June 14th, 2008
Twitter isn’t a popular joke or what you’re having for lunch.
Twitter is the funniest thing you’ve said today. And you’re saying it (again?) online.
Do it, bitches.
Whenever I go downtown, I feel like an Ex-Con casing the joint
Texas County Convention
March 29th, 2008I am attending the Travis County Nomination Convention this morning. It is expected to be the largest convention of its type in Texas. It covers two State Senate districts and more than 12,000 elected delegates are expected to register betweeen 7AM and 10AM CDT. There are expected to be over a thousand alternates, although since all the alternates in my district have to go to work, either number might be a bit of a misnomer.
I will try to Twitter updates at http://twitter.com/pmcg
I am an elected delegate from Precinct 109. My precinct will elect 1 delegate to the State Convention and 1 Alternate (low by most precincts’ standards, some have up to 10).
I intend to photograph the proceedings in the Travis County Exposition Center.
If the cell network survives, I will upload pictures at http://gallery.mac.com/pmcgrane#100116.
The county conventions are a, let’s be frank, ridiculous process where those elected by their neighbors elect other more popular neighbors to go to the State Convention in June.
This said, the narrative could be that Obama gains delegates beyond what he got on March 4th. This seems likely since the rules of attendance are bizarre and interesting.
Barack Obama Thinks He Can Win Texas in a General Election
March 29th, 2008You heard it here first.
Obama
March 19th, 2008If you are, like me, attending a County Convention in Texas, then the Obama campaign has quite a web site for you.
And if you haven’t yet watched his recent speech in Philadelphia, I recommend it. I’m not yet aware of any online reproductions except on YouTube where they split it up and that’s BS. So I’ll work on that.
iPhone SDK
March 7th, 2008Well holy shit, it looks like we’ve all been carrying around 80% of a Macintosh in our pockets for half a year.
The Apple SDK for the iPhone exposes nearly all the guts of the system, as well as sophisticated integration with other apps, OS components, and hardware. Apple claims that my cell phone and my laptop are using the same kernel. (I guess we knew this but it’s nice to hear it from the horse’s mouth).
The jailbreakers will have their work cut out to compete.
The first “blessed” 3rd party iPhone app I’d like to see in June is a streaming MP3 player. I’d like to listen to DirtyRadio and my stack of various NPR stations whenever I’m bathed in WiFi microwaves. (Or, dare I dream, even an EDGE connection?). Based on what I’ve seen, this is plainly no challenge at all to someone competent to write any kind of media player. (by which I mean basically connect a network socket to an audio buffer and then go have a drink)
But Fuck! You could get fancy and use the iPhone to triangulate your geographical position and then present a list of regionally appropriate streaming radio stations. You could then animate an old-time tuning dial and probably even fade each one into the other with static overlaid in between. Literally you can do this on a god damn cell phone. Apple has videos explaining each component. You can go nuts!
The second app I’d like to see, I’ll try to write myself. Nothing too extraordinary but I’d find it useful about twice a week. It might even be easier to do as a web app, but I will endeavor to continue my Obj-C edumacation.
And have I missed something or is the Interface Builder half of this iPhone SDK still “Coming Soon”?
A police woman Ghost Rides The Whip
March 2nd, 2008It’s 3AM and I’m gonna kill you
March 1st, 2008If you’re not sure who to vote for in the Democratic primary, you might watch this ad and vote for the other person.
Silverdoesn’tworkonPPCMacsandsucksanywayLight?
February 28th, 2008Microsoft’s “Silverlight” is sponsoring SXSW. That’s adorable.
Multicast out with your modem out
February 24th, 2008AT&T’s TV offering is called U-Verse. I just now learned the details of it.
It’s H.264 MPEG-4 video over a multicast IP Fiber Optic network. No one else is doing this. Not even Verizon with FIOS. This sounds super-cool and since detractors say it’s impossible to scale, I say go with it, at&t. I doubt I’ll subscribe to pay tv anytime in the near future, but this is the way to go. Keep on truckin, SBC … I mean AT&T.
I got a huge new TV so fuck you
February 24th, 2008I consider myself at the forefront of technology. I have an iPhone, which I adore. I have several relatively modern Mac computers running the very latest operating system (including Vista! Ugh). I have the fastest DSL that “at&t” will provide. I have … an iPod shuffle. Uhh shit, is that it?
Maybe it is because my favorite new gadget is my new TV.
Let me tell you about my new TV. It’s silver plastic. It has stereo speakers. It weighs a hundred pounds. It has like three inputs, maybe four.
It’s a Sony KV-27FS100.
State of the fucking art.
In 2002.
Holland’s friend at work got a new plasma screen (or whatever — it’s flat) from his parents so with a small house and a big heart, he was willing to give away his old tv, which was only a gift to begin with. Props to you, Mister well I don’t know your last name. So there I was in South Austin (what a trek) loading this heavy bastard of plastic and glass into my back seat.
For nearly the past two years Holland and I have been watching most of our TV on my 20 inch iMac, downloading it from, well it must be from something. That wire plugs into the wall and I imagine it goes somewhere. We sure do get a lot of shows and movies from … somewhere. And no commercials either. I subscribe to The Daily Show and The Colbert Report on iTunes and the rest, well I’m a big slut for hard drives and let’s leave it at that.
We have had a television, a 12 inch model from some abandoned room in Holland’s mom’s house. It’s very cute and easy to pick up with one hand. Back in NJ after I failed to convince Verizon that I only wanted DSL and not a telephone, then I subscribed to Comcast and got HBO by lucky accident, it got more use than I expected. But since moving to Texas the rabbit ears don’t pick up much worth watching. It’s kind of nice since you’ll turn on the tv when you know there’s something you must watch (mainly the Superbowl and the Simpsons). Otherwise it’s off.
It surprises me what a difference a big TV makes. There’s still literally nothing worth watching. With some sophisticated RCA rabbit ears bought only 2 years ago at Target, we get only 6 stations in English (but I’m debating my decision to delete the Spanish channels, since they offer an incredible level of enthusiasm). As far as I can tell, TV is a government franchised method to advertise pickup trucks.
But these 27 bright diagonal inches of nothing entice me. Only a little bigger (and less widescreen) than my iMac, which holds literally over 600GB of entertainment offerings, I’m watching CSI Miami reruns on TV. I like CSI: Miami because Horatio cares about the children.
Maybe this will pass.
About the time this TV was manufactured in late 2004, I bought a Nintendo GameCube. I hooked it up via trickery to an old Apple computer monitor. Recently Holland and I have enjoyed Paper Mario on the Game Cube and wish there were more GameCube games worth playing. Sadly there are not.
After so much time where the excuse not to buy a Wii was that our TV was the same size as the controller, now what is our excuse?
The excuse is you can’t fucking buy a Wii, even a year and a half after its debut. It’s just as well, because the next time I go to Target to pick up prescription drugs, expired meat, and beer, if they have a Wii on the shelf then it’s mine.