It’s a little bit late compared to Typepad, but the Wordpress iPhone app is out today. Now I can blog from anywhere! Anytime!

The question is… Will I be motivated enough? Typing on this virtual keyboard is serious business!!

I’m sure a million other blogs will be talking about this today. I’ll keep it short and sweet:

LA Times article

San Francisco Chronicles article

It’s about time. Here is an excerpts from the SF Chronicles article:

In a 4-3 decision, the justices said the state’s ban on same-sex marriage violates the “fundamental constitutional right to form a family relationship.” The ruling is likely to flood county courthouses with applications from couples newly eligible to marry when the decision takes effect in 30 days.

“The California Constitution properly must be interpreted to guarantee this basic civil right to all Californians, whether gay or heterosexual, and to same-sex couples as well as to opposite-sex couples,” Chief Justice Ronald George wrote in the majority opinion.

Allowing gay and lesbian couples to marry “will not deprive opposite-sex couples of any rights and will not alter the legal framework of the institution of marriage,” George said.

I’ve always hated the Christian fundamentalist argument against gay marriage, especially in regards to how it threatens the traditional definition that a marriage is “between a man and a woman.” I’m sure there will be Federal implications of this ruling afterwards, we’re long from seeing the day where gay marriage is accepted across all states; but this is a great step forward.

I’ve been using Firefox 3 beta for a while now, and it’s a definite improvement in memory usage and speed over Firefox 2. As expected, it’s taking some of the addon developers quite a while to write new versions of their addon that’s compatible with Firefox 3.

Granted, I don’t use a whole lot of Firefox addons, but there is one addon I couldn’t live without: The bookmarking addon from del.icio.us. Since I work on multiple computers at work and home, del.ici.ous has became a valuable tool to keep all of my bookmark in one place. It’s also much more flexible than Google Bookmarks.

Now there is a beta version of the del.icio.us addon for Firefox 3, available here:

delicious blog - Firefox 3, del.icio.us, and you

Just follow the link and install the new version of the addon, so far it’s been working great. With the availability of this addon, my switch over to Firefox 3 is complete.

Via the Huffington Post:

Azariah Southworth announces he is gay

I haven’t watched any Christian-based TV programming in years. To be quite honest, even at the highest point of my most fervent belief, I never watched that much religious based programming. So I really have no idea who this person is.

Apparently, he is a very popular Christian TV host.

Apparently, he is also gay.

I can’t fathom the amount of personal agony to be a popular figure for a religion that despises your existence. Can’t even get close to imagining the amount of courage to stand up for who you are, knowing how much ridicule, especially given our current political and religious climate, that you are about to receive.

Kudos Azariah, even though I’ve never watched any of your show.

I can’t take credit for the title of this post, it’s really just a part of the discussion on one of the TWIT podcast this past week (or was it the week before? I can’t remember). Last week Google announced an astonishingly underwhelming software platform. I mean, it’s not horrible or anything, it’s just disappointing that a lot of people were expecting Google to throw their hat in a complete consumer product, rather than a half-assed promise to deliver some sort of product nine months from now which may or may not be any good.

Well, Google released the Android SDK today. The SDK was pretty impressive, giving us a good preview of the the OS user interface (via Engadget). However, one can’t help notice how much the “mockup” looks like a Palm Centro, or any myriad of Palm or Windows Mobile device that’s been available so far. One also can’t help but notice how the UI takes many lessons from iPhone’s UI. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, I suppose, but didn’t everyone expect a *lot* more from Google than just another software platform that looks just like any other software platform?

I listen to podcasts when I bike to work every morning (my form of reading the newspaper while having breakfast?), and one of the panelist on TWIT made a lot of sense, although I can’t recall it verbatim (and I’m too lazy to listen through a one-hour long podcast to find the exact quote)….

Google’s Open Handset Alliance is exciting, because geeky programmers around the world just all simultaneously orgasmed and are now struggling to hold their drool inside what is presumed, to be their oral cavity. To be frank, that was not my first response to the announcement. I had a really, really busy day at work when Google hit the press; so my first impression was, “Oh, there are some new info on the Googlephone, great!”

It was another day of soul-searching later, that I said to myself, “Wait, is that all there is to this news? That’s it? Really? You mean, I didn’t miss anything? I mean.. I combed through my RSS reader for hours and hours looking for more detailed information, something more exciting, something with actual substance…. and… really? That’s it?” For at least a few hours, I thought I was caught in some sort of temporal anomaly and was missing vital information that Google has apparently announced to the entire world minus little ol’ me.

The truth is rather, disappointing? Underwhelming? Indeed, the news outlets were positive on Day 1, and almost all universally speculative and introspective on Day 2. How many times have we been promised a “mobile phone OS based on Linux & open-source”? This harkens back to the Linux PDA days, and we all know how that went. The only difference between Google’s announcement and all the other dozen open-source mobile OS initiative, is that Google has a lot of money. Shitloads of money. Certainly a lot…

Since I got my iPhone, I’ve been buying a lot of TV shows on iTunes, so I can carry them with me and watch them wherever I am. Most of the time that watching is done when I’m in my room, right before bed (I don’t have a TV in the bedroom right now). However, the freedom of watching a TV show or a movie when I’m out eating dinner (by myself, of course, that would just be rude in the face of other company), or waiting in line at some place, is quite priceless.

So I was a little disappointed when NBC decided to have a bit spat with iTunes, and decided to pull all of their shows off of iTunes by the end of the year. What really gets to me, is how senseless the arguments the media companies are raising against Apple. This doesn’t pertain to just NBC, but all media companies dealing with iTunes as a whole.

Think back to when Universal was negotiating with Apple for their new music agreement. Their argument was that they’re not making enough money from iTunes Music Store, they want more control over pricing. Similar arguments has been brought up over the years with Apple multiple times, and they’re all along the lines of more control over DRM, more control over pricing, more profit for the record labels. Time and time again they insist that they can’t make enough money from iTunes Music Store alone.

Yet, look what happened these past few months….

When I first got my iPhone, I noticed that some of the black looked weird on video playback. I thought it was just a problem with all iPhone screens. Then the reports about iPod Touch’s “negative black” screen came out, I got suspicious that some models of the iPhone exhibited the same issue as well. Seeing Engadget’s post about iPhone display problem yesterday confirmed my suspicion.

I immediately scheduled an appointment at the Genius Bar, went in and exchanged my iPhone after work. The concierge at the Genius Bar was taken by surprise; he said it was the first time he’s seen this on the iPhone, although it was seen plenty of times on the iPod Touch already. He promptly exchanged my iPhone, and I walked out the Apple Store within 10 minutes of my appointment with a brand new iPhone and a much better screen.

The customer support experience I’ve had with Apple has always been very good. Although I do wish that I didn’t have to do that with almost every first generation Apple product I’ve purchased. I have exchanged an iPod Nano that couldn’t play Apple Lossless formats (even though it played everything else just fine), older iPods where the hard drive failed after less than a few weeks of usage; and my Macbook Pro’s power button has sunken in, which means I will have to take that to the Apple store eventually down the road.

Despite how well their products are designed, it’s also pretty widely known…

I know at least one person who’s not completely happy with the new iPod announcements. I have to agree at least in part, that the new iPods are not all that exciting. iPod Touch is really the only revolutionary product here, if you consider iPhone to be a completely different product category.

Here I think of all the announcements:

1. iPod Shuffle - Practically nothing new and worth mentioning at all.
2. iPod Nano - It’s FAT. I really don’t like the new look. Although I bet once I’ve held on in person, I’d be willing to put up with the new form factor. It is even slimmer and overall smaller than the current Nanos. The proportion of the click wheel to the width of the device is just… ugly. I wish they could’ve worked a little harder and done something else. I was really hoping for an iPod Nano-Touch type of device here. It’s still not a bad iPod, just underwhelming.
3. iPod Classic - Same ol’ same ol’ with bigger hard drive. I do find it funny that the iPod Classic’s hard drive is bigger than some of my friend’s computer hard drive. Nothing new, nothing exciting.
4. iPod Touch - Great device, but it’s not really that fresh since it’s just a stripped down iPhone. Like I said, I rather wished they would integrate Nano + Touch into some device that’s in between.

I’m sure Apple will still sell a ton of them, because no other MP3 player in the market has near the media…

This is the video clip from WWDC, so hilarious~

[youtube Bf5qZrFfQFg]

Enjoy!