Jack Frost Arrives

The weather quickly turned cold on us in Michigan.  Now we’re lucky to see the mid 30’s.  Mice seeking warmth have invaded our house and we anxiously await the moment they spring one of the traps we have set.  While it is much colder than Virginia, I’ve found that I’m starting to adjust.  It’s especially easy to stay warm by being active.  I set up my 1999 Blueberry iMac in the garage to play tunes while I refinish an old interior door that’s been sitting in the basement since before we moved in.  It has about 4 layers of paint on it and each application of stripper only takes off one layer. 

We’ve been sprucing up our house to get ready for our neighborhood’s progressive dinner party.  We volunteered to host dessert, since Julie has some mad dessert making skillz.  We replaced a ceiling light in the front entry and replaced the ceiling fan in the dining room with a chandelier.  Installing light fixtures is much more difficult in an older home!

I still can’t believe there’s only 4 weeks until Christmas.  We’ll be spending the holiday in Fisher and then New Year’s (and our anniversary) in Chicago.  I used to hate Chicago.  I used to think it was a bunch of warehouses in the suburbs and a few office buildings downtown.  But now that I’ve been around town a little, I have to say it is my favorite American city.  New York is cool and all, but Chicago isn’t so pretentious.  DC has history and some culture, but it’s comparatively bland outside of the downtown/Georgetown/Alexandria area.  Plus, the area is too car-oriented, which makes exploring the city prohibitive, especially if you live and work in the suburbs.  Anyway, I like being only 3.5-4 hours from Chicago (or 4.5 hours by train).  I like that Amtrak takes me directly from Lansing there, but I wish it would run more often than once a day. 

Speaking of trains, I’ve been thinking a lot about why they’re not so popular.  I would think spending 4.5 hours on a train that doesn’t require a security check, allows you to plug in and use your laptop, and costs half as much as flying would be better than flying.  Sure, you may get there a bit faster, but at a higher cost financially and psychologically.  I could see it replacing all of those short-haul hour-long flights, like the ones from Lansing to Detroit or Chicago.  Why not stick a train terminal right next to the airport?  I’d rather take a 4.5 hour train to Chicago than take a plane and spend 2 hours waiting for my connection.  Just think of the reduction of traffic that would result at airports if they could get rid of those short flights.  Think of the money the airlines could save by ditching their regional jets and only having to maintain the larger ones.

In other news, I’ve decided to spin off all my technical posts into a separate blog.

ZOMG!! Web Apps for the iPhone!!!1

Apple just released their official directory of web apps for the iPhone.  I’ve been playing around with the Facebook app and it’s really neat.  They did a nice job of fitting everything onto the tiny screen.  Also, you can tap on phone numbers and it will start a call to that number.  You can click on addresses and it will open the Google Maps app with that address.  Very cool!

Remembering Why I Like Apple

After so many years of using a Mac at home, I started to have thoughts, like, “well maybe Windows isn’t that bad. People seem to get along OK with it. My work computer has problems, but that’s probably because I do weird things with it.”

But then reality hits and I realize how dreadful it is to use a PC.

Things that annoy me about Windows:

• Since Windows has such a good reputation for security, it is mandated that I have Symantec Antivirus installed at work.  This wonderful program causes explorer.exe to hang when I browse files.  Then I get to CTRL+ALT+DEL and restart explorer.exe.  Woohoo!
• The MDI paradigm is so clunky!  I have two monitors, but apps like Visual Studio can only occupy a single monitor.  I’d very much like to drag my output/find/project navigation windows to the other screen, but that’s just not practical in Windows.  MS has tried to make some apps like Word more SDI-like by putting each Word or Excel doc in its own task bar item.  However, Excel has the wonderful habit of closing all spreadsheets when I close a single Excel window.  Word doesn’t behave like that.  Excel, why can’t you be more like your brother?!
•  Those handy reminders the pop up in the task bar, like “Outlook is taking too long to respond.”  I’m glad that Windows is barging in and spending more CPU cycles to tell me that something is taking a long time to process.
• IE7 is still the worst browser ever made.  How many times have I told it to save my username/password for that site that needs HTTP authentication?  Does it listen? No!  And let’s not forget IE’s outright flaunting of web standards.

How is Mac OS better?

• No viruses so far.  However, I have run Windows without AV software for a couple of years without any problems - you just have to stay up to date on patches, stay behind a firewall, and don’t open suspicious attachments.
• I love SDI.  Not ever Mac app is SDI (like Eclipse) but I love having separate windows that I can put anywhere.  I like having a consistent spot to look for the “File” menu.
• No annoying popups.
• OK, browsers aren’t OS-specific, but at least the browser isn’t built into OS X.  I still can’t understand why Microsoft has left IE so tightly coupled with the OS.

Missing Out on Joost

Joost looks really awesome.  Tons of free TV shows streamed on demand.  It’s too bad that their client software isn’t compiled for PowerPC.  :(  I’ve only had my PowerBook G4 for 4 years, but maybe it’s time to upgrade to a MacBook Pro if companies keep leaving PPC users out in the cold.

Tech Explosion

This article is a little old, but it hit me at just the right time. Lately, I’ve been on a binge of researching new programming languages and frameworks, now that I have so much free time and the fact that, lately, I’ve felt like I’ve fallen behind a bit after playing so much EU II and focusing on PHP for a year. In the process of playing catchup I started to feel overwhelmed - there’s so much out there - Hibernate, LINQ, CouchDB, Erlang, Ruby, Smalltalk, hey remember Scheme? SQLite, JQuery, Perl, Spring, ad nauseum.

I guess the important part is knowing the fundamentals. Really nail down a few major languages and frameworks and you can work from there and google your way across the bridge when you come to it.

Applelicious

This weekend has been an applelicious weekend! Today, Julie and I went to the Michigan Apple Festival to pick some apples, grab some donuts, guzzle cider, and savor an apple dumpling with ice cream. We then passed out on the couch/la-z boy. We picked some Red Delicious, Golden Delicious, Macoum, and Jonagolds. I think if I were alive prior to the industrial revolution, I would have been an apple picker. I think it would be the funnest job ever - hunting for apples and reaching way up to get them.

What also made this an applelicious weekend is that Julie and I drove out to Grand Rapids last night. Grand Rapids is not only the home of Gerald Ford, but also the home of our closest Apple store. For my birthday, Julie bought me a 4GB iPhone! Best present evar!

I’m just amazed how Apple came into a pretty well-established industry and totally showed up the competition. The phone is so intuitive and feature-rich. It also worked out nicely because Julie had lost her cell phone a while ago. While I had bought a pay-as-you-go phone (and swapped out the SIM card with her AT&T card) as a cheap replacement, it just wasn’t doing the trick. So now she can use my old Samsung phone.

SQL

One thing that’s always bothered me is when people pronounce “SQL” as “sequel.”  Where did this come from?  I prefer to spell it out and say “ess kew ell” and I think it probably annoys people who say “sequel.”  I was reading about a new technology called SPARQL, which Wikipedia says is pronounced, “sparkle.”  Then I got to thinking: wouldn’t it be more logical to pronounce SQL as “sickle?”  

Studenting

I was starting to get a little disappointed this summer. Before we moved, we were excited that we were moving to a college town. We believed the smallness mixed with the coolness of a college community would offer us light traffic, kind locals, fab hangouts, and big-city culture.

Well, let’s pretend those are objectives for our “life surge,” and I’ll be General Petraeus and report our progress to you In all honesty, Lansing feels like a dying city, following the same path as Detroit. The economy has been shrinking, thanks to the idleness of the American auto industry, and people keep moving out into the surrounding suburbs, leaving the downtown area to rot. Some time in another post I’ll explore the issue of white flight. But for now, I’ll just say that life is peachy in the suburbs, but the area around our neighborhood is plagued with low incomes, dilapidated property, and a “for sale” sign in front of every other house. This summer, there weren’t any sort of great art events or lectures at MSU. I was ever longing more and more for life in the big city of DC or Chicago. I missed the culture.

But now that school’s back in session, things have picked up. Now that I’ve finished a long-running PHP project, I’ve decided to delve into the world of Ruby on Rails. Yeah, I’m 2 years behind, but now I have plenty of time to do it since I’m home alone 3 nights out of the week while Julie’s at class. Last weekend I attended the Grand Rapids Ruby Users Group. It was nice to get together with people interested in new and better ways of development. It was very refreshing and I learned quite a bit. For now, I’m working on a pet web application using Rails and the Google Maps API. I decided to throw an app together that would let you quickly plan trips - sort of like Dopplr or Yahoo!’s trip planner, but more focused on a precise Itinerary and less on the social aspect.

On Thursday I’m going to see Helvetica The Film. I’ve always been mildly interested in design and typography, so it should be really interesting. Later this fall, I’ll get to hear Julie perform Carmina Burana with the MSU choir and there are plenty of other performances going on in the music department.

So things are looking good in the culture department.  The locals are friendly and traffic is an absolute breeze.  There are some cool cafes as well, such as Espresso Royale and Beaner’s.  Lansing also seems to have the highest number of ice cream parlors per capita.

This summer has been nice, getting above 90 degrees only a few times.  But now it’s quickly changing to fall, and I don’t know if I can handle the cold weather again after living in Virginia for 4 years where temperatures in January stay around 30 degrees.

I think we need to give our “life surge,” just like the real “surge,” more time.   We’ve been meeting most of the benchmarks!

The New Command Line

The wonders of “Web 2.0″ and AJAX design have brought us back to 1979. The innovations of WordPress/LiveJournal, Myspace and GMail - social networking, blogging, and flashy interfaces - have paved way for a new old way to manage your life. You can now send SMS text messages to web applications like Twitter, a site that was intended to be a “microblogging” network. Some inventive people have written programs that will respond to messages you type into Twitter and perform certain actions. For instance, I have my Twitter account hooked up to Remember The Milk. At any time I can send an SMS message to Remember the Milk, say, “meet Joe at 5pm tomorrow” and it will add that event to my calendar. It can even manage shopping lists. Another program offers budget management. So, every time you go to Starbucks, you can type in how much you spent on Lattes and keep a tight watch on how much money you’re throwing at Seattle. Yet another program allows you to keep track of gas mileage by entering your car’s current odometer reading, how much gas you just filled it with, and how much you paid. Over time it will chart out your car’s performance. If you have multiple cars it can even guess what car you entered mileage for based on typical mileage, so you don’t have to specify which car you filled up.

It’s really amazing to see those text commands and how similar they are to those old DOS commands we used to type to start up a game or Windows 3.1. Of course, the command line never went out of style. All of us cool computer programmer types use it to perform tasks that would be cumbersome using a mouse or when toying around with Linux or Mac OS.

The question is, though, will this command line fad last? If more and more people buy phones with similar capabilities as the iPhone, we won’t really need the command line because it will be easier just to click (or, tap, I guess) around a web page.

I guess the Twitter integration is for those of us who can’t afford iPhones

Man, I want an iPhone!

Google on the Phone

When I first got my cell phone a few months ago, I tried browsing to GMail since I finally had a phone that could handle it. While checking my mail, I noticed a link advertising their GMail app. I downloaded it and ran it. Very cool! It’s just like using GMail on your PC (well almost). You can easily access messages and do all the GMail things you can do with your PC. Sweet!

Another app I found was Google Maps for cell phones. I had tried going to Google maps with my phone’s web browser, but lo and behold! A link to a Google maps app for cell phones! I promptly installed it. It’s just as smooth as Google maps for PC and it’s great to basically have a nav system right on your phone. It gives directions and finds businesses (but it won’t route you in real time).

The applications have come in handy up here in Lansing. At work, they heavily restrict our internet usage, so it’s nice to be able to check and respond to important emails during the day. Last night, my wife had given me directions to a Kinko’s to fax some loan documents. When I got there, there was a sign saying it was closed due to loss of power. I fired up Google Maps and found the other Kinko’s across town.