"Search" Does Stuff

Still in very, very early stages, but the "search" link on this site actually does something now. I threw together a very basic search engine that currently only shows 10 results and is useless without javascript, but does a resonable job of being a search engine.

So now you can find out how many times I've used dirty words here over the years.

And also see what a right-leaning d-bag I used to be.

One More Phone Thought

I got my first cameraphone when I was a senior in high school. I had a job at Circuit City, and I saved up my dough for quite a while to buy a Nokia 6820 for $400.

After I graduated, I went on my first road trip to Chicago. While there, I had a real camera but I took a few pictures with the phone for the heck of it.

Here is one picture I took:

That's taken from the Sears Tower (now Willis Tower) observation deck.

That is the actual size of the photo. Not resized or anything.

Now here's a picture I took with my $200 phone yesterday:

That's not full size. Here is a larger version, but Flickr wont let me upload the full size image without paying for Flickr Pro. The actual image from the camera is 2.5x larger.

Here is a comparison of the image dimensions between the two cameras.

All I'm saying is, my phone has a good camera.

Time Travel

Mark burst into the third-floor apartment, as he always does, tossed his backpack onto the supposed dining room table, like he always does, and plopped down in the middle of the couch, like he always does. The wood frame of the couch squeaked with the force. It was an old piece of furniture which, at its prime, was slightly more off-white than the carpet, which was just as slightly more off-white than the walls. It was a cheap, poorly appointed apartment that reflected the priorities of its two, twentysomething, bachelor residents.

Dale spun around in the computer chair to face the couch. "Did you get it?" he asked.

Mark smiled, reaching into his left pants pocket. "Had it sent to the office." After some trouble reconciling the poorness of his posture and the tightness of his jeans, he was finally able to draw a slick, black-and-silver phone from his pocket.

"Awesome," Dale said, rolling the chair closer until the carpet wouldn't allow it.

Mark spun it around in his fingers a few times, before handing to Dale. Dale admired every inch of it, examining it like a rare specimen.

"Any problems getting it activated?" Dale asked, turning the on the screen and swiping a finger across to unlock it.

"No," Mark said. "Pretty simple, this time."

Dale stared at the screen, wide-eyed. "This is so damn cool," he said. He flipped through a few pages of the installed apps.

"Yeah," Mark said. "Wifi and 3G internet, GPS for maps, video calling. It's the future, man."

"Totally," Dale said. "If I could go back in time and show this to my twelve-year-old self, he/I would go nuts."

"Hey, yeah," Mark said. "We should do that."

"Yeah," Dale chuckled, "sure."

"No, look," Mark said, walking over and taking the phone. He flipped a through a few pages of apps and pointed at an icon labeled, "Time Machine."

"Oh, hey," Dale said, "this one has Time Machine data backup service?"

"No," Mark said. "It's an actual time machine."

Dale looked at Mark for fourteen seconds. "...What?"

"Yeah, just... here. Hang on."

Mark pressed the icon to launch the app. The screen filled with text. "Just skip through these warnings.... and.... here, see?"

On the screen was was a simple, plain-text readout of the current date and time, and below it was a dial to select a new date and time.

"What year was it when you were twelve?" Mark asked.

"What, are you serious?" Dale asked, incredulous.

Mark didn't reply. He was busy with math. "Er... 1995, right?" He spun the numbers until the date was changed to 1995. "Sweet, here we go..."

"Wait, wait, hang on." Dale said. "What the crap are you talking about?"

Mark looked confused. "What?"

"Time machine?" Dale said.

"Yeah," Mark said. "Why not?"

Dale thought about it, then shrugged. "Whatever."

"Alright, then," Mark said. "Here we go, for real." He pressed the big red button on the screen.

Then they were falling.

They landed on a tar and gravel roof. Dale on his stomach, Mark on his back.

"Ow," Dale said, his face pressed against the roof.

Mark sat up. "What was that? What happened."

Dale spun around, wiped away the pebbles stuck to his face, then stood up. "Where are we?"

Mark got up as well, then walked to the edge of the roof. "This is our street," he said, looking down at the ground. "This is our corner. This is where are apartment is."

"Or will be," Dale said. "Our apartment building is, what, ten years old? There used to be a pizza place here."

"We are now on top of said pizza place," Mark said, leaning awkwardly over the edge, looking at a sign that said "Rizzato's."

"So we're in 1995?" Dale asked.

"Looks like," Mark replied.

"Crazy."

"We probably should have done that from a ground-floor location," Mark said. "It's lucky there was a building here before, otherwise we would have fallen three stories instead of one."

"Yeah," Dale said. "That's what I'm focusing on now."

The two argued for a bit about the mechanics of time travel, the nature of existence, the possible rules of causality and the ramifications of altering the space-time continuum. Deciding that they couldn't undo the entirety of existence with a ninety-nine-cent app, they decided they would probably be fine if they kept their visit brief and didn't kill anybody likely to become important.

"You probably should have read those warning screens," Dale said as the two walked toward Dale's childhood home. "It might have said something about butterfly effects and whether they exist."

"Come on," Mark said. "Nobody reads those things, so when they made the program they had to have known people would skip through it all. If it were dangerous, they'd make you take a quiz or get a license or something."

Dale had been wondering if his mother, in 1995, would be able to see him, fifteen years older, and recognize that he was her son, who, to her, was only twelve. It was a bizarre hypothetical, and frankly it hurt his head more than the time-paradox stuff. He decided it would be best to avoid his 1995 mother altogether, so when the two arrived at his 1995 home they snuck through the back door and into the basement, where a twelve-year-old Dale was playing video games.

"Hey," adult Dale said.

Younger Dale paused the game and looked over. "Hey," he said. "Who are you guys?"

Dale knew that he couldn't rightly just say he was from the future, the younger version of himself wouldn't believe him. He'd have to ease him into it, and find some way to convince the younger him that he wasn't lying by using knowledge only he, fifteen years later, would know. During the walk, when he wasn't thinking about whether his mom would have recognized him, he was thinking about that.

"Well," Dale said to himself. "It's hard to say, exactly, but basically--"

"--He's you from the future and I'm his-slash-your friend from the future," Mark said. "Hey, is that Super Nintendo?"

Young Dale looked at the two for a moment. "Me, from the future?"

Adult Dale cringed. "Yeah," he said. "Sorta."

Young Dale furrowed his brow for a second. "Well if that's true... what girl do I like right now?"

"Ah, jeez," Mark said. "I didn't think you'd be quizzing yourself. We should have prepared for this for a bit. I know I don't remember anything about the girls that I--"

"Becca Layton," adult Dale said, to his younger version's surprise.

"Wait," Mark said. "Becca Layton... isn't she that girl on Facebook you're always--"

"Shh--er--ah--shubbaduh," adult Dale interrupted.

Young Dale was convinced. "So do I ever have a chance with her?"

Mark was just as curious.

Adult Dale stammered for a bit, "Er, I don't think.. uh, spoiler alert. Yeah, that. I'm not here to; that is, I don't want to change the way things unfold."

"Isn't that what we're here for?" Mark asked, holding up the cell phone.

"Well, yeah, but that's... for that, we can be mysterious and then leave. I can't tell him how my actual life turns out."

"Whatever, space cadet," Mark said, handing adult Dale the phone. "Just blow his mind with the thing so we can get out of here. I'm having legitimate concerns now about this thing's battery life. I didn't bring a charger, and there aren't going to be any made for about a decade."

"Right, that." Dale took the phone, switched the screen on, and walked over to his younger self.

"Basically," he started, "I came back in time because this phone just came out and I knew it would rock your world."

Dale flipped through the pages of apps.

"Cool," young Dale said. "Touch screen."

"I know!" older Dale said. "Touchscreen stuff barely existed back... now, Mark."

Mark nodded. He was checking out the Super Nintendo games on the shelf. "SWAT Kats, awesome."

Older Dale continued with the demonstration, "and, obviously, you can make calls with it. Here, I'll call and order a pizza." Dale tried to dial a number, but there was no service.

"Oh, right," he said. "Cellular systems were analog until a few years from now, and I don't even know if Mark's carrier even exists yet."

"Lion King?" Mark said. "You had The Lion King for SNES?"

"Hey," young Dale said. "That game is cool. Right?"

Older Dale looked away, then back at the phone. "Anyway, well you can get on the internet using wifi--- wait, 802.11 wireless networking doesn't exist until, like, 2002. Crap."

"Very impressive tech demo so far," Mark said. "Hey, you don't have any Final Fantasy games here."

"Final what?" young Dale asked. Mark's eyes widened.

"--Anyway," adult Dale interjected. "Well, it's got GPS, at least, so the phone can actually tell you exactly where you are..."

Dale launched the navigation app, but nothing happened.

"Aw, hell," Dale said. "GPS doesn't go online for civilian use for another three or four years."

"What's GPS mean?" young Dale asked.

Older Dale just looked at him. "Well the communication systems might not exactly be available to show off, but you can at least see how it plays music and movies. Mark, did you put any media on here?"

Mark shook his head. "I was going to sync it with my home PC."

Older Dale's head dropped. "Alright, so this thing can't exactly do anything right now, but you should still be impressed. Look how small it is, and this thing's got more processing power than... crap, I don't even have a computer yet in 1995."

Mark was reading the back of the Homeward Bound VHS cassette case. "When does the PlayStation come out?"

"I don't... I don't remember," older Dale said. "This is very distressing. Look, kid. Look at this thing! It's so small. Be impressed!"

"Yeah, it's cool I guess."

Older Dale's eyes narrowed. "You guess? This thing can hold, like.. several thousand songs."

"For what?"

"For... for songs. For listening to!"

"Who needs to listen to that many songs?"

"That's not the point! Look at this thing, it is a technical marvel!"

"If you say so," the kid said. "I like my Nintendo."

"Yeah, well... wait until the Wii comes out. Huge disappointment."

Younger Dale laughed. "The wee comes out of what?"

Older Dale took a long, deliberate breath. "I hate you, me."

Younger Dale shrugged.

Older Dale turned to Mark. "Well, this has been terrifically stupid." He handed Mark the phone. "Let's go back now."

"Finally," Mark said.

He flipped through the pages to find the Time Machine app and launched it. Dale looked around. "We should probably go outside, though. I don't even know who owns this house now."

"Err..." Mark said. "This sucks."

"Well, not now, I mean," Dale said. "I mean, I don't know who owns this house in our time. Our now. Not now-now."

Mark wasn't responding. He was staring at the phone's screen.

"What is it?" Dale asked.

"I read the warning screen this time," he said.

"Yeah? What? Crap. Did we screw up the future?"

"Nnnno," Mark said. "It's not about that. It says, 'Warning: Time travel feature requires wifi internet connection and GPS location detection. Do not travel to a time without these services'."

"Oh," Dale said. "Yeah, that sucks."

Random iPhone 4 Thoughts

I took the above photo from work with my new iPhone 4. I took some more on the way home today.

It's very, very nice to have a phone that can take a half-decent picture. I moved to this city primarily because I love taking photos of it so much, but I rarely have a proper digital camera with me, so all I'm left with is my phone. The iPhone 3GS had a lot better camera than previous iPhones, but it was still pretty sub-par as cameras go. The iPhone 4's camera is comparable (note strategic use of word) to actual point-and-shoot digital cameras, so I'm excited at the prospect of being able to shoot quick pictures of things without them looking embarrassing on a computer monitor.

One thing I love about taking pictures with an iPhone, as opposed to most digital cameras, is that the iPhone tags photos with the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, so inside software like iPhoto (or, now, on the iPhone itself) I can see all of my photos represented on a map. That makes it easy to, say, find all the pictures I took while in Grant Park, or the photos I took while at my brother's place in Maryland. I find that feature so appealing that even when I have a superior camera with me I'll choose to use the iPhone so that I'll automatically have that location information stored.

Lines

I waited in line for four hours to get my iPhone 4 last night. I had a reservation, and reservations expired at midnight, so if I didn't deal with the line to get the phone yesterday, it would have been at least a month before I could have gotten one. I checked out the line at the Michigan Avenue Apple Store on my lunch break, and it was about 5-6 hours long. When I eventually got in line after work, it was a bit shorter. By that point, only people with reservations were allowed in (no "walk-ins"). It's amazing that a phone can draw that kind of line.

Apple handled the line rather well. It wrapped entirely around the block, but there were store employees all around, making sure that curbs, entrances, and sidewalk crossings weren't blocked and answering people's questions. Apple even paid for a local burger restaurant to give anybody in line free burgers, lemonade, and milkshakes, on top of having plenty of bottled water to go around, and for the first half of the day there was coffee and iced tea. When I was in line, a radio station was handing out bottles of SoBe Lifewater. I felt very looked-after.

Prior to this, the only line I'd been in close to that length was for roller coasters. I figure that if people can reasonably wait 2-3 hours for a ride you'll experience for about 77 seconds, the same amount of time for a phone I'll enjoy for at least a year can't be that absurd. The people nearby in line were pretty friendly and talkative. There was a nice mix of people, not the sort of sweaty geeks you'd expect to see lined up for a product launch. The guy behind me was editor-in-chief of his law school's Law Review.

For the record, I waited about an hour to get an Xbox 360 (which I don't really regret) a few days after launch, and about 40 minutes for a Nintendo DS (which I regret entirely).

Face-Time

The addition of a front-facing camera and a built-in protocol for video calling is nifty, but right now I'm like the one guy in 1987 who owned a fax machine and couldn't wait for someone else to get one so he could make use of it. Since iPhone 4 has only been out for a day, and only people with iPhone 4 can use Face-Time, there's nor many people for me to Face-Time with.

I suspect that in a year or so, the video calling environment will be a bit more accessible. Hopefully, Apple will add in support for people using their iChat software on Macs (which is in itself a rather well-performing video chatting utility), so that (so to speak) people will realize that they had fax machines the whole time.

Long-term, though, I don't think video calling will ever catch on in the way that the past's version of the future predicted. Video chatting requires you to worry about how your face and hair look, and it requires your full attention, whereas you can be naked and rollerblading and hold a vocal conversation over a phone perfectly well. Our laziness and vanity will probably keep widespread video chatting on hold for quite a while, until we've reached a point where shame and privacy are no longer common traits among humans.

Screens

Much hay has been made over the iPhone 4's buzzword "retina display." A previous iteration of me would have spent time researching the specific pixel matrix resolution mathematics involved in the newfangled screen to formulate a solid opinion regarding whether Apple really accomplished a legitimate feat of engineering, or just hobbled together someone else's invention and put a marketing spin on it, but at this point in my life I don't or can't care.

All I know is that the screen is so crisp, my brain can't process it. It's crisper than any display (computer or handheld) I've ever seen. Text isn't represented on the screen, it exists on the screen. The words just pop out at you. Comparisons to printed paper are meaningless, because the concepts are entirely different. Text on the iPhone 4's display is a whole new kind of thing.

The Catch-22

I think the mostly-plastic iPhone 3G and 3GS were kind of ugly from the back, but didn't mind so much because the back was always hidden by the various multi-layered cases I bought for them. It was in my interest to protect the iPhones from the various drops-on-concrete I subjected them to, so the ugly back wasn't an issue.

The iPhone 4, however, is much better-looking a phone. It's a rather gorgeous little brick of steel and glass. Sometimes I just look down at it, sitting on my desk. Hello, little phone. That beauty comes at a price, though. The glass front and back means it's got twice as much surface area susceptible to catastrophic breakage.

That means that it's in the phone's best interest to get some kind of protective case for it. But it's in my best interest to leave it naked so I an continue to ogle its curves and edges. Because it's so pretty, I don't want to cover it; but because it's so delicate, I want to protect it. I feel like the parent of a teenager struggling to find the right balance between overprotective and irresponsible.

The Verdict

Upgrading from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS had a very sharp, immediate payoff in that apps ran twice as fast. It's an easy selling point: iPhone 3GS is faster.

Upgrading from the iPhone to the iPhone 3G also had an immediate, obvious payoff: it had 3G cellular internet, which was much faster than EDGE, plus it had actual GPS. Easy selling point: iPhone 3G has faster internet.

Upgrading to the iPhone 4 doesn't really have that wham-bam payoff. It has a lot of improvements and niceities, but nothing that gets all up in your face and tells you how stupid you've been for having a crummy ol' 3GS. It's faster, sure, but not several times faster. It doesn't have faster cellular internet. It has a much better camera, and a crazy-awesome screen, but those aren't huge selling points to the general public. Basically, it's just a ton of gentle improvements upon the former phone. Its selling point: iPhone 4 is just better.

Tweeter Feetchers

I swear, I put off being a Twitter user for a long time (despite my signing up for it very, very early to get a premium username before I'd eventually be relegated to being "AaronSk8erboi839191_4") but I had to build in some Twitter-related features to some websites I was doing for clients and work and that put the bug in me. It's ridiculous how easy it is to make custom applications to fetch and display tweets of any classification.

And then I moved here to Chicago and I felt like the people from back home would probably have a slight, slight interest in what was going on with me, but with a full time job it was hard to find the energy to write full-on blog posts, so Twitter it was.

When I decided that I was comfortable with it and that I wasn't going to drop it, I decided to make my tweets get pumped directly onto my blog here so that I wouldn't have to explain to my parents what/who/how/why/where a Twitter was, and just to generally make life easier. Also because I like to make things that do things with data from other places. It's my thing.

So I took some code I'd made for a client website to pull in tweets, changed a few things, and plopped it onto this site here.

That's worked out pretty well, but my nature doesn't allow me to let a good thing remain good when I could screw around with it and make it better, so I just added a few more features:

Firewall Bypassery

A few people whose workplaces have firewalls that block Twitter have told me that this prevents the display of Twitter content here. That makes sense, because my script is just telling your browser to get a data feed from Twitter and then interpret it, but it also cheesed me off pretty hard. I didn't like the idea of my website breaking for people at work because of IT policies put in place to prevent secretaries from wasting time at Friendface and Twitbook and such.

So I've added a thing that tries to detect when the script is having trouble fetching the tweets, and then will (unobtrusively) ask the user if they're behind a firewall. Answering "Yes" will attempt to bypass any firewalls using a homespun proxy. I may remove the whole confirmation thing and just attempt the proxy automatically if the first attempt fails, but I liked the look of the confirmation message...

Geolocation/Stalker Enhancements

Twitter recently started allowing for tweets to be encoded with the geo-coordinates of whereever you happened to be when you sent that message (if whatever you're using to send the message allows for it). My phone allows for it, so when I tweet from my phone it includes the location. Even though it kind of creeps me out, I thought it was cool enough that I now display any geo-location information that may exist along with a tweet. You may, on certain messages, see something like this:

The general location of the message is displayed in text form, and if you click the location (or the little pin icon) it will take you to a Google Map showing exactly (exaaaactly) where I was. I think this can supply a little context to messages, the benefit of which should hopefully outweigh the creepiness. Please do not use this information to murder me.

Image Auto-Thumbnailing

Basically, if I link to a TwitPic or Flickr image in a tweet, the script will try to generate a thumbnail for them. Yeah. Fancy stuff.