the singularity of being and nothingness
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iOS4 Reflections
Jul 1st
I’ve had iOS4 upgrade on my iPhone 3GS for about 2 weeks now, and since I’m not unfortunate enough to have procured an iPhone 4, I thought I’d share a few reflections about my experiences.
First, the BadThe biggest downside of the upgrade is that the new OS puts a severe beat down on the battery life. Before the upgrade, I used to be able to listen to Pandora all day at work, make a few calls, and surf around on my phone while watching TV…on one battery charge. Now, however, my battery life is at least halved, if not more. If I start Pandora first thing at work, I’ll be getting down into the 30% range by late afternoon, necessitating an early evening charge. *Sigh*
A few other disappointments:
- Random buggy-ness: I’ve noticed that apps will randomly crash without warning
- Multi-tasking management is kinda clunky–way too many double-clicks and holds to end a program (should give you the option when normally closing, me thinks…)
- Camera “zoom” upgrade is a joke. It’s exactly what you’d expect, and exactly what every app out there already did: make crappy, low megapixel pictures look even worse.
While these are fairly serious issues, there are some definitely cool More >
The Final Touchdown
Jun 15th
In case you didn’t hear, the iconic “Touchdown Jesus” (or “Big Butter Jesus”) that guarded the I-75 passage from Cincinnati to Dayton, OH, is but a skeleton of its former self. In what is the stuff of blogger’s dreams, the 62-foot statue in front of Solid Rock Church in Monroe, OH, burned to ground Monday night after–ironically enough–being struck by lightning.
I was fortunate enough to be able to see Touchdown Jesus 6 days before this transpired. It will be missed (probably not…).
Before: After: Share this: Oil on our Hands
Jun 12th
Over the past weeks, I’ve listened with great interest to people’s opinions about the BP debacle in the Gulf of Mexico. With little deviation, most reactions have been a combination of disgust, anger, and finger pointing. While I certainly understand such feelings, let me offer another perspective. Warning: it probably will not be popular…
To start off, let me make this clear. BP (and other contractors involved) is certainly responsible for great negligence and sheer incompetence. They should be held responsible for their role in this disaster, and I personally hope that they are made to help for years to come in cleanup and restoration efforts.
However, before we begin erecting soapboxes against oil companies, let’s not forget our own culpability. Sure, BP was negligent–perhaps criminally so. But what caused this? Greed? Sure. Oil companies are out to make money, and they–like everyone else–want to make as much of it as they can. But what drives their profits? Do they make money simply from the pure act of extracting crude from beneath the earth? No. They make money by fulfilling a need for petroleum. And currently in the West (and now the developing world), that need is thoroughly insatiable.
In the West, we More >
Happy Thanksgiving!
Nov 26th
Just wanted to drop a quick note and wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving!
I'm spending my Days of Turkey in Fredericksburg, VA, with my second family.
We had a great night last night at the Fredericksburg Pub where I had some outstanding bangers 'n mash–good stuff! The night was finished off nicely with wins by the Jayhawks and Wildcats–woot!
And now I'm just sitting around, rabidly anticipating delicious turkey and my mother-in-law's devilled eggs…yummy!
Anyway, I hope everyone has a great day with family and friends-make it a good one 🙂
Share this: It's Really About Us
Oct 15th
This year's Blog Action Day topic is all about climate change. Hardly non-confrontational, right? Depending on who you ask, you can get a variety of opinions about this subject. Some will foam at the mouth, ranting about how humans are killing the planet and that we're all going to freeze to death, or burn up…or both. Others, with equal rabidity, will quixotically assert that climate change is a hoax, foisted upon the minds of the gullible by political forces with nefarious agendas.
Who's right? Well, it's a difficult question. We don't exactly have the right kinds of data from which to make accurate predictions about whatever future the current, apparent trends in climate change might bring. Given that we have not had the opportunity to examine the effects of similar conditions on more or less equivalent celestial masses, all of the prognosticating about doom-and-gloom weather models is really quite tenuous. And on the other side of the frenzy, the sometimes intentional distortion of whatever-limited-research-we-do-have does not help provide meaningful answers. Both approaches are not only naive, but in fact are diametrically opposed to actually getting at what is important regarding the discussion of climate change.
How so?
Let's think about this for a More >
It's Really About Us
Oct 15th
This year's Blog Action Day topic is all about climate change. Hardly non-confrontational, right? Depending on who you ask, you can get a variety of opinions about this subject. Some will foam at the mouth, ranting about how humans are killing the planet and that we're all going to freeze to death, or burn up…or both. Others, with equal rabidity, will quixotically assert that climate change is a hoax, foisted upon the minds of the gullible by political forces with nefarious agendas.
Who's right? Well, it's a difficult question. We don't exactly have the right kinds of data from which to make accurate predictions about whatever future the current, apparent trends in climate change might bring. Given that we have not had the opportunity to examine the effects of similar conditions on more or less equivalent celestial masses, all of the prognosticating about doom-and-gloom weather models is really quite tenuous. And on the other side of the frenzy, the sometimes intentional distortion of whatever-limited-research-we-do-have does not help provide meaningful answers. Both approaches are not only naive, but in fact are diametrically opposed to actually getting at what is important regarding the discussion of climate change.
How so?
Let's think about this for a More >
Getting Back into Posting
Apr 29th
Wow. It's been nearly 2 months since I last posted here. Not good.
The other night, I was feeling guilty about that, so I added a few items to my portfolio.
I've been out of commission the last several months for a couple reasons. First, my day job has been pretty hectic recently. We've been launching some large projects, and I've started to become involved a lot more with planning aspects of what we're doing. So while there's a lot less code work happening from me, I've been make up for that with writing, reviewing and an endless stream of meetings.
Second, I've been in the middle of a pretty decent little content management system. I'll be blogging about it a bit more when I'm ready to unveil it, but it's coming right along and I'm pretty pleased so far with what I've accomplished. As CMS's go, it's nothing revolutionary, but I have learned a ton in the process, so at least I have that going for me.
So in the meantime, I'm going to try to get back to blogging regularly. I've missed it quite a bit, and I have a ton of things to blog about, from opening up Spry's guts, More >
Blog Action Day 2008 : Poverty
Oct 15th
For Blog Action Day 2008, I have posted an article over at my personal blog. It's pretty short, but it highlights an issue I've thought a lot about over the last year.
Share this: Getting Into Skype
Jul 3rd
So I finally moved into this century last week by downloading and installing Skype on my computer. Notwithstanding the $15.00 I paid for my headphones, I really like what I see so far.
My primary motivation for getting Skype is my freelance work. While I love talking to clients, it is incredibly taxing on my cellphone minutes to try to manage weekly calls with several clients. I'm hoping that Skype will enable to reduce–or eliminate–this issue altogether, while also providing a way for me to be able to work with both hands while chatting on the line.
So here's some initial thoughts: Skype seems to provide pretty good call quality on my cable connection. In the few calls I've done, I've not had terrible difficulty hearing the other person, and the connection never broke up. Plus, I like that Skype provides a built in contact manager and internal chat client for quick catch-ups with clients that do necessitate a full-blown call.
Negatives: I've noticed that in Firefox 3, Skype recognizes phone-numbers (or at least phone-number formatted strings…) and applies some functionality to them. At first blush, this is cool–but it does get annoying, and can seriously break an otherwise consistent design flow. But More >
I'm Building a CSS-Gallery
May 23rd
Yeah, yeah, I know. There are already a billion and 3 CSS showcase galleries out there. Why re-invent the wheel, you surely say?
Well, I'm actually not…well, not really. I have a few projects that are hovering on the horizon for which I am going to be using a few features I've never built before, such as a rating system, and a tagging system. While I feel confident that they will be no big deal, I figure something like this could provide a good playground for working those things out now, rather than later.
One thing I am going to do with my CSS gallery, however, is auto-generated thumbnails. I really want to do nothing but approve or deny submissions, so the thought of taking time to open the RAM-whore Photoshop CS3 to crop up a bunch of images is not appealing!
In thinking about this, I snooped around the Intrablog for some free services that would provide this. One of them, Websnapr, has an extremely easy to use API…the only problem is that they slap a stupid watermark on the thumbnails that are generated. So obviously, I moved on. The next one I found (and stuck with, incidentally), was ShrinkTheWeb.com. Their web More >
