IMHOtep

30-30-30

2011-07-27T19:02:00.054-04:00

So, I was bound and determined to get a 30-30-30 in - finally - on Wednesday. I took my Magic Pants to work, the sleeve, a Stinger (from Beth's collection), goggles, and shoes and - even though I was supposed to meet Joe for Wednesday Night Baseball, after the swim the previous night, I knew I was just going to do it.

I drove from work directly to the gym, got there at the top of the hour, changed, stretched lightly, and headed to the pool. Hardly anyone was around, so I got my pick of lanes. I stretched a little more, dipped my hand into the water, and then ... started. I dove in and had a few good dolphin kicks, resurfaced, and started nice and slow. One length down then two. My legs felt tired from last night's swim, but soon enough the cobwebs were kicked loose and I was going. Three and four and five and I barely felt winded. Six came, and I flipped over onto my back for a length of backstroke at seven. That done, my shoulders were sore from last night, too - so I flipped back into a crawl for #8, #9, and #10.

I was tired, and thought about flipping into a crawl. But no. Technically, #11 would be my final length come race day, and I wasn't going to end on back stroke. So I kept going. The dolphin kicks on the turns were going pretty well, too, and I was proud of that. So #11 came and went and I headed into the last length. The twelfth was strong. I didn't want to blow it out and die in the middle of my last event, but I was good to go. I put my head down, and switched to 4s, which made me go a little faster to get to the breath at the end. And then I was done.

I bobbed in the pool for a couple of seconds, a little dazed, and then told my self - you prolly can't do this on Sunday. So I climbed the ladder, got out, and made my way into the locker room. Twenty minutes to change and do the swim.

The great thing about the tri shorts is ... no changing. I toweled off and got mostly dry, and put on my shirt, pulled on my socks and shoes and then ... realized two things. One, I had forgotten to put my calf sleeve on, and two, I had forgotten my iPhone with the C25k app. I took off my shoe and pulled the sleeve on, and figured - I had already wasted enough time in this transition, I would run out to the car after the bike and grab my Android.

I grabbed the Stinger, jammed it in a pocket, went up to the video bike, adjusted it, and hopped on. I wanted a better, more life-like workout than the other night, so I chose "Race Day" and cued it up for 35 minutes, and started. I knew it was going to be a little different when the program exhorted me to go up to heavy resistance. I ignored it. Not ready yet. I got into a groove pretty quickly, waited before getting into a standing climb, and then started to follow the program a bit better - standing climbs, jacking up the resistance, etc. By about halfway through, I could feel my legs getting tired. So I pulled out the Stinger, ripped the top open, and gulped about half of it down.

It was interesting. Definitely honey - but something else kinda malty, too. And maybe it was because it had been in the car all day, but it was pretty liquidy, too. The gulp was more of a gush, really. I sucked the rest of the Stinger out, and kept going to make sure I had all of it that I could get, before stuffing it back into my pocket.

Maybe it was psychosomatic, but I felt like I could feel the lift after a minute or so. My legs weren't as tired anymore and things got easier. I was a little disappointed, though, that it didn't last longer. By the time the ride was almost done, I could feel my legs getting tired again, and I started thinking - how am I ever going to do this run? Maybe I need a second Stinger.

I got done with the bike, and then briskly walked out to the car, grabbed my phone, and realized - I had deleted the C25k app because it was so sucky. Fumbled through the process of re-downloading, and realized my calf was starting to get tight. Stretched it out a little, cued up the right week, and was relieved that it was 10 minutes of running, 3 of walking, and 10 running. So I started off on my warm-up, mostly to make sure that leg was good and loose. After about three minutes I thought - screw it, let's just finish this thing up. And started my jog.

I've never been so happy that I was only going 5mph. I think during the run I bumped it up some, but by the end - back down at 5mph. And you know, as I said earlier - I want to so be at 6mph. But maybe 5mph isn't so bad. That's 12 minute miles, and if I do that - especially after the swimming and biking - coming in somewhere over 36 minutes isn't too bad ... is it?

My calf did start to tighten up, but the sleeve kept it in pretty good control. It was a struggle the last few minutes, but not like the other times I ran. I was tired, and I felt it, but I didn't need to call on any inspiration to get through it, like that twenty minute run last week. All in all, it was a great feeling of accomplishment. So I celebrated by going to Fieldhouse and having a couple of beers and watching baseball games that I didn't really care about.

Beth is away this weekend, and I have a Ghost Tour and work Mobtown - but I'm hoping a I get to do this again before the 7th....

The Sweat Factory

2011-07-26T22:38:00.001-04:00

So, Friday the plan was to go in early to work, come home and work from home (while simultaneously doing stuff to get ready to go to the beach), and then head down. But by the time Beth made it home, I was nowhere near ready to go. I still had to do two more sets of minutes, and then throw my backpack in the car, and get the bike rack, my bike, and the bike my brother had given me on the car. So Beth took off without me, and I worked a 9 hour day....

The further plan had been to make it down to the beach in time to do something on Friday - most likely, with the heat, a good, quick swim. I finally made it down to Milton around 7:30 or so, and met up with everyone at Po'Boys. It was steaming hot outside, it was steaming hot in the restaurant, and I found out when I talked to Beth, the Usuals, and Matt and Jen that it was a toasty 88 degrees when they had left for dinner. We made it back to the house around 9 or so, and it had cooled off to 84 inside, A/C chugging away. Mucked around, went to bed not too late, and got a solid amount of sleep.

Saturday we putzed around for most of the morning, and had Dogfish Head tour tickets at 12:30. We made it over there, enjoyed ourselves with samples, bought some stuff, and then went to the Broadkill Boat House for a great lunch (I had the calamari boathouse tacos) with Matt and Jen, the Usuals, and Kori and Larry.

We were on the beach by 4:30, I think. Going into the water was weird. It was obvious that the water wasn't really much cooler than the ambient air temperature - it just felt like walking into jello that was pretty much the same as the air. Clearly, the water was 85+. BUT, you weren't sweating your balls off - so who cared? We floated around for awhile in the water, until someone said, "How's the tri training going? Swim down to that buoy. It was one of the buoys that served as an anchor-place for a boat that would come in there, and was about 50 yards away or so. So... I did. Made it back and didn't feel much the worse for wear. I splashed around for a couple minutes longer, and then thought - oh, screw it - might as well get that workout in.

I took off for the far jetty. Now I should say that one of the things about swimming in the bay down there is that I find I have to stop every so often to make sure I'm now about to hit a buoy, the boat, the gaggle of other swimmers, the rocks of the jetty, etc. - and that I'm not drifting out to sea. I try not to touch - just sorta tread water for like two seconds until I can get my bearings. So when I say "I made it all the way down" - the caveat is - I stopped a couple of times to look around. But I made it the 100 yards or so, turned around and backstroked for awhile.

I made it past the boat - maybe 50 yards? - and my arms hurt and I felt like I had a decent breath. So I turned back around and crawled the rest of the way. I turned around immediately, and crawled the 100 yards back down the beach. Again flipped to a back stroke and went past the boat and finished with a crawl. 400 yards by my reckoning, 100 of that back stroke.

We got out and went about the rest of the day. Tony grilled up some good chicken and corn, we watched Iron Man 2. And I had every intention of getting up at 7:30 to try a 30-30-30 (30 minutes of swimming, 30 of biking, and 30 of running.)

But at a little after 7:00 it was already 82 degrees, and by 7:30 it was 83 degrees, and the prospect of doing running 8:30-9:00 as the mercury climbed did not excite me. And indeed, another fairly hot day. We spent it on the beach - and the water was colder - but by a little after 1, there was some strong thunderstorm activity in the area. So.... that was an end to swimming. We ate lunch and wiled away the afternoon watching as two lines of thundershowers blow through. Everyone slowly packed up and left. I was last to leave, and entertained thoughts of pulling my bike off and going for a last minute bike ride as the temperature had dropped to a more sane mid-80s around 3:30 after the storms blew through. But that didn't happen. So, I packed up and went home, never having tried my tri shorts or calf sleeve out, but with a good swim under my belt.

I should mention now that I figured something out in that 400+ yards of swimming. This was getting easy. And I felt like I had a real good power stroke if I made sure I was bringing my arms through and brushing my thighs as I followed through. Maybe it did something for my form, maybe it did something to focus my mind on some repetitive motion. But I really started thinking - I can swim all day like this.

Monday promised to be another scorcher. And I woke up feeling like crap - achey all over, all out of sorts, just not good. There was no way I could even face going in to my 80+ degree cube, so I called in to work from home. Did my work, made dinner, and at 8:00 figured a brick was in order. I grabbed my new tri shorts, put 'em on, pulled the calf sleeve over my left calf and headed off.

Beth had already spurred me to action by telling me that, in her bike ride (executed while she recovers from some muscle strain in her glute), she had managed 12 miles in 35 minutes. I was jealous as hell. "And," she added, "I kept it right in the 130 beats per minute zone." Now, all of my experience had suggested that the 12 miles/20km was going to take me an hour. At the beach - on flat ground, going at it pretty aggressively - it was taking me half an hour to go the 6 miles from Alabama to the park. How was she besting me? "Well," she said, "I'm probably not going any where near as high a gear as you are."

I will admit that I'm most comfortable in 2.5 or 2.6. And - to me - most of the 3 gears feel a lot less taxing than 2.6. So... I'm used to going pretty high. But this was just not ... acceptable. I started to feel bad. If she can get on a bike and DOUBLE MY SPEED, meeting my max speed (22-23mph) - I was kinda screwed.

So I scampered to the gym, tri shorts strapped on, jumped on a bike, and knocked off 20km (a bit over 12 miles) in around 27 minutes. Now, I'm not kidding myself. I feel like there are calibration problems. The exercise bike is also inside, no stop signs, no wind resistance, no inclines.... But that felt pretty good.

I went from there to the treadmill (still too hot outside!), and started week 6 run 1 in the C25K program: warmup (cut short because I was ready to GO!), 5 minute run, 3 minute walk, 8 minute run, 3 minute walk, 5 minute run, cool down. I gotta say: easy peasy. I was only going at 5mph. My calf was feeling tight, but the sleeve really felt like it was keeping things in line. Again - no headphones, just trying to run low and loose. And the tri shorts - good god! I felt superhuman. Maybe it was the sleeve - but it was like wearing armor at +5 CON or something! All in all, a good strong night.

So, Tuesday.... My plan initially was to get home early and swim before going to the Board Meeting for Mobtown. I made it in early, got through a Steering Committee meeting where I asked for a 5010 extension and got it, and left around 4:30. At the gym at 5:00 though, all the lanes were taken. I came home, made dinner, and took off around 6:00. The Board Meeting went longer than anyone anticipated - I got out of there at 8:30, and was in a semi-panic. I double-checked pool times, and Merrit closes the pool at 10, so I was good. I raced down to the gym, pulled on the Magic Tri Shorts, stretched a little, and then headed out to the pool.

I just jumped in and started swimming. And man what a good swim. I crawled two lengths and felt good, barely winded, crawled 3, 4, 5, 6! Six lengths before I was feeling a little out of breath - half my customary twelve! I turned on my back and backstroked 7 & 8 until my shoulders started to bark. Flipped and did two more (9 & 10) before I had to stop. I stood there sucking major wind, and prolly pulled a dozen breaths or so. And that was all I needed. Caught my breath in those few seconds and thought - well, let's go for it. Dove back in (my dolphin kicks were getting a little ragged and shallow at this point), and snapped off the last two lengths.

I FELT GREAT!

As I drove home, I knew there would have to be a way I could do a 30-30-30 on Wednesday....

We're Having a Heat Wave

2011-07-21T22:42:00.000-04:00

At 9:30 tonight - on my way home from the gym - my car said it was 92 degrees. Today was just a sauna - something like 100, with a heat index over 115.

To make matters worse, the air conditioner at work is broken, so I am spending sweltering days in my cube. I was happy yesterday that the heat didn't get above 80 degrees. Today it was rubbing 82. I left a little early. Tomorrow I'm going to go in for a standup meeting, and then come home - where my air conditioner works - before leaving for a weekend at the BBC with the Usual Suspects and Matt and Jen. It appears to be a little better down there - merely topping out in the mid to high 90s. And the air conditioner at the BBC is a little weak, too. Great.

So - listless from all the heat - we ordered sushi from Chiu's, and about 8 something I figured - this was my best chance to go to the gym and get a run in. Because as much as I might want to 30-30-30, that might not happen if morning temps are in the 80s at the beach....

I was already resigned to redoing the last run. It called for 20 minutes non-stop and I couldn't do it. I had to stop for 3 minutes after 10 minutes of running. So I wanted to do it this time - run for a solid 20 minutes. I got in my car and looked at the C25K app and saw Week 6 started off with a run 5 - walk 3 - run 8 - walk 3 - run 5. Definitely doable - but I wanted that challenge. I wanted to get that 20 minute straight run in, dammit!

Went upstairs to the treadmills, stretched, and did the same as last run - not wired in to anything, just propped the C25K app up on the treadmill, did my 5 minute walk warmup, and then dialed it up to 5mph, and went for it - keeping my arms low and loose. The first five minutes practically flew by. I had a little tightness in the bad left calf, but nothing bad. The second 5 was a little more effort. The leg tightened up a little more, and it felt like I was never going to get out of the 13 minute zone.

I hit the halfway point and was like, I can do this! I got it licked! Somewhere after the 10 minute mark my calf loosened up a little, and then went sort tingly and numb - didn't hurt, didn't pop, but it was kinda strange. That 3rd 5 minutes wasn't bad either, but near the end, it was feeling long and was taking some effort, and I had to call on a little inspiration.

The last five minutes was ... interesting. My calf was numb - so I wasn't worried it would pop, but it did give me some concern. I was a little labored, but generally okay. I didn't seriously think I needed to quit - I entertained the idea, but it was relatively easy to go - nah, just keep going. But my GOD, it seemed that half the run was in that last 5 minutes. The time just wasn't moving. I was stuck on 4 minutes, and 3 minutes, and 2 minutes. And then I kinda started to struggle. But I was bound and determined to get this 20 in.

I looked up for most of the last minute - I don't think I saw it go to :59. But by the time I looked down - I was at the last 10 seconds. Good feeling!

So, here's the thing. I really want to do 6mph+. It's a small goal, but I feel like that puts me in striking distance of an under 30 minute 5k. It's still slow, but it's kind of this psychological thing. When I started running again earlier this spring, I was whipping off 6.5mph to 6.7mph, and it felt natural and it felt good. Granted, that was for short time periods. But I was proud of that pace.

But I just haven't been able to sustain it. Since I started recording this stuff - 6+ is just too fast for me; I burn out early and the rest of the run is a struggle to catch air. I've dropped to 5.5mph, thinking I could push it later in the run. But like the last run, I couldn't even do that - I bottomed out at 10 minutes running 5.5mph.

So, I tried 5mph and it was okay. So maybe that's my pace. Which is kinda depressing. That's a 12 minute mile - which puts me at 36 minutes plus for a 5k. Hell, my Thanksgiving run was better than that and I ran a crappy race that day and was all over the place. But maybe that's what my pace is. After all, my goal - as I told someone today - is to a) survive and b) finish. No time goals, I just want to go out there and finish the tri.....

And run a 6+....

So I came home and pulled Beth's roller out and did a little rolling on my calf. Still a little wonky feeling, but I think I worked a little something out of it. Tomorrow it's to the beach, and I'm not sure what exercise I'm going to get in - maybe some evening swimming? But - if the heat cooperates - I really want to try a 30-30-30 Sunday morning.

Well now

2011-07-19T22:18:00.001-04:00

First, just let me say that I have no idea why - sometime this afternoon of July 19 - Google and Facebook decided to talk to each other and Facebook posted all of my recent blog entries as notes. Sorry if I spammed you. I'm looking at what happened and how to undo it, so the sordid details of my training don't interrupt your life.

Anyways - tonight was a bike and swim night, I had decided yesterday. I had experimented with some stuff this weekend and I wanted to see if it translated to laps of the pool.

View 2011-07-19 19:58 To Gym in a larger map
So, after dinner, I changed and got on the horse to make it down to the gym. And it sucked. The outside of my quads were not happy. Powering down Linwood felt like slogging through mud. I finally got the groove down on Boston. Overall, the trip took 10:14 with 7:45 of that moving; 1.46 miles with a moving speed of 11.27 mph, topping out at 19.45mph.

Locked up the bike, got inside, changed into swimsuit, and headed for the pool.... to find all the lanes taken and several of them doubled up. I figured, no problem, I'll do some stretching and then work on some of the breathing stuff I was sort of doing at BBC and wait for a lane to free up. And I did that - taking about 4 to 5 laps in the foreshortened end of the pool. If each length is 25 meters (and I just discovered something GOOD), then this was probably 20 meters or so? So, call it 80 meters of warmup.

And I was feeling pretty good. I realized that - taking it nice and easy - breathing every other stroke gave me a good amount of air, and kept me from going too fast. I even tried doing every three strokes - effectively switching breathing sides - and that wasn't too bad. It became more and more apparent that I really am comfortable with one side over the other, however. Breathing left was kind of like batting left; I can sort of do it, but it's all very intentional and obvious and doesn't look or feel natural. I tried moving my head side to side, but that didn't work nearly as well as when I was trying NOT to put my head under water.

A lane came open - the second lane, so pretty deep, but I didn't even care after the weekend - so I did my best Frogger impersonation and got into it (on the far end) and started.

The first length wasn't bad; I was breathing every other stroke, and going pretty slow. But man, by the second length.... I was getting tired. I rolled onto my back and did a back stroke for the 3rd length, and probably could have rolled back over and crawled for the 4th, but decided to go another length of back stroke. By then my shoulders were getting tired, so flipping over to the crawl felt good ... for a length. I tried mixing in some 4's and 3's, but I was tired and kind of burning by the time I hit 6 lengths. I took a breather, standing in the pool, and was kinda happy that I had made it 6 whole lengths without stopping, but disappointed I couldn't go more.

And then something kinda good happened. I was going to take a long break - like 5 minutes. But prolly about 2 minutes in, I had caught my breath, and I started feeling good. So, at prolly 3 minutes, I started up again with a crawl. And suddenly, the crappiness that was there for the first 6 lengths and 150 meters was gone, and I was swimming pretty well. I don't remember what my progression was, I think because I got into a groove. I know I flipped on my back and did two lengths of backstroke, but they were separate - so it might have been 7 & 8 were crawl, 9 was backstroke, 10 was crawl, and 11 was backstroke. Somewhere in there I damn near drowned myself on an errant backstroke that came up over my face, but for the most part - I was feeling pretty good.

And somewhere in the 10th length - that's when I got tired again. Really tired. Which is why I think 11 was backstroke. 10 was a struggle, but I was not going to backstroke the last lap. So I started 12 in the crawl. But I was off. My back half was dragging, weighing me down in the water. I thought maybe it was my breathing and tried going side to side and breathing every stroke, but that just made it worse. I was practically doing the doggy paddle. So I put my head down and started going every other stroke, but still didn't have a lot of power. I was getting beat by an older gentleman back stroking. So... I reared back, and powered through the rest of the length in 4, my lungs burning, my legs aching, nothing working the way I wanted it to. It was kind of a disappointment to finish weak like that. I got to the (far) end, and there was someone asking to share the lane. "Go ahead," I gasped, "I'm done." "Oh, you don't have to get out," she said. "No," I said, "I'm DONE."

View 2011-07-19 20:43 From Gym in a larger map

It was then that the old guy was like - "I'm done. You can use my lane." So she jumped into his lane, I think because it was shallower. So, I just stood there sucking wind, and after a minute or so I realized a) I was on the complete opposite end of the pool from my towel, and b) I didn't feel so bad. So, I figured rather than haul myself out of the pool or play Frogger to get to the shallow end and walk out and then walk all the way around the pool - I may as well swim another length.

So I did. And it was a good length. Dispensed with the side to side, just kept it simple with every other stroke, kept it slow, kept it strong, and finished up well. 13 lengths times 25 meters = 325 meters, plus 80 meters in warm-ups.

Got dressed, got back on the bike, and made it home in 8:32 of moving time, with an average 11.8mph over 1.7 miles, topping out at 23.4mph! Uphill, with a 225' elevation gain.

As I was writing this, though, I realized I had one of my stupid oversights - you know where you have all the information and somehow just completely don't put it together right? I knew the pool was in meters - 25 meters to a length. I knew the swim in the tri was in yards. So when putting it all together, what did I do? Transpose the meters to yards, and figured I needed to do 12 lengths (12*25=300) to get to 300 yards. But I don't. 300 yards translates to 274 meters, so I really only needed to do 11 lengths. Which means that really rotten 12th length didn't count. Though it also means I finished with a backstroke. But #12 & #13 were overtraining!

Later, that same evening

2011-07-18T22:09:00.000-04:00

It's been awhile, I know. Been more or less keeping up with the training, and a lot of stuff happening, but not enough time to write. And as time went by, I kept going - but I can't write about that. I have to go back to where I left off.... Meaning I haven't restarted in like two weeks.

So - I'm going to blog for tonight and go back and try to catch up real quick. I'll have to post date entries or something.

We got home from the BBC yesterday, and it had been a very full day. By 8 I was ready to go to bed - sunburned as I was - and just laid there with the AC and ceiling fan on, watched some Walking Dead, and then went to bed.

Woke up this morning, and my quads were pretty stiff and sore. Went through the day and they felt okay, but never really loose. Had an audit tonight and came home and made dinner, and really felt like crapping out for the night. But I didn't. I got dressed, and made my way down to the gym. Really didn't feel like the run, and felt less like it when I realized that it was a big jump up from this weekend 5.2 (8 min run, 5 min walk, 8 min run) to a 20 minute straight run. Got up on the treadmill and took it slow - 3.5mph 5 minute warmup, followed by 5.5mph to start, dropped down to 5.0 after 5 minutes.

At ten minutes, I couldn't continue. So I dialed it back down to 3.5mph walk and told myself I would do that for 5 minutes. After 3 minutes, I was feeling pretty good - so I started again. Five mph seemed too slow, so I started at 5.3 and that was nice and easy ... for a while. After about 5 minutes, I took a 30 second breather and dialed it back down to 5mph. With a minute left, another 10 second pause and then finished up.

Not the greatest, the whole thing was like 2.5 miles in 34 minutes, and I was disappointed I couldn't stick with the program. But I realized I am now further than I was the last time I embarked on the C25K program. I also tried something different tonight: I just ran. I didn't carry the iPhone, I didn't jack in, I just set it on the treadmill ledge so I could easily see the clock, and worked on keeping my hands low and loose and being comfortable. This last weekend I realized I was running tight. My hands with the iPhone were high, my shoulders were tensed.... I caught myself and went - whoa - you're at the beach - relax! I dropped my arms, loosened my hands, and the strides came a little easier and I finished okay - it wasn't such a struggle. So I tried to carry through with that tonight, reinforced by a guy I saw running when I drove in. He was loose, arms low, running easy, looked like he was kinda having fun - like it wasn't torture. So I figured, well - let's try that.... And you know it wasn't too bad.

So, on to tomorrow. I plan on doing some swimming, I think - prolly bike down and swim and bike back, and prepare for a run on Wednesday before hanging out with Joe and Ryan....

A Lost Week

2011-07-10T07:45:00.047-04:00

So, after the Big Swim at the BBC, things kinda went downhill.

We left the beach Tuesday afternoon around 2pm. Hit holiday traffic in Denton - as per usual. The Bridge wasn't too bad, but it was still after 5 by the time we got back, and by the time we pulled everything out of the car it was well into the evening. So, I had splashed around a little on the beach in the morning - but nothing real. So, Tuesday was a down day.

I had auditions for Epicoene on Wednesday, and was such a nervous wreck I scrapped the gym. Just no way to concentrate on working out when I was preoccupied with what needed to happen that evening, making sure I had everything, etc.

Thursday, I was ready to go. My plan was leave work a little early, get home and make a quick dinner, hit the gym, and scamper up to the theater. But life conspired against me. I left the office late - at like 6:15, and hit traffic. I immediately jettisoned all plans and went directly to the theater. And it again sucked; I don't know as anyone came that night....

Friday I was going up to Pennsylvania to meet Todd, Regan, Brehan, Connor, and Hayden at Knoebel's Grove. My plan was to get in early and leave work early - which I did. So early, in fact, that I didn't have anything ready to go. So I went home and packed, and then stopped by the smoke shop to pick up some Bad Boys for the weekend. Went through the back woods roads of Maryland to get from Franklin Blvd to I-83, and it was damn near 6 by that time. After a stop for the worst grilled chicken sandwich at Wendy's I have ever had, I got up to Elysburg a little after 9, restarted the fire, the gang met me at the site, the kids went to bed, and the men stayed up and drank and smoke until 2 AM, whereupon I blew up the air mattress in the back of the fit and crashed.

Knoebel's is a lot of fun. It was where my grandparents would take my brother and me whenever we would come up to visit them in Muncy. So many great memories. My friends Rick and Matt took an impromptu weekend camping trip there in the late spring of our senior year. It's no Disney, but it holds a real big place in my heart.

Saturday morning we went to the park - I got to take Bre while Todd took Connor. We came back to the camp site for lunch, and then went off to the pool/water slides. I ended up chasing Brehan and Hayden around in the shallow end of the pool for quite a bit of the afternoon. Got a little sunburned. I started actually trying to swim around. Not laps, but some solid strokes. But soon I could barely see my eyes hurt so bad from all the chlorine. Now wrestling in the water with a 5 and 7 year old takes a lot out of you, but I'm not sure I would call it a great work-out.

That night I got Connor and went to the kiddy part of the park. Amazing how all this stuff just bubbled out of my memory banks. There was a rocket ship slide thing - where you slid down this twisty slide on coconut fiber maps. I had totally forgotten about it until Connor demanded we go. And watching him carefully make sure he didn't hit anyone in the kiddy bumper cars may have been the highlight of the trip. We met up with everyone, rode the Flyer (which just dripped with nostalgia for me), and headed back to camp at 9:30, stopping for slushies and french fries.

Back at camp, the kids went to sleep, we stoked up the fire, Regan made a last minute 11pm beer run, and we stayed up until 3 AM before we packed it in for the night.

The next morning we packed up camp and left before 10 AM, I think. So, needless to say - on maybe 5 hours of sleep and 5 beers, I was not feeling great. Got back to civilization, hoping to feel better to do a 30-30-30 (30 minute swim, 30 minute bike, and 30 minute run), but it just was not to be.

So, there you have it. A lot of fun, but a totally lost week. I didn't do a damned thing from Tuesday until Sunday, unless you count splashing around in the huge pool on Saturday. (It's nearly two weeks later as I write this, and I'm still disappointed in myself.) It just shows how easy it it to get off track.

Swimming the Primal Abyss

2011-07-05T22:10:00.195-04:00

So, this is what I swim at the beach:

You can kind of see the two jetties, or at least the humps in the sand around them, that are the markers. I measured this on Google maps, which tells me this is about 125 yards apart. Yeah, and those two white specs there are boats - which tend to be moored there quite a bit.

This started around Memorial Day. Alabama dumps at the northern-jetty, and - no one really getting in the water - we would pile our beach stuff up there. The thing you can't see, however, is the coral reef that makes up part of the jetty and stretches to the north.

Well, on Memorial Day, we got the kayak out and started puttering around. Larry and I both got in, and we immediately ran aground on the reef. I had Larry get out, and flying solo I had no problem getting over the reef and tooling around. But I still didn't know how extensive this thing was. As the tide started going out, I started walking around the surf - still wigged out by the bay water, and I noticed that - yeah - there is a lot of coral there - no wonder we were having trouble. I could start to see the coral poking up out of the water, and I figured - well, if there's all that coral there, we'll just have to move up slightly more north of the reef. I started trekking further and further north along the reef, trying to feel my way along it. But I kept stepping into holes, kicking pieces of the reef over, and no matter how far north I went, it was still there!

About that time, two things happened. It dawned on me that the southern beach front - between Alabama and Georgia - didn't seem to have that problem as there was a group of kids about 20 yards off shore horsing around and having a great time. And, I kicked a piece of coral, it gave way, I thought it was something in the water, recoiled, stepped in a hole, and fell. I caught myself in the surf with my hands - but I was soaked. So I figured - well, what the hell now, I might as well explore the southern beach.

So I waded back to shore, trudged over to the area south of the Alabama jetty, and waded back in. And it was nice. Despite being the end of May, the water was warm. And it was pretty obvious that it was a sandy bottom all the way out - not the muck I had imagined. I kept wading out, got out beyond the jetties, and realized that I was only up to my waist in the water. I looked around approvingly and decided - I can swim this!

June was really busy - so I didn't get back down to Delaware until the 4th of July. Going into it, I was like - I am so doing everything down there - biking, swimming, running. I'll at least brick every day and I'll prolly get a day of all three in there, to boot! And then ... vacation intervened.

Friday - as I already related - was a wash. I think I got in the water but didn't really do anything. As we went to the brewery and then to dinner, I told myself - that's okay, I'll just do all three tomorrow. Which was why I let Eileen talk me into doing the Firecracker 5k so easily, I think. And why I pushed myself to do the bike after it.

As late as Saturday afternoon, my plan was to jump into the water and do a little swimming, too. But heading out to the beach, one thing was immediately clear: we weren't getting in the water. Why? Attack of those primitive life forms from the stygian depths of the ocean - the jellyfish. Scores of them, washed up on shore, extruding themselves through the jetty, hanging out in the coral pools, smashed to bits on shore, washed up on shore, lazily circling in the surf arranged in a defensive network.... I think many of them were dead, and I had no intention of testing whether their sting lived on. Besides, I had bricked, so.....

At Broadkill, there are two winds - the Marsh Wind, which brings flies, and the Bay Wind - which keeps the flies away. And apparently, according to local lore, the Bay Wind has variant: if the wind is blowing all the way from the ocean, it brings in the jellies. Now the water was warm and brackish, and this might have been killing a lot of the little blighters - but there they were.

So, Saturday came and went, and Sunday dawned, and the wind had shifted and now the jellies were gone. No trace of them whatsoever. So into the water everyone poured.

Now, mind you, I'm still a little igged out by the bay water - Memorial Day revelations not withstanding. Plus, everyone's been talking about the sharks and stingrays that they've been finding off the beach. And, you can't see more than 4 inches into the murky green depths, even if those depths are only 2.5 feet. "Shuffle your feet; that'll chase the stingrays away" sounds an awful lot like bang two sticks together to keep the mountain lions away..... But, at least it's not the chocolate milk I remember from last year. And my Memorial Day explorations confirmed that it is a sandy bottom way out there. So I put on my swim suit, grabbed my goggles, and headed in for a crisp 3 times up and down the beach.

So, first - I encounter two members of the extended BBC contingent for the weekend. Nice enough guys when you're not training so you don't die in a month, but when you're trying to get at least 100 yards on a stretch of beach 125 yards, and they are both right at that line between the deepest you feel you can go and so shallow that you'll drag your knuckles every stroke.... Well, I was feeling a bit trapped. I exchanged niceties, strapped on my googles, and tried to get a lap in.

Second - I've done some reading, and people talk about the panic that sets in when you're in a lake and quite literally find yourself out of your depth. It's true. I've had it twice now this summer - once in Sandbridge when I felt like I nearly got swept out to sea, and this moment. Here I am, head down, realizing how murky and green everything is, when I see something flit just out of my range of sight, something pale and long (maybe my arm?) that really seems to swim away. I've seen them pull sharks (little ones) out of the water. People fish here all the time. And the niceties I was referring to above? Stingrays.....

And the thought goes through my head - I'm just really not into messing around with whatever that is. So I'll just pull up for a couple of seconds, let it go on its merry way, figure out how far that little splashing took me.... I wasn't scared, just ... didn't want to press my luck. I set my feet down, and realize I can't feel the bottom. Now, I'm a decent enough swimmer that panic in me doesn't look like immediately thrashing about and yelling. But it does mean I stop everything else I'm doing and quickly try to get back to where I can touch. Which I do....

And immediately find myself struck into conversation with the two fellows from above, who have apparently followed me on my little flailing adventure. Either that, or I didn't swim anywhere near as far as I thought I had....

At this point, it's hopeless. I'm stuck, I'm a little shaken because I don't know what for hole I just swam into, I can't tell where it gets really deep, and I'm a little freaked out. So I tell all this to the guys - swimmy thing, can't touch, swam into a hole of something. We go in a little further towards shore, and the one guy is merrily chatting away about all manner of sea monsters and things that live in rivers.

Third - it was about then that I stepped on something. I don't know what it was. I don't think it was a rock; it was prolly a horseshoe crab. But I felt the thing underfoot and did one of those acrobatic things where you were going to transfer your weight, somehow stop mid transfer, and do a not so graceful hop-step, that ended with me dunking myself. I got myself back up and said - dammit, I just stepped on something, I'm out. And the swimming was done for the day.

View 2011-07-04 17:58 Beach Ride in a larger map

The next day was Monday, July 4, and by God, I was bound and determined to get in my laps at the beach. I hadn't done it at all yet, we were to leave the next day, and I simply have to get used to this if I'm going to keep tri-ing. So, after lazing around doing one thing or the other all afternoon and mixing up some ice cream and brining a pork loin, I don my swim-suit, grab my goggles, and storm to the beach. I'm in before I have time to chicken out, only this time the tide is out - which means that sandy bottom goes out a long ways up to your waist. The boat is parked out there, and there are a few BBC'ers out there, but I go beyond them. I strap on the goggles, and dive in, and start crawling my way down the beach. Success! I mean - I kind of stop a couple of times, because this is effing weird - where the hell am I? How close is the boat?! But I keep going and I figure I hit 100 yards or so, turn around, and go back the other way. When I get tired, I roll on my back and trot out my new backstroke. That's slow going, especially swimming up stream. But all in all I get four laps in before I get really tired, flip on my back to do the back stroke, and somehow manage to turn myself around. Completely confused, I figured this was a good indication that I'm done.

July 18, 2011

But I felt great! I rushed back inside, changed into biking gear, got the pork loin on the grill, recruited Carlos, and went out for a quick sprint to the end of the park and back. A quick stop at the end of the world - and a few shoulder presses with the bike, and we're heading back to the BBC. Half an hour, 5.7 miles, going about 11mph with a top speed of 22mph in a sprint from the Mall to the house.... Yeah, I was feeling pretty good.

Dinner and drinks (a lovely concoction Carlos whipped up with a lot of ice, soda water, lots of lime, and a tad more than generous splash of Don Q) were well deserved that night!

Not According to Plan

2011-07-04T12:00:00.020-04:00

Well, here it is Monday the 4th. It's been a pretty crazy week, and things did not go exactly according to plan.

Monday
I missed my strength workout. Sat down for dinner with Beth and talked right on past 8:00. Beth looked at me and said, well, it's pretty much too late to go to the gym, now, isn't it? And I had to concur.

Tuesday
It was hot and sticky, so I headed to the gym to get a run in. Got on the treadmill and kept things easy - averaged about 5.5mph and just focused on keeping on running. It was pretty difficult, I think because the gym was almost and hot and sticky as it was outside. Found myself wheezing along. I thought about pushing up the speed on the last five minutes in minute increments, but couldn't do it; I think I dropped to 5mph for a couple minutes of the five, but dialed it back to 5.5mph for the final minute for something of a kick.
Watched the O's getting beat, watched a great sunset over storm clouds, watched the storm roll in and just drop buckets of rain. It was kinda interesting because - of course - the O's game on the other side of town was getting this weather before we were in the gym. So when it started to drizzle, I knew something was afoot, and when they pulled the tarps on the field and showed the gouts of rain, I knew I was staying at the gym for a little while.

So I got off the treadmill, and decided to do some of the strength training I had missed the night before and wait out the storm. The first thing I noticed was that they had changed all the machines around to create a wide walk way through the gym and to the pool area. So I had to hunt for my machines. I couldn't find the independent chest press, just the old chest press. Jumped on the abdominal and lower back machines, decided to skip leg extensions, and wrapped things up with the chest press. And I don't know what the deal was, whether I was tired, have gotten worse, or the new machine, but 120# was rough. I got two sets of 12 in, but dropped back to 100# for the final set. Just too much.

Rain finished, I left the gym, and dragged myself back home....

Lehigh Cement

Wednesday
I threw some laundry in after work, made a really bad chard and bacon (I think adding salt made the chard weep, which kinda nullified the bacon; and I prolly should have used more bacon....) Then I jumped on my bike for a quick long ride before meeting up with Joe for Phillies-Red Sox. Went down beyond the gym, and down to Lehigh Cement. Never been down there, nice view of Fort McHenry. Watched a tug come in. Looked at my phone while taking pictures and saw that it was twenty after 7. Hopped back on my bike and high-tailed it over to the Fieldhouse. When I got off the bike I started dripping. The cool thing was, it was obviously a work-out. I topped out at 22mph somewhere and the mileage wasn't there, but it was easily doable, not the struggle from Tuesday.

Thursday
I had planned to postpone the Thursday workout because we would be going to the beach. Dragging stuff up from the basement - like the bike carrier and Beth's bike - ought to count for something, right?

Friday
My plan was to start off and do all sorts of stuff on Friday, but that did not happen. After a little time on the beach in the AM, we had a quick bite to eat at the BBC and then took off by mid-afternoon for Dogfish Head Brewery. A healthy sampling of beer later, and a purchase of a shirt and case of beer, we were off to the Milton Farmers' Market. Nothing there, we headed over to the Broadkill Boathouse for dinner. Got back to the BBC and more or less crashed. Saturday was going to be a busy day....

Saturday
The Usual Suspects got up early Saturday morning and set off to Rehoboth to run the Firecracker 5K Walk and Run. It was the same course as the Thanksgiving Race last fall where I kinda fell apart, but came in at 35 or something. Carlos and Beth got up close to the start and ran. I think they ended up finishing around 26 minutes, Carlos coming in ahead of Beth.

Eileen had convinced me to run the 5K Friday evening, promising to fetch beer all day Saturday. So Tony, Eileen and I ran together. I followed Week 5 of the Couch to 5K program - 5 minutes running, 3 minutes walking - repeat for a total of 15 minutes running. We ran the first 5 minute warm-up into the first 5 minute run, but even then there wasn't enough time to do the whole 5k - I think it got us right to the water station at 2 miles. We walked the cool-down, and then I reset and we started all over with a 5 minute run. Tony ran ahead when we came to the 3 minute walk, but Eileen stuck with me. When it came to the next 5 minute run, we were within striking distance, so I really tried to leg it out and finish with a good strong kick. I felt like puking after the kick - so I gave it a good shot of what I had left - but a quick drink of water and it was easy to suppress that. But the kick felt GOOD!

Not sure of the pacing. I finished at just under 41 minutes, which was way down there at #319, off of Eileen's pace from the week before, and short of my PR. There wasn't really a heat problem - it felt fairly cool and wasn't too humid. The fact that we got to the Mile 2 marker just before the end of the 3rd five minute run - albeit having run 4 of the first 5 minutes of warmup - suggests that our top pace was pretty close to my top pace I had been running in training - maybe a touch under 5.5mph/11 minute miles. The 41 minute overall means I was running a little under 14 minute miles, slightly better than my average on the treadmill. That probably was running the warmup and the good kick. That I got that and literally went the extra mile - I'll say that was good. I either need to get my own Garmin, or start running with my phone. (Okay, so looking at the results, my pace was 13:09 - and I was dead last in my age group.)

Physically, my left calf felt great while stretching, but started to knot up almost immediately. Not hellishly, but it was there. Both calves were cramping after Mile 2. I need to stretch better after the run, but all in all - I didn't feel too bad and breathing was fine - maybe a little raspy. We packed into the car and took the ride back to Broadkill, and I already knew what part 2 was going to be.

We got out of the car at the BBC, I changed shorts (so I had a pocket for my phone) and put my sandals on (my feet felt like they were swelling a little in my running shoes), filled my water bottle, strapped on my helmet, and headed out for a bike ride. I reckoned it was three miles down to Route 1 from Broadkill, so after my 5k a little 6 miles of biking would be good and would help stretch the calves.

View 2011-07-02 09:17 Broadkill To Route 1 in a larger map

Well, I knew something was up when my phone started talking to me right after I crossed the bridge, suggesting it was a mile from the BBC. Made it down to Rt 1 several minutes later. I felt good about the ride, but it seemed a lot longer than I had initially thought. Was keeping hydrated, and was pushing myself pretty good. I had a little bay breeze at my back, and was consistently in 2.7, swapping up to 3.6 every once in awhile and getting some saddle relief with a standing climb at 3.7. I started developing what I called skating - working on real powerful strides at 3.7 whether standing or seated. Not too long, but something that made 2.7 feel like a god-send when it came, and when my quads got a little tired I would as often upshift to 3.7 as downshift to 2.6, skating to change the rhythm and stretch, and then would go back to 2.7. Somewhere in here I figured I topped out at the 19.9mph.

I hit Rt 1 and doubled back, expecting to head into that breeze. Luckily, it never materialized. I started wondering when my phone was going to tell me I had hit another mile marker, but I knew I was beyond the 3 miles I had thought. I dropped my water bottle and had to stop and go back and get it. But otherwise the return trip was pretty uneventful. I was skating a little more, thankful I wasn't getting smacked with a headwind. That materialized after the double turn heading up to the bridge, and that was rough. I think I dropped to 2.5 or maybe 2.4; man it would be nice to have a computerized bike that could tell you what you shifted to when. Got over the bridge and cranked it up hard and sprinted the mile back to BBC.

Checking the route out later, turns out it was a total of 8.8 miles. I felt good. The knot from the run had been worked out, no more cramping, and I had a good amount of energy left - I wasn't as wiped out as I had been the Sunday Beth was gone and I swam and biked and then passed out. That being said, I did grab a couple of Corona's, set up the beach chairs, watched the parade, and then hung out for the rest of the day.

Busy weekend

2011-06-26T20:01:00.001-04:00

Friday was an off day, and I spent it hanging out in the Brewers' Art with Ryan, Bill, and Tony. Hadn't been there in awhile and it was a lot of fun. Very chill, shootin' the shit and drinking beer down in the basement. Great place, lots of memories, and wish I went there more often.

Actually, Friday morning I looked at the watch data - and it wasn't as bad as I initially thought. I was running much faster than I thought, but that first awful run I did start too fast. I was below an 8 minute mile! So that was probably why I needed to stop. But even when I slowed up - I was still running something like a 12 minute mile (5 mph).

The Thursday night run was a lot more even. I thought I was pathetically slow, but I was basically right around 10 minute miles for the first minute or so. I slowed up after that, but I was still at 12 minute miles for most of the next two runs, but by the second half of the 3 minute run I was getting gassed and dropped to 13, and the last 5 minute run I dropped to 15 minute miles. But I did have a decent kick in the last minute of that fiver, and pulled it back up to around 10.5 minute mile.

So, yeah - Beth's watch is pretty cool, huh? I wonder how it would do in water....

But of course, with Beth being gone this weekend, I didn't get to sleep until 4 am Friday night and had an awful night of sleep. Dreams of apocalyptic evacuations and not being able to find Beth. Woke up for good at 11 - much later than I wanted - and spent most of the afternoon puttering around the house. Nothing major - some laundry, worked on the script a little, jailbroke my old iPhone (more on that one day), and then did my run at about 4:00.

I did it at the gym on the treadmill, but it went pretty well. Again, Week 4 on the C25K program, I took it slow - kept it at a steady 5.5 mph (11 minute miles) rather than pressing at 6+. I know I need to work on that, but for right now, until I get that base down, I think discretion may be the better part of valor.

Skipped the strength; I was beat and still had a ghost tour to do that night.

Once again, didn't sleep well Saturday night, either. Woke up later than I wanted to at 8 am. Made it to the Farmer's Market, and after a cup of coffee and an Ethel and Ramone's sandwich was feeling pretty good. Brought my haul back, scurried around, pumped up the bike tires and grabbed my swim suit and goggles and made it down to the gym.

I used the MyTracks Android app. Google designed, I think, and it worked pretty okay. When I got home I uploaded both legs. You can see that it isn't quite as good as the Garmin - but it more or less was free. Not bad. I think I'll keep using it when I don't have access to Beth's watch.

The swim was tough. Lots of people already at 11:30 am, so I need to do this earlier. Got lucky and went to jump in a lane and the guy did one more lap and left, so I got the lane to myself. But I think I started too fast. No fancy gizmos to confirm that, and the first two lengths I felt great. But I more or less stopped and had to tread water for a couple seconds on the third length. I didn't give myself nearly as much recovery time as I had a couple of days ago, and dug back in - slower this time - after only a couple of minutes. Again - real struggle, but I gutted through it. The second intermission was a little longer, but still not the five minutes I was taking earlier in the week. Same struggle with the third set.

Changed, jumped on the bike, and rode hard to get back home. This was more challenging because it was uphill and a little longer, but I was just over 1mph slower than going downhill in the morning.

I came home, checked the distance between jetties at Broadkill Beach - 128 yards - and then sorta crashed before getting moving again and cleaning the house before Beth got home. No nap, mind you, but folded laundry, watched the O's for a little while, and finished up the cuts I had laid out for the script. The nap came after Beth got home, and I passed out for a half hour before making an Amy's frozen pizza for dinner. Nowhere near enough energy to work on the back slab - maybe I can get to that this week before we head to BKB for the 4th.

Whew. Not your typical busy - but it's been two pretty full days. I'm ready to watch a little ESPN Sunday night baseball, read a little, and pass out, so I can hit the strength tomorrow.

A Day Off!

2011-06-24T07:57:00.001-04:00

Really feeling pretty good about myself right now.

First, I had a pretty good interim review at work yesterday. I've made progress, everyone recognizes that, I need to keep going, but "good job" all around, and I've sorta been taken off my performance plan and placed back under a Director, rather than receiving the personal attention of the VP. Which I'm kind of ambivalent about. I mean, it shows a certain amount of faith in me, and I seem to get along with the Director in question pretty well. But it's change, and I liked working with and reporting to Maryann. She's firm but fair and has taught me a lot, and it granted me a certain ... power? clout? prestige? that I don't think I have now and I'm not sure how that's going to change things. In my head at least, there was always the - if you don't play nice, it'll come out in his one on one with the veep.... We'll have to see.

Today, though, I have a 5010 Stakeholder meeting. Have to polish up the presentation, but I'm excited I get to tell the higher ups how much progress the team has made.

On the tri side:
- Wednesday was swim and run, and I went for the swim and skipped the run. The swim was much easier. I need to do 12 lengths of the pool for the August, and for now I'm concentrating on getting through 3 sets of 4 with a breather in between each set. First set was pretty easy, and then I took a long break. Second set wasn't bad, followed by a shorter break. The third set I did three and then had to stand up in the pool for a few seconds before going on the last leg, which was pretty pathetic and I nearly drowned myself - but I got it done.

I decided to skip the run - meeting Joe for Wednesday night baseball, and my knees weren't feeling great after my Tuesday 15 minute run, and save myself to do the rest of this weeks runs.

- Thursday I went out while Beth was icing a cake. New orthotics in my shoes, I was on to Week 4 in the Couch to 5K program. When I looked at it on the iPhone, I remembered this week in the program well. This was a big ramp up from the previous week. Week 3 was two sets of 1.5 minute run, break, then 3 minute run. And when I ran outside last week - I couldn't do my 3 minute runs; I had to stop and walk in the middle. Week 4 starts at 3 minutes, a 1.5 minute walk, and then a 5 minute run. Whew.

I took Beth's advice and took it slow - which I think was my problem the previous week. Was really gratified when the little voice said "You have 1 minute to go" on my first run. Timing was spot on so I wasn't running up the entire hill in the little park - just the last third or so. By the way, the view of the sky and Baltimore from the top of the hill in the little park is amazing. Done it twice now and the sunsets are just spectacular.

I made it through the five minute, had a nice 2.5 minute walk, then back to the 3 and 5. Made it through everything with a little bit of a kick at the end of the 5. Again - I was slow as shit, and it was prolly more of a jog than a run. But I made it through in sped up motion the whole allotted time. I was also outside (which I really suck at), it was sorta hot (but not really uncomfortable until I stopped), and I had no water, so.....

Didn't do the strength portion, though. Had I gone to the gym I would have done the little set of chest press, leg extensions, abdominals, and lower back. But I wasn't at the gym. Prolly throw it in this weekend.

Anyways, today's a day off. Which my knees are thankful for. I have a run on Saturday which I'll likely do at the gym, and then a bike and swim on Sunday - which I'm going to try to do early when the pool's not crowded.

And then - since Beth is away this weekend - I might try to root my iPhone and finish up the script! And clean the house and back slab.

I did it anyways!

2011-06-22T07:47:00.000-04:00

Last night my plan was to come home, hop on the bike, and put in 45 minutes - thus saving my knees for the heavier duty running later in the week. But of course, that's not what actually happened.

On the way home from work, Beth - who was on her way to an info session about a training group - called and asked if I could call about a package at UPS. There was a little bit of a runaround (the computer was telling me that they had attempted at 2:00 pm and subsequently sent it back and I should call the shipper if I wanted it - and I knew that wasn't right), and then when I started thinking about it, I realized that Wednesday was going to be difficult to go get the package, get a work out in, and meet Joe for Wednesday night baseball. So I should just get the package now.

So - plan thrown into disarray. I made dinner, waited until 8:00, got into my gym clothes, drove over and picked up the package at UPS, and then went to do my biking at the gym. As I got on the bike, I thought - rather than 45 minutes of biking - why don't I bike the 30 minutes and then do the elliptical for the 15 minutes of "running"? It isn't exactly the same thing, but what's bothering me about running isn't the fatigue and breathing, it's the stress on my knees. And 15 minutes of the elliptical will save my knees, but I'll still be building cardio. Yeah!

So, 33 minutes on the bike with warm up, got on the elliptical, and hated it. Could only stand three minutes with the weird gait - legs too far apart, couldn't make it go as fast as I wanted to, the arms all over the place. I got off the elliptical, sucked it up,and got on the treadmill. It was inside, and I was running slow and "taking it easy" trying to save myself for later this week - but I still did the run. I had to stop and stretch out my calf a couple of times (which was where things went all screwy last year), but I did the running.

Of course, coming down the stairs at the gym, my kneecap felt like it was going all over the place. And laying in bed, my knee and calf felt kinda numb. Not really pain - but not a real great, hunky dorey feeling either. This morning it's better, but still not great. It feels kinda weak, and I twisted it just making lunch for Beth, which caused some pain.

So.... I think tonight might just be extra swimming instead of 15 swim and 30 run. We'll see how the knee feels throughout the day, but I think a day off of running will do more in the long run.

And I'm off

2011-06-21T14:31:00.000-04:00

So, the reason I'm trying to get back into the groove here:

I'm running a sprint triathlon on August 7th.

Yeah, scary.

So, I've been trying to follow Hal Higdon's Triathlon training plan. There are two, and this is the second, more intensive one. Not great, because it's geared towards runners who want to do this, not people-who-really-like-and-are-kinda-okay-at-swimming-and-biking-but-really-suck-at-running. It's 6 days a week of activity.

So it's kicking my ass. I'm also trying to use the Couch to 5K plan for the runs. Six week program to get you up and running from having no experience to a successful 5K. I have used it already, to train for the 5K's I ran last fall. But since the last "injury"/foot pain in November's race, I'm out of running shape. And it's only a 5K for the sprint, so I figured - well, might as well use that again.

What's neat with that plan is there are a plethora of Android and iPhone apps to help out with the program. The Get Running app is really the main reason I keep the iPhone around (plus, I want to root it and use it as an international phone.) But Android has a bunch of apps, too, which I haven't tried.

So, basically, I'm a little loosey-goosey with it. Last week - the first week - I hit 4 of 6 nights of exercise. Including a first night of biking and strength. By the time Thursday came, I just couldn't do it, and had to take the night off. Felt great on Saturday after two days off and ran an easy Week 3 on c25k (which takes 25 minutes, which I figure is close enough to the 30 Hal prescribes). But Sunday being Father's Day - and a long conversation with my Dad - I didn't get out to do the swimming or the running.

Last night was really the first time in the pool. Got my 300 yards in (the length of the tri) and a little strength, so I feel accomplished, but ... man, I'm kinda beat already with a full week of work outs!

Tonight? 30 minutes of biking and 15 minutes of running.... Which isn't on the 5K plan. Tomorrow - Swim 15 (yay!) Run 30 (boo). Thursday? Run 30 and strength.... Maybe if I just did 45 minutes of biking tonight?

A year and a half on....

2011-06-21T12:33:00.000-04:00

So, a little while, someone hit me up on the Intertubes asking for my Blogger domain. They had a good reason: they would use it and it appeared as though I hadn't touched it in almost a year and a half. And they were right. I got an email today that appears to maybe back up their claim....

But, you know, I rather like the name - and while I'm not blogging with it - I keep meaning to do so.....

The problem is - keeping it going. I've looked over the last several years, and it always starts the same. A couple of very frantic weeks while I post a bunch of stuff, and then.... nothing.... for vast .... stretches of time.

This has been no exception.

And rather a lot has changed since the last post in September of 2009.

TOTALLY new kit, it seems - I'm now an Android owner and made the switch to using it (very nicely) as my main electronic gadget. Which means the old PDA and phone and DMP are all Droid X. And therefore a whole slew of new apps. Though I also own and enjoy an iPad (original). Oh, and the laptop is long since gone.
I'm looking at my N800 links and well ... I'm not even sure I can find my N800 any more.
I've been playing with a lot of new stuff, too. Booted up Chrome off of Hexxeh's builds awhile ago but surrendered the cute lil' laptop to the theater (which hasn't used it yet.) A myDitto personal network storage device has been installed, along with a good cloud backup service.
We went in on a beach house in Delaware last year, so a lot of time has been spent down there - and more time will need to be spent as we redo the room.
And recently, I've started to train for a little sprint triathlon in early August. And I've found myself the last couple of days really wanting to comment on it. That should be good for about 8 weeks.

So, of course, here's another start. And of course, Blogger has introduced all sorts of new templates that look pretty good, so I'll likely have to check that out as well....

And something occurs to me. I spent a lot of time fretting about setting up two blogs - one more techy and one more generic me - and screw it. Beth's blog is successful pursuing her many hobbies - food and baking and running and travel. So.... mebbe I should just concentrate on one journal, tag the living beejeezus out of it, and let Blogger sort the damned thing out....

Here goes ... again....

My wife's blogging

2009-09-03T17:30:00.000-04:00

So, Beth has decided to start blogging. She's quite good at it: she has a great voice and with the new camera her camera skills and eye are really helping out. I've been helping out on the technical side, and snapping the occasional picture of her baking endeavors.

But there was a problem she's been having that has vexed the living hell out of us. It seems Blogger's new post editor is really screwing with her line breaks. I got sucked into the problem last night, and it frustrated the crap out of me, too. What she was typing on screen did come through in the preview; it would smoosh all the lines together so a line return like this

was showing up like this
and so it went through the whole blog. And when she added pictures - it all just got worse.

And there was another problem with the pictures - she's been complaining that they aren't the right size. The new photo handler wants to make everything smaller - so even the large size in Blogger is smaller than what she uploaded to Picasa.

Seriously, she's been thinking of booting the whole thing. She kinda likes some of the features of Picasa, but has really been eying up Flickr, attracted by the community aspect of it. And there was the Wordpress movement a few months ago that has resurfaced. The only thing that kept her with Blogger/Picasa was that it was fairly easy and seamless to post, handle pictures and then pull them in. Well, not so much anymore.

So, this is in part a test to see if I can figure out what the issue is.....

Zaggnut

2009-08-20T12:38:00.001-04:00

Today I am going to talk about my favorite iPhone accessory: the Zagg full body coverage InvisibleSHIELD. I've played with a lot of cases for a lot of different gadgets. I've elsewhere confessed to being a case-aholic (despite my wife's assertion that I'm a headphone-aholic), and I don't think I have ever been as satisfied as I am with the InvisibleSHIELD.

When Beth and I first bought our iPhones, we purchased cases to go with them. The sales associate at the Apple store suggested one - a fairly slim, slightly rubberized, black model where the bottom slid off. I believe it was this one, the InCase Slider. I think we also bought some cheapy screen protectors at the time - or I tried to use the WriteRight protectors, or we went without. But shortly after our friend Tony bought his iPhone, he showed us the brand of screen protector he used - Power Support's Crystal Film, and we went and got that.

And that's when I (at least) started to have a problem.

The combo of the screen protector - which, btw, was excellent - with the case tended to curl up the screen protector at the edges unless you got it perfectly on the iPhone. Which I couldn't do. And I couldn't stand the bubbles along the edges where the case pushed up the screen protector. I reckoned that the screen protector was more important than the "shock absorption" the case was supposed to provide. And besides - despite claiming to be 1mm thick, it really felt like it added bulk to the iPhone.

So I abandoned the case.

Beth stuck with hers. In part because - well, she sometimes gets a case of the dropsies. In fact, her iPhone is not only ensconced en case, it is also swaddled in a quilted, Etsy-bought wallet ... thing. But after the better part of a year, the slightly rubberized surface started to peel away from the case, and she had lost the slider portion. So I gave her my unused one. That went well for a little while - but then the complaints started. Chiefly, she really came to hate the slider. She had lost it in the first place, and it was a real pain to slide the thing off and stick it in a charger. And I'm not making light of this. In order to pull the rather secure slider off the bottom, you had to grip the iPhone in a death grip and pull - which half the time led to sliding the part that wasn't supposed to slide off. I mean, it's good and all that it's secure and won't fall off - even in a tornado. But I cringed every time I tried to pull the thing off.

Also - it was black. Now, while a basic black suited my tastes just fine, it did not suit Beth's.

And then, lo, a co-worker came in with this case one day. iFrogz: Colorful, whimsical, same slightly rubberized feel. You can slide it off, but the bottom is designed to fit into most chargers, so you don't need to. I was intrigued. And then, when Beth and I were walking through the mall, we saw that one of the kiosks had them. She was intrigued, too.

But - in actuality - there was something else that caught my eye....

Back when I used my N800 for my PDA, I had experimented with several different screen protectors, but was never really satisfied with any of them. I liked the Zagg InvisibleSHIELD, but it really was hard to use a stylus with, and eventually removed it. Problem was, nothing else really grabbed my attention, and I think I went back to the WriteRights before I ended up getting an iPhone and putting the N800 (sadly) in a drawer.

So, guess what I found at that little kiosk? Yes, my old friend the Zagg InvisibleSHIELD. So, I bought Beth a pink iFrogz case, and myself the full bodied Zagg InvisibleSHIELD for iPhone.

Again - the application process is somewhat laborious. Peel it off the backing, douse front and back with lubricating mist, slap it on there, position it, squeegee the water off, and wait. But doing it the second time. Not too bad. I did have a bit of a time with stray particles once I got the thing on, and at that point it's a bear to pull the thing off, remove an offending particle, and then put it back down. Let's just say my trigger finger got a good work-out with all the spritzing of lubricating mist, and my forearms feel a lot stronger now from trying to peel this stuff back; let me tell you, it really holds on. And, to be completely truthful, I now have a couple of barely noticeable but somewhat disappointing "creases" in the front screen and there are a couple of nicks and blemishes here and there because I couldn't leave well enough alone. (But they are better than the offending hair or little piece of whatever.)

But let me tell you - I love this "case." All the things that I had trouble with on the N800 are plusses here. The iPhone has no stylus - so there's no problem with the SHIELD's improved grip grabbing the stylus. A finger glides smoothly across the surface. The pebbled surface - actually it's the only thing that let's you know it's there. Crystal clear and

somewhat glossy at the wrong angle, but I haven't had a problem with it in actual use. And let me tell you, the grip on the iPhone is vastly improved and ... warm. I guess it's because I'm grabbing rubberized surface and not cold plastic and aluminum. The screen also stays incredibly clean - despite oily fingers - much better than Power Support's Crystal. (Though the Anti-Glare was fine.)

I had some abrasions on the back of the iPhone, having eschewed a case and stuck it in my pocket for the better part of a year. The InvisbleSHIELD almost perfectly hides those scratches, and now my iPhone feels almost just new. No shock absorption (and just how much real "shock absorption" do one of those cases give you?), but it adds no additional bulk to the iPhone. You can't even tell it's there! And again - this stuff was designed to protect military helicopter blades - thus the helicopter on the packaging. From past experience, this stuff is tough and just does not scratch.

Outside of a less-than-easy application procedure, Zagg's InvisibleSHIELD is simply the best case/screen protector for the iPhone.

Quick update, because I've been busy

2009-07-16T14:21:00.003-04:00

Quick update, because I've been excruciatingly busy in doing my real, day-job stuff - and other little ventures - and thus haven't kept up lately.

Just got back from vacation and there have been a number of little things to have happened lately.

iPhone 3.0 software came out. Pretty much liking it. I know other people have been complaining about hangs and lags and crashes, but I haven't had too many. I attribute that to a little app I picked up called FreeMemory. I believe there's a small price, but it does a couple of nice things: shows the actual percentage of battery power I had left (I can't tell you how many times I've looked at the icon and said - oh, I have like 60% still there, only to find it was 38%), the amount of memory I had left (and when the iPhone is getting laggy, it's because the memory has dropped to around 4M), and - if over 4M - allows you to free memory up - making it run more efficiently. This is a godsend, because as I discovered, 3.0 seems to reprogram what happens when you hold the Home button. Used to be, it force quit the app - exited out of the program and dumped it from memory, rather than closing the program down but still - while not exactly running in the background - retained a bit of memory back there. That's gone, and holding down the iPhone's button does nothing on the iPhone 3G. (A little research shows it's supposed to bring up voice commands on the 3GS, but ... erg.) This guy says you can force quit by holding down the sleep/wake button until the slider appears, letting go, and then pressing the Home button; yeah, I haven't gotten that to work. This post provides more detail - hold in the Home button for 6 seconds. This means it takes a long hold on one button, switch to another button, and hold that for even longer. It takes like 10 seconds just to quit the entire program; and that kinda blows. Yeah, FreeMemory.

I got Google Voice - which seems really cool. I'm still sorta configuring it and figuring out what I can do. But I really like the idea that I can give out one number and then I can do all sorts of stuff with it - have my wife ring every device I have, have a special greeting for her (I'm thinking "Hey there, gorgeous," in my best Barry White), block people I don't want to talk to (Omaha Steaks, are you listening?), have people send SMS messages to me that only go to my Verizon phone - but allow me to retrieve and send SMS messages on the iPhone (or computer for that matter). Many wonderful things.

I just took advantage of Verizon's New Every Two and got an LG Chocolate 3. I pretty much like it, but I'm still playing with it. Impressions: the ear piece and speaker are plenty loud, but almost too clear - in a way that kinda gives way to tinniness and distortion, and isn't at all natural. Harsh, in a word. The all plastic body feels cheap (especially compared to my old LG flip phone - RIP.) And I can see what they mean by the keys feel slippery and that's not helped by it being a smudge-fest surface. BUT, I'm liking this phone. It's light and thin, the keys are plenty big, I think I can eliminate some of that harshness by keeping the volume lower (especially if it's plenty loud), the front view screen is nice and large, and - AND - it has a full sized headphone jack. And works with my Decoy's (and my wife's enV2's) power jack - which is power adapter to USB to USB.

With the new phone, I've been playing with making ring tones to replace the ring tones I had ported to the old flip but got discouraged with the Decoy and never ported there. And along with that, found a snappy way to make iPhone ring tones for free off non-DRM'ed music. Excitée. WavePad has been a component of making the Verizon ringtones - and works well. Supposedly I can use that to make iPhone ringtones as well; we'll see.

Well, off to another meeting, so more detail later.

Quick on the Draw

2009-03-04T08:00:00.004-05:00

I've been keeping some graphics programs on my iPhone, and it's time to trim the fat.

What I wanted with a graphics program was an "eletronic napkin." Back when I was teaching college classes, I also used to joke that I loved to draw, it was just that I wasn't very good at it. Drawing someone a picture sometimes goes a long way to explaining it to them, and I also find when I'm really stuck, getting that concept on to paper is a great way to sort out thoughts. And the iPhone would seem to be a great platform for doing just that.

I'm not looking to create art - fine or otherwise - here. I just want an app that will give me plenty of space to work, and allow me to have some fairly decent fine-grained control of lines and shapes. Color fills would be nice - though not necessary. And text capabilities (for labelling) would be great. I'm not asking for Visio here, but the basic ability to draw a bunch of boxes and cylinders, some arrowed lines connecting them, and the ability to label all the doodads. An undo capability - to correct those stray marks you make - and an eraser to just get rid of something that just doesn't work - is a must. Being able to export it somehow - email it, save it to the Camera Roll, push it up to a network - is a key feature, as is the ability to retrieve the drawing and keep working at it.

But so far, I haven't found a program that I like.

I had grabbed two graphics programs - Sketches and NetSketch - and I wasn't using either of them.

Sketches is a rather neat little app. Your pictures and drawings are presented as pictures tacked to a corkboard. Touch one of them, and it loads onto the screen. You have a rather rudimentary zoom in the upper right hand corner - zoom in, or zoom out. Across the bottom, there are a number of tools.

The first - a back arrow - allows you to undo your last several actions. Unfortunately, I see no way to redo what you did, if you decide you rather liked it the way it was - or if you mistakenly hit the Undo button (like I just did).

You then have the main drawing tool - Ink. You have the ability to select the opacity of the line - or, alternatively, to make the pencil into an eraser, the line thickness, and lastly the color (24 of them). The selector is pretty straightforward, but make sure you select your color last; that selection shuts down the dialogue and returns you, ink in hand, to the picture you are about to work on. It works the way you would expect it to. Make your choices, then drag your finger across the picture; a trail of the thickness, opacity, and color is left behind. The eraser is a little tricky. It erases the foreground only. It uses the line thickness, but doesn't give you any way of knowing what exactly you're erasing, so you spend a lot of time going over and over an area trying to remove the last little trace of that line.

Next up is the Shapes tool. You are presented with a grid of nine categories, two of which are your traditional drawing tools - geometric and text - and the remaining seven are more properly thought of as stamps. Geometric presents you with choices for line, arrow line, box, oval, and filled box and filled oval. These utilize the settings that you have selected in Ink - color, opacity, and thickness - to create these various shapes. You place them by using multitouch - two fingers define the diametrically opposed points of the shape. Spread or pinch to change the size and shape of the object. It's a good idea, and works a lot better on geometric shapes, but still feels awkward at times.

Text uses the same basic concept. You are presented with a dialogue that invites you to enter the text you want to place, and gives you a choice of three fonts: Helvetica (sans serif), "Times New" (serif), and the iPhone's default "Marker Felt." Once you type in the text and hit Go, you can position and size the text with the two finger approach. Again, it takes the opacity and color from the Ink settings.

The other stamps work much the same way - six predefined graphics for each of the other seven categories that you can place and size using the two finger multi-touch. The graphics look fine, and they're really made to enliven the photographs you take. Add text balloons, for instance, or put a party hat on your girlfriend. But in some cases they can be really frustrating. Just try shrinking down a game controller to get it between your cat's paws; your fingers are swiftly blotting out the picture as you pinch it to make it small enough, and you can't see where you have it, and the attitude (pitch and yawl) of the thing. And worse, once you take your fingers up - it's there to stay.

You have six types of backgrounds to choose from: snap a picture to serve as the background, pull a picture form your albums, fill with a solid color, specify a web-page, specify a map, or choose from a library of six backgrounds (sketch, leather, graph paper, yellow note, white note, or blue print). For the web, you get to specify a webpage to capture, but frustratingly you can only map your present location. The library images - rather than be helpful - are more gimmicky than anything else.

Lastly, there's a "forward" option which lets you export the image to the camera roll, email the drawing, push it up to Twitter(!), or push it to your desktop using a built-in web server (which is pretty cool).

The real purpose for Sketches, therefore, is fun. For example, the color pallette is, for lack of a better term, party themed. Its 24 colors are not exactly pastels, but light and bright. Gimmicks (the cork board, the backgrounds, the stamps) abound. The app is really designed to let you snap a picture of your cat, put a Santa hat on him, a text balloon saying "Ho fucking Ho," and then upload it to Twitter and email it to your friends as a holiday eCard. It does that well, but it's not really what I want in my drawing program; really difficult to draw database cylinders and application boxes.

NetSketch has one absolutely killer feature, and it's the reason I held on to it for so long. You can zoom in and out of a drawing without limit using pinch and spread, creating an infinite piece of paper. Scrolling around is easy, as well, utilizing two fingers. How and why do you want to use this? Well, imagine you want some really small text. You zoom in until the area is big enough for you to use your finger to "draw" the letters of the text, and then zoom out to make the letters small, and - for example - draw a box around your now really small text. It's really smooth, and works really well, and I wish other drawing apps would utilize this zoom approach.

Unfortunately, NetSketch is rather primitive in the rest of its toolset. It basically seeks to freehand draw everything, and it has what I guess is a pencil and paintbrush in a cup but looks more like the Flying Spaghetti Monster. In the FSM, you can configure three paintbrushes - in three tabs - with different thicknesses and colors. The color picker is expansive - allowing you to pick a color from a spectrum. Click OK and then draw away.

Next, you get an eye-dropper tool to pick the exact same color that's already in your picture (in case you chose a different color with the FSM). Next to that is a screen re-centering tool, which fits your entire image on the screen - sort of resetting the view for really big canvasses. The multi-stage undo is a little different, and well conceived: rather than undoing a brush stroke, you undo sections of the stoke. Draw a box in one smooth stroke, and you step through undoing the box in four distinct pieces. Sounds like a bit of a pain, but allows you to not throw the baby out with the bath water.

Lastly, NetSketch has an export feature which allows you to Replay(!) the drawing, send to your camera roll, email, or upload to NetSketch.

NetSketch's big selling point is that allows you to share your drawing over the internet, including only a select number of people you specify. Looking at the community drawings, it's fairly impressive what others have come up with. And that is sort of what NetSketch is about. It has some nice free-hand drawing tools, which - when combined with the infinite zoom - really allows you to get creative. And then it has tools for you to share your creativity with others. You can even share your drawing over your network so others can pick it up, duplicate it, see how you went about drawing it, and generally have at it.

But again - it's not what I'm looking for. To its credit, I used NetSketch to do the one useful drawing thing that I've done with my iPhone: sketch out a new Mobtown website. I had an idea, wanted to sketch it out in full color, and made a go of it with NetSketch. It worked, more or less, especially zooming in to enter the navigation labels. But it all looks really sort of ... melty and off-kilter. Again - it's all free hand drawing. There is no text, there is no way to generate a cylinder or a box or a fill. There are no backgrounds, there are no stamps. And while I don't need all those things, remember - I like to draw, but I'm not good at it. I really need the computer's help to draw a reasonable looking box, not something that looks like a stuffed Glad trash bag. And that's sort of when I stopped using it.

And that brings me to my latest attempt: iDoodle2. Once you get past the janky light blue coloring, this app has quite a few nice features that make it surprisingly nice. First, there's a User's Guide. Rudimentary, but very worthwhile. Next, the interface works quite well. Across the bottom of the app are four tools and a Menu button. The tools show you what the current settings are. The menu gives you access to a few very nice things: new, save, edit the background, replay (!), the gallery, preferences, and the user's guide.

While each one is a separate button, Tools, Line, and Fill work together as tabs. Under tools, you can choose the freehand pen (and control thickness and sharpness), a line (choose thickness), a blob, text (you choose size of font), rectangle, oval, erase (choose thickness, sharpness, and opacity!), and eyedropper (choose to select line or fill color). The line tab allows you to choose the opacity of the line with a palette of 16 colors - or you mix your own colors with an RGB slider. Same with fill. Your selections are automatically reflected in the icons at the bottom and the other tools, so you can see what a blob with fuzzy, mostly clear black borders and a grey fill will look like. Astonishingly, it appears that you can even select a color gradient for fills! Use the color preview near the top, and select either end to specify the colors in a gradient, or the middle to select a solid color.

What's it like to create a new drawing? At start up, the menu pops up; select New Doodle and you are taken to the Edit background screen. Editing the background allows you to select a fill color (including a gradient fill), snap a picture with the camera, or select from your photo albums. Once your background is set up, tap on Tools (or Line or Fill) and configure your drawing tool. For example, select Blob, with a green line color (for the outline of the blob), and a light green fill color (using the Advanced color sliders). Click done and start dragging your finger on the screen in a roughly circular, blobby shape. No need to connect the beginning and the end; when you pick up your finger, the blob completes, and fills itself in with the color you chose. The other tools work similarly. Choose the Oval, for example, tap on the screen and drag the oval out. Text is vaguely the same. Choose text, type in your text, select the text size via the slider, and then slightly tap and drag to place your text on the screen.

The zooming capabilities are a little disappointing: double tap and you zoom in. But here's a nice feature. The zoom icon works as a toggle; zoom in and then tap the zoom icon and now you can drag the zoom window around the entire image. The icon reflects what piece of the entire image the zoom window is looking at. To edit, tap the zoom icon again and go at it. Double tap to zoom back out.

A couple of other points about the drawing experience. Look out for the opacity settings! By default, all objects are at about 50% opacity. This is fine for most things, but when you start laying objects on top of each other, the results may not be what you expected. I found them rather interesting - an almost watercolor quality. Want to "deepen" the color? Just keep drawing over the same area. When you get the hang of it, it looks rather cool and you can get some interesting layering effects, but the first time you do it, you're left wondering what you did.

The undo/redo feature uses a rather creative approach. To undo (or even multi-undo) what you just did, you need to tip the iPhone to the left and return it to its upright mode. It's taken me quite a lot of practice and I still don't get it right half the time. It feels like you really need to whip the iPhone in order to get it to work, and a good chunk of the time, I end up redoing instead of undoing. (Redoing is accomplished by tipping the iPhone to the right.) In fact, sometimes I give up and whip it to the right to get it to undo. Interesting etch-a-sketch-like approach, but one that could be smoother.

Your export choices are limited: click Save Doodle and you can either save it to the gallery (to keep working on it), or "publish" the drawing to your camera roll. No, you can't share it over the web or email directly from the program or even post to Twitter. That's a small problem in my way of thinking; I've got Twitterfon, so I can post the pic to Twitter. I can email to anyone, including myself, from the Camera Roll. And besides, the drawings are in a proprietary format, so I'm not sure what good sending them to my desktop directly from the app is going to get me.

And, in fact, as I type this I see there is an update for iDoodle2 which promises better text support (including fonts and shadows), a smart pen offset (so your penpoint isn't totally obscured by your finger), multitouch zoom and pan (can't wait to see if that brings it closer to NetSketch's use of zoom), and Undo button, and a couple of other features, such as a Child Mode, saved tool settings, and rotation of background images. Stay tuned for an Update!

Stuff I'm taking off my iPhone

2009-02-23T00:35:00.004-05:00

Well, long-winded Jott post aside, here's what else I'm taking off of my iPhone, and why....

iWant - It was my survivor of the "service location app" wars. I tried several of them, and this looked like it wasn't necessarily the best, but it did more things well than the other options - ATMs, pharmacies, bars and restaurants, movies, gas, etc. I think one of the reviews pointed out that everything it did could pretty much be done with Google Maps. Looking back at it, yeah - it does work pretty well, good interface - but again - I've used it maybe once, and that was right after I got it, I think. I have used the Google Maps search function to find more things, plus I have Urbanspoon to look up bars and restaurants and Now Playing for movies, and I've never really had a problem finding gas. But it's taking up space, so I'm going to get rid of it....

YouNote - I was searching around for a better notepad app, and this won amongst several other choices. I like the fact that it has several different types of notes (text, drawing, camera, voice, web, and multinote), that I can tag and color code and sort on three matrices. But it is less than ideal in that a) I can't rotate the screen, b) there's no formatting, c) I can synch my notes to my PC using a desktop app - but it doesn't really use the Cloud. I think I'll stick with Evernote, which is Cloud-based, even if I can't format the notes in the iPhone app (but I can in the desktop application and web interface, and it shows up fine in the iPhone app) or rotate the screen. Plus - Evernote also allows for a variety of notes (not a drawing note, alas - but voice and camera notes), and eliminates redundancy.

PanoLab - Neat functionality - stitching photos together into panoramas. But the fact is, I can do this with PhotoShop elements - and I can do it better. I will likely not be doing any major photo manipulation on the iPhone and wait until I can load the photos onto the main computer.

Photogene - Similar thing. Decent functionality, but photo manipulation is better done on the desktop.

Sketches and/or NetSketch - Both of these are drawing programs. I'm thinking I should keep one of these - I don't have this functionality. But I'm not sure which one. I believe Sketches has better functionality, but NetSketch does allow you to share with other NetSketch people and collaborate on drawings via WiFi. I doubt I'm going to use this feature, and I'll likely stay with Sketches. But I might remove both - I haven't actually needed to use either.

There are others that I haven't used much - Units, Truveo, Shazam, Stanza, USA Manual, Baseball, Geocaching, QwasiPad (which seems to have stopped working), Easy Wi-Fi (which has never worked, but I think there's something wrong with my AT&T account and my phone). Plus there are a slew of games that have lost their luster but I just don't want to get rid of, namely Koi and Ocarina. But given that I'm about to kill Jott, at least 5 of the above apps, and I'm replacing my on screen web bookmarks with iDash Pad (a total of 5 bookmarks) - that's a total of 11 slots, about 2/3 of a page.

Good thing, because I've got several new apps I want to try....

Phoning It In

2009-02-22T23:52:00.004-05:00

So, here's the quandary I'm in right now.

I have too many iPhone apps. I have almost five full pages of apps, and by God, that's too many. I need to start cutting them down. It's not that I mind five pages of apps, but I put some thought into creating logical categories of apps - 1 or 2 per page - and now that's thrown to hell. So I have to start trimming.

I'm a pack rat - and I think the reason I'm a pack rat is I always think - well, what if I need that later on. It's the same with my apps. There are several that I haven't used in awhile, and quite a few of those that I keep thinking - well, what if I need that later on? Better keep it.

It has to stop.

Now, one of the reasons I think I might "need it later on" is, quite frankly, I paid for the bleeping thing, and even if it was only $1.99 I hate to waste money on it. After all, I can't get my money's worth if it's not even on my device, can I? It's a bad attitude, I think, and just leads to me not being able to find stuff and my productivity - the thing the iPhone and the Cloud are supposed to enhance - takes a hit.

Another possibility is that it has some decent functionality that seems neat. But if I'm not using it - I'm not getting the benefit of that functionality. It also leads to a situation where I have some ill-thought-out redundancy. For example, I have two apps that do drawing. Each one has a decent feature or two that the other one doesn't have. I've kept both because - I never know when I'm going to need that feature! But I don't need two programs for it. In truth, I might not even need one - since I haven't used either enough to be happy with it....

You might notice that this entry is tagged "Cloud" - and that might seem to be a bit of a stretch when ostensibly this article is about iPhone apps. But my dedication to the Cloud concept is such that I think it should also be a feature in my iPhone apps. Does this app represent not just synching, but does it include a healthy Cloud consideration? All things being equal, I should keep an app that addresses the Cloud in some way, and get rid of the non-connected or just synch-to-a-desktop-program apps.

So enough of a preamble. On to today's thingamabob: Jott.

First, I love Jott the service. I first was turned on to Jott by Nozbe (more on that in another post) and then a David Pogue article hit pretty quickly after it. As Pogue says, Jott is your personal dictation service. It's pretty cool. You call up Jott, it asks you, "Who do you want to Jott?", you make a sort of coded reply, it confirms your choice, and then you dictate your message. The Jott service takes that message and does a pretty good job of translating it into text, and then - and here's the real killer feature - it does something with it.

That something is largely up to the way you have it configured, and in part based upon whether or not you want to pay. Jott connects to a variety of services through what it terms "Links," and some of the things it can connect to are blogs (Blogger, Wordpress, Typepad, Live Journal), social networking services (Facebook, Twitter, Jaiku, Tumblr), about a million To Do applications (my personal fave Nozbe, but also Remember the Milk, Toodledo, Mentat, 30 Boxes, 43 Actions), plus a few others - like Google Calendar and Trapster. You can also create a list of contacts and dictate text messages or emails to them. And you can group those contacts and send out dictated text messages to the whole group. Jott essentially adds an easy voice entry system to all these things - blogs, calendars, to do lists, text messaging, and email.

Jott also claims to be a literal feed reader. On the go, but want to sort through your Engadget articles? Huffington Post? New York Times? Yahoo! Weather? ESPN? Jott can hook you up. It works, but throws you into a different area. (When asked "Who do you want to Jott?" you have to respond "Jott Feeds," and after confirming, you're asked what feed you want, with a typical phone-based menu - "Say or press 1 for the New York Times....") The machine voice is also a little tough to understand sometimes, due to a combination of flat tone and even pace. A neat idea, but one that is far from its core functionality.

The bad news, however, is that Jott isn't content with serving merely as a conduit to all these other things; it also fancies itself as a listmaker/todo app in its own right. You can leave notes for yourself, and organize Jotts into myriad lists. And you can check them off. Jott can send you a reminder on these items, as well.

The cool thing is that these items are all housed in the Cloud, on Jott servers, and there are several ways to interact with them. First, you can create Jotts through your cell phone(s). While your account is linked to one phone, you can set it up to recognize multiple phones (I have both my Verizon and iPhone pointing to it). Real manipulation of Jotts can be done via the website, a small desktop dashboard, or a newly re-engineered iPhone app.

Neat ideas, but Jott really suffers in the execution of all this functionality. It's a pretty simple and straightforward - almost elegant - list maker. You make a Jott, either by phoning it in, typing at a full browser, or tapping away on the iPhone. You can say it's a priority. You can move it to other lists. You can check it off and delete it..... and that's about it. Jotts are really wedded to their lists, so much so that you can move a Jott from Notes (which seems to be the generic catch-all area) into a list, but you can't move it out of the list and into Notes. You can see "All lists" and in the website version you can look at all the Jotts underneath each list. But you can't see all Jotts irrespective of the list that they're in.

Inside a list, you can sort Jotts by Date, Done, and Priority. You can move completed items to the trash (where they stay around forever until you empty the trash). Even in the website's All Lists view, you can't sort across lists. You also can't reorder Jotts within the list other than the specified Sorts - and I found that crippling. Have three priority Jotts and 10 non-priority Jotts, but one of those priority items really needs to be done first, and half of the non-priority Jotts aren't really important at all? Tough. Date, Done, or Priority.

Now, this simplicity might all be fine with you - and I found the approach appealing. So much so that I decided to try it in a full test run. I had Nozbe - a GTD to do list application - for all my personal things; but I had just moved into a new position and was getting a slew of tasks associated with work projects. I didn't want to crowd Nozbe with both my personal things and my work things; I initially started to and found that my next action list was getting HUGE. So I figured, let's try Jott. The functionality seemed like it would work, a different list for every project. And I could press the phone input into double duty - for personal things use a Nozbe link, and for work things either direct it to the Notes box or into one of the native Jott lists. If I was at work, I could easily type in a text Jott. In a meeting? I could use the iPhone app.

Entry was easy, and it worked really well. The problem for me came in trying to organize the Jotts. The thing I really like about the GTD approach - especially as executed through Nozbe - is that I can create tasks and put them into projects/categories. I can thus organize and deal with them that way and I can also pull the tasks I need to do now into "next actions" and view those all at once. You can't do this in Jott.

But this was a small quibble, I figured. Jott doesn't bill itself as a GTD tool, and this approach is really one of the hallmarks of GTD. Where I really became frustrated was in trying to sort the Jotts. What I swiftly came to realize was that I was adding Jotts true to their namesakes - I just wanted to jot things down, without worrying about what order they were supposed to go in. Frequently, I'll jot something down and realize - "Ooh. But before I do that, I have to do this." No such luck in Jott: Date, Done, or Priority. Going by Date, that is going to show up before this. I can prioritize this, but what if this and that have to do be done (prioritized) before some other thing? Again, both being prioritized, that shows up before this.....

Now, I also had some quibbles with the first version of the Jott iPhone software. It's layout really caused problems, because unlike the website, I couldn't see all my lists, even. I could display the three most important lists as icons at the bottom of the screen (and keep an icon for Recording), but as I came up with more work projects, I was coming up with more lists, and they (and Notes) were buried in the "More" icon. It just got really difficult to manage. To boot, using the dictation never seemed to work right. I would make a dictation, Jott would tell me to come back in a few minutes, and I would come back days later and it wouldn't be updated. That seems to be corrected in this latest version, which is a lot slicker and has a much better layout. But, still, the basic problem remains - I can't sort anything. As a to do list application, it still has problems - not as full featured as something like Nozbe, and in point of truth, it lacks some of the functionality of Zenbe lists (also Cloud-based, also very simple - a check box and the item - but with the added ability to actually move and hand-sort the items).

So, I'm going to remove the Jott app from my iPhone - but I'm going to keep my (pay) service because of the killer ability to use my phones to jot items, on the fly, into Facebook, Nozbe, GCal, and yes - with this little hack (also referenced here) - my Jotts end up in Evernote, as well. And that means, I can bypass Jott's software service even for those random notes that aren't status updates, appointments, or to do items. And that alone is worth it.

Google Syncing ... with better Contacts

2009-02-16T12:54:00.002-05:00

Just noticed this recently. Well, noticed it before I knew about it.

Last week, Google opened up synchronization of calendar and contacts with a bunch of devices, including the iPhone. Pretty damned sweet.

I had been using Nuevasync to do just about the same thing (basically set up your Google account through an Exchange server so your iPhone could sync with it). It worked pretty well, but I did have some qualms with giving these guys access to my Google account, but, you know ... gift horse. This just did the calendar synchronization, and it worked pretty well. I was overjoyed at a clean way to get my calendar entries from GCal onto the iPhone, and even elevated the native iPhone Calendar app to my front page.

I had also purchased Sync in a Blink to synchronize my contacts between GMail and the iPhone. Sorta worked. It was a bit of a laborious process to get things to match, and I ended up with a ton of duplicates that I was trying to slog through. And the merging function was pretty laborious. But it worked - got my GMail contacts and iPhone contacts all living in one, happy, dysfunctional family.

And then they went and made a French version of it and fried the English version, so I was waiting.

But then Google came along and solved both problems in one great leap. I made the changes right away, and then repeated it for my wife's iPhone. Huzzah!

The process is pretty simple. You basically:

Set up an Exchange account on the iPhone in the Mail, Contacts, Calendar, area of Settings
for the server use m.google.com

And basically you're set.

The step I initially missed and created some frustration was this:

Access m.google.com/sync from your mobile device. This will allow you to choose up to five calendars to sync between your device and GCal.

The one bummer is that you can't seem to control the colors your calendar appears in on the iPhone. The first calendar - your personal calendar - appears to always be red. A bit of a bummer when my personal GCal calendar color is blue, and my wife's calendar is a hot pink; those colors sorta get transposed. Spent about 15 minutes playing around with ordering things a bit, and at best it seemed like a slippery eel trying to get the calendars ordered.

So, I started mucking around with my contacts. Now, GMail's contacts have been much maligned. They were originally designed as sort of an afterthought, and sucked in every contact you had any email contact with. After awhile, they added a couple of standard contact fields, and allowed you to add custom fields.

But it appears that along with sync, they've updated their Contacts functionality. Now, some of this might be because - with the Contacts functionality so poor at the outset - I largely stopped paying attention to what they were doing. Some of this might have been in place for awhile. (Though I must say, I checked in only a few months ago when I was looking at how to get friends' Shared feeds into Google Reader - which included some reference to a Preferred Group or something which I never figured out; at the time, Contacts did not look this different.)

The long and the short, from what I can tell is:

They've allowed for better grouping of Contacts. Much easier. I was dragging and dropping people around, assigning them to multiple Groups. Though they really should stick with one metaphor and keep it as labeling your contacts. They now have essentially the same functionality in GMail, Contacts, and GDocs - and arguably in GCal - and they call it something different in each one. Labeling, Groups, Folders, and Calendars. But along with this better Groupness, they now have a Group called My Contacts. You can move contacts in and out of My Contacts. It's this group that gets synced with your devices. All the other flotsam is still there, under All Contacts, but nicely separated out.
Merge. Merge is very nice - much nicer than Sync in a Blink - though that's largely because you have the whole screen to look at and it's mostly a manual process. You click the checkboxes on multiple Contacts, click Merge these x contacts... and it does a pretty good job of merging all the details together, you just have to click OK.

As some people have pointed out, this increased functionality now means that Google has pretty much the same functionality as MobileMe. I don't know; I don't have MobileMe, but this is a pretty big step in terms of Google functionality through the Cloud. Now, if only they'd allow me to edit my docs on the iPhone....

Eeeeew. Janky.

2009-02-05T10:34:00.005-05:00

More news on the GMail new labels functionality front.

First, here's the page where they give more info.

But I just tried something that really didn't work. I got an email that I wanted to reply to. So I hit the reply button and typed my reply. I had just installed the Send & Archive button from Google Labs, so I figured I would use that. But first I needed to label the thread.

Conveniently, GMail repeats the button bar at the bottom of the email as well as the top. So, rather than scroll up to the top to apply the label, then down to the bottom again to hit Send & Archive, I figured - cool, I can just use the Label button here at the bottom before I hit Send & Archive - no scrolling!

I hit the Label button and the "menu" popped up; or rather, like the original drop down box - because it ran out of room at the bottom - it "dropped up." No problem. But rather than scroll through the list of labels, I started to use auto-complete, and type my label in the box.

And that's when all hell broke loose. The "menu" dropped to below the button, briefly showed what I had typed, filtered the labels to correspond - and then disappeared. The screen had shifted up - so half of my reply window was buried at the bottom. And I lost my I-bar cursor. All in like .5 seconds.

I figured it was because the list had run out of room at the bottom when it tried to filter, so I scrolled all the way down to the bottom of the screen hoping to purchase a little more real estate, and tried it again. Same thing.

So I hit 'l' to try to bring up the menu manually, only to find that, in fact, the "menu" was still there - the 'l' was the next character entered in the auto-complete box. But it was way at the bottom of the screen, and the box was the only thing you could see - you couldn't see the filtered list of labels. Sometimes, I would get the very first label in the list - but I knew there were others that should be there. So I would grab the browser's slider to slide down and ... the "menu" disappeared.

I tried a variety of ways, and found out that I could use the arrow keys to push the page down and see more of the list, but if I scrolled past the last, "create new" entry on the list - the screen sorta bounced.... I also found that if you clicked on some blank area and then hit 'l' to bring up the Label "menu," it took you to the top to draw the "menu" under the top button.

I gave up and scrolled to the top, selected my label, scrolled back down, and hit Send & Archive.

What I would have liked, and expected, was that - like the original drop down, which dropped "up" when it didn't have enough room to drop down - the "menu" would have stayed put when I started auto-complete, rather than trying to redraw itself under the labels button (or whatever it was doing) and totally reorienting the screen. It basically scuttles what would have been some convenient functionality between the Label button (which appears at top and bottom of a thread) and the Send & Archive button (which only appears at the bottom of a compose/reply box), and instead creates a perplexed frustration.

Some more thoughts on the labels "menu."

I complained that, after hitting the Label button, if I wanted to use auto-complete, I had to remove my hands from the mouse, and start typing. I would get a winnowed down list - which was cool. Unless it brought up a unique label, I initially thought I then had to lift my hand off the keyboard to go back to the mouse and point and click in order to apply the correct label. A nit - but it took away from the "smooth" feel of the previous More Actions drop down.

I soon discovered that - after using auto-complete to winnow down the list - I could use arrow keys to navigate to the one label I wanted, hit Enter, and apply the label. So far so good.

But what if I wanted to apply multiple labels - which the new functionality makes provisions for with the check box? The example I used was - I have multiple Friends labels: Friends/Bob, Friends/Charise, Friends/Dennis. What if my email involved both Bob and Dennis, and I wanted to apply both labels? Then I would have to do the awkward mouse-point-click-keyboard-type-type-mouse-point-click-point-click dance for a fairly simple thing. I mean, using the keyboard is supposed to be faster - but I can't use the keyboard to its fullest.

The reason? I cannot use the arrow keys to select multiple labels. Remember, you have to hit Enter, and Enter applies the label but closes the "menu." In order to select multiple labels, I need to mouse click on their checkboxes. It would be nice if, say, I could navigate to the label with the arrow keys and hit the space bar, which checks the box. But I can't do that, because the I-cursor remains in the auto-complete box. So if I hit space, not only does it not check the box, it inserts a space in my auto-complete "search." And I don't have labels that start "fr " - so my list of choices gets winnowed down to nothing. Not good.
There is something that is really cool about this functionality if you want to remove a label using the Labels button. In most situations, it's likely more efficient just to click on the little 'x' to the right of the label, but if you're in the Labels "menu" and want to remove a label... the email's applied labels all appear at the top of the list, nicely checked. In one operation, you can uncheck the label(s) that you want to remove, and then go and find the label(s) you want to add, and then hit Apply.

This is much better than the previous functionality, where you had to scroll all the way down to the bottom of More Actions to get to the Remove labels section. And if you were removing multiple labels, you had to do it again, and again.....

I can see this being very useful when I erroneously label and archive something. Previously, if I pulled up everything with that (bad) label, and removed the label first, well, it would sorta disappear into the ether. I used to have to first label it with the correct label, hit the More Actions button again, scroll all the way to the bottom, and Remove the label. Now, it's just a simple operation of checking and unchecking, in no particular order, and committing the changes when I hit the Apply link at the bottom of the "menu."

So final thoughts? I am really growing to like this Label functionality. (I doubt I will use the Move to button, and would really like a way to get rid of it. Additionally, I think this functionality could be much better accomplished with a drag and drop, as it appears in most every other email program AND in Google Documents.) There are some really nice things which, in general, are far superior to the way the old More Actions drop down worked. I am quickly becoming enamored of the whole checkbox approach. But the thing still needs work to really tighten up the functionality and make it consistently good. It just doesn't feel like everything has been completely worked and thought out, and instead its potential is marred. This wouldn't be a problem if it were, say, a Labs feature - I sort of expect that. But the fact that this was treated as core functionality.... Well, I'm a little disgruntled ... and worried.

Google just did something funny

2009-02-03T23:44:00.005-05:00

Google just did something funny with GMail. I now have, on an open email, buttons for "Move to" and "Labels." "More actions" no longer contains labels.

I don't remember it this way, and my wife's email doesn't display the changes. Is it a browser thing - I run my stuff in Firefox, and she runs her's in Chrome.

"Move to" appears to apply the label and then archive it. "Labels" appears to ... label ... the email. Kinda dumb.... There's a search box at the top of each button to search through the list of labels, and a Manage labels link at the bottom....

Similar changes to the Inbox....

That's all the changes I can see right now....

Happens in IE 6 as well. And now in Chrome as well. (Signed out of wife's account and into mine.) And now that I've signed into my wife's account - it's there as well.

And here we go....

"But it's not always obvious how to use labels, especially for people
who are new to Gmail and used to using folders, and it hasn't helped
that some common tasks have been more complicated than they should be.
For instance, to move an email out of your inbox and into a label you
first had to apply the label using the "More actions" menu and then
click "Archive."

It looks like it's also supposed to have auto-complete. Okay, there we go. The little "search" box is the auto-complete feature; start typing and it winnows down the list to all labels starting with those letters. Sorta helpful, because I have like 10 million labels.....

And they've added some keyboard shortcuts: press 'v' to bring up the "Move to" button, and 'L' to bring up the "Labels" button.

Huh. Odd they should cater to "people who are new to Gmail" - and allow them circumvent the second best feature of GMail and return to the crappy old "folder-style" way of doing things.

Enjoy!

-----------------------------------

Update : 2/4/09

It also looks like they got rid of the Search the Internet button, which I kinda miss.

And this is proving to be a bit of a learning curve, as well. I can't find the Delete button half the time, and I keep hitting More Actions to choose labels.

To boot, the new functionality of the Labels button feels weird. I had to pull up the old version because I can't remember now, but it felt smoother previously. I think it was because of two things. In the old version, if I clicked on the More Actions drop down I could simply run the mouse up and down the list. This was great if the label I wanted was in the first 25 or so labels. (Remember, I have like 10 million). If it wasn't, the slider on the list was right under the drop down arrow. So it was really easy to drop down half an inch and grab the slider and go to the bottom bunch. So really it only took like two clicks to apply most labels, maybe three clicks (or more appropriately, click, click-hold-slide, click) for the rest.

The new Labels button behaves like a menu - not a drop down - and shows only the first ten labels, greatly increasing the chance that I have to click-hold-slide. So just about everything means I need to take three clicks. Additionally, that slider is over to the right about an inch, and a lot smaller - so now I have to pay attention to grab it.

The auto-complete is a bit heavy, too. To use it, I need to click the button, let go of the mouse and move my hands to the keyboard, and start typing. If I can type a couple of characters and get to the unique label, I just hit enter - and I apply the label. But if I get to something that has a bunch of similar labels - for example, I have several labels that I lump together as Friends, Friends-Bob, Friends-Charise, Friends-Dennis.... - I then need to take my hands from the keyboard, move back over to the mouse, and point and click. I guess I can actually just use the up and down keys, but for some reason I feel like I have to click the label - maybe because of the checkbox doodad they have there now.....

I think it might take some getting used to, and then I'll think it's pretty nice. I just discovered something pretty cool, for instance. If I'm in auto-complete, I can start typing a new label name, and I get the option to create a new label of what I just typed at the bottom of the menu. The addition of the Manage labels link right there is welcome.

But they need to clean it up. There still seems to be some inconsistency with the Labels button if I don't have an email selected.

If I don't have an email selected, I still get what appears to be the full functionality of the Labels button. I can start blithely typing away in auto-complete, get several good key strokes in, select the label - and get an error message.
I get the Manage Labels link - which is good, but I don't get a Create Label link. That would be handy; I have gone into the old More Actions drop down specifically to get to the New label link to create a new label. These two would thus be the only reason to open this button if there was nothing selected. If you do it for one, why not the other?
If I choose a label checkbox, I strangely get an Apply at the bottom of the "menu" - but it does nothing....

Okay, I see. If I click on the label name, I choose that label and that label only for the email I have selected. If I choose the checkbox, I can choose other labels as well. When I'm done, I click Apply or the name of the last label I want to apply. Handy.

But a better execution - when nothing is selected - is right next door, where the More Actions button options are greyed out if I don't have anything selected....

For the Move to button, Spam and Trash are redundanct - they didn't remove the old Report Spam and Delete buttons. That's not unwelcome - I like redundancy. I'd rather they remove the Report Spam button, since the Spam filters are so good, I need to use it like once in three months - and now my button bar is feeling a bit long, particularly if I add the Mark as Read button from Labs.

Like I said, these are largely nits, and I'll likely adjust to the learning curve. Just seems a little stange.

GDrive

2009-01-28T17:16:00.002-05:00

Whoa! Look at this and that and this, too. The GDrive. Long rumored, it looks like this is pretty close. Along with stories that GMail is getting the Gears treatment and so will be available off-line - with automatic syncing - it looks like maybe Google is up to something.

It's an explosion. I can't even keep track of how many times they reference the Cloud. But it looks like - pressured by whatever Microsoft's doing with Windows Live and Apple's divided MobileMe and iWork - the Big G is looking to jump into the game. And this might bring greater integration between the various Google apps. I'll believe it when I see it, but it's looking like this stuff is happening fast.

As a quick observation, I think this is great, despite my investment in Box.net. Hopefully, they'll also figure out a way to let me access the documents and files - and edit them - via iPhone, as well.....

GMail

2009-01-28T16:54:00.003-05:00

Well, I had decided that my first real blog entry on Cloud details would be on GMail, but I want to write about something else Cloud related. So, in keeping with the original spirit, here are my thoughts about GMail.

One of the first appearances of the Cloud is really in the host of email programs that sprang up in the late 90s, with Hotmail and Yahoo! Mail being the biggest and best examples. Prior to that, your email client was just another program on your desktop, most likely Outlook. You had to configure it to hit a mail server somewhere, which was a rather painful experience of religiously following a list of arcane instructions dotted with references to smtp and mail servers, and where things would mysteriously go wrong. Very painful.

The first I became aware of an alternative was when some of the ISPs and hosting services I tapped into started allowing webmail - basically a website that you could call up anywhere and tap into your email account. Most of them were pretty plain and didn't work all too well. And they didn't get around the basic problem of sucking down your emails onto your desktop; if you were at work and wanted to look up a personal email you had gotten three months ago - sorry, no go; you had to be at your home desktop to do that.

But Hotmail and Yahoo! started changing the game. The web interface for both of them was fast, appealing, and - best of all - you could access your email from anywhere you had an Internet connection. Not a lot of capacity, but you could store them in folders, keep them around for awhile, search through them, etc. As internet connectivity became ubiquitous, these gained in popularity; by the mid-2000s, if you were on a computer, you were connected - and it didn't make sense to deal with Microsoft's Outlook to lock all of your email in one place.

Cloud-wise, there's not a lot of difference between Yahoo!, Hotmail, and GMail. And I'll confess - I switched from using both Yahoo! (for most of my mail) and Hotmail (for really personal mail) a few years ago. So Yahoo! and Hotmail may have matured some in the meantime. I, however, am hooked on GMail - for the way it tackles the Cloud.

Good Stuff

So, what's so good about GMail, and why won't I ever consider going back? Initially, I believe I got hooked because of the storage - which at the time was a robust 1G and then 2G and the promise that you would never have to throw anything away. It pretty much kicked everyone's ass at the time. In response, it seems as though Yahoo! created unlimited email storage, and Hotmail upped their limit to 5G, and GMail responded with 6G for everyone "and counting." I, however, bought space a couple of years ago for Picasa, with the result that the extra Google storage didn't apply just to Picasa, but also other Google apps - notably GMail. So, let's see.... I currently have 1.4G in GMail (and I've been keeping damn near all my email for something like three or four years now), which is 8% of my 17.1G capacity - for which I pay like $5 a year or something.

But storage was just "the hook." The reasons I stay or much greater.

Threading

Threading is the single biggest reason to stay with GMail, because GMail's threading kicks everyone's butt. Outlook says it has threading, but when I tried Outlook 2003 a few years ago, it was so horrible as to not really qualify as threading. Thunderbird has threading, but.... it just wasn't as good. It looks like Yahoo! and Hotmail still don't have threading.....

What is threading? Well, you know the situation where you send three friends an email (Subject: What's Uuuuupppp???) asking what they want to do this weekend. Friend A replies back to you that they want to go out drinking Friday. You reply back that Friday you have to shave the cats, but your band-aided and iodined self should be up for heading out around 9:00 or so. Friend B laughs at the joke. Friend X, who you haven't seen in year's, sends you an email (Subject: Long time, no ears) to check and see how you're doing. Friend C says they can't do Friday night; have fun; but they're going to see a movie on Saturday - who's up for tagging along. Friend B says they'd love to go. Business Associate W asks when you're going to be done reviewing that document he sent (Subject: Re: Document for your review). You gently remind Friend B that they haven't committed to the pub crawl Friday night. Friend D chirps in that they have strep, so won't be doing anything.

How that whole series of events is translated is vastly different in GMail versus just about everyone else. Regular email programs/services just spit out one email after the other, and often place your replies in the Sent folder.

Friend D; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Business Associate W; Re: Document for your review

Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend C; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend X; Long time, no ears

Friend B; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

Friend A; Re: What's Uuuuupppp???

7 emails, not including the three emails that you sent which are sitting in the Sent Mail box/folder. It takes up a lot of screen real estate, and jumbles these things all together.

GMail attacks the problem completely differently:

me, Friend A, Friend B, Friend C, Friend D; What's Uuuuupppp???

Business Associate W, me; Re: Document for your review

Friend X; Long time, no ears

If you were to open that first email, you'd see the whole threaded email conversation, your original email, and the other 7 subsequent replies to it, including your replies, in chronological order; the ones you've read would be collapsed into just the author and first line. Along with Associate W's recent email, their initial email from three weeks ago floats up to the top, along with your initial reply asking for more info - which they never got back to you. It works very much like an internet forum thread, but even better.

Occasionally - and seemingly only from one particular person whose emails are delivered through a Yahoo! group - the threading gets a little screwed up. But by and large, this just works. It's revolutionary; and once you try it, you won't be able to go back to using normal email. It's painful for me to use the iPhone's mail app hooked to GMail. I use it, mostly because GMail's iPhone webapp version isn't great, either - but boy do I miss the full-on GMail experience, and for a lot of email processing, I need to be at a full-blown browser.

Labels

The second revolutionary email innovation is GMail's use of labels rather than folders. Labels are a much more fluid, better way to work than folders. I can tag an email thread (sorry, not individual emails) with one or two or several different labels. If my wife sends me something, it gets tagged with 'Beth.' If she's talking about something to do with the house, I will also tag it 'House'. And if it happens to be an email asking our family to come paint the house, I'll maybe label it 'Family' as well.

Why is this important? Well, it gives me a really handy way to look up those emails later. I know there was an email thread that was sent out about painting the house, so I look at emails with the House label. Generally, you can design a label system that's fine-grained enough to narrow your search, so it makes it relatively easy to find, and voila - because of threading, I have the original email and all the replies from everybody making excuses as to why they can't be there.

But isn't that just like folders, you ask? No, and the reason is - I can put multiple tags on the thread. That way I can go searching for it from different angles. Maybe I just remember that Beth wrote the initial email, so I can look for all those emails tagged Beth. Or maybe I remember that I asked my family, so I look up family. You can't do that with folders without making lots of copies all over the place. And how do you update all those copies when people email you back? Not to mention the fact that all subsequent replies get separated from their antecedents, and you have to file each and every one; I label the thread, and every email in that thread gets pulled together and labeled the same. Folders also tend to be for storage: you move an email into a folder, and out of your inbox. Not so in GMail; I can label an email and keep it in my inbox for further action.

Additionally, you can star email threads - which is really just a very specialized label. Don't remember a damned thing about the email other than you had to do something with it? Look under Starred. And with the newest Google Labs innovations, you can star it with different symbols. I label emails with some neat information that I'll want to reference later with a blue 'i' "star." One click - and there it is.

What would a Google service be without Search? And the GMail search works very well. As initially touted, GMail allowed you to "never throw anything away." That gets you a lot of emails very fast, and it would be a problem if Google wasn't synonymous with Search.

Case in point. Last night there was a horrible ice storm. We don't get these days too often here in the Mid-Atlantic, and when we do - well, I never know where to look to find out if there's a delay or cancellation or what. Unfortunately, this morning, I managed to lock myself out of my email and Citrix accounts, so I couldn't find the policy or the number to call to figure out whether we had work. I made it into work to find that my boss had emailed the inclement weather policy - with the weather line number - at about 6:30 AM. Which of course I couldn't get to because I was closed out of work email. SO.... I forwarded the email to my GMail account, tagged it with my 'Work' label, and archived it. In two years when we have another ice storm that threatens to shut down the city, I can easily type in the search box 'inclement weather' or 'weather policy' or even just 'weather' and I should have a much reduced list of emails to sort through. (8 emails show up in the Search of 'inclement weather' - including the email I want and this draft; I can see the message I sent out 2 and half years ago explaining what we would do for my outdoor wedding in case of inclement weather....)

It's a powerful way to find emails, and so easy that you do it without even thinking about it.

Archive

The amount of storage space, use of labels, and great Search functionality allow you to archive emails. Press the button and they zip to a place out of your way. You access them by calling up their labels or searching. In essence, this is not that different from filing in a folder, but it feels different - it's a different way of thinking about it. It essentially separates categorizing an email from filing it away, so you can categorize an email the first time you read it, and hold it in the inbox or star it for later action. Later replies are also tagged with the same label. When you're done with the email - then you file it, not exactly getting rid of it - but getting it out of your sight.

Spam & other nasties

Spam sucks. But GMail has the best spam filters I have seen. Very little gets through. I currently have 588 spam messages isolated, with at least 150 in the last week. And I haven't seen one of them. Every once in awhile there will be a spate of spam that creeps through. I mark it as spam, and after a day or two the epidemic goes away. I seriously do not worry about spam, and I never have to configure anti-spam software on my computer. Additionally, GMail does a good job of catching and alerting you to phishing emails. Viruses? I don't worry about anti-virus software on my email (which is admittedly true of most on-line email services), either, because GMail gets rid of that, too. (I do have it on my computer.)

Integration with other services

Google isn't alone; I understand that Yahoo! has a particularly strong calendar, contacts, and RSS. And there are other surprisingly robust application suites out there - like Zoho, which I've used with my Box.net account (more on that one day). There are others out there that a Google search will turn up - things like 37Signals' BaseCamp and Backpack, or Scrybe. Even aspects of Apple's iWork and MobileMe, and Microsoft's Windows Live. Another that I came at by shank's corners is Zenbe - again, more on that soon.

But Google's "suite" of apps is nice. The contacts is really just an add on to GMail, and while it has made some strides, is still not the most robust out there, but it works (and I have it synching with my iPhone now). Google has a very nice integration with Google Chat - which pops up in the corner; conversations are archived and searchable like email.

There is some nice integration with Google Calendar (GCal) and Google Docs. GCal is a very nice program - I love it almost as much as GMail, but that's another post. And there are a couple of points of integration between the two. First, if someone sends you an email with date and time information, GMail makes an attempt to create an event out of it. Look over on the right, and there's a link to "Add to calendar." It's not great, and could use some tweaking - a recent "Add to calendar" link picked out a reasonable event title and got the date right, but chose the End Date listed in the email as the start date.

While composing an email you can add an event invitation, as well. And Google has released a nice little Lab add-on that gives you a peek at your calendar. You can configure it to show a mini-calendar, display one or more of your GCal calendars, and can do a quick add of an event from it. Quite handy.

As for Google Docs, there's a similar Lab widget, and if you get a spreadsheet or document or presentation as an email attachment, you are given the option to display (and save) the file in Google Docs.

A series of links at the top of the page allows you to launch GCal, Google Docs, Picasa (Photos), Google Reader, and additional programs (such as a To Do list, through a Lab add-on). Not much of an integration, and it could be more, such as a more seamless way to start a doc in GMail, import a picture from Picasa, save it to Google Docs, and ultimately publish to your Blogger blog. There are Firefox plug ins that allow you to do this - so maybe it's not too far off. Some of this stuff you can do thanks to a Labs add-on (to start a Doc from an email conversation), and Docs now allows you to publish directly to your blog. But it all has the feel of being patched together, not seamless.

Bad Stuff

But, there's some trade off.

Security

The Search capabilities create a problem. If Google indexes your emails so you can find stuff easily, it means anybody can find stuff easily. I personally find this a little overblown. Yahoo! and Hotmail also have this information indexed so it can be readily accessed; the difference is Google does it better. If you have security issues, well, perhaps you shouldn't use Google's services. But as I've mentioned earlier, perhaps you shouldn't use the Cloud at all, including Yahoo! or Hotmail.

Not as tight as it could be

There's a lot of potential here, but it's not fully realized. The bit of research I've done suggests Yahoo! is doing a lot of this stuff, as well; in several cases, doing it better. (Yahoo! bought, within the last year or so, a company called Zimbra that appears to do many of the same things as Google, but as a commercial enterprise product.) Google contacts are a little light. Google has yet to fold Picasa into the group as well as they have Blogger - and even that is a bit of an afterthought (as Lab add-ons, not as a full-blown feature of GMail.) Zenbe comes close to providing an integrated solution, but has some other problems. But, really, not many people are doing as much as Google in this area, and no one is doing it better or doing more.

GMail and the Cloud

So, bottom line, how is this the first really meaty piece of my Cloud investigation?

Gmail is the base of operations

It's my home in the Cloud, more or less. Now, I'm not saying everything is right there. But GMail is where I start every day, and more than likely where I end every day. The first consideration for any new service is, "How well will it integrate with my GMail?" If I can get something that leverages my GMail account, it's as near to in as it can be; if it would replace GMail - well, it's pretty much out. (Xobni held my attention for a little while, until it I realized that it did some similar things to GMail, and some things I'd like to see GMail adopt. But to get that functionality, I had to pass GMail through Outlook, and I just wasn't that into it.) Again, Zenbe gets tantalizingly close to providing an email platform that serves as a home for a variety of other applications, but falls a little short. GMail, on the other hand, supplies great email features and it seems to be gaining extensions and add-ons that allow me to do lots of other stuff, too.

GMail is a good example of Cloud computing

First, all my emails are sitting in the Cloud. I can access them through my computer at work, I can access them through my computer at home, I can access them at the library, on my friend's computer. I can get them on my iPhone.... And I'm not syncing (which I sort of consider cheating). They are stored on a server that I will never see.

And, likewise, the application itself is stored on and operates from a server I will never see. This has implications, as well. Google gets some stick for being in "constant beta," but that's sort of the hallmark of Cloud computing. Commercial Project Portfolio Management packages that are marketing themselves as Software as a Service (i.e., Cloud-based) tout the fact that features - while still dutifully tested - are rolled out as they are developed, and seamlessly. No reinstallations, no upgrades to download and install, the user never recognizes a thing, other than a "New Features!" link.

What GMail doesn't have - and most Web 2.0 services do - is collaboration. But that's as you would expect it; I don't want to share my email with people (that I know). (Though Zenbe allows for email collaboration in a rather interesting way.) Email "collaboration" takes the form of forwarding and replying; and in a way, GMail handles this better than most through its threading. At least, it's easier for you to figure out what's going on. But additionally, the other parts of the Google cloud - GCal, Google Docs, Picasa - do allow for a rather robust collaboration.

So, GMail. It's good. The benefits - especially threading and labeling - far outweigh the security concerns, the underdeveloped add-ons, and the lack of integration (that no one else does any better.) Would I like it to be able to do some of the things that Zenbe or Xobni can do? Sure - they both have some nice features: ZenbePages, a separate tab that collects your attachments, analytics.... But they lack the basic functionality, and - dare I say it - "just works"-ability of GMail.

The Cloud - Part 2

2009-01-08T13:56:00.001-05:00

Yeah! Like a week after I wrote the beginnings of my opus on Cloud computing, Steve Ballmer of Microsoft delivers the opening keynote for CES 2009.

Why is this so cool?

As I said previously, this whole Cloud thing has been common knowledge to techsters for the last few years. We've seen it coming (thanks largely to Google), we've been using these services on PCs with our browsers, and we've been trying out the first hardware forays into the Wild Blue Yonder. But unless I miss my mark here, Cloud computing isn't exactly a household concept quite yet.

I just checked - the recent Macworld keynote delivered by Phil Schiller makes no mention of the word Cloud. It skirts the issue - you can make documents in iLife and iWork and then get them to your iPhone. And you can "share" documents that you make in iWork to iWork.com where others can take a look at them. Then, of course, there's MobileMe which syncs calendar, email, and contact information between your PC, iPhone, and Mac through the Cloud. (They mentioned that at the WWDC last year.) I don't know how they both work, exactly; but already I see a split between MobileMe and iWork.com; one is for one type of information, one is for another.

Ballmer mentions the Cloud twice (at 6:45 and 7:39) to announce that Windows will be the lynchpin that ties it all together, and that families will be connected with "cloud-based entertainment content." A chunk of this seems to be provided by the Windows Live service - which near as I can figure brings Hotmail, on-line storage, "People" (contacts?), Messenger, and Photos together and allows you to use them via your PC or phone.

Neither of these is exciting. Google has been doing this for awhile now - with GMail (and its built-in contacts) as the mother ship - which nicely integrates with GTalk, a pretty decent integration with GCal, GDocs (which has some integration), Picasa (for photos), and Blogger. Additionally, Google has started making forays into bookmark management (which is somehow mysteriously tied to GNotes) and at least half-hearted attempts at a slew of other things, like web authoring, social networking, and a wikipedia. Oh, and a browser.

And there are dozens of other services that do things like this. Box.net , for example, fills Google's lack of accessible on-line disk space, and hooks to a bunch of services, including Google and Zoho.com - which is a Cloud-based service allowing for storage and editing of documents and spreadsheets over the net and a whole lot more.

And indeed, Microsoft and Apple have some catching up to do. I won't totally sell them short, but I will say - I'm not sure they can do it. Microsoft has Windows, and all accounts are Windows 7 is going to be good. Huge market-share there. Apple is beloved by a large section of the tech buying public, as well - and has a reputation for just making stuff that is simple and elegant and just works. But Google alone has a huge lead on them. (I felt a little bad because Schiller was going on and on about how iPhoto can recognize faces - when this is technology Picasa has had out for the last 4 months or so.) And both of them still miss the point somewhat. I think the split between MobileMe and iWork.com is pretty big. And note that this is syncing - the file resides on multiple devices and it pushes changes to the Cloud, Mac, iPhone (only), and PC that you have registered. Windows Live doesn't even appear to try to address the problem of on-line document editing, but potentially comes closer to allowing a large array of devices (home PC, work PC, XBox, WinMo phones, and anything with a browser) to access content. (I say potentially because I am disturbed by references to Windows Live as opposed to XBox Live - I'm not sure how well the two are integrated.)

But what's exciting about these keynotes is that "the Cloud" is about to launch into the public consciousness. 2009 will be the Year of the Cloud. Both Apple and Microsofts efforts - as late to the game as they are - are the mainstreaming of a current that has been developing the last couple of years. It's going to be a cool year.

Life in the Cloud

2009-01-02T16:50:00.003-05:00

I've been threatening this topic for awhile, dancing around it, sizing it up.... Started a couple of times and I just couldn't get my thoughts on to paper. But it's been getting increasingly difficult to think about this stuff without taking some sort of white paper approach to this, so here goes another stab.

One of the greatest things about the modern internet is the emergence of "the Cloud." The movement towards Cloud Computing has been growing for some time, but - looking back now - it seems like it really made its emergence in 2008.

For those of you puzzling over what I'm talking about, "the Cloud" is really just the internet, so named because on network diagrams, connections to the internet are shown as a cloud. For some time the Internet has been used to serve information to each other. Email is one such application: a user at a terminal on the left side of the picture above shoots a chunk of information to a user on the right side of the image. Internet browsing is another. A user on the right side sends a request for information to a computer on the left hand side, and that computer returns a chunk of information that the right-hand computer can composite into a web page.

Typically, we install programs on our computers and use those programs to write a letter on Word, crunch numbers in Excel, watch a movie or listen to a song in Windows Media Player or iTunes, play games, etc. The program and the data reside on our hard drives and use our hardware; in some cases the application might go out to the Internet to grab some information, but all the processing was done locally. But in the last couple of years, the Internet has seen the steady growth of Web 2.0 applications, where the program no longer resides on our computer. Instead of making a request to a computer across the network for a static blob of information to be composited as a page, we are now able to make a request of a computer on the other side of the network and have that computer do something for us. The code and the processing power resides on the other side of the Cloud. This is great for software companies for a variety of reasons. Delivery is made a lot easier - no CDs to burn, manuals to be printed, blister packs to prepare, shipments to be made; no big box store is needed to do the actual distribution, idiot end users who may do funky things with their install won't be calling tech support.... It also means that the software company can make updates a lot easier and get them out a lot easier and keep everyone on the same set of code. In fact because you control the environment, you can ignore many of the problems of developing for multiple platforms. As long as they can access your server via the Internet through one of the handful of standardized browser's - your computers do the heavy lifting in whatever language you want; it's up to the client's browser to composite the standardized blob you send them back. And you don't have to worry about bootleggers copying disks and sending it to all of their friends, or their two laptops and desktop computer.

And not only is the program code on a server sitting across the internet, but the data for that program is also likely sitting "in the Cloud." The letter you typed, the numbers you crunched, the photos you uploaded and manipulated aren't on the computer you used, but are sitting on another computer linked to the computer providing the code. And that seems a little weird - your stuff, your information isn't on some medium that you own or control. It's on a computer many hundreds or thousands of miles from you, jumbled together with the data from a bunch of other people - but still, almost instantaneously available to you.

There are several implications to this arrangement. One, it can be a bit of a security problem. If you don't control your data, how can you protect it against being accessed by others, or used without your permission? Two, if you need access to the Internet in order to retrieve your data, what happens when you lose connection to the Internet, or the server the data is on loses connection to the Internet, or the company administering the server goes out of business?

In some ways, these problems aren't really all that different from problems that exist in the "real world" side of computing. If all of your data is on your laptop and you don't have access to your computer - you don't have access to your data. And what happens if you out and out lose your computer or get it stolen or the computer crashes? Unless you've back up regularly - and which of us is confident that our backup protocol is airtight? - the chances are you are going to lose something. And in terms of security, it is not a difficult thing to smash and grab a laptop and thus gain access to a whole bunch of personal information.

In some ways, Cloud computing is a little more secure and stable. The fail-safe abilities that these companies have is impressive; strong backup protocols, redundant servers, 24 hour maintenance. If their hard drive crashes, it's already been backed up and was probably replicated on another server anyways. You can't smash and grab these places - your data is generally split up and sent all over the place - so it's not in one easy location for a thief to access, and you need to have a password in order to get to the data. I mean, given enough desire and know-how, a thief can capture your password and gain access - but it takes a lot more effort to do that than to break your window, grab your computer, and run out of the house.

It's my belief, however, that the big benefit of Cloud computing far outweighs the potential problems, and that's access. It's a security risk (less of a problem and more of something that needs to be provided for), but because your data is distinct from your computer, you can get at it from many different places, computers, and platforms. At work? You can likely use work's internet connection to get to your data. At a friend's house - ask for a quick couple of minutes on their computer. On vacation - you wouldn't believe the number of internet cafes and business centers that are in major metropolitan areas. On the go - most cell phones these days can access the data just as easily.

A case in point of one of the most popular Web 2.0, cloud-based applications: GMail. Google controls GMail's code base, and they've adopted a little gimmick by having it in constant beta. In other words, they can - and will - release features willy nilly, as they come available, rather than waiting for a big release. Your emails reside on a Google server - or rather, several servers spread throughout the country. I can access my email at work, at home on the HP media center, at Panera on my laptop, on my friend's Mac, on my Verizon cell phone, on my old Dell Axim PDA, on the old WinCE or 286 machines at the theater, on my iPhone, on my Linux-based N800..... All I need is a modern browser and my user information. As long as I keep my password secure, and Google upholds their end of the security bargain, it's pretty tough for anyone other than me to break into my source. And I never need to worry about my laptop flaming out (as it did a few years ago) and losing access to everything everyone had written me.

The list of applications is surprisingly large, and as I mentioned earlier has been growing for the last few years. Google has a bunch of them: GMail, CCal, Picasa, Google Docs, Google bookmarks, etc. But there are lots of other applications out there. There are services such as Jott - which transcribes vocal notes you make on a cell phone and turns them into electronic notes, reminders, to do items, and texts. Or Evernote - which does about the same thing with pictures. In fact, many banking applications use the same principals: you interact with password protected financial information from your bank, on a variety of platforms, where you can look up information, contact a representative, make financial transactions, view and report on transactions, etc.

So, that's cloud computing in a nutshell. But there's so much more to it than just that. My plan is to continue to revisit this topic and talk about some of the applications and services I'm using. So stay tuned....

What a day (and a half or so....)

2008-10-01T16:16:00.001-04:00

So, I haven't blogged in a long time. Got a couple of posts sitting in the email, waiting to go up, PLUS things have been a shaking in the Ratskellar in terms of new and good tech stuff. But the last day or so has been very, very interesting on a couple of fronts....

Sprint's XOHM has gone live in Baltimore (sort of - maybe another week before I can sign up), and it certainly looks like it's going to be the Comcast killer I crave. They have a $35 ($25 for the next six months) home option - you have to buy an $80 modem, but it is reportedly comparable to cable. And for that price? Gives me a chance to yell at Verizon, too, for not delivering FIOS (or even DSL for that matter).
Found out yesterday there are several iPhone apps out there that allow you to control the mouse on your computer. I was grooving on iPhone's Remote - which allows you to control the iTunes content on your PC (well, as much as one can groove with some cranky guts). But this would essentially give me a super remote which would allow me to a) start iTunes (or any other program), b) drag the window over to the tv, c) select the media I want to play, d) control all aspects of that media - stop, start, rewind, fast forward, volume.... all from the couch!!! The only question is - which one?
Sportacular - the sports news iPhone app - had an upgrade that looks pretty snazzy. Can add favorite teams, and hide those leagues that you don't care about - like the NBA and golf.
Photogene - an iPhone app that allows you to manipulate shots from the Camera roll - appears to have upgraded as well, and adds the ability to Sharpen, and put color filters on. Pretty cool.
AND - though I only played with it for a few minutes - seems I missed an upgrade to the Facebook iPhone app which looks really quite cool.
I used my iPhone this afternoon to find my first geocache. It was so sillily exciting, I nearly forgot all the other cool stuff that has happened.

And what were some of those other tech things to report on?

After my LG VX8700 external display broke, I decided to go through Asurion - the insurance company - to get a replacement. Hilarity ensued.
And then we broke down and got iPhones. Lots of stuff to report on there. Comparison versus N800, app store, apps, using it in the cloud....
I killed Comcast - mostly.
And replaced it with a digital HD antenna. Cool!
And we got a supercomputer (well, not really, but it's pretty super!) that we successfully hooked up to the tv and can handle media quite nicely.

So, a bunch of info to get up there. But first - my take on the cloud.

Netflix Roku versus TiVo/Unbox

2008-05-22T16:10:00.001-04:00

So Pogue wrote a little something about the new Roku Netflix box. The ten second summary: Netflix now has a set top box that allows you to stream movies from Netflix using their streaming movie service. No additional charge (other than the hardware cost) and you can take more than 24 hours to watch it. Pogue admits that there are other services - expressly naming Amazon (Unbox) and TiVo - but says that each of these "is fatally flawed." Not so the Netflix/Roku player.

This all sounds great, but frankly I think Pogue and everyone else is making a mountain out of molehill and not crediting Amazon/TiVo the props they deserve.

The fatal flaw that Pogue mentions? Well, it's either that you have to download it and watch it on your computer, or you only get (horrors!) 24 hours to watch the movie.

The first flaw is a problem - as he says, not many people want to watch Lord of the Rings in a desk chair; we want to watch it on TV. The Unbox/TiVo solution is excellent, though. While you have to shell out more money for your Roku or Vudu or AppleTV box, you've probably already got the TiVo to do what TiVo's do - digitally record your tv programs. This is just an added feature, one that makes the TiVo set a multitasker - and a hell of a one at that!

But the second is something of a red herring, in my opinion. The Roku box doesn't have better technology than the TiVo/Unbox combo; in fact it's more primitive: it's simply a dedicated streaming video player - there's no storage that I can tell, it just hooks itself up to Netflix's servers and streams the data into the (most likely) flash-based player in the box - similar to the way your MS browser on your computer grabs it. There is nothing in the technology that necessarily inhibits the Unbox/TiVo from doing more than a 24 hour rental. The fact that practically everyone is susceptible to this 24 hour rental model suggests it is the corporate lawyers and the other industry players decreeing a 24 hour limit - it's DRM, not an issue with the player or service.

There is nothing that technologically allows the Roku box to get around this DRM issue. What the Roku/Netflix box has going for it is that, since it's an extension of NetFlix and these are streaming media, it's subsumed in your subscription (not actually free). That doesn't mean that NetFlix has really gotten around the 24 hour limit - they've just nullified its effect. How?

First, as Pogue points out, these aren't cutting edge movies - they are older titles and a lot of crap that have progressed through the industry's various "windows." You know when you would go to Blockbuster and you could take out the really old titles for a week at a time? Why? Nobody cared - there was no demand, they had been on tv for years, and income from renting them was seen as gravy. But try to take a hot, "new" title (an appellation that would still pertain like 2 years after its release) - and you had ... 24 hours (later expanded to 2 days, as I recall).

Second, it's streaming video. It's not being stored on your hard drives, so again no one cares. But because of that, quality and ease of use (see Pogue's description of "tv" quality video on a 2.2M cable connection and the rewind/fast forward concessions) suffer. Not to mention - what happens when you're network isn't quite up to snuff - or is getting hammered because all of your neighbors are also using the service. (Have I mentioned lately that I hate Comcast?)

Third, to the extent that anyone does care - it doesn't matter; it's free! Watch half an hour of this old title, stop the feed, get back two days later and restream the feed, skipping through the parts you've seen. You're not paying any more for the service, and Netflix is beaming the same amount of this uncared for schlock as if you were watching something new.

And again, I'm not saying this Netflix/Roku box isn't good. I like Netflix, and this is a very nice addition (even if I have to pay $99), and we might very well end up getting one for us and for our families. What I'm saying is someone ought to recognize what the TiVo/Unbox service brings, instead of bashing it as "fatally flawed."

The Unbox stuff is really quite cool.... Pogue even thought so, too. I can select the videos on the TiVo AND on the computer; on the computer I can select for watching on computer or on the TiVo. (It appears that you have to get on your computer and set up your Netflix instant view queue in order to see it on your Roku box.) If I buy a movie, it keeps it on the Unbox server, so I can delete the movie from my TiVo to save space, and then redownload it when I want to watch it again. I think I can even start to watch the movie before it finishes downloading. I can start a download from Unbox at work to my TiVo, and then it's available on TiVo when I get home. It takes a little while to download, but the video quality is better and I get better control of the movie. In fact, the Unbox is really tightly interwoven into TiVo - it operates just like a TiVo video, and TiVo's swivel search will find Unbox titles.

But most upsetting to me is that everyone is making a big deal out of this 1 day rental thing. I don't get it.

First, Unbox allows you to download the movie, wait up to a month, and then start watching it. My wife's response to this complaint was logical - I think the issue is sometimes you get a movie, and then something comes up, and you don't get to it right away. And I can see that; been there myself. But Unbox's 30 day "rental period" followed by a 24 hour "viewing period" gets around this problem rather elegantly.

Second, especially if you just get the movie and none of the extra material, how many people take more than a day to watch a movie, and how often do they do that? When I finally get a chance to sit down and watch a movie, the chances are very good I am going to watch that whole movie in one sitting. While a lot of people squawk about it, I have some serious questions about how many people take multiple sittings to watch a movie once they start. Yes, I can imagine situations in which it might take a couple of sittings to watch a movie; my roommate used to watch half an hour of a movie every morning while getting ready for work. But we're talking an 80-20 solution here. As Pogue himself points out, Netflix doesn't even see this thing as your exclusive movie service. The whole thing is premised upon the fact that when you want to see the latest movie (about 80% of the time), you'll get it from the mail service; when you want to see a movie now (the other 20%), you'll use the instant view service. I really believe the splits are something similar for this 24 hour thing: 80% of the people 80% of the time will watch a movie within 1 day (especially if they have to). It's not going to work for me the 20% of the time I want to watch a movie in more than one sitting (when I will likely use my Netflix subscription), or the 20% of the people who habitually watch their movies serially; but is that something that Unbox/TiVo needs to worry about? Is that something that they deserve to be knocked on? Especially when Netflix/Roku doesn't worry about it for their 80-20 solution, and doesn't get knocked for it?

And again - this isn't even Unbox/TiVo's fault. The 24 hour limit is a DRM issue, created by Hollywood lawyers. If you can convince Hollywood that their best interests rest in allowing an expansion of that time limit - it's a relatively easy to execute. What's the best amount of time? Again, an 80-20 solution I think would come close to something like 36 hours. Say I start to watch a movie at 6pm and watch it for 30 minutes. The next morning, while eating breakfast, I watch 15 minutes. I have a dinner I'm going to that night, so I don't get back to start watching the last 45 minutes or so until 10pm, and I still have plenty of time.

Whew - as always, a lot of words. But here's the quick and dirty.

Issue	Unbox/TiVo	Netflix/Roku
1. Download	You can use your PC or the TiVo box to select movies to rent or own	You must maintain your queue with your PC
2. Speed	Takes longer to get a big enough chunk to start watching, but you can start remotely.	20 seconds to start watching
3. Cost	$4 for rental of most titles, $16 to buy	$99 initial outlay, cost subsumed in Netflix subscription
4. DRM	24 hour	N/A
5. Quality	"Very good"; DVD-like	"TV-like" with a fast cable connection
6. Library	Old and new	Not new/garbage

If Unbox/TiVo is fatally flawed, so, too is Netflix/Roku. Will Unbox/TiVo beat out Netflix/Roku? Probably not, given the fact that Netflix/Roku is "free" and is supported by Netflix. Will it survive? Maybe not, if Netflix can catch on here in a big way. But I think Unbox/TiVo does a really good job, and if it fails, it won't be because it wasn't as good a product.

--
Noel Schively

Creative Zen Stone +

2008-05-01T10:51:00.001-04:00

People wonder why the iPod, in its various forms and incarnations, is so popular. And the reason is, the alternatives just aren't as user friendly.

A couple of months ago I decided that I was tired of pulling my iPod out of its protective sleeve to pop it in another sleeve to take to the gym. I really only listened to a handful of albums - Modest Mouse We Were Dead... , Soul Coughing's Ruby Vroom, a couple of live Jethro Tull performances.... I considered getting an iPod Shuffle, but I'm just not a "shuffle" sort of guy; I'm more of a "play the album as it was originally conceived" sort of guy. I was really worried that, without a screen, I would be blind among my four or five albums, never sure which one I was about to listen to. So I looked around and found a good price and a postive reviews on Creative's Zen Stone +. It was small, it had a screen, had enough memory for me to pop my four or five albums on, and seemed perfect. Additionally, it had an FM radio, voice recorder, and stopwatch functions - things I thought I might use, but not necessities. Got the wristband attachment for it, figuring that would be a little easier to use in the gym than some giant armband thingy, and if I really liked it, I could wear it as a third watch....

Now, don't get me wrong. The sound on the thing is really good. Even through pretty mediocre sports headphones, the sound was surprisingly good, perhaps better than on the iPod. The form factor is nice - small, shaped like a skipping stone or one of those little rocks you get in the faux Buddhist sand gardens (and thus very appropriate). The screen isn't anything to write home about, but it works as a GUI and to let me know what song I'm on. But everything else, while working okay, was sort of a disappointment.

1. It's a little on the large side to wear as a watch; not too too bad, but a little large. But what makes it impractical to use as a watch is the fact that when the Stone+ shuts down - it shuts down. It goes into a "deep sleep," and in order to wake it up, you need to hold the top button down for a small millenium before it switches on - and then it starts playing music, so you have to pause the music. The top button is a sort of rocker switch - hold down on one side and you control the power, the play/pause, and the menu functions, hold down on the other side and you have a programmable hot key - which you can set to display the time. But the thing has to be on and awake for that programmable button to work. Then it shows the time for like 5 seconds before switching to the song display. It will show the song display for 30 seconds, then switch back to the watch face for 30 seconds, then go black; still awake, but black.

2. The controls don't feel intuitive to me. I've used it several times - not steadily, I'll admit - and every time I'm fishing for stuff. I'm turning the volume up when I want to go to the menu, for instance. I have to go to the menu (center button once if the display is dark, then again when the display is on), tab over to Music Options (right on the ring), choose the menu (center button), down through the menu options (either right or down on the ring), center button to select. If I want to choose an album, it goes something like - center button (to turn on the display), center button (to get to the menu), right ring (to move to Music Options), center button (to choose the Music Options menu), center button (to choose Browse Music), down/right ring to navigate through albums (stored as folders), center button to choose the album. I guess this isn't more onerous than iPod controls, but it feels weird - Music Options, "Browse Music" to choose an album? Things are stranger when you need to change the clock, or find an FM station, or want make a recording. Am I pushing the rocker switch on top, or the center button? Additionally, some menus have a "Cancel" option - which takes you all the way back to the song display, for instance. Some don't have any way to back up at all, you just have to wait 10 seconds until the song display takes over. There is no "back" function at all, so once you go down a path, like say the Browse Music, you can't go back, there is no cancel, you must wait 10 seconds to go back to the Song Display and start all over again - unless you choose an album....

3. This is really annoying: there is a noticeable pause between tracks. I have two live JT albums, which should have almost no pause between tracks. More and more modern albums are so thematically composed, that often times songs will bleed seamlessly into one another; I'm listening to the Decemberists Picaresque right now, and it just did it - blending into "On the Bus Mall" as the last chord of "Engine Driver" resonates. We Were Dead... does this as well. But the Stone+ is totally incapable of doing this. I'm not talking a slightly annoying 1 second gap, as you might have on old vinyl when songs were discrete songs. I'm talking an unbelievably long, several second gap - long enough for you to go "WTF is going on? Have I ripped my headphones out? Did the battery die? Did the album end? WTF?" And then the song starts.

4. A really nice feature of the iPod is the music automatically pauses when you rip the headphones out. I'm constantly doing this at the gym: get the cord wrapped around a piece of equipment, pull, and the ear pieces drag out of my ears, the cord rips out.... Or, more gently, in the car with the iPod plugged into the Aux port - you tug the Aux cord out and the iPod stops. Not so with the Stone+. But this goes beyond losing a few seconds of music when you manage to perform a de-earbudding. With the iPod you essentially have an "If I can't hear it, the music is off" attitude - which saves an untold number of battery hours. With the Stone+, you can be listening to some music (to the point the display has gone dark), decide to stop, detach the headphones.... and the display remains dark, but the music keeps playing, eating battery life.

5. The battery life isn't too good in standby mode. This might be a function of the fact that I don't use it all the time. But just about every time I pick it up - the battery is just about dead. I recently had surgery, so didn't go to the gym for like a month, and so didn't have a reason to wear it. It so drained of power that I had to reset it before it would actually take the charge. It was weird. Took three overnight "chargings" for me to figure this out. Not a big thing, I guess, just ... annoying.

6. It's a quibble, and is a problem with the fact that I had the iPod first and encoded all my CDs through iTunes, but in order to get them to play on the Stone+, I need to re-encode all of them first. I need to do the same with the N800. But there is proprietary Creative Zen software that I need to use in order to copy the music over; it doesn't act like a mass storage device that I can drag and drop .mp3 files onto. I haven't yet tried with my DRM free music that I got through eMusic or Amazon to see if that will load without too many hassles.

7. It seems really sensitive. Twice now I've shorted out the thing with static electricity when I pulled my fleece off. Luckily, it's nothing that a reset (via a pinhole in the back) can't take care of. But it's a pinhole, and when you do it at the gym, you usually don't have anything small enough to reset, so no music for you.

In a sense, a lot of these are quibbles, and the constant comparison to the iPod is slightly unfair; the Stone+ is a decent enough machine. And if this was my first DMP, these prolly wouldn't be hang ups. I would be habituated to pausing the music before taking out the headphones, I would have encoded all my music in a more open format, I would be as used to the Creative music manager as I am to iTunes, the navigation would be second nature. But the difference with an iPod is obvious. The iPod just works; I have to work the Stone+.

So all and all, not a bad machine, but not a great machine. I'm going to continue to use it as my gym machine, but it will never be my second choice, let alone first....

Write Right, InvisibleShield & N800 Screen Protection

2008-04-23T14:37:00.001-04:00

So, according to General Antilles and some people over at the ITT site, you're a complete fool if you don't put some screen protection on your N8x0.

Now, I have mine in a little modified case I got off of eBay - specially (ill) constructed for the N800. The N800 is swaddled completely in faux leather, with a nice design concept that has little holes for all the controls on the N800. Here's a link to the eBay search - done on 'N800 case'. It appears to be a "book type" case, and there are about a million out there for under $20. Got mine from some outfit in Hong Kong, which has prolly changed names by now... Anywho, it works pretty good; adds a little bulk, but the thing of it is, all the little cut outs for the N800 controls don't really line up well. Thankfully, the case is tight enough that the N800 doesn't readily slip out, so I snipped the one little piece of side leather (where the power and headphone port is located), and now when I need it, I just give it a good firm shake and the N800 slides partially out. Good solution.

But I didn't have any screen protection on it. And I was a little worried that the constant dragging of the hanging bit o' leather was gonna cause some scratching (though keeping it in the case generally saved it from the harshest wear and tear). And General Antilles said I should get a screen protector....

I had withheld, because my little solution was working well. The real impetus for change started with another piece of kit - my iPod. I had had several cases for it (my wife teases me that I'm a headphone-aholic, which isn't true - it just took me awhile to find a few specialized sets of headphones that I like; I'm really a case-aholic, but shhhhh.....), but wasn't real real happy with them. I was happiest with the iSkin line, particularly the Claro. But that added bulk, was a little bit of a pain to get out of the case, and I bent the kickstand. But I really liked the slim .5mm, "U2 Special Edition"-like skin that came with it; only problem was, it didn't have a screen protector on it.

So I started looking around for screen protector solutions I could use for all of my kit. And I decided to try Fellowes' Write Right, because they looked thin, came in packs of ten, were cheap, and I could cut to the size of the screen of whatever kit I wanted. The trimming worked rather nicely; each sheet has a grid that helped a lot. Application wasn't too bad - basically, you trim to fit, peel the backing off, attach one edge to your kit, and use the included cardboard squeegy to press the adhesive down smoothly, guide the application, and iron out the bubbles. I did ruin one sheet for my N800 because I had a problem getting it down square and without bubbles and when I pulled it off to reapply it, some hair got irretrievably stuck on it. But they were like 50 cents a piece! Whatever! After I more closely followed the directions for the second time, it worked much better.

As I say, it did take a little bit of work; but I was quite happy with my efforts. Put one on my iPod's screen, one on the LG's internal and external screen, and one on the N800. (I need to put one on the camera, too, and the one on the LG's external screen has since fallen off). But all in all, okay....

Unless you're using it for a PDA. The surface is thin, and feels kinda hard and rigid and a little slick - which was very nice for the N800. Touching the screen seemed to work fine, and may have actually improved the "pinpoint" accuracy of the touch. Touches and stylus motion glided smoothly across the screen at first. But after a little while, the stylus chewed the surface of the protector to shreds. It basically created very fine etchings. On most angles, you didn't visibly notice these etches. But you sure as hell felt them with the stylus. And along the side where the scroll bar is located there were so many etched lines that things got kinda hazy.....

Now, they're cheap enough that it would be easy enough to remove each one when it got a little bad and replace it. Installation wasn't ideal, but it wasn't too bad. But, I decided I wanted to try something else.

People over on the ITT board mentioned invisibleSHIELD by Zagg. So I decided to try it. $13, shipping brought it to $20. They have this thing in the demo videos where they say "built to protect army helicopter blades," and show it being slammed down on a pair of scissors, which only succeed in temporarily stretching it. Which is cool.

I got it, and was a little daunted by the instructions. There's a rubber squeegee, and some lubricating mist that come with it, and an exhaustive list of instructions that include description of a "palming" technique, and a link to an on-line installation video. This seemed like a big deal. When I finally worked up the courage to do it, however, it was really easy.... I peeled the backing off the protector, spritzed it with the lubricating mist on both adhesive and outward sides, lightly cupped it in my palm, slapped it onto the face of the N800, and used the squeegee to push water and bubbles off the surface and out from under the protector. The lubricating mist allowed me to slide the protector around and bit and get a better fit, even though it was cut perfectly for the N800. I had to wait 12-24 hours before I could really use it, but that was no big deal. So, installation: really easy.

One of the things Zagg mentions is that it "improves your grip" - and that's just about right. After about 18 hours of drying, the protector set up clear as a bell - even a little glossy when held at the wrong angle. It has a kind of slightly "pebbled" surface to it that attacking it with the squeegee didn't solve, but it doesn't interfere with the view. The problem is that this thing is like rubber. This isn't too bad with a finger - again, it seems to improve the "pinpointability" - but with the stylus it is horrendous. The N800 stylus catches on the surface of this thing like nobody's business. Moving widgets around on the desk top is a chore. Using the little "up" gesture on the software keyboard to generate uppercase letters - never an easy proposition - is damn near impossible. It feels squishy.....

This seems to improve if I use a different stylus; I have an old Concept (who used to make the WriteRight protectors) honking stylus that glides pretty well across this protector. But it's huge! The stylus on an old Cross multi-pen works about as well, but it's pretty big, too. The stylus from my old Dell Axim doesn't catch quite as much as the Nokia's native one, but it's still pretty catchy. I'll have to try my wife's multi-pen with stylus, but I'm looking at a solution here that does not fit into the slot on the back of the N800. Not ideal.

So.... If you like to use your finger a lot - this may work very well for you. Seems to be no problem with cleaning (it even seems to stay cleaner), I know that nothing is getting through this thing to damage the actual screen, it is practically invisible, applies easily, and the finger (at least the nail) seems to glide nicely (a fleshy fingertip still grabs somewhat). But I like to use the stylus a lot - and I am seriously considering removing the protector. I know it provides superior protection, but the gripping and grabbing and squishiness is a serious deal breaker. I don't think I take it out nearly as often anymore because I don't want to confront it. I'll prolly try to find a stylus to use with it - but I am kinda missing the smooth glide I had without a screen protector....

My adventures in N800 videoing

2008-03-21T10:43:00.003-04:00

My wife doesn't understand.

Several weeks ago, for the span of about two weeks I had been trying to pick media players out for the N800. This has necessitated a lot of back and forth, to and fro, long hours hunched over my glowing screen. "You care more about that thing than me," she chides. Which, of course, is untrue - but given the fact that almost all spare time has been devoted to installing and uninstalling apps, repositories and libraries - I can hardly blame her for the appearance.

Nobody tells you what you really need to know to enjoy video. And with all the different things out there, it's really tough to figure it all out. A lot of chaff, and a lot of bad stuff.... But.... this is what I think needs to happen so you can turn your N800 into a multimedia powerhouse.

As I understand it, there are three pieces to multi-media: music, pictures, and video. And the first thing I decided was that the native apps on the N800 - Images and Media player - were surprisingly okay in handling those three. No bells and whistles, but they do a good job. Images ain't bad at all - includes a slide show mode, and the quick 30 second drill revealed it could do most things. Playing music with Media player was a little weak - the interface seems a little scooby and playlisting is ... difficult, plus no album cover art. But as a video player, it does a much better job.

But I wanted something with more pizzaz. I wanted a reason to listen to the music on my N800 over using my iPod. Since the iPod has a great, intuitive interface - that's going to be real tough to pull off. But with a sample of music on my N800, I wanted to plug it in at work, hook up my headphones, and listen to the stuff I usually like to listen to. Leave my iPod for more obscure stuff, car listening, mobile listening, etc. I figure this might persuade me to listen to more FM radio, and use the N800 (rather than work's internet) for calendar entries and non-essential email, maybe even use it as an interface for SMS with my phone over bluetooth. And maybe ... maybe ... watch a couple of movies I've wanted to watch but haven't had time.

I'll get to music and pictures in a second, but my choices really seem to be driven by video playing.

Now, my understanding is that the various video players out there - Video Center, UKMP, Media Box, and Canola2 - all use either Media player or MPlayer (another video player) to do their heavy lifting. I've read a lot of reviews, and a lot of people swear by MPlayer; it reportedly has superior codec support. But I just couldn't get Mplayer to work for me. There was usually an extremely annoying lag between what the people on the screen were saying and what they said. Your lips move, but I can't hear what you're saying ... for like a full second afterwards. So no MPlayer.

Of all those video players, only Canola 2 handled all multi media - music, pics, and video. It has a nice interface, and it's being upgraded all the time thanks to a dedicated core group of developers. Already there have been 2 fairly major updates, new music formats added, etc. Beats the pants off the other stuff. Plus, Canola 2 has album art and can pull in Internet feeds (podcasts, videocasts, photocasts, etc.) Got the nifty kinetic scrolling, and pictures look gorgeous on it. Some lag problems on start up and navigating to big photo stores (seem to have gotten better in the latest update) - but that may be worked around by doing some logical organization.... Also, there are a couple of utilities that help with album art and video thumbnails.

The lack of codecs isn't necessarily a deal breaker for me. The reason for this is, even with MPlayer I would have had to rip and recode video because I don't have a library of digital video already. Yeah - if you've got some digital videos, MPlayer is prolly better - but chances are you would have to recode for file and screen size. So I have the advantage of being a noob here.

Following Aisu/Ty/Penguin Geek's advice, I use Handbrake (with DVD43) to rip video from DVDs. I'm kinda playing with settings a little, and Ty says something along the lines of - it doesn't matter how you code the thing just so long as you get it digitized. It sorta lightly sucks that I can't rip from DVD directly to an N800-compatible file, but into each life.... [Settings?]

From there? I use Urho Konttori's (the guy who made UKMP) Media Converter to convert the digital video to an optimized format for the N800. Drag and drop, super easy.

Of all these things, getting Handbrake to rip the DVD (I think some of the protections are just too strong, and some of the DVDs are too weird) is the hardest part. It is also time consuming. I set up Handbrake to rip the DVD, and walk away (preferably to bed). Wake up the next morning, and use Media Converter on the new digital file (assuming everything worked) to create the N800 version. And then I go to work. And if everything worked (cross my fingers), I have a new N800 formatted video that evening.

I'm batting about .500 thus far.

So, the bottom line this....

N800: Canola2 using the built-in media player
Software: Handbrake, DVD43, Media Converter
Process:
1. Rip DVD using Handbrake
2. Go to Bed
3. Wake up next morning and use Media Converter to format the digital video for the N800
4. Go to work
5. Come home and copy N800 file to N800, delete it from the main machine, and test it
6. Delete Handbrake file
7. Delete and Repeat as necessary

PS - tried again last night, and two things:
A. The earlier vids I decoded no longer worked.... Tried it late at night, but they would load up in both Canola and Media Player (the N800's native app), but I'd just get a black screen. Now I had done a lot of stuff (upgraded Canola and Modest and GPE and a bunch of other stuff), so maybe it was a memory issue, but....
B. I found instructions on MaemoApps for using Handbrake to get to a N800 file. The key seemed to be specify an average bit rate of 1000. I ripped it, but I haven't tried it out yet. Tonight I'll load it up and see if it works. The comments suggest the Output resolution needs to drop to 400x224.... So if it doesn't, guess I'll try that, and then on to Media Converter....

Update 3/25/2008:
Okay - the Handbrake straight to N800 didn't work.

Played around for awhile, and this is what I found:
Handbrake - I use the AppleTV preset. Documentation says AppleTV gives the best image and was middle of the pack in terms of speed, so.... Might take awhile, but I know I started it off Saturday afternoon, went out, and when I woke up with a bit of a hangover the next day, it was done. It was, however, over 1 Gig.
Media Converter - I used the N800 Very Good setting ( I think). It's rated at like 13fps. Don't ask me why the N800 Good setting at 18fps is worse than the N800 Very Good @ 13fps; I don't know. Final file size: 257 Megs.

Video quality was generally pretty good; audio quality I thought was excellent. (This was a Jethro Tull music DVD). Color looked bright, images were for the most part very clear. There was some distortion when Ian Anderson was hopping all over the stage; it wasn't the pixellation I got on an action flick, but the image sort of developed all these "scan lines" around the body part that was flapping around the most...

Linksys router

2007-12-06T12:09:00.001-05:00

Yesterday, I finally decided it was time to install the Linksys WRT54G (wireless router, 54Mbps, 802.11g) ($50, BestBuy)* I had lounging in a bag, replacing the Netgear 802.11g router I had bought about 9 months ago. Home networks are semi-complex things, so let me give you the whole story....

I've had some spotty service with Comcast lately, dating back about ... 9 months. Nine months ago, I stayed home from work to do some stuff for my theater company and the show I was directing. Got on to my computer to pull some information out of GMail, and I couldn't connect to the Internet. I had been having problems like this, and usually if I rebooted the router and/or the computer, everything was cool. But that day it wasn't. Couldn't get on no how through the router. Got so desperate that I wired directly into the modem, which worked for a little while, but then didn't do so well. Nothing I tried seemed to help the trickle, and after a day of running around trying to find an Internet connection, I decided the time had come to redo my system. The Linksys wireless router I had was kinda old - 802.11b, I think - and it had done its service well for about three years, and seeing as the lifetime of most electronics these days is about two years ... well, I figured it was time to upgrade.

I did a little research and ordered a Netgear network plug adapter to use the electrical wires in the house to hardwire my laptop in the basement, and a Netgear 802.11g router to more or less go with it. Reasonable name, I figured, plus there should be no problem with the plug adapters, as they were the same brand. Got everything from Amazon, hooked it up, and it seemed to work like a charm. Only afterwards did my father-in-law say something to the effect of, "Wish you would have asked me. I had a Netgear router; worst thing ever. When I started having problems with Comcast, the Netgear router would just wig out, and I had to reboot it all the time - like once or twice a day." I hadn't had that problem yet, but it did give me pause.

There was no problem through the spring and summer. But this fall, the problems started to mount. The Internet was having a real hard time staying on for more than a day; it seemed I was constantly rebooting both router and modem. And I started to notice that the modem - which was a rental deal from Comcast that I got about 5 years ago - was running HOT. When it got that way, it wouldn't connect to the Internet at all, and I generally had to leave it unplugged for a time until it cooled down and then would connect again. So, I reasoned, my modem was pretty well shot, and some of the problems I had earlier that year might have been pre-onset modem failure, or something. Again, did some quick research (because when your network is going down, you just want it up again - fast!), and purchased a Motorola SURFboard cable modem ($80 at BestBuy). Had a bit of a time with Comcast. First, it seems that as soon as I unplugged my old modem and installed the new modem, Comcast's network went down. A call to customer service basically went, "Well, there's an outage in your area, so we can't really doing anything about it." So, I waited about half a day, and then tried and failed to hook the Motorola modem up. I called them back because, it seems, you have to register the modem with them. Guy was nice enough on the phone, got the new modem registered, removed my $3 a month charge for modem rental (which over the life of the modem was something like $144-$180, or about twice what the new one was worth), and so I was pretty content.

So there I was with basically brand new kit: Motorola cable modem, Netgear router, and Netgear plug adapters. And it seemed to all work pretty well - for about a month. And then things start to degrade ... again. The past three weeks, I had been resetting the modem and router every day. I actually bought another plug adapter to hardwire my computer, the TiVo, and my wife's computer - because it seems to work a little better hardwired than wireless. But I'm thinking, this is just wrong. This is a new modem and a new router - at least one of these things should be working. When I looked on the modem, all the lights seemed to be bllinking happily enough; ditto for the router. But, see, I suspected the router because of what my father-in-law said. So the next time it went out and I needed to reboot the system, I just rebooted the Netgear router. Presto - thing works like a charm; until the next day, when I have to reboot the router again. At this point I was getting pretty tired of constantly rebooting a newish router, but also of my wife, every morning, yelling down the stairs - "The Internet's out again!" I actually went out and bought a new Linksys router about ten days ago, but hadn't installed it yet.

Friday into Saturday was the last straw. Came home to find no Internet, but this time I couldn't get it back on - even with rebooting modem and router. Called Comcast Saturday to complain and found out there was another outage in the area. Internet came back around 3:00pm, but I actually had them come out to take a look at things on Sunday. They, of course, claim nothing was wrong and that I was getting an excellent signal both inside and outside the house. But since that time, even with the Netgear router, the Intenet has remained on the whole time.

Nevertheless, for reasons I won't mention, I decided to replace the Netgear router with the Linksys. I felt pretty foolish at the time - I had what was now a fully functioning router, even though I had suspicions about it and Comcast. But forge ahead I did.

Now, that was a rather circuituitous route to get down to bottom line: Linksys router = Nice.

I had the whole network back up and running within half an hour. Ran into a couple of snags (either I managed to set the modem to standby, or unhooking the wires caused it to go to standby), but the software on the Linksys is a very nice feature. Helped get around the problem and then helped re-establish the connections to the rest of my network (my laptop, the TiVo, my N800....). What's more, there is a very nice network visualization that will help with troubleshooting network problems. Plus, I had always been happy with my old Linksys, so....

We'll see how this set up goes. At least now I can be reasonable sure the next time something goes up that it's Comcast....

*- A note on this. I noticed that there were a hell of a lot of router alternatives out there. Linksys has a SpeedBoost model which gives you "twice the speed" of this model - but still only is rated at 54Mbps over an 802.11g connection. 802.11n gives you speeds "up to 12 times faster." But, like with most electronics, that's simply overkill. Check out this site; cable modem speeds, while faster than DSL, are merely 1.0Mbps. Compared with that, even the old 802.11b wireless connections are 10 times faster than your connection to the Internet. What most people want to do with a router is split up their Internet connection to multiple computers and devices. Faster wireless speeds will help you if you are streaming music and video between your network devices, but it's not going to help you get a faster Internet connection. What's more, they cost a hell of a lot more. The model I bought is $50. The SpeedBoost model is regularly $90! The newest wireless N device from Linksys? $120. The wireless N with all the bells and whistles? $280!!!

Unless you are planning to do some heavy file sharing between devices on your network, go with a plain old, cheap 802.11g device - at 54 times your Internet connection speed, it'll be okay.