SkaroffBlog

I LOVE this show.

In the related videos there are also all kinds of hysterical ad parodies. Plenty of material to get you to the end of the day.

(via Philebrity.tv)

Looking for something new to eat for lunch, and inspired by Feed Me Philly’s review (found via Foobooz, a must-read for Philadelphia foodies) I hopped on my bike this afternoon and rode over to Chinatown to try the new Malaysian restaurant, Banana Leaf. I decided to go with a classic and order the Chow Kueh Teow. Good enough that I’ll definitely be trying it again.

It was such a gorgeous day that I rode over to Franklin Square park instead of heading back to work to eat at my desk. They’ve done some really great work on the park in the past few years and despite it being in the shadow of the Ben Franklin Bridge and wedged between highways and streets, it’s turned into quite a nice little spot. I snapped a shot of my new bike in front of the fountain on the iPhone.

FYI – Instead of emailing this photo directly to Flickr, I synced to iPhoto and then uploaded. For some reason iPhone emails a lower resolution version of your shots and I wanted to see what the 2 MP camera can do in all its glory. Not bad in the sunlight.

Well I’ve been using the iPhone for about 24 hours now…

• Please get Note synching working soon Apple. I have memos from my Treo that I do not want to retype. They’re useless without syncing.
• The keyboard isn’t an issue if you just trust the auto-correct software and let it do it’s job. But why can you only use the keyboard in landscape mode in the browser?? That’s stupid. Most typing is done in SMS/Mail. Similarly why can’t I go into landscape view mode in Mail? It renders HTML mail as a web page. Why not treat it as one?
• Multiple mailboxes in Mail = stupid. It’s way too many taps to move between inboxes too.
• Bluetooth on/off is in a weird place in Settings > General. Not that bluetooth is useful on this phone since I can’t sync or connect to my MacBook Pro over it. My 2 year old Treo 650 could do that.
• The wow factor simply is incredible. Everywhere I go everyone wants to see it. I had a five year old boy scream at the top of his lungs when I pulled it out on Sunday night. And it hadn’t even been activated yet!
• Visual Voicemail and the whole voicemail setup in general is great. Hopefully all phones will have this soon. It appears that your outgoing message is recorded on the phone and then uploaded to the server making it extraordinarily easy to change your message.
• The orientation sensor seems to lag a bit sometimes. Hopefully this can be fixed through software.
• EDGE isn’t great but isn’t terrible either. Big step up from the Sprint 1xRTT network I was on before. WiFi has worked well for me so far. It would be nice to have a feature to tell it to turn off the WiFi radio if it hasn’t picked up a network in a certain period of time. I also want to be able to “sleep” my email at night. I don’t need email notifications while I sleep but I can’t put it on silent either since I’m using the alarm.
• As for the alarm, I understand why for business reasons they don’t want people using any old iPod song as a ringtone. But at least let me wake up to my music! The alarm interface is superb though.

More thoughts to come…

Well despite my troubles activating my new iPhone from within iTunes yesterday as I tried to move my number from my mom’s family plan to my own account on AT&T, I was able to quite easily get everything fixed this morning. I called the 1-877-800-3701 activation line, as mentioned here and here, waited 30 minutes or so and after explaining my situation to the very friendly woman on the other end of the line and waiting another 10 minutes on hold I was up and running!

So add me to the list of people who had initial problems with activation but are now able to use their phone. Hooray!

As a bit of background, I headed down to the Center City AT&T store after work on Friday and waited in line with no success. I’m estimating they only had 75 phones or so in stock. But on Saturday I had to go to NYC so I stopped by the Soho Apple Store around 3 pm and picked one up no problem. Go to the Apple Store if you’re still looking.

I present to you…my new whip:

IRO Mark V 53 cm frame.
Velocity Deep V rims in white with Velocity hubs.
FSA Orbit headset.
Nitto bars.
The rest of the parts are fairly budget with upgrades to come over time.

We leave tomorrow in our RV for my fifth year at the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival in Manchester, TN. As always I’ll take pictures to post when I get back, but in the meantime I may (or may not, depending on how I’m feeling) try and do a bit of twitter mini-blogging of the weekend. You can either go to my page on Twitter to see my latest updates or just check out the little widget below.

See you in Tennessee!

Yesterday was my birthday and while we dine at Xochitl tonight to celebrate, yesterday I capped off literally months of research and finally purchased a new bike. For the last year I’ve been riding a green three-speed 1980s Schwinn Collegiate, purchased used from Via Bikes. It’s a solid bike with plenty of miles left to go but I’ve been wanting something sleeker, faster, and most importantly, fixed gear. So check out the new ride, a 2007 Schwinn Madison:

It’s a remake of their classic ’80s Madison which was a lugged track bike apparently beloved by all. This bike is double butted cromo but otherwise identical. I’m going to flip and chop the bars for bullhorns and remove the back brake since I’m going to ride it fixed but otherwise she’ll look a lot like this (well until I upgrade the wheels someday). This time I stayed a little more local and went just around the corner to Mike’s Bikes at 13th and Mifflin. It won’t be in until the beginning of May but Mike cut me a good deal on the bike and has guaranteed that they’ll make sure I’m happy. So far I’m definitely a fan of the shop.

More thoughts and pics to come once she’s in my hands.

I’m not really much of a hacker when it comes down to it but I’ve been fooling around with a lot more tools and possibilities since I got this 15″ MacBook Pro at work. I run Parallels Desktop and Windows XP most of the day so I have access to Visual Studio development tools, SQL Server, and of course, the Rhapsody client.

On the Mac side I use Adium for chat and I love the Now Playing status script that shows the current iTunes track in your status. But since I don’t use iTunes most of the time I was out of luck. Well today I managed to whip up an AppleScript that puts the currently playing Rhapsody track (sort of) in the Adium status.

If you want the whole script, it’s after the jump.

Read the rest of this entry »

There is NO Ben & Jerry’s Stephen Colbert’s Americone Dream in Philadelphia. It is confirmed.

However a little birdie has informed me that a shipment is expected next week.

UPDATE: The No Fact Zone has a google map listing Americone Dream spottings and it seems it can be found at the Acmes in Bala Cynwyd and Woodbury, NJ.

When I was 12 I’d already determined that I was a big nerd. And when a big nerd often flies cross country to visit family in California, he looks for the geekiest magazine he can find to pass the time. In 1993, that was quite clearly Wired Magazine. One only needed to scan across the covers of the row of computer magazines (always the bottom row it seemed) to see that Wired was in a different world from publications like PC Mag. 

From the start I was completely captivated, not only by the writing and ideas, but by the radical design and layout. If you remember the earlier days of Wired, it could be nearly unreadable at times. There were no columns or simple pie charts. Instead it was a seeming hodge podge of color and type set at oblique angles. Just picking apart the levels of detail in a single print page could be quite a challenge. But it was interesting and wild and completely different. 

A few months ago I started subscribing and regularly reading Dave Winer’s Scripting News. Yesterday while reading the transcript of his interview with Robert X. Cringely for NerdTV I realized Dave was one of the original contributing editors to Wired. And so it made sense that I enjoyed his current writing so much. I think there is something about the way his mind works that matches up well with my own thought processes. 

With some time to kill yesterday, I invested a few hours into learning the OPML Editor, Dave’s tool for creating outlines (and quite a bit more). It’s an interesting piece of software because it’s not immediately intuitive. But after a bit of exploration, it starts to just click. And with a built in blogging tool, it seemed natural to give it a try. So here’s my first (real) entry. This was composed in the Editor and then manually mirrored to WordPress on skaroff.com. The original exists at my OPML blog at http://blogs.opml.org/jskaroff/. 

My thoughts on the OPML Editor so far: 

While I certainly recognize the power of outlining (I’m already a big fan of outlining in the OPML editor’s scripting environment – hierarchical outlines make so much sense than curly brackets for code blocks) I’m not sure it makes quite as much sense for blogging. Not to say it doesn’t make sense either.

Now whether that is because the OPML editor itself has such a poor UI, or whether I’m simply not accustomed to it yet, or whether it’s just not how my brain works, I’m not sure.

But I’m willing to give it a try. I can already see the way that posts and paragraphs become a time stamped stream makes a ton of sense.

I think there are ways to integrate the editor into WordPress. That’s a project for another day.

As an aside, I desperately need to upgrade my WP install.