apple survey

Question: What one thing would you most like to see Apple improve upon, and why?

Answer:

iTunes. It's slow, the update process is terrible, it's huge, it erases content from my iPhones a ton, works terribly with multiple iOS devices, works terribly with multiple computers, installs crapware like Safari and Bonjour, causes problems when syncing libraries across devices. I mean, it's just an awful awful piece of shit... er.... software.

day 13 - end of days

We took our third overnight bus of the trip last night to return to
Istanbul. Let's just say that some overnight buses are ok while others
aren't after a good experience with Metro between Pamukkale and
Göreme, we had a terrible experience with them coming back to Istanbul.

So far I've been a bit disappointed with the Lonely Planet for this
trip. They were pretty inaccurate for accomodations in Göreme as well
as very incomplete/inaccurate with top sights, tours, food, etc. What
gives? The book is only two months old!

My take on Instanbul would include the following: best area to get
food is behind the New Mosque by the post office. The Grand Bazaar is
an overrated tourist trap. It lacks any authenticity anymore
(especially compared to the 15 year old LP we came across) and is way
overpriced. The merchants there aren't even willing to bargain to a
10% markup over normal prices outside the Bazaar on things like
magnets. Obviously we got our magnets somewhere else since no one
seemed interested in doing business at fair tourist prices.

Other random thoughts:
Favorite mosque is the Little Aya Sofya
Favorite site: The aquaduct and around, or the Bosphorus
Least favorite site: the Genoan Tower

day 12 - çay çay çay!

Spending the day writing postcards while drinking 45 Kr (30 cent) çay
with a bunch of old men. It's been a good trip. I'll have plenty of
retroactive blogging to do.

I just finished writing my 15 postcards. 5 to the DC area, 5 to the
Cleveland area, 3 to the northeast, and 2 to the great state of Texas.
There would have been more to Seattle, but I miscounted addresses by
forgetting to include the names of work friends from Progressive who
get postcards. Sorry. I'll get you other things!

Overall, Turkey has been great. Lots to see, friendly people, and
generally reasonable prices. Things may be different in peak season
though, so I'm glad I'm here in May and not June. I'll hear from the
parents what that's like, but I imagine a lot of sights may be
overcrowded and the locals may be lost in the sea of tourists, which
would be a damn shame, especially in Pumakkale, Marmaris, and Göreme.

Other brief descriptors:
Clean
Great roads
Smoking
Çay çay çay!

day 5 - rodos

day 4 - selçuk and efes(us)

Took an overnight bus from Istanbul to Selçuk, the town by Ephesus.
The bus ride kinda sucked. I'm pretty convinced by this point that
these fancy Mercedes buses have inadequate a/c. On the upside, we
got to take a ferry, plus we got to Selçuk a little past 6am and we
got to Efes about a half hour before it opened.

We started off at the lower entrance, where the tour buses pick people
up, so we were going in reverse of the typical order. The early
arrival and the reverse order meant that we had the entire place to
ourselves for the first half hour. It was pretty awesome running
around the coliseum like idiots. Since most of the most impressive
sights were down towards we were, we definitely made it out ahead.

After walking 3km back to Selçuk, which the LP wrongly advises
against, we got a super tasty lunch way behind the bus station. Great
food at 1/4 the price of the LP recommended places. Yummy.

After, we hopped on another bus to Aydin where we connected to a bus
to Marmaris.

Now, I am on a boat right now to Rodos. I am kinda waiting to see if
anyone is going to throw up. (-:

day 3 - istanbul

A park without benches is like a living room with no couch.

back

The blog is back. I am *assuming* there is no more stalking action going on. Yes, I am talking about you, Alison Grande.

ridiculous "security"

Some of this I find personally annoying. Some of this is just plain stupid. I am speaking of the password security requirements for WSDOT's GoodToGo! electronic toll pass.

Password - 10 characters/numbers, at least one upper case character, one lower case character and one number. Password cannot contain spaces or special character.

• OK. This isn't terrible. It's just personally annoying because my passwords are generally, but not always!) 8 characters long. Enabling special characters makes the passwords stronger, but also theoretically puts a greater burden to the developer to make sure the characters aren't special in a bad way.
  

Security Questions - must not contain special characters and must be at least 6 characters long and maximum of 16 characters long.

• What is your sister's middle name (no sister)
• What is the name of your first pet? (4 characters)
• In what city were you born (7 characters... phew)
• What street did you grow up on (has a space, I hope that's OK)
• What was the make of your first car? (5 characters - about half of cars have makes less than 6 characters long)
• What was the name of your (first) elementary school? (6 characters, woo!)
• What is your brother's middle name? (has a special character)

This would be fine if they had security questions that worked well with these requirements. Unfortunately my options are limited. I get to use the city I was born in (which generally brings up confusion as to whether to include the state), the street I grew up on (where there's two options, and my the name of my first elementary school (which I barely remember). Great. Thanks, jerks.

Car makes under 6 characters (FAIL):

• Acura
• Audi
• BMW
• Buick
• Chevy
• Dodge
• Fiat
• Ford
• GMC
• Honda
• Jeep
• Kia
• Lexus
• Lotus
• Mazda
• Mini
• Saab
• Scion
• smart
• Tesla
• Volvo

Cars with makes 6 characters or longer:

• Aston Martin
• Bentley
• Bugatti
• Cadillac
• Chevrolet
• Chrysler
• Ferrari
• Hyundai
• Infinity
• Jaguar
• Lamborghini
• Land Rover
• Lincoln
• Maserati
• Mayback
• McLaren
• Mercedes
• Mercury
• Mitsubishi
• Nissan
• Porsche
• Rolls-Royce
• Spyker
• Subaru
• Toyota
• Volkswagen

vw

Greg: I don't know when you're planning on replacing this car...

Paul: When it's gone.

Glass Guy 2 (as he's working on the rear quarter glass of a red VW Beetle):
Whatever you do, don't get one of these!

Paul: I know. The glass falls down. I don't know a single VW owner who
hasn't had that problem. Good business for you, right?

Greg: Yeah. They really do a bad job with those.

what is this saying about microsoft?

random projects

Upgrading the HTPC:

The HTPC has served me faithfully for two years, but I felt like it was time for an upgrade. No, not rational at all. I suppose I got annoyed by waiting for Firefox to load. Sure, it's not the computer's fault, but I'm upgrading anyway. The Intel Core Duo E7300 (which is still really competent by today's standards), motherboard, and RAM have been transferred to the HTPC Midwest Edition. In other words, it's now in a nearly identical setup at my parents' house - only this time with a 2TB HD so my dad can download lots of pr0n (although honestly, why bother downloading pr0n when you can stream it?).

New parts:

- Intel i3 540

- ASSrock H55M mobo

- Last minute call to keep the old 1TB WD Caviar Green HD and add on a...

- Intel 40GB SSD (which actually will solve the Firefox issue... hopefully)

I suppose at some point in the future I may want to upgrade my desktop PC, although it's totally not worth the money. I might as well get an iPad 2 first.

Car work:

The car recently hit 200,000 miles (figuratively). Aside from a well deserved car wash, it also needs:

- A change of antifreeze

- A change of oil (by the time I get around to changing it)

- A new windshield (gonna splurge with an OEM part seeing how easily these replacement windshields break)

- New trim for the windshield, since Low Price Auto Glass of Austin, TX didn't mount it right and it flew off somewhere. )-: The parts have been ordered.

scale - ski edition

A ski-related version of my other post "scale," comparing relative distances of places in Cleveland and Seattle.

One Hour Drive:

Cleveland - Boston Mills/Brandywine

I'll give the combined stats for both ski areas as if they were one... since that's kinda what Summit does too.

240' vertical

17 trails

85 skiable acres

20,000/hour lift capacity

Seattle - Summit at Snoqualmie/Alpental

2,280' vertical

52? trails

1.17 mile longest run (International)

1,981 skiable acres

34,490/hour lift capacity

Two to three hour drive:

Cleveland - Holiday Valley

750' vertical

58 trails

290 skiable acres

23,850/hour lift capacity

Cleveland - Seven Springs

750' vertical

47 trails

1.3 mile longest run (Lost Boy)

285 skiable acres

26,620/hour lift capacity

Seattle - Crystal

3,100' vertical

57 trails

2.5 mile longest run

2,600 skiable acres

20,910/hour lift capacity

Seattle - Mount Baker

1,500' vertical

38 trails

1.75 mile longest trail (White Salmon)

1,000 skiable acres

FAQ seems to boast of how they have no phones, no WiFi, no ATMs, no TVs.

Within a day's drive:

Cleveland - 10 hours to Killington, VT

3,050' vertical

140 trails

752 skiable acres

37,535/hour lift capacity

Seattle - 4-5 hours to Whistler, BC

5,280' vertical

200+ trails (if they don't count, I won't either)

7 mile longest run (Peak to Creek?)

8,171 skiable acres

65,507/hour lift capacity

browser wars update and bad reporting

A couple of months I switched from FireFox to Chrome. My initial complaints were all from getting used to a slightly different UI. Now that I've gotten over the difference in bookmark UI and the combined address bar and search bar, I have replaced the cons with the really nasty performance issues that I am now all too familiar with. I've also updated IE to reflect IE 9. Note that there are no more rankings. They all are inadequate in covering certain basics.

Firefox

Why I like it:

• Great extension support – notably AdBlock Plus and xMarks
• I like how I can dock my bookmarks. It’s a great way to make the screen narrower (in other words, more readable) while making good use of that space.
• It works.
• The URL autofill is great.
• BlackSheep extension and HTTPSeverywhere extensions make me feel safer.

Why I hate it:

• It’s slow. Ridiculously slow to open, and then if I leave it open for more than two days (on my work computers, for example, or when I put my home computer on standby), it gobbles up enormous amount of memory. I really want a better #1.

Chrome

Why I use it:

• It opens up really fast. If I just turned on my computer and I don’t need to access my bookmarks and I’m doing basic browsing, I’ll just use Chrome. This only happens on my desktop at home.
• Good extension support. It now has AdBlock and xMarks. Finally.
• Address bar search is "good enough" for finding certain bookmarks, but still not as good as Firefox.
• Google Voice integration is nice.

Why I hate it:

• Occasionally just hangs for 10 seconds and then comes back to life
• Has huge performance issues with managing tabs. Specifically, when opening multiple windows at once (like when checking NFL box scores or reading news off TechMeme in the morning) and also when closing multiple windows sequentially.
• Address bar is absolutely terrible at quickly prioritizing and displaying autocomplete candidates. Sometimes it would be faster to just type in the entire URL.
• Address bar doesn't let me delete autocomplete entries like FireFox.
• Auto-complete results take precedence over what I type. If I have "www.knowyourmeme.com" in my history and I want to go to "www.kno.com", I should be able to type in "kno" followed by Ctrl+Enter to get there. That should *not* take me to knowyourmeme. That's why I'm pressing the Control key!
• The bookmarks UI is terrible for using bookmarks.
• Fanboys who think that Chrome is fast. It just isn't.

Safari

Why I use it:

• Best browser for the iPhone.

Why I hate it:

• On the PC it’s installs itself whenever anything Apple needs to be updated. DOJ should get on it, because it’s not cool to have a new version of QuickTime, Safari, Bonjour, and whatever crap installed every time I upgrade iTunes (which is now a beast).
• Weird keyboard shortcuts. Ctrl-T, Ctrl-Tab, Ctrl-L, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-W. Thanks.

Internet Explorer 9

Why I use it:

• Work. Intranet sites.
• The only browser I have that can open multiple tabs in sequence without lagging substantially. YES! I can now open all the box scores for last weekend's NFL games without getting my browser to hang.
• It’s a good second browser if I want to be logged in using different accounts for different services (like Facebook, e-mail, etc.). Any browser can do this, but I have IE installed on all my PCs so it’s the default.
• Sometimes it's just up.

Why I hate it:

• Like Chrome, hangs on the closing of multiple tabs. Ugh.
• No extension support, therefore no AdBlock.
• Bad for going to intranet sites since it assumes that if there is no http:// prefix you want to do a search.

On to bad reporting rewards for the morning:

• Robert Scoble On Twezr. Good demo, but your questions are horrible. If I got a nickel for every time he asked about some weirdo fringe scenario that no real people care about, I'd be able to buy lunch.
• Mary Pilon of the WSJ on mobile and "spending." The headline has nothing to do with the data, and in fact the update posted at the end basically says that the headline is wrong. Fix it, dumbass, or just withdraw the entire story.

the three most scenic flights in america

1. Punta Arenas - Santiago
Sit on the east side of the plane and soak in views of the Andes for
the entire flight. Highlights are the massive icefields in the south
along with the glacial lakes, Fitz Roy, and Torres del Paine.

2. Los Angeles - east
Views of the Grand Canyon are just as grand from the air, especially
since it takes an hour to fly over it.

3. Los Angeles - Seattle
Sitting on the east side, beaches in SoCal, followed by Yosemite,
followed by the volcanoes in Oregon and Washington.

a few random things

1. By the end of November, I think I would have seen Chinese films at five different theatres in Seattle - 3 within walking distance from my place (Central Cinema, Egyptian, Harvard Exit).
   
   
2. About Windows Phone 7 - a lot of fuss has gone on about how there are only a few thousand apps compared to iPhone's hundreds of thousands. In the end, the ones that I need are there (OneBusAway, Foursquare, Facebook, Google Voice) along with some others that I use sporadically (Flashlight, Fandango, YouTube, Shazam, Yelp, Messenger). The only ones missing are the Seattle Times and Instapaper. If you're looking for a fart app, sorry!
   
   
3. 125 more miles till 200k on the 1993 Honda Accord. Miles driven this month: 25.
   
   
4. Miles biked this month: 250+
   
   
5. I've spend a lot of time wondering how the insane "ramps to nowhere" interchange on SR520 at the Arboretum were intended to be if complete. I finally found the answer.
   
   The plan:
   
   
   The result:
   http://maps.google.com/?ie=UTF8&hq=&hnear=535+13th+Ave+E,+Seattle,+King,+Washington+98102&ll=47.644466,-122.297047&spn=0.005775,0.013937&t=h&z=17
   
   
6. I live on 13th Ave E, but at one point it was to be called Randolph St.

the worst people to sit by

They come in with muliple bags of fast food
They have a small child
They have an infant
They have a screaming infant
They have a screaming infant with pierced ears and ear rings
He drinks
They fart
They fart a lot
The person sitting behing you hits your seat
They have other people traveling with them handing each other stuff in
front of your face
They need to go to the bathroom three times
They take forever going to the bathroom
They are traveling with some guy who offers them chocolates by putting
his crotch at your face and then stretching so you can see his hairy
orange belly
Their infant throws things
Their infant likes smacking your table
They constantly eat crap (Reeses pieces, chocolate covered nuts, boxed
chocolates, cookies, nuts, several random boxed candies). They didn't
get to the chips
The dad, out of laziness, asks if he "can throw" his son over you into
the aisle. No, there is no one there to catch him.

On the plus side, no throwing up! (yet?)

10 reasons why miami international airport sucks

1. I had to walk over half a mile to get to customs
2. I had to walk another half mile to my gate
3. Half the walkways and escalators were broken
4. Nothing here is open in F terminal except for the overpriced juice
place that has terrible food
5. I had to go through the ticketing area to get to my connecting
terminal
6. Five foot wide corridors that serve as bottlenecks
7. The international baggage recheckin area is a total cluster
8. The show infomercials in the terminal
9. No 2G data connectivity (3G kills battery) and no free wifi
10. There are plenty of bathrooms on the walkway to customs, but none
by most of the gates in F terminal

thoughts on the plane

Good: exit row on an intercontinental flight

Bad: no personal entertainment on the back of each seat
Bad: same movie as the flight last month
Bad: small overhead bins
Bad: pillow feels greasy
Bad: seat belt is attached to the plastic arm rest and not the seat
frame (by design... wtf, boeing?)

another wacky dream - draft

At a concert with ross - amptitheater with seats
Kept moving seats
Eventually lost ross
left
was walking home on the streets
realized naked
Started running back towards venue
I think this is where I saw Allison at a cafe or something, but was in a hurry so kept running.  Hoped I wasn't seen, because I didn't want to seem to be ignoring her.
go back for clothes
cut across this pond area
would have waded across but there was a tug of war competition
had to climb over this rock formation
Seemed like 15' high, but after getting to the top it was suddenly almost 100' high on the other side
WTF.  I've done this before, but this is INSANE
Worked my way down.  I had boots now.
Got back to the venue
They were cleaning up.  I wanted to find my pants
There was a guy on stage asking whose pants where these.  venue was now a grassy area with stage
Not my pants.  I was looking for the REI pants I recently brought. His pants were cargo pants.
Searched in the stream
There was all sorts of weird stuff in there.  I think I may have even come across a console gaming system.

why???