amdavidson

February 9, 2010 at 1:23 am

Shanghai Morning Stroll

Saw this building today when I went for a walk in Hongqiao Park, around the corner of my hotel. The architecture is do different from what one normally sees in Shanghai.

Most of the windows had some amount of paper covering them up and some of the pathways next to he building were boarded up.

I wonder if it's under renovation or just going to waste as so many buildings over here seem to.

Comments [0]

February 5, 2010 at 10:44 am

nook: verifying update

When updating my nook it let it's Linux/Android guts show.

The update is making me nervous in my 5 minutes of testing. I've already had one crash, and I haven't had a crash in all of my previous weeks of use.

I'm excited that the update should fix the issues with the nook forgetting where I had stopped reading on side-loaded books.  That had gotten really frustrating.

Comments [0]

January 30, 2010 at 10:45 am

Squaw Day

Comments [2]

January 27, 2010 at 11:53 am

The Apple iPad

Well, the secret is out! 

Comments [5]

January 21, 2010 at 12:32 pm

YouTube HTML5 Beta Program

Comments [0]

January 20, 2010 at 5:22 pm

SweetCron is Dead or Why Lifestreaming isn't for Me

For some time, I have had a sweetcron install setup as a lifestream at amdavidson.me. It has worked out alright, for the most part, but I think it's time to put it out to pasture.

At first glance, lifestreaming seemed like a neat idea. One place to aggregate all of the content that I generate around the web. A "one stop shop" to see everything that I had been up to. It worked out exactly as it was intended. SweetCron faithfully sat in the background, pulling in RSS feeds from around the web and publishing them to my site.

Unfortunately, SweetCron is no longer actively developed. Yong Fook, who created the software, has open sourced it but there seems to be no real movement towards continuing it's growth. He posted his reasons for this on his blog.

He makes a few very valid points in that post. The one that is most interesting to me is the impersonal nature of the lifestream. I think that really nails one of the aspects of the lifestream that never satisfied me. I don't much interaction on any of my sites just a few views and even fewer comments. But the SweetCron site took it to another level, it removed my interaction from the site. There was (probably literally) no one involved.

The SweetCron site is still up and will be for now, but I won't pay much attention to it. Instead I've been toying with a tumblelog for storing the things I find interesting around the web. For content that I create: check back here.

Comments [0]

January 19, 2010 at 2:09 pm

My New nook

I got my Barnes & Noble nook in the mail last night (finally...).

Here are my first impressions.

Pros:

• Ergonomics are much better than my Sony Reader.
• Page turn speeds not nearly as bad as early reviews said (running v1.1.1 software).
• Sony Reader ebooks were easy to side-load

Cons:

• User interface is clumsy and awkward.
• Heavier in the hand than expected (but not overly heavy).

Comments [0]

January 16, 2010 at 11:25 am

Moving from Tumblr to Posterous

Well...

I spoke too soon. The move to Tumblr went smoothly and Tumblr is definitely a nice platform, but I should have finished exploring Posterous before I switched over.

In my mind Tumblr's biggest advantages are in having different post types and with that the ability to theme them differently and in the community that surrounds it.

I will definitely miss the post types. I copied this theme from my Sweetcron site to my tumblelog and was able to keep icons and formatting separate for photos, videos, quotes, links, and posts. On this posterous site you'll notice that all the posts are formatted as generic blog posts. I will have to figure out better ways to format the post content to differentiate the content.

I won't miss the community, it seems to be very repetitive. Almost like email forwarding used to be, with the same content being pushed around and repeated over and over and over. For the tumblelogs I've found with good original content I will just continue to follow them with Google Reader.

However Tumblr is limited in how you can control cross posting to Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, and other sites. In my mind this is Posterous's killer feature. This post will be sent only to the main Posterous site because I don't feel the need to broadcast this one on my other social network presences. On the other hand, last night I was able to send a single message from the same gmail account and have my photo of Cirque du Soleil posted to Twitter, Flickr, and Posterous with no extra effort.

I won't say that this is the new permanent home for this blog as I've already moved it twice in the last week. But, Posterous sure seems promising and anyone interested in a super simple blogging platform should check it out.

Comments [0]

January 15, 2010 at 7:57 pm

At the Circus

Seeing the Cirque du Soleil "OVO" show.

Comments [0]

January 14, 2010 at 9:33 am

It’s absolutely clear now why five years from now, Apple will have 3 to 5 percent of the player market.

Rob Glaser, CEO RealNetworks,  The Guts of a New Machine - NYTimes.com (11/30/2003), via (Daring Fireball).

Comments [0]