2007
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Twitter is addictive, at least for me. The distraction was too pronounced, and while it’s fun to keep up with a number of people you wouldn’t otherwise see that much – it also pulls you out of the experience you are having right then.
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I prefer blogging, and the complete sentences and paragraphs that surround it. While blogging is not incompatible with Twitter, I feel that I’m blogging less in part because I Twitter in between things.
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It has the potential to lessen the value of in-person discussions. When catching up with a friend I’ll think “I saw that on your Twitter” and then we move on. But really, could a 100 character SMS really sum up the richness of a trip to the zoo with your kids?
Butterball!
Tammy and I had a great time last night at the Butterball! Through the generosity of my friend Dan Grigsby, Tammy and I as well as the Tangen’s got on our best Black & White and headed out for a night of fun. The evening was packed. The Butterball sold out and raised a nice amount to help get food to those who need it.
The evening began with a silent auction. There were probably 50 items up for auction with a great variety of things. We put our name on a number of items and after surveying the area a bit decided to get serious about the live art. There was an artist on the stage who was doing a painting right there while everyone mingled. The artist was Chris Allen and he was doing a Graffiti piece. I really liked it for a bunch of different reasons so we focused on that and happily when 9:30 arrived we were the highest bidder. Great art, and for a great cause.
This is the piece that we got before framing and in really horrible light.
We ran into so many people that we knew at the Butterball. It made a fun evening even more enjoyable! After the auction ended Soul Asylum took the stage and put on a really amazing show!
I haven’t listened to much Soul Asylum for a while now and it was really fun to hear some of the great songs. The energy was great – really a fun show.
After a few hours of mingling and having a great time, we headed home in the chaos of Saturday night frenzy in downtown.
Launch of MinnPost.com
Last night Tammy and I joined some friends and attended the launch party for MinnPost.com. MinnPost is an interesting new non-profit trying to bring the public radio model online to produce quality journalism (more). It is founded by Joel Kramer and has a cadre of writers signed on. The site just launched this last Thursday. I’m hoping they do some great stuff.
MinnPost is still very early. They just passed 400 members and the momentum is good. Good luck to the crew! And give it a read… and become a founding member.
PS - The site has already been parodied at MinnToast.com. Funny stuff.
Initial Review of GMail's IMAP Service
I’ve been yearning for native IMAP for a long time now. Essentially since the day I got my iPhone. It got much worse as Leopard approached and the great features in Mail 3.0 were making me drool.
It wasn’t a simple decision though. I moved to GMail for really good reasons and I refuse to go back to running my own mail server. The result was to look at paid IMAP solutions but none of them offered the complete bevy of features I wanted. I finally identified both Fastmail and Tuffmail as having great services.
I was days away from switching to Tuffmail when GMail announced IMAP support. I eagerly awaited my account to be activated and started using it immediately. However, it’s a mixed bag unfortunately.
GMail has some concepts that make IMAP hard. Like labels versus folders. Like not really liking to delete email. Starred emails. They’ve accommodated that in the IMAP solution, but also complicated things in a bad way.
For example, GMail IMAP has to expose a folder called “All Mail” that is the catch all for email that doesn’t have any label. The unfortunate part of this is that mail clients will see two copies of everything, the one in a “folder” and the other one if the fake “All Mail” folder. This wreaks havoc with things like Smart Folders in Mail.
GMail also has some gnarly non-standard behavior. For example, when you send an email via it’s SMTP service it automatically puts a copy in your Sent Items “label”. This isn’t normal, and requires that you configure your Mail client in somewhat non-standard way.
On top of this, the service is a bit slow and has had some hiccups for me. I may still end up signing up for Tuffmail but I’ll give GMail IMAP a try since the price is right and the webmail client is so nice.
Mixed Green Messages
I just took a trip to San Francisco. The hotel I stayed in had some odd mixed messages related to green issues. They encouraged me to forego daily washing of my linens and towels so that I could help them help the environment. This always makes sense to me. Who changes there sheets every night at home. Why would you need to at a hotel? And the amount of water and energy this saves is significant. Kudos.
But then, when I came into my room they insisted on having the TV turned on playing soothing music with videos of waterfalls and flowers cycling through. It’s pretty normal that nicer hotels will turn your clock radio on to a classical radio station, a practice that I dislike as it is, but this seemed just crazy. They were running a TV for hours and hours with nobody at all in the room. To make matters worse it wasn’t some high-efficiency LCD panel, it was an old CRT-based tube television just sucking down the watts.
What’s the point of having this TV on all hours of the day? I can only imagine if a visitor from Europe or Japan comes they must be stunned. Lights on, TV on with soothing waterfall videos – for nobody. Just wasting energy. But meanwhile, I’ll make sure to reuse my towels. What a mixed message.
iTunes Social Edition
I’ve become a huge fan of iTunes. I’m pretty sure this is the biggest about face that I’ve ever done on a piece of software. For years I eschewed iTunes. I even insisted on using 3rd party applications to load music on my iPod. I resisted because I didn’t like the idea of being locked in with a lot of metadata with one application. For years I insisted on manual management of ID3 tags and stuck to a simple file system based model. This gave me ultimate flexibility, but also minimal capability. I’ve been really amazed with how powerful iTunes really is. It’s the rare type of application that seems really simple, yet as I want to push it there is almost always a way to do what I want to do. Except when it comes to sharing my music with my wife. We need an iTunes Social Edition.
iTunes is great for me, but there is a gaping hole in the application when it comes to sharing with friends. Some of this has been actively discouraged due to sharing of copyrighted music, but that the legitimate use cases need to be handled better. Let’s look at some examples.
Even on a single computer, there is no easy way to share one iTunes library between different accounts. Of course we all have different accounts in our house, and iTunes really only works with one of them. iTunes needs to understand that some metadata has multiple users (song ratings, play statistics) and other metadata is universal (genre, album art). I should then be able to easily share this library across multiple users and still have the capability for different views.
Of course this needs to extend to other computers. It’s totally lame that iTunes can “authorize” up to 5 computers but does absolutely nothing, zilch, to help me put that music on those 5 computers. Ugh!
And then what about my friends? I “publish” my home movies out of iMovie into iTunes and I’d like to share those movies with friends and family. iTunes should allow me to do this as well.
There have been rumblings about a P2P-enabled iTunes (BitTorrent DNA anyone?) that would be used to facilitate HD content. I dream of a day that the same functionality is used to keep libraries in sync and share non-copyrighted materials with friends.
Sous Les Sapins
Photos from our weekend in Eastern Iowa staying at Sous Les Sapins Guesthouse with friends.
The Hold Steady at the State Theater
On Thursday I went to see The Hold Steady for the first time. The Hold Steady is a Minneapolis-grown band that has now reached some recognition. It was a really good show. They hit all my favorite songs and were really engaging.
The Hold Steady grew out of another band called Lifter Puller. These guys have a good following in the cities, so there were a lot of people at the show that were Hold Steady “devotees”. I was a little surprised to be surrounded by a large crowd of people that seemingly knew every word of every song. Felt a bit like I was crashing someone’s high school graduation party. After all, three of the band members parents were in the audience.Great show either way. If you haven’t listened to The Hold Steady, you should check it out.
Buh-Bye Twitter
I’ve tweeted my last tweet.
If you’re a diligent visitor to my blog, you’ll notice that the Twitter section on the right hand side is no longer there. My iPhone is noticing that the volume of SMS messages has dropped way down. Most importantly my brain is feeling less distracted.
I’ve been a big fan of Twitter for a while now. So far I’ve created 1,281 tweets. 1,281 little 100 character updates sent who knows where. Now I think I’m done though. There are a number of reasons I decided to get off the Twitter bus.
I don’t mean to condemn Twitter. Different strokes for different folks after all. And I do think it’s a great platform for mobile live blogging. I’ve kept my account active even though it’s disconnected from my phone and everything else just in case I want to use it to live blog the Folk Festival or something. But for now, I bid adieu.
If you happen to follow my robot, that account has been deleted.
Hiding in the dark having ran out of candy on Halloween!
Wiring up Mail.app with GMail/IMAP. First impression — painfully slow.