Guv 9-12 Stage

Guv 9-12 Stage
Originally uploaded by duelin markers

One of the opening acts for Mos Def at Governor's Island.

Apollo Run at Bryant Park

Yesterday after work I walked over to Bryant Park and watched a band called Apollo Run for a bit. They were really talented and fun to watch. If you can catch them live I recommend it. The singer (who also plays trumpet, keyboard, and guitar (one at a time)) has sort of a Jeff Buckley vocal thing that I really dig. He could exercise a tiny bit more restraint, but if I had to choose between an over-the-top Jeff Buckley vocal thing and none at all, I'd take over-the-top. The Bryant Park After Work series is going every day this week (6 to 7:30) to finish out the season.

Steve Martin Plays a Mean Banjo

I was shocked to discover this exists (via one of those annoying "you like this so you should check out this other thing" emails from amazon): Steve Martin, playing and singing original banjo music. It sounds pretty good too.

From Indian Hammock

From Indian Hammock
Originally uploaded by duelin markers

Goodbye 11 Penn

Goodbye 11 Penn
Originally uploaded by duelin markers

From the Oily Banks of the Gowanus

From the Oily Banks of the Gowanus
Originally uploaded by duelin markers

Looking south from the northern tip at sunset

Shame on Apple's iPhone Team

Here are the reasons I'd be ashamed to admit I worked on the iPhone team (if I were lucky enough to work on the iPhone team). I wrote about some of these issues way back in July of 2007 when I first got the phone, and only one (multi-recipient SMS) has been addressed. I'll update this post as features are added, bugs are fixed, or I discover new stupidity.

• No copy-paste.
• Amazingly, still no way to send or receive contact information. Combined with the lack of copy-paste this can actually force you to grab a piece of paper to write down something from a text or email message so you can then type it into the Contacts app. (Most absurd workflow ever?)
• No option other than CALL for phone numbers encountered in email or web pages. How about the same little blue button you already have in the SMS and phone apps?
• No picture messaging (MMS) and nothing even to let you know that someone tried to send you an MMS message. Your friends' messages just disappear into the ether.(Here's a lame (send-only) workaround that requires asking everyone you know what mobile provider they use and entering an additional email address for them into your contacts.)
• Mail can't rotate to a landscape orientation. This makes some HTML emails extremely difficult to read.
• No queuing and automatic retry of outgoing SMS messages when you don't have a signal.
• In Safari, strange behavior where previously loaded pages reload when you reopen the application. (I'm guessing this has to do with cache-related properties of the page/HTTP response, but redisplaying a page after switching windows or closing Safari shouldn't be subject to the same cache rules as, say, hitting the back button.)
• Speaking of the back button, a user should be able to hold down the back button and see history to choose something other than the last viewed page. Over a cell signal and for pages that don't want to cache, having to go back one page at a time is very slow.
• No ability to say which known Wi-Fi network you prefer.
• When listening to a track without album art, a screenful of nothing (well, a big gray musical note) while the artist and track info is squeezed into a tiny menu bar at the top of the screen.

Shame!

Each Better Than the Next

I hate it when people are fawning over a series of some sort and say (or write) "every ___ is better than the next." Think about that! It means the first one is the best and each one after that is worse. The last one could be completely without merit. There couldn't be any more after that. Unless they started killing babies or something.

Halloween Party

P1000131
Originally uploaded by duelin markers

We had our Halloween party last weekend (almost a week early, but it just worked better). It was awesome. See photos.

Giving Up On MSN Instant Messaging Due to Spam

After a couple weeks of an absurd volume of spam messages (almost all exactly the same), I've decided to stop signing on to MSN messenger in Adium. I think I only have one friend who still uses it anyway, and I can get in touch with her on Facebook anyway. I've also seen quite a bit of spam to my Yahoo! IM account (though not as much as MSN), but that's the service ThoughtWorkers mostly use, so I can't really give it up. I've still never gotten a single spam message on my GTalk or AIM accounts.