As Jenn has mentioned before, typing on a 2.5 inch iPhone keyboard is not always the most efficient.  Sure, it works sometimes, but every once in a while something will slip.

An industry friend of mine finally caved in and bought an iPhone, probably because of the goodies that are coming soon.

Either way, Apple will never prevent us from making typos.

Colleague: Yt?
Nico: yep
Colleague: Nice
Nico: hah yeah, workin’ all night long
Colleague: Typing on my iphone
Nico: ohhhhh finally caved?
Colleague: Indeed
Colleague: What’s a sweet game?
Nico: i remember hearing good things about dizzy bee
Colleague: Any goo shooters or driving games?
Colleague: Goo shooters
Colleague: Hilarious
Colleague: “good”
Nico: …LOL

*Definition of “phoneme” here.

In the last post I talked a little bit about my sudden lack of having a phone.  And as I’ve always hated my phone, no matter what kind of phone it was and how well it worked when it did work, maybe this is a blessing in disguise.

I’ve always hated answering the phone.  I’ve always hated calling people.  I’ve always resented txting being so useful for when I didn’t care to have a conversation with someone, and only needed a specific piece of information.

For example: [name of bar] 2nite?

See?  Just a yes or no suffices there.  Even asking for ETA is stupid, as everybody ends up at the damn bar by around 10:00 PM anyway.  And why didn’t I want to just talk to them?  Because I was going to see them later anyway, where I could give them full and undivided attention.  Well, maybe divided by two, as I would have been paying as much attention to my drink.

Anyways, after being shut out of buying one of those fancy schmancy iPhone 3Gs for three days in a row – I started to question myself.

“Waaaaaitaminute… if I hate phones… what is the point of me getting a more involved phone?”

Maybe I should not be getting an iPhone.  Maybe I just dislike phones altogether.  And maybe I should be replacing what was touted as a smartphone (more like a STUPID PHONE!) with something that just sends and receives calls and texts.

In the short period of time I have not had a phone, I have really enjoyed myself.  When I had a phone, the only reason people would call me would be to ask for something.  If they could book a show at the venue.  If I could find or do this or that for them.  If I had the time to go somewhere to hang out, which essentially meant I would help alleviate their boredom.  It was never “How have you been?” or “I thought you might like to know [x] because I thought of you when I heard about it.”  Those conversations – real conversations – are relegated to in-person and online, because in those realms you aren’t charged by the minute (excepting rollover.  And unlimited nights and weekends.  To your [#] favorite people.  Nationally.  Or roaming.).

It makes me think two things: 1. That people only call me as far as I am useful, and 2. that this is what cellphones were made for – to reach out to your resources and get shit done.

Maybe the only “smartphone” is to just have one at home, connected to a wall.

Have I been showing my geekery lately? Not as much, sadly.

But oh, what do we have here?  (There!–>)

Aside from immensely enjoying Firefox 3 now that I’ve tricked it out (See Lifehacker), there hasn’t been anything I’ve found worth talking about concerning geekery other than video games. I mean, web development changes as far as the content you create goes, but the means to do it are usually pretty consistent.

Not today, kiddies. If you are a web developer and you need something way lighter than the nightmare that is Dreamweaver* (you see what I did there?), you might want to look into something that was just recently brought to my attention: Flow by Extendmac.

I have it, I love it, I like how I can edit remote files and use an FTP AT THE SAME DAMN TIME WITH ONLY ONE PROGRAM, and I am really digging concurrent FTP connections.  And did I mention that it’s light as a feather on your OS? Oh, about that: It’s for OS X Leopard only. So, Mac power users rejoice! We have a simple solution, and it’s about damn time.  BBEdit is great too, but it’s nowhere near as light as Flow.

Web dev is a blast with this little app.  I feel so much lighter!  Dumping Dreamweaver was like taking a long overdue poop.  An interweb poop. (an interpoop?)

…Maybe I should refrain from referencing bodily functions when talking about a program called “Flow”, but whatever.  No point in editing that out.  If I have the image in my head you might as well, too.

(PC user? I didn’t forget about you guys. Try EditPlus, which has been around for a while but it’s still notably effective.)

*To be fair, Dreamweaver has made some significant improvements since Adobe bought it. But it’s still heavier than a Scandinavian death metal band and slower than the continental drift, so that’s one tall glass of fail as far as I’m concerned.

Because I deal with musicians a lot, MySpace is like our necessary evil for communication. Seeing less spam will be nice!

So, after having won this lawsuit, does this mean I’ll be tripping over less spam? I hope so! Will this make me want to participate in that site more often?

Nope.

I went with some coworkers to do some old-fashioned networking, and among these coworkers was BJ and fellow 20something Katelin (can’t wait for her post!).

But the event itself was interesting in that it seemed like an adult version of high school. That is, there were 3 distinct parties:

• The TechSet (AKA The Geeks): Obviously part of web 2.0+ culture, and also the main reason I wanted to attend this event in the first place. Some exciting conversations about the future: about why certain technologies work and why some flopped; about why we just can’t ever get our clients to buy into new approaches because of endless explaining to them about how these things work; about the bottom-line, and the best way to use it; about reaching the ends of the internet, poking around, and discovering that there are no best-practices because very few others in the market have gotten this far to define what the hell is going on; and most importantly about trading business cards like they were freaking Pokémon (gotta catch ‘em all!).
• The Film Festival (AKA The Life of the Party): Down the street was a film festival event that seemed to be comprised of young, independent film-makers from around the world, who seemed to be hell-bent on getting drunk, cracking jokes, and talking about the Los Angeles culture. So long as you were in character (character being any cordial drinker with any kind of sense of humor) these people were actually a blast to talk to. May their films be queued in many a Netflix account for ages to come.
• The GQ Party (AKA The Popular Kids): These were tragically hip, well-dressed, very attractive, and intensely clique-y. As BJ put it, the GQ party was identified as either very pretty girls who were sitting alone and txting on their phones, or a very pretty guys and a girls who were standing next to each other but who weren’t talking to each other, and instead looking around the room for something to comment on. This supports the idea that when you spend your life on your looks, you have very little in the way of being conversational. That is, until they get drunk, in which case they became friendly and conversational but still didn’t have any good ideas.

I don’t mean to demean pretty or popular people… wait, no, I do. I hated these shit-talkers in high school and now the tables have turned, because I have a career path and their shelf-life expires at 30. Who’s the loser now, assholes?

…

In the end, the party was pretty fun. I hope there are more events like this because I really do like pontificating on the future of the internet. And moreover, it’s really nice to talk to people who know their shit! And it’s even nicer to discover that I also know my shit enough to keep the conversation running in perpetuity. Crazy!

I realize I am swearing in this post more than I normally do but I will attribute this to being somewhat hungover.

I’m sorry, I haven’t been this excited since purchasing the Orange Box. I’m going to throw a party. And there will be cake! Ok, I’m lying, there won’t be cake.

As excited as I am for getting my 360 back, this may be bad timing as my freelance work, especially in the Photoshop department (Hi Conrad!), has recently picked up. This time, it’s pro bono stuff for portfolio-ing, which I actually seem to enjoy more than the pressure of paid gigs.

And speaking of paid gigs, nobody told me that half of freelancing work is really just keeping it going. It’s seriously 40% actual work and 60% client-project management. One of these days, I’m going to ask some people to jump on this train and help me manage accounts and charge my clients because I am getting sick of explaining what I do, how much it will cost, then doing it, and then explaining what I’ve done, and explaining why what I’ve done costs [x] amount of money.

Does anyone (in the LA area) want to make a start-up? I’m thinking I may need some help here.

I’ve only been using this mouse for less than a week and it’s the best one I’ve used in the office thus far. Decent fire rate, smooth movement, and fine control for some intense Photoshop work — and horizontal scrolling!? WTF who thought of that!?

I’m excited about using this mouse. I am excited to get to work because then I get to use this mouse. I realize it’s kinda dumb to be this psyched over a friggin’ mouse but now that I think about it, a lot of my waking hours are spent using a mouse and keyboard, so this is actually a part of my life.

Welcome to my life, LX3. Where have you been all this time?

And did I really just blog about a mouse? Really?

But, oh, how I want this:

ohmigodijustsawthenewiMacandiwantonesobadiwantitiwantitiwantitgimme!

Ordinarily, it is a great experience to clean install an OS, because you get to start fresh and build again from the ground up without your system being bogged down. Ok, I realize that maybe this doesn’t sound as exciting as I’m making it out to be, but when you can feel the difference in speed with a fresh OS, the headache of re-installing is definitely worth it. And that, to me, is exciting. Very few people around me have to terms with the fact that this is just a process you sometimes just have to do every once in a while with a PC. I have yet to experience this with an Apple, but we’ll see once I’ve owned mine for a year or so.

Well, back to the clean install, I have recently gotten to the point of brain fatigue in keeping track of what things are where, and after watching a straight 8 hours of progress bars you tend to get lazy / haphazard. Or at least I do. And it gets the best of me.

I own a pocket PC that has Windows Mobile – I think that the phone itself is great, but I could do with a better interface. Especially after envying the iPhone for a little while.

Well, one thing you have to remember about these Blackberry-esque phones is how to sync them to computers. And I’ve just totally SCREWED myself because I disassociated it with its original sync target.

Long story short, I’ve lost my phone numbers. All of them. Shit.