Let me give some perspective on the whole “review” angle here, because I think that a history with smartphones and phones in general might tint the experience a bit.  I was late to the cellphone game by my normal early-adopter standards, getting one when I first moved to the Twin Cities in 2002.   My first cellphone was a Nokia brick which I could basically run a truck over and have no trouble with.   After a few years, I was getting a bit more advanced, I got a Samsung SGH-509 which was my first camera phone.  It was super thin which I was happy about.. people were commenting on the thinness of it a decent amount.   I think I had another phone in between but it was just a basic flip phone from AT&T.  I went from my super thin phone to a G1 when it came around, my first jump into the smartphone area.  That was 2 years ago (actually a little bit longer now) and now I am up for a renewal of my contract, which means some serious subsidies on a phone.

I picked up the iPhone first, and it was immediately awkward in my hand.   It felt about as thin as my SGH was, which is pretty damn thin.  I know it isn’t because the specs don’t match up, but the G1 is a weighty phone in your hand, you really cup it.   I have also been told I have reasonably sized hands, so maybe bigger phones are just for me.  The other thing I noticed was that it was all glassy.   I usually don’t like glassy, because I do tend to drop my phone about once a week.   My G1 has held up admirably to the drops, landing mostly on it’s back but sometimes on the screen.   I’ve seen some horror pictures of the glass on the new iPhone breaking but wanted to hold judgement.  It may hold up to more abuse than it feels.    I took a look at the screen, and it might just be because I am nearsighted, but I didn’t really see an immediate difference from the G1 that I am currently using.  I went to the browser and zoomed in a bit just to see a smooth curve or something.. then I zoomed out and I kindof saw what people were talking about with the higher resolution, but it wasn’t immediately like “wow this will make my life better”.    I’m also a guy who likes to code with Profont 9pt on a 1600×1200 or better screen, with coworkers regularly coming by and asking how I can even read the code that I’m writing, so it’s not like I don’t like me some high density display.  It just wasn’t something that I was going to drop $200 on.  On top of these, though, I can’t seriously consider the iPhone 4.  It’s not because of AT&T (which is atrocious here) or because I’m an Android fan, but because if I’m going to buy an phone that’s practically a computer, I want to be able to program stuff for it, and the last Apple computer in my house got sold a month ago when it broke down.

So I walked around the corner (no really, the stores are about 50 feet apart) and picked up the Samsung Vibrant.  It was much weightier in my hand, but it is still thin.  It wasn’t as much hefty and large in my hand as it was just weird to hold the phone with the crazy security device that they had on it.  I’ll give something to the Apple store, their security straps really don’t get in the way of you checking out the phone.   The iPhones were held down with a small, silver sticker thingy on the back.  All the phones in the T-Mobile store had the old stand-type security devices, meaning that if you want to hold it, you have a 1.5″ pipe sticking out the back of the phone.  Not exactly the best way to see if it’s the right size for your hand.  I wasn’t serious enough in my designs to ask a clerk if I could hold one without a security thingy on it.  It still seemed large.  The other thing about this security device thing was that it made it seriously hard to find the hold / on button on the phone.  It’s on the side, in a not so bad place actually because you could activate it with one hand and still be able to swipe your pattern in, but it was almost covered by the security thingy.

Enough complaining about the phone display quality. The Vibrant itself was quite snappy.   Faster than my G1 by far, and the screen was bigger, but it doesn’t seem to be the same increase in resolution as size.  I browsed to some of the same sites on the Android browser and did the multitouch zoom to the same curve as the iPhone 4, and it looked just as curvy as I had seen just minutes prior.  The Vibrant display was more… well.. vibrant as well, it seemed like the colors were brighter and the backlight a bit brighter.  It wasn’t any easier to read, mind you, just brighter.  I’d probably turn it down in real life to save battery.   It looked a lot like an iPhone 3, with a curved back and a nice big screen covering everything.  It’s a good style, and I like it possibly more than the iPhone 4′s solid lines and such because it makes it easier to cup it in the hand.   There was one big turnoff for me about the Vibrant though, and it was the useless tinkering that Samsung did with the launcher / home screen thing.  It wasn’t overbearing or anything but it was obviously different.   The most jarring was the browser, which had a new “home screen” which I wasn’t pleased with, and the browser was renamed “Web” which I have nitpicks about.  Anyway it was a good phone, but it was also above $100 (there’s a deal for $150 that I know about) and I wasn’t ready to drop that kind of cash for what amounted to an upgrade.

That’s the deal with these phones now.  The jump for me from a Nokia brick phone in 2002, to a flip phone in 2004, to a cameraphone in 2006 were just small steps in cell phones for me.  Each phone had just a small difference that was completely approachable compared to the previous one.  This one is easier to carry.  This one has a camera.  This one is thinner.   They were all basically the same device though, a phone.    The switch from a cameraphone to the G1 was such a change in how I conduct daily life it isn’t even comparable.  It was a revolutionary change in my computing style.  I carry a single device that handles my email, music, reading, todo lists, and on-the-go browsing.   It’s a small computer, and that’s the problem with the new phones I was looking at.  It’s just an upgrade from what I have already.   Switching to an iPhone 4 now is not going to change my life again, even if it has a screen with 300 dpi.   Switching to a Vibrant now isn’t going to change my life again, even if it is two times as fast.  Those changes are evolutionary, not revolutionary.  An upgrade is much less appealing.

Eventually my G1 will stop being upgradeable.  (I’m currently running the 2.2 software on it, and it’s pretty snappy)  Or maybe I’ll drop it and it will actually be broken one of these days.  Then I’ll buy a new phone.  Until then, I’ll continue having a great experience with a truly revolutionary phone, at least for me.

I had an issue with the program, because I like to go out to eat with my lovely wife fairly frequently.  This means that I am constantly trying to calculate the calories in meals, constantly overestimating or underestimating. Fast food is generally okay, because as a company gets larger in size more people will start asking for the nutritional facts. Of course marriage actually adds a lot more problems with the scheme because Diana likes to cook (and she cooks delicious meals), and those also don’t usually come with calorie content.

It wasn’t working out, so I ended up basically quitting after a while, because of the frustration with both the calorie counting, and I didn’t have an accurate scale.  A scale that you can depend on across the weighings is very important.  Luckily I fixed the second part of the equation.  I still haven’t figured out how to fix the first part, so I ended up giving up and modifying the diet.

My current plan is reliant on the weighing system, but doesn’t deal with the calorie counting.  So I weigh myself every day, and keep track of the average just like on the original diet.  Additionally, I’m adding an exercise component, in order to burn more calories off and make sure that I am calorie negative.  Of course, exercise has other benefits beyond just burning calories.  Getting out of the house and walking around helps me with listening to the podcasts that I want to, as well as some audiobooks.

I started the exercise at the beginning of the year, exercising on the treadmill and on the crosstrainer in the newly installed exercise room in the apartment complex.  My normal schedule was an hour five days a week, with a break day Thursdays and Sundays.  That was great and helped with my determination by having the days off. Everything was working for a while, but I think I started unconsciously eating more calories, compensating for the exercise, and I started to see stagnation.  To give my diet a kick, I started watching my intake as well, and that seemed to have the intended effect.

From the last month:

So just like the last time, I am using the tracking tools on physicsdiet.com to generate pretty graphs and give me the trend lines. Actually, I’m keeping track of my weight daily in a Field Notes memo book that I got on special and which is about the perfect size to keep right next to the scale, and then I transcribe them to the website about once a month. You can see here the time where I was stagnating at the beginning of June, and when I started watching my intake where the trend line starts going down more smoothly.

Entirety of the diet:

Here the stagnation is a lot more apparent. I was still making progress, but it was much slower from mid-April to the start of June.  Overall though I like this rate of weight loss.  One pound a week is what most people would call sustainable weight loss.  My short-term goal is to be below 300 pounds, which looks like it will occur this year. I don’t know what the long term goal is yet.  I’m hoping to make a post about once a month, if only to keep myself reevaluating myself.

Cullect was very focused around sharing your list.  It had a number of options for sharing to services like twitter, del.icio.us, facebook, whatever you could think of.  That is fine for sharing individual items, but the real gain would come from sharing a whole list.  You see the importance rank can work for you: it will make the best items from all time come to the top.  In this way, you put Cullect to work as a curation tool, hiding things that are irrelevant, and recommending items that you would like more of.  As a bonus, you can have multiple people who are curating a list, recommending and hiding items as they see fit.

Now we get to the skitzophrenia though, because a list couldn’t serve two purposes at once.  If you have a reading list, you would hide items as soon as you had read them, because you’ve already seen the information.  Even if it’s the most important item tomorrow, you won’t want to read it again.  If you’re curating a list however, you never want to hide the most important items, making it a pain to skip past the ones that you’ve read every time.  Even on the most active topics, the most important items are static for hours or days.   If I’m curating a list, I always switch to the latest feed, so that I can look at the newest items and bump them up by recommending them if they are good.  Multiple curators make this an issue though, because my fellow curators may hide items that I could recommend.

You have two tools: a great reader that you can just sit down at and read for 10 minutes and know you’re reading new, interesting, “important” things, and a excellent tool for showing the best content in a particular area.  You can’t have your cake and eat it too though, which might be a feature that could push it over the top.   You can fix this by splitting the “read” and “hidden” flags in the database, so that curators can choose between the “important and not read” view and the “important all time” view.  You might even extend the concept to allow a user to decide how to time-limit the importance view.  This type of time-limiting is a powerful tool – you could build feeds that only show a single item from each day (or week.. or month), just the one that is most important.

This “concept problem” has been bouncing around in my head for a while now, but it’s still not fully formed for some weird reason.  It could indicate that I’m just not seeing the forest for the trees, or that I’m getting a little too hazy on the problem because there is so much which was done right with Cullect.

Next, I’ll talk about a feature that I’ve been wanting for a while in any reader, that seems like a slam dunk for Cullect.

The first of these features, and the one which was most visible and that I want the most, was the way that it made reading a lot of feeds a trivial task.  This was because it included a recommendation system that would rank the stories that you hadn’t hidden (which is somewhat, but not exactly analagous to “read”, a topic I’ll take on in a later post).   It used the fact that you liked some feeds better than others to put those at the top.  I don’t know the whole algorithm, but there was a hidden social aspect as well – if some other people “recommended” the story, then it would get more importance.   This was brilliant, because you could spend ANY amount of time looking through your feeds, sorted by importance, and be sure that you weren’t missing the big story of the day.   When you got bored with the stories, you would just leave, knowing that you wouldn’t be missing anything that was more important.

Some other aggregators would like you to think that they have something similar, sorting by something like times recommended, or amount of comments, or votes, but they are not the same.  Importance score was tailored to each post, and to each Cullection (a set of feeds).   This made it personalized to you, and presented the things that YOU wanted the most.   Unfortunately, I think that one of the reasons Cullect ended up shutting down was because recalculating all of the importance scores was very CPU consuming, and it was taking too many resources.

Since the takedown of Cullect, I’ve been using Google reader as a passable replacement.  Recently (as in, like the last year?) they added a bunch of new features, including “liking” a story, sharing stories with friends (another thing which Cullect excelled at), and “Sort by magic”.  It’s not exactly the same as sorting by Importance I am sure, but it is the most likely the closest thing out there.   It seems to have a little more in common with the “popularity” indices that other aggregators are using, but I was happy to see something at lease somewhat similar show up in the reader that I ended up using as a replacement.    Still, I hope that Cullect can come back in some form in the future, as it was hands down the best reader that I had ever used.  That’s not to say that there weren’t problems with the site, though.  I’ll cover some of it’s disconnects in part 2.

Garrick is still making cool new properties.  I’m using kernest on this site to get fonts that I like out to every modern browser with little effort.

Because I love the iPad, it’s such a great piece of tech.   I can even buy into the “new world” of non-multitasking (noone really multitasks anyway) and non-filesystem world.  I can see building apps for it, but I don’t want to work in the closed system which is the Apple universe, where everything is gatekeepered by a process which has been opaque at best.  It’s all of the arguments against the iPhone’s development model, except on a larger scale.  There were companies who wanted to develop software for the iPhone that were niche apps – things like warehouse inventory systems.  The iPad is larger, it’s about the perfect size to walk around with and read stuff off of.  10 hours of battery life means it lasts through the whole workday.

Of course, there is a back door into most of the new apps – the web browser.  The best part of this may be that you can use it perfectly as a portal to a web app that can build you anything you need. Apple may be getting what they wanted at the start for the iPhone with the iPad.  We all remember the few months before there was an SDK when the party line was that you could do everything with web apps?  It’s much more likely with a nine inch screen and a blazing fast browsing experience.  Web apps are also the end-around of all the restrictions that Apple places on their “approved” apps.  You want a picture of an iPhone in there?  It’s just a GIF.  Want to put some “adult” content in?  HTML5 video to the rescue!  The only thing you can’t do is background processing, but you can’t even do that with real apps.  There’s no API bugs to work around.  It’s not exactly the same as a real app for low-latency things like gaming.

At any rate, I’m still going to develop web apps, and I think that the iPad will be the kick in the pants that the industry needs to make a decent tablet.  Android phones are getting better, and accelerating, in large part because the iPhone changed the smartphone ecology forever.  If the iPad does the same to the tablet market, it will be a very exciting future.

The ocean extended out into the horizon, and we sat on the patio (lanai) to eat breakfast which today was cereal with milk. It is quite relaxing and especially knowing that I didn’t have anything really planned for the day. We decided to make this a little excursion day, finding the nearest large-ish town and looking around. We drove down to Hanalei which is the nearest town of any size. The road down is pretty steep and includes a one-lane bridge, saying something about how many people are around here often. It is obviously one of the less-populated islands. Hanalei itself is a fairly small town which borders a very large beach. I would estimate that it is about the same size as Pella, Iowa.. maybe a little larger. It’s hard to gauge because it is very spread out along the beach. We stopped for some lunch and looked around the shops for a while. Then I bought some sunglasses because I lose every pair that I own after a max of a week.

Afterwards we decided to explore the small condo complex that we are staying in. The pool was found, and is open from 7am-7pm. The hours are a little strange, but it is not lighted, so I guess it is better for the night to be swim-less and also accident-less. I had heard about Sealodge Beach that is near the complex, accessible by trail and wanted to go down there. The trail was marked with a sign saying that it was steep, slippery, and dangerous. Thinking it was only to ward off liability, we started down the trail, which was immediately quite steep. There was then a little creek and then a steep hill that we went both up and down the other side. It was really like hiking through the jungle. The path was quite beaten though so it was well-travelled at least. After the hill we came to the ocean, where the coast is covered with huge porous lava rocks. At this point we either took the wrong way, or the trail got a lot more treacherous. It was very narrow and right along the dropoff which was rocky. People with little hiking skill shouldn’t really take the course. I didn’t realize until later how scary it was for Diana, and now I wish we hadn’t gone farther than the first view of the ocean which was spectacular and much less scary. When we finally could see the beach, we found our way to the end of the trail which was a quite large drop (>4 feet) before the beach was accessible. I think we either didn’t see the right path, or we were supposed to take some other way down the rocks. In any case, we didn’t have the right footwear for this hike – we were both wearing our sandals at the time. I think that Di got some good pictures of the hike before it got to the scary part. We went back to the scenic look of the ocean and relaxed a while, and then again back to the condo from there with some rests. We warned a couple off the trail who was also wearing sandals on the way down, and told another of how it got much harder down the way. I also lost my newly-purchased sunglasses somewhere on the way back up, setting a new record of about 2 hours from buy to lose. I’ll need to buy another pair. I’m still thinking of trying to make it there again. Knowing the way makes it a bit less scary, because you know that you can get there. I don’t think I can convince Diana to let me head down there though, she was very scared for our safety near the rocks.

After the hike to the beach, we relaxed for a little while and then decided to head for some dinner. We drove again to Hanalei and spotted a pizza place called Tiki Man Pizza. The wait was a bit long, there were apparently some large orders (the man mentioned something like 8 pizzas for one group) but it was worth it. We had a pork pizza with pineapple and extra cheese. It was some of the best pizza I’ve had in a long time. The sauce had just a little sweet barbeque in it, which gave it a nice taste. There was music at the bar next door as well, but it took a turn for the “frat boy” as Di put it, so we decided to go to another place for dessert and drinks. We ended up heading to Bar Acuda which had an interesting atmosphere which seemed a bit more high-class. We had some cocktails and wine and a nice dessert chocolate ice cream.

It being about 2am our time at this point, we headed back to the condo. It started to sprinkle a little bit and we walked out on the lawn to see the Kilauea Lighthouse flashing it’s warning to boats (although we have seen exactly zero boats in the water off the coast so far). The rain didn’t come in the condo so we just left the windows open even though it could get a bit cold at night as we found out our first night. Anyway that was Day 1. We’re headed to the lighthouse again today I think, and maybe to the beach to try some snorkeling and swimming, and relaxing.

Check out Diana’s Post for Day 1

This particular image is kindof hard to make out in the black and white which it was modified into to make it look old. The original is a little easier to see the actual lava which is flowing from an eruption happening in the center to another pool of lava rock.

There are four different types of lava, which are based on the chemical composition of the lava itself, but that correlates with the temperature. It is of course, extremely hot, with the coolest form of lava being at least 1000 degrees Fahrenheit. A lot of the lava which is in the US is in Hawaii – it would be nifty to see some of it, but hopefully not the quick flowing kind. We’re heading there on our honeymoon later this year, so it’s a possibility. One of the things that has always fascinated me is Pillow lava, which is when lava is extruded under water and instantly cools and solidifies partially. It also looks really cool. I found out that it is also used as a way-up criterion because of the way it is formed with the ridges normally on the top.

This is a microscopic picture of Radiolaria. Again the image comes from Jupiter Images. They represent a species which has been around for a very long time, since the Cambrian period, so basically 500 MILLION years ago. Because they have been around for so long, but not forever, finding fossils of the Radiolaria are important for dating things.

Radiolaria were popular with amateur scientists in the victorian era thanks to some elaborate drawings that are now part of wikimedia commons. Some of these cellular organisms can become very complex and beautiful. They are still inspiring artists today, as seen on the art page at Radiolaria.org.

Wonderful.

The image in question comes from Jupiter Images stock photography, and is labelled as “Ascaris bivalent mitosis magnified 200x”. Ascaris is a roundworm, which can infect pigs or humans. It lives in the small intestines and produces lots of eggs. This reminds me of an episode of the Soup where they had some stupid reality show doctor clip about getting tapeworms because of bad sanitation, which is where you would get these. Ascaris lumbricoides is the most common worm infection, affecting more than a billion people.

Just one more reason for me to wash my hands.

This is the first in a (hopefully) long series of posts in which I am attempting to identify all of the pictures in the opening credits of The Big Bang Theory. I’ve done some minor searching on the web for something of this nature but haven’t found anything, and I’m always wondering what the heck all of those pictures flying by in the second half of the intro are actually. I’ve decided to start at the beginning, mostly because the pictures will be easier to identify.