neilios

Spent today taking photos of a very cool building in the South End in Boston and then taking some photos of little baby E who I’m holding in an earlier post. I’ll come back to that building once those shots are edited, but here’s the baby for now:

I blew the focus on this next shot and it really, really pains me.

Well, J had her baby while I was traveling back from Hawaii.

and I will miss this water:

And yes, C, there is a giant piece of dust on my D70’s sensor. It ruined some great panoramic shots. I was PISSED. I blew it off with a bulb blower after that first day, but never got a chance to take good shots again.

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Originally uploaded by weisen123

I’m in Hawaii for a pediatrics conference and met someone special. Last night she left for home- a place about a sixteen hour flight from me.

I can’t really get her out of my mind and don’t really want to.

I had the waitress at my favorite bar on the beach bring me a second, empty glass and took this photo. It’s a missing man (or woman) formation for the drunken holiday set.

Sweet dreams back at home, V. I’ll think about you quite a bit.

The cast is horrified:

Some people have too much time on their hands. I would be one of those people.

Posting from the beast itself. Did a jailbreak. So far the only real excitement is MobileScrobbler, an awesome Last.fm client (I’m weisen on Last.fm).

Everything on the iPhone continues to be pretty. Even when crashing. Oddly enough, so far I’ve had the built-in web browser (Safari) crash more than anything else.

Enough typing on this thing. Later gators.

I am now officially a technology WHORE and here is the proof:

So I’ve been needing, yes ma’am, needing a new iPod for a while and I’ve been toying with the idea of getting an iPhone. For the past few months I’ve been saving a TON of money on rent by living with a friend in a place which is fairly *cough* cheap *cough* (witness bare window shade behind head). What’s not visible in the photo is even worse. But I’m moving in two months, so cut me some slack, k?

Anyway, back to the issue at hand: the iPhone.

I didn’t want to spend $400 on an iPhone. It’s a lot of coin. But somehow when you wrestle with that idea and then figure out that you can get a refub (good as new and warrantied) for $250, somehow the $250 seems cheap. So I went for it.

First impressions: as an iPod, it’s amazing. It is a really, truly beautiful piece of work and it works so well synchronizing to my Macbook Pro, that it’s really hard to stop saying “wow.” As a phone, it’s great. Same awesome user interface and design details in every aspect. When a phone call comes in, the music fades out gracefully and the ringing fades in. After the call is complete, the music fades back in reminding you where you were when the interruption began. It’s hard to describe, but I think that Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO, may have been the one to use the phrase “lickable” to describe over-the-top beautiful design and this is it. Slurp.

As an e-mail and web surfing device, however, I say “meh.” I’m amazed that the technology pundits will write about the iPhone and speculate about the death of the Blackberry, because it’s clear that these people have never used both for any period of time. The iPhone is awesome and I’ll live with it for e-mail, but it is not a Blackberry. There’s a reason why the Blackberry is addictive — it’s really freakin’ good at what it does. If typing on the Blackberry wasn’t a “holy cow, this works REALLY well” experience dating back to the original models circa 2000 or so (yes, I had one before they were even phones), I don’t think that the Blackberry would have taken off. The iPhone presents a beautiful user interface, but typing with normal adult male finger tips on a glass plate with key targets mashed together just really doesn’t work well for me. I’ll bore you, or not, in a week and see if it’s better, but I can’t imagine ever being able to type as fast as I can on a Blackberry.

One major complaint that should be solved in the next gen iPhones due out in the next couple of months is the network speed. Again, the pundits complain that “EDGE” is sooooo slooooow. Yet I’ve been using EDGE on T-mobile for two or three years and never thought it was *that* slow. Until I met the iPhone. Part of the problem is that the iPhone’s browser really is trying to load and decode fully adorned web pages, but that’s really only a part of the issue. Even on mobile versions of web sites, the iPhone on AT&T is slow. Really slow. And I don’t think it’s because of EDGE. I’d love to hear from someone who has used the iPhone on both AT&T and T-mobile to hear if maybe AT&T just sucks. One thing I’m wondering about is whether AT&T’s DNS servers are just dog slow (maybe they’re getting advice from Verizon) because what is really slow is the initial contact.

Anyway, enough geek talk. Don’t hate me because my iPhone is beautiful.

If you’re reading my super-secret “real” blog, rather than the Xanga update, you’ll notice that I’ve gone with magenta text today, in an (entirely unnoticed) show of solidarity with Engadget Mobile:

Thanks to the lovely and talented Veronica Belmont for the story

A minor detail on a bridge. I wonder if such things are even doable anymore, let alone whether anyone would bother to so adorn a minor pedestrian bridge.

[Edit: good god, did I actually just say "so adorn?"]

This rolled by while I was waiting in Harvard station for the bus:

All I can say is “WTF.”

[Edit: it's someone's hairweave. Hard to make out on the cameraphone photo.]

How’s that for a sweeping generalization?

I’m someone who identifies far more with the ideals of the Democratic party, rather than the Republican ones, but quite frankly I can’t imagine what the problem is with Democratic party leadership.

Dave Winer, one of the inventors of blogging, posted a copy of a Clinton “phone call” yesterday. Listening to it, I was amazed at how her staff members don’t know how to talk to normal people. Is it really necessary to speak of “disenfranchisement” and “delegates not being seated” rather than simply saying that people’s votes aren’t being counted? Does it make them feel better to use language that part of their (potential) constituency won’t understand or are they simply so far out of touch that they have no idea? Can we somehow find a way to work antidisestablishmentarianism into a sentence?

Another side of this issue is that Democrats don’t know how to defend themselves. If someone calls you a “tax and spend Democrat,” why aren’t you responding with “borrow and spend Republican?” It’s actually funny the term “tax and spend Democrat” because that’s precisely what government does. It funds itself on revenue collected by taxes and uses that to purchase things (services, mostly) on behalf of the people. That’s what government does. It’s like going into a store and saying to the shopkeeper “you dirty money-taker and product-giver!” He’d say “um, yeah, that’s what a STORE is.”

I just don’t get it.