Sixapart thumb drive that I can post here...

Not this website, but my laptop has gone into arrest. It will not start. Nope. No go. I tried everyway. Hopefully it is not dead, but only in a coma. I need help.

Ever since SXSW 2005, my laptop has had a new quirk that even when it is plugged into the wall electrical socket it will not start unless the battery is charged. I have two batteries and both are 2.5 years old with more recharges than their life expectancy. I ordered a new Dell battery, but it has not arrived yet. I *hope* that will solve the problem.

If not... then cry. After crying, I will need to find someone in Dublin who can help me backup the contents of my hard drive to my external hard drive before I send it off to Dell for repairs. I did my last full back up right before Erika's wedding and what I want to really retrieve are the wedding photos, new client work, and a few emails. I brought all of my program cds with me in anticpation of needing them in the event of a crash but it is my photos and other files that I want most.

Any referrals would be lovely.

Sun 07.31.05 - BlogHer - Leaving the Bay Area.

Sun. 07.31.05 - BlogHer - Lauren demonstates how to use Picachu's analogue message board.

Sun 07.31.05 - Blogher - We decided to drive widdershins around the Infinite Loop before driving home to SoCal.

Sat 07.30.05 - BlogHer - Jen, Lauren, & Niall looking at Niall's photos of BlogHer on Flickr. Meta-BlogHer.

Sat 07.30.05 - BlogHer - At the RSS Session.

Sat 07.30.05 - BlogHer - The Moblog Panel with Barb & Debi.

Sat 07.30.05 - BlogHer - Anina.

Sat 07.30.05 - BlogHer - Yet another TV guy.

Sat 07.30.05 - BlogHer - The Mo-Pho-Blogging meet up.

Sat 07.30.05 - At BlogHer. Debi Jones and her fabulous Nokia N90.

Sat 07.30.05 - at the first session of BlogHer.

Sat 07.29.05 - BlogHer - It is way too early to see a TV crew.

Fri 07.29.05 - Staged of course...

Fri 07.29.05 - Matt & Jelly.

Fri 07.29.05 - The remains of dinner.

Fri 07.29.05 - Jay Rosen.

Erika, Lauren and I are now in our hotel room at the Westin Santa Clara having a small settling down before the Friday night kickoff dinner at Andiamo Cafe. I am very tired but excited for tomorrow's BlogHer.

So, far the BEST PART of the Whole Event So Far was Lauren's Groupie Moment. I was quite embarrassed in the moment, but laughed hard up in the hotel room.

The Flickr BlogHer Tag group has already commenced.

Fri 07.29.05 - BlogHer -Walking up to the Westin, the "boycotters" were so obnoxious we didn't even want to find out what they were boycotting.

Fri 07.29.05 - Stopping at a fruit stand outside of Gilroy.

Fri 07.29.05 - I like that the tomatoes get to ride to the packing plant in an open air truck.

Fri 07.29.05 - ... to BlogHer.

TidBits from a VERY hot Friday whilst sitting at the door at Alex's...

It is a good thing that my brother told me to keep the Silver Pony until I depart as 5pm found the temperature at 96 F and found me driving around Orange, Santa Ana, and Tustin enjoying the air conditioning. Ok, I am a Super-Urban Wimp! I admit it.

1) I like Movable Type 3.2 beta. I do. My only problem / disappointment so far is the fact that I am unable to post my photos from my Nokia 7610 here via Flickr. Due to the fact that my phone's version of LifeBlog does not play well with MT (only TypePad), I have to email my photos and text to Flickr and then Flickr posts the photos to my MT install. Since 3.2, no go. Sad. This blog is now text heavy.

2) I wish Amazon would set up their site's user interface in a way that the login for regular customers was easy to find! It is so frustrating to hunt and peck for the small type on sub-pages. Hello! Hello, Amazon, wake up, let me login with a nice text box up in the nav bar on EVERY page. Hello, wake up!

3) I have been thinking about Gratitude. PTL and pass the...
As people have found about my getting into Trinity College Dublin for grad school, they have been very excited. I have moved past excited and into "Advanced Planning" mode. My head is : Where am I going to live? How much is it all going to cost? If I live on campus, what should I bring? If I live in an apartment, UGH, how will I get important stuff over to Ireland or how to afford new stuff? etc. etc. etc. etc.

How do I live in thankfulness as I move into practical / pragmatic mode? I have struggled for many years trying to realize my dreams and the practical mode is my way of keeping my dreams and hopes from being severely trampled on or thrown out altogether. I am trying to live in gratitude while trying to figure out my plane flights, money, and living situation.

In 1994, my friend Judy Dodgen gave me a weekly prayer workshop book and the first few weeks addressed how to be grateful amongst bad times. Now my question is how to have internal (& external) heart felt thankfulness in a time of plenty. Harder than I imagined after living in emotional survival mode for the last few years.

4) Ok, blogosphere, anyone out there attended Trinity College Dublin or the like in Ireland and can explain the academic system, esp. the examinations? I really want to go to SXSW 2006i, but it appears to fall on the weekend and start of the week of examinations. Please do tell...

Happy Friday! Tonight is Rapid Fire (FiiiiiiRE!) at Alex's and Mikey's birthday celebration. Come on down and celebrate with us.

The Tid Bits:

1) Some folks do binge drinking or scarf down quarts of Tom & Jerry's ice cream, not me. Me, I have pea binges and want to run around singing "Pease porridge...". Every so often I have a day of Pea-a-palooza. I eat peas at every meal. Today is one of those days. I had leftover pea and pancetta risotto for breakfast (heavy on the peas), I had Peas & Potatoes (aloo muttar?) from India Sweet & Spices for lunch, and I have a bag of Trader Joe's Petite Peas in the freezer, so what should I make pea-ful for dinner?

2) Cell / mobile phones have been in the news this last week after a study conducted by insurance companies concluded that hands free cell phone talking is just as distracting and dangerous to driving as holding the cell up to your ear.

From the LA Times article:

A study of cellphone use by motorists suggests that they aren't any better off using a headset in the car than holding the phone to their ear: They're still four times more likely to end up in a crash and injured than if they weren't using the phone.

The survey, released Monday by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said that using mobile phones while driving was just as dangerous whether they're chatting through a headset or holding on to the handset.

The statistical analysis, which compared phone records with the times of acci