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Why so rabid a user base? You have me at that one – I’m hooked and have no clue why.

Then go here to enter the latest Gear Live contest. It might only be a 1st gen iPhone on the eve of the 3G launch, but it’s at the right price: free! There are other prizes too, but who cares: orange creamsicle iPhone!

It’s so good I’m writing this post while I watch a second time!

See something I like and think I might someday want to return? Click the star to bookmark it, and forget about it. If it’s something I’m likely to use frequently then another click of the star lets me add a few appropriate tags to speed up the search.

No longer do I have an organized collection of bookmarks, and a bookmarks bar crammed with common links and folders of bookmarks. With the ability to search my history and bookmarks from the address bar an entirely keyboard and search based browsing habit has evolved. A few Quicksilvr like keystrokes reveal an impressively accurate and intuitive list of what I want, culled from the URLs, tags, and titles of the visited pages.

The Firefox user interface has become minimal, The address and search bar, a list of my open tabs, and nothing else. Pure efficiency and elegance in internet consumption. I have achieved Firefox zen:

Interestingly enough it would seem that my visitors have as well. A quick look at the last few months of visitors shows that over half of my visitors have selected Firefox as their browser of choice with Internet Explorer coming in 2nd and Safari trailing in 3rd.

With the Mozilla Foundation putting so much effort into setting download records at the release of Firefox 3 I wonder how that percentage will grow in coming months both on Futurist Now as well as the internet as a whole.

Side note: yes, I see the irony in cheering for Firefox given where I work. I don’t actually see a problem with that – I think Firefox has given Internet Explorer a lot and the more recent versions of Internet Explorer have been better for the competition that Firefox and Opera have provided. I strongly believe that competition is the key to any successful market and am always happy to see multiple contenders reaching for the stars – the biggest winners in this kind of technology arms race are almost always the consumers.

As you can see the box that arrived is not terribly big. Even my wee EeePC is larger, and both are dwarfed by the 15″ Macbook Pro they alight upon. I immediately rip the box open with the only sharp implement handy.

Obviously I need a better sharp implement for my desk, or at any rate one less dangerous. Note to self: pick up giant serrated blade that will look good on a glass desk.

To help elongate my personal mysterious something experience both something’s came individually wrapped. Within seconds I had ripped into my smaller something, eager to divulge it’s contents.

A box! A tiny black box! Heart contain thyself. The box is constructed from pleather-clad cardboard and proclaims ‘Di Capri’ in embossed silver letters. What could be inside?

Cufflinks! Reasonably well put together and styled cufflinks at that. Luckily blue is my favorite color, and rectilinear forms are my favorite shapes. Worth the $10? For something #1 an enthusiastic yes. But what could the other (and ominously larger) something be?

This is either something fantastic, or something horrific.

It would seem the latter: something horrific yet delightfully soft. Either this is my new lounge wear, or the best white elephant gift for the upcoming holiday season. Worth the $10? For something #2 the verdict is a not so definite perhaps. It should be worth noting that the Something FAQ even specifically calls out the scenario of a feminine something going to a (somewhat) masculine guy so I can’t say I wasn’t warned.

End verdict: the Something Store gets a thumbs up in my book. Don’t bet the farm on them with their specifically random product delivery but for a fun way to blow $10 that’s likely less damaging to your liver than an evening out on the town check them out.

For a few more pictures of the Something Store unboxing extravaganza check out my Flickr set on the topic.

My new EeePC
I picked up one of Asus’s delightfully tiny new netbooks, the EeePC. A netbook is a new category of sub-notebook device with low end specs designed primarily for browsing the web. The EeePC clocks in at a measly 900Mz, but at 9″ and under 3 lbs it’s easy to forgive it’s specs in lieu of it’s ultimate portability. So far I’m finding it an ideal email machine for use at meetings at work, and as a great bedroom/couch machine for keeping an eye on the tubes while relaxing or watching movies.

Being entirely solid state (the EeePC 900 series comes with 12GB of flash memory rather than a hard drive with spinning platters) it’s shock resistant, and gets surprisingly good performance for it’s diminutive specs. Due to the random access nature of flash memory the EeePC boots quickly and gets great battery life (3 hours of real use). While solid state drive (SSD) technology is still not competitive in price or storage capacity to typical hard drive (HDD) technology I can see the potential and am starting to get excited about the predictions that in 2011 or so SSD will all but completely replace HDD technology in notebooks and desktops.

While the EeePC 900 I picked up came pre-loaded with Windows XP I’ve done some experimentation with putting Ubuntu on it. As with my typical annual cycle I attempt to put some variant of Linux on my computers to see how the OS X/Windows competition is doing. This time however I was surprised – the latest Hardy Heron (8.04) release of Ubuntu is slick, polished, and works ‘out of the box’ on all the hardware I had laying around. While Ubuntu might be getting attention as a decent desktop alternative where I think it really shines is on a low end PC like the EeePC – it’s limited feature set and lean architecture work perfectly on a device with CPU and memory constraints.

Movies
Being a 3 day weekend I took the opportunity to see a couple of movies with Brien and Brian. We saw both Indiana Jones 4: The Crystal Skull, and Iron Man. Both movies were excellent (if not over the top) and fun movies to see while on holiday. I was never the hardcore fan of the Indy series that Brien was, and much to his horror I actually liked the newest one best from the series. It captured the fun essence of the earlier flicks while maintaining a fresh and modern feel even while being set in not so modern times.

Iron man also kept a modern feel, although it did so with a very modern setting. Having never read the comic book I assume I missed out on a lot of the back story, but still found the story presented in the movie touching and engaging. Having grown up idolizing gadget superhero (Hello, Inspector Gadget) it’s nice to see a modern take on a technological super-hero. Final note on the movie: I need a flying metal suit, that looks fun!

Lensbabied sneaker opus
Last but not least, a quick shot I took with my Lensbaby 2G while out on a photo walk on Saturday. I’ve been using my 18mm and 50mm primes a lot and decided to take the Lensbaby out and go for a stroll. I’m certainly glad I did as one of the resulting shots is a clear winner in my odd little abstract world.

Well, carry on then.

I guess not everyone has to be into zoos. Personally I don’t much find animals interesting. Sure I love Skype and having him around is a blast, but I enjoy his companionship rather than a fascination with his non-humanness. From a photographic perspective zoos don’t really do it for me because of the cages and glass – I far prefer getting up close and personal with my subjects, really interacting with them to get the perfect shot.

Oh well, I had fun, learned something about myself as an adult, and avoided heatstroke for another day. All in all a positive way to spend a Saturday afternoon even if I won’t repeat the experience.

As strange as this sounds it does make sense – insurance and health care is expensive these days, and the lower salary ranges tend to have more physically oriented jobs. Not having the money required to fix the root cause of a particular pain leaves the sufferer with two choices: dull the pain with inexpensive drugs (read: over the counter drugs), or suffer onward enduring the pain. Neither option really strikes me as an ideal long term solution, but until a national health care plan with reasonable reach and plausible economics exists do we have another option?

A quick glance through the collection shows I have 8 of these movies unopened in my collection so those will be first up on the viewing list:

Barry Lyndon (1975)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Hotel Rwanda (2004)
Juno (2007)
Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
Magnolia (1999)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)
The Shining (1980)

Which leaves 168 remaining movies to select from, listed in the full post. If you have a suggestion of a favorite movie from below that you particularly like and think I should prioritize onto the list leave a comment and let me know!

3:10 to Yuma (2007)
8½ (1963)
A Christmas Story (1983)
A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
All About Eve (1950)
All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
American Gangster (2007)
American History X (1998)
Amores perros (2000)
Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
Annie Hall (1977)
Battaglia di Algeri, La (1966)
Belle et la bête, La (1946)
Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
Boot, Das (1981)
Bride of Frankenstein (1935)
Brief Encounter (1945)
Buono, il brutto, il cattivo, Il (1966)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
C’era una volta il West (1968)
Cabinet des Dr. Caligari., Das (1920)
Casablanca (1942)
Casino (1995)
Chinatown (1974)
Cidade de Deus (2002)
Citizen Kane (1941)
City Lights (1931)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Crash (2004/I)
Diaboliques, Les (1955)
Dial M for Murder (1954)
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
Double Indemnity (1944)
Du rififi chez les hommes (1955)
Duck Soup (1933)
Ed Wood (1994)
Fargo (1996)
Frankenstein (1931)
Gandhi (1982)
Glory (1989)
Gone with the Wind (1939)
Goodfellas (1990)
Grindhouse (2007)
Harold and Maude (1971)
Harvey (1950)
Heat (1995)
High Noon (1952)
His Girl Friday (1940)
Hot Fuzz (2007)
Hotaru no haka (1988)
Ikiru (1952)
In Cold Blood (1967)
In the Heat of the Night (1967)
Into the Wild (2007)
It Happened One Night (1934)
Jaws (1975)
Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Ladri di biciclette (1948)
Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Leben der Anderen, Das (2006)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
Lola rennt (1998)
Léon (1994)
M (1931)
Manhattan (1979)
Metropolis (1927)
Million Dollar Baby (2004)
Modern Times (1936)
Mou gaan dou (2002)
Mystic River (2003)
No Country for Old Men (2007)
North by Northwest (1959)
Notorious (1946)
Notti di Cabiria, Le (1957)
Nuovo cinema Paradiso (1988)
Oldboy (2003)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Once (2006)
Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
Out of the Past (1947)
Paths of Glory (1957)
Patton (1970)
Per qualche dollaro in più (1965)
Platoon (1986)
Quatre cents coups, Les (1959)
Raging Bull (1980)
Ran (1985)
Rashômon (1950)
Rear Window (1954)
Rebecca (1940)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Roman Holiday (1953)
Rope (1948)
Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
Salaire de la peur, Le (1953)
Scaphandre et le papillon, Le (2007)
Scarface (1983)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Shaun of the Dead (2004)
Shichinin no samurai (1954)
Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
Sjunde inseglet, Det (1957)
Sleuth (1972)
Smultronstället (1957)
Some Like It Hot (1959)
Stalag 17 (1953)
Stalker (1979)
Stand by Me (1986)
Strada, La (1954)
Strangers on a Train (1951)
Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927)
Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Sweet Smell of Success (1957)
Taxi Driver (1976)
The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938)
The African Queen (1951)
The Apartment (1960)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Big Sleep (1946)
The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
The Conversation (1974)
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
The Departed (2006)
The Elephant Man (1980)
The Exorcist (1973)
The General (1927)
The Godfather (1972)
The Godfather: Part II (1974)
The Gold Rush (1925)
The Graduate (1967)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Great Dictator (1940)
The Great Escape (1963)
The Green Mile (1999)
The Hustler (1961)
The Kid (1921)
The Killing (1956)
The Lady Vanishes (1938)
The Lost Weekend (1945)
The Maltese Falcon (1941)
The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)
The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
The Night of the Hunter (1955)
The Ox-Bow Incident (1943)
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
The Pianist (2002)
The Prestige (2006)
The Searchers (1956)
The Sting (1973)
The Third Man (1949)
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
The Wild Bunch (1969)
To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
Touch of Evil (1958)
Umberto D. (1952)
Unforgiven (1992)
Untergang, Der (2004)
Vertigo (1958)
Vita è bella, La (1997)
Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
Wo hu cang long (2000)
Yojimbo (1961)

Update:Removed Amelie and Spirited Away from the list as I didn’t recognize their non-translated titles. Bad Sparky – BAD!

Without further ado: http://sparktography.tumblr.com/

Update: Tumblr ended up being close to what I want, but not quite it. Tumblr will only allow short form content and won’t import long format blog posts. I also noticed it copies Flickr photos locally and re-compresses them which adds a slight color cast and loses the tack-sharpness that so much effort goes into on the front end.

Anyone know of a better aggregation service with similar features that I could check out? Leave a note in the comments with a link to it. If I don’t find anything readymade I guess I’ll have to roll up my sleeves and make something.

*wonder, wonderment, and wonderfulness not guaranteed. All Sparky all the time has been known to cause health complications in certain situations. If you experience a Sparky lasting more than 4 hours consult with a physician immediately.

Enjoy, just don’t enjoy too much – we all know what happens when OMFGTOOMUCHCOFFEE is consumed.

What makes Traskpro so great? What do I do with it?

• Manage projects at work
• Keep track of all the little details
• Brainstorm ideas
• Create shopping lists
• Plan maintenance projects around my condo
• Capture ideas for creative photography
• Track car maintenance needs
• Know who has borrowed one of my DVD’s
• List my goals the next 1, 2, 5 and 10 years
• Maintain a list of expenses for reimbursement

Amazing ehh – give it a whirl or check out the Traskpro blog – you can do all these things and more! With Traskpro’s flexible design you can track almost any kind of information – all for free!

Now what would a big Traskpro advert like this be without a few power user tips? Traskpro uses the URL to determine what tag you are viewing – this means that you can bookmark frequently used tags for quick access. I am able to use this feature by setting my internet home page to my “work” tag at work, my “personal” tag at home, and the high priority view on my iPhone – whenever I open a browser I immediately see a highly contextual view of tasks related to my current environment.

Further to URL bookmarking when setting a sort preference the sort preference is added to the next page view URL. This allows you to bookmark not only a specific tag, but also to make it so whenever visiting the bookmark the sorting options can be left intact – useful for power users looking to really take control of a large list of tasks.

Aside from the car life has been good. Traskpro has his a solid and stable 0.9 (and graduated from alpha to beta) and is rocking my task list right and left. I even have acquired a few other heavy users which is oddly gratifying. I’ve still got 31 remaining features/tweaks to make, but those can happen gradually over the next few weeks as I continue to ramp up on JavaScript.

Also in the world of good things Scott came over last night. He hadn’t experienced a proper viewing of Pirates of the Caribbean: At Worlds End so we did dinner and a showing of that. As silly and overly-Disney as the film is I really do enjoy watching it. I really do hope that big budget swashbucklers never die – they are just so much fun to experience.

Right – back to work now. I have to finish up a ton of stuff today and tomorrow to be ready to take off a few days to be home for Christmas!

This has been quite the productive and exciting weekend: I’ve seen Alissa’s play again (this time with Jesse and Brenda), taken interesting makeup photos with Jessie (see above), learned bucket loads about SQL, and released an early alpha of Traskpro.

I’m feeling surprisingly good given that I didn’t have much downtime this weekend. Having a personal project like Traskpro has re-energized me. I’d forgotten how fun coding can be – particularly with tons of small rewarding features to work on. I feel like I’m using agile with a 2 hour sprint!

Traskpro is finally feature-complete enough to stand up to day to day use. I still have a TON of work left to do on it, but that can happen over the next few weeks. Go in and check it out – updates from now on will be pretty much transparent to the users. The temporary production location is at Traskpro.com – I’ll be getting a more official URL for it shortly.

Update: Changed the URL above to the actual production URL. No more temporary URL’s for me baby!

Via Photododo

Things have been pretty crazy of late and I’m stressed out as a result. Work has been and explosion of activity and my personal life has been busier than I would like. It’s all added up to me being stressed out. After last week I decided I needed a plan to get things back under control at work, as well as a plan for getting better control of my other commitments.

My boss has been somewhat unhappy with the performance of the team. I’ve decided the only way to make things better is to reapply myself to my job and focus on keeping my eye not only on the project’s current status, but also looking ahead a release or two making sure we don’t paint ourselves into a corner or repeat old mistakes.

I’m making a few modifications to my typical productivity style and adopting some of the more extreme GTD behaviors to try and better segment my time and plan better. I’m also going to get more into my backpack for tracking little tasks.

Luckily I have a few things to keep me distracted. Earlier in the week I purchased all 5 seasons of Mythbusters on iTunes and am slowly perusing it on my AppleTV. It’s funny that these days a single click can cost $100 and take 2 days of bandwidth on my fast connection to deliver 58Gb of content. 48 hours might seem like an excessive download time, but for perspective bear in mind that my Mythbusters collection spans over 80 hours of content so leveled out to be nearly a twice-realtime media acquisition.

Super Mario Galaxies came out this week for the Wii. It’s a load of brainless fun and in typical Nintendo fashion it’s quite rewarding for the player. The spherical level concept is fresh and new – a blast to run around the puzzling little worlds finding the start that rockets you to the next one.

While at the Leopard launch last night Mike picked up an 8Gb 3rd generation iPod Nano for his daughter. While over at their house this morning I was amused to see he was having trouble registering the Nano. Every time he tries to sign in with his Apple ID he gets the puzzling error “This person record requires harvesting.” (click the image above for a full sized view).

While I’m sure it has a valid technical meaning it’s a strange message to show to an end user. It almost makes me wonder – what kind of harvesting is Apple talking about here, a kidney or a crop?

YAY! My life is better having discovered QuickPack. Go technology!

Strangely enough I think NetNewsWire has just left my life as suddenly as it came to it. More and more I found myself using Newsgator as a reader rather than NetNewsWire. I really like the slick interface NetNewsWire offers, but the overhead of opening and syncing it with Newsgator combined with the fact that I don’t always have a Mac handy combined to limit it’s use to a single big post reading session in the evening to drive my unread count down to zero for the next day. I mainly read RSS in tiny chunks I squeeze in here and there throughout my day as I can spare the time, so entirely web based solutions make it easier to do from whatever computer I happen to be sitting at without having to worry about clients, syncing, or application state.

I just discovered my new reader of choice Google Reader (yeah – I know, I’m really behind the times) and I have to say I’m 100% impressed. Just like Google revolutionized the concept of web-mail using a fresh new Ajax approach Google Reader has done the same for RSS. Reader dynamically loads your stories in the background and provides a configurable view including my all time favorite – the never ending scroll of articles that I can slide through as I get the time.

Google Reader performs a great little trick by automatically marking posts as read when they scroll up the screen leaving me with fewer actions than with Newsgator where you see 50 articles at a shot (not configurable) and have to click a link to mark them as read and to pull up the next batch. Another nail in the coffin of Newsgator was that some of the Javascript they used had issues and would occasionally fail to respond to clicks and have to be reloaded.

To seal the deal Google Reader has amazing keyboard shortcuts. While in the application simply hit the ? key to bring up a semi-opaque cheat sheet. The keyboard shortcuts are intuitive and make navigation, triage, bookmarking, and reading very efficient. After less than 20 minutes of use Google Reader became an entirely keyboard based application for me, and one rivaling the functionality of most thick-client RSS readers.

At this point my only gripe with Google Reader is it’s iPhone experience. Newsgators was worse, but the iPhone version of Google Reader is very static and really fails to capitalize on the rich Javascript capabilities the iPhone bestows to offer a experience that matches the desktop browser experience in functionality while being tailored to the user interface limitations of the iPhone.

Sorry Brent – I still love NetNewsWire and have a special place for it in my heart, but the cloud is calling!