Organizing iPhone Apps
I’ve loaded my iPhone up with a decent number of applications now and found it difficult to find things quickly. I’ve started organizing the Springboard panels: main, info, media, games, other.
This is working well but it bugs me when you update an app and it loses it’s location and has to be put back manually. I hope Apple is working on something to make this more manageable.
Our friend Marilee Poe Tangen took this picture of Mazie and I love it.
“That guy can run.” No kidding. Usain Bolt’s 100m was amazing. ⚡️
Wondering what is on Phelps’ iPod. Anyone?
Just got another update from Hector in Beijing at the Olympics. Bro- and Sis-in-law are having once in a lifetime experience!
Wow – Spitz talking to Phelps. Nice. Wish Lemond could show half that much character to Armstrong.
Whoa – totally digging Quordy on AppStore. Would like to see some games coming out with network play.
Best iPhone file utility: DataCase, File Magnet, MobileFinder, Files? DataCase seems best, agree?
Why does swimming almost never have a false start, but track does a lot?
Researching average weather for our London/Scotland trip. Conclusion #1, bring rain jackets.
Can Al Trautwig be any more annoying? Seriously, we all get the scoring system. It changed years ago for craps sake!
Shopping for plane activities for Mazie. Coloring books!
Drinking cold press coffee. Still good after a few weeks in the fridge.
Summer of Love Resuming - Preparing for London
Tammy and I are doing final preparation for the second big trip of the Summer of Love. We leave on Sunday for London. We’ll be staying there for four weeks and exploring London in detail and taking some day trips as well. We’ve booked a trip to Stonehenge and are also planning a day trip to the Royal Observatory to stand on the prime meridian.
We’ve rented a flat for the month. This will be a very different trip than our 6-week tour around the Western US. We’ll be staying in one place. We won’t have a car and will be using public transport only. I expect to take a lot of pictures and will be trying to post regularly.
Tammy and I will also be taking a short trip to Scotland. My mother is coming over for a couple of weeks. The first week she is spending with us and will be watching Mazie while we are in Scotland. The 2nd week she is honeymooning with her new husband.
There is much planning and packing to do.
Scoring Gymnastics, Bring the Computers
Tammy and I have been watching a lot of the Beijing Olympics this year. Tammy is a huge gymnastics fan and we’ve been watching nearly all of the coverage this year. A few years ago gymnastics changed its scoring system to make it less subjective and the commentators, particularly Al Trautwig, love to recount the changes all the time, over and over.
However, even with all these changes gymnastics is filled with questions on scores. I’m writing this as all the commentators are scratching their head trying to figure out why Nastia Liukin got such a low score on her vault. On top of this, there have been significant delays as judges stare at frame by frame replays trying to figure out how to score the routine.
My response, bring on the computers!
I’m guessing the technology may not be there right now but only because people haven’t tackled the problem. You could easily see how a combination of real-time 3D scanning lasers around the routine area, in combination with some simple instrumentation that is integrated into the gymnasts uniform and completely unobtrusive, could provide the data for algorithmic analysis of the gymnasts motion with ridiculous levels of precision.
After capturing to extreme resolution and frequency the routine, a warehouse of machines could analyze the data and determine exactly what happened. How many degrees the shoulders turned; how many millimeters was the step on the landing; exactly how close were the feet. This could remove the subjectivity and timing of human judging and make such a subjective sport objective and farer for the athletes.
Reasons to Love Cold Press Coffee
I wrote a little over a year ago about my introduction to cold press coffee. Shortly after that post I got a Toddy Cold Press Brewing System and I’ve enjoyed a decent amount of cold press since then as well as introducing a few people to it.
I’ve been surprised by how few people know about Cold Press and some of the benefits. Many people assume it’s just brewed coffee that is then stored in the refrigerator. That is not the case. The basic cold press is made as follows.
Put 4 cups of water in a container. Pour in 1/2 pound of coffee ground coarse. Add 3 more cups of water. Add remaining coffee grounds. Pour 2 more cups of water over the top. Do not stir. Let sit for 24 hours and strain without disturbing the mix.
This gives you a concentrated coffee mix that you can store in the refrigerator. Why is cold press great?
- Cold press is cold brewed and doesn’t produce acid. This makes it easier on your stomach and also makes it very stable. You don’t get mold growing on it even after a few weeks in the refrigerator.
- It can be made hot, just add hot water to the cold press concentrate.
- It makes the smoothest ice coffee possible, mix ice and concentrate with water to taste.
- This is not scientific, but, the caffeine in cold press seems different. The theory is that since there is no heat it is purer. Not sure about that.
- Going camping? Cold press can be put in a Sigg bottle and used to make coffee for several days.
Make some cold press and enjoy a variety of drinks.
Go Dollar!
As we are preparing for our trip to London I started watching, with great displeasure, the demise of the US Dollar. However, August has brought some pleasant changes. (Note, this is a chart of how many £ GBP’s you can get for $1 USD. Higher is better for us.)
Seeing these recent moves I’m feeling that I picked a good day to wire the 2nd half of our apartment payment as well as the £1,000 security deposit. We are at the best point of the entire year.
Charts are all from my alma mater BigCharts.com.
First ALT.NET Meetup
I received an email this morning from Ira Mitchell clueing me in on a group that Freemind is helping get going called ALT.NET. The first thing I noticed was that they have a really cool Minneapolis-inspired logo for the group and then I started trying to figure out what it was all about. From the ALT.NET site:
At it’s purest, the driving force behind the ALT.NET developer community may be described simply as “The pursuit of happiness.” While Microsoft has provided developers with a powerful framework and a bunch of very good tools and packages to build upon, it often feels like too much effort was put into a “one-size-fits-all” design philosophy that can make it complex, tedious, or just plain impossible to do things that don’t follow Microsoft’s prescribed approach.
With other development platforms and languages offering so much choice (Java and it’s many quality open source offerings) and elegance (Ruby on Rails with its “beautiful” code and “convention over configuration” philosophy), .NET developers longed to craft cleaner, more elegant solutions without having to leave a framework that has so much to offer.
ALT.NET is about following your own beliefs about application design, and using the .NET platform to support your ideas, rather than retro-fitting your ideas to the platform.
Sounds cool! The first meet-up is at The Bulldog NE, the same place where people meet before Ruby Users of Minnesota meetings. Check it out; the beer will be good, the food will be good and hanging out with hip people working with cool technology will be good as well.