Updates

alternateorg on October 24, 2002

So work’s been going really well, which is the reason for the obvious lack of activity here. I’ll be surprised if anyone actually checks here anymore. If you do, the chances are that I know you personally.

Anyway, just a heads up. I’ll be out of the state this weekend, as my cousin is playing for ASU in Arizona, and we’re meeting some other family members there for a rootin’ good time. I’m planning on using the 2 14 hour drives in 4 days to catch up on some much-needed sleep, hopefully resulting in my not using phrases such as ‘”rootin’ good time.” My lovely iPod will be keeping me company, my only concern being that 5GB of music won’t be enough.

Some random thoughts:

  • Soul Coughing’s ‘Screenwriter’s Blues’ is as addictive as crack, and much less harsh on the lungs. “We are all going to Receda someday, to die…” Check it out.
  • iChat is a great app, once you’ve got it configured to not be gay.
  • Object-oriented PHP makes life that much easier. At least while you’re coding PHP.
  • How cool is it that I get to design the interface for what is basically RetinalPMS, only it’s my employer footing the bill? The answer is very cool, as I don’t feel like my ideas for a web-based project-management system are going to waste
  • I’ll be adding a poll for you to decide whether I should buy a .Mac account or not. The low-down: My wife uses iPhoto/homepage to host images for her ebay auctions, and it’s way easy for her to use, as it’s all integrated. The replacement photo service she switched to has been down for 3 days now. I use homepage to show pictuers of our kids to family abroad. Yet the entire thing now costs $100/year. Still undecided, basically because I can build something that does all of this, runs on hosting I already have, and looks however I want it to look. On the other hand, that will take lots of time and I’d almost rather buy the service and have it taken care of.

    • Why manage two separate MP3 collections? Just stream it.

    alternateorg on August 11, 2002

    Andromedia is a new way to stream your digital media – to yourself.

    Content-streaming conglomerates have a new enemy, and his name is Scott.

    Scott Matthews’ Andromeda is streaming software that’s secure, works on OS X, Microsoft and Unix platforms and lets you browse your media library using any web browser, sans advertisements. It’s dead simple to install and the free version is robust. And unlike other home broadcast technologies such as ShoutCAST, Andromeda is pull-based: You choose the songs or videos you want to hear or see.

    It’s basically a PHP/ASP app that runs on your internet-connected, web-server-installed home computer. If you’re on OSX, fire up Apache/PHP, and Windows can use the built-in ASP support under PWS. Just when I was about to transfer a hard-drive’s worth of MP3s by doing just that – transporting the hard drive, I found a new solution to help keep me from having to manage 2 sets of MP3 collections. Of course as soon as I buy Tai’s iPod, this will all be relatively moot.

    Macworld just slips in under your nose when you have a life

    alternateorg on July 17, 2002

    Because of my relatively new position as full-time parent, MacWorld Expo NY kind of took me by surprise. Among the new-fangled Apple-riffic items:

    1. 17″ iMac, $100 less than high-end iMac previous
    2. New .Mac services, basically a pay-version of iTools
    3. New iSync, iCal, iChat, iTunes software. iTunes at v3.
    4. iPods: 5,10&20gb models, 5gb $100 cheaper than before. Official Windows support.
    5. Jaguar: OSX 10.2, August 24. $130, which seems like a lot to me just for an upgrade.

    iPod XL

    alternateorg on March 21, 2002

    How come no one told me about the new 10GB iPod? The equalizer is nice and the address book makes it one step closer to an all-in-one palm type of thing.

    I guess YOU should be head of product development, then?

    alternateorg on February 28, 2002

    I love it when know-nothing people decide that they know far better what Apple should do than Apple itself. Regarding the iPod:


    1. Put a 40-GB hard drive in it so it would have been head and shoulders above its numerous competitors.

    2. Added AirPort wireless connectivity to it.

    3. Included digital video features.

    4. Made it PC-compatible.

    5. Sold it for at least half the price.

    Right. And they didn’t do this out-of-this-world stuff because it absolutely isn’t possible to do all this for half the price AND keep it about the size of a deck of fucking cards. Jesus. They could have done this, sure. But you would have had to wait like 5 or 6 years for it all and by then who knows where things will be and the iPod would be regarded as behind still.

    We waited in line for Steve Jobs all day today

    alternateorg on November 11, 2001

    10:00 AM: Wait in line for Littleton Apple Store to open
    11:00 AM: Actually enter Littleton Apple Store and wander around with all the other totally helpless geeks, wait in line to see/use new hella cool iPod
    7:50 PM: Skip waiting in airport-like lines and buy tickets at a terribly interfaced ABO (Automatic Box Office), attend ‘Monsters, Inc.’ at Littleton/Highlands Ranch supermegahyperglobalplex amongst all the teenagers for whom Ben Folds’ ‘Rockin’ The Suburbs’ song was written explicitly for

    All in all, a good day. The Apple store was every bit as interesting as I expected, especially with a someone special close to Alternate working at the Genius bar. 5 free t-shirts, I might add. Although they are dorky and do say ‘Aspen Grove’ on them (the name of the mall where said store is located). Some of those people in line with me were just… man. Geeks to the fullest extent. But at least they were Mac geeks. Balding men wearing multicolored Apple logos emblazoned on black tees abounded. And there was a guy on stilts.

    iPod and iTunes 2.0

    alternateorg on October 23, 2001

    Despite that fact that this whole ‘everything prefixed with a lower-case i’ thing is pretty 1999 (hey, at least the computers don’t come in colors any more), Apple introduced today the iPod and iTunes 2. The iPod is a digital music player with a 5Gb hard drive that weights in at 6.4 ounces and is about the size of a pack of cards. What is quite amazing about it is that it’s got 10 hours of batter life, and can be charged via the FireWire cable that’s used to drag n drop music files to it like a hard drive. An interesting user interface provides the listener with quite a lot of control when away from your digital hub (ie, Macintosh computer), including playlist selection and native language selection. iTunes 2 is simply a newer version of the popular iTunes software, which will be required to connect to the new device. At $399, it ain’t cheap especially for you PC users out there, as you’d have to buy a Mac to use it. Nyah. I also noticed that the new device looks exactly like the MP3 player that was included with Developer Preview releases of MacOS X, prior to the Public Beta which included iTunes instead.