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Here’s a hint.

I am so late doing this I’m practically ashamed.  E.G,   The house only holds about 40 people and , well you think hell 40 people that’s easy Probably so easy that telling everyone would lead to a lot of disappointed folks which I’m still aiming for

 

Marian Call delivers whimsical Alaskan folk funk for the Coffee Counter-Culture. She sounds a little like Joni Mitchell & Regina Spektor raising the child of Jason Mraz & Erin McKeown. Call’s sound is always soulful, honest, and clever, loved by all types — computer geeks, church ladies, teenage thugs, NPR listeners, and urban hipsters worldwide. Marian is currently touring all 50 states and hopes to play for you soon — find more information at http://mariancall.com.

If you like what you hear  then how about hearing it live, like two days from now?

When we originally requested a house concert it seemed plausible. laughably in hindsight, that we could accommodate this at our house.  Thankfully friend and  fellow fan Mandi stepped in to save the day and for this Phoenix and surrounding areas  all you have to do is leave your house on a Wednesday night and come out for live music. 

 

RSVP to

mandi  AT neuroticbynature.com

For details on where to go, what to bring and how much fun you are going to have.

        

Basically testing out an embed.

here we are

        

The other day I was searching for the opening hours of a local restaurant. After running to find a phone-booth to covertly speak a request into the iPhone  (sardellas) that I was looking for  which was about a mile away from my current location.

Google’s mobile iPhone app gave me a restaurant in Rhode Island a couple of thousand miles away as my number one and two result. 

What the hell is the use in that? A geo-enabled device making a request from a mobile app gets results for places that are hours away by jet! 

Yes it’s rather cool that I can talk into my phone, have it get the right phrase, and see results within a few seconds but it would be nice if it could be done with more attention paid to the context of the search.

        

here we are with otters

        

Now there’s a single minded dedication to ensuring that you get only the “real” Amanda Fucking Palmer, oh wait they don’t return any results for that.  May as well ask which Bjork, which Tori Amos and which Jean Michel Jarre which I kid you not occurs.   Anyway that’s my UI annoyance for today.

        

From the 500 hats blog comes a nice summation that matches many of my feelings with regards to how programs are pitched, created and go to 2 cups (He has a much better line but I'll not steal it totally out of context.)  He brings up  login friction, e.g.,  how easy it is to actually use the service and creating infrequent use apps can cause problems by itself.

So listen up I'll share a little secret with you -- there is one very simple way to avoid forgotten passwords.Basically, it's this:

Make a Frequent-Use Product.
That's it, you say?

Yeah, that's it Sherlock.Make a brain-dead simple, frequent-use product.If users login a lot, then they don't forget their passwords

 While my favourite inner-Austrian applauds lines such as

Newsflash folks: The Internet does NOT want to be FREE... It wants to GET PAID on Fucking Friday, just like everybody else on the damn planet.

It's kind of sad that this has to be restated that making a program that needs to be useful is another. 

        

We’ve had a year and a half of strong netbook sales yet the majority of sites make no concessions to accommodate the people on them.While it’s particularly stupid for stores to shoo away visitors I’m perplexed that we’ll happily support IE6 but make few,if any, concessions those with a case of vertical screen interuptus.

Scroll wheel on desktop is a finger puzzle on netbooks that support it,banners that often leave your most important items below the fold, workflows that DON’T and just a complete lack of attention to the expected usage of the products make the netbooks look bad in the same way that most sites shrunk for mobile phones do.

 

Netbook sales 2009

        

There should be a show were people that fight computer crime use guns, baseball bats and other implements of destruction on the detritus that try to scam the populace.

I’m selling a car,trying to,presently on Craigslist which leads to the kind of interactions with people I’d rather not have. People that are possibly worse to deal with than car sales types.

Apart from the usual people that want to buy the car for $1000 less than posted without even looking it over, those that want to come tell you why it’s crap and that they don’t like the brand, those that want to buy it for a college student and expect a six year old car to carry the kind of guarantee that a new one would etc  and  the most interesting?  A ,can I politely say, less than  mentally capable person that doesn’t –even- have a driving license showing up at the door at 2130 ( 9 30  at night for those of you that can’t add twelve) unannounced that we didn’t give the address out to which is kind of spooky. Not a fan of this guy to say the least.

I still have the car and some information on a new scheme/scam.  Person mails me, asks some info and to arrange to see car.I send it. They then say oh prior to me coming out can I get some idea of the auto insurance via this site.  Auto insurance tips dot com,but the link went to tamiesunshine144 .blogspot . com and then redirected with the affiliate ID to the insurance site.  E.G., trolling for affiliate commissions. 

CL is turning in Ebay and it’s usefulness is only possible when using a third party to search it when you are looking for something specific though as a means of exposing yourself to jerks it’s first class.

        

Over the last couple of months I've been playing with many an aggregation tool that aims to let you make personal dams in the torrent that's laughingly referred to as a life-stream.

I've fallen in the Atlantic,in large rivers and streams in the past and have to say that one is certainly not manageable without assistance.Sure you get the life jacket that keeps your head above water as it flows around you but you can't actually do much but sit back till someone pulls you out. 

To help pull me out from my info addiction the nice people at  lifeio.com streamy and threadsy.com have offerings which seek to provide a nice paddle with which to beat back the creek of crap we're exposed to daily.

The one that apparently does the least, on the surface,is my current favorite.
Threadsy is in the lead with it being a constant presence on one monitor while I just dip into the other two. It's interesting as Threadsy started out doing less than the other two offering but it does it so well.It also solves a very real problem that the mainstream users haven't encountered yet, they probably won't encounter it till more of them actually use FB and Twitter in their daily lives.   

Threadsy , pardon the sewing puns, seamlessly brings together the contents of tweets, Facebook updates and your mail account. I don't have to chase many windows around to see, reply to tweets, post status updates, see incoming mail.   Nothing revolutionary that alt - tab or the amazing Firefox extension Foxtab couldn't do for you but it's the thread part  of the name that makes this so useful.

Most of the interesting stuff in twitter are links to images, videos or pages that obviously make no sense to a human when a URL shortener is used, no mind , i get a preview of each item, can play video in place,see the image, reply to or make a comment on the tweet/ update and go about my day without closing out a pile of windows each time curiosity gets the better of me,about 10-12 seconds.

When I open up a mail, tweet or update the author panel to the side shows me the services they use, their latest posts, tweets, images. Single click. Yum!

Plus it has Meebo chat built in accounting for just about any messenger service you'd care to use.  Aggregating the streams is one of those  emergent/ obvious things ( has to be I thought of the same damn thing way back) but execution is everything and so far these software tailors have provided this Emperor* with an impressive suit of  new clothes

*Much in the same way Joshua Norton was