This is a short post to let you all know how much I love GoGo Inflight Wifi. It should be on every flight, esp. international ones.

Yes, I am blogging, tweeting, and reading on the web while sitting in seat 24A. Yay!

Thank you, GoGo Inflight!

Dear Nokia,

As a 12 year vet of SXSW, here are my tips and tricks for a great SXSW experience, particularly my food recommendations.

Don't miss the Kickball game at Palm Park on Sat. March 13, 2010 at 10:30. More info at http://www.dashes.com/kick

While I already have my SXSW Interactive Badge & plane flight, I would love to win a white Nokia N86 to take lots of great photos & video at SXSW (see min 3:30 to end of video).

Less than a week away folks! It will be fun! ;o)

Ms. Jen

My one big/small complaint about Google App Engine has been the documentation, as for a long time it was very sparse and even more very abstract. The nice folk at Google App Engine have worked to beef up the documentation and I greatly appreciate it, but most of the code examples are either still too abstract or too simple.

Now that I am many python files into a complex application, I have been trying to refactor some of the code to reflect a one-to-many relationship database relationship and my four hour frustration today was that the example code given for database/datastore model relationships in the Google App Engine Python docs works in the interactive python console but when one translates it to one's models the code does not work.

It has been my experience all the way along that the code examples in the docs are either very basic and don't reflect dynamic datastore usage or that they are very abstract. I have found that it is good to read the docs for the theory of how it should work and then go look at an example of actual working production code from the samples to see how it really works and then spend multiple hours to make the theory work to your code based on how the implementation of the theory worked for someone else.

My experience in PHP is that the code works as advertised. My biggest frustration(s) with PHP is the (1) danged punctuation ({;}); plus a few more ;;;;, which leads to debugging purgatory, and (2) that in reading the various Php.net docs and the blogs out there one has no real idea what really are best practices in PHP right now as there is so much cruft code, old code, and competing code examples on the net.

Python is so beautiful and clean without the punctuation nightmares of PHP, but it is so difficult to transliterate abstracted Python code examples for Google App Engine's webapp & datastore written by ethereal Python engineer ninjas and then try to figure out how to make it work for those of us who have not ascended to the level of deity but still have our feet on the ground while we scratch our heads or pull out hair in frustration in our attempts to 'correctly' solve problems rather than hack away.

((O.o))

Ladies and Gentlemen,

I hereby declare that I had a failure, more like a forget-ture, in February to label any vaguely mobile | web dev | design posts as Project52 and develop them into articles.

So Sorry. It has a been a busy month for work & various family bits, so I am begging your forgiveness.

I shall start back up again before the end of this week, which would/should/shall be Week 8 by Thursday.

Hold me to it.

Photo of a DimeStorePretty.com hair pin purchased on Etsy taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900 on 12.01.09.

If you know me, you know that I really don't like jewelry at all, but I do like a good sparkly hair pin. Forget a diamond ring, or the necklace, or the diamond tennis bracelet, but give me a few lovely vintage rhinestone hair pins and I am very happy.

All that said, recently, per my usual, I have composed whole paragraphs of wonderful, amazing, world alerting blog posts in my head though I am nowhere near a computer. Once I get to a computer I have completely forgotten what I wanted to write about.

Yeah, yeah, yeah... I could talk into my mobile and record my thoughts as I compose them. I could text myself the ideas as I have them. I could email them to this blog. YES, I KNOW.

But it doesn't happen.

If the business dudes in their suits and BMWs get to wander about like crazy people, gesticulating wildly with their hands, while talking loudly into their bluetooth headsets, can someone please invent a super cute 1940s rhinestone wifi to my blog hair pin so that I can walk around or drive around town talking to myself as it gets transmitted to my blog?

Please?

After months of going going going, it has all caught up with me this week and I am exhausted in a bad way. I am off to bed soon. Yes, shocker, before midnight.

But I have a few posts I would like to write and by writing them now it will remind me to do so in the next few days:

1) Voice Mail Transcriptions: Spinvox vs. Ribbit vs. Google Voice

My quote for the week in an email: "I have had Google Voice for months now. The transcriptions suck pustulated monkey butt. "

2) My Final Final Wrap up to the Nokia Booklet 3G. Somehow I was prescient in all my moaning about the evils of Windows 7 Starter and how I wished wished hoped against hope that Nokia would partner with a linux distro to put a proper OS on the Booklet, and on Monday Morning, Feb 15, 2010, OPK & Intel answered my prayers to the mobile deities: MeeGo.

3) A few assumes that there will be at least three things in my list but I have forgotten the third due to tiredness, so instead I will delight you with this link from the New York Times on how the seafaring history of humans has been pushed back another 60,000+ years if not more:

On Crete, New Evidence of Very Ancient Mariners

Go read it.

Plus a small lament:
Oh, Google App Engine, why oh why did you wait until only the last few weeks to get semi-decent docs? Oh the agony you could have spared by putting those up months ago.

Contrary to all of the uproar this past week, I like Google Buzz, but with a reservation or two.

I like that Buzz is a version of Jaiku, which I love love love, that is attached to my Gmail & Latitude on my mobile phone. I like that most of the people I liked best on Jaiku are already on Google Buzz and are already my friends due to being in my address book. I really like that I am not limited to 140 characters, as I am on Twitter, and that to interact with Google Buzz I just need to log into Gmail.

Google did ask if I wanted to have Buzz attached to my Gmail account and I said yes. Google also asked if I wanted my Google profile public, which I edited and then made public and searchable.

My only but about Buzz is that it would have been much better if Google Buzz had asked if I wanted to make all my address contacts and Google Reader follows to be my friends in Buzz. I would like to have opted-in rather than logged in with over 100 people I was following automatically! 100! Woah!

I can't really go unfollow them now. And by automatically having me follow the folks in my address book who are on Buzz, it took away the fun game of joining a social network where one has to search for one's friends or other interesting people. Google took away the exploration phase.

Google, please allow for opt-in, not opt-out. And don't forget to let us explore to find our own friends rather than finding them for us.

First off, I love the name. easypeasy

Second off, I love the first paragraph of copy on the Easy Peasy website:

Why was your awesome netbook shipped with that horrible operating system? Your netbook is not a typical laptop, so why should you use a typical operating system? easypeasy is harder, better, faster and stronger than what came with your netbook. And did I mention it is 100% free?

I shall install Easy Peasy on the Nokia Booklet 3G today and see if there are any differences from Jolicloud.

Screenshot photos taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Wed 02.10.10 - In the last two weeks of trialing the Nokia Booklet 3G that WOM World/Nokia sent to me, I have had a range of great to ok to just bad experiences with the Booklet, but all of them have been predicated on the Operating System (OS) and not necessarily the Booklet itself. I am of the opinion that the Booklet is a great little mini-laptop that is beautifully designed but hampered with a crappy OS in Windows 7 Starter. It would be great if Nokia were to install an OS that had the same level of polish, attention, and design that the Booklet itself has.

Here are my thoughts after two weeks of testing, installing, uninstalling, and reinstalling alternative Linux based Operating Systems in the form of a Pro & Con comparison of the hardware, and the various potential OSs of Windows 7 Starter, Ubuntu, and Jolicloud:

Pros for the Nokia Booklet Hardware:
Beautiful hardware design
3G with a sim chip port in a netbook is excellent and frees one up to be able to work on a computer anywhere
Lovely screen
I like the chicklet style keyboard, even if a bit narrow
Truly long long long battery time: 10-12 hours. I have yet to run it all the way down.

Cons for the Nokia Booklet Hardware:
I don't like the touchpad, rough surface, works poorly in Win7

Overall: The Nokia Booklet 3G is a lovely, little mini-laptop. The only thing cuter is Jackie's pink Eee PC. The Booklet would be cuter than the Eee PC if it came in hot pink or deep purple.

****

Pros for Windows 7 Starter:
Native 1280x768 screen resolution

Cons for Windows 7 Starter:
Wow! Win7 Starter sucks.
AT&T Sim chip does not *just* work for the 3G side, Al and I had to add our own settings & it still didn't work. It finally did about 3 days later.
Multitouch on the touchpad does not work or works very badly and intermittently.
Win 7 on the Booklet is slow. Sometimes molasses in a blizzard slow. Unexceptably slow.
Can be quirky on start up and starts in Airplane Mode with wifi/3G turned off. Odd but true.
Windows 7 Starter does not let the user do a lot of normal tasks like change the background, so I had to download a specious 3rd party app to rid the desktop of the Win7 logo.

Overall: Windows 7 does NOT live up to the hype. While it may appear to be an improvement over XP or Vista, any OS is an improvement over those two, so it is not saying much. Windows 7 Starter is a bad little OS. Nokia's biggest mistake is not the 1 GB of RAM or Intel Atom chip speed on the Booklet, but the inclusion of Windows 7 Starter as the OS as the Windows Bloat slows down the hardware. If Nokia wants to be in bed and having relations with Windows (each to their own), then for the price of the Booklet, they should have Windows 7 Ultimate as the shipped OS, as it is more polished and for the $600 price unlocked the Booklet does deserve a polished OS.
Did I mention how damned slow Windows 7 Starter is to do any task? Ugh.

****

Pros for Ubuntu via Wubi:
Super fast install of Ubuntu via Wubi which uses bit torrent.
Wow! Ubuntu is much nicer than Win7 Starter! Can I say that again?!
AT&T sim chip 3 G data *just* works in Ubuntu after you answer 3 questions, no fiddling with properties & preferences.
Multitouch does work on the touchpad and it is *fast* (it worked on the first two times I installed Ubuntu through Wubi, but not the last two times)
Ubuntu is fast on the Booklet, none of the hesitating or slow loading of Win7.
Ubuntu comes shipped with over 25 applications that provide a wide range of office, graphics, web, and developer tools and programs, including Nokia's QT.

Cons For Ubuntu:
800x600 screen resolution. As of Jan 29, 2010, don't try the kernel mod fix to make the res 1280x768 as recommended on the Ubuntu wiki, it makes for a very unstable install, wait for the Ubuntu dev folks to make a stable fix.
Sometimes the multitouch works great, sometimes it runs too fast.

Overall: Ubuntu is my favorite OS for the Nokia Booklet 3G hands down and miles ahead of Windows 7. While at the time of writing this, I could not get the native screen resolution to work with the Ubuntu fix, the Jolicloud folks did, so the Ubuntu folk should not be far behind with a workable fix.
The best part of Ubuntu on the Nokia Booklet is that the OS has a light footprint which makes for a fast Booklet and even though light & fast, Ubuntu is powerful and comes with or one is able to download easily any and all developer tools to really work on the Booklet with Ubuntu. I can code and deploy Django, Google App Engine, and Nokia's QT with Ubuntu, which I would not be able to do fast or easily with Windows 7 Starter or Jolicloud on the Booklet.
I really do think that Nokia should do a co-promote with Ubuntu's Canonical and ship a version or a dual boot of Ubuntu customized / polished up for the Booklet, as it is provides much more programs and functionality than Windows. For all the naysayers that don't think Ubuntu is polished enough, if Nokia were to work with Canonical, much of the polish problems could be solved within a few weeks with a team of devs & designers on the project. The main points are to make sure the native screen resolution and multitouch always work, as well as the syncing with one's mobiles. If one really wants Windows, then provide a dual boot. Many folks would be happier with Ubuntu after 30 minutes of using it, not just a geek like me.

****

Pros for Jolicloud:
Native Screen Resolution of 1280x768 out of the box (or install as the case may be)
Different User Interface desktop layout
Apple/Mac style keyboard shortcuts work to close windows (ctrl+w) & exit programs (ctrl+q). Ubuntu & Windows do not do this.
Touchpad is fast for moving the cursor.
I like the black background & the colors & icons are easy on the eyes.

Cons for Jolicloud:
First time I tried to install last week, it kept quitting. It worked tonight, but it was very slow.
Slow start up load
Froze completely the 1st time I asked it to use the AT&T sim chip for data connection, had to force re-start.
2nd time I tried to use the AT&T data, it froze again. Not working.
Different User Interface desktop layout
Multitouch does not work, two fingers won't scroll
While Jolicloud is built on Ubuntu, it does not have as many programs & applications available without downloading or using the package manager
Jolicloud takes over any install of Ubuntu on the Booklet and I had to uninstall both to reinstall Ubuntu to get it to load again.

Overall: Jolicloud has a great deal of potential, esp. as a netbook OS for non-power/non-geek users. The User Interface has quite a bit of polish, the native screen resolution of the Nokia Booklet works on startup on Jolicloud, and I love that some Mac/Apple gestures & keyboard shortcuts just work. The downsides to Jolicloud of non-working 3G, missing programs & tools that Ubuntu ships with, slow load time, and the lack of multitouch on the touchpad make Jolicloud unworkable for me as a geek user who would like to use the Booklet as a mini-laptop that is a mini-dev box. But I will not discount Jolicloud as their developers are ambitious & very responsive and many of these issues may be solved within the month or two.

***

Conclusion:
I may expire waiting for Apple to deliver a cute, tiny, light, fully powered 10 inch MacBook Pro. Nokia has done the next best thing by making a cute, tiny, light, well designed 10 inch Nokia Booklet 3G. But... it is under powered with a bad operating system in Windows 7 Starter that slows the machine down and makes for a bad user experience. Sorry, but the Windows 7 experience does not cut it, even in the upgraded $80+ Ultimate version.

As with many Nokia products the hardware is beautiful, but the OS is either lacking or the wrong fit for the beautiful hardware. In the case of the Booklet, Windows is a wrong fit, but there are options out there and Nokia should give the customer a choice of a great user experience with the Booklet.

Nokia needs to step up their game and either develop a kick ass version of the Maemo OS for the Booklet, which would be delicious, or work with Ubuntu to make a Nokia branded version of Ubuntu that would make the Booklet experience a delight to use and worth the $600 unlocked asking price.

At this point, I would love to buy a Nokia Booklet 3G if it had a great OS, but not if it comes shipped with a bad OS at $600 when I could get a pink Eee PC at $275 and install Ubuntu on it for free.

Tues 02.09.10 - Today, Jackie Ojeda, singer of Bella Novella and talent buyer for Alex's Bar , and I talked about her super cute new little pink Eee PC netbook that she bought for taking notes at nursing school and to communicate more effectively while on tour with Bella Novella

The last week, Jackie got to see and test out the Nokia Booklet 3G netbook that I had with me, of which she liked, but when she went to buy a netbook she was turned off by the AT&T 2 year contract for the $199 price on the netbook or the $600 unlocked price. She was able to get the Eee PC for $275 without any contract, even though it does not have 3G nor GPS as the Booklet does.

We both agreed that the best part is that the Eee is pink.

Project 52 : Week 5

If you haven't read Paul Graham's essay "Hackers and Painters" yet, and you are a maker / creator / creative, go read it.

I read it about 4 or 5 years ago for the first time and reread it this morning. Today it resounded as I have been frustrated at myself for what I perceive to be my failure at software engineering, as I when I code, I think of how I would apply paint. When I get stuck with trying to code in Python or PHP, I draw in my sketch book until I can get unstuck. Many times if I can't solve a problem, I do something else or go to bed and my brain will serve me the answer or solution while in the other activity or when I wake up.

Much like Mr. Graham describes in the essay, I build web apps and web sites much like I would build a painting or a whole dinner, I think about the whole idea, I get the ingredients or supplies ready, and then I start to make | code | create | sketch | paint. Scrub out what does not work and repaint | recode. I don't plan it the app out extensively before hand, I code in the browser. I am not the type who writes out pseudo code beforehand, or does wire frames, or designs in photoshop.

For a couple of years now, I have jokingly called myself a 'Professional Art Weirdo' whenever someone asks what I do for the living. This title always confuses other web professionals who know that I am a web / mobile developer. In 2007, I found myself at a programmer's conference full of Java folk, while in a small group setting everyone said their names and very detailed descriptions of their Java skill sets, when it was my turn, I cheekily said, "Hi, I am Jen and I am a painter." Then I passed on to the next person.

All jokes aside, I was delighted and relieved to read this essay this morning, as Mr. Graham quite nicely makes a defense for the intersection of programming and art as creative | maker disciplines rather than programming as engineering or science. I would love to see more artists learning to program and more programmers learning to paint.

Go read it.

Wed 02.03.10 - William Sisti, aka Flyinace2000, tweeted me today asking if I had seen his twitters about installing Mac OS X on the Nokia Booklet 3G, here is the transcript of our Twitter conversation:

William: @msjen Have you been following my tweets lately? I got OSX on the Nokia Booklet 3G. about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 I have been a twitter near blackout for the last 3 days due to my TweetDeck being down. Are you going to blog how you did it? about 9 hours ago

William: @msjen I did OSX only now. Working on finishing walk through that i will post in soon. Still ironing out details. www.unboundmobile.com about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 A blog post with specifics would be lovely. Did you dual boot or OS X only? about 9 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 Is it your own bought Booklet or a review trial one? Mine is a trial, so if I can't dual boot w/o harm, I will let you try. ;) about 8 hours ago

William: @msjen It is on loan but i had permission to do whatever i wanted to get this to work. about 8 hours ago

Me: @Flyinace2000 Did you install any of the mac software like iPhoto, iMovie, or the like? iMovie would die an evil death on 1gb of RAM, though about 7 hours ago

William: @msjen I didn't bother too. those applications require GPU support that the gma500 can't provide. about 7 hours ago

The point to having a mini-laptop is to be able to work and play on it when out and about. At this point, Windows 7 Starter that comes shipped on the Booklet is a non-starter, but Ubuntu via Wubi really is a great alternative if one is willing to live with a 800x600 screen resolution until a stable driver for the Intel Poulsbo chip is worked out, as Ubuntu sits lightly on the Booklet and is a power house of a OS plus it comes with creativity and productivity software.

Wed 01.27.10 - #37 the Nokia Booklet and I are not only back on speaking terms, but with great affection. Thanks to Andrew Currie and Steve Rowlands who recommended Wubi as a fast and very painless way to get Ubuntu Linux running on a netbook without harming the original Windows install, as of this morning, I now have a working dual boot of Windows 7 and Ubuntu 9.10 on the Nokia Booklet.

And when it is time to ship #37 back to WOMWorld/Nokia, all I have to do is log into the Windows side of the install, go to the control panel and uninstall Wubi in the normal Windows fashion and the whole Ubuntu side will be gone. The machine will then return as it came.

The best part for me, is rather than spending the next 11 days of my trial period struggling with Windows and ultimately disliking the Booklet, I get to spend it enjoying the Booklet, use it as a mini-laptop, and being able to evaluate it as the lovely piece of hardware that it is.

Once Andrew got Ubuntu working on his trial Booklet, #38, via Wubi, he announced mid-day that he had uninstalled Wubi and was on to try Jolicloud. It appears that Andrew is going to test every possible way to set the Booklet free of the confines of Windows. Good on him.

Now that #37, my trial Booklet, is free, I am going to go deeper and see what the capacity of the Booklet is now that it has been set free. Many of the reviews of the Nokia Booklet 3G is the surprise or disappointment on the part of the user on how under powered the Booklet supposedly is in terms of RAM (1 GB) or in terms of the Intel Atom processor. Today as the Booklet wizzed along happily a good speeds under Ubuntu, it hit me that the Booklet may be 'underpowered' for an inefficient hog like Windows, but the Booklet was a speedy little fellow(ess) under Ubuntu.

For a mini-laptop, does it need to have bigger laptop sized RAM & processor or does it really need a better, freer, more open Operating System that is more efficient with the hardware it has?

Point in case, the Booklet allegedly has a multitouch touchpad, but for the life of me I could not get the two finger scrolling to work under the Windows OS, but in the Ubuntu side the touchpad is by far more responsive and is really fast at multitouch. Same hardware, different OSes.

Photo taken of the Booklet screen by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Tues 01.26.10 - Today was also a busy work day, thus my only accomplishments in making progress with the Nokia Booklet was to download and install the Oceanis Change Background program that Vaibhav of The Symbian Blog recommended.

Apparently the version of the Attack of the Redmond Drones that Nokia installed on the Booklet, Windows 7 Starter, is a non-starter in that it does very little and really is only there to irritate the Booklet's owner into returning it or paying MicroSquash $80+ to upgrade to Windows 7 Home or Ultimate. Since, I have no intention of giving any $$ to the dreaded Mordor, I mean, Redmond, I instead put a call of help out to Twitter and my mobile Tweeps delivered.

When I installed Oceanis Change Background, it put a very amusing cartoon in places of the Windows logo, of which I have taken a photo of and placed above, the caption that satirically sums up MicroSquash:

"It's a revolutionary approach really... Instead of developing new software adjusted to the user's needs, we've started developing new users, adjusted to the software's needs."

I also let the Booklet phone home to Finland and update itself and add Nokia Ovi Suite and the Nokia Social Hub. Ovi Suite is just the new name for Nokia PC Suite which is the way one is to supposedly manage one's mobile device's relationship with one's PC, but my mobile, currently a Nokia N97, is a Protestant and does not need to a middleman to manage its relationship with its deity, the MacBook Pro in this case. So, I closed Ovi Suite when it wanted the N97 to come to confession and make a connection.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N97.

Project52 : Week 4

Mon. 01.25.10 - Late this morning the Nokia 3G Booklet arrived from the folks at WOMWorld/Nokia for a two week trial review period. I am quite excited about this, I do love to tinker about on a new computer, especially one as lovely and beautifully designed as the Nokia 3G Booklet.

It is cute! It is tiny! It is solid! It is light in weight! It is well-made! Did I mention it was beautifully designed and cute?!?

And then....

I turned it on and I was confronted with the... evil blue background with the light waving Windows logo. Gah.

Fifteen minutes into my new love affair with #37, I had to turn her off and put her back into her wrapping and two boxes and then put her box under my bed, because Windows 7 had so elevated my blood pressure that I was ready to call DHL to take #37 back to London and then write a scathing review of how F*cking Evil Windows is and How it is the Worst Possible Decision... blah blah blah... all because I spent 15 mins trying to figure out how to change the damned Windows background into something more eye pleasing. Big, deep breath.

So, I returned to the work project that is on deadline for tomorrow and then surreptitiously searched Google for 'Nokia 3G Booklet Hackintosh', 'Nokia 3G Booklet Ubuntu 9.10 USB live boot', etc. Yes, I spent most of the rest of the afternoon deep in dual work mode and researching my options for a USB live boot of a real OS, an OS that keeps one's blood pressure at normal.

Which computer or mobile operating system one likes is not just a matter of brand preference, or what your friends like, or what you have already spent the time to learn, it is also about a mental metaphor and mind map. And that mental metaphor / mind map may still be uncomfortable even after learning how to use a system. Sometimes, one just has to give up an operating system that does not fit one's mental processes and move on to one that does. After reluctantly using Windows for years, I happily and with abandon switched over to Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X about 4 - 5 years ago and have never looked back.

I gladly pay the Apple Tax to get lovely, well designed hardware and OS. I am also happy to pay the Nokia Tax to get kick ass mobile cameraphones, even if I continue to be bewildered by Nokia's hard-on for all things Windows and how their Symbian mobile OS is mapped to Windows and its metaphor. One of the reasons that I am so excited about the Nokia N900 is that its OS is Maemo which is a lovely mobile version of Linux.

All of this adds up to, right now I just can't open up #37 the lovely Nokia 3G Booklet again, until I have time to create a USB stick with a live boot of Ubuntu or Moblin for the Booklet.

Project52 : Week 2

File Under: I didn't need to see the shit squeezed out of the intestines before they are turned into sausage casings...
OR
Fire Under: How did the drafting of the specs for the new HTML5 and web standards turn into a serious detour in to the spider webs of Mirkwood?

Wow! The Twitter-verse erupted this last week on WTF is going on in HTML5 world:

"is there a good concise blog post anywhere explaining just what happened to HTML5 / WHAT WG last week? Seeing the trees, not the forest." - @mezzoblue

'Thinking of getting this framed: http://icanhaz.com/specdance" - @adactio

"Pleased that http://whatwg.org/html5 is back to being a spec called HTML5 (and more) rather than HTML (including HTML5). Thank you @hixie." - @adactio

" '#HTML5 is a beautiful mess': Sitepoint podcast with moi, @lloydi, @cssquirrel. Transcribed as well, thanks @sentience http://bit.ly/5rJmbS" - @brucel

"#html5 punch-up featuring @marcosc, @hixie, @shelleypowers, @johnfoliot http://bit.ly/4Ojp2v" - @brucel

And there are many more Tweets from Jan 8th to 15th on the subject of HTML5, the WC3, WHATWG, and the spec deliberations.

I am unabashedly a fan of strict XHTML 1.0, as I love the element tag minimalism and the strict code typing. If I code a site in XHTML 1.0, be it transitional or strict, I have few worries on what device will the site work on and I have fewer cross-broswer debugging issues than if I write in HTML 4.01 or the like. I realize that others want more features and the early specs of HTML5 appear to make better semantic sense, but the web standard spec and full browser adoption is supposedly years away.

I don't like to watch the tech sausage being made, I much prefer to let folks duke it out behind some closet doors and then when the browsers adopt the spec, then I will learn it. My passion is in mobile and the web that works for all, not to be the first to use or develop a tecnology. On top of all of that, I am a minimalist. I prefer lean, mean, and elegant over busy, full-featured, and many-optioned.

I first noticed this week's brouhaha when Dave (@mezzoblue) tweeted his call for someone to interpret and explain the forest for the trees (first tweet quote/link above). Tonight was the first time I had the opportunity to go through my feed reader and read some of the blog posts on the HTML5 rupture of the last 9 days.

I started by reading Dori Smith's post, My (current) opinions on HTML5, on Backup Brain which was a good summary of the situation and how it effects the various parts of the web design and development ecosystems. Dori is clear sighted in the matter and I noticed quite a few comments, upon clicking on the comments, I was treated to John Foliot's stident interpretation of Dori's take on HTML5 and Web Standards.

I clicked over to Mr. Foliot's web site to find that he was in full defense / offense mode all at once. ((O.o))

Mr. Foliot referred to Andy Clarke's "Keep calm and carry on (with HTML5)"

Faruk Ateş attempts to find the forest for the close examination of the trees in "The Battlefield of HTML5"

Bruce Lawson, Ian Lloyd, and Kyle Weems weigh in with a SitePoint podcast on "HTML5 is a (Beautiful) Mess"

Mark Pilgrim asserts that nothing has happened other than the HTML5 spec is in the Last Call phase. Mr. Foliot continues his offense/defense bit.

Wow! See what I miss when I am working rather than reading... Wake me up when the spec is ready and the browsers are using it. Then we can slather the HTML5 up in some garlic oil, cook it up on the grill and make some beautiful, accessible web sites and apps.

No Mirkwood spiders, please.

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to delete().

As a person who studied art, art history, and graphic design in the first round of my college education, I spent a lot of time reading about and studying artists and designers of the past. We know and study those artists and designers by the physical objects, paintings | journal entries | letters | etc, that were left after their deaths. We know them by their objects.

How will future generations know about our generation when we have spent so much of our time and efforts tossing the physical object to the wind and embracing digital ephemera? For the first 10 plus years of the internet revolution, the giddy joy was in the ephemera, the shifting sands of the bytes blown by the winds of chance and a forgotten domain registration. But the winds have shifted, a few of the early generation of internet pioneers have passed away and now we wonder what will happen to their writings, photos, and their primary sources when the domain expires or the hosting goes past due?

How will future scholars know who were the true pioneers, the giddy bon vi-bloggers from the corporate marketing shills that followed fast on their heels? Do we give the college freshman of 2567 CE/AD an introductory digital studies of Steve Ballmer meets Proctor & Gamble, or do we protect the writings of internet and blog pioneers such as Brad Graham and Lesile Harpold who died too early to write a will or a set up a trust that considered their seminal writings and blogs to be passed on to a university collection?

Now some would say, it is just the internet - here today, gone tomorrow. I would counter that we don't know what others in future eras will want to know and what will be just assumed about our era, and that more the more well preserved primary sources we leave the better for future scholars and pundits to be able to analyze and learn from our time in a way we are too close to see with any clarity.

A discussion started on the "Remembering our friend Brad" Metatalk post between Matthowie, barbelith (Tom Coates), Maximolly (Molly Steenson), myself, holgate, and a few others how to preserve blogs to an archive that can be accessed past the time the domains have expired and the files deleted off the web hosting server.

Tom suggests that:

"We should consider talking to George Oates at the Internet Archive to see if they have any options for this kind of situation. They might be the perfect place to put sites after someone dies like that."

I agree with Tom that the Internet Archive is a great place to start, as I use it to find all of my own 1996-2001 website archives given that I can't find the files on any old disks anymore. But the problem with the Internet archive is that it does not bring any photos or other image files, only the text from the sites that it archives.

After watching in the past few years the work that George Oates did with the Library of Congress while she was still at Flickr, I wondered if we should be considering a long term strategies that would go beyond registering a blog's copyright or even a periodical ISBN with the Library of Congress or other Copyright Libraries (such as Oxford or Trinity) but should we not also be archiving our text, images, and presentation (css) files to the copyright libraries for future study and access?

In the Metatalk thread, I asked:

"Previously if one was a writer or artist or scholar or otherwise historically/culturally significant, one would give one's writings & 'collection' to a university library. What do we do with our websites & blogs past the time we can pay for them?

How can we know now what might be significant for study 100, 200, 500, 1200 years from now? How do we archive bytes?

Some folks are printing out their blogs to custom ordered books, but this is not necessarily the best solution, as what will the children or grandchildren of our friends and families do with those books? Will they end up at flea markets along with 78rpm acetate records? But maybe that is good, the randomness of the find.

By choosing to engage in the frontier online space, we have chosen to some degree to toss the long term to the wind. The suggestion of the Library of Congress, or other institutions that function as a cultural respository, may be a good bet for the long run in terms of keeping an archive of text|image|ephemera, as after 2 recessions, I don't trust the market to keep a reliable archive.

If we can now register our copyright with the Library of Congress or the Copyright Libraries (such as Trinity, Oxford, etc), and we can get an ISBN or periodical number for our blogs, how do we start to archive the actual posts and images to a repository.

Do we lobby our congress|political critters to set aside resources for blogs that are periodicals to be archived OR as Matthowie suggest do we donate to an institution such as the Archive.org foundation and make sure that it can function as a cultural archival NGO?"

Is the Library of Congress or the various other copyright libraries up to the task of the pioneer digital generation donating their archives to the libraries in question or do we donate to the Internet Archive so that they can provide a more robust non-governmental/academic solution to archiving blogs and pioneering digital media?

Ashe to ashes, dust to dust. Pixels to electrons, electrons to save().

Photo taken today by Ms. Jen with a Nokia N900

Tues 12.01.09 - Rabbit rabbit. With the greeting to the new month out of the way, I would like to alert you to several interesting takes on Nokia's strategy and mentions of the N900:

GigaOm's very own Om Malik had a chat with Nokia's Tero Ojanperä last week and Om now has a wee bit more faith in Nokia's direction. Read it at, "For Nokia's Ovi, the World (Minus the US) is Enough."

Analyst Michael Gartenberg questions What's the future of Nokia? on Engadget's Entelligence:

"Second, Nokia's services strategy is as muddled as the fruit in Don Draper's Old Fashioned. Ovi sounded good when it was announced but it's now gone through so many iterations, with different services added, dropped, and changed that it's hard to know what's in and what's out. Comes With Music has been reported as having as few as 107,000 users worldwide, and Nokia's put off bringing it to the US this year, leading me to wonder what kind of future it has as a service. The N-Gage project not only resulted in two failed phone designs but the service itself is on its deathbed."

As a Nokia mobile phone owner, I have felt quite burned over the last four years by Nokia's frequent changing around and dropping software and services. I won't even invest any of my data at Ovi, as I don't want it to go away in 2 years when Nokia has changed its strategy again or the project manager has moved on along with the marketing manager to another project and the new folks in charge don't care and move on to new divisions themselves.

The big reason that I am so excited about Maemo is that Python comes already installed and integrated on the Nokia N900, so I can code my own apps and not worry about will they be supported 12-18 months from now. I don't code in C, C+, Objective C, Java or Symbian, so most of the world of mobile application development is closed to me, but I do code in Python. While one can install python on Symbian and run a PyS60 app on a Symbian phone it is not without hassle and if you want to share the app, then the other person has to install Python on their phone too, thus creating a large barrier to entry.

Roland Tanglao and Croozeus are also both excited about pre-installed Python on the N900. Yesterday, I was on the Maemo.org website looking at the various apps available for download and the ones in development. The best part was finding out that many of the apps that I would want to use or contribute to are coded in Python. One of the great parts of any Open Source and/or Linux community is the ability to contribute to projects and to the code base, and now for me it is even better that I can contribute in Python. Furthermore, I am very excited that Maemo community has an active PyMaemo sub-community.

Yes, the Nokia N900 may seem a bit too geeky to some, but in the long run, I do think Maemo will bring in developers who have been alienated by Symbian's high barriers to entry and the whole certification / app signing troubles, developers who will have more choice in programming languages, more choice in how to contribute & distribute. More choice means more mobile applications available to everyone.

*******
Related N900 Posts:
Nokia N900 : The Artist Phone
Nokia N900 : The Gold Standard Test
The Nokia Flagship Face Off : Nokia N900 vs. Nokia N97 : Part I, Night Video

Some how I have hit the Google Wave invite jackpot* and now have 38 invites to give away. If you want one, please comment on this blog post with your email address and I will send you one.

***Update*** : Sun 11.29.09 - Thanks for the folks who have requested an invite by a comment so far. I have two requests before giving out any more invites:

1) Please put your email in the email box in the comment form rather than in the comment itself, this protects your email as only I can see it.

2) Please put the URL of your online space in the URL box, as if I am going to invite folks I want to be able to see your website or twitterstream and say hi.

****UPDATE**** : Mon 12.07.09 - Thanks for your comments and replies, but the invites are now over and done. If you commented here and did not get an invite, it was because you didn't give me your URL after I asked for it above. I hope you enjoy Google Wave.

* T'would be nice to hit the lottery jackpot instead... but one has to work with what one has got... ;o)

I know it is good to be a DRY, Agile programmer and not repeat yourself, but I have a hard time being "lazy" due to a problem with perfectionism.

I have been working on finishing up additions to a web app in PHP that I coded last year and for each day that I *should* wrap up, I find One More Thing that should be polished A Bit More, just One More Thing. Last week, I fell down a hole of internet research about the latest developments in PHP security. This was bad, because there have been new techniques on how to best beat the bad boy hackers, so this week I found myself making a few changes to reflect best, current secure practices of the most recent cutting edge.

This is the right thing to do, right?

Well, bits of the app then needed to be recoded, and then a few more changes, and then test the database, and then some more recoding, and I had a huge refactoring snowball rolling down a hill attacking me. Gah. But in good conscience, I could not leave the client with security holes.

Where do you stop? Right at the letter and law of the contract? A few extra hours of work if you find some new information on the latest and greatest practices? Or do you just do it and refactor the whole app for professional pride and a good job well done?

Let me know where you draw the line.

I don't know about you, but I have had a little list of blog upkeep items that have been on my to do list for ages, but haven't had the time to research and then execute them. After thinking about a few of them for some time, oh like a couple of years, I decided recently to make a real paper list and make it happen.

Here are the things I wanted to do:
1) Figure out how to get thumbnails of images to appear in the excerpted version of this blog's RSS and Atom feeds.
2) Think about how to keep the evil sploggers (spam bloggers who scrape feeds) at bay AND keep my regular feed readers happy with a good feed. I have had my private full feed for at least two years now & announce it frequently but folks who want a full feed didn't know about it.
3) Even though Perl is not really my friend, I have wanted to figure out how to alter the Atom script for this blog so that when I use Lifeblog or PixelPipe to mobile blog from my camera phone to this blog that the photo will be uploaded into the file directory of my choice and not the default main blog directory.

A few weeks ago, I dedicated a few hours to attempting to bending the Atom and RSS feed templates to my will. Unfortunately, Movable Type 4.x is very dependent on the Asset Manager for knowing where the images are, and due to challenge #3, I was not able to fix #1 with any satisfaction, as all the fixes required the Asset Manager to know where all the images are and by default the Atom script uploads all assets/images to the main blog directory, which causes a messy main directory with my daily mobile blogging. To solve this, I have been manually moving images to a proper image directory and then updating the blog post later, thus the Asset Manager can't keep up with me. Poor thing.

Persistent artist vs. computer program. Who is going to lose? In the long run, the program. Until I solved problem #3, problem #1 was a null point.

I solved #2 by resetting my public facing feeds to be a bit bigger excerpts that would show the images but would excerpt any article over a certain length. I use the .htaccess file to stop any lifting of images. And I still have the private complete feed for anyone who emails me and lets me know that they want the url.

Today, I decided to conquer the moblogging directory issue and attempt to make Perl bend to my will.

Update about an hour later: I was able to get the script working and the next post after this will be a tutorial / reminder to me on how I did it.

The Fix: How to Change the Directory that Movable Type Uploads to When Using the Atom Protocol (Lifeblog, PixelPipe, etc)

Updated a few minutes later: Ok, so the path is right, I am just missing one bit in the Atom file to make sure that the photo is being uploaded into the right directory.

The Fix: How to Change the Directory that Movable Type Uploads to When Using the Atom Protocol (Lifeblog, PixelPipe, etc)

'Sita Sings the Blues' is a very delightful feature indie animation film that combines 1920s jazz vocals with the ancient Indian story of Ram and Sita and the parallel story of the animator Nina Paley and her husband Dave.

Worth watching for the interplay of animation styles and narrative, of which is the interstitial bits of the three humorous arguing narrators. Even more worth watching for the gorgeous visuals.

Sita Sings the Blues

I am not much of a video recording person, I only remember to switch my camera phone or digital camera to the video mode when it occurs to me that the photo I want to take will only make contextual sense if there is sound and the image over time. I usually notice this after the person has started speaking or the action has began, thus my videos tend to be truncated.

Oops.

To top it all off, I really hate the post-production process. In other words, I hate editing video. In grad school, we had to do an intense 2 week course in video and editing, and I hated every moment of it, other than the editing instructor was a hot 40-something Irish gentleman. But not even Gerry could convince me that editing was worth my time, although I did enjoy watching him talk. Luckily for me, in my final project team we had a member in Shonagh Hurley who not only loved editing video and but could spend hours creatively editing.

Unfortunately, Shonagh is in Dublin and I am in SoCal, so when I need to trim or splice together video segments, I am a bit screwed. And why?

I went to the Google I/O conference back in late May and by early June I was on the Google Wave Dev Preview Sandbox thingy. By and large, unless one of my tech friends was gushing about wanting to see Google Wave, I haven't logged in in the last four months unless I was giving a demo.

Sorry folks, I am not and have not been participating in the rather fascinating, from an anthropological point of view, hysteria that has surrounded Google Wave the last few months. And that hysteria reached a crescendo in the last 24 hours.

Google Wave is interesting for its potential, not the beta form it is in now. The potential is a great interconnected collaboration tool, the current reality is IM on speed. And since I am not a fan of IM chat, I don't log in much.

The other key thing is that unless your friends or colleagues are on the system, most of the power of what Wave can do is stripped away. It was great to be on it with thousands of other developers, but most of the conversations were around tech details.

Photo by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Thurs 09.24.09 - Martin Ramsin presenting the Ovi SDK to the folks at the Ovi Developer event in London.

The new Ovi SDK Beta utilizes the new Ovi API and javascript, which makes it a good place for web designers and developers start to on creating mobile apps.

While the Ovi Dev day got off to a bit of a rough start before lunch with a small conceptual conflict between the verbal democracy of the dev crowd vs. the business-styled approach to presenting topics that Nokia folks are so fond of.

After lunch things got back on track when the presenters spoke of more concrete and relevant topics such as the Calling All Innovators UK, an open panel with last year's winners, and Martin presenting on the release of the OVI SDK.

I had a very good conversation after wards with Nokia Forum's Jouni Toijala about how to get more web designers and developers involved in mobile application development.

Photo taken by Ms. Jen with her Nokia N95.

Tues 9.22.09 - A big Happy 3rd Birthday to Moo.com. Big thanks to Richard Moross and all the lovely folks at Moo for the great photo cards they make and the lovely party.

"Freemont Troll" by Roshan V on Flickr with a CC License.

I am honestly getting wearied by all the wars being waged online in the name of gadgets, devices, and software.

You love the iPhone? Good for you.
You love your Google Android G1/G2? Excellent.
Love your Nokia Nseries or Eseries? Even Better.
Are you a die hard Wordpress fan? Fabulous.
Can't believe that any designer or developer worth their salt doesn't use Expression Engine? Hmmm... me neither, esp. since the EE folk throw a much better party at SXSW than the Automattic crew.
Are you Windows all the way? MacBook forever? Ubuntu for the win?
PHP partisan? Ruby on Rails raconteur? Django devotee?

Good for you. Good for your neighbor. And good for your perceived enemy.

First and foremost all of the above devices, software, dev frameworks, and operating systems are tools. They are tools to communicate, tools to create, tools to prototype, tools to view, tools to do business on and with, tools to publish, tools to build a system with, etc. etc. etc.

Depending on your usage, needs, culture, time frame, profession, and preference will determine which tool, device, software, operating system will be best for you. Maybe you have a try a few options to know which is best for you. Maybe you need time, maybe you need to discuss it with your friends online and in person. Maybe you need time to physically try the various options.

At the point where you have written or gotten excited about your new device/tool/software online is where the troll can come in.

For whatever reason, some folks want to go past a bit of teasing or a bit of good, honest debate with solid backup arguments to build their case; some folks want to troll. They want to mock, to drag a discussion or debate into a space that is no longer about sharing one's excitement or learning from each other and into a space that is about bullying or badgering the other person into the troll's point of view. A troll can and will argue beyond the point of normal communication and good manners to get their point across or lead the general discussion into a very fruitless place.

This is frustrating. Very frustrating. We have all been online long enough to know what is good manners and what is not. We all choose to use the tools we are using for a reason. If you want to convince a friend to try another tool, do it with persuasion, not with trolling.

It becomes even more frustrating when folks who are professionals in a field in and around technology become devotees to one product and are unwilling to explore the other options out there, esp. as the devices or software grows over time.

Recently, I had to unfollow a person that I liked on Twitter due to the fact that this person started many fights with anyone who was not an iPhone owner. This person chose to take any mention of any other mobile device as a time to point out the superiority of the iPhone, even when it was nonsensical and not on topic. The person would then pursue the argument with Direct Messages on Twitter that would attack one and one's choices.

Love your iPhone that much? Good. I am very glad for you.

I choose to use Nokia Nseries devices for their cameras and moblogging abilities. As of the date of writing this blog post, the iPhone's camera is not up to my standards. Sorry, but true. Please don't send me Direct Messages on Twitter harassing me about using an obviously inferior Nokia, it is uncool and unworthy of our friendship or even mutual respect professionally.

Next year or the year after that there will be another device(s) or tool(s) that will excite everyone's fancy. And just maybe it won't excite yours or mine or someone we know, but maybe it will.

In the meantime, let's all remember that these devices or software or systems are just tools, tools to accomplish what we want to do online or create with or communicate with. None of these tools are worth trolling for and thus breaking relationships over.

Instead let's use these tools to create and communicate with in a way that builds relationships, communities, systems, and applications. We can respectfully choose to disagree, we can also attempt to persuade others to our point of view, let's even debate, but let's not troll over tools.

Om Malik in yesterday's post, The Evolution of Blogging, concludes with the argument that those of us who are lifestreaming on our blogs rather than Facebook, because we want to be our own 'digital repository' or as I have called it the last few years "Own Your Own Stuff", will need to have our blogging software evolve to handle more real-time streaming.

"Millions of Facebook users will have no reason to use any other service for the foreseeable future. And even when they decide to leave, they'll realize they can't, for they'll have stored their photos and videos into the service, which has no visible way of exporting such data. It's the ultimate lock-in: control consumers' data and you control everything.

For others -- whom I would loosely define as "power users" -- today's blogging software and services are the best option for becoming a repository of our digital creations, because they are more open, more extensible and at the end of the day, give us more control "

Malik mentions Posterous, Tumblr, and WordPress's P2 theme as blogging platforms that are moving towards evolving blogging, but he does not mention Movable Type's Motion. As someone who is serious about owning her own digital repository, I haven't gotten on board with Posterous or Tumblr as they are both hosted and ultimately are yet another space on the web where my stuff gets atomized. I am planning on exploring the possibilities of Movable Type's Motion soon, when I have some time. ;o)

On another note, Fast Company has a great magazine cover article on Nokia Rocks the World: The Phone King's Plan to Redefine Its Business, of which they start with a great few paragraphs:

"The gathering in the courtyard dining room at the Greenwich Hotel in Tribeca has the feel of a meeting between the Mafia's dwindling five families and an emerging Balkan gang looking to join forces. Instead of bookmakers, drug smugglers, and racketeers, the endangered species assembled are music executives from the industry's remaining major labels, including Warner and Universal Music, and an agent from the Beatles' Apple Corps.

Despite the general tension typical of an industry in free fall, there is a reunion vibe and everyone greets one another warmly over cocktails, throwing out a bit of cocksure swagger to project the notion that they can still deliver a hit. Still, nobody in attendance would deny that the days of record companies making a killing in the music industry are over.

The hosts for the evening are Nokia's 43-year-old executive vice president of entertainment and communities, Tero Ojanperä, and Eurythmics founder and Nokia consultant, Dave Stewart. The two make for an odd pairing: Stewart with his quintessential British rock-'n'-roll-ness and Ojanperä with his Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness. But tuning in closely to Ojanperä's precise, inflected words, it's hard to elude his magnetism, a cross between Andy Warhol mystic and James Bond villain."

The article both gives a good overview of Nokia's efforts to both woo the music industry and their recent forays into applications and services, as well as giving a few fun tweaks at the "Finnish-savant electrical-engineer-ness" meets "Baltic Mafia". Blessings on the Finns, I <3 the lot of them!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design + Development = Developers <=> Desingers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.