Quixotic Bravado

• at some Nokia pre #fowa event in downtown Miami at a place w/ a great name: "Dolores but you can call me Lolita."
• WIll the #fowa wi-fi hold-up? Going to start finding out real soon.
• Just got interviewed in the lobby about the conference and MQ.
• Watching a room full of people twitter while one of the Twitter guys talks about people using Twitter. Be funny if it went down mid-speech.
• No sooner did I post about Twitter going down and then it did. That’s got to suck having a theater full of people tell you your site’s down.
• People keep asking me if there are outlets where I’m sitting as their laptops die and they panic. About to get up; there could be bloodshed.
• Gary from winelibrary.tv just finished and rocked fowa. Need to add to twitter and start watching his show.

• At #fowa. Unfortunately been on conference calls since walking in the door. People eating all around; I’m on phone and on the ‘puter.
• Thought while driving to airport listening to radio this AM: Kate Nash sounds like someone spliced Bjork & Lily Allen together. I like her!
• Writing Flex code, having impromptu meetings, writing emails and attending a conference. Slow day.

• @chipd Don’t forget to set some stretch goals — like not forgetting to wear pants.
• So a huge power outage in Miami today instead of when I’m there Thursday. Now to figure out where I got these karma points from.
• Things to do today: Check out FriendFeed like everyone else today: http://friendfeed.com/quixado Check!
• Just bagged two Nintendo Wiis.I don’t see what the big problem is getting one.
• Just finished packing for FoWA in Miami. Ping me if you’ll be there. Now off to hook up the Wii!

• Just got back from dinner and seeing the newest offspring of @Antthelimey. This is not helpful in reducing the GFs "baby-fever."
• Just added seatguru.com to my travel bookmarks. Thanks @guykawasaki!
• Trying out the Twhirl AIR app.

Recent links to http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• MissingDrawer plugin for TextMate
• MonoPrice.com HDMI Cable, Home Theater Accessories, HDMI Products, Cables, Adapters, Video/Audio Switch, Networking, USB, Firewire, Printer Toner, and more!
• Keywurl Safari Plug-in the restores search to the address bar like Firefox.

• At eye doctor waiting to get optics prodded. Good timing since I got a major poke in the left orbit on Sat night.

• @chipd Time for a big boy bag. I recommend a Tumi. Last one lasted 6 years; just got a new one for Xmas. http://www.tumi.com
• Came home to find the house smelling of the chicken recipe T was trying fused into the ceramic of the Crock-Pot. Scary.
• I’m on an email writing spree with Obama and Clinton bickering on CNN in the background.
• After a meetingrific morning, all my plans for my plan are in motion. Something should go wrong in 3… 2… 1…

Recent links for http://del.icio.us/quixado:

• Tip: Prevent iPhoto from opening when you plug in your iPhone - (37signals)
• Free ?Starkers? Wordpress theme
• 5 htaccess Tricks Every Webmaster Should Know
• Install hidden screen savers in Leopard

With the HD-DVD format officially dead, I’ve seen a spike in banter about people now shopping for a Blu-ray disc player; I’m part of that search. Hands-down the most often quoted choice for price/performance is the built-in Blu-ray player in Sony’s Playstation 3. I’m seriously thinking about getting one.

I love my Xbox 360; I don’t like much about the PS3, the controller, the game selection — not my thing. Microsoft has been effective at overtaking Sony in the game console market, but they backed the wrong horse in the high-definition DVD. A lot of people have been fence sitting the HD format war, now that there’s a clear victor there’s a lot of reason to go get a Playstation 3. In fact, I remember seeing somewhere that because the game selection was so bad, most people who had been buying PS3s were doing it for the upgradable Blu-ray player it had.

To me this seems like a no-brainer, with the HD-DVD corpse still warm, Microsoft should have announced the release of a Blu-ray player for the 360. Even if it’s not ready to be shipped, tell your 360 owners it’s coming. Did Microsoft do this? No, they did not. I’m sure they believe they’ll just bypass physical discs and everyone will embrace their downloadable video. Not yet. Here’s why:

• The video is so compressed it’s a stretch to even call it “HD.”
• Most broadband connections will still force you to come back later once it’s downloaded, this doesn’t play well with an instant gratification culture.
• No one wants to be locked in to the fragmented selection of HD content on Xbox Live. Apple’s going to have an issue with this as well with AppleTV.
• Netflix. At 10 bucks-a-month, one can get around 6 movies mailed back and forth. At $3.99 each per download, you can get two-and-a-half movies.

So instead of moving to the ball, people will go get a PS3, including me probably. Having the PS3, maybe they’ll start buying games for it, maybe some accessories. This sounds like a great strategy for giving market share back to Sony.

For a long time I’ve been increasingly frustrated with the performance of Firefox 2 on my Mac. The Mozilla folk will blame it on plug-ins and such, but I’ve done a lot of tweaking, hacking, and research and it’s just got issues.

The main issue is the memory bleeding. Every other day requires I shut down Firefox and restart it. The second is occasional responsiveness even before the memory leakage fires up. On the Safari side, the new Webkit builds keep getting faster, and being an iPhone user, the consolidation and ease of syncing bookmarks is not without its appeal. This doesn’t mean Firefox is out, the wide selection of plug-ins/add-ons still makes it my go to browser for development and debugging; I’m just trying it in the second string position.

Speaking of plug-ins, this may be the biggest flaw in using Safari: Not a lot of development for plug-ins and not easily extensible. The biggest resource I’ve found so far is a site called Pimp My Safari, which has been helpful, but doesn’t seem to be updated frequently. So I’ve been compiling a list of the features I want/need ported from Firefox to make this browser switch stick:

• Click RSS icon and add to Google Reader or other online reader. Since I access feeds from both my Mac and my iPhone, I use an online reader. I want to easily click that “RSS” icon in the address bar and assign that feed where I want.
• Multiple session session-saver. You can load your last session, but I want the option to save multiple sessions and jump back to a specific ones.
• Some refinement to the very impressive Safari Web Inspector. Namely the ability to click “Inspect” and select a section of the page like Firebug.
• I like to search right from the location bar. My biggest frustration right now is that muscle memory has my typing search terms in and getting a Safari error page.
• A plugin to post directly to Delicious. Bookmarklets are fine, but I want tighter integration, once again like the delicious plugin for Firefox.

I’m sure I’ll find some others and will update this post; I’m only in day two of the test. If you have solutions or know of good plug-ins for Safari, please let me know.