the mofo with the info.

My Moleskine Notebook is one of my few Savage Indulgences*. Despite the fact that I have readily available at my desk my iPhone, my BlackBerry, notepad.exe, evernote.com, PowerPoint, and countless other technologically advanced offerings that could easily supplant my Moleskine, I still like to have this clunky oilskin notebook with my horribly unintelligible scrawl to refer to in meetings and to keep track of my progress on various ongoing projects. However, due to a poorly thought out partitioning scheme several months ago, my current Moleskine is going EOL, and I have to replace it. Naturally, savagery begets savagery, so I am being forced to leave the air conditioned confines of my office and I must venture into meatspace to do some shopping. However, that doesn’t mean I have to be completely unarmed for such a task…

Planning
I’m combinng my moleskine shopping with some other tasks. I need to buy some new pens and highlighters as well, and some sticky tabs for the moleskine. I’m also continuing my search for the Holy Grail of wallets (id window, space for bills, slim); a friend tipped me off to the Bosca Small ID Wallet which looks like it might be The One, and I notice that Saks Fifth carries Bosca. I’m planning to do this all in a half hour lunch break from work, so I’m also going to pick up lunch from one of my favorite food carts, Kwik Meal.

I start out with a tool that Esther just noted on Google Reader earlier today: Text 2 Mind Map. Basically I put my shopping list in a simple text format like this:
Shopping List
Kinokuniya
Highlighters
Fine-tipped pens
Office Depot
4x6 Scotch Pads
Sticky Labels
Barnes and Noble
Moleskine Reporter Notebook
Saks Fifth Avenue
Bosca Slim ID Wallet
Kwik Meal
Lamb and Chicken Rice

and I end up with this:

It’s pretty but it’s not quite what I’m looking for. I wonder if there were any google mashups that would do something like this, and lo-and-behold, it turns out this functionality is already built into google maps, in a fashion.

Some quick searches and tags later and I end up with this:

View Larger Map

OK, ready to roll.

Implementation
So it’s a beautiful day out in Manhattan, so it’s starting to look like this whole meatspace shopping might not be so bad after all BUT on my very first stop, I find that the Google Maps search for the Kinokuniya is outdated, and the space is now some kind of horrible tourist trap related to Rockefeller Plaza. While I could blame this on google not updating soon enough, I’m going to be fickle and use this as an example why meatspace shopping is vastly inferior to online shopping.
Internet 1, Meatspace 0.

My second stop (using the Dijkstra’s algorithm shortist path!) is Saks Fifth Avenue. I wait forever for the elevator to go to the 6th Floor, and I look at their selection of Bosca Wallets and I’m horribly disappointed to find that they don’t carry the one I’m looking for. The only id window wallet they have is a bulky brown monster, and isn’t what I’m looking for at all.
Internet 2, Meatspace 0.

I’m on my way to my third stop, Barnes and Noble when I run into a pleasant surprise. While I had been planning to buy my sticky labels at the Office Depot on 43rd Street, I ran into a Staples 2 blocks farther north, which cuts my trip down a little bit. This is an unintended benefit of meatspace, so I am grudgingly giving them a point (However, they almost lost the point for playing a horrible muzak cover of Heart’s Alone). I buy my sticky labels and some Pentel Flair Pens (not the cool japanese pens I was hoping to buy at Kinokuniya, but oh well).
Internet 2, Meatspace 1.

Barnes and Noble is next. While they sell Moleskines at MSRP which is such a ripoff, I still just buy it. Pretty quick.
Internet 2, Meatspace 2.

Any good venture into Meatspace should end with actual meat, and today is no exception. I stop at the aforementioned Kwik Meal, and the line is surprisingly short. It’s lamb and chicken marinated with papaya, coriander, and whatever unearthly spicy goodness that makes this the best cart in midtown during the day.
Internet 2, Meatspace 3.

All in all, it looks like Meatspace is about to win, when suddenly I round the corner on 5th avenue and am treated to Hello Kitty in a coconut bra:

AAAAUGH, MY EYES! It’s a children’s cartoon character dressed up as Maui Hooker! WHY? Meatspace forfeits all points and does not pass go!
Internet 2, Meatspace negative a billion.

My collection of Savage Indulgences includes but is not limited to: comic books, the non-digital SLR that I never use, the fact that I sometimes order from restaurants that aren’t on SeamlessWeb, my love of index cards.

Here’s a funny thing I just noticed. One of the Register articles today was posted with the enticing headline “Anonymizer looks for chinks in the Great Firewall of China“. Funny right? Even funnier is if you follow the link through, you will see that the Register has prudently changed the name from “chinks” to “gaps”. Who knows how long the google search page will be live, but I’ve screenshotted it for truth:

Get it? Chinks? China? That British wit gets me every time.

I sometimes grief Apple for what I perceive as marketing ploys or overpriced crap and the fact that it sometimes seems to be helmed by an irrational hegemon who dresses like a flood victim, but I dollaz speak louder than blogposts, and I recently purchased the Intel Duo Core Mac Mini. As I’ve used the little device for about a week now, I figured it was time for the inevitable review (and plus, I’ve been pretty light on the blog content this week, so what the hell).

While my 12″ Powerbook is only about a year and a half old, my headless linux server was pushing 6 years (which is like a hundred in computer years), and after my last move, I think I jostled it to the point that I couldn’t rely on it for basic operations like serving web pages, acting as an ftp server, etcetera. I’d been planning to replace it since November or so, but I put on the brakes expecting Jobs to announce an update to the line shortly. When he announced the new Mac Minis, I was pretty happy with the announced specs, save for the crappy graphics card; and as I was primarily planning to use this for non-graphics intensive operations, I went ahead and ordered the diminutive box within the first hour of its announcement. It arrived much faster than I expected; not only did it ship the same day that I ordered it, but it was delivered in 2 days despite the fact that I selected 5 day shipping. I’ve heard that this is a common experience among people who order in-stock products the same day they are announced.

First off, I found the Rosetta performance to be acceptable. Even before I installed the 1GB of RAM I ordered separately, I found the performance of most apps to be responsive if run by themselves. Non-Universal binary applications like Photoshop were not noticeably slow, and were certainly usable even with the translation hit.

Though I didn’t think much of it from Steve’s original announcement, I really took to Front Row. The interface is very clean, and just animated enough to let you know that it is being responsive. Before I installed the extra RAM, though, the performance was abhorrent, so you definitely need at least 1 GB of RAM to be using this without a noticeable lag. Once I had the extra RAM it ran great, and it was a ton of fun to browse through my music, photos, and video files in this way. I’m definitely going to be using this as my fullscreen music player of choice, and I plan on using it to view downloaded tv shows, and the like.

My main criticisms of the system as a whole are:

1. iTunes must be used to organize movie files in Front Row, and there is no clean way of labeling movie files as “tv shows” or “music videos”
2. Movie files must be playable in Quicktime, which leaves out a lot of the good bittorrentable files that require obscure codecs.
3. Front Row’s interface is just similar enough to the iPod to really irritate a heavy user of both. Aside from the wheel differences, the fact that you can’t rate songs while listening to the songs in FrontRow is really annoying.

All in all though, the Mac Mini has restored my faith in Steve Jobs’ ability to pour our Kool-Aid. Drink up, Mac whores!

UPDATE: I’ve uploaded the pictures of the RAM install job to Flickr. It gets pretty gory…

The minds at Penny-Arcade have a new comic dealing with their newfound feelings at having switched to the flamboyant Apple lifestyle. While they joke about the dangerous path they have set down, I saw the announcement that the two authors of the comic were switching to Macs from PCs to be groundbreaking, and a signal of a big victory for Apple in general.

Here’s some background. Penny-Arcade is the most widely read webcomic around, and they primarily deal with the topic of video games. They have a rabidly fanatical fanbase, and are treated by video game manufacturers as journalists; they have access to sneak previews of new games and consoles, they have been commissioned to make supplementary material for big video games such as Rainbow 6 and World of Warcraft. In addition to this, they have traditionally had a strict anti-Mac attitude; a character in their strip Charles, is typically ridiculed for his love of the Mac platform in general. This has made sense, as they are gamers, and there are… exactly one game (s) available for the Mac that are worth a crap. So I was pretty surprised when they announced over a month ago that they were both looking into buying Apple machines, spurred by the switch to the Intel processors. Though as a Mac fanatic, I am pretty happy about this, it had me a little confused. The switch to the Intel platform has very little impact on the immediate availability of games for the Mac. In fact, due to Rosetta issues, there are reports that some games that worked on old Macs will not work or will run slower on the faster powered Intel Macs.

So… These people were unconvinced by Apple’s switch to BSD, they were unconvinced by Ellen Feiss, and they were unconvinced by Tiger. Why switch now, when nothing has changed from their perspective? How could two users so defiantly anti-switch be swayed by a change of architecture, and the announcement of minor improvements to the basic hardware that they offered before? I have a theory, natch.
(more…)

I don’t know why most of the Apple event recappers left off the most important part of Stevie-J’s keynote, so i’ve transcribed it here.

10:49 Oh, one more thing… [The crowd goes wild]
[Steve pulls off back panel of iPod Hi-fi to reveal a fat wad of cash.]
10:51 Every $350 iPod Hi-Fi comes with $200 cash in the back of it! That’s why the damn thing costs so much! It will also be available in a $450 version that comes with $300 dollars.
[Much applause from apple shareholders. Exeunt omnes]

Much better.

Thomas Pink was clearly a classy brand up until about six months ago, so what the hell are they doing? First I hear about this stupid iPod nano tie, which everyone is quick to point out will be unavoidably uncomfortable, and well, retarded. Fine, plenty of high-fashion brands have tried to profit off of the iPod or PSP brands with overpriced unusable accessories. However, right after that I backed out to their main US page and am greeted by… The Pink Panther?

OK, ok, back up there fella. About three years ago, Thomas Pink was the pinnacle of metro fashion; a businessman’s way of declaring individuality from behind a boring double-breasted suit. Even pre-Queer-Eye, this posh british import convinced us that you can wear pink and purple stripes while still grooving on the vertical smile. New York magazine still refers to the store as “a wardrobe mainstay for cosmopolitan businessmen.” Any New Yorker who visited a Pink store during their seasonal sale days would be confronted with a veritable shopping bloodbath, with grown men tearing through stacks of clothing like twenty-something girls at a Louis Vuitton sample sale.

Maybe they’ve just spread too fast. While it used to be a arduous task to find the oddly located Pink stores, they now have locations in prime spots, such as the Time Warner Center (which, let’s face it, kills everything it touches). In either case, why would they tie their upscale menswear brand to a mediocre kids movie remake? OK, I get it… you both have the word “Pink” in your title. But are they really trying to spread the message “when you think of our brand, think of cheap foreign accent and fart jokes”?

We have zero idea what this thing is, if it’s real, or if it’s some kind of factory leak, but this does look a bit promising as the new Dell Dimension B210 that fans have been speculating about for a while now (and yeah, we’re assuming that’s a USB slot at the bottom there). Dell Inc.’s marketing department has yet to confirm or deny the veracity of these leaked pictures, but they certainly look like they are in keeping with the existing Dimension aesthetic that fans have come to recognize. A VERY GOOD SOURCE suggests that these exciting new boxes will ship with 256 MB of DDR SDRAM, a CD/DVD combo drive and a whopping 80 GB Hard Drive!

More details are expected at Dell’s widely expected press event this Thursday, and we will be sure to post more news as it comes to us!

Google launched its page creator today… the fact that your third-level-domain is forced to be the same as your gmail account means that the whole “use my name as my e-mail address” gmail thing is probably going to go out the window now. At the very least, I’m going to start registering as many gmail addresses as I can to soak up some free web hosting space, and to give me more options with the naming.

My major concern is this: The fact that your third-level domain has to be the same as your gmail address could have some unfortunate consequences. By finding an active googlepage, they automatically find an active gmail account. Theoretically, I can envision spammers harvesting active e-mail addresses in this manner; once these pages are indexed, a simple google search for “site:googlepages.com” will return thousands of active gmail addresses. I’m surprised that they didn’t let people choose their own prefix, as they did with blogger accounts; when I had an active fastmail.fm account, they recommended that you host your public files using an alias, and specifically warn you that the hosting of files under your active mail account could potentially lead to address harvesting. Until Google reveals that it has some ingenious way to stop his kind of address harvesting, I would recommend that anyone that wants to play around with this new service create a “shield” gmail account that they don’t plan on using.

I have some other minor irritations, such as the inability to use custom CSS skins and the fine control of the actual HTML of the page. I can’t figure out any way to edit the HEAD information of the page, which severely limits my ability to customize the styles or behaviors of the page. I still have yet to explore this fully. However, it’s just like me to inspect this gift horse’s teeth. It’s free web storage at this point, right? For all the times I’ve tried to transfer semi-large files to another person and had to deal with awkward AIM firewall issues, I think this will definitely come in handy in some fashion or another. I do hope they fix the naming thing.

UPDATE: Well… rather than fix the third-level domain issue noted previously, Google has apparently shut down the creation of new accounts. This actually circumvents the possibility of creating a “shield” account to test this service with a fack gmail address. I would recommend that users be very cautious using this new site without seriously considering the risks of exposing your e-mail address publicly to the spammer-bot community. What’s funny is a google for site:googlepages.com is actually returning no hits at this point, but a Yahoo search for the same term returns about 109 active pages. Is it possible that Google is aware of the spam risks to their googlepages users and was hoping to prevent this malicious usage by preventing the pages from being indexed for the time being?