September 30, 2005
It’s no secret that I’ve never been much of a sports fan, but for the right sport I have been known to get into the spirit of the games and become a fan. Ok, in my past experience, the “right sport” has only been college football, the Olympics, and the occasional World Cup, but it’s not like I’m entirely anti-sports.
One sport that I have never particularly cared for is baseball, and despite my initial curiosity with the sport and the fact that I was charmed by the ephemera surrounding the beginning of baseball season in April, I am growing extremely tired of the sport. I’ve never lived in, or anywhere near, a “baseball town,” so the logistics of baseball had never been something I’ve needed to know.
Particularly, I didn’t know that “baseball season” actually means “every season of the year not called ‘winter,’ and sometimes winter too.” I understand that baseball is extremely popular, but I want it to go away. Specifically, I want baseball fans to go away. You have to be willing to accept a certain level of inconvenience when you decide to live near a baseball stadium, but the fans of the Baltimore Orioles and their opponents have overstayed their welcome in the area immediately surrounding me wherever I am. A 10-minute commute home from work becomes a 45-minute commute every time there’s a 7 pm game at Camden Yards, and while I was more than happy to accept that in exchange for the excitement of a big event happening right in my own backyard, now it’s just become a gigantic pain in my ass.
Football is a sport about strength, stamina and strategy. Once a week, for three months, football teams give it their all for three grueling hours. Baseball players stand around and cause traffic jams while playing catch for nine months. Go away.
September 13, 2005
Sorry I didn’t tell you that trains aren’t running to Woodberry for two more months.
September 13, 2005
So, it’s here, and I pretty much love it. It’s the tiniest thing ever. It’s actually thinner than the iPod shuffle. And since I don’t have a great track record when it comes to hanging on to small music devices, it’s engraved with the address of this here web site. Here’s hoping when if when I lose this one, it’ll wind up in honest hands.
All in all, it’s perfect in every way, except, of course, the lack of FireWire. I’ve got a USB 2.0 cardbus card coming tomorrow, so I’ll get to use that empty slot with the button that’s fun to click when I’m nervous and speed up my transfer speeds simultaneously.
Update: For reasons that really only become apparent once you’ve got the headphones in your ears, despite the fact that some people have complained about it, it really makes a lot of sense to put the audio out jack on the bottom.
September 11, 2005
- Good food
- Smoking sections
- College football fever
- Roads without potholes
- Being able to go for a drive at night
- Southern accents
- A sky unpolluted by city lights
- Oppressive, miserable heat and humidity
- Paying less than $3.00 for a gallon of gasoline
September 8, 2005
While it doesn’t do much to affect my enthusiasm for the brilliant (and brilliantly-designed) iPod nano, I was nonetheless dismayed to find that “USB through Dock connector” was the only listed means of connectivity for the svelte new iPod.
The switch to USB-only made sense for the iPod shuffle, considering the design and physical dimensions of the device. It’s aggravating, though, that a device with a standard 30-pin iPod connector is going to download songs from my 2003-era PowerBook at a rate of 10mbps due to its lack of USB 2.0 hardware.
Whether FireWire support was left out to save money or to save space, I can’t help but wonder why Apple is ditching its own technology. When I bought my laptop in March of 2003, I was rather curious about the FireWire 800 port on the side of the machine. To date, I have never plugged anything into it, because there’s approximately five devices with the port on the market. FireWire is a great technology—and it’s the only technology available to people with Macs more than a year old. Apple trumpeted FireWire for years, leading us all to believe that it was a vastly superior technology while USB was the devil’s playground. Now, FireWire appears to be quickly becoming a relic, a piece of “legacy hardware” in the Mac-lovin’ world. Whether Apple’s best-friends relationship with their new processor vendor has anything to do with their new love for Intel’s baby is open for speculation.
I realize it’s my fault for having such a woefully old machine, but on the other hand, it’s Apple’s for not releasing a compelling update to the PowerBook since I bought mine 30 months ago.
September 7, 2005
The regrettable Unified1 user interface has struck again, in a modified, quasi-metal form, in the “streamlined” (Apple’s words) design for iTunes 5. I suppose the only possible bright spot in this is that the brushed metal interface might be phased out entirely.
As it stands, I’ve now got five different interfaces all competing for my attention and I’m beginning to have a hard time remembering that I’m using a Mac.
1 Someone pointed out to me that Tiger’s Mail interface is actually called “Unified,” while the Dashboard-style interface is called “Plastic,” so with Aqua, Brushed Metal, and now Smooth Metal I guess that makes five.
September 5, 2005
Face it. If you have a web site, there’s probably just a bit—or a whole lot—of narcissism going on there inside your head. Whether it’s for you, your paintball club, or your grandmother’s dot-com afghan superstore, nobody goes to the trouble of setting up, designing, launching and supporting a web site if you aren’t convinced you can offer something no one else does.
It’s no different for me. So, when Shaun Inman told me about Mint I was thrilled to have a chance to give it a whirl. After using it for a few months now, I’ve given up my unhealthy addiction to Urchin and my Textpattern logs. It appeals to the narcissist in me by giving me quick, thorough, and uncluttered access to the information I want: namely, how many people are schlepping to my site, and how they’re getting here.
You’ll be hearing a lot about Mint’s features over the next week or so, but I’d like to talk about two features that are particularly fantastic to me: smart referrer grouping and search referrals.
When I used Textpattern logs, way too many of my referrers were from my own web site. This was because, when you spread a site out among several subdomains (for example, photo.iammattthomas.com) each click between pages was recorded as a referrer. Mint changes all that just by clicking “Don’t count local subdomains as Referrers.” You’re done. It’s also smart enough to know that www.haveamint.com, haveamint.com and haveamint.com/index.php are all the same site, and groups them all as one entry in your list of referrers.
The most fun feature to me, though, is Searches. Searches gives you a running tally of the searches people are performing that are leading them to your site.
Rather than having to decipher query strings in simple referrer logs or drill down ten pages deep in your bloated logfile analyzer, Mint gives you a quick look at both your most recent and most popular search terms. This can provide you with information that can be entertaining, enlightening, or downright disturbing as you can see above.
Mint is available now for the low, low price of $30, so head on down to haveamint.com and start enjoying it yourself.
But don’t take my word for it; check out the sites below for more tasty glimpses into Mint.
September 1, 2005
Since I know all the big networks have people monitoring my RSS feed: Could y’all please stop reporting the fact that the President “cut his vacation short” to deal with the hurricane aftermath as though he made some sort of sacrifice? He cut the vacation short by two days.
That means you too, NPR.
