In followup to this post
And yes, I had kimchi at Thanksgiving. 
It’s been four years since I last wrote about my cousin Juno. I haven’t changed much but a baby grows up a lot in that time.
While technically he’s my nephew, he calls me “사촌”—사촌 (sa-chon) means cousin in Korean, so I refer to him as my cousin Juno. And apparently I’m a big hit with him—Juno constantly pesters his parents before family get togethers, “Is Sa-chon Terry going to be there?”
The reason why is I have a secret weapon…
…an iPhone loaded with tons of free and $1 games.
Unfortunately because I never actually play the games, I hadn’t unlocked enough levels in Krazy Kart. Marie had to help out:
What an amazing device, and an amazing cousin. Oh, to be a kid right now! Wait a minute…
We still are!
Me (as navigator): Okay go right here and then turn left onto Mission.
… (later)
Me: Are you sure you are going the right direction?
Her: I got it under control.
Me: I think you must have gone the wrong direction earlier.
Her: I turned onto Mission like you said.
Me: Oh! I should have told you that the turn was more like a hairpin left.
Her: You give terrible directions.
Me: Well don’t blame me, blame Google. See?
Her: Those directions are terrible, it should have said, “Flip a bitch onto Mission Street.”
Are you listening, Siri?
My friend, Andrei, points out an article as possible counter point to my observation and ridicule.
It is an interesting article for those not familiar with the legal basis created by the Right of First Sale or the Betamax case (though the application is not literally true in the case of Netflix. Netflix revenue shares, and has used similar deals to bargain with in early streaming contracts).
But, despite those good points, here is why this article is actually pretty terrible…
Continue reading about my critique of the defense after the jump→
Now that this site has been down for a month (Thank you, SARSxSW), I tried to see restart this blog with a deep thought.
I couldn’t come up with anything.
So instead, I’ll talk about the tech news. Recently a lot has been going on about Steve Jobs latest missive: “Thoughts on Flash” to which, Adobe’s CEO quickly responded to in the Wall Street Journal.
Instead of rushing to Apple’s defense here, I thought I’d provide some thoughts on these “thoughts.”
Buried in a previous article, instead of carrying the paper manuals around, I mentioned that you should download your manufacturer’s camera manuals onto the iPhone for reference. But I didn’t explain how this could be done or why it is useful.
Here are three applications I’ve used that render PDFs:
I’ll be talking about Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader. If you want to know the solution I use for camera manuals, skip to the section on GoodReader.
Continue reading about reading PDF manuals in Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader after the jump →
I’ve always said that the best camera is the one you have on you, and I’ve mentioned that that cameraphones have a lot of versatility.
I haven’t been shooting seriously in over a year and my cameras are screaming for me to take this stuff seriously again.
Even my iPhone camera.
With my car finally back from the shop, my rear mirror finally repaired, me in the passenger side, and the latest burger from McDonald’s in my lap, I felt a lot of regret I couldn’t snap this with my Leica or Panasonic LX1. But then I remembered I was charging my iPhone…
One of the iPhone updates I downloaded last night was the New York Times app. Trying to figure out how it was better than the previous version I was hit with the announcement that there is a Kindle app for the iPhone.
Here are some screenshots with commentary:
The Kindle icon is nice. I put the app next to Stanza which is, by far, the best free book reader for the iPhone. Yeah, my battery is running out.
This screen is the same as the Kindle 2’s UPC symbol.
All my purchased books are synced and the covers are in color. Nice.
On the other hand, none of my sample chapters synced, none of my documents synced, and my magazine subscription The New Yorker didn’t sync. I was hoping to see the latest cover in color on the iPhone. 
Kindle app wirelessly synchronized my page position from my Kindle 2. Slick! You flick tap to change the page, tap hold to pull up the menu. They’ll probably have to change the navigation UI to be more in line with other iPhone readers.
For some reason the scroll is too slow for page flipping. You flick to fast you just get a white screen. You can change the font size but you cannot rotate the display.
Images on Kindle books are supposed to be color. Not for me! Maybe it depends on the book, but the print version of this book is clearly color, while the Kindle version is black and white. Also you can’t pinch zoom or tap zoom any of the images. So much for using the Kindle for my pr0n needs. Argh!
There seems to be a bug where both “Beginning” and “Cover” jump to the cover. Beginning is supposed to jump to the first readable area.
Note that the app syncs my notes and marks from my Kindle 2.
The jump menu is the only thing clearly better on the iPhone. I can jump to the section with just a flick and tap. Those of you who take a lot of notes know how frustrating it is to navigate the Kindle 2’s eInk display.
BTW, there is no text-to-speech. This is disappointing. I know the iPod has spoken menus and there is a way sync high quality voices to it. I’d love for a high-quality voice like Alex read my books while I’m driving (and then sync my book position back to my Kindle 2. [If I have time I’ll archive my notes later in this article]
Well the Kindle 2 came out today so I preordered it.
This morning two people IM’d me about it so I decided to give the first my Amazon referral bucks. I give Amazon bucks semi-randomly to various friends and he asked me how I do it.
I use a “Buy from Amazon” bookmarklet I wrote to make life easier.
You can drag that into your toolbar if you like. One nice thing is to remove the second prompt and just replace the href with the tag to yourself. I keep it this way so that I remember to put the associate ID of one of my friends since I put them on rotation.
Even though it’s been a month, I still have yet to write down my New Year’s resolutions. I think that’s because last year I only completed one of four, after being three for three in 2007, I’m demoralized.
If I were to write one, the resolution would center around becoming a person more honest with myself and, by extension, with others. So far, I’ve found it relatively easy to do the physical aspects like “workout” but rather hard to do emotional ones like “letting go.” This is compounded by the fact that it is relatively easy to write achievable goals for the former, but not so easy to for the latter.
I stumbled across an application this morning after working out. It’s selling for 99 cents on iTunes.
The idea is to write five things a day you are thankful for. Every so often (every day?) after writing in the journal it gives you an inspirational quote. I guess the idea is that if you focus on the positive you can create an abundance mindset and thus be happier. As for me, I just think that we don’t focus on our inner selves enough.
We cannot exercise the physical heart directly, so we do so indirectly with large muscles moving. Perhaps we cannot exercise the emotional heart directly, so we do so indirectly with small gratitudes giving.
Maybe it’ll help, and, if you’re in the same boat, maybe it’ll help you too. The nice thing is, you can even do this without an iPhone.