right on bro!

I wrote a web app for the iPhone that lets you browse and read profiles of the 2007 Maxim Hometown Hotties contestants (there are over 1,000 of them), as well as play a silly but kind of funny quiz game. It’s been a good time-killer in the airport and I am happy to now be able to unleash it to the public.

Jon Regul, please point your iPhone to: http://apps.maxim.com/iphone.

Can somebody explain what <3 means? I’ve been seeing it in several different places and I don’t understand what it is.

I ran into the VP of Finance (the guy who signs my checks and expense reports) at Costco this weekend. Out of all people and places at which I think I’d want to run into co-workers, I think that was a pretty good one.

If you want to be able to track everyone’s blogs in one place (a la the old peeps page that I set up a while ago and killed off recently), go to Netvibes and create an account there. Netvibes is a personalized homepage tool that allows you to pull in things through RSS feeds among other things (it also has Jon Regul’s favorite thing on the Internet - the weather report). It’ll also do things like check your MySpace and Facebook activity so you don’t have to visit six billion sites to collect all of your news.

I used to diss Netvibes when it first came out because I had actually written my own personalized homepage system, but two things happened - a) I got too busy/lazy to update my own and b) Netvibes’ feature set improved quite a bit. Highly recommended now, and I use it multiple times per day. I have no idea how they are going to make money but use it while it lasts, I guess.

To get a feed on there:

a) on the left side, click “Add Feed”
b) put in the RSS feed link:

http://www.rightonbro.com/feed/
http://www.overactive-imagination.com/ramble/atom.xml
http://www.noiseinsidemyhead.com/feed/atom/

c) drag and drop the module on the page anywhere you want it.

It’s cool and fun!

Last week, I went to a corporate retreat for the company I work at. One of the speakers (a C-level executive at one of the biggest traditional media entertainment companies in the United States) was talking about his Web strategy and said that the future of convergence wasn’t going to be figured out by him - it was going to be “22 year olds with no social relationships with the opposite sex.” I could feel eyes on me, and somebody said, “No offense to anyone in this room,” and there was a small round of nervous laughter.

You are who you are, I guess.

Back to figuring out the whole convergence thing…

I flew the new Virgin America airline a couple of weeks ago. It’s been getting quite a few good reviews in the press, and their corporate website says they are inspired by “changing domestic air travel.” I fly LAX to SFO quite a bit and was told it was the hot new thing by one of the engineers I work with, so I figured on my next trip I’d check it out.

Well…it was okay. Their new Red interactive system is branded as beta, which I think is an appropriate status designation for the entire airline.

Here’s the good:

Checkin was painless at LAX. Virgin America is located in Terminal 5, which doesn’t seem as hosed as the dreaded Terminal 1, which I absolutely hate flying out of because the security lines are a permanent mess. I liked that there was a rep available to walk me through the self-checkin terminal, except when the printer jammed and my boarding pass wouldn’t print.

The cabin has undeniably cool lighting to it. If you like flying in something that looks like an ultralounge, this is the airline for you. However, this means that when it’s dark outside, it’s virtually impossible to see inside the cabin so getting to your seat might take some time. I hope they do something about this for early morning/late night flights.

Here’s the okay:

The “Red” interactive system is cool. A TV screen and detachable remote control at every seat which has satellite TV, on-demand music, on-demand videos, on-demand games (albeit lame ones) , ordering food from your seat, and the ability to chat with other passengers. It is, however, buggy. At times, the remote lost control of my Doom guy, and sometimes the music and videos wouldn’t load, and about a quarter of the satellite TV channels were out due to some sort of error. Nobody was on the chat system so I couldn’t really try it out. Red does get points for running Linux - I know this because it crashed and during the reboot sequence, Tux appears and it says it’s a variant of Red Hat.

Allegedly there are USB ports and power jacks at every seat too, but I couldn’t find them.

Coach class is just as uncomfortable as any other airline. Yes, the seats are leather, but it’s the same old story - your knees will knock up against the seat in front of you, and if that person reclines, it’s game over. Also, the magazine holder doesn’t open up enough to accommodate a water bottle. Virgin America certainly gets no points in this category so if you are seeking additional comfort without paying an arm and a leg for first class, look elsewhere, such as United’s Economy Plus.

Here’s the bad:

My flight back was delayed 2.5 hours. The staff at SFO were awfully nice about it, passing out free water and snacks while we were waiting, and pretty straightforward about what happened - there was some sort of clerical error and they had no pilot for the plane. That was a nice touch for them to be honest, but for me, delays are the kiss of death, especially when SFO to LAX is only about an hour or so.

Overall:

I get the sense that these guys are still figuring things out. Either that or I had a string of unfortunate events come together. I don’t think there’s anything super compelling that makes me want to fly them again, so I guess I will stick to a fallback of price, choosing between them and United on an ad hoc basis. I suggest you check out Virgin America for yourself, but as of right now, don’t expect the revolution in air travel that was promised.

I’m headed out to New Orleans for the weekend - thanks to the power of advanced posting, by the time you read this, I should be on an airplane out there. I haven’t been to New Orleans since my road trip, and since Hurricane Katrina hit. I remember standing out on Bourbon Street thinking that it’d be a cool place to be with friends, which was one of the downsides of driving across the country by one’s self, but this time I’m rolling with the Costa Mesa crew, so we’ll see how much damage we can do. Looking forward to a few days of R&R, beignets, oysters, something called etouffe, cards, and booze in the French Quarter.

I love this woman.

I’m taking this from a chain letter that Michele sent me:

Three things about me:

3 movies I’ve watched over and over

1. Hard-Boiled

2. Armageddon (when it’s on TV)

3. Casino (just got the HD-DVD of this puppy, yow!)

3 PLACES I’VE WORKED

1. City of Los Angeles

2. Sheraton Portland Airport Hotel

3. Snap-On Tools

3 PLACES I’VE LIVED

1. Los Angeles, CA (duh)
2. Portland, OR
3. Brookfield, CT

TV Shows I Love to Watch

1. Friday Night Lights
2. Entourage
3. CSI: Crime Scene Investigation

3 PLACES I’VE BEEN ON VACATION

1. Las Vegas, NV
2. Las Vegas, NV
3. Europe

3 FAVORITE FOODS

1. Sushi
2. Catfish
3. Blue cheese

3 PLACES I’D RATHER BE RIGHT NOW

1. Las Vegas, NV (this is a temporary wish)
2. Beijing, China (this is another temporary wish)
3. Brussels, Belgium

3 PEOPLE I THINK WILL RESPOND

1. Montez
2. Buller
3. Toby

I paid for a Movable Type license a few years ago, but I switched to WordPress.   I’ve been running WP on another project for almost a year now, and I like it better, so here we are.  I’m using a theme from the ThemeViewer library now, but I’ll work on customizing my own.

Things that just made sense to switch:

• Akismet spam filter - I was getting hundreds of comment spams on MT and Akismet does a good job of just getting rid of most everything.
• Adding non-blog pages with the same theme is super easy.
• It seems like WordPress launches more features and fixes more quickly.
• Automatic Google sitemaps generation with the Google Sitemaps plugin.

The reason this came about today was that my server has been getting craptacularly slow, and I decided this morning to do something about it.  I rewrote some code on DealTuner (thanks Serge for your help) and just decided to swap over blog software while I was at it.

Enjoy!  You’ll be able to read my trash more quickly and with more stability now.