Freedom for My Wireless Phone Number

Treo 650 CameraA couple of weeks ago, I bit the bullet on a brand new Treo 650 smartphone, partly in anticipation of possibly getting assigned to a lengthy stint of jury duty. Imagine how dumb I felt when, in response to the heightened security brought on by the recent bombings in London, the courthouse forbade the entry of mobile phones equipped with cameras. And, naturally, I was selected last week to sit on the jury for a week-plus case. Even the best laid plans of mice and mobile phones, right?

In a way, it was actually a relief to be relieved of my mobile phone, but I can’t deny that it would have made my time away from the office more productive if I’d had my Treo 650 with me. It makes me lament the relative scarcity of Subscriber Identity Module technology, or SIM cards, at least in the United States. The idea that I could pull out a SIM card from my Treo 650 and insert it into a camera-free mobile phone — while also transferring my actual mobile phone number and contact database — is enormously appealing.

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The Road Ahead

CaminoAs a delayed response to some boosterism over at Jon Hicks’ weblog, I was inspired to download and install the Camino Web browser today. It’s slow and somewhat awkward and it lacks the polish of Apple’s own Safari, to say nothing of the outstanding feature set of the Omni Group’s superb but flawed OmniWeb. Still, the browser remains in development with regular builds of its code, working up to its official 1.0 release, and it would be unfair to characterize it as anything less than a terrific piece of work.

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Musical Batonism

iTunesWeblog posts about music, in my opinion, are a kind of no win situation, because there’s nothing that you can say about a piece of music about which you’re currently very enthusiastic that will really mean anything to anybody unless they’re already familiar with it, or unless they’re so powerfully predisposed to that particular genre or style that a positive reaction is a foregone conclusion. The exception to that, of course, is if you have a weblog that is primarily focused on music and/or has accrued a significant share of musical credibility when it comes to endorsing bands. I don’t have that kind of weblog, clearly, so when I think about writing a post about music that’s exciting to me, I generally resist it.

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All You Can Eat Bookmarks

Del.icio.usWhen it comes to social bookmark managers — hosted repositories where your favorite bookmarks mingle with everyone else’s — I’ve been more of a Spurl fan than a Del.icio.us devotee. Mostly, I’m responding to Spurl’s generally nicer user interface which, as a designer, I feel compelled to support. For all its spareness though (and indeed, spareness is essential to its appeal, I’m sure) Del.icio.us is the one that, undeniably, represents the most potential. Its user base is larger, and its principal author, Joshua Schachter, has just secured a dream investment scenario in which he has agreed to receive funds without giving up control of his own project. You can’t not root for that.

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Podcasting Not All Hype After All

iPodderXThere are at least a few podcasting skeptics in my office, and until last week, you may as well have lumped me in among them. The technology seemed a bit too eagerly hyped to be really as cool as all that, plus I couldn’t justify finding the time to experiment with it. At some point, though, I downloaded the installer for iPodderX, probably the most well-known of the podcasting software aggregators (or whatever this particular sub-genre of software is termed), and installed it.

It was a week or two before I actually opened up the software and started to fiddle with it. In spite of its best efforts at imitating an Apple-style user interface, it’s not particularly elegant or intuitive, but I managed to get a few podcast feeds functioning and transferred to my iPod.

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Timing the Hand that Feeds Me

XML BadgeOne thing that I’ve learned is that if I open up NetNewsWire when I get to the office in the morning, my day is shot. I mean, I’ll get my work done, but rather than working for long stretches of uninterrupted productivity, my time is fragmented by countless little diversions to other people’s weblogs. An RSS aggregator is like a Pandora’s box of distractions, and it’s difficult to resist when facing those not-so-fun tasks that populate a work day. Very often though, I have little choice but to hunker down if I want to get out of the office before midnight, so I make a conscious effort to avoid firing up NetNewsWire at all.

Which leaves me feeling perpetually behind on my weblog reading. Not only am I missing out on the latest postings and developments with the many good friends I’ve made online — prompting feelings of guilt over not being a sufficiently faithful reader of their weblogs whenever I chat with them — but I’m missing out on lots of genuinely great content that’s constantly being generated in the blogosphere. Two or three times a week, I’ll find an evening hour to try and catch up with all of my RSS feeds; it’s exhausting and it always leaves me with a nagging feeling that I might have better spent that time doing some actual design work.

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The Slow Lane

Road RunnerAbout nineteen months ago, I set up my first wireless router at home, and I remember at the time that there were only one or two other publicly broadcasted SSIDs in the general vicinity of my apartment. Today, there are at least eight or so wireless networks within range of my laptop, suggesting that broadband, in my building or in my immediately neighboring buildings anyway, has reached a significant level of pervasiveness.

One unwelcome consequence of this is that my home broadband access has gotten noticeably slower over the past six months, almost to the point of frustration. It takes two or three seconds of blank responsiveness from my browser before a page will suddenly load, a clear sign of saturated bandwidth. I was hoping that, by upgrading to an 802.11g router as I did earlier this week, I would see some performance gain — not a realistic presumption, I know, because most of the speed increase in wireless-g hardware benefits intra-network activity. Still, I hoped, but as is to be expected, no favorable results.

I never paid much attention to warnings that the performance of cable broadband pipes, by virtue of the fact that they are community shared, inevitably degrade with increased patronage. Naturally, I assign more credence to that claim now, but I think it’s also attributable to a predictable tendency to outgrow bandwidth, regardless of how much speed you have. Given 5 Mbps downstream (I’ve been at that speed for roughly five years now), before too long I’ll need 8 Mbps. And if you give me eight, I’m sure I’ll find a way to max it out before the current (and last!) Bush presidency comes to a merciful end. You can never have too much bandwidth, so to speak. It’s a natural human behavior — or, at least, a natural consumer behavior.

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Keeping Secrets

LockThere are a lot of codes that I need to remember in order to get through a day of work. I’m talking about passwords, combinations, personal identification numbers, credentials of all kinds. Most of these, I keep in Web Confidential, a Mac OS X program expressly designed to encrypt and store this kind of data; it’s pretty much the best utility of its kind in my experience, but I’m no big fan of it. That’s why I notice acutely when I have to open it more often, and over the past six months, I’ve been looking up the 280 or so passwords I’ve stored in it almost constantly.

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A Matter of Perceptionists

The PerceptionistsThere’s a marketing person somewhere who should be proud of himself for pulling off a nice little feat at my expense yesterday. I subscribe to the email newsletters regularly pushed out by the folks at Definitive Jux Records, and because I rarely have time to properly read them, my usual pattern is to quickly scan their contents — perhaps without really retaining anything — before hitting the delete key. When I got the latest update yesterday, I noticed a big emphasis at the top of the email for the debut full-length album from The Perceptionists, this week’s hotly tipped hip-hop act. Being generally preoccupied with design and online geekery — and also being generally squarer than I was a decade ago — it was the first time I had heard of them.

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