Posts from — October 2007

Two days after I decide not to buy an iPod Touch because it doesn’t have enough interesting applications, Apple announces it will have an SDK for iPod Touch and iPhone developers in February.

Figures.

I bought a black 80 GB iPod classic at the Apple Store in Palo Alto on Monday.

(Nelly Furtado music not included)

I spent a long time trying to decide between this, the ipod touch, and some other mp3 players. I won’t go through all the details, but the touch lost out because they had removed so many features from the iphone (no google maps, email client, etc), plus it didn’t have as much storage as I wanted.

So far the ipod has been a mixed bag. I’m still not crazy about itunes, but apple seems hell-bent on forcing me to use it. Syncing the music between my computer and ipod would be much easier if I just told it to sync everything, but I don’t want to do that. There’s enough space on the ipod, but if I were to put the portions of my collection I don’t listen to on the device, navigation would be a lot harder (since there would be more clutter to search through). On a computer where I have a search box and keyboard, this doesn’t really matter.

One thing I did like is that syncing it up with podcasts is really easy.

The screen is good enough for watching some video without being annoyed (I was skeptical at first). The range of encodings it can handle is limited, so I have to do an annoying transcoding step before putting some videos on the device, but it’s tolerable.

A long article in The New Yorker about David Simon, creator of The Wire. The Wire is probably the best TV show I’ve seen. I don’t recommend that you start watching it now… rent the DVDs and watch it from the start.

In other news, It’s Always Sunny in Philadelpha is now my favorite currently-playing TV show. This season has been better than the first two.

Lawrence Lessig’s “alpha version” talk about corruption is well worth watching:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-2171306322262202538

It’s an hour long, but I found it quite enjoyable. One thing that he mentioned briefly was the concept of political finance anonymization. Right now there are several efforts aimed at making political financing more transparent, but this would do the opposite. Make it so that campaigns are unable to determine who is giving them money. Donors can tell the campaigns that “hey, I gave you $1000″, but anyone could say that just as easily, so the politicians would have less incentive to do what their donors want.

I don’t think the idea’s perfect, but it is interesting and I hadn’t heard about it before.

So here’s what’s on the agenda for the remainder of the year:

October
19 - 21: Back at Lehigh for alumni weekend, playing with alumni band, etc.

November
15 - 19: Back at Lehigh for Lehigh/Lafayette, currently planning on marching with the band.
20 - 24: In Connecticut for Thanksgiving and the Manchester Road Race.
25 - 27: Potentially in Florida visiting family (and Kowalski).. haven’t really planned this yet
28: CNN/YouTube Republican Presidential Debate in St. Petersburg, FL

December
22 - 27: CT for Christmas: haven’t really planned this, I might be there earlier or later.

I’ve fallen behind in quite a few correspondences lately, so if you’re waiting to hear back from me, please hold, emails will be answered in the order they were received. Actually, they probably won’t be in order, but whatever.

Girts, John and I spent a lot of time for building an application for an internal Google app building contest. We started a week before the contest was over, which was much later than a lot of the entries, but I think it went pretty well. We’ll know how we did in a week or so. Unfortunately, this has been terrible for my sleep schedule, as we were at google working on it until 4am on the weekend, then up until 7:30am the day the submission was due (Wednesday) and until 5am the day of our demo to a bunch of people (Friday). I hadn’t stayed up this late in a while.

Bombard visited earlier this week for a little while, since he was in the area for a conference. It was good to catch up with him… he seems to be doing well, and it’s nice to hear about what’s going on around Lehigh. I think I’ve now given a tour of google to about 15 family and friends from the East coast. Not a bad start.

This video is a short, mesmerizing, beautiful celebration of the 22nd amendment

This is an interesting article from Esquire in which the author haggles on everything from hot dogs, gallons of gas, candy, etc.

Wow, Yahoo averages 50 employees per VP. The number at google is far, far higher, though I’m not sure what it is.

Wow, this picture is awesome and terrifying.