I’ve had my first gen ipod touch for about a year and a half now. The two main things that I do with my ipod are Audio books and Podcasts, and the lack of over-the-air podcast download in the original firmware lead me to hacking it right away and installing a better podcatching client.

When the v2 software came out, I reluctantly wiped out my ipod and paid the $9.99 to install the upgrade that now had over-the-air podcast downloading. It was pretty much broken, and really didn’t work that well, but the app store and the other cool new features were enough to keep me from hacking it back to 1.1.x.

My main problem with v2 was how difficult it was to listen to audio books. If you were distracted and needed to go back a couple minutes it was virtually impossible to find your place with the cumbersome interface. The other problem I have (this hasn’t been fixed) is that when you sync your ipod it stops the playback and then doesn’t store any information for where to pick it back up again. Since I listen to a lot at my desk, I end up getting disconnected at least a couple times a day. This only happens with Podcasts, not audible.com books (because they have proprietary technology in their format that keeps it’s place.

Anyway, while listening to TWiT and hearing about the new “scrubbing” feature, I figure that it’s probably worth yet another $9.99 download.

It TOTALLY is!!!

1. The new search is awesome. Click once on the button and you pull up a search which searches through everything on your ipod, music, contacts, emails, everything. Very impressive. You can also access it by swiping one screen to the left of your home screen.

2. Scrubbing is AWESOME. Here is how it works: first of all you can hear the playback as you’re scrubbing through it. If you hold your thumb on the timeline and scrub one way or the other it goes just as fast as v2. The great thing is that if you pull your thumb down horizontally the timeline slows down. So what you do is move your thumb to the general place you were, then pull your thumb down to slow down the speed of the scrubbing and find your exact position. It’s a bit hard to describe but it works VERY well.

3. Speed up & Slow down. I am a fast reader, faster than people who read my audio books so having a button that says 2x right on the screen is a GREAT way to speed the reading up to my comfort level. They are using some sort of pitch shifting technology so the voice gets shifted down to the same pitch as standard speed. It takes a few seconds to get used to the readers voice once you make him talk twice as fast, however once you get used to it you don’t notice it AT ALL. I tried listening to TWiT in 2x - it didn’t work very well probably better when there is just one speaker and yo udon’t have to adjust to multiple voices.

4. And finally the 30-second back button. This is the simplest and the best little button to have, and because I know I can jump back 30 seconds, I find myself more likely “pick up” my audio book when I just have a couple minutes to “read”. I have to say the icon is a bit ugly and makes the music screen look “cluttered”.

All in all, I feel like this version of the OS finally feels like a really usable platform.

When I did my first gander through Mahalo, I was put off and quickly wrote it off as yet-another-mediawiki-based-seo-focused-keyword-sink. There wasn’t much that I could find there that wasn’t within the reach of a couple google queries.

Skip ahead a year (and change) and it looks like they have either dumped mediawiki, or successfully disguised it to create a platform that fosters amazing interaction with its users. I did a quick search, and before I knew it I had already claimed a page and was on my way to becoming a Mahalo heditor.

I’m still not sure about its future as a full blown search engine - but something is certainly going on here!

I started my blog in 2003 when blogging was still fairly young. Back in the day I was consulting and had time on my hands & blogging was the best way for me to not just comment on the news that flew past me, but create an archive of all these random thoughts and technical commentary.

One of the blogs that influenced my style of blogging was Agonist.org - this blog flew to the forefront of the blogosphere (although I’m pretty sure that was before the term was coined) during the initial invasion of Iraq. As I read the agonist, I saw a change in the way blog authors interacted with their readers; Instead of providing a lot of commentary, the agonist was pulling specific pieces of news out of the news stream and posting them to the blog obsessively, providing an up-to-the-minute news feed from Iraq. Without the usual commentary, the “just the news” readers got what they wanted, and the discussion of the news was left up to the reader. Never before had I seen such lively and intelligent discussions.

I never had any big plans to turn my blogging into a “for profit venture” or become an A (or even B) level blogger. I simply enjoyed firing off lots of posts “agonist style”. Some days I was doing conference blogging, sometimes I was posting images, and then for a week straight I could have sworn I was a link blogger. But I had a blast!

Then life took over.

Since moving from consulting to full time “a real job” employment I’ve seen the time that I’ve been willing to to spend sitting behind a computer doing “my own stuff” slowly diminish until recently I’ve found that I have all but given up on my blogging.

To be fair, I do blog occasionally on our hedge fund blog at hedgeco.net, as well as spend a fair amount of time tweeting.

I’m not sure if twitter has replaced the need to sit down and spend 5-20 minutes creating a valuable blog entry, but more and more I am trying to find a link I posted on twitter and, thanks to twitter’s useless searching, have come up with nothing. The more I use twitter, the more difficult it gets to find anything I said using twitter.

Which brings me to this final realization: Even if nobody ever reads this blog, there is still a place for my Blogging.

Which leads to the obvious question: What am I going to do to get my blogging back on track?

• Focus on blogging: Bring people to my blog and create unique & useful content
• Build tools to consolidate my social networking footprint: My social footprint is a DISASTER - I am working on some tools which will turn my blog into a “portal” for all my social networking attention streams.
• Make goals: I’m going to be announcing a couple blogging goals in the next few weeks. Again, these will not be monetary goals, but I have gotten so out of the habit of blogging that unless I work pretty hard to get it going again its not going to happen.

Well, I guess we will see what happens with that!

Have a GREAT week!

It’s great when you get a website project where each time you sit down you can’t help but think of a beautiful Costa Rica vacation!

The HedgeCo Websites team started working with the Punta Bocana team last year, our goal was to create a website for a real estate project that is both aesthetically pleasing as well as an informative resource for future vacationers and more importantly potential investors.

When creating a website for our usual Hedge Fund clients, one of the difficulties that our team has is finding unique design ideas which clearly capture the goals/plans/spirit of the individual firm. However, having all the beauty of what promises to be the Costa Rican Premier Beachfront Community and Marina, made our job really easy.

“Punta Bocana, a luxury beachfront community and marina located in Playa Herradura, Costa Rica, has officially gone online with their new website. Visitors to www.puntabocana.com will find updated photos of construction progress, the latest renderings and access to the upscale community’s master plan.”

“Punta Bocana is a master-planned resort community overlooking Herradura Bay and the Pacific Ocean in Costa Rica’s central Pacific coast. The resort has been designed with preserving the area’s stunning natural beauty in mind. Set on 220 acres that overlook the placid blue waters of Herradura Bay, Punta Bocana’s vision features luxury mountaintop and beachfront residences and condominiums. Within the resort will be a boutique hotel, fine dining and shopping, and a deluxe hotel on the marina. The state-of- the-art marina will offer slips for docking up to 155 vessels, accommodating yachts up to 125 feet in length. There will also be over 40 dry storage slips.”

Accompanying the primary Punta Bocana Costa Rica real estate site, we also created the “Costa Rica Venture Fund” website, which provides our full suite of hedge fund specific functionality for investors.

The most exciting part of this project, is to watch the resort itself grow. The construction workhas started and Phase 1 of the Punta Bocana resort is slated for completion in July 2010. We will keep you informed of the developments!

Please visit Punta Bocana.com for more information on the Premier Beachfront Community and Marina in Costa Rica.

It’s really simple. All you need to do is drag the bookmarklet link to your bookmark bar (this has been tested in Firefox ONLY)

I can’t post the link in wordpress so here is a simple page with it: http://www.wormus.com/rot13/

Once the bookmarklet is on your bookmark bar click on it to post a rot13 tweet. To un “encrypt” a tweek, select the rot13 text and click the bookmarklet.

Pretty simple!

Pikchur is a multi-platform mobile photo sharing platform. Think of twitpics on steroids with a good design and some awesomeness sprinkled in for good measure. It is really the simplest way to share pictures on the go (yes, that is from the front page).

I signed up for a Pikchur account - grabbed the name aaron (to add to my flickr and linkedin collection) but since my trusty Blackberry 8700 (aka “The Calculator”) did not have a camera, I did not have any need for a mobile photo sharing platform.

Skip ahead a month - I just got the new Blackberry 8900 which has a fantastic 3.2 megapixel camera. I was playing with Twitter, Twitpix and a couple other tools when I pulled up Pikchur again.

I’ve been playing with Pikchur now for a couple of days and love it.

At its core, Pikchur gives you the ability to upload images from a mobile device, this can either be done through a web, email or mms interface. Once your picture (or pikchur) has been uploaded, there is a lot that happens.

Integration with other platforms.

Pikchur is integration at its finest. In fact the integration with other platforms is so seamlessly integrated into Pikchur that you don’t even need to have a Pikchur ID, but can log in using the credentials of any of the sites that Pikchur integrates with. Each connection is done through the individual platform API which makes the integration simple (and secure).

As soon as I logged in, I added my Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and Flickr accounts to Pikchur. I then sent a picture from my phone to the Pikchur email address and it was sent to all the platforms.

That was pretty impressive, but the Pikchur team took it one step further. Any comments that are made by pikchur users are also posted to the other platforms. This means that if I comment on an image in pikchur, then my flickr identity will also comment on the picture in flickr and if I’ve chosen to link up my Twitter account, an @reply will be sent as well. VERY cool.

Other Goodies
Now you’re probably wondering if it’s really that great an idea to automatically send all your pictures to all your different social networking platforms. The Pikchur team thought of that and came up with a simple yet effective way to turn off posting specific images to platforms.

If I am sending an email update and I want Pikchur to post an image to Twitter but not facebook then I will attach the image, add my subject line and then add the following tag to my email body.

+tw+ -fb-

Using the same “trigger” concept you can post an images into a “PikBoxes” tagged as “fun” using this format:

+fun+

Geotagging

By default Pikchur will read the geo data from your image and tag the images with the information. The homepage will show a google map with call-outs from locations where images are being taken in real time.

If your mobile device does not have GPS capability, you can manually add your data by appending the address to the subject line like this example:

Palm beach boat show * royal park bridge, 33401 *

There is still a lot of work to do

Despite my gushing over the sweet platform that is Pikchur, it is still very much a geeky toy and does not feel like it has received the UI attention that a powerful platform like this needs.

The social networking aspects of this platform are nice, however you can’t do something as simple as viewing the most recent photos of all your friends. You can’t flip back and forth between images in a photo set. This is my BIGGEST issue and there is a lot of pageviews which they are not getting because a user has no easy way to browse a photostream.

Also I would love to be able to do simple things like rotating an image after I uploaded it.

In the facebook integration, I would like to be able to have the option to change my status to the subject of the image with a link to the Pikchur page. Maybe as a “premium feature” I’d like to be able to post the full sized image to to Facebook (I’ll pay for that).

I think there is an issue when you combine triggers and email sigs. I’ll test that out later.

Conclusion

Having said all that I am LOVING Pikchur and I encourage as many people as possible to sign up to Pikchur and of course view my incredibly awesome photostream

http://help.pbxtra.com/Troubleshooting/FON_Script_Interface#Fon_Script_Interface_Overview

1. Tish Das: You’re a crazy straight-teethed chick magnet - you enjoy the view from the top of your Manhattan condo - I’m having a whopper! (oh BTW, you’re still cool with me crashing at your crib on the 27th right? awesome!)
2. Sunman Returns: Best all-round designer on EARTH - I never thought it would end this way
3. Brett Eigel: What’s up couz? You know what they say - food before family!
4. Cathy: What can I say… tough times
5. Chris Cornutt: The most obsessive PHP blogger ever! I appreciate the years of work you’ve put into PHPDeveloper.org. Maybe we can go out for a burger sometime!
6. Clare Parker: I am sure you understand the lengths that one must go to for an extraordinary deal!!! I was thinking - I might take the day off on Monday the 16th of FEB… do you have anything planned for that long weekend??? Sorry, I would have sent you a fb message, but well… you’re not my friend anymore
7. Davey: Best programmer ever! I don’t need you as a fb friend - your awesomeness transcends social networks! Wouldn’t it be crazy if this meme killed facebook???
8. Dawn Alba: Craziest West Palm Beach Party animal ever… you eat the tomatoes you just got from the green market. I’m going for a whopper!!!
9. Scott Sigler: Now that Contagious is a New York Times best seller - you have no need for your OJs… (and I’m almost done with that site)
10. Stella: Now, that I’ve done it I have realized how short-sighted it was to sacrifice my wife, who cleans up after me, takes care of the kids, not to mention being my best friend and … OMG! the gravity of what I have done is just sinking in … I’ve un-friended the person cooks delicious meals for me every single day for 1 lowly whopper. You’re not going to take this personally? I’m really really sorry!!! We can still be friends right? Can I make up to you by adding you right back??? We can split the Whopper I’ll go on that diet we were talking about yesterday (right after I eat my whopper!) OK?? Good - that was close

Now you too can make the Whopper Sacrifice!

http://members.shaw.ca/nicholas.fong/dig/