drunk cab ride, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

Ars Technica: Let a million iPhones bloom – great article.
Here’s a piece:

Well that very same AT&T in that same market just got probably half a million new two-year contracts in three days. Now I don’t know what AT&T’s usual acquisition numbers are like, but I have to think there are some big smiles in the boardroom right about now.
And that’s amusing because AT&T has almost nothing to be happy about. Those smiling executives are probably already starting to convince themselves that they’re responsible in some way for this success. That sentiment is about as well founded as the power company patting itself on the back as big-screen TVs fly off the shelves.

If anything, AT&T’s douchey-ness was amplified next to Apple. All the complaints I’ve heard thus far about the iPhone have all been about AT&T technical issues and bad customer service.

I’ve been meaning to write about this for a while, even before the complaints started about the iPhone having only 8 gigs of disk space.
There are some people that seem to have the impression that they need to load their digital music device with as much of their entire music collection as possible. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve guilty of this in the past. “I like Talib Kweli, I’ll just load all his albums onto my iPod…”
There’s nothing wrong with this behavior, but if you’re like me, and you have your device set to SHUFFLE ALL, you notice that you spend a lot of time clicking the Forward button over and over and over until you hit a track you want.
A better route to take is to create playlists in iTunes. It might be a little time consuming, but it will be well worth your while in the long run. As much as you love the Led Zeppelin II album, you know damn well you were through with Stairway to Heaven by junior year in high school ….so why are carrying that track around on your iPod?
A first stab at creating Playlists is obviously ‘old favorites’. This is a good start and will work for some people.
Another good list that I like to make is New Albums. This takes the old mentality of ‘dumping’ albums on your device, but in this case, it’s just to sift out the tracks you like and don’t like. Once I realized what tracks I liked from The White Stripes new album, Icky Thump, I just kept those and deleted the rest.
One of the most helpful techniques for getting solid listening experience from your iPod is deleting the tracks you don’t like. Tell me if this has ever happened to you (over and over): when your iPod is set on shuffle, it seems to like to shuffle the same songs every time, and they’re the songs you always don’t want to hear.
Well, the first step to happiness is removing those tracks from your iPod. The shuffling might begin to find great tracks, or it might find more crappy ones. Just repeat the above process until you’ve chipped away the all the unwanted tracks.
ALthough this is essential to owners of iPhones and other players with smaller capacity, it’s equally powerful for 60 gig iPod owners too.
It’s about quality people, not quantity.

HBO Voyeur – This is great site and the quality of the video clips is amazing – super crisp!
It reminds me of the Tram ride I take from 60th Street & 2nd Ave to Roosevelt Island (where my wife and I live). When we take the Tram you get a bird’s eye view hundreds of apartments. Unfortunately, the ride is too quick to see anything spicy. 🙁

So I stumbled upon AOL Video for the first time tonight and I noticed something interesting – all the videos I clicked on are from YouTube! Is there anything wrong with this? Absolutely not. I guess I just expect this sort of decision from an amateur – not from an established (and outdated) company like AOL. I guess they must have some amazing editorial skills for extracting video ‘gold’ from YouTube to make themselves a profit. (update: It looks as though their premium video content that they sell is in Windows Media format, and it doesn’t seem to play nice with my Mac.)
I guess they’re running out of ideas, I mean shit, they did rip of Yahoo with their beta site redesign. See below…

Continue…

Palm’s chief Ed Colligan back in November (I wrote about this in my entry from 21 Nov 2007):

“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent phone,” he said. “PC guys are not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”

You can learn a lot about what someone is really thinking by the language they use. Looking at this quote again, I like how he says they’re working to make a decent phone. If you’re mindset is ‘decent’, then don’t expect to produce anything exceptional.
So it has come to be. You were very wrong Ed. As a faithful Treo user for 3 years, I hope you innovate the shit out of the Treo and give Apple some competition, until then, I’ll be enjoying my iPhone – next month, that is, when I actually try to buy it.
I know what some of you are thinking, and it can be summed up in this scene from Clerks:
Audio MP3:

Randal: I hope it feels good.
Customer: You hope what feels good?
Randal: I hope it feels so good to be right. There is nothing more exhilarating than pointing out the shortcomings of others, is there?
Customer: Well this is the last time I ever rent here…
Randal: You’ll be missed.
Customer: Screw you!
[The customer storms out. Randal runs out into the street.]
Randal: Hey you’re not allowed to rent here anymore!
Jay: Yeah!

If you’re wondering, it does feel good to have known that the iPhone was going to be a hit.

from the King of Comedy

You know, someone like Rupert Pupkin, who can live at home with their mother in Jersey, wait on lines for days upon end for things, people, events. Detached from reality. Just replace his autograph book in this scene with an iPhone.
Rupert says it perfectly in the scene above:
“What’s so funny about that? A man can get ANYTHING he wants as long as he’s willing to pay the price! Crazier things HAVE happened…”

This is real simple and doesn’t require a long-winded explanation.
The iPhone is the floating car we imagined we’d be driving in the future.
The Jetsons, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Minority Report …the iPhone is that touchscreen gadget they all used (metaphorically speaking) to communicate with. As John Gruber points out (so obvious we all didn’t catch it), the iPhone is the first mobile device being promoted for its interface, not hardware.
… and like any good science fiction movie – it’s about the theatrics. The experience. The motion. The transitions. The atmosphere. What the iPhone does is as important as how it does it.

Hey! my co-worker Paula just launched her fresh new site, 365 Days. Check it out, she crops her photos into squares. I kinda dig that.

photo credit: Paula Tsai, 365 Days

RealPlayer beta released: no Mac, iPod support (yet) – Does anyone still use RealPlayer?
“Maybe” is one option too many – Zeldman’s right about getting rid of Maybe on sites like Evite, but I’m not down with his argument for 4 star ratings being a better alternative to 5-star ratings.
I’m also not buying his argument, E-mail is not a platform for design. What’s smart is using services like (or adopting practices like) Campaign Monitor that allow you to create HTML and plain text versions of your messages.

This is only interesting to me, but it looks as though this site’s feed is getting picked up by Sphere, who syndicates content for WSJ.com. I discovered this when I noticed I was getting referrals from this WSJ article. I must be an ‘official’ blog or something.

IMG_5177.JPG, originally uploaded by combustionchamber.

IMG_5209.JPG, originally uploaded by combustionchamber