A Day in Paradise

OK people – mark you calendars as this is possibly the one rant that I will do on how incredibly awesome an Apple product is.

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.

I think twitter has stolen my ability to create a post title without telling the whole story, but I’ve been banging around Mahalo for a few minutes and I wanted to do a quick post on how far the site has come.

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!

Greetings to everyone who still has this blog in their RSS feeds! I wanted to take a few minutes, while this beautiful Sunday evening winds to a close, to reflect over the years that I’ve been blogging.

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!