Random iPhone Photo of the Day
02 Jul 2009Owen Memorial Plant
All the Way Broken is Better Than Partially Broken
12 Feb 2009Oddly, I learned a fun lesson today:
All the way broken is far better than partially broken.
I think I implicitly knew that--debugging completely broken things is far easier than debugging something that works sometimes--but our network at work today has been what you could politely call "flaky." And not knowing if your last keystroke got through to the server or if the request you just sent went off into the ether is not a fun way to work.
At least if everything was broken I could have shifted into doing non-online things and actually been productive.
Tech Things I Want to Work in 2009
15 Jan 2009There's lots of little things that, if tweaked, would just make life a lot nicer . . .
For instance . . .
The Google Calendar sync tool should support syncing Outlook to secondary Google Calendars, not just your primary calendar. That would mean I could drop SyncMyCal which runs in my Outlook-only Parallels Virtual Machine. I'd have a nifty, no-click workflow to sync my Work calendar to my secondary Work Google Calendar, which get sync'd down to iCal and to my iPhone.
Better yet . . .
The iPhone should support syncing both iCal and Outlook calendars. It's sort of a dumb thing that if you turn on Outlook calendar and contact syncing, that's the *only* calendars and contacts you get. Why not keep them separate? If Apple added the ability to have your Outlook calendar sit right along side your iCal calendars, then I wouldn't even need to sync my Work calendar up. I could just accept meeting invites on my phone and have everything work nice and happy.
Oh, and same goes for Contacts. Just let me sync my Exchange contacts as a separate group. Seriously.
Even better . . .
Apple Mail and iCal should build in real Exchange support. Then I could actually not run Outlook in my virtual machine all day. Instead, I could just use Mail and iCal as Exchange clients and have the most simplified workflow of all. Supposedly, this is going to happen in Snow Leopard. That would be awesome.
Making life even sweeter . . .
Google should fix contact management. I love Gmail. I use it for everything. I hate Google's Contact stuff. It is awful. They tried to make it better. It didn't work very well. But they've got the keys right in their hands ... Social Graph. Imagine you gave Google some information about you that they could use some OAuth or other authentication means to determine that it is really you. So you hand them some keys to Flickr and Twitter and (if they can work out their differences), Facebook. Now, Google pulls all that information together and makes a nifty contact for you. Name, picture, email address, home address, work address, phone number, Twitter, Flickr, etc, etc. You only get as much information as the contact allows (if we're not friends on Facebook, you don't get my phone # or address).
Now, Google can do all this behind the scenes and give you a little button to "add so-and-so" as a contact. If I add them, they go into my Contacts section. Then, I subscribe to my Google Contacts like they're an LDAP source or however else they want to get hooked into your setup.
Boom. All of a sudden I've got a real contact solution that's continually updated.
Ok, sure, that's a lot like what Plaxo promises. Except Plaxo really doesn't work all that well.
So. When all this happens, I'll have my calendars all seamlessly syncing together to my computer and to my phone. On top of that, my contacts (work and personal) will all sync nicely as well. And stay up-to-date, thanks to something like Social Graph or the like. Plus, Snow Leopard will mean I don't have to run a Virtual Machine just to use Outlook (and don't tell me to use Entourage ... it barely works).
With my work life (and personal contacts) working so seamlessly . . .
I've got time to kill. I want to get through some movies or TV while I'm out and about.
Give me Netflix Watch Instantly and Hulu on my iPhone! Now that they're on my XBox and Mac, I'd love them remotely. When I'm out eating lunch or riding in a car, I don't need HD video. I just need crappy streaming video that will let me knock off an old episode of Newsradio or watch 15 minutes of a crappy movie.
But, if I don't want to watch something . . .
Sometimes I just want to listen. The fact that the new version of the iPhone firmware lets you download podcasts is great. By why doesn't it sync my entire podcast list and let me just quickly scan for a new episode of something I listen to? Even better, why not do something similar to Genius and recommend me a podcast I might like?
All that would be very cool.
Oh, and why can't I sync stuff over bluetooth. That would be good too.
Only Redeeming Thing About a New England Winter
15 Jan 20092008 Top Ten: #1 -- Tokyo Police Club "Your English is Good"
01 Jan 2009Yep. A song that's technically about 18 months old wins. Because it's *that* awesome.
Off of their first full length album, Elephant Shell, Tokyo Police Club put together the best song of 2008. It's bouncy, pulsing, and fricking awesome.
It's a sea of shouts, hand claps, keyboards, jangly guitars, and drums. Live, it's just a fantastic thing to see:
Ok, so it kinda sucks that this really came out in '07 as a single, but it was on an '08 album. So it counts. (If you want to disqualify this one, you can pick something off of Vampire Weekend's album to take its place.)
Anyway, '09 is just around the corner and it promises new songs from A.C. Newman, which means you'll likely be listening to one of those songs on this next year. But for now, enjoy Tokyo Police Club!