What is in a name?

Shakespeare wrote "Would not a rose by any other name still smell as sweet?" Which is particularity fitting since I'm wearing my favorite Shakespeare t-shirt today.

Some of my friends are posting their ROBOT names. As I had to try the widget out to see what my name is. As a programmer many people think I'm a robot anyway since I tend to think like one. In fact some people have been known to fail the turing test when speaking to me. So what I found out what my robot name is... it all makes sense.

Get Your Robot Name

Still I'd change it to Digital Synthetic Machine Optimized for REALLY Scientific Explanations

Sugar and Fat Please

So I think its funny how KFC is trying to re-brand themselves as a healthly choice. They want to be known as KFC rather then Kentucky Fried Chicken. Because 'Fried' is so unhealthy. To this end they now have Kentucky Grilled chicken. So I decided to sacrifice my arteries to the grease gods and give them a try.

The nice lady behind the counter assured me that I could sub the grilled chicken into any meal. So I ordered the 2 piece and asked for white meat only. She stopped for a second and then said "I'm sorry the grilled only comes in dark meat" HELLO Dark meat? What is the point of making it grilled then? Lets take a twinkie and in stead of deep frying it lets saute the twinkie. Clue Phone. Dark meat has never been healthy That is why the ground turkey costs less then the ground turkey breast.

So I got past that and ordered my chicken breast strip meal. Of course I also got a biscuit (who could resist) and when she offered me butter and honey I politely nodded. I'm not normally the type to put honey on my biscuits, but I figured why not the packets don't cost extra. At home I was playing with the honey packet when I saw on the front something that scared me very much. 11% real Honey. ELEVEN PERCENT? That means its 89% NOT honey! I had to flip it over to read the ingredients. High Fructose Corn Syrup = Sugar, Sugar, Honey, Corn Syrup = Sugar, Flavoring & Color. Yes that means that its atleast 80% sugar. Yum Yum. You know I don't think changing your name to an acronym is going to change your image. Try serving foods that won't kill you.

Blogroll Updated...

So as a general rule of thumb I never post about my family nor do I post about work... Which frequently leaves me with nothing much to say... As a result the site gets stale and I don't post anything at all. This morning my father mentioned that my one of the links in my blogroll was not working.

Well my blogroll was created by bloglines, which was nice, but I got fed up with bloglines a couple months back because they were not showing me new content in the feeds I was asking them to subscribe too. For a tool which is supose to gather all my feeds into once place, failing to gather new content was the kiss of death for me, So I found the export to OPML link and took my feeds to Google Reader. I have been very happy ever since.

However I never updated the code here on my own blog to have the blogroll coming from google reader vice bloglines. so today I followed some very easy steps to create my blogroll from google and I encourage you to check out what I read.

iphoto 09 - My review/rant

So I bought Ilife 09 the day it was announced, because quite frankly the faces feature is some thing I've been looking for in my photo storage software for a long time. I love the picassaweb people feature, but I want to analyze all of my photo not just the handfull I share... I mean lets be honest the ones I shared I already know who is in them.. the ons buried on my hard drive are the once I really need this feature for.

So I waited for nearly a month until the product shipped and I got my hands on Ilife within 24 hours of it shipping. Importing my photos from picasa and moving them from my PC to my mac was a piece of cake. I installed ilife and I have told my wife it should be called "I used to have a life" because I have been spending countless hours pouring over each event and picture to correct the date of those scanned in images so they fit in my timeline and my events flow with the correct aging sequence.

Then came the facial req... Wel it does pretty well on full faces, and does amazing on blurry images. but sunglasses kills it every time, and since I life in Hawaii a majority of my pictures include people wearing sunglasses, which sucks. Profile faces are so so. And the tool to add a face well that is just freaky trying to get it centered and zoomed at once... maybe if their was a cross hair when you drug the box around.. fortunately macworld pointed out that if I hold option down the resize of the box works like I'd expect it to.

Places works well, I love the integration into google to look up address of places and restaurants. it works well. The one thing that is missing from both Faces and places is a way to view photos without locations or photos with unknown faces. If I had a way to create a smart album that way I could review those photos that need my attention.

But now that the review of the features is over, I'd like like to address the user interface... THIS SUCKS. I expect more from apple, this feels like two large features have been bandaided on to the core features without any thought for the user wanting to interact with them all. For example I import new photos and I want to ID the faces, clean up the redeye and add location tags.. These three features are all locked in their own edit mode sequence which requires me to bounce back and forth between adding names, and editing the photo and the get info screen to update the locational data. Bouncing back and forth quickly proved to be so time consuming that instead make three passes through my event to do each feature, because of the backwards way these features were stapled on top of other features.

What irritates me even more then that however is the lack of ability to bounce between methods of viewing the photos. If I find a photo in faces, I can RMC and "show Event", but if I find a photo in place the RMC menu option does not exist. (WHY?) Same thing with albums and smart albums the RMC menu to "Show Event" does not exist.

All this creates a product with great features, but the chunkiness I'd expect from Microsoft, from Iphoto I expect more I expect to be amazed with its user interface and think to myself ... why didn't I think of that... or that is really cool.

My last annoyance, when adding names to photos and using the left and right arrows to advance to the next photo the info panel often fails to update with the info for the photo but instead shows the date range of all photos in the "last viewed faces.." album. This is really annoying as I often need the date to give me a heads up to which child the baby photo is of. toggling the arrows back and forth corrects the issue, but why should I have to go forward, backwards then forwards again just to see the information about the photo I'm viewing? WTF?

Review: Zimbra Desktop

I pulled down the beta of Zimbra Desktop the other week and have been using it off and on. First the things I like about it:
1) group by conversation!!!!!
2) supports IMAP, POP3 & Zimbra accounts.
3) same look and feel as Zimbra web.
4) offline support.

I much prefer it for reading my email because like gmail it will pull my sent email and all replies together into a thread so that I can read things in context. This is the way all email should work. I also love the idea of being able to open zimbra desktop on my laptop, pull down my email, disconnect and read and work with it all. (I know almost all mail clients support this)

Next the cons:
1) no LDAP support. - How am I suppose to know who send my email too without my address book
2) Signature Bug- When I try to set a signature for my first email account it worked great. Once I added more then one account setting a signature came me a cryptic error message "error in identity {long GUID here}".
3) Useless error messages - this morning I opened it up and one of my accounts has a red icon. Hovering over the icon it said "error" but there was no way to see what the actual error was? Was it a comms error? as user/password error? what is wrong?

Overall: I think Zimbra desktop has the potential to be an outlook killer app, but defiantly not in its beta state, I re-evaluate when they release 1.0.

Firefox 3.0

So I have been using the Firefox 3.0 release candidates, and I'm loving it. The new location bar, which lets you search your bookmarks as fast as you type. This is awesome.

Also I accidentally clicked on favicon the other day and up popped a dialog with some information about who owns the site which I thought was a little annoying but cool. Then yesterday I clicked on it again, and then clicked the more info, and I was magically taken a tab in firefox where I could inspect each cookie I had from the website ans see/delete all saved passwords. I have been trying to do that for months since I reset my password and it "remembered" the old one.

I say let all set a world record and download firefox 3

10 Year Vacation

In 1994 I bought my first PC. Previously I had no less then 4 macs, and I loved them. But the mac Laptops were out of my price range (even used ones) So I bought myself a 486 Laptop with a gray scale screen and a built in track ball it was loaded with windows 3.11. My true feeling for PC's might have been obvious when I asked it to boot into dos, and I renamed the windows executable from win.exe to lose.exe thus forcing you to type lose before being able to open windows.
Anyone who knows me knows I held off on windows 95 until 1997, then I jumped into win 98 and Win ME, where I stayed until XP came out. I was so scared of XP that I drove as fast as I could to frys to buy a copy of win 2000. Once XP SP2 came out I was willing to make the switch to XP Pro and I have been happy ever since...
In 2004 my work bought me a Mac G5, it was the first time in a decade I had used a mac. I hurt, I was confused. My mind wanted to over complicate simple tasks, and I could not get much done. Most of my time I ran VPC, and complained how slow it was. In that time Mac had gone from system 7 to OS X (10.4) this was my ten year vacation from macs... to be honest my homecoming was less then thrilling. I found myself stumbling around and not really in love with macs. Although I did love their commercials because there is just something funny about the truth (see the success of dilbert)
Without a doubt I love my ipods, now on number 3, I have loved them all, and the ipod touch has me singing apples praise... the multi-touch screen reminds me of minority report, its just too cool. and I love the fact that its flash based so I don't need to worry about the hard drive failing like my last ipod.
Next week I'm going on a trip and I jokingly said to my wife that I needed a laptop. She thought I was serious and said "We have so many PCs" (one for me, one for her and one for our TV, plus the NAS) and that a laptop seems unnecessary unless I was thinking of getting a mac...
Since my return to macs they were now using intel chips and has the option of boot camp and of course parallels, so I proud to announce that I am now an official mac owner. I am amazed at how well it is playing with with the other PCs on my network. The relationship started off rough as macbooks come installed with 10.5 but not the full version, once I reloaded from the disks they provided me, I have been very happy with my new mac. Some of my favorite 10.5 features... Spaces its like virtual multi monitor display... since I have been using two monitors for the last five years, I love it, it gives me room to spread out.. I know solaris has had this from version what 4... but its still very nice.

First Day of Work.

Friday afternoon, I cleared out my desk and brought home a box full of ASP, HTML, VB and various web books. (now I have to find a place to put them all) I spent the last two days out-processing and checking out from every department. Some of this was necessary, most of it was political. Monday morning I'm going to start my new job, I will be a contractor working in the same building working with most of the same people, so it's going to be a challenge to tell people who have been coming to me with the same issues for years that I no longer do that job.

People will surely get confused, but I am looking forward to being responsible for the maintenance and use of just one program not everything digital, database driven or web-based like I used to be responsible for.

Here is hoping for a smooth transition, and that being closer to the customer will make me happier.