Apple can call its sexy new gadget the iphone
Ya! Although I think it could have been called anything and still be just as successful.
Feb 252007
Feb 212007
Today as I was munching on a Green & Black 70% bar it occured to me that all the foodies I know love dark chocolate. In true snob fashion, they all claim that white chocolate isn’t even chocolate, and milk is questionable at best. They (we perhaps?) consider chocolate candy in a completely different (and lower) class. Another claim is that those who like chocolate candy have not yet had a chance to sample quality chocolate. Everyone has their own tastes, but what I find odd about it all is that I have yet to meet a white chocolate evangalizer. Why is that?
While I was browsing Gourmet magazine, I stumbled on an article about a milk chocolate tasting contest. I haven’t had milk chocolate in a long time, but I’m open to trying a few of their top picks.
What are your favorite types/flavors/brands of chocolate? I love the scharffen berger nibs bar. I don’t like richart. Though beautiful, their tiny morsels have too much milk/cream in them so they taste more like truffles than chocolates.
I also discovered that there are people outside of my circle of friends who dislike ‘those fucking marina types’ who come to the Mission on the weekends to drink. I mean, really, can’t we all just get along?
technorati tags:food, chocolate
Blogged with Flock
Feb 132007
A few years ago while I was hanging out in Soda, I bumped into an acquaintance who had already graduated. We got to chatting, and he was telling me about the “roses” his company sold. He worked for a dating site, and they had this idea to sell flower graphic that show up on the receivers profile page for a few days (because flowers wilt, duh!). They had $1 and $2 dollar flowers, and the $10 red rose. They didn’t think anyone would buy the top flower; it was supposed be the ‘top shelf scotch’–taken out only for special occasions. It turns out that people bought more red roses than any other flower. Receivers often got confused and upset when the flowers ‘wilted’ and disappeared. This was brilliant. The ROI on this was huge. It would only be a matter of time before this plan caught on.
Enter facebook. They have introduced ‘gifts’ for $1. I suspect that these gifts will make facebook a tidy chunk of change. When they take it a step further, they will probably will introduce tiers of gifts, and the more expensive pngs will be better designed (one would hope. They could simply be the most popular pngs, hence the free gift to gather data. The first one is always free.)
And yes, they are popular. When I was musing about who I should give my one gift to, Ashot immediately claimed it. Why? Well, of course you know why. My berkeley self cries out. And while I am laughing at the absurdity of paying money for these pictures, would you be so kind as to give me your one gift?
Blogged with Flock
Feb 092007
yahoo pipes is pretty freaking cool. The name is taken from the unix pipe ( | ) command which basically takes output from one command and feeds it into another. It enables less programmy people to build content filters/aggregators that are taylored to their needs. For example, you could make a “pipe” (now on referred to as module, because pipe is an awful word) that finds all the bands playing in your location and then finds all the flickr photos of that band. Module possibilities are huge.
I tried making a module this morning that asks you for your favorite dessert, took a feed of dessert recipes, and then finds flickr photos that match with the title of the dessert. The drag and drop interface is easy to understand and there are a lot of tips. However, I didn’t fully succeeded because the images overwrote the original description of the recipe. I also don’t think that the resulting xml file would be parsed correctly by a feed reader. Perhaps if I had fiddled with it for more than 20 minutes, I could have figured it out. If I come up with a good module to make, I may try my hand at it again, though I’m inclined to wait for other people (who have more time and desire than me) to make interesting modules for me to use.
Blogged with Flock
Feb 082007
I’ve been following the jumpcut movies of livingonthedge and her latest is the best so far.
She does a great job timing the pictures to the song. It’s very much a “wtf?” experience.
Feb 072007
I have been playing with my new blog for a week or two now and I am very excited to say that I have successfully imported this livejournal blog to it’s new home: http://karenism.com/blog. Please update your feed if you use one. I will be continuing to play with the css of the new blog, but I’m pretty much at the point where I don’t really care about colors and font sizes anymore (not really. I’m just sick of it right now). I will likely use flock to post, so if you don’t use feeds you will still see the same posts here.
Importing was semi-painless process. I used ljarchive to make an xml file of all my posts with comments, and then used this script to import. One quirk I noticed was that the resulting posts state that there are no comments even though clicking on it shows the comments. Also, commenting is closed for all those posts. I can turn on commenting for each post, but I haven’t found a way to batch change posts yet. The only thing that sucks is that it did not import my tags/categories. I may look for another script that deals with that, but I also may just leave it.
After having fussed with the script to get it to work I discovered that there is a dedicated wordpress page that allows me to import from different blogs. I want to try out that feature (which is why I’m making this last post on lj).
BTW I highly recommend wordpress. It is easy to use and contains a lot of flexibility to allow more techie people to customize the blog to their preference.
EDIT: Ok I just tried the wordpress importing and it doesn’t have that “no comment” issue that the other script did. Still no threading but it is much easier.
Feb 052007
Feb 052007
I’ve had my new phone for 2 months, and I just figured out how to get photos off of it. (I’m the type of user who tends not to use nifty extra features of most products) The detailed karen-proof instructions for connecting a motorola razr with mac os x via bluetooth
Though I’d much rather carry a camera with me all the time, I often forget it, so the phone is a workable substitute. It’s been difficult to upload the video from the phone to jumpcut. I don’t think the transcoder works for 3gp format, so I tried to convert it with divx converter, but it is an unsupported format. Fortunately, it’s supported in imovie (ya for macs!), and I just used imovie to export the file in mp4. It was absolutely a pain in the ass.
I would have gotten really frustrated if I had no experience dealing with video files.
Groovr has lately been my favorite topic of conversation. It really scares me, but it is strangely compelling. The scary part is that in the future I can see my phone automatically sending my location to some centralized site. Hello big brother. However, the people who lived in the wild west several hundred years ago probably would freak out about the gun control laws of today. Hospital records? Drivers Licenses? We willing give up private information for certain benefits with the understanding that it is closely guarded. On groovr it makes me uncomfortable that I can easily look up where someone lives just because they ‘check into’ “home”. Naturally, the site allows you to create a private profile so that all your activities are only seen by friends. I can’t imagine it would be hard for a court to demand this data and get it.
I am drawn to “checking in” for a reason I cannot clearly articulate. There is just something interesting about looking at my profile and seeing the places that I have marked. I like creating the places (by being the first person to check into and name a location) because it satisfies some early adopter-type desire. I will note that dodgeball has been offering a similar service for 2 years. Like webvan, though, they were a bit ahead of their time. I didn’t sign up for that service because I don’t want all of my friends texed each time I check in somewhere. Currently there is no benefit to my checking in to Groovr because I have no local friends. I imagine it would gain popularity in a college setting, where one is far more likely to find friends nearby. My friends will probably never use it. Large gatherings are pre-planned, and calling friends is cheaper than texting them (unless both parties have a texting plan).
EDIT: it turns out that jumpcut does support 3gp format. The problem was that we were so slammed with traffic yesterday (due to the Doritos add thing) that the site was behaving strangely.
Feb 052007
I’ve had my new phone for 2 months, and I just figured out how to get photos off of it. (I’m the type of user who tends not to use nifty extra features of most products) The detailed karen-proof instructions for connecting a motorola razr with mac os x via bluetooth
Though I’d much rather carry a camera with me all the time, I often forget it, so the phone is a workable substitute. It’s been difficult to upload the video from the phone to jumpcut. I don’t think the transcoder works for 3gp format, so I tried to convert it with divx converter, but it is an unsupported format. Fortunately, it’s supported in imovie (ya for macs!), and I just used imovie to export the file in mp4. It was absolutely a pain in the ass.
I would have gotten really frustrated if I had no experience dealing with video files.
Groovr has lately been my favorite topic of conversation. It really scares me, but it is strangely compelling. The scary part is that in the future I can see my phone automatically sending my location to some centralized site. Hello big brother. However, the people who lived in the wild west several hundred years ago probably would freak out about the gun control laws of today. Hospital records? Drivers Licenses? We willing give up private information for certain benefits with the understanding that it is closely guarded. On groovr it makes me uncomfortable that I can easily look up where someone lives just because they ‘check into’ “home”. Naturally, the site allows you to create a private profile so that all your activities are only seen by friends. I can’t imagine it would be hard for a court to demand this data and get it.
I am drawn to “checking in” for a reason I cannot clearly articulate. There is just something interesting about looking at my profile and seeing the places that I have marked. I like creating the places (by being the first person to check into and name a location) because it satisfies some early adopter-type desire. I will note that dodgeball has been offering a similar service for 2 years. Like webvan, though, they were a bit ahead of their time. I didn’t sign up for that service because I don’t want all of my friends texed each time I check in somewhere. Currently there is no benefit to my checking in to Groovr because I have no local friends. I imagine it would gain popularity in a college setting, where one is far more likely to find friends nearby. My friends will probably never use it. Large gatherings are pre-planned, and calling friends is cheaper than texting them (unless both parties have a texting plan).
EDIT: it turns out that jumpcut does support 3gp format. The problem was that we were so slammed with traffic yesterday (due to the Doritos add thing) that the site was behaving strangely.
