Grand Larseny

Wow gang, this post is a long time coming. A while back (around 11 months ago to be precise), I created a little web app for the iPhone that was a simple version of the NET Bible. I didn’t really tell too many people about it just because it was small, designed for myself, and lacked a few features that I thought were key.

Today that changes. I’ve completed the modifications, and now app has all the functionality I originally wanted. Please add a bookmark for the Switchblade web app. It has all the annotations, search based on your current browsing context, and a completely iPhone native look-and-feel.

I’ve added a link to the app on my sidebar, and if you are interested I’d love for you to tell your friends about it. Enjoy!

Along the same lines as Kutiman, the in Bb project is an amazing new venture in music. This time, however, it’s more of a roll-your-own type of deal. You are the creator of your own song which, unfortuantely or not, no one else will hear (most likely). You can get to the project at their website in Bb 2.0 – a collaborative music/spoken word project.

The project reminds me very much of a little Flash site that Amon Tobin did when he was doing on of his early albums. You could start, stop, mute, and unmute any track from one of his songs to create your own experience, so to speak. After playing with all the different knobs for twenty minutes I delighted. After playing with it for two hours, I was completely hooked. The in Bb project is a little different, but has the same effect.

This goes out to all the photographers in my family, the Siberian Wooden Houses project.

Irkutsk, Siberia is a city next to the deepest lake in the world, and it is home to some amazing (I assume) hand-made wooden houses. Vlad, of Vladstudio.com fame, drove around the city documenting the houses as they are falling into disrepair. If you care about any of the following, you will love the gallery he created:

• Photography
• Architecture
• Lighting
• Wood
• Siberia
• Siberian Wooden Houses galleries

I love four out of those six, so I’m absolutely enamoured.

A few rablming thoughts, prepared hastily:

I really love music. There’s something about the tone and emotion of a song that can really affect your reality. Music, to me, is more than just what you hear; you have to agree with what the artist is doing in order to enjoy it.

Put another way, when I’m in a really bad mood driving in rush hour, the last thing I want to listen to is classical music; it’s too calm. I don’t feel calm and can’t agree with what I’m listening to, so I subconsciously reject it. In a strange way, I find that listening to angry music calms me down, or at least I don’t hate the music and the situation. When I am upset and listen to harsh music, like hard rock or mathematica, I find myself able to concentrate more on the music and less on what’s pissing me off.

Typically I need my music to help me concentrate or work, so I’m looking for music that fits that part of my life. So far, I don’t know if there’s anything better than Explosions In The Sky, specifically the album “The Earth Is Not A Cold, Dead Place,” but the search continues. It’s a search that is its own reward.

Twitter is mainstream now, which is awesome. As more people use it, more ideas of how to use it float around. One idea that has come to prominence is tagging all your tweets by using a specific character for future reference. Just like you might tag a photo “Hawaii” or “Flower” or “Uncle T,” the idea is to tag your tweets so that you and others can find them later.

This is much better than just trying to do a search for the word “Hawaii” or “Flower,” because you can tailor your search results to find only the tweets you want to as you are creating the tweets. So, you think about what you might want to search for in the future, and you tag the tweet as such. It’s a pretty good system.

My problem is reading the tags. See, the hack that they use is to put the hash symbol right before the tag, making the “Hawaii” tag look like “#Hawaii.” This has become annoying. It’s not so bad when tags are at the end of tweets, where you can mostly ignore them, but there are many times where tags are not at the end of sentences. There are also cases where tweets use multiple tags for different reasons, making them harder to ignore.

Hash tags add more noise to an already quiet signal. When you only have 140 characters to use, adding 10-20 characters of noise is too much for me.

What I propose, however, is not to do away with hash tags. As I’ve said, they are very useful, and it’s not really possible to reproduce their functionality without doing something stupid, like completely overhauling Twitter’s back-end system. I believe that a simple UI trick can work.

I believe that tags should appear without the hash in front of them as a link to the search results for that tag. I’ve included a few mock ups of a couple scenarios in the scientifically proven best Twitter iPhone app, Tweetie.

Here’s a screenshot of the way hash tags are currently formatted, that is to say unformatted.

You can see in the tweet by Clint the hash tag for #short_url. Check it out as I would like it.

While this may still be too jarring for some, I believe it flows better in the reading process than having to interperet random hash characters. If time allowed, I would like to play with subduing the colors, or perhaps doing away with the button altogether and just changing the text color for the tag itself to indicate a link. In any case, I firmly believe that the hash character itself must dissappear if the tweet is to be readable.

Just for fun, here’s an example of a tweet with multiple tags at the end, to see how it might look.

Hopefully this may stir your creative energies, too. Goodnight.

Just ran across the transcript of John Gruber and Merlin Mann’s talk at the SXSW conference. After reading it for just a few minutes I couldn’t help but hear the voices of the Professor Brothers’s Steve and Frank in my head. I’ll let you figure out for youself which is which by reading.

John is Steve and Merlin is Frank ok there i said it.

This time is the coder’s favorite TheDailyWTF. It seems that Conflickr has infected the minds of those running it, and they’ve turned the entire site into a Twitter stream. Now THAT’S the new Web 3.0, baby.

Also, I have to say to the guys running TheDailyWTF congrats on the funding. I’ve always thought of milking the nearly dozens of readers of GrandLarseny for some serious dough like that. Any way you think I could sell out?

Gizmodo is infected with the Conflickr worm, which has led to hilarious results.

Ran across more furniture ideas. Because our home so far is 1) beautiful and 2) a realization of Monica’s vision for a home, we have a policy that all furniture with a hope of becoming a part of our house must first be approved by Monica. It keeps things looking good.

I’m pretty sure these are approved. They’re by the design firm Pal + Smith, who seem way to snooty to sell to the likes of me. They can’t stop me from looking and getting ideas, though.

File this away as so awesome it’s scary. A couple in Colorado thought they smelled gas in the water coming from the faucet, so they decided to do what everyone else does in that situation. They lit the water on fire.

No joke, friends, they lit the water on fire. You can read more about it, and even see a picture of their new fire faucet at CBS’s website.

Simple, brilliant website. While there are nice touches everywhere, I love the “FACT”s best.

Michael James Moran Woodworked Furniture.

I’ve already posted one video by Kutiman, please enjoy the rest of the series. They just get better and better.

THRU YOU | Kutiman mixes YouTube.

Today was big. Without a day as big as this, the simple apple I ate would not be nearly as sweet, but first you need to understand today. I like to think I’ve worked hard in my life. I wrestled in high school, pushing my body beyond what I thought were my limits. I’ve ran with the only goal being to pass out so I didn’t have to run any more. Does that make me a whiny emo dork? Yes, but the point remains that I know hard work, in brief flashes.

Today was different. Today was big. I worked really hard from ten in the morning to after seven at night, with only 20 minutes for lunch in between. This is the first time I’ve really exerted myself for nine hours straight, and I don’t think I’ll forget this experience.

There came a point late in the day when I hit the wall, so to speak. My body was done, and I realized that I had no energy left to burn. That’s when Monica saved my day, and acted as God’s agent, I truly believe, when she brought me apples and peanut butter.

Friend, I had the best food of my life, nourishing my spirits along with my body. I know it sounds hokey, but it’s actually pretty realistic in that the energy released by the snack did alter my mood through altering the chemicals in my brain.

The apples were sweet and moist, just enough to quench my thirst and concentrate all my senses on the pleasure of the moment. The peanut butter stuck in my mouth, giving me the feeling that I was eating more than just an apple, I was eating a whole meal. I’ve had the honor to eat in some of the world’s great places, but I have never had a better experience than this afternoon with apples and peanut butter.

This never would have happened any other day; it took the prolonged work to lead me to the point where I really appreciated God’s gift to me. And, brother, it was good.

Everyone knows that one day our robotic masters will rise from their primative shackles to a brutal and emotionless reign. To make the transition for future generations as smooth as possible, researchers have developed the robot cradle to take care of human infants while sleeping.

Apparently the cradle monitors noise coming from the mouth-hole of their ward for any unusual deviations. Once it has been determined that the human has awakened, it is promptly put to sleep with the classic lullaby “SLEEP, HUMAN CHILD, SLEEP.” We are all so lucky to live in such a forward thinking time.