However, on the plane flight home from Seattle, I was thinking about more serious things and decided a right-handed drawing might be the best way to express some heavier thoughts.

Normally I post these on Facebook. But I think this one is better suited here, where things are more quiet. This isn’t intended to start a religious debate. These are just my thoughts, poured out at 37,000 feet, through my right hand. Cheers.

Yesterday, my unit moved to our new office on Delaware Ave. My portion of the new office is rather spacious, and I’m happy about that. I also have plenty of natural light now, which rocks. Aside from random office noise, it’s easy to focus and get things done, which is a luxury I’m very grateful for.

It’s funny how being uprooted opens your eyes to your surroundings. Tonight, after my trip to the gym, I stopped by the old office just to see what it looked like without us in it. The carpet was dingy (always was), and it smelled like rats and dirt. The hallway was always cramped in that office and I could hear every single phone conversation on my hallway via the ducts of the asymmetric heating system. There was a quant charm and character in the old office that there will never be in our new office. I will miss those “old building” oddities about the Carriage House. It will always have a soft spot in my heart. But if you stay too long in one place, it’s easy to stagnate. With the UC budget situation the way it is, I think we moved out of the old office at the right moment; a moment when fresh ideas need to be born to deal with unprecedented difficulties.

1. Like going to Macworld
2. Enjoy surprises

I really look forward to “the new thing” being introduced and gawked at by the geek masses. That is one of the best parts of Macworld, the surprise. I’m too old to believe in Santa Claus, birthday party magicians, or unicorns (although part of me holds out hope). But I can count on a cool new gadget from Apple every January and whether I ever purchase said new gadget, the surprise is always worth it.

I must be in the minority however, because everywhere you go on the web, people are telling everyone rumors about what Steve Jobs will deliver tomorrow morning at the “Stevenote”. Yes, I know it happens every year. Yes, I know that the rumor game is just as fun as the surprise for some people. However, I believe breaking the secret of what will be revealed is akin to telling the kids there is no Santa Claus, that party magicians are fake, or that there are no unicorns (NOOOOOOO!!!). It sucks the wonder out of the event and the surprise. We should be thankful that Uncle Steve still comes to Christmas with something new. The fact that Apple has been able to maintain this kind of hype and surprise for the last several years is amazing. We should enjoy it and live inside of the wonder, not kill ourselves trying to spoil it for everyone.

Surprises are special gifts. Whether you actually get something tangible or not usually doesn’t matter. It is a moment when — despite your expectations — life catches you off-guard in a joyous way. You smile bigger than normal and usually a piece of your true self is revealed for everyone around you. I love surprises.

Uncle Steve’s coming to town tomorrow and he’s got a few surprises. I’ll be offline until then.

Rob

The Loves

For starters, it is simply amazing to have a phone that actually functions the way I expect it to. Most of what I want to do is less than two finger taps away and I don’t have to hunt for functions I need. We all know that Apple really puts time and effort into user interface design and they have delivered a rich interface on this phone.

I’ve noticed that I’m less likely to get on my laptop when I’m at home to do simple things like checking email or reading RSS feeds. The iPhone is very capable and easy to use for doing these things quickly. And although I thought it would leave me chained to my email, The luxury of having email in my pocket at ay moment has calmed my propensity to check it. It’s right there if I need it, so I only check it when I need it. And increasingly that is not too often. It has meant that I’m sending more text messages. Because it’s so flipping easy!

I cannot stress enough how handy it is having a full web browser on your phone. On my previous phone, I struggled to use the mobile web browser because it looked like an ad–supported, poorly written piece of shareware from 1997. This is a major reason why I think there aren’t more people (at least amongst people I know) using the mobile web. No one is going to use it for anything more than sports scores when it looks as bad as it does on your standard flip phone. For those not lucky enough to have the mobile version of the Opera web browser, the mobile web just doesn’t cut it yet. Here’s hoping that the entrance of a full web browser on a mobile device helps change that.

It plays with my mac. Holy crap, it plays nice with my mac! My last phone played with my mac (sync’d my contacts, and I could pull movies and pictures off it and onto my mac). But it didn’t play nice (didn’t sync calendars, restricted what I could do over bluetooth, couldn’t add my own music to it without taking it apart**). I have complete control over what goes on my iPhone and what stays off. It’s a simple question, but seriously, shouldn’t I be able to do what I want with my phone? The iPhone just works and that is infinitely more handy than a device with arbitrary restrictions placed on it.

But it isn’t perfect

I need copy and paste! This sentiment has been echoed elsewhere and I couldn’t agree more. One of the first things I tried to do with my iPhone was copy and paste my 63 character wireless network password from an email into the password field of my phone. Surprise surprise, I couldn’t. After valiantly attempting to keep track of and type the password in manually, I had to give up and just set a shorter password on my wireless network. John Gruber makes a good point (see link above) about why it wasn’t in there when the iPhone was released, but I’d like to see it added soon.

The calendar app isn’t as useful as I’d hoped. I have several calendars with very different types of events listed on each. In iCal on my mac, the calendars are color-coded, so it is easy to see the different events and what calendar they belong to. On the iPhone, all events are listed in black. In the month view, a single black dot shows a day when I have an event listed. I’d like to see event colors added to the iPhone’s calendar app. I’m still not sure the problem isn’t just my resistance to calendaring in general. But I’d like to see colors in the calendar listing before deciding that I’m just a dumb ass when it comes to effective calendaring.

I want to take videos with my iPhone. It is such a bummer that I can’t take video with this phone. I love taking video with my still camera, but don’t carry that with me everywhere the way I do my phone. It seems like a feature Apple may have had to leave out in order to get the phone out by June 30 as promised, so I’m willing to play along. But I would be quite disappointed if they didn’t add this feature in a software update and instead waited for v2.0 of the iPhone to add video support. Most new phones today have a video camera, so it seems strange that it was left off the iPhone.

I’m embarrassed to pull it out in public. This is no fault of the phone, just the hype. I have a hard time pulling it out of my pocket in public because I don’t want anyone to notice that I have it. For me, it is a functional device with great features that make certain aspects of my life far easier than before. It isn’t a status symbol or sign of the devil (even if Karl Rove uses one). Once the hype wears off, the weird feeling when pulling it out of my pocket will go away.

None of these things are deal breakers for me. They’re just minor gripes. I really couldn’t complain too much about the phone. It has performed flawlessly for me, including the virtual keyboard, which some people have complained about. I’m a very happy iPhone owner. After using it for 10 days, what is amazing to me is that Apple absolutely delivered on the impossible hype that surrounded the iPhone.

Last Friday I was thinking about how I haven’t been out surfing in quite awhile. I went to my go-to site for local surf conditions and found it in a state of disarray. Frankly, it feels stale now. It used to be a wealth of great info and it felt fresh. It was well taken care of at one point. Now it just sits there…getting old and looking older.

What is a web developer to do when a formerly informative site is no longer fun to visit? I realized that a lot of their information was coming from outside sources. Their tide chart was coming from the Scripps Institute. And several other informative parts of the site were publicly available elsewhere on the web. So I took the URLs of that info and made my own surf conditions page:

http://robknight.net/tides

It has everything I want to know about local surf conditions and I don’t have to go elsewhere and see an old, stale site. I don’t own this information, but now I’ve taken ownership of how I get it and I present it in a way that suits my needs. Nice!

Second case in point: would you like to watch me work today? Sound like fun? No, I know it doesn’t. But you can. ustream.tv lets you set up and stream a live video feed on the internet. Before ustream, delivering streaming video was the kind of difficult voodoo that you needed a PhD in quantum mechanics to pull off. And my PhD is in collecting tech gadgets, so I was out of luck. Now I can just do it. And…I can put my streaming video feed wherever the hell I want:

http://robknight.net/live (Watch 10am – 2pm, 04 May 2007)

The webcam world, formerly only for women of questionable judgement and cat’s litterboxes, is now available for anyone with a camera. And you know what? It’s as free as a slice of turkey sausage in a Dixie cup at Trader Joe’s.

We own the internet. Go forth and create!

Before we left for the trip, we spent plenty of time with Google Earth, planning our trip against visible trails and other map features. This got me thinking about a different way to present the trip to friends and family when we returned. Without much experience using Google Earth, I was pleasantly surprised to learn this morning that it is quite easy to create a “tour” in Google Earth. Not only that, using simple HTML, you can add photos and links to the tour. This was exactly what I was hoping for, so I got started on it this afternoon and with a few hours of work, I have prepared a simple tour of our entire trip. Being such a visual person, this makes me incredibly giddy because it allows you to see our trip photos within their geographic context. It is like an interactive globe! First a few details about the trip.

Annoyances and Helpful Aspects of GPS handhelds

I acquired a Garmin eTrex Vista Cx before the trip in hopes that I could add topographic maps to it and plan our routes using the maps. Was I in for a surprise. Garmin (and I assume Magellan is the same), maintains proprietary control over what can be uploaded to the unit. You can only use their map products to upload maps to the unit. Currently they offer 1:100,000 scale topographic maps of the US. This is not a usable map scale for topo maps if you want to navigate with the GPS unit. The basemap that comes on the unit is abysmally lacking in detail unless you are navigating a city, which is ironic because the unit I bought was marketed as a hiking unit. Despite the lack of map detail, the unit was very handy for providing some interesting hike metrics I had never seen before. We were able to see our average speed while moving, and our overall speed including breaks. We could see the duration of time we were moving and the duration of time we were stopped. We could see an elevation profile showing our total ascent over the course of the trip, our current elevation above sea level (of course the topo gave us that as well). And one totally useless bit of info that I always felt compelled to inform Kalin of, was the straight line distance to our destination. This bit of info always came with the qualifier, “If we could fly to the next campsite, we’d only have to travel X miles.” After day 2, Kalin asked me why that mattered, and after thinking for a moment, I had no answer, so I stopped declaring this bit of info before trips.

This Map is How Old?

Because of the lack of detail in the Garmin GPS unit, I opted for an analog solution, USGS 1:24,000 scale topographic maps of the island. These, combined with a compass, ended up being our second most helpful solution. A simple trail map of the island obtained for free from the ferry terminal was the ultimate guide, with the USGS topos and compass to confirm we were headed in the right direction. I would have liked to use the topos exclusively. But since they had last been updated in 1988, many map details were missing. As much as I trust my compass skills, it helps to see a trail on a map where a trail should be in real life. Do we need to have bake sale so the USGS can update its maps? Or maybe we just need an administration that gives a snot about wild places. But I digress.

The bottom line on the mapping/navigation situation is that we could have certainly lived without the GPS unit, and probably the USGS topos. It’s sad when a free ferry terminal map gets you where you want to go better than satellite navigation and government elevation maps. But such is life. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that my fourth navigation piece was Kalin. I’m seriously direction-challenged. Without Kalin to say, “No Rob, that’s the wrong way” 2 or 3 times daily, I wouldn’t be here to write this. I mentioned to her on the trip — and I believe this to be true — the female vagina has a built-in compass.

Google Earth and Flickr: 70′s Slideshow for the 00′s Techie

Despite it’s shortcomings in the map department, the GPS unit was helpful for marking significant points and tracking/storing our movements throughout the trip. I have a mostly accurate (except under areas of dense tree cover) view of our path over the island that helped me build the tour in Google Earth. One amusing aspect of tracking your every move on a trip is that you realize what an idiot you must look like sometimes. Each time we reached a campsite, there were several minutes of wandering, circling, and aimless tracks as we tried to figure out where we wanted to setup and looked for outhouses, etc.

I uploaded all of our trip photos to Flickr last night. And then using the static links Flickr gives you for each image, I created placemarks in Google Earth where the some of the photos were taken. If you store all the placemarks in their own folder, and order them logically to follow the timeline of the trip, you can playback a nice tour of your trip. And I mean nice. You get flyover views of each point, with a popup image at each stop*. It is quite pretty. Combined with the Flickr photoset, this is an awesome way to display a trip of this type. Since Google Earth and Flickr are free, anyone can do this.

Google Earth Tour

• Download Google Earth
• You’ll need to change a few settings so the tour works right. Open Google Earth and in Preferences > Touring set the Tour Pause to 12 seconds and be sure Show balloon when tour is paused is checked.
• Download the KMZ file and double click it. Google Earth will open and in the Places panel on the left you’ll see the KMZ folder. In it is a folder called “Catalina Tour.” Select that and click the play button and you’re off enjoy.
• You can skip to any point in the tour by double-clicking the camera icon next to that point in the places panel.
• The whole trip takes about 3 minutes. After it is over, you’ll get a link to view all of the photos from the trip on my Flickr page. Enjoy.

This is my first attempt at a tour in Google Earth and I will surely do it again because of how easy it was. I’d love to know what you think. Did it work ok for you? Did it not work? Was it worth it? Suggestions for next time? Let me know.

Flickr Slideshow

Not all of the photos from the trip made it into the Google Earth Tour. All of them are on Flickr though. I haven’t gotten to Geo-Tagging them yet, but I plan to tag them with their exact locations as many of them are in the GE tour.