Airport Smoking Lounge

There’s a new D-1-3 show available here and on iTunes. Don’t make me repeat myself.

Turning Left

This description of a new person at work tells you something about the area I live in: “She’s a big NASCAR fan. In fact, when Dale Earnhardt Jr. changed his number and main sponsor, she had to get a whole new wardrobe.”

Suicide Balloons

This week’s D-1-3 podcast is fresh-roasted and brewed to perfection. Go slurp some down.

Take that, Vegas!

So, I’m in Las Vegas for work. Luckily enough, we reached a stopping point where I get to hit the strip and enjoy myself. And I have for the most part.

I just came back from whirlwind monorail tour of the strip, and guess what – I came out a winner!

That’s right, Las Vegas – I am walking away for $12 of your money! 120 dimes, 240 nickels, 1200 pennies! All mine, currently burning a whole in my pocket.

I’m what the industry refers to as “A Whale” as this point. It’s very doubtful the city will ever let me set foot in a casino again. Oh well, that’s the price of being a winner I suppose. My and Billy Mitchell are on the same page here (“King of Kong” reference – a movie everyone should see).

Apart from that, here’s a few things I’ve learn on this trip to Vegas (other than how to be a winner).

1.    The Strip sucks when you’re by yourself.
2.    No matter where you are in the world, be it Orlando, Vegas, or Istanbul, you’ll always see and angry father beating a whiny, tired child in public while telling the child how much he’s spent on this “family vacation” and they better enjoy themselves.
3.    When you find something you really enjoy in a vacation destination, it’s often gone with little or no warning (see the article at “These are the continuing voyages…” on this blog)
4.    “Shadows” at Caesers is the Second best place in the world to have a drink.
5.    “The Pussy Cat Dolls Lounge” at Caesars is the best place in the world to have a drink.
6.    I can spot a “Hot Hot Penny” slot machine from 500 paces.

So, that’s all for now. Check back in August when I will inevitably have to come back for work again. Hopefully my reputation as “A Whale” will have cooled off by then.

Be sure to check next weeks podcast – I’m reasonably sure this topic will come up.

These are the continuing voyages… er, maybe not

Long story short, I’m currently in Las Vegas for work – helping get a huge project done in the zero hour.

Despite the rush, tight deadlines, and 14 hour days, I have managed to find sometime here and there to enjoy myself. During one of those brief periods, I hopped on the monorail and headed to the Hilton for a relaxing drink at “Quarks” inside the “The Star Trek Experience.”

After the drink, and a quick bite to eat, I got my tab – and an odd little slip of paper. My jaw dropped and my enjoyment quickly turned into a slight depression as the note read:

“Star Trek The Experience: Wall of Memories

The staff of Star Trek the Experience would like to extend our heartfelt thanks to all of our dedicated fans who have made the last ten years the most phenomenal experience that anyone could ever imaging. As we prepare to say goodbye on September 1, 2008, we encourage you to share your thoughts and memories of us through notes, photos and items to be placed on our memory wall located behind Moogies Trading Post on the first level of the attraction. For more information, please visit this area.

Thank you,

The cast and crew of Star Trek the Experience.”

Well, crap!

WeatherBugs

I’ve been using WeatherBug on my iPhone for a week now, because it gives some more details than the standard Weather app. But lately I’ve been getting these “severe weather” warnings a lot:

Since when is no rain considered an advisory condition? It’s not like I live in a draught zone. We just had rain last week.

The worst part is you can’t get rid of the little number badge on the WeatherBug icon:

And I don’t know if my OCD can handle having that there.

A Long Time Ago, In An Upstairs Bedroom

A wonderful gallery of pictures of sci-fi fans at home (as well as some cowboys and Indians, for good measure).

The Saga Continues

If your copy of iTunes hasn’t already downloaded it, our latest podcasts are now available. Yes, you heard me right – “podcasts”. This week’s session went longer than planned, so I broke it up into two.

Go. Go now.

New Home, New Feed, Old Shows

There’s new permanent how from the D-1-3 podcast at http://www.neozaz.com/productions/d13/
With that, this is also a new feed link for the show which is http://www.neozaz.com/productions/d13/media/d13show.xml

I had to change the location of the feed directory to accommodate the WordPress RSS feed for the D-1-3 Site it’s self.

So, ignore all that above if you happened to read in in the past 3 hours. The iTune feed has been approved, and it is at: http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?id=285275317

Over time there should be a bit more information on the show, cast, and an archive for the original mid to late 90’s Radio Show Dave and I did way back when.

Conspicuous by its Absence

With all the hoopla surrounding the iPhone 3G release on Friday, I think one very important missing feature has gone unnoticed, and one that I’m not sure third-party developers will be able to adequately cover. And it’s one of the most egregious omissions from the iPhone’s repertoire.

Most of the features that were missing from the original iPhone platform had some good reason for their absence. Either they affected battery life (3G, GPS, Flash), or they involved proprietary software (Flash, Java), or it was not obvious how to do in the new Touch user interface (copy/paste), or perhaps they just didn’t get to them in time, but they came in an update (iTunes store, App Store, etc.).

But there’s one feature that was missing from the iPhone, and still is, and yet is on every other phone you can buy today – not just smartphones, mind you, but the crappy “feature” phones you get for free with service.

It’s not that difficult of a feature. It’s been around forever. The iPhone has plenty of power to handle it. And the UI for it would not be a challenge.

I’m talking about Multi-Media Messaging.

We were surprised when it didn’t ship on the original iPhone. But the rest of the package was so lickable that we figured it would come soon in an update.

Here we are, a year after launch (18 months after the original keynote announcement), and it’s not even planned in the big 2.0 software update. This is patently absurd. I’ve got luddite friends who don’t even know how to work an iPod who try to send me pictures of their cat via MMS and I can’t receive them. Don’t think they don’t give me shit about that.

(And don’t tell me that I can go to www.viewmymessage.com to see whatever it is, because I’ve gotten that message twice and it hasn’t worked either time.)

Certainly, when everyone is using an iPhone, or other email-enabled smart phone, this will become less of an issue. But in the real world, 95% of the world has SMS/MMS as the main or only messaging system on their phone.

As I said before, this shouldn’t be technically challenging for Apple. The iPhone already stores, sends and receives pictures (via email, at least), and it has QuickTime player, so attached audio or video files should be playable.

The UI should be fairly straightforward. If you get an MMS in the SMS application, there could be a button or icon to press that would view/play the attachment. I just don’t see the problem.

You may argue that some third-party developer will come up with an MMS application. And well they might. But there are some problems there, too.

First, Apple has created a perfectly good iChat-style SMS application. It should be trivial for them to add MMS capability to it. It would be probably impossible for a third-party to add functionality to that app. They would need to write their own.

Second, I don’t know if the iPhone SDK provides the kind of access to the cell network needed to support SMS/MMS, so it may or may not be possible for a third-party developer to do.

Third, any third-party app would either need to replace the SMS app entirely (like Adium replaces iChat for many people), or work in conjunction somehow. I don’t know if MMS messages come across a different pipe than SMS messages (I don’t think so) so you’d have to be able to specify which app would handle which types of messages, and that seems like a level of configuration that Apple has (rightly) been avoiding with iPhone.

While I’m very happy to get all the updates we’re going to get with v2.0 (I’m not going to rush out and buy a new 3G iPhone) I’m disappointed that I still won’t be able to receive (or send, for that matter) pictures of my friend’s cats. And isn’t that what the mobile Internet is all about?