Ten Reasons Why

The door-to-door mileage from my home on Capitol Hill to the house I grew up in (yes, my parents still live there) is almost exactly 115 miles. Nearly 99% of that is on interstates or expressways – matter of fact, only 2.2 miles of those 115 are on “surface roads.” Of that 113 or so miles of highway driving, about 92 of them are on Interstate 95. (Thank you, Google Maps.)

And therein lies the problem, for I-95 is the bane of my life. There is very nearly nothing in my life that makes me as unhappy as the stretch of I-95 between Alexandria and Richmond. It is the Demon Highway.

It was simple. So simple. I would drive down to my parents house on Sunday afternoon, buy them a nice dinner on Sunday evening, stay the night, help my dad to his doctor’s appointment on Monday, and drive back to DC on Monday evening.

Oh, but the Demon Highway had other ideas.

I departed on Sunday afternoon and had maybe a good 7 or 8 miles. Then everything ground to a near halt at the Springfield interchange (known semi-affectionately in these parts as the Mixing Bowl, since it’s a noodle-ish mess of seven or so different highways converging. I spent the next two hours and forty-five minutes creeping down I-95 in bumper to bumper traffic. At 3:30pm on a Sunday afternoon. I made it about as far as Stafford, VA, and gave up. I couldn’t take it anymore.

Departure time: 3:30 pm
Direction: Southbound
Driving Time: 2 hr 45 min
Miles traveled: 48 miles
Average mph: 17.5 mph

That’s an average 17.5 mph on the frickin’ interstate. On a non-holiday, Sunday afternoon. At one point I was sitting at a dead-stop on the interstate, with the car in Park, for nearly 10 minutes.

The insane thing is there was no reason for this. I kept listening to WTOP with its “weather and traffic on the 8’s” for the update every ten minutes. And they seemed as perplexed as anyone. No accidents, no construction. A brief thunderstorm — less then 20 minutes — had passed through, but other than that there was no reason whatsoever for a 40+ mile back-up. No reason other than the Pure Unadulterated Evil of the Demon Highway.

I gave up at Stafford. My patience had come to an end. I got off at the exit, called the parents, and told them they were on their own for dinner. I wouldn’t have wanted to inflict myself upon them in my dark, frustrated mood at that time anyway. So I headed back north.

Which wasn’t much better.
Departure time: 6:15 pm
Direction: Northbound
Driving Time: 1 hr 15 min
Miles traveled: 48 miles
Average mph: 38.4 mph

At least it moved. No dead stops.

Monday, I made a second attempt in the early, and, lo, did the light of the Lone Traveler shine down upon me and did the highways open up before me, and it was good.

Departure time: 7:30 am
Direction: Southbound
Driving Time: 1 hr 45 min
Miles traveled: 115 miles
Average mph: 65.7 mph

That’s the way it’s supposed to happen. Didn’t last for the drive back that evening. Stupid Lone Traveler.

Departure time: 4:30 pm
Direction: Northbound
Driving Time 3 hr 45 min
Miles traveled: 115 miles
Average mph: 30.7 mph

Here’s the final totals. (Also, someone double check my math. Even though I used a calculator, I’m the guy who yesterday added 15 and 17 and came up with 27):

Total Driving Time: 9 hr 30 min
Total miles traveled: 326
Average mph: 34.3

On the highway. 34.3 mph. On the frickin’ interstate.

Oh, I-95, I-95, how I hate thee. The only possible reason I have to look forward to any potential thermonuclear holocaust scenario is that maybe, just maybe, some rogue nation will blow I-95 back to the Hell from which it was spawned.

Greg Other

I really want one of these stylish stands for the MacBook Pro.
 

But at just over $300 (holy crap!) I don’t think I can justify it. It’s not even a docking station, just a stand. Plus, I’d have to go out and buy an external keyboard and flatscreen display just to make it usable.

For all those people who thought I was crazy to buy the iPhone, please note: I’m not spending three hundred bucks on a laptop stand just to make my desk at home (which is only seen by me 98.5% of the time) look cooler.

See? Self control!

Powered by ScribeFire.

Greg Apple

So I’m out and about earlier today and realize that some information I need is in a file on my MacBook Pro . . . which of course is sitting at home on my desk. Sigh.

Waitaminute. I’ve got a brand new portable Internet device in my pocket. Wouldn’t it be simple if I could just access the files on my home computer from the iPhone?

Waitanotherminute. I use FolderShare, a free service from Microsoft, to keep key files on my multiple computers in sync across the various machines. One of FolderShare’s other features is that you can use the FolderShare web interface to access files on any of the machines that you’ve configured with FolderShare. Maybe I could access those files via FolderShare’s web interface and Safari on the iPhone?

Holdonthereaminute! Are you sure this is secure? Well, FolderShare is a secure P2P infrastructure. All the traffic is authenticated via RSA, encrypted via AES, and delivered over SSL. Good enough for me. Let’s give it a shot.

Starting up Safari on the iPhone . . . thumbing http://www.foldershare.com into the iPhone keyboard . . . yep, there’s the site . . . logging into FolderShare . . . navigating to the FolderShare Remote Access interface . . . yep, the FolderShare client on my home computer is running . . . click on that icon for my home computer . . . zowee! there’s the Home directory . . . navigating to the Documents folder . . . scrolling down the list of files . . . bingo! there’s the file . . . opening . . .

Ta-dah! There I am sitting in the bookstore viewing a PDF pulled off my computer at home over the Internet on my iPhone.

Sometimes technology makes me really happy.

Greg Technology & Internet

John Dennett was kind enough to point out that TypeKey was upchucking all over anyone who tried to comment on my blog.
Don’t know what the problem was. I went through step after step resetting up the TypeKey authentication service for commenting, but it just wouldn’t stick. Finally, I just created a new TypeKey account and that seemed to work. Guess the initial TypeKey account was corrupted somehow.
Dennett was kind enough to say in his email that the horked TypeKey connection was “probably why you’re not getting any comments on your blog.”
The other (more likely) reason is that I’ve only posted six times in the last year — and 2/3 of those in the last week. Not exactly blazing a trail for loyal followers, am I?
For some reason, I’m feeling a little bloggier these days, so maybe the more frequent postings will persist for awhile.

Greg Movable Type, Weblogs

In the last post, I got a little fanboy and gushed openly about the iPhone. However, like any piece of software or technology, it is not without it’s frustrations. In order of most to least frustrating:
Yesterday, the iPhone locked up on me. The touchscreen got flaky and unresponsive. It would take five or six tries just to operate the slider that unlocks the phone, and once I got in the touch interface was sluggish and erratic. Don’t know what was taking place, but a reset solved it. (Reset = hold down the Sleep/Wake button and the Home button simultaneously for a few seconds until the phone reboots. Cf Apple’s iPhone Support). Scary, but that’s first generation technology for you.
Other than that lock-up, the top complaint would be that none of my existing iPod or phone accessories work with the iPhone. This includes:
My Sony MDR-EX71SLA headphones. I’m not too broken up about this one. These headphones fit well and sound much better than Apple’s standard headphones, but the “neck-chain” style cord on them is a miserable disaster. I’ve been shopping for new headphones anyway. They actually do function with the iPhone, but because of the headphones’ L-shaped plug and the iPhones recessed jack, they won’t stay seated in the jack — the slightest jostle pops them out. The recessed headphone jack is by far the biggest design flaw on the iPhone.
My Kensington iPod FM Transmitter/Auto Charger. Now this one does burn me. I just got this Kensington FM transmitter a month or two ago to replace the Belkin FM transmitter that some crackhead broke into my car and stole. (Seriously, who steals an iPod FM transmitter? Can you even pawn that?) I specifically got the Kensington because it’s a hardware solution (e.g. does not require installing management software on the iPod, like the Griffin iTrip does). However, when I attempt to use it with the iPhone, the iPhone just plays music through it’s external speakers, not through the FM transmitter. Grr. There’s some indication I might be able to get it to work by putting the phone in Airplane mode — but they I can’t receive calls. Which might not be a problem because . . .
The iPhone never discovers my el-cheapo Mustek MBT-H120 bluetooth headset. Again, not too torn up about that. I had the bluetooth headset for two reasons: 1) to use while driving and 2) to use during my regular early Tuesday morning status calls with my team in India so my hands are free to look up issues in the bug-tracking system. I knew the Mustek would be a piece of crap — functional, but still crap — when I bought it for 20 bucks off Woot.com. Since iPhone headphones have a mic built in, I can use those, but it’s frustrating that my old Sony Ericsson phone found the Mustek headset easily and the iPhone can’t.
Three times the music has stopped playing suddenly while i was simultaneously surfing the web, each time on a different website. Once or twice, i’d take as a coincidence. three times seems to indicate a bug. I’m expecting there’s some Javascript or something on the website that’s colliding with the iPod-functionality on the iPhone.
Gmail on the iPhone is pretty useless, IMHO, but that’s the fault of Gmail’s POP implementation, not of the iPhone. Even though I’ve never used POP on Gmail, when I enabled it there were 862 messages in my POP mailbox. Why 862? I don’t know. There’s far more messages than that in my Gmail account. Maybe there’s a size limit on the Gmail POP mailbox, I don’t know. Either way, I really don’t want the last 862 Gmail messages downloaded to my iPhone, because there’s no bulk delete of messages on the iPhone. Hell if I’m going to individually delete 862 email messages. Turned off Gmail and went with my Yahoo account (which is not full of hundreds of messages). Any mail account, whether it’s Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, or your POP/IMAP account all use the same Mail interface on the iPhone, so you don’t get any UI advantage using Gmail over Yahoo like you would through a computer’s browser.
The big beef of Blackberry users is the iPhone doesn’t connect to Microsoft Exchange servers. Well, actually it will, but your IT team has to enable IMAP which ours won’t do, and even then it’s not “push” email. The iPhone just polls the server every n minutes. It would be nice to access my work email through the iPhone, but neither am I broken up about this. I’ve never craved a Blackberry. I spend the vast majority of my time at the office or at home, and in either of those cases I’m never more than 50 feet away from a computer where I can check my work email. When I’m not at the office or at home, I’m almost always someplace where I don’t want a device attached to my hip buzzing every time I get another spam from the Marketing team. The exception is business travel, in which case I can access my email via Outlook Web Access on the iPhone’s Safari web browser. Very clunky though. Or I could just set my work email to forward to Yahoo Mail when I’m out of the office.
A lot of people bitch about AT&T’s EDGE data network, and yes it’s significantly slower than WiFi, but I’ve never had a 3G-capable phone, so it’s still a wonder to me, not a downgrade. I’ve been an AT&T customer since ‘99, and have always had terrific coverage, world-wide, with their mobile network, so the single carrier for the iPhone was never an issue for me.
There’s no way to get photos you take with the iPhone off of the iPhone except to email them to yourself. Annoying!
There doesn’t seem to be a way to access the iPhone as a hard drive which puts the kibosh on using it to transport files. Not something I did often, since I must have a half dozen USB thumb drives, but it would have been nice. Also probably would have given a way to get photos off the dang thing.
A lot of these complaints stem from the “convergence” not quite converging as much as I want. The good news is that all of these complaints, except the recessed headphone jack, are software related. Since the iPhone can receive software updates through iTunes, I can hold out hope that many of these complaints might be resolved over the coming months.

Greg Apple

Dude, it’s sweet!
First, some minor cool stuff.
I’m loving the keypad. Lots of reviews have griped about the on-screen keypad, but I was wailing away with two thumbs in just a few hours. The trick is to trust the software-based correction, which is really good in almost all instances. (Matter of fact, as I type this I’m griping to myself, because Movable Type isn’t correcting my typos on-the-fly like the iPhone does.) The one place where the iPhone’s auto-correction bites me is when I’m typing in usernames on websites. My username is frequently “gritter” which the iPhone always wants to interpret as “gritted.” I’m hoping there’s a way to train it or update the dictionary or something, else I’m going to curse while logging into dozens of websites.
Contacts integrate beautifully with Address Book on the Mac, and Calendar integrates wonderfully with iCal. The Alarms feature is super-easy and works well — I’ve used it several times already in the last few days. YouTube and Google Maps are pretty sweet, and pretty equivalent to the user experience on the web. Actually the Google Maps experience is a little better, since it has additions to Driving Directions meant to be used while you’re in the car. It’s not a GPS, but it beats having to print out directions before you leave home.
The camera is better than I expected for a 2 megapixel camera. I took several photos of quickly moving toddlers at a friend’s brunch this weekend, and it did a respectable job of capturing the action. I suspect in a dimly lit setting, it might be more problematic, but it’s a fine camera for quick snapshots and party pics.
Most importantly, though, the iPhone just works. It’s hard to explain how easy, intuitive, and natural the iPhone is.
The only way I can think to explain it is by comparison. Two weeks ago, I bought my mother a new mobile phone. Her six-year old phone had finally gotten so out-dated that AT&T told her it was no longer going to be supported on the current network. Buying a phone for a sixty-something woman who is pretty uncomfortable with technology more complex than a microwave is tough. I wound up getting a Samsung Sync, not because she needs the built-in MP3 player, camera, Bluetooth, 3G network, etc., but because it was the only affordable phone I could find with big buttons and big numbers on the display. After rebate and a new contract it was free, so she got a bunch of features she’ll never use. Whatever. The thing is it took me — a fairly technical, geeky guy — about 30 minutes just to figure out how to add contacts into the Samsung Sync’s address book, never mind figuring out any of the advanced features she’ll never use anyway. I was ready to tear my hair out trying to configure her phone; I can’t imagine what a painful experience it would have been for her on her own.
For that matter, I’ve had a Sony Ericsson T637 for the last several years, and although it (theoretically) syncs with Address Book, can surf the web via WAP, etc., I’ve probably used those features less in the last three years on the Sony Ericsson than I have in the last three days on the iPhone, because on the iPhone, it just works.
I was showing the iPhone around the office today, and demonstrating for Janhow to add a contact, make a call, take a photo, add the photo to the contact so it appears when someone calls, etc. All of that took 15 seconds and I’d never done any of it before (except take a photo). I asked Jan to call me from her six-month old Blackberry, so I could show her the visual voicemail (a very useful feature), and as she started she said “You’ll have to wait a bit, because finding your number and calling is going to take me a good fifteen clicks.” And it did.
Apple’s emphasis on human-computer interaction design pays off in spades on this device. The user experience is by far the best part of the iPhone.
Tomorrow: the Cons (and, yes, there are cons).

Greg Apple

On a whim I drove by the Apple Store in the Clarendon neighborhood of Arlington, VA, after grabbing an omelet at Pete’s Diner this morning. The Clarendon Apple Store is in a little shopping center called Market Commons that has a U-shaped road looped through it. There’s almost never parking in the loop, but I told myself if there was no line at the Apple Store and if there was parking in the loop, I’d buy myself an iPhone.
I figured I was saving myself some money by making that deal.
Oops.
The loop’s one way, so you have to drive all the way around it to get to the Apple Store on the east side. I could see there was no line outside the store. As I rounded the corner of the loop, I saw an SUV pulling out of a parking space right in front of the Apple Store. Yes, I got a space less than 10 feet from the door of the Apple Store. I got out walked in and walked straight to the demo table where the floor samples of the iPhone were set up. As I walked up, another guy walked away and with a grand total of zero seconds waiting time, I was playing with an iPhone.
It really took only a few minutes to confirm that I wanted one. I checked a few websites, played a song, flicked the contact list up and down, badda bing, badda boom, turned around and walked the eight feet to the front counter where there was no one in line and bought an iPhone (8GB model).
I would have been out of the store in under 6 minutes, except as soon as the cashier handed me the box, I realized the iPhone doesn’t come with a belt clip of any kind, so it took another four minutes or so to grab a simple, inexpensive belt clip and get back to the cashier — still no line — and buy the clip.
Total time elapsed from getting out of the car to getting back into the car with an iPhone — less than 15 minutes.
I had to text (from the old Sony Ericsson) my friend, Bug (a nickname, but he answers to it) and gloat a bit. He’s an Apple diehard — the man has three 30″ Apple Cinema Displays on his desk, and I lost count of the number of Apple computers he owns. He did some intermediate (read: hours, but not double digit hours) line waiting yesterday evening.
Gloating was unnecessary. He was at the Bethesda, MD, Apple Store getting his second (or third maybe) iPhone, and having the same speedy experience.
Should anyone really have expected any different? I’m sure it might be different in some of the densely populated areas like NYC or geek-heavy regions like San Francisco and Silicon Valley, but Apple is not like Sony delivering a new playstation. Apple doesn’t have to under-manufacture the hardware to manufacture demand through scarcity, because they are expert at creating demand before the release.
So the iPhone is activated now and going through the first sync with iTunes which is nearly done, so I’ll finish up this post and write a full review later.

Greg Technology & Internet

It’s hard to feel sorry for James Hong. As one of the two co-founders of HOTorNOT, the oft-copied photo rating site, he’s raked in the dough. For years, HOTorNOT was run leanly, with little investment in development and lots of advertising revenue. Hong himself describes it as a cash cow.
Recently Hong has been re-inventing the aging HOTorNOT, and he has written about it on his blog.
It’s a good read in general, but this is the part that made me groan out load. He describes their initial strategy to re-invent the business:

[O]ur original vision was to become an incubator and to enable our employees to work on new ideas, and let them spin those off as separate companies.. basically let our employees graduate into becoming funded entrepreneurs at a time when funding was hard to get. Our first and only attempt at this was back in 2003 when we hoped to work with Steve Chen and Mike Solomon to start Yafro.com, which was going to be a social networking site with media sharing applications built on top. [Emphasis mine. -greg]
In the end things did not work out because some members of our board were uncomfortable with the idea of giving the employees of a spinout majority share and control… so Jim and I agreed with Steve and Mike that it was a no go.

Sounds reasonable until a couple of years later when you realize you punted on funding a social media-sharing service being pushed by Steve Chen. Yes, that Steve Chen.
I’m sure the tens of millions Hong has raked in from HOTorNOT allays the pain a little, but still . . . damn, that’s gotta burn!

Greg Technology & Internet

Some new thinking up over on the work blog.

Greg Education

I’d been thinking about starting this blog up again for a few weeks now. I didn’t think I’d have something so tragic to write about.
Probably it goes without saying that my thoughts and best wishes go out to the students, faculty, and staff at my alma mater, Virginia Tech, and especially to the families and friends of the victims.
I was working from home today, heads down with all my external inputs (radio, TV, email, IRC, RSS feeds, etc.) turned off, so it wasn’t until mid-afternoon that I became aware of what had happened. It has shaken me up, more than I would have expected it would.
It’s disconcerting to see a community that you’ve been part of suffer an event like this, especially when you see so many images on the news of places you’re quite familiar with. When I was a student at Virginia Tech, I had friends who lived on the 4th floor Ambler-Johnston Hall, where the first shooting took place. I had classes in Norris Hall, where the second shooting occurred. I know these places. They were my places. It was my community. Even though I’ve been gone from Tech for a long time, it still hits close to home.
Back in ‘88-’89 I was one of the editors of the Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech’s student newspaper. I’ve thought a lot about the students working at the Collegiate Times today. What was the biggest story we dealt with back in ‘88-’89? I think a steroids scandal on one of the sports teams. Nothing to compare to what happened today. What a time it must be for those young, aspiring journalists. How difficult it must be to cover what will probably be the biggest story of your life when you are just twenty or twenty-one. Doubly difficult since it is the slaughter of your classmates that you have to cover. As young journalists they must feel a great deal of excitement at The Big Story . . . and, at the same time, a great deal of guilt and dread for being excited while their friends lay dead. I hope they sense the importance of their role of as the student voice of the Virginia Tech campus more than ever. (CollegiateTimes.com is down, and the server is re-directing to CollegeMedia.com, the parent site for the student media outlets at Tech. And I just noticed that the Collegiate Times Online Editor, who has been posting to http://www.collegemedia.com all afternoon is named Christopher Ritter. No relation, if you were wondering.)
Besides my former professors, I only know a couple of people still at Virginia Tech. None of them were likely to have been in either of the buildings where the shootings took place, but I’ve dropped them emails anyway. And I’ve been contacted today by former classmates who I haven’t heard from in years. When something like this happens, you start thinking about the people who shared your life then and you want to reach out to them, even if you’ve been silent for years, because their the only ones who are going to understand your loss in the same way.
The news reports are saying that this is the worst shooting on a college campus in American history. Oddly, one of the other campus massacres that has been mentioned repeatedly was a 1991 shooting rampage by a physics grad student (who also killed himself) at the University of Iowa, where I went to graduate school. My other alma mater. That took place just three months after I left Iowa City, and, unlike today’s tragedy at VT, I knew many people who were on campus at that time.
Then a few years back, in the fall of 2000, a student murdered one of his classmates at Gallaudet University, and went un-apprehended for months until he killed again in February. I had worked at Gallaudet for three years and left just a bit more than a year before the murders there. Again, I was gone, but, again, I knew many people affected by this. It wasn’t the kind of rampage like at Iowa or Virginia Tech, but it held the campus hostage to fear nonetheless.
So this is the third time I’ve watched a campus where I have lived, studied, or worked be victimized by a murderer.
It sucks. It sucks for me, it makes me cry to see a community — my community — ravaged, even after I’ve been absent from it for years
And as miserable and helpless as I feel, I can’t imagine how horrible it is for those living through it.

Greg Personal