Friday Flashback – February 22nd

Friday Flashback 2/22

2006 – Coultergeist Visits WMU
2008 – The USS Lake Erie knocked a “downed satellite” out of orbit using the AEGIS weapon system to do it, perhaps. Nobody knows exactly what happened, but sometimes I like to think about how it might have played out. Also in 2008 I was playing around with a swiss ball trying to get in shape. It didn’t take, at least not at that point.
2009 – One-word LiveJournal quizzes kept me occupied and I was busy contending with a cold, feeling awful and sick. I was also in the middle of reading Green Lantern comic books from the 80’s with all their adorable schlock.
2010 – Toyota was dealing with their runaway vehicles, while I was struggling with an injured back. Christmas trees that resist removal are such a pain. TweetDeck was a charmer but ultimately a piece of shiny junk.
2011 – I wrote about the importance of a Carbon Monoxide detector as the region was dealing with a nasty winter storm and a lot of power outages. Western had opened up some of it’s resources to the community to help mitigate what the outage meant for a lot of people in the community. We also learned that sections of permafrost were melting. Saying that this was one of the first indications of climate change would be laughably wrong. We’ve all known for a really long time that we’ve damaged the climate, this was just some lighthearted wistful comedy that helped round it all off.
2013 – I finished moving my Twitter activity over to Day One. I also decided to buy into the Sentricom system to protect my house from Termites. Perhaps it was a waste of money, but generally isn’t it better to be safer than sorrier?

A little trip down memory lane. I’m going to try to do these on Fridays from now on. Since I have so much of my past recorded in Day One, this should be easy. The only difficulty will be trying to summarize some of those days when I was tweeting a lot.

Apple iPad App Review – Page 1 Line 2

Part 3 of my Apple iPad App Review, what I have on Page 1 Line 2 continued:

  • Netflix – The Netflix app is free and provides access to the streaming content of the Watch Instantly system present in a basic Netflix account. The application works well, it has yet to crash, but I did run into a usability headache early on while trying it out. With all video on the Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad the native presentation of the video appears with slight letterboxing, depending on how you orient the device while you watch it. There is, in almost every video application a button control to remove the letterboxing and expand the video to use the maximum amount of screen real estate. While using the Netflix app, early on, I mistook the exit button for the letterbox-resize button so every time I would start a movie and try to maximize it, I was actually asking Netflix to go back to the previous video selection screen. I became quite irate at the Netflix app for what I perceived as a epic failure until I realized that I was pressing the wrong control. Now that I know where to expect the control to remove letterboxing, the app behaves as it was designed to, and I’m quite happy with it. The movie quality is at best 720P but that is perfectly acceptable to be able to hold it in your hands or against your legs while you watch. I predict that this, and any front-facing camera adjustment to the iPhone/iPad will melt down any 3G network in a red-hot minute.
  • TweetDeck – A true Love-It/Hate-It app if there ever was one, the TweetDeck app on the iPad is acceptable, it’s worth the cost, which is to say free. In the portrait orientation it wastes a fantastic amount of screen real estate meaninglessly, but at least it doesn’t crash with wild abandon as it does on the iPhone. The biggest gripe I have about TweetDeck, both the iPod Touch version, the iPad version, and the Adobe AIR version is the impossible-to-reconfigure font and font size in twitter text on the display. This app is ripe for relocation and/or removal.
  • Videos – The factory included Videos app is a delight to use, much like the other factory included apps. The folding metaphor when you select videos is very visually appealing and the video itself is crisp and beautiful and all the controls work as you would expect them to. The first video I played on my iPad was Airplane!, it’s how I inaugurate all my Apple devices. Funniest movie of all time, meet best device of all time. 🙂
  • YouTube – I’ve just touched on the YouTube app only sparingly. I suppose other people get a kick out of watching inane people doing inane things. I haven’t posted a video on YouTube and I guess I’m too old to ‘get it’. This app will likely be relocated, as factory apps can’t be deleted from the device. YouTube works for Google, it works for a lot of people, but I don’t really care that much for it. Technically however, it does work well, much like the other video apps on the iPad, and it hasn’t crashed on me so I don’t have anything negative to share.

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