Looks like the mystery of what Santa does in the off-season is now solved. I caught him on site here in Western New York this weekend.
The poor guy is even wiping the sweat from his brow in the unseasonably hot 80+ degree weather. Would you believe it was snowing this weekend last year? I guess Mr. Claus was counting on it.
Good thing I’m not at all squeamish about flying. The song playing while my prop plane pulled up was “When the World Ends” by Dave Matthews.
Microsoft Live Labs brings us Photosynth Technology Preview. And what a taste it is the software takes photos, analyzes them for similarities against the system and then displays the photos in a 3D space with relational information.
How cool would it be to take a picture and have it identified immediately? Even if it does not live up to the marketing hype, it is a great concept.
So today was the launch of the iTunes at Starbucks dealio. I stopped by with my iPhone and a thirst for latte at 10am for a taste. Starbucks was roasting hot and I couldn’t get the Starbucks iTunes store to appear. I did, however, snag the last download card of the day: Bob Dylan’s “Joker Man.”
While it was downloading back at the office, I couldn’t help thinking that it would be infinitely cooler if the download of the day were a “new” artist or an exclusive recording of a well-known one. As much as I dig Dylan- this track isn’t anything new or particularly special.
Apparently this is the complete list of the songs to be given away by Starbucks in conjunction with their Apple / iPhone deal. I sure hope that I don’t re-read this in November and compare my final collection… 
10/02 Bob Dylan - Jokerman
10/03 TK Tunstall - One Day
10/04 Joni Mitchell - Night of the Iguana
10/05 Keith Urban - I Told You So
10/06 Emily King - Moon
10/07 Mavis Staples, We Shall Not Be Moved
10/08 Ceu, Roda (Bomba Dub Orchestra Grateful Dub Radio Mix)
10/09 Band of Horses, No One’s Gonna Love You
10/10 Gloria Estefan, 90 Millas
10/11 Fine Frenzy, You Picked Me
10/12 John Legend, Show Me
10/13 John Fogerty, Gunslinger
10/14 Patti Scialfa, Looking for Elvis
10/15 Herbie Hancock, Maiden Voyage
10/16 Angie Stone, Happy Being Me
10/17 Annie Lennox, Dark Road
10/18 Brandi Carlile, Turpentine
10/19 Alice Smith, New Religion
10/20 Rogue Wave, Lake Michigan
10/21 Alice Russell, Hurry On Now (Featuring TM Juke)
10/22 Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, Grace is Gone
10/23 Sonya Kitchell, I’m In Love With You
10/24 bitter:sweet, Heaven (Nicola Conte Remix)
10/25 Greyboy w/ Sharon Jones, Got To Be A Love
10/26 Spanish Harlem Orchestra, Sacala Bailar
10/27 Rissi Palmer, Country Girl
10/28 Raul Midon, Pick Somebody Up
10/29 Joss Stone, Tell Me ‘Bout It (Live from the Bowery Ballroom)
10/30 Federico Aubele, Maria Jose
10/31 Sara Bareilles, Love Song
11/01 Hilary McRae, Consider Me Gone
11/02 John Mayer, Dreaming With A Broken Heart
11/03 Galactic, I Got It (What You Need)
11/04 Bebel Gilberto, Um Segundo
11/05 Suzanne Vega, Frank & Ava
11/06 Sia, Day Too Soon
11/07 Paul McCartney, Only Mama Knows
From the latest woot! at woot.com:
“Aww, poor baby! Your iPhone crashed? You mean you marched along with the pied marketing pipers and paid way too much for a first-generation product? You mean you didn’t realize that you were being used as a lab rat? You didn’t think that a big corporation would take your money for something that hadn’t been totally debugged?
Pardon us while we wipe away a tear.
Of laughter.”
Gotta love those woot! guys.. the entertain me AND sell me crap!
iPhone really needs a search mechanism. I’ve used mine since launch day and one thing I really do miss from my BlackBerry is simple contact search.
My iPhone has over 3000 contacts and scrolling by letter takes too long. A simple solution was to create some new groups in the Mac “Address Book.” That was great, but why not use “Smart Groups?”
I setup several Smart Groups and got ready to sync. That’s when I found out that the iPhone cannot sync Smart Groups. What a pain!
My solution was to write an AppleScript to copy from the Smart Group “Smart Restaurants” to a “Dumb Group” called “Restaurants” which can be synched to iPhone.
Here’s my script: (saved to /Library/Scripts/)
—
—“Copy from Smart to Dumb.scpt”
— Description: Dumps Address Book Smart Groups to Dumb Groups
— by: David F. Bills 09.29.07
—
tell application “Address Book”
if not (group “Restaurants” exists) then
make new group with properties {name:"Restaurants"}—Create our ‘hard’ Group if missing
end if
save addressbook
set smart_Rest to id of every person in group “Smart Restaurants”—This is the name of the Smart Group
set hard_Rest to id of every person in group “Restaurants”—This is the name of the ‘hard’ Group
repeat with sr in smart_Rest
if hard_Rest does not contain (contents of sr) then add (every person whose id = sr) to group “Restaurants”
end repeat
save addressbook
end tell
Seems to be faster to run this from the shell script than in Script Editor and it makes sense to use osascript since I’m calling via Cron at 3am nightly.
0 3 * * * osascript /Library/Scripts/Copy from Smart to Dumb.scpt
Now, I just need to do my daily sync first thing in the morning and I’m up to date. Thanks to Craig Smith and Niel for their assistance.
Saw this on my way to brunch today. Would you believe it’s a laundrymat? Honest- check out the laundry bag to the left of the sign.
LinkedIn will be adding photos tomorrow. Do I see a small crack in their conservative website? Stay tuned for my appropriately conservative photo.
News courtesy of TechCrunch
Update 09.30.07: I’m conservative’d.
One of the sites I work on, Songwriter101, has been experiencing problems in the forums- Chinese drive-by spammers. The forum moderators had been deleting posts for weeks by users called shoesnew, Hu, ch, shoeman and the like. They were all posting about the same topic- deals on sneakers, athletic wear, etc.
My team was pulling out their hair. “Of all things… why shoes?? Do these spammers think that songwriters have a thing for purchasing new shoes? I could understand if they were spamming guitar strings or something, but shoes???”
I asked if there were any good deals.. and then knew I had to deliver a solution. After playing the cat and mouse game for some time with suspending the userids and banning the IPs, it was time for something more drastic.
A quick Google search pulled up a great site with complete IP blocks in several formats. A bit of htaccess tweakery with the CIDR files and now, we’re Chinese spam-free!
(I’m quite proud of the “error message.”)
From the moderators: “And… today is the first day all week of spam-free moderating. Thank you!! ...enjoy the absence of sneaker ads.”