Fitness Crossroad Group Fitness Calendar for iCal & Google Calendar

I rejoined the Fitness Crossroad, the neighborhood gym about a month ago and have yet to make it a regular part of my schedule.

In hopes of more quickly getting in a comfortable rhythm1 I’ve ported their Group Fitness Schedule PDF into a subscribe-able calendar (for iCal or Google Calendar).

If you’re in the area and have the same need – here’s the link for your calendar: Fitness Crossroad Group Fitness Calendar

1. As an additional incentive – I’ve committed to burning >1300 calories each week between now and January.

Sphinx Config Problem on OS X Leopard 10.5.8

I bumped into a very strange bug trying to compile Sphinx on OS X Leopard today.

After running ./configure for Sphinx 0.9.8-rc2, things looked good until:

configure: error: cannot run C compiled programs. .

Then nothing.

Now, I’m positive that my computer is advanced enough to run C compile programs. So I peaked into the resulting config.log and noticed:

...Bad CPU type in executable...

Turns out Sphinx defaults to compiling for 64bit machines and, well, my MacBook Pro isn’t.

Changing the configure flags to 32bit mode fixed it:

./configure CFLAGS="-O -arch i386" CXXFLAGS="-O -arch i386" LDFLAGS="-arch i386" --disable-dependency-tracking

Thanks to schmeeve over at d27n for the tip.

After running: make; sudo make install, remember to create a sphinx.conf file:

cd cd /usr/local/etc
sudo cp sphinx.conf.dist sphinx.conf

Then run sudo searchd to run Sphinx or for ThinkingSphinx:

ts:config
ts:index
ts:start

My Bread (Year 2)

Over the weekend, I tried out a new bread book – My Bread: The Revolutionary No-Work, No-Knead Method, by Jim Lahey.

Lahey’s basic recipe is very similar to the basic Artisan Bread 5 Minutes a Day recipe in I’ve been working with for a year now.

The biggest difference is the cooking method – in a pre-heated covered dish at a slightly higher temp vs. placing a small dish of water in the oven and cooking at a slightly lower temp.

Same ‘baking with steam’ concept, without the loaf shaping.

The result is a gorgeous loaf with a fantastically crunchy crust and a slightly less custardy interior.

My Bread

Verizon Droid Hands-On Review

Motorola_Droid

The Verizon / Motorola / Google Droid, released later this week, is a solid, tactilely satisfying handset. I suspect it’ll be Motorola’s most well-received handset since the RAZR.

Verizon’s marketing is correct – the Droid is the first real peer to the iPhone. More importantly – the Droid is the first significant competitor to the Blackberry in the corporate environment – since the iPhone.

The 4 buttons (‘Back’, ‘Menu’, ‘Home’, ‘Search’) below the Droid’s touch screen remind me of the 4 similar buttons on my long obsolete and much loved Palm Treo 650 and Handspring Visor. The level of UI customization and promise of easy app development of the Droid also recall my love of the PalmOS. These things make me happy and want to see the Droid succeed.

In an earlier post – I criticized Verizon’s Droid TV ad for being the anti-1984 – for bringing the sense of an oppressive, non-descript, technical figure. Unfortunately, this notion is also in the device itself….the Droid starts up with a HAL 9000-esque glowing red eye.

Ominous. Foreboding. Completely out of place.

Nothing else in the Android v2.0 interface is red, threating, or sci-fi-y Everything is clear, polished, crisp, and at no point did I feel the device wanted me dead.

Slightly annoyed in parts, sure, but not dead.

For example:

  • There’s no affordance on which direction the screen slides to expose the keyboard. Once I figured it out (left-to-right), both the smooth slide and the quietly, confident click-into-place confirmed a very high build quality.
  • To type numbers or punctuation – the ‘ALT’ key needs to be pressed simultaneously as the desired key – just like on a regular 2-hand desktop or laptop keyboard. But, this is mobile phone, so I expected ‘ALT’ to be sticky.
  • The continuously blinking green (not red) light is very distracting. There’s no need for it. And it doesn’t look like it can be turned off.
  • The multiple search buttons in a single view confused me a couple times. For example, if you’re searching the Droid Marketplace – with the soft keyboard display – there are 3 search buttons presented; on next to the search form, one in the soft keyboard, the one below the touch screen. In my tests – they’re not all contextually smart.

I made a few calls with the device and found the telephony app enjoyable and again reminiscent of the Treo (again making me happy). Though, as the iPhone showed us, telephony in these devices isn’t really that interesting.

Smart phones are about pocket-sized mobile messaging, mobile maps, and mobile internet access in general. To that end, the Droid is very small, very fast computer with a telephony app and a persistent data connection.

With the keyboard slid out, the Droid looks like a mico-laptop and I started wondering about the differences between this device and a netbook with a VOIP client & mobile broadband service. Depending how much the camera is used – and how cramped the keyboard feels…they could competing with each other. Mobile phones (handheld computers) and netbooks (lap-sized phones) at the same price point? Such an interesting world we live in.

This mobile computing angle is where Droid Marketplace comes in. Finding and installing apps in the Marketplace was on par with Apple’s App Store. Installing an app is clear and effortless – with the added benefit of clearly stating which Droid functionality is used (data call, location, etc) prior to download.

Though, I had the same problem I have with Apple’s App Store has – I don’t know why I’m there or what’s worth using. Usefulness is difficult to gauge from ratings or reviews.

I grabbed a few of the usual suspects; Pandora, Skype, Twitter, Facebook (Facebook conveniently imported all my friends into the Contacts app). Though, even then, after installing them, I didn’t use all of them. Primarily because I didn’t feel like going to my desktop, opening up Keychain.app and re-entering my name/passwords for each 3rd party app.

While my laziness is partly due to knowing I only had the Droid for a few days, it’s also a larger usability problem I have with the iPhone. The Droid’s integration with Google’s apps (and the underlying Google Authentication APIs) has the potential to minimize the multiple-credential problem (as would Apple putting Keychain.app on the iPhone).

Like my Samsung flip phone – the Droid has little interest in talking to my MacBook Pro. It refused to receive files via Bluetooth. When plugged into a USB cable, OS X didn’t mount Droid’s SD card or its internal storage by default. Turns out, it’s a 4 step process:

  1. Touch the status bar at the top of the Droid screen
  2. Drag it down (again, there’s no affordance indicating this is a possible action)
  3. Click “USB connected”
  4. Click “Mount”

Once mounted, iPhoto automatically launched and was “Ready for Import” and images imported as expected.

The photos were in a directory marked ‘DCIM’ and both the Droid’s file structure and Motorola’s Droid customer service page were less clear about where I put audio and video files. For example, the support topic for to ‘downloading music files:

“Click Amazon MP3, Find a song, Click ‘Buy'”

Not exactly the answer I was expecting. So, I just dumped some MP3s in the root directory of the SD card.

Worked perfectly. The Music app automatically found them and played them. SimpleHelp.net has a nice tutorial on copying music from Mac to Android

For contacts and calendars syncing with the Mac there are 3 options:

  1. Have everything in Google (it’ll be on the phone after you sign in)
  2. Review Todd Ogasawara’s tutorial on syncing Macs & T-Mobile G1s
  3. MarkSpace’s Missing Sync for Droid. Since Missing Sync was responsible for all my unhappy Treo memories- that’s not my preferred option.

The Droid handset and Android 2.0 UI is a significant improvement over the initial version. If Windows was my primary OS, if the bulk of my stuff in Google, or if I was a Verizon customer – I’ve have one on pre-order already. Easy.

Thanks to Albert Maruggi at Provident Partners for providing the review unit.

Elsewhere:
Graeme Thickin’s review of the Verizon Droid
“Again the feeling I got from this was ominous and forbidding.” – from David Newberger’s Droid review.
Justin Grammen’s covers the marketing confusion I’m seeing in his Droid Review

“And my main conclusion after three days of Droid use, it’s still lovable, but it needs a solid human factors going-over. ” – Dave Winer

(reminds me of what I wrote earlier, “Yes, the iPhone does have weaknesses – humanity isn’t one of them“).

“Something that Motorola got right here was that they actually made a phone, not just an internet communication device.” – Christopher Smith

I Unpleasantly Review Mad Men

The older I get, the lower my tolerance for fictional stories about people disliking themselves and those around them.

I’m not a fan of AMC’s Mad Men, I concur with Kevin Fenton’s assessment:

“With the exception of a few marginal characters who get to show human complexity as a sort of consolation prize for not having any power, everyone on screen is thin-souled and remorseless.”- Kevin Fenton

Additionally, I find Don Draper a vacant grey flannel suit1 struggling to retain the insatiable impulses of a teenage boy. I see him closer to a Kid’s In The Hall parody than the alpha dog of Manhattan’s advertising scene.

The remaining major characters are equally flat and free of redeeming qualities – and all are struggling to self-destruct faster than the other. Like The Office, none of the characters are working to improve their lives by leaving the crab bucket.

Then again, Mad Men is a fictional program, written by writers and performed by actors – not a documentary or a How To for behaving like a responsible adult.
On the plus side, the set design is gorgeous.

1. According to this Wikipedia entry, the show’s writers have make this connection in season two of the show.

First Crack 121. Drink Beer from a Cat’s Butt: Tasting of Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Brunch

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Now that Surly’s Coffee Bender has become the pinnacle of Coffee Stouts I’m on a quest for interesting and unique coffee beers. I picked up bottle of Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Brunch – an oatmeal stout with civet coffee.

After the civet coffee review with Sam Buchanan how could I not take this beer home.

10.9% alcohol in a 1 Pint 0.9 oz. bottle.

My tasting notes:

Short version: “It doesn’t want to be drunk.”

Long version: Listen to Drink Beer from a Cat’s Butt: A Tasting of Mikkeller’s Beer Geek Brunch [11 min].

Corkboard Productivity

There’s a corkboard downstairs in what I enjoy calling the ‘machine shop’.

In fact, there are 2 corkboards. A big one on the main wall, behind a heavy, wooden desk with a dozen perfectly sized drawers – and a second, smaller one on the back wall.

When we moved into this house 3 years ago, I hung all the tools I’ve acquired over three decades on hooks on the corkboards.

Now I could see them.

All neatly organized.

It was at the moment I realized…

After years of hauling multiple toolboxes from rented apartment to rented apartment to rented apartment, what I really needed was a better understanding of how use use these tools.

The corkboard shrugged.

Merlin Mann, thanks for reminding me of my corkboard.

Makebelieve Help, Old Butchers, and Figuring Out Who You Are (For Now) from Merlin Mann on Vimeo.

Initial Reaction to the Barnes & Noble Nook

First off, the Kindle is the only device I that made my heart drop when it feel on the floor and broke.

As I mentioned earlier, it’s not a perfect device. Overall it feels slow and clunky. Simultaneously, it gets out of my way and is cool enough to let me get swallowed up by the book I’m reading.

Barnes & Noble’s recently announced Nook competitive offering solves a couple issues I have with the Kindle – while also introducing a couple more.

(Note – my thoughts here are based on the pictures @ BN.com – I haven’t played with one yet)

Where the Nook seems to have improved on the Kindle:

  • Sleek looking pagination buttons
  • WIFI

Where the Kindle still has the lead:

  • Doesn’t show me the books I’m not reading (in distracting color) while I’m reading one (in monochrome).
  • hardware keyboard

I’m also not seeing the benefit of the Nook’s ‘lending ebooks to a friend’ feature.

Lending books only makes sense if two things are true: a book is expensive, a book is scarce. The function of the internet and ebooks is to render both of these false.