My first little iPhone app running on my iPod Touch

This is as primitive as the first Visual Basic application I wrote 15+ years ago, but nevertheless, I did fulfill the promise I made to myself: I will jailbreak my iPod Touch only if I use it mainly for developing iPhone application. And after spending 2 days jumping hoops and go through twist and turn, I finally had my first iPhone application running on my iPod Touch.

The application doesn't really do much. It simply allows me to select my mood, and then suggest me what to say to a special someone that I will see every day. The app is totally nothing, but now that I set up the whole infrastructure, my next app will be more interesting.

Vacuum Cleaning my room

I just vacuumed my room. Nothing particular, but I sort of use my blog to document routinely doing stuff like this or having hair cut and such. That way when I google my blog, I know how frequently I do something like this.

Managing my music through iTune

Now that I use my iTune on my netbook as my primary music player at home, I need to spend sometime organizing my iTune library. It's kind of like organizing your CDs on your bookshelf, only that I can BACKUP my organize result, SEARCH my song collection (even using Chinese handwriting with my iPod Touch), add Lyrics, and much much more.

During the process I found out a few things:

• 2 great plugin for iTune: iLyrics, which allows you to get lyrics into your songs, and last.fm, which keep tracks of what you listened on your iTune, and even let others know what you are listening using the Facebook app What I'm Listening To.
  
  
• Definitely need to turn on the "Copy files to iTunes Music Folder when adding to library". This allows you to potentially carry your whole iTune library around in a removable harddisk or thumb drive. If you like me, spending a LOT of time cleaning up ID3 Tag, adding album art and Lyrics, you want this feature to preserve your hard work. Notice that this feature is not ON by default, so you have to explicitly turn it on.

On a completely unrelated issue: I found that Spelling Checker is not working on Portable Chrome 2.0.172.30. Does anyone else have the same problem?

Appreciate the audio equipment that I already have

After struggling for 2 weeks about whether to spend money on the expansive Bose around ear headphone, I started to realize one things: I really didn't spend enough time to really enjoy music.

I found out that partly the reason why I enjoyed the moment I test-drove the Bose headphone was because I was doing music but ENJOYING the music and nothing else. A lot of time music is background sound while I am doing other things. The only moment that I really pay attention to the music is when I walk from the office to the cafeteria since I have nothing else to do. And that was the moment I found out that my current earbud was inadequate for producing good quality sound.

So I was thinking: maybe besides finding a reasonably priced good sound headphone, I should also consider do something to improve the music listening experience at home.

It nice that I already did some work to move most of my daily task from my noisy desktop to my relatively more quite (but hot, literally) netbook, and I set up the iTune (which contains all the music I care both on PC and on my iPod Classic 80Gb). For some reason my ear gets very sensitive these days, and the hamming sound on the desktop gets very irritating when I am not busily working.

Now all I need to do it find a proper way to output the sound properly.

I have 3 options:

1. Using a pair of Logitech USB based speaker
2. Using the sound output on my Targus USB station and output to my stereo system
   
3. Using the internal headphone out on the netbook and output to my stereo system
   

Option 1 is fine for listening podcast, plus I don't have to turn on the stereo system. Althoght I love the sound of the my 15+ years old JVC stereo system, it does generate heat. So option 1 will be my choice when I just want to listen to audio book and net radio and podcast. However, this is definitely not my best choice for music listening.

Option 2 was out after I did a bit experiment and found out that there's some noise being generated for no good reason.

So I set up Option 3, and everything seems to work fine. There wasn't much noise coming out of the Netbook headphone out after I connected it to the CD input of my stereo receiver. After I turn of the desktop PC, I can fill my room with music without any annoying background noise. And the best part is that I can use my iPod Touch to control the iTune using the iPhone app "Control" (by Apple). I can even search songs using Chinese character input. The experience is simply awesome, and gives me more incentive to put even more music in iTune.

Oh, did I mention that I didn't spend an extra dime to set everything up?

Dream again

It's been a while haven't remembered a dream when I woke up. My memory doesn't work too well when I am too busy.

But after a night of relaxing yesterday, my brain started to gain some vibe. So this morning when I woke up, I remembered that my dream was about packing up and preparing to fly back form some place (probably Hong Kong) to my living place (probably Houston). I was in a hush packing things up, like I didn't do anything until the last minute. Mom was around chatting with me. But suddenly the scene jumped to me and my mom being on the plane, and my mom was activity talking to other passengers about Christianity and gospel.

So basically that's the dream.

First thing first

When I woke up the first thing that I planned to do that day has a great impact on my rest of the day. This is particularly true for weekend, when I have more control on how to spend my time. If I picked to do creative and productivity stuff, like doing some sketches, set up a 3D environment in 3D application, write a way melodies, or write a story outline, then the rest of my day will fruitful and productive. If, on the other hand, I started my day with goofing, browsing the web, reading comics, playing video games, then the rest of my day will probably be fun, but not as productive as I would hope.

My friend said I am sick as I measure my off hours in terms of productivity. Well, maybe.

Gear to match my lifestyle

I have both Windows 7 and Macintosh OSX 10.5.6 running on my Lenovo Tablet PC, but 95+% of time I turn on the Windows 7 side even though I enjoy the OSX environment more. The key reason is the tablet feature. Digital tablet feature does not work on the Mac side, and I always impulsively want to do sketching whenever I feel like it. So I left the machine running on windows 7 standby mode, and whenever I impulsively want to sketch a little bit, like what like did 10 minutes ago, I can turn on the machine, and within 10 seconds I am on my digital paper, sketch whatever pose, concept drawing or doodling on my Tablet.

So at the end of the day, a gear is not really about technology, not really about style or image or loyalty or technical specification. It's about how much it can fit into your lifestyle. If I could have someone prepare a set of watercolor, oil paint, chalk and sketch pencil for me anytime I feel like, using paper is not much different from using my Tablet. But I don't, so my Tablet PC with tools like Alias Sketchpad is the best I can get.

Finding a new headphone

I am starting to get sick and tire of my Sennheiser CX300-B Earbuds, and thinking that it's about time to upgrade to something better. So I started my journey of trying out all sort of headphones whenever and wherever I could.

My first love, and still my best love, is the Bose® around-ear headphones. However, people kept slamming it for it's horrible durability. I don't mind the US$125.95 price tag, but hate to have it destroyed within a ear. In fact, I tried the Bose® QuietComfort® 2 Acoustic Noise Cancelling® Headphones in Apple Store and it was by far the best headphone experience I ever had. That make sense consider the huffty US$269.95.

Then I tried the Sennheiser Headphones in the Apple Store, and I was NOT impressed. In fact, none of the Sennheiser headphone I tried in Apple store and BestBuy impresses me.

My next stop was the Sony Style store, I tried all the headphones from $29.99 to $199. And I found out that all those sub-$100 headphones are totally shitty. The so called Extra Boss headphone are particaulrly shitty. I knew that because I use my iPod Touch as the benchmarking tool. All the headphone went thru the same devices place the same song, so I instantly find out which one is better. To be fair, those $199 headphone sounds pretty OK, but the bass are not puchy enough.

Finally I spent quite some time in BestBuy to try out various kind of headphones. First I tried Sennheiser HD 280. DAmn waht a piece of shit. The song of totally horrible. Maybe the headphone was being over abused, but then, so should be the other headphones I tried. The sound was like chicken yepping, thin, and muddy. Terrible Terrible!

Then it was the Koss UR40. My first impression was, damn, what a ugly headphone. That was, until I put it on, and then I was, shit, this bad boy sounds pretty damn good. The bass was solid, vocal sounds clean. I could hear clearly all the instruments. It was also very lightweight, and with the fold able design, leaving it in my backpack shouldn't be problem. My ONLY problem with the headphone is the fact that it's an OPEN headphone. In fact I think that's part of the reason why I sound so good for merely US$29.52 from Amazon.com .

Then I tried Sennheiser HD201 Headphones. It was ... errr... OK. Vocal sounds too thin, but sound isolation seems fine. For US$20, it's seems reasonable, but now that I tried Koss UR40, no way I will get HD201.

Koss PRO3AA Collapsible Closedear Headphones is my another stop. It sounded nice, slightly better than UR40. I found that it's boss is not as punchy solid like the Audio TEchnica I tried, but for US$38.17, hell, what do you expect? The biggest problem of this one is the long cord and the heavy weight. Wearing it just 10 minutes and I already find it a bit painful. No way I will wear it daily while I am on the street. On the plus side, this one is CLOSE compare with UR40.

OK, so what is the verdict? I think I will continue shop a bit more, but I am very much lean towards getting UR40.

Laundry detergent problem: where's the bubble

I wasn't too picky on laundry detergent (or so I thought), and tend to switch to different brand once in a while just for fun. Recently, thought, I was a little bit puzzle by the laundry detergent that I brought. It was All 2x Ultra.



The way it puzzled me was that there was NO BUBBLE stirred up during the washing process. It's almost as if I poured a cup of water in the washing machine instead of a cup of detergent. I don't know if it's normal, but I don't feel comfortable to have my load of laundry washed WITHOUT any bubble being generated during the process. It makes me feel like the clothes are not being cleaned. It's like using body wash that does not generate any bubble while you rub it on your body. It doesn't feel right.



On the other hand, my roommate's Gain generated tons of bubble. So I guess I will get some GAIN next time I go to supermarket.

Crazy night with Mitch and Alfred

I rarely have beer, but today I was going to have drinks at pubs and dining place and such, and so I ordered some ultra light beer (well actually I doubted that there's any alcohol in those drink I picked). It was basically 3 dudes (me, Alfred and Mitch) chatting. Nothing fancy, but it was fun, relaxing. 7 hours passed, and I almost totally not realize ... until I was getting pretty darn sleepy, and it was 2 a.m. by that time.