i’m trying to figure out how to maximize my productivity using my new…iPhone! Well, it’s not brand-new. I spied a pretty good deal for it on Craigslist and found the seller to be pretty trustworthy, so I bought the original, 1st-gen phone. I think it’s worth it because I don’t need to pay an extra $20 a month for faster data speed.

In fact, I was originally gonna unlock it so that I could just keep my regular voice plan, disable EDGE, and go with just the WiFi, but I ended up activating it (which took exactly 3 minutes via iTunes), and now, after getting a taste of EDGE-speed access, I think it’s all right, worth the $15/month I have to pay.

Anyway, as soon as I activated and the Home screen appeared, it was Love. I’ve decided to name it Helmut.

Right now I’m loving Tap Tap Revenge, and Scribble, and the Maps application. Pandora would be cooler if you could run it in the background, and Twitterific would be better if it notified you of new tweets, like the desktop Twhirl app does. Maybe they should make Growl for the iPhone! Also, why do they constantly need to know where I’m located? That’s annoying and they should allow you to disable it.

Anyway, what I would like is for an effective way to tap in notes and tasks, and to get reminders, preferably without using SMS since I”m limited to 200 messages a month. Unfortunately, Remember the Milk isn’t free. So I’ll be working with gCal I think. And Twitter, I imagine.

just remembered – this is what my program director said, during my portfolio panel, about my website:

I liked clicking the buttons.

test

[vodpod id=Video.690720&w=425&h=350&fv=] from vodpod.com posted with vodpod

my classmates and i have been trading a bunch of emails about our latest class assignment (the final for our cataloging course). we’re just mad because it seems like more stuff than we should really need to do, and not in a good way – which would be like, making us better catalogers – it’s just more about extraneous work and stuff that makes us (me, at least) more confused rather than more…enlightened.

but part of our complaint is that we’ve just been assigned to watch a whole lot of things in the school media lab. i foresee many logistical problems, seeing as how she’s only given us two weeks to watch everything, there are 20 people in the class, and the lab is not open 24/7.*

so. we’re mad that we have to watch a bunch of TV and that our assignments are longer than they need to be. why is life so hard??

so maybe it’s not so surprising that, after “stuff white people like,” my new favorite RSS feed comes from “whitewhine.”**

* also, the lab is cold.
** they’re (i’m) not racist! the idea behind both blogs is that people in my SES (high education level, solid middle-class background) are…well, spoiled. i guess that makes me classist, but hey, they’re my people so it’s okay, right?

“Police say a bullet hit one of the struggling men, shattered a window and then hit McRoy.

“The bullet hit a DVD McRoy was carrying in his pocket. He suffered a bruise but didn’t realize he had been shot. As he told a police officer what happened he noticed a bullet hole in his jacket, the shattered DVD case and a piece of the bullet.

“The DVD was nicked. It was a gift from an employee who had recorded a TV show about fire extinguishers.”

Okay, so maybe recording a show off the TV isn’t a crime (yet), but it could very well have been something like piracy!

[Yahoo! News]

Today I joined one of the l-school’s geek clubs on a tour of Yahoo!’s usability lab facilities. I don’t know what I expected, exactly, but the labs are very well put together, I think. The rooms and equipment were cool and fun to look at. It was a far cry from that one time I did user-testing at Flock in a spare room stocked with only one video camera and a Macbook Pro =D

Usability design seems like an interesting path to take. I never really thought about it as a career option before, but it looks pretty solid. Must investigate!

okay so i know i said i was all about the adium duckie, but then i browsed through their Xtras page and found this: can you spot my new adium icon?

re-DONK-ulous!

Manolo the shoeblogger has been posting excerpts from the autobiography of his idol, David Hasselhoff. At first I skipped right over these entries because while the Manolo has every right to indulge his devotion to the Hoff, I have every right to breeze through to get to the pretty shoe photos.

I accidentally read through last Friday’s, though, and realized I’d actually been missing out on some gems. Say what you will about Mr. Hasselhoff, he’s certainly had many more interesting life experiences than the average person.

And I agree with the commenter for that last story, every sentence *should* begin, “Someone handed me a koala bear, and…”

Have you been to Google.com today yet? Have you been invited to Beta-test TiSP?

Man, I was actually getting kind of excited about it too! Well, no, not really, but it is pretty funny. Almost better than PigeonRank.

I totally fell for the Ask Metafilter one, too. They were pretty early with theirs.

But the one to beat is still last year’s “OMG LOL Ponies!!”

[I suck at April Fool's so I never even try]

update: okay..I like this one:

We interrupt the Winter Quarter from Hell to bring you this rather entertaining video. Probably via Metafilter or BoingBoing or someplace. I found it while furiously writing a 15-page paper [but boy, am I glad that one is over!], so I didn’t really mark down how I found it.

The explanation given by the uploader should be read first:

This is a rare gem. This was a PSA that the voice-over person decided to record an “alternate” version of for fun. This comes from the archives of a local tv station. You won’t find this anywhere.

Got it? Okay, now the vid [oh, uh, the language is NSFW, so keep the sound down if you need to]:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_3mw49mk_x0]

Hahahahahaha