i was about to go to bed, but i noticed a certain album slated to be dropped on september 11th had been leaked... hmm...

Season 1 DVD of Heroes is currently sitting on my fun-ton. Is it time... to be addicted?

Today, I committed a fashion crime, but it was cause it was hot! I converted my khaki pants into khaki capris today. It was pretty hawt, if I may say so myself. I would post a picture, but I don't think it's fair to cause jealousy in the hearts of thousands of my fans like that.

Short thoughts about iPod's releases:

iPod touch - cool, I guess. The one biggest gripe with the iPod (which still hasn't gotten better for me after 3 years of owning an iPod) is the lack of tactile response. I know Steve Jobs hates buttons and whatnot, but I used to really like being able to reach into my bag and operate my CD player on feel alone. I hate whipping out the iPod and having to stare at it to get anything done... I'd rather stare at all the Socal hot chicks walking around in skimpy clothing.

Aaron got an iPhone, and after playing with it, I was thoroughly impressed with its UI. But I'm not sure how useful their whole pinch/drag UI is for playing music. I'm also not completely sold on their music playing interface (looks too contact list-y for me). Buying the iPod touch seems equivalent to buying a really sweet sports car ... as an automatic. Sure, it looks cool, but everybody knows why you bought it (and that you copped out by not getting stick). The iPod touch has a max of 16GB of space? My 3G from three years ago has 15GB...

iPod nano - hate it. I hate the fatness of it. Totally not a good fit for me - why would I watch a video on that tiny-ass thing? Do people really watch videos on iPods (commuters via public transportation excluded)? Is it really comfortable to hold an iPod for however long a TV episode is? I never understood this.

iPod classic - the only one I'd consider buying. 160GB? Holy shizznits. Do the later generations have better hard drives? My 3G's hard-drive burned out once and I had to buy a new one and replace it myself.

iPod shuffle - dunno, don't care. What's exercising???

Overall: I hope the CoverFlow or whatever that crap is called doesn't suck as much as it looked in the demo.

I'm going to give the Zune ONE more chance tonight. I uninstalled the previous installation and am going to try it ... PLEASE LET IT WORK. I'D LIKE TO COMPARE.

My last attempt at getting the Microsoft Zune to work was a complete failure. After some encouragement from spaceinthewho, I decided to give it another go.

This could bode poorly for Han, cause I promised him he could have the Zune (maybe it would work better for him) after my initial frustrations with it. Would the Zune work, thus depriving Han of a portal music player?! YOU'LL FIND OUT!

. . .

I can be overly critical, so I decided not to go in with a negative bias. I would forget about my past bad experience with installation and try again. Like an overly affectionate boyfriend clinging onto a girl he knows is too good for her, I needlessly showered my Zune with compliments when I opened the box (again). Here goes the installation process again!

What lovely packaging! What an attractive device! So far, it sure looks like I can believe the 94% customer satisfaction rating!

I excitedly popped in the installation CD and got this screen:

Holy crap. I'm joining the social. This is going to be awesome.

If there's one thing Microsoft is good at, it's showing diversity. Check out the install screen pictures I screenshotted (screenshat?):

I've never felt so hip and relevant in my life. Look at all these racially diverse groups of people having so much fun joining the social. I can't WAIT.

18 minutes later, the installation is done! Yippee! I connect my Zune as instructed and then ... what?

I guess the 18 minute install didn't include the driver. And then ...

Sigh. Windows ... blah. (This one isn't Zune's fault, I know).

Anyways, this time I got much further into the install process. I could see the Zune on the software end, and the Zune reported it was connected as well!

First things first, delete all this useless music off!. (It took me a bit to figure it out, but I had to turn off auto-syncing before I could delete anything). Alright, let's do a simple operation, DELETE!

Toodle-doodle-ooh...

5 minutes reaches the limit for how long I'll wait for an application to delete a file. Le sigh.

An early conclusion

I give up. Again. It really is a shame, cause the Zune (from a hardware perspective) looks very promising. It's a shame the software for it absolutely sucks.

I hate to reiterate this point, but iTunes + iPod just works. On Windows. When I installed the iPod, I didn't waste an hour trying to get the product installed, and then run into a brick wall of failure.

The software sucking would be acceptable if there was some fall-back. Like, for example, mounting the goddamn thing as a hard drive. I understand the DRM limitations probably prevented this feature from happening on the Zune, but seriously, can't I just drag and drop some files from Windows? Please? Can we stop reinventing the wheel?

One caveat: Yes, this could all be the fault of my computer. Maybe my copy of Windows (WinXP Tablet SP2; now going at least 4 years old without a reformat) is the issue at hand here. I'm perfectly willing to accept that reality. But that doesn't change the fact that my iPod works, and the Zune doesn't. As a consumer, when I drop a hefty chunk of money for a piece of hardware, I expect it to work. And the Zune failed. Miserably.

Anyways, Han, do not worry. Your Zune is on the way.

Sorry, spaceinthewho!

A note: It may seem like I doctored these photos or did something on purpose to crash the Zune. I promise, I did nothing of the sort. I did my best to prevent any unexpected scenarios. I assure you that I didn't drop $150 to write two snarky, sarcastic posts on the Zune (I'm not that desperate for popularity).

Check out this interesting op-ed: (quoted in its entirety below)

There are a few LOL moments for me (bolded) in this op-ed. (No, I don't agree with the overall sentiment, but there's a few salient points in here).

A Wall Street Trader Draws Some Subprime Lessons: Michael Lewis

By Michael Lewis

Sept. 5 (Bloomberg) -- So right after the Bear Stearns funds blew up, I had a thought: This is what happens when you lend money to poor people.

Don't get me wrong: I have nothing personally against the poor. To my knowledge, I have nothing personally to do with the poor at all. It's not personal when a guy cuts your grass: that's business. He does what you say, you pay him. But you don't pay him in advance: That would be finance. And finance is one thing you should never engage in with the poor. (By poor, I mean anyone who the SEC wouldn't allow to invest in my hedge fund.)

That's the biggest lesson I've learned from the subprime crisis. Along the way, as these people have torpedoed my portfolio, I had some other thoughts about the poor. I'll share them with you.

1) They're masters of public relations.

I had no idea how my open-handedness could be made to look, after the fact. At the time I bought the subprime portfolio I thought: This is sort of like my way of giving something back. I didn't expect a profile in Philanthropy Today or anything like that. I mean, I bought at a discount. But I thought people would admire the Wall Street big shot who found a way to help the little guy. Sort of like a money doctor helping a sick person. Then the little guy wheels around and gives me this financial enema. And I'm the one who gets crap in the papers! Everyone feels sorry for the poor, and no one feels sorry for me. Even though it's my money! No good deed goes unpunished.

2) Poor people don't respect other people's money in the way money deserves to be respected.

Call me a romantic: I want everyone to have a shot at the American dream. Even people who haven't earned it. I did everything I could so that these schlubs could at least own their own place. The media is now making my generosity out to be some kind of scandal. Teaser rates weren't a scandal. Teaser rates were a sign of misplaced trust: I trusted these people to get their teams of lawyers to vet anything before they signed it. Turns out, if you're poor, you don't need to pay lawyers. You don't like the deal you just wave your hands in the air and moan about how poor you are. Then you default.

3) I've grown out of touch with "poor culture.''

Hard to say when this happened; it might have been when I stopped flying commercial. Or maybe it was when I gave up the bleacher seats and got the suite. But the first rule in this business is to know the people you're in business with, and I broke it. People complain about the rich getting richer and the poor being left behind. Is it any wonder? Look at them! Did it ever occur to even one of them that they might pay me back by WORKING HARDER? I don't think so.

But as I say, it was my fault, for not studying the poor more closely before I lent them the money. When the only time you've ever seen a lion is in his cage in the zoo, you start thinking of him as a pet cat. You forget that he wants to eat you.

4) Our society is really, really hostile to success. At the same time it's shockingly indulgent of poor people.

A Republican president now wants to bail them out! I have a different solution. Debtors' prison is obviously a little too retro, and besides that it would just use more taxpayers' money. But the poor could work off their debts. All over Greenwich I see lawns to be mowed, houses to be painted, sports cars to be tuned up. Some of these poor people must have skills. The ones that don't could be trained to do some of the less skilled labor -- say, working as clowns at rich kids' birthday parties. They could even have an act: put them in clown suits and see how many can be stuffed into a Maybach. It'd be like the circus, only better.

Transporting entire neighborhoods of poor people to upper Manhattan and lower Connecticut might seem impractical. It's not: Mexico does this sort of thing routinely. And in the long run it might be for the good of poor people. If the consequences were more serious, maybe they wouldn't stay poor.

5) I think it's time we all become more realistic about letting the poor anywhere near Wall Street.

Lending money to poor countries was a bad idea: Does it make any more sense to lend money to poor people? They don't even have mineral rights!

There's a reason the rich aren't getting richer as fast as they should: they keep getting tangled up with the poor. It's unrealistic to say that Wall Street should cut itself off entirely from poor -- or, if you will, "mainstream'' -- culture. As I say, I'll still do business with the masses. But I'll only engage in their finances if they can clump themselves together into a semblance of a rich person. I'll still accept pension fund money, for example. (Nothing under $50 million, please.) And I'm willing to finance the purchase of entire companies staffed basically with poor people. I did deals with Milken, before they broke him. I own some Blackstone. (Hang tough, Steve!)

But never again will I go one-on-one again with poor people. They're sharks.

You: "I don't believe you're an astronaut. In fact, I don't think MindTouch has anything to do with space exploration!"

Oh really???

(Credit to our awesome graphics designer, Damien)

In 1997, an RFC was released which allowed for the usage of Max-Age in cookies that allowed the server to set the expiration of a cookie in seconds. Somehow, IE still hasn't implemented this :( Sad panda time.

If IE7 doesn't get a cookie with the expires parameter, it treats it as a session cookie (makes sense). My problem is easily solved for the IE7 experience: send both an expires parameter and a max-age parameter.

Unfortunately, if your server time drifts, you'll get erratic behavior with Firefox.

Argh!

Man, it's been six years. I still remember that morning very clearly. I had passed out on the futon in my dorm room at Hinton James the night before - I was skipping that morning's intermediate organic chem class, when I woke up to CNN on the TV. I didn't think it was such a big deal at first - a plane crashed into a building. Out of the ordinary and tragic, but nothing historical. Then as the events unfolded, a feeling of astonishment took over.

What's sadder than the tragedy of the deaths of 9/11 is how little progress we've seem to have made ...

Twitter (2006) is AIM reinvented (1997).

Joost (2006) is Broadcast.com reinvented (1998).

Facebook (2004) is Friendster reinvented (2002).

Justin.tv/blogtv.com/every 5th startup (2007) is web-cams reinvented (1996).

Seems nobody has reinvented blogging yet ... hmm...

Steve shared with me a fascinating statistic:

Are wikis gonna go mainstream soon?

Update: Check out the comparison when you add forum to the list. If there's 3 things that every company needs, it's a forum, a wiki, and a blog.

There's one feature I really enjoy about Wordpress (I saw it first on Aaron's blog, but I can't seem to bring up any posts): related entries. Computers need to be able to mine data to find related content (I railed against tagging a long time ago as the result of failed tools).

I started hacking together something to try to find related entries - I managed to pass all 2000 of my entries through the related post filter, and I got some interesting results. What this feature does is it takes your entry's contents and compares it against your past entries' contents to see if they are similar. Similarity is handled by keyword and phrase overlap (nothing groundbreaking here). The feature took about 4 hours to implement from beginning to end, and I'm pretty happy with the end results.

One of my biggest regrets about Tabulas is not pushing for more of these types of discoverability tools - hopefully as I get some more time, I can hack together some more useful tools (along with a whole new concept of communities).

For example, see what the feature matched against my asstronaut entry. Pretty accurate, I must say! It's sort of fun to see what Tabulas thinks are "related" entries for a given entry.

Once I get this rolled out on a large scale to all patron accounts (sorry to those free accounts, there are technical limitations), I'll be interested to see how well it matches against my friend's entries.

Obviously this is a really broad first pass, so I'll tune the feature a bit to match some better things ... but it's a pretty successful first pass!

Fact the first: I am craving some cupcakes bad. Preferably with chocolate frosting and rainbow sprinkles. I'm halfway debating going down to Ralph's, but I doubt they have any premade. And do I really feel like baking tonight?

Fact the second: I always wanted to buy Trivial Pursuit and memorize all the trivia. Then I'd encourage my friends to play Trivial Pursuit (in which I'd own). I would impress a cute girl with my immense knowledge of the world, and could finally find myself a girlfriend.

Fact the third: This past weekend, some girls drove past me in Pacific Beach and yelled, "Looking good!!!" Max can verify this story. He was standing next to me, along with some other friend-of-a-friend (I had my first east coast visitor this past weekend!) ... but I'm pretty sure they were looking at me when they said that (I hope).

Aaron put up a nice demo of Deki Wiki. Since I know most of you are way too lazy to actually check out the application itself, just watch the 4 minute video which shows you the UI work we've put into Deki Wiki:

. . .

And only cause I bust IE's balls all the time, here is one huge example of how IE6 did something great for the web... HTTPOnly cookies rocks my world! (Firefox and Opera *just* added this capability into their browsers).

Without MS's willingness to innovate in their browsers, we really wouldn't have asynchronous calls, nor would we have HTTPOnly cookies. On one hand, developing applications for multiple browsers is a PITA (pain in the ass), but I do want to see browsers willing to take a risk and introduce non-standard behavior. So for all those people who think that browsers introducing proprietary behavior (a big example of this is Safari being the iPhone SDK) is a bad thing ... it really isn't. We can't all sit around and wait for standards to be written for us - it's nice to see innovation lead the way for standards to be written (after all, how can you figure out what the best practice is if you haven't tried it out a few times?)

A complete and utter feeling of despair. The new control panel is an utter piece of crap. Sigh.

Sorry, everybody :( Back to square one...

Edit: Some thoughts I should write down so I don't forget:

You know how you get so invested in something you can't look at something objectively? Yeah, I just got over that period with the new control panel last week. So I'm trashing the whole thing, design and all coding (the code for other reasons) and starting from scratch ... again. Lovely. Given that this is my third (or fourth) try, hopefully I'll fare better this time around.

The right column = bad idea. I initially shifted the items to the right side to take advantage of the "F" viewing patterns of most visitors. The "F" viewing pattern indicates how most people will scan a new webpage - first along the top, then down the left side, and then the top of your content area. For example, if you were track where the eyeballs were focusing on when you loaded the old control panel, it'd most likely look something like this:

For the new control panel, I shifted things right (believing, incorrectly, that focus on the content was more important - wrong!):

The problem is that the right side became ignored, and I idiotically decided to put the tertiary navigation there:

The numbers indicate where options are located. Talk about bad design.

. . .

Given the vast number of features Tabulas has, I've concluded that there's really no way to avoid 3 depths of navigation.

I detest drop-down menus (I hate forcing users to discover navigation), so those were out of the questions. One of the few things I was happy about the new control panel is the reorganization of tabbed items and the secondary navigation - it was just a matter of where to place the third level nav elements.

So after a bit of mucking around (the following image took me all of Saturday - can you believe it?), I've reached this conclusion:

The third level of navigation appears right below the other navigation items (jeez, that might be making too sense - it only took me 2 years to realize this!!!!!!!!!). I also removed the "help" tab, changed the "Preferences" tab to "Settings" (less geeky, and shorter) and switched up a few icons (I'll prob change the "Extras" icon back, since the wrench is way too similar to that of "Settings"). Yay, down to six tabs from ten tabs (currently control panel). Less visual overload = win!

All navigation elements will be horizontal - but the implication of this is that I'll be removing the vertical left navigation. The left nav's been served a lot of utility on the old control panel, cause it was a way of quickly finding your recent entries - so the downside of this will be that the "recent entries" box will have to be removed.

But now, I'm debating the merits of a "dashboard" view which would be loaded by default instead of the "add entry" view upon login - the dashboard view would have: your recent entries/images/links/blah, recently added friends, your community activities, and your friends' recent activities. The problem is, i'm really reluctant to add another tab just for a dashboard interface - I worked really hard to pare down the number of tabs to six ... ho hum.

The best digg comment EVER:

drjekelmrhyde speaks more truth than you will ever imagine. (Do you think the horrible sentence construction was done on purpose?)

Hey Bert, in case someone hasn't already sent this NYTimes article to you:

Like other young people on the fast track, Mr. Hammond has run the numbers and figures that an M.B.A. is a waste of money and time — time that could be spent making money. “There’s no way that I would consider it,” he says.

;)

Watch me choke with irony when I go for my MBA in two years...

. . .

Marc Andreessen (of Netscape and Ning fame) has written an excellent post about Internet platforms. If there is one place to learn everything you need to know (from a somewhat non-techie point of view), this post is it.

An Access API should become standard. Actually, I think all applications should be written with an API first and a UI second. That part is a no-brainer.

The "Plug-in" API is an interesting idea. While I was initially very excited about Facebook's API, I've really cooled down on the idea after realizing that most people abused the plug-in to try to turn me into a werewolf (you know what I'm talking about). That aside, there's a *huge* overhead to learning these Plug-in APIs; each site you have to relearn the plug-in architecture.

I've been wondering for a while if I could leverage the traditional plug-in model that Movable Type, Drupal, and Wordpress are known for in a system like Tabulas by using programmatic hooks.

This is going to sound very similar to what Facebook does, so please shush: you could register a URL as a hook that will be hit every time a specific action is undertaken. For example, I might specify: http://roykim.net/tabulas/journal/post as the place that Tabulas should POST to before saving my entry - Tabulas would take the entries contents and POST the whole thing to that URL - the URL would do some processing on it and pass it back to Tabulas; Tabulas would then save whatever your site returned.

You could use this hook to save your entry locally, or do some transformation on it (autolink your own entries, do your own smilies, etc) before passing it back to Tabulas.

These hooks could be all over the place - when you save an image, when you write an entry, when you save a link, etc.

The hooks would be accompanied by a PHP script I'd write, which would handle all the communication issues, so all you'd have to do is literally write some PHP code (and work with native PHP data structures). You'd never have to know about how the communication works; you just write your own PHP code and let the script you installed happily handle everything else.

Here goes any credibility about my manliness:

I can't stop listening to this song. It's so prrrrreeettttyyy!

Do you ever get the feeling that you're one repartee away from a meaningful relationship? Unfortunately, I'm cursed with the affliction of coming up with great comebacks after the moment has passed.

A warm Cinnabon really melts the stress of the day away...

(Woot is a site which offers one awesome deal per day - it's got quite a cult following).

Oh dear lord. Remember that Zune I bought from Woot for $150? They have it on sale for $130 ... and check out the hilarious description they put up:

An Emergency Open Letter

To all Woot customers:

I have received more than three emails from Zune buyers who are upset about Woot dropping the price of the Zune by $20 one month after it went on sale the first time. After reading every one of these emails, or at least scanning their subject lines, I have some observations and conclusions.

First, I need to make a better effort to hide my email address.

Second, I am sure that we are making the correct decision to lower the price of the 30GB Zune from $149.99 to $129.99. This confidence is based on more than the holy doctrine of corporate infallibility. The Zune is a breakthrough product, and we have the chance to “ride the lightning” and “shoot the curl” this holiday season, not to mention “kill the messenger” and “rock the vote”, further enabling us to “pay the rent” and “keep the lights on”. It benefits both Woot and every Zune user (but especially Woot) to drag as many new victims as possible into the Zune “dungeon”. We strongly believe that misery loves company this holiday season.

Third, being in technology for 1+ years, give or take a year, I can attest to the fact that the technology road is bumpy. There is always some idiot changing lanes without signaling, and the potholes never seem to get fixed. If you always wait for the next price cut or to buy the new improved model, you’ll never buy any technology product. I mean, why should you? Truth is, you don’t really need any of this junk. We’re afraid you’ll catch on to that fact and overpaid frauds like me will have to go back into fields like telemarketing and burrito construction. Fortunately, most of you continue to languish in a consumerist stupor, wallets spread wide for us to plunder as we please. The bad news for us is that if you buy products from companies that support them well, you will receive years of useful and satisfying service. But we’re hoping you’ll buy from Woot instead.

Third-and-a-half, even though we are making the right decision to lower the price of the Zune, and even though the technology road is, like, this total Deathrace 2000-type scene, we need to do a better job taking care of our early Zune customers, at least until we find a private security firm we can afford. For some reason, our early customers trusted us. We must live up to that trust with our actions in moments like these, lest you turn off the money spigot that maintains our decadent lifestyles. These peacock-egg omelets and mink-lined Jacuzzis don’t pay for themselves, you know.

Therefore, we have decided to offer every Woot customer who purchased a Zune from us on August 22, 2007 (or in the last Woot-Off) a $10 Woot credit towards any Woot order of $40 or more, before shipping. If that’s you, just enter the coupon code BUMPYROAD while making your purchase, and boo-yah: you’re mayor of Discount City. This discount applies to any Woot site, including Woot.com, Shirt.Woot, Wine.Woot, Sellout.Woot, and Beets.Woot. It doesn't expire, so feel free to check back everyday 'til you find something that will temporarily fill the void in your soul. You may use the coupon as many times as you bought Zunes. So, if you bought one Zune from us back in August, you can use BUMPYROAD once; if you bought two, you can use it twice; and so forth and so on and what-have-you. But you can only use the discount once on any one order. We make this decision with every confidence that most of you will never want any of the crap we sell anyway.

We want to convincingly pretend to do the right thing for our valued Zune customers. We’d apologize for disappointing some of you, but we long ago lost the capacity for sincere remorse. We will continue to do our best to trick you into having high expectations of Woot.

Larry Stalin
Woot CYA Officer

Seriously, who writes these? They are friggin' hilarious.

I had the fortune of catching the Red Bull Air Race down at San Diego bay today - it was basically timed races of airplanes going through pylons. Here are a few picture I lifted from Flickr:

Anyways, between races, they would have random airplanes fly by. One time, this helicopter started doing crazy ass tricks ... including *multiple* loops. I had no clue helicopters were capable of doing loops ... it just boggled my mind. This guy was doing them from a completely stationary position, too!

Now I'm going to get into my Audi and drink Red Bull.

If you've ever visited San Diego, you've probably visited the Gaslamp quarter. It's about sixteen square blocks of restaurants and bars ... tons of good (but expensive) food in the area.

Unfortunately, my personal favorite restaurant goes something like this (not in any order):

• Red Lobster
• Taco Bell
• Rubio's
• In-n-Out
• Bojangles (unfortunately this is only a Southern thing)

Want to take a fat guess how many of those are within walking distance? A big fat zero.

I wish somebody would open one of these wonderful establishments within walking distance... sniff sniff.

How does Chicago expect to win the NFC with Rex Grossman at helm? I watched the first half of the Cowboys/Bears game and he was atrocious. The numbers in the first half were deceptive, because most of the incompletions Grossman threw were nearly picked off.

Tony Romo has the most awkward throwing form ever. Every time I see him, I feel like he's going to fly in the other direction of the ball after release.

Ok, I'll definitely go to hell for laughing at this ... but ... "Don't Tase Me ... the MC Hammer remix" (which is exactly what it sounds like)

I can't believe I haven't heard about these guys before ... they're a New Zealand musical duo who are hilarious! They're like Tenacious D ... except classier.

Check out these three vids:

I just love how this quickly starts into a situation that we all find ourselves in ... and then quickly evolves into something absolutely ridiculous.

I'm told they also have an HBO show - their Season 1 DVD is coming out soon; I'll definitely have to get it!

Let me get this straight: you bought a cutting-edge toy from a company that has never had a good track of backwards compatibility in their operating system division, a company which has time-and-time again issue updates to software which causes massive breakages, then you proceeded to hack it against their warnings, and when said company releases a software upgrade which breaks your expensive toy just like they said it would, you whine like a baby?

Here, let's try an easier quiz:

If you are one of these people, you are:

Dumb
Dumb
Dumb
Dumb

Working for MT and seeing the issues that come up with upgrading our software in the forums, it's very hard to create an upgrade process which doesn't break something in the process, especially if people are mucking around with the application on their own!

I had a dream last night where somebody notified me that I hadn't completed a required class in high school, so I had to go back and take the class over again. For some reason, I went back to high school to take this English class and it was really awkward.

. . .

I know a lot of people don't like Kanye, but I really like him:

Kanye does give off a strong vibe of arrogance, but I think that's just zealousness towards the pride he takes in his work. I can easily understand how if you work really hard towards creating something beautiful, how wrapped up in it you'd get, and how disappointed you'd be if other people didn't acknowledge your efforts.