Our, er Janine's Netbook

The Netbook
Originally uploaded by Mike and Janine

Next to a sheet of paper, this laptop looks pretty small.

We've had the netbook now for a couple weeks and it's great to have one of these for web surfing around the house, for watching TV shows on Hulu, or for blogging like I'm doing right now.

The keyboard is really nice. I've gotten used to the layout of the keys. I thought that the keys would be small or hard to use, but this Acer netbook has everything pieced together really well.

It runs XP, there's one GB memory, there's a nice big 160GB hard drive, and it's fast. The networking features are great, I'm able to stream media easily from my Windows 7 machine.

Overall I very highly recommend everyone get one of these netbooks. It's not just great for people that travel, but even great for home use.

My Take on Number Four

So Football season begins as summer winds down and as sure as the sun has gone up at the beginning of the day and finishes by setting at the end of the day, Brett Favre is still playing. Here's my thoughts.

As I post this, the Vikings are playing their final preseason game before the regular season begins. I cringe as always by seeing Viking purple as a Packer fan, but there's a familiar ex Packer and future hall of famer playing in a purple uniform.

Of course this happens a year after announcing his retirement after making a comeback with the Jets after announcing his retirement from the Packers. When he retired two years ago I knew he had another three or even five years left in him. Favre has a crazy work ethic and I don't think he can walk away from the game, he'll have to be carted away from the game.

That reminds me more of people in my Dad's generation rather than mine. That mindset being retirement is out of the question, it's like a death. I sense that in this quarterback and instead of me putting on my cheesehead and calling Favre a traitor or wishy washy, I'd rather look and smile at my own grays, and give my respect to someone who still believes in hard work to the end.

So I think it's wonderful that he's playing. I hope he plays another five years. I won't be pulling for him two games this year though. I'll get to actually cheer when he throws his first interception to a Green Bay Packer. But if by some strange alignment of the stars the Vikings make the Super Bowl, I'll be pulling for the team in the ugly purple shirts.

Googaphone Thoughts

I've had my new phone now for about three weeks, I figured it was time to post my thoughts so far on the device. As you know, I purchased the MyTouch 3G or the G2 as I much prefer to call it, so when you hear G2 for now on, I'm talking about my phone and not Gatorade.

I have to say overall I'm really pleased with the phone. The features fit the phone and have the advantage of an open platform to allow me to customize the phone as I want it. The service has also been excellent so far which was one of my biggest expectations in choosing T Mobile as my carrier. So here's my thoughts:

• Battery - This was my biggest concern about the handset itself. People when talking about the shortcomings of the predecessor, the G1, constantly talked about how the battery barely kept a charge. I learned quickly they are right if you keep your wifi, your GPS, your brightness on full high, and you constantly put the phone to sleep only to wake it up again seconds later. With good common sense use, turning off the GPS and wifi when not needed, I am yet to run out of battery. In fact, I can go almost 2 full days without a charge. So I consider the charges that the battery life is not good to be bogus and ill informed. 
• Keyboard - Another drawback to most with this phone is the lack of the qwerty keyboard. This is a valid concern to people that cannot master the use of a virtual keyboard, but in my case, owning an iPod Touch for over a year, I got proficient at using their on-screen keyboard with little problems. With that said, this is my biggest drawback with this phone. The standard keyboard is harder to use than the iPhone, the spell correction is nowhere near as good, and it's less responsive. I was able to download the Better Keyboard application to skin and improve that interface, and it works fine for me, but there's room for improvement. 
• Applications - There are no where near as many applications in the Android store as there are in the Apple store. I don't see that as a weakness, but I see that as having quality apps vs quantity of apps. All of my favorite apps from the iPhone platform are already in the Android store, there are more free options vs the iPhone, and I've had less problems dealing with crashes and constant updates. The apps that are available make this phone better and the open platform make it easier in the long run to develop. In a few years, the Android store will be far superior, I'm convinced.
• Android itself - What an amazing little OS. I am constantly learning all of the neat things that I can do and I feel I haven't scratched the surface. Not only that, it's easy to gain root access vs other phones to install ROM's and other open source platforms. I've noticed some glitchyness, but overall I am really enjoying the Cupcake!

This is a good phone and worth the price. I'd even suggest the G1 to people that like the physical keyboard, either way, I recommend people join the Android community. It's less crowded over here.Since you'll hear me talking about Android a lot more in the future, here's their intro video:

To Cloud or Not To Cloud

Many of you have a similar web experience than mine. About nine years ago people started setting up Live Journal pages and kept a journal. People started calling that kind of journaling blogging and blog services started springing up. Around 2004 or so blogs started to show into the mainstream discussion as some journalists began the slow process of embracing blogging. In July, 2004. I became a "blogger".

Then MySpace hit and there was a flood of interest for this kind of social network with blogging features and people began to get distracted from their home base, their website, and started dedicating hours of their time to a service that we had little or no control over. As MySpace became a juggernaut, people began to search for other services that were easier to use that didn't force feed dozens of simultaneous ads down our throats. Most of us remembered when it became overly pop culture, it jumped the shark and became old hat.

The skies then opened up. Facebook changed their platform, micro blogging services began to emerge like Twitter and pretty soon everyone started moving their networking from their localized blog network into proprietary networks run by somebody else. Blogging then suffered. Look at my blog. At one point I had twenty posts a month, now I'm lucky to cram in four. Our networks have moved into the cloud and to many including me, it just feels like the natural evolution of things.

So instead of focusing on a blog post, many update their twitter, their Facebook status, check aggregate services like Friendfeed, talk about their photos on Flickr, and instead of commenting on peoples blog posts, we're all commenting on these statuses. But is that so bad?

There is a time for that kind of social, cloud networking provided there's a degree of openness and as long as we can bring that to our home service. With us going more and more mobile with smart phones as I discussed in a prior post, it's easy to talk on those networks. Mobile apps and that marketplace is probably going to be the most successful virtual business in less than a year with a vengeance. The ability to share and talk about content now is easier than ever. It's become more natural to tweet while we're out, use a location service to find friends, and snap a photo and upload it to Facebook or Flickr or Posterous or Tumblr.

And then there's our blogs. Our poor neglected blogs.

Now many of us have shared the same story as our changes have come with networking, but they've also shared this nightmare. I with a lot of people dedicated ourselves to Pownce posting daily and commenting, and building a tight community. We all wake up one December morning and that service gets turned off. That network is gone, the hours spent there over the two years of its existence and people have nothing to show for it. Pownce is a graveyard now and my content is buried there with it!

Many also have found recently on Friendfeed that their service was purchased by Facebook and people have learned that all their time spent sharing content there was also virtually in vain, so as many of us have taken off, as life goes, things go full circle and now people are returning to their nests. So now instead of trying to find a way to migrate my information away from my blog, I'm dedicated to bringing it all back to my nest.

So what are you going to see?

You're going to see stories that interest me here. You're going to see my photos here. You're going to see what I comment on here. I will do that through all of these micro bloggy cloud services, but many of us are coming home to roost. So expect to see a lot here, not just posts, but everything, right here. I don't want to be known in the social networking space by a handle, a Twitter login, or any other service. I want to be known in that space as The Lewis Show guy. I want my content back. I say we all need to reclaim our web identities.

Or at least rethink how we manage them.

Multitaskers Beware

I never claimed to be anything but one tracked. I try to multi task, but I quickly forget tasks and as I become more and more my father's son, if something isn't written down, it's lost forever. Ars Techinca wrote a piece this morning discussing some interesting research.

Article:

Multitaskers beware: your divided attention comes at a price:

A lot of the Ars readership would probably fit this description: TV on in the background, computer screen in front of them, and various windows—mail, chat, browser—vying for attention. Although most people find themselves multitasking, we're actually remarkably bad at it. Humans actually switch attention rapidly rather than truly multitasking, and tend to lose whatever is in our working memory when doing so. Nevertheless, a number of people tend to attempt to process multiple streams of information at once, which has prompted researchers to ask whether these individuals are especially good at juggling simultaneous inputs.

The answer, according to a paper that will appear in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science later this week, is that they may actually be worse; heavy multitaskers tended to be more readily distracted by extraneous information than their more focused peers. That doesn't mean that multitasking is a total loss, as there may be benefits that weren't tested in this study, but it does make the case that heavy multitaskers might want to consider the limits of their habits.

My First Contract

So far so good.

I've never committed myself to a cell phone plan. I've always used prepaid phones. With the inception of smart phones, I began to rethink how I would use these mobile devices. I couldn't justify paying money for a telephone that followed me everywhere, but I can justify that phone following me if it can access the web, use email, and guide me to a good pizza place.

I debated between several phones over the past couple years with the iPhone always being ahead of the competition. They truly innovated the smart phone space with their release in 2007. Other phone companies tried to imitate their success which tragic results. I love the iPhone interface. I've had an iPod Touch for a couple years and ever since they opened their phone to 3rd party applications, the device became darn near perfect.

I only had a problem with the carrier for the iPhone. I could easily jailbreak one and carry to someone like T Mobile, but I figured since I already own the Touch and because it does everything that's great about the iPhone, I decided to look at other phones.

I started looking at the Blackberry. RIM makes a serious phone, but it has enough nerdy goodness to make it an enjoyable phone. I really wanted to get my hands on something like the Blackberry Bold, but they had the same issue with the iPhone, poor choice of carrier.

Then I turned my focus on the G1. The G1 is the first Google phone which runs on the Android operating system. Android is an open source project essentially which allows for open development and as far as I know a little more access to their SDK. I liked their qwerty keyboard, but it seemed clunky to me, so I decided to wait until now.

The G2, or MyTouch as T-Mobile calls it is right up my alley. It has no real keyboard, but it does have a basically functional virtual keyboard like the iPhone, it has a very simple interface, and best of all it runs that Android platform. I fell for the form and function right away at the store and knew I had to get one. What an enjoyable phone. My next post, I'll give some thoughts about it. There are a few annoyances, several disadvantages vs the iPhone, but I want to focus on it's advantages.

I'm not alone with my new cell phone purchase. Janine has also gone into the smart phone market by purchasing her first Blackberry. She has the last gen Curve, but I think I'm going to upgrade her to the newer model that just came out. She seems to really enjoy having it. She's already downloading apps, sending out lots of emails, and just having fun keeping access to everything right at her fingertips.

These smart phones will only get better. One day everyone will have these devices and it will be as natural to us as a land line telephone. You remember what those were, right? I remember.

Links:

T Mobile G2 MyTouch
Blackberry Curve
Apple iPhone
Android

Dinner Time, Dudes

 I have been thinking about doing this for a while. I won't post entire recipes here regularly , but for the sake of getting things started, I figured I would this time. Especially since I had been craving something that I had in California for a long time. I may post a few more in the future, but I want to archive them in some other way.

Street food is becoming fashionable again. I've seen it highlighted on a few food and travel channel shows.After mentioning this a few times out on the social networks, I figured I'd share how I prepared:

Fish Tacos (or as I called it, Surfer Food)

white sauce:

1/2 cup plain yogurt*
1/2 cup mayonnaise*
1 lime, juiced*
1 jalapeno pepper, minced
1 teaspoon minced capers
1/2 teaspoon dried oregano*
1/2 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon dried dill weed
1 teaspoon ground cayenne pepper*

* what I used, the rest are extras for flavoring

fish:

tilapia, mahi mahi, cod, or other white fish depending on
taste. We like tilapia because it doesn't have that knock you out
fish taste like the others' do.

everything else:

1 (12 ounce) package corn tortillas
1/2 medium head cabbage, finely shredded

1 bag of seafood mix for breading or,

beer batter (optional)
1 cup all-purpose flour
2 tablespoons cornstarch
1 teaspoon baking powder
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 egg
1 cup beer

To make beer batter: In a large bowl, combine flour, cornstarch, baking powder, and salt. Blend egg and beer, then quickly stir into the flour mixture (don't worry about a few lumps).

Make the white sauce and let it sit in the fridge for about half an hour. Shred up some cabbage, I like the white parts on the inside, nice and tender. Put the tortillas in the oven under low ish heat to get warmed up. Nuking them is fine too, but grilling is best!

I soaked the fish for about 20 mins in cool water with sea salt or kosher salt, then i take them out and pat dry them with paper towels.After they get dry but still a little moist, put them in the beer batter or the mix and cover them well. Place the fish into the frying pan probably for about 3-4 mins on each side, no more than 5 then 4 works for me typically. I play this by sight, when they go from light brown to more of a brown golden brown, take them out and place them on paper towels to drain excess oil. Your instincts are good, trust them. If you're good at grilling, that is a great healthier alternative. Broiling is good too.

Once the fish is good to go, cut it up and place the desired amount in your tortilla, cover with shredded cabbage and white sauce and love them!


most of the ideas, ingredients, and ideas came from here and here. I still haven't decided if I'm making videos, or creating a Tumblr page to post these, but I figured I wanted to express my latest creative outlet.