1. Nano first impressions

    Received my nano today, a little surprise since fedex’s site said it wouldn’t be delivered until next Wednesday. I guess they heard my cries. Luckily I also received the invisible shield today, this way I can keep it looking slick.

    After opening the box I held it and thought, “this is way too small”. It’s so much smaller then I remember and the black kicks way more ass then I thought it would. The screen looks crisp and bright nothing like the early reviews. Also included is a little dock attachment so the nano would fit older docks. I guess this is their way to distract from the absent travel charger.

    After plugging it into my existing dock, I got the message to the effect, the Nano only supports usb, WTF? That totally blows since I had just enough adapters for work, theB, and home. so I replaced the firewire cable with a usb cable and I registered the thing.

    So…

    With only 4g’s i still can’t fill the thing up unless I use some really smart smart playlists, like random unplayed and random unrated.

    Listening to it now and it sounds really good. Keep in mind I’m not a music snob so whatever quality output it gives is enough for me.

    Like I said earlier, it’s almost too small. I want to get this thing under a swim cap soon.

    The invisa shield is pretty sweet but i might have to get another and re-try; I want perfection.

    The UI for the nano has some cool new things, like the blue dot next to unplayed podcasts. A feature if I would have known the nano had from the beginning I would have bought the first day.

    The headphone jack on the bottom: MUCH BETTER THEN ON TOP. It may cause some accessories that I don’t have not work but IDGAF, I rather hold the thing and not have the headphone sin the way any day.

  2. Some recent Mint stats

    thumb

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  3. FEMA’s cruise line

    FEMA made hasty $236 million deal with cruise line during Katrina crisis / 3 ships now sit half empty in river and Mobile Bay

    To critics, the price is exorbitant. If the ships were at capacity, with 7,116 evacuees, for six months, the price per evacuee would total $1,275 a week, according to calculations by aides to Sen. Tom Coburn, R-Okla. A seven-day western Caribbean cruise out of Galveston can be had for $599 a person — and that would include entertainment and the cost of actually making the ship move.

  4. OSs for your hand

    Jason’s post about the Q has brought up some conversations about the Palm vs. Windows Mobile and I thought I should write up a comparison.

    For someone who has worked with a lot of PDAs and smart phones recently; the current Palm OS, even though outdated, is much better then the Pocket PC OS. But with the recent arrival of the Windows Mobile OS and the questionable demise of the Palm OS things could change.
    The main reason I like the Palm OS is that it is simple, similar to OS X-p, the average person could use it and not worry have to worry about, like Nathan said, the horrible UI of the windows system.

    Palm OS pros:
    More apps. Funny since Jared said it’s hard to write for, and it can’t be entirely related to the much earlier release of the Palm OS.
    Better devices/smart phones. The Pocket PC was not meant to be a smart phone and until WM comes out on the new Treo and the Q it still won’t be an acceptable device to me because PDAs are useless if you have to carry a phone as well to connect to the internet wherever you are. I know you can use bluetooth to connect the two but really, what a nuisance, I did it before and my UX50 was just a paperweight after a week.
    Documents to go rocks, supposedly better then the integration that PPC ever had with Office.

    Palm OS cons:
    OS stagnation until Access starts up the development of a linux based version or gets cobalt’s development back up.

    Windows Mobile Pros:
    Multitasking. More then one application open at a time is awesome but having to go the the memory manager to shut the apps down completely is bad.
    Better Exchange compatibility.

    Windows mobile cons:
    Expensive. Only smart phones could make the prices reasonable since the carrier will absorb some costs.

    So even though I really love the Palm OS I hear a lot of good things about the WM OS and the Q and new Treo looks awesome.

    I also want to speculate that Microsoft will soon dominate the mobile OS market and then soon after stall all innovation; similar to what they have done with Windows, come out with a great product that everyone can use then rule with an iron fist riding there coat tails until another OS comes along to push them a long just a little bit. Hopefully this other OS would be Palm and Access will develop the so anticipated cobalt OS.

  5. Feeds

    I am looking through way too many feeds per day.

    Example: I have been gone for 5 days and I have 5000+ unread items. I do skim through them but geez…here come the prunning sheers.

  6. The lake

    Got back yesterday from our annual Men’s Retreat at Lake Naciemento. My best experience yet; it broke my back (wakeboarding) and it broke up some rough parts of my life. The Bridge guys: diverse, wise, simple, complex, honorable and most importantly human.

    I received a lot from that trip, the best part, the conversation I had with Tommy and DaveL on the ride home; so deep and answer filling. And the hardest but most fulfilling was the conversation I had with an already good friend.

    Can’t wait till next year.

    FFYI: Naciemento has WiFi now.

  7. This Week’s Del.icio.us bookmarks

    Shared bookmarks for del.icio.us user
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  8. 10 words you can’t say

    I always wondered…

    [Link]

  9. Hardening Windows XP

    Jared: What do you say about this?

  10. What is Google up to?

    …Google was supposedly buying up unused fiber and spare backbone bandwidth like crazy—enough to move some serious, serious data. Then yesterday our man Om pointed out IP Democracy’s report that Google has been further reviewing bids for building a nationwide DWDM (dense wavelength division multiplexing) fiber network, one theoretically capable of terabit speeds, and at the bargain basement price of under $100 million—apparently this thing could even be up and running in months, according to their sources…hence speculation of a WiMax or WiFi network. Now today it’s come out that yes, they actually have a piece of working WiFi VPN software to download called Google Secure Access, and that it “is only available at certain locations in the San Francisco Bay Areaâ€?—coincidence that that’s where they happen to have a test bed of location-tracking WiFi hotspots to provide Google-local based ads on top of free WiFi access? And knowing Google, of course they’d want VPN software running on “GoogleNet,â€? what kind of PR nightmare would it be for them having millions across the nation getting online on open WiFi on account of the “do no harmâ€? company?…

    [link]