Just a snapshot of my day

I found this idea from Derek Powazek’s blog via another blog I follow (sorry I can’t remember which one). You basically set up a smart playlist in iTunes and specify the dates. My “The High School Years” playlist is not very interesting (no really embarrasing songs), and I find that I actually listen to a lot of the songs up to this day. I guess I like the oldies! Lots of English Beat, Cocteau Twins, Everything But The Girl, The Police, Bowie, and Bauhaus. Maybe some of the new wave stuff is a little embarrassing, but whatever! And our iTunes library includes Mariko’s cd’s as well, so I see all the music she listened to during those same years. She really was nuts about Toshiki Kadomatsu! Anyways, try out a smart playlist like this and see if you can dig up some old songs that you might have forgotten about.

For this week, the wallpaper on my phone for the daytime hours is an illustration of the anime “One Piece”.

I came across the Yard Sale Treasure Map while browsing Lifehacker. It’s a mashup of Google Maps and Craigslist garage sale listings. Just put in your address (or town), select a radius and day, and the site will map out a route for you. Once you have the map, you can edit it however you please. The only thing missing is the ability to add the map to your saved My Maps, but it’s still really neat.

Yard Sale Treasure Map

I’m a big fan of Leo Laporte’s podcasts and one of his sponsors that he mentions each week is Audible.com. After hearing the pitch for a while now, I decided to check it out. I figure I can spend $15 a month out of my monthly budget for some audio books. But when I was checking out the membership plans at Audible, I saw that for $14.95 per month, you get 1 credit. This credit is equal to one audio book. Am I crazy, or does $15 for a single audio book sound expensive? Is that the normal rate of a book in audio format? It would seem reasonable to pay about half that amount, or get two credits a month. On a happier note, I see my local library has a bunch of audio books in their catalog that I want to borrow. I’ll be getting some later next week!

I’ve been exploring Google Maps a lot lately, since it is so integrated with my G1 phone, and I created a few map sets, just to record different places (like the fishing spot my cousin took us to last weekend). I was adding some other locations to the map, and decided to share a little personal history of landmark places that have been part of my life. I doubt anyone will find it super-interesting, but it’s pretty fun to put stuff on the map, and a lot of good memories have resurfaced. It’s still a work in progress, but go ahead and take a look, why don’t you?

Barron’s Personal History Landmark Locations

I can’t be the only guy who puts wallpapers of beautiful women on their phone, can I? I actually have a program called Locale on my G1 that will switch out my wallpaper automatically at different time intervals. So I have a bunch of various wallpapers ranging from landscapes to CG abstractions, to sports logos, and yes, women! Izumi Sakai (singer), Yoshino Kimura (actress), and Toda Erika (actress) to be exact. I guess it’s a little unusual to have them on there, but whatever!

I’m so excited to become friends with a beautiful French woman! I don’t know what attracted her to me. Perhaps it was my awesome “Condi Wearing Beer-hat” avatar that did it.

One thing that a lot of people don’t like about the T-Mobile G1’s design is the “chin”. It’s the bottom of the phone, which is at a slight angle. I think the comment most given is that it messes with the simple design. But, functionally, it’s great. That little curve helps a bunch with one-handed control of the phone. It’s sort of like the kicktail on a skateboard. It makes holding the G1 more stable and comfortable. That and the trackball make using the G1 with one hand a breeze. Speaking of the trackball, it’s really a great way to navigate around web pages, form fields, and scrolling screens. And since you can press the trackball down to click, it makes for easy precision selections on small items in a web page. Really helpful!

But back to the chin. Like I mentioned earlier, it messes with the clean lines of the device, but this is really a good design because you can lay the phone down on its face, and the screen and buttons will not touch the surface of a flat table. When listening to music or streaming audio through the speaker, this is perfect. No need to worry about scratches to the screen or an errant button press. Also, the width of the G1 comes in handy because you can put the phone on its side if you wanted to. On the other hand, HTC really blew it when they failed to include a simple 3.5mm headphone jack. My brother bought me a little adapter that fits into the mini-USB port that will allow me to plug in my standard headphones, plus a mini-USB cable at the same time. I can’t wait to try that out.