State of the Jezlyn
[Editor's note #2: Post updated with my Brightkite link.]
[Editor's note: will update the post later with the link to my posts on Brightkite. Inconveniently, Brightkite is down right now (6:27PM Central, Oct. 8).
]
As for the trip itself, it went really well. We both were really impressed with the bay area and were psyched to find out how much it fit with our interests. For example, we love Japanes food & culture, and the Japanese stores and restaurants we checked out were great. We'll definitely be spending a lot of time at Mitsuwa, Kinokuniya, Tomi Sushi, and discovering new places to try. There was also an abundance of Filipino restaurants compared to here in Chicago. Jollibee! I have no idea why there isn't a Jollibee in chicago when there is a sizeable Filipino population here. >:-\ Moot now that we're moving. We had two great Filipino dinners with my extended family on my mom's side, one at Tribu in San Bruno, and the other a couple nights later at Ongpin in South San Francisco. Both kind of far from the Santa Clara/San Jose area, but worth the drive. I might drive the hubby nuts driving around to try the different Filipino restaurants around, or finding Filipino grocery stores to frequent.
We hit a few malls (Valley Fair & Santana row, Great Mall (that's where the Jollibee is in Milpitas), and Oakridge Mall), a few Fry's Electronics to see the themes, and sampled Peet's coffee. We tried to find the shopping areas to figure out where they would be in relation to where we'd live. We didn't want to end up somewhere where it takes 20-30 mins just to do a quick grocery run. Overall we wanted to pretend like we were already living there as a practice run. And we were happy to find out that the Santa Clara/San Jose area fits in quite well with how we're used to living out here in the west Chicago suburbs, except it seems like it's a lot easier to get around, due to a better-planned road network. Oh yeah, we also had our first In-N-Out burgers, which were good, but nothing spectacular, IMO. *shrug* Anyway, if you check out my posts on Brightkite, you'll get an idea of where we all went. I used it to kind of help me remember where we visited.
I've rambled on long enough, even though I've only glossed over some of the major things we did. It was a great trip, & we're excited to be moving out there. The hubby said at one point, "Why haven't we moved here sooner?" That's how good it was.
It’s a little silly to be excited about this…
Editor’s note: Because of WordPress’s lame way of not easily embedding video, I had to add the link to the end of the article, even though Posterous correctly embedded the video on my Posterous blog. Get with the program, WordPress.
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…but I still am. Earlier this evening I sent a reply to William Gibson (@greatdismal) about the Sony Rolly, since he had posted a link to a demo video of the Rolly. I sent him a link to a Rolly video I recorded at a Sony Style about a year ago. Told him I’d buy a Rolly if I had the spare cash. To my surprise, I saw that he retweeted the link to my video! William Gibson looked at my video (for however long) and retweeted a link to it! I really didn’t think that he would even see my tweet, so I was pretty psyched. I know it’s really silly to be proud of this, but I am. 
Here’s the video I linked him to: http://vimeo.com/1066182
Snakes on a Cane!
Now, as I blogged before, I loved the movie Snakes on a Plane. It had a great online “cult” presence and I thoroughly enjoyed it, even though it was far from being best movie of the year. Anyway, I just found out a little while ago that Fox has started a little viral campaign of its own for the fall 2009 season premiere of House, M.D that riffs off of “Snakes on a Plane”. They sent out a bunch of awesome black t-shirts with this logo:
And you can see this same t-shirt on snakesonacane.com. I first read a tweet about this from Kath from Give Me My Remote, and that’s how I found out about the viral site Fox put up. So far it has a countdown clock indicating how much time is left before the season premiere (I presume). Clever! At this moment the premiere is 36 days, 19 hours, and some odd minutes and seconds away. It does get me excited for the season premiere, especially thinking about how last season ended (won’t go into detail so as not to spoil anyone). Why do the TV bloggers get all the cool schwag? Hey Fox PR people, how about throwing me a House t-shirt?
P.S. Hugh Laurie…swoooooooooon…
Bollywood Hero flash mob: good viral marketing
As I was browsing my Twitter backlog I saw this tweet from Steve Isaacs:
“I’m totally gonna watch the Bollywood Hero mini-series on IFC because of that awesome Times Square stunt. #nyc #win” Then I scrolled down more and saw what he was talking about: “This RULES! Indian dance flash mob in Times Square for Chris Kattan’s “Bollywood Hero” on IFC: http://bit.ly/ZnAN3 #nyc” Great video! And like he said, now I’m interested in watching the show, simply due to this one short video. Good on you, IFC. You guys know how to take advantage of viral marketing in the way it was intended. Now hopefully Bollywood Hero is as entertaining as this video is.Pixel in mid-stretch
Caught thanks to the quick “burst” photos I can shoot with the iPhone 3G. Edited in Photogene and Photo fx before posting. Couldn’t do anything about the blown highlights, but fixed the contrast and color pretty well (at least it looks good on my small screen).
*emera – fashionable women’s camera totes
Awesome-looking camera bags for ladies. Most techie bags I’ve seen “for women” look like such a joke, clearly designed by men or by women who have awful, awful fashion sense. Pink is not the favorite color of all ladies, okay?
I’ve been searching for a bag that I can throw my camera gear into along with miscellaneous personal items like my Moleskine wallet and such. The only thing I don’t like about this bag is that it seems not to have a laptop compartment. However, most of the time I don’t bring my laptop with me on shoots, so this isn’t a dealbreaker. It just would’ve been nice to have one bag serve as my day bag, camera gear bag, and purse. 2 out of 3 isn’t bad.
I’m definitely going to get one of these sometime soon.
Can this pull me away from my iPhone?
I am quite the iPhone enthusiast, but before I finally got the iPhone 3G, I was using a Sony Ericsson P1i. I loved that phone. It had a great camera, even though it was lower-res than my Nokia N95. The camera UI was quite user-friendly and a bit snappier than the N95′s. Once I figured out the hotkeys, it was easy to change settings on the fly without having to navigate an on-screen menu. The overall UIQ OS was a bit fussy, but there were many things I liked about it over S60 3rd-edition. I loved the unique keyboard on the device. I got really good at typing fast on it. I even really liked Opera Mobile and Opera Mini on the P1i. I almost upgraded to the K850i before I decided to go with the iPhone. IMO, Sony Ericsson does cameraphones just right. They basically shoehorned a Sony Cybershot camera into nice phones. And their Walkman line of phones use a great UI that’s very similar to the PSP/PS3 menus.
While I am eagerly anticipating the update to the iPhone 3G, and it’s highly likely that I will upgrade to it (if I can afford it), I am very, very intrigued by the Sony Ericsson Satio (though I’m not so enthused by the name):
I think I saw news about this phone when it was still called the Idou, but I hadn’t paid too close attention to it at the time. I’ve been bad about keeping up with tech news lately, and this, among other things, slipped by me. However, after I saw today’s news about the final name of Satio, I went looking up more info about it on Engadget Mobile and saw this video they did. Very cool idea behind the phone, merging the Cybershot and Walkman lines of phones together. I also love that it’s Sony’s great UI over Symbian S60. I haven’t been too impressed by Nokia’s half-assed implementation of touch S60, so I’m hoping that Sony did better.
Even though I think that the iPhone has a great combo of OS, UI, and App Store, I do miss using other phones sometimes. The Satio looks like a great gadgety phone with features that I would love. The Palm Pre looks great, but I really don’t want to switch to Sprint. I already switched from T-Mobile to AT&T when I got the 3G, and my contract hasn’t run out yet. Besides, I was on Sprint a long time ago (using a Nextel phone before it got popular and then annoying) and don’t want to go back. I know the Pre is going to be released on other carriers later, but it could be quite a long time before it’s available from AT&T, if ever. Anyway, the Satio just seems really interesting to me right now. I was disappointed when the P1i never got updated, and SE subsequently dumped UIQ. But the Satio seems like the natural successor to the line of smartphones that the P1i was a part of. I’m very eager to see how the Satio looks like in person. And I’m glad that even though there’s been some bad financial news with Sony Ericsson lately, they still seem like they’re working hard to release interesting phones, which is more than I can say for other phone manufacturers in the dumps.
No, I mean tonight, in the building. Suddenly. Into our lives.
For the first time ever, every week/weekend in the month of May features a new movie that the hubby and I want to see. The movie industry is getting plenty of money from us this month. This week brings Terminator Salvation, yeah!
Anyway, last weekend the hubby and I watched Angels and Demons. It was alright. We probably could’ve taken last weekend off and waited to rent the movie. It wasn’t really necessary to see it on the big screen. At least we were able to see it during the afternoon at matinee prices.
Getting to the point of this blog post, we saw that one of the characters in the movie was played by Cosimo Fusco, the actor who played Paolo on Friends, one of my favoritest TV shows ever. When we saw him on screen, I whispered to the hubby, “he’s a huge CRAPWEASEL!”, a famous quote from the show, paraphrased. BTW, if you want to see the scene where Ross tells Paolo this, pull up this video and go to minute 4:45. Well, when I checked out IMDB for Angels and Demons to see the rest of the cast list (I do this a lot), I happened to notice a very funny Friends-related discussion thread on Cosimo Fusco’s IMDB page. Since it requires registration to view it, I took the liberty of screencapping the thread for your viewing pleasure:
Bwahahahaha! It’s not really fair to the actor to only be known to the majority of American audiences as “Paolo” on Friends or as a crap weasel, but the IMDB thread is still frickin’ funny. **sheepish grin**
Sharpie Pen 6-pk test
Yesterday afternoon I went out in search of a multipack of Sharpie pens. Recently I had started using one again after reading a thread about them on FriendFeed. I had a pack & used one a long time ago, but at that time I was into pens with a finer line, like my favorite Sakura Pigma Micron 01s. But after I rediscovered the Sharpie pens, their thicker line started to grow on me. Anyway, in the FriendFeed thread (editor’s edit: I think!) I had read about the 4-packs with black, blue, red, and green. I went out in search of the 4-pack, but found something better — a 6-pack with orange and purple included! You all probably know my favorite color is purple, so this was quite a find for me. Hopefully when I test the colors below, none of them look bad. I’d read some complaints that the blue pens had some inconsistent shades. Anyway, here is a color test…
blue – not bad, nice slightly peacock shade (at least in the current lighting)
red – also not bad, would’ve preferred darker
green – I don’t usually like green, but this is nice & bright
orange – I’m also not a big fan of orange, but again the clear brightness of the shade is good
purple – Cool, the deep purple shade I was expecting!
Looks like I spent my money well.
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Editor’s note: the picture above doesn’t quite illustrate the bright transparency of the green and orange shades, or the slight peacock shade of the blue. I was too lazy to try to get closer to the original colors.
“You hear that TV networks? That is the sound of inevitability. That is the sound of your mistake.” ***
Yesterday I posted a rant about how the TV networks were completely clueless when they made Hulu take their content off of Boxee. Well, it was inevitable; here is a workaround from Jake Marsh. He has an alpha plug-in for Boxee on Macs and an RSS feed to add to Boxee on Apple TVs called TV Library. It doesn’t just add Hulu, though. It also adds Veoh, YouTube, Google Video, Tudou, 56.com, Guba, MegaVideo, YouKu, and Tu.tv. Many of these I haven’t even heard of, so I am interested to see what shows they offer. The timing is great, and I look forward to seeing the finished product. In the mean time, the TV networks can *bleep bleep bleep*. Have fun filling in the blanks. **smirk**
***Gold star to anyone who knows what movie quote I altered for my post title.
Google Reader and Instapaper could be like chocolate and peanut butter (without the salmonella)
I was sifting through my many unread items in Google Reader when I had this random thought: it would be really cool if there were a “Read later” button in Google Reader that would automatically add the article in question to your Instapaper queue. I star a lot of items in Google Reader with the intent of reading the articles later. But of course it’s more likely than not that I star an article and never get back to it. If I could shuttle that article off to Instapaper, I could open the Instapaper app on my iPhone and have a lot of interesting content to browse through whenever I have a spare minute. Of course, I could just open the original article in another tab and then hit my “Read later” bookmarklet, but what can I say, I’m lazy…
Can someone please code up a Greasemonkey script or something to do this? That would be awesome (sort of…I use Chrome at work and Webkit nightly at home, so a Greasemonkey script might force me to go back to Firefox, but I would strongly consider it for a Google Reader -> Instapaper script).
An “aha” moment
Ever since I upgraded to an iPhone 3G, my iPod touch has been sitting around getting dusty. But tonight I realized one way I can effectively repurpose it — make it into my kitchen computer/cookbook. In the past, when I’ve wanted to make a note of a recipe, likely found on allrecipes.com, I merely Google Bookmarked it so I could pull it up in any browser later. But since for whatever reason Google Bookmark still doesn’t have an iPhone-friendly site (or even a regular mobile site, AFAIK), pulling up recipes isn’t that easy, requiring multiple clicks and zooming in on the recipe text just so to make it readable.
Just today I realized that it would be better just to clip the recipe text and maybe a picture and send it to Evernote. Then I can open the note in the Evernote app on the iPod touch and it’ll be nicely formatted for the small screen. Sweet!
All we know is that he’s called The Stig…
AWESOME!
After years & years of wishing there were season box sets of Top Gear available to purchase here in the US, I just now found out that iTunes has Top Gear, series 10 available for purchase! I can’t wait to see more seasons show up for sale. Very cool. The Stig approves.
More TV premieres this week!
Hi, Kids!
Quick TV programming note for this week: both Heroes and The Office are coming back! Heroes’ premiere is tomorrow at 8PM Central time. The Office’s premiere is on Thursday at 8PM Central. Get your DVRs ready!
One camera is never enough
Hi, Kids!
Just got back from a nice vacation out in the Seattle area. Luckily this weekend is a holiday weekend, so I have some extra time to recover.
So what’s with my post title? Its meaning is twofold:
1. I used several cameras during my vacation with wonderful results. Had a Nikon D80, Nikon F100, Nikon 35Ti, Vivitar Ultra Wide & Slim, Yashica T4 Super, Ricoh GX100, and a Polaroid SLR 680 SE, and an iPhone 3G. I used them all and got a fair number of keepers from each camera. Hopefully I can process a bunch of pictures and post them this weekend.
Each camera has characteristics that worked well in different situations, so there weren’t really any redundancies. I would possibly pare down my camera gear very slightly during my next vacation, but not by much. Perhaps leave the Ricoh GX100 and Yashica T4 Super behind next time…
2. Upon my return from vacation, I came across a couple exciting new cameras, both with HD video capabilities: the Nikon D90 and the Sony DSC-T500.
At one end of the spectrum, the D90 is the first DSLR to shoot video, 720p HD video to boot! There are some limitations, as I understand it, like not having the ability to auto-focus while shooting the video. However, given the flexibility of being able to shoot video with any lens, and being able to set the depth of field through aperture settings, I think having this video capability on the D90 is a great advantage. Imagine shooting wide-angle, fisheye video, or macro video just by switching the lens…very cool!
At the other end of the spectrum, the Sony DSC-T500 looks like a sweet, sleek, pocketable camera with a huge touchscreen LCD that can also shoot 720p HD video. You can shoot stills (not sure if you can shoot at full, 10MP resolution, though) and use optical zoom while you are shooting HD video, both rare features on P&S cams. I am not sure if the D90 can do that. The T500 also has optical stabilization, which is a welcome feature in a small P&S. It’s not a new feature; it’s just preferable to the other method of stabilization via forcing a higher ISO, which has become somewhat prevalent on recent P&S cams to save on manufacturing price.
Yes, the T500′s image quality will be somewhat hampered by the small sensor typical of pocket P&S cameras, but this would be a companion camera to my other cameras, digital or film, so I’m not so worried about the T500′s small sensor. Besides, I’ve shot wonderful pictures with my plastic Vivitar “toy camera”, so it’s really just a matter of knowing a camera’s advantages and limitations and shooting with them in mind.
Both of these cameras have really caught my attention; I’m eager to see them in person soon and give them both a test drive!
Yeah, Wargames!
So excited! Tonight we are going to see Wargames (the original 80′s movie, Ladies and Gents) on the big screen. I love this movie. It’s one of the movies that influenced my love of computers and technology, even though I was already leaning that way. We’d seen some commercials before a couple of the movies we saw recently about Fathom Events showing Wargames in theatres for one day, supposedly in celebration of the 25th anniversary of the movie. I think it’s more to pimp the straight-to-DVD release of the 2008 sequel to Wargames. I am really not that interested in the sequel at all; I can’t imagine that they could’ve done a good job with it. I am grateful that they’re re-showing Wargames on the big screen anyway. I never got to see it in the theatre. By the time I’d seen it, it was on HBO. Of course, with many movies that I saw on HBO, I watched it several times, whenever it was on.
Anyway, I don’t know how widespread this Wargames screening is, but I highly recommend going to Fathom Event’s site to see if it’s showing near you.
Eggs, Toast, and Bacon
Underneath the yummy melted cheddar is eggs baked into the middle of the bread. I used this recipe as my guideline:
www.aeb.org/KidsAndFamily/recipes/FriedEggToast.htm
I cut out the middles of the pieces of bread with a glass (I don’t have cookie cutters), then I sprayed the bread frames with a bit of Pam cooking spray. After placing the bread on the foil-lined cookie sheet, I broke an egg into each piece of bread. I sprinkled some garlic pepper seasoning mix over the eggs (the mix has a bit of salt along with other spices). Then I laid out 3 pieces of bacon around the edges of the cookie sheet, with one piece cut in half, to fit on the shorter edges of the cookie sheet. The whole thing baked in a 350-deg F oven.
At the 6-minute mark, I took out the cookie sheet to flip the pieces of bacon. 4 more minutes in the oven, then I transferred the bacon to a plate. I sprinkled some shredded cheddar on top of the eggs, turned off the oven, and put the cookie sheet back in for a minute and a half (I have a timer that can be set with minutes and seconds) to melt the cheese. And then it was all done!
Very easy to do, since everything bakes on one tray, and I could tend to other things while waiting for the food to cook. The toast turned out the right amount of soft in the middle and crispy on the edges (thanks to the cooking spray), and the eggs were just a tad bit underdone, enough that I could sop up a bit of the yolk with the bits of bread that didn’t have egg or cheese on them already. The bacon always turns out perfectly when baked this way. Ever since I read about how to cook bacon in the oven, I’ve been using this method. The only thing that I’d change next time — and yes, I’m going to make this again — is to cook the eggs a little less. I am a sunny-side-up fan. Maybe only cook the egg toasts for 7 or 8 minutes, and let the bacon finish up after the toasts are taken out. Otherwise, this was a great, filling meal. Mmmmm!
Sony Rolly does NiN
I love the Sony Rolly. It’s such a cute little, “Aibo meets mp3 player” kind of robot toy. When I first heard about it and saw videos demoing its functionality, it reminded me of the old Sony — the Sony that made really awesome gadgety stuff, whether or not it made sense as a mainstream product. They made tons of different electronic devices in strange form factors, and dominated the consumer electronics world. Unfortunately, that Sony has been replaced with “is it good for the shareholders?” Sony — a Sony that still makes some really lovely hardware, but has enough financial issues that they can no longer afford to make devices like the Clié (the absolute best line of Palm OS PDAs, closely followed by the Tapwave Zodiac) or the cute line of Aibos. When I saw the Rolly, I saw the old Sony taking a peek out from behind the stodgy, “bottom line is king”, new Sony. Don’t get me wrong, there are still plenty of innovative (and expensive) products coming out of Sony, like that super-thin, OLED TV that they are selling now, their interesting take on digital SLRs, the Sony Reader, and their fun line of phones, several of which I’m enamored with. I just miss all the fun, “What am I going to do with this?” products they used to have.
Anyway, this rambling is just an introduction to a video I put together recently. I was surprised to see the Sony Rolly displayed at the Sony Style store in Woodfield, so I busted out my phone to take a video of it in action. Too bad I didn’t have the N95-3 with me; I could’ve Qik’ed it… Oh well! The original song it was bopping to was “Love Song” by Sara Bareille (IIRC), but I forgot that I turned off the audio recording. The audio probably wouldn’t have turned out so well anyway, since there was some other music blaring in another part of the store. Luckily I was able to find a good replacement song that still fits with the Rolly’s dance moves. Strangely it’s quite a different song from the original tune that played — “Discipline” by Nine Inch Nails. Thanks, Trent Reznor, for Creative Commons licensed songs! I converted the video from the original 3GP format and added the song as the backing track in iMovie, quite a painless process. I was all smiles while I was watching the Rolly dance in the Sony Style, and I was still all smiles when I watched it dance to NiN. Pretty funny contradiction between a cutesy, mp3-playing robot toy and an angsty (but dancey) NiN song. See it for yourself!
Skitch to the rescue after all?
I’m not sure if this version of Skitch that I installed after upgrading to Leopard has better drawing capabilities, or if I just had to set up the preferences properly, but it seems a lot more responsive now. I don’t have to write so slowly just to get legible ink! Granted, it still looks a bit messy, but I think this could be a viable ink blogging tool to use on my Mac…
Yay!
Mobile Ink Blogging from the N810
Editor’s note about my last “quinkie” post: I composed and uploaded it from MaemoWordPy on my N810. The other times I posted quinkies, I actually inked them out and uploaded the pictures to Flickr from my 770, but then I went on my desktop PC to type up the description and post it to my blog from Flickr (for a few reasons that I won’t bore you with).
This time I tried out MaemoWordPy to see if it would properly upload the picture directly to WordPress.com, which other blog editors have screwed up in the past. It was a bit tedious to switch between MaemoPad+ and MaemoWordPy to type out the text “translation” of my ink post, but other than that, it was incredibly easy to compose and upload directly from MaemoWordPy. Very cool.
P.S. This post is also coming at you from MaemoWordPy.
Sony mylo, part deux
A couple of the devices that I carry with me everyday have all the features of the Sony mylo 2.0, and then some. Yet, I am still quite intrigued by this device. I can’t help it; it’s a shiny new gadget.
I doubt that many people bought the first mylo. It was a cool device, and I was quite excited to see one in person, but I think at the time of its announcement and release, there were other devices, including Sony’s own PSP, that had similar features plus more functionality, for less money. I had been hoping that perhaps the first mylo would’ve taken the same great media playback features and the wireless connectivity of the PSP and repackaged it into more of a communication device than a gaming device. I had also hoped that some of the technology in the mylo would have been ported back into the PSP — well, mainly the slide-out keyboard and the dedicated media playback controls. Entering text on the PSP is a pain.
However when I finally got my hands on the mylo, I was disappointed that it didn’t even support all of the audio and video codecs that the PSP did. At the time I had been pleasantly surprised that the latest firmware update for the PSP (3.x, IIRC) allowed it to support most audio and video podcast material formatted for the iPod without any transcoding. That, combined with the RSS support that allowed the user to download podcasts directly to the PSP, made the PSP a really nice media playback device for me. The PSP also had an okay browser that was marred by low memory errors and the lack of a decent text input method. The mylo seemed to improve on the PSP in that arena, slightly, but not enough to make it a great browsing device. These were my impressions from playing with a mylo at the Sony Style store for a while. I didn’t actually own a mylo, or get an eval unit, so it could be that later on Sony released some firmware updates to address some of these issues. Or perhaps some enterprising developers took on hacking the mylo as some had taken to hacking the PSP. I didn’t follow its development closely after the mylo’s release, since I had been rather disappointed with it when I saw it at the store myself.
All that being said, I think the updates that Sony made for the second-gen mylo really go far in addressing some of the issues I (and probably others) had with the original — updates to the browser to support more Flash content (still Flash lite, not full, desktop-machine-level Flash), more audio and video codec support (upon first glance it seems to at least be on par with the PSP’s codec support now), a backlit keyboard, and some refreshed hardware design in general. It’s interesting that it has a touchscreen now. This might make mobile browsing a nicer experience, instead of having to depend solely on a d-pad or joystick to move the cursor around the page. It’s also nice that it has a camera, though I wish it had higher resolution than 1.3 megapixels.
On the software side, the mylo is a lot more like the iPod touch than the N810. It’s more closed down, with a simplified interface that probably isn’t very tweakable. And it probably won’t ever have any full-fledged apps that can be installed, however it is interesting to note that in the features list on Sony Style, there is an item called “mylo Widgets”. Under that bullet point, it is clearly stated that, “…for the first time, users will be allowed to register as a developer in order to gain access to the technical resources they will need to build their own widgets.” For a consumer-level device that’s more on par with an iPod, this is sort of a unique feature. It’s not in Sony’s nature to allow a device to be open like this, even though widgets are pretty low on the totem pole compared to full apps. I know that the iPhone’s/iPod touch’s SDK is getting released in February, but the way the text reads from Sony Style, it seems more like any average user can register to create his/her own widgets, whereas the iPhone/iPod touch SDK seems more for established developers. I would be keen to see if any mylo widgets make their way over to the PSP platform.
Lastly, I like how Sony has taken the idea of free WiFi hotspot access that they first tried out with PSP users and carried it over to the mylo. I don’t know if Sony eventually did the same thing for mylo users before, but I did notice it this time around. The number of hotspots is limited, and I don’t know if there’s a time limit overall. IIRC, PSP users could have free WiFi hotspot access via T-Mobile for 6 months or a year. Either way, this helps take the sting out of not being able to be connected all the time via a GPRS/EDGE/3G connection.
These updated features make the mylo 2.0 a very nice addition to the internet tablet device space. Right now there aren’t many devices in that area, but the mylo’s competition is stiff, with the Nokia tablets and the iPod touch (and maybe a few others I can’t remember at the moment). While I’m not sure that the mylo will reach huge sales numbers, I’m still glad that Sony is releasing devices like this. It could be that somewhere down the line, mylo features will get ported into a new version of the PSP. Even if they don’t do something like that, I like that Sony is still taking a chance in niche markets and putting out products other than the PlayStation, TVs, and other mainstream, “sure bet” items. I’ve always been a fan of Sony’s imaginative devices and hardware designs, even though I don’t like some of the decisions they’ve made with their consumer electronics. The recent mylo and the Rolly mp3 bot products remind me of the old Sony I knew and loved during simpler times.
Google <3 Jaiku
Yay, great news for my favorite social network — Jaiku is joining Google. I am very excited to see how Jaiku grows with Google’s support. Of course, I have a bit of apprehension that being part of the Google “empire” might adversely affect Jaiku, but I am happy with a lot of other Google services right now, so I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt.
At any rate, big congratulations to the Jaiku staff is in order! I look forward to seeing fun stuff that I’m sure is in store for us Jaiku fans.
Powered by ScribeFire.
Fall 2007 TV show premiere dates (US)
UPDATE: If you’re looking for fall 2008 season premieres, CLICK HERE
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I’ve been seeing a lot of people getting to my blog via searches for “house md premiere” or some similar search keywords. Well, just to make things a little easier, here’s a link to epguide.com’s complete list of season premieres for this fall. I admit that I have some TV show premiere dates marked down in my Google Calendar so that I don’t forget them. *sheepish grin* Though, with all the anticipation we have for some premieres, I have it kind of burned into my brain that next week and the week after are big premiere weeks for a bunch of shows (all times below are Central Daylight Savings Time):
- Chuck – Sept. 24, 7PM
- Heroes – Sept. 24, 8PM
- Journeyman – Sept. 24, 9PM
- House, M.D. – Sept. 25, 8PM
- Bionic Woman – Sept. 26, 8PM
- Dexter – Sept. 30, 8PM
- Life – Sept. 26, 9PM
- The Office – Sept. 27, 8PM
- Cavemen – Oct. 2, 7PM
- Pushing Daisies – Oct. 3, 8PM
There are quite a few freshman TV shows on my list, but I haven’t heard one way or another if any of them are supposed to be good. Since I still have to wait until next year before Lost and Battlestar Galactica start again, I have some time to try out new shows. Of the older shows, I’m particularly excited for Heroes, House, and The Office to start back up again.
How about you? Any upcoming shows I should check out?
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