KABOOM! That was a great firework show.

Hanging out in a field with some friends waiting for the fireworks to start. Matt B was just out of frame so mad props to him. Ideal July 4th.

We made it to Bethany Beach today and Kristina is already soaking up the sun. We saw dolphins which were poking up really close to the shore. Worst part of the day was the meter fare: 1 quarter = 10 minutes.

Kristina and I took an early morning bike ride on the boardwalk here in Ocean City, Maryland. The weather is overcast, hazy, and humid so we worked up a sweat but it was still fun, fun, fun.

Big news in the cell phone world this week. On Monday T-Mobile announced the MyTouch 3G as the follow-up to the G1. This morning HTC, maker of the MyTouch 3G as well as a slew of other phones, announced a new device called the Hero. While the two devices both run Android and sport nearly the exact same specs (MyTouch 3g specs, HTC Hero specs), the Hero gets a sparkling new interface which will make even Apple die-hards drool:

The MyTouch 3G will go on sale in the US in August while the superior Hero device will only be available in Europe and Asia by the end of the summer. There are rumors that the Sense UI will be available for the MyTouch 3G, but that could be a long time. While this could be my next phone I might just wait to see how some of the rumored Android phones pan out like the Samsung Bigfoot, Motorola Morrison, and the Samsung i7500. At least there are finally phones to choose from now.

This past Saturday Kristina and I saw 3 movies that were part of the SilverDocs Documentary Film Festival . My reviews of the films we saw (plus embedded clips from YouTube) are below. But first a bulleted list of one-line summaries for the impatient blog skimmers:

• Partly Private: Funny movie about circumcision and weird traditions.
• No Impact Man: Crazy experiment involving no electricty, paper products, other human niceities for one year to reduce impact on the environment.
• We Live In Public: Josh Harris experiments with the Internet/technology and its wild effect on human behavior.

Partly Private

Partly Private is about the age old question that arises with the birth of every boy: to circumcise him or not? Filmmaker Danae Elon dedicated many years to the question which led her to several countries to discover how circumcision is handled in different cultures. The eye-opening moment for me was seeing how the tradition is handled in Turkey where the operation is performed on boys between the ages of 6 and 9. Families hold celebrations in a place like Chuck-e-cheese’s where the boy wears festive garments resembling a Sultan’s or a King’s dress and ride amusement park rides until it’s time to go under the knife.

The audience was also introduced to such protest groups as Stop Infant Circumcision Society which hold a protest on Capital Hill every spring. I feel like people who are so adamantly against circumcision weren’t hugged enough as a child and have grown up with a chip on their shoulder. In the film we saw a member describe a device used to stretch and pull their on their penis in order to recreate foreskin. Weird.

Overall it was a good film with interesting characters. If you were ever curious about all the kookiness that is circumsion, Partly Private is for you.

No Impact Man

No Impact Man takes living green to the extreme. Colin Beavan wanted to see if it was even possible to live with no impact on the environment for a year. The catch is he lives in a Manhattan apartment. Starting in stages he convinced his family to give up electricity, paper products, any form of transportation that isn’t man powered (including elevators), and even buying anything new. He blogged during the entire experiment which he still keeps up with today (Go figure, he’s a writer.).

For food, Colin resorted to farmers markets and any vegetables he could grow at his urban garden. Laundry was washed in the bathtub by stomping on them (see the clip above) with a mixture of natural cleaners. The TV was discarded, clothes given up, and they even replaced their refrigerator with a cooler. I was surprised his wife even went along with it considering how much of a fashion connoisseur she is.

At the end of the year the husband and wife added a few niceties, like electricity, back into their life. But they were surprised about how many things they actually liked and wanted to keep doing. Colin states that it is totally impractical to expect many to go to the extremes that he did, but if everyone took one or two steps to reduce their impact, the world would be a much better place.

This was Kristina’s favorite film of the festival.

We Live In Public

We Live In Public documents the antics of web entrepreneur Josh Harris. Josh was in early on the Internet boom of the 90’s. He founded high-tech market-research firm Jupiter Communications which is where his money for his other projects came from. Pseudo.com was created to be an online television network targeting big media companies like CBS and NBC. In the midst of the dot-com boom, Harris lost interest in Pseduo.com. He cashed out his share of the company and began work on his next experiment, Quiet.

Quiet was a multimillion dollar month long millennium party in a Manhattan bunker. 100 others were invited to live in a pod hotel while their every move was recorded 24/7. Things didn’t quite turn out as happy as Josh had hoped as people started going crazy from the lack of social structure in the “real world.” That’s OK. Quiet was a pre-cursor for his next project We Live In Public where he broadcast to the net every waking moment with his girlfriend in their apartment. Think of it like an all-access and uncensored version of Big Brother.

The movie shows the effects of technology on human behavior and there were some scary scenes. This was my favorite film of the festival because technology plays such an important role in my life. Plus it was a blast to see some of the big ideas from the dot-com bubble of the late 1990’s. Jason Calacanis had a great quote (I wish it was on YouTube) urging college kids to drop out of school create a dotcom start-up. I would highly recommend checking out We Live In Public if you have the chance.

SilverDocs made for one busy Saturday but it was a lot of fun watching movies that deal with subject matter off the beaten path of mainstream flicks. Kristina and I can’t wait for next years festival.

Today was filled with interesting quotes from my daily information grazing. Below are a smattering of what I found as well as links back to the full source for your reading pleasure.

“Why is every browser logo round?” – I never realized this until Download Squad brought it up. I know the Google Chrome logo isn’t all that original.

“In other words, inebriated subjects report less mind wandering only because they are less aware of their own minds.” – From a Discovery Magazine article about why we stop paying attention and zone out.

“BlackBerrys have become like cartoon thought bubbles.” – NYTimes article about how smartphones are replacing our manners.

“The winning words in 1950’s spelling bee: psychiatry, condominium; 2000’s: succedaneum, appoggiatura!” – From a presentation given by Neil Howe, a generational expert with a focus on demographics and culture, who spoke to the Pew Research Center staff this morning. Spellingbee.com has a complete list of National Spelling Bee champions and winning words since 1925.

This might be a couple years old but I just happened to stumble upon this feature last weekend. Google has always had shortcuts built into it’s search results for things like mathematical calculations (10! / 2 -12), definitions (define: boisterous ), and local weather results (weather 90210). With Subscribed Links, you can add your own custom functionality to specific searches like nutrition data for food items via CalorieLab.com or a list of the cheapest gas stations in your area by GasBuddy.

This is a neat customization that I’m surprised has n’t changed much since it was brought back nearly two years ago. Adding custom functionality to your searches is kind of like adding custom programs to your command line. My only complaint is they don’t behave like I expect them.

For example, the subscribed links are never near the top. They always seem to be mixed into other results. If I explicitly signed up for added functionality and I need to use a custom syntax like “gas prices 20906”, I expect the add-on to be the first result. The Weather Radar add-on is a bit too small and cramped to be of any real use. It also shows up four items down below Google’s default 5 day weather outlook which comes up on top.

I hope Google has plans to expand these search add-ons. I can only imagine there are heaps of companies that would like to provide an add-on that puts their products and services front and center in the crowded search results.

The target attribute of a link forces the browser to open the destination page in a new browser window. Using _blank as a target value will spawn a new window every time while using _new will only spawn one new window and every link clicked with a target value of _new will replace the page loaded in the previously spawned window. Try it out for yourself:

Links with target=”_blank”

Google | Yahoo | Bing

Links with target=”_new”

Google | Yahoo | Bing

target=”_new” is not a standard target value. You could use any term you like and any link that has the same target value will open in a previously spawned window. See the target=”booger” example below.

Links with target=”booger”

Google | Yahoo | Bing

How can I force a link to open in a new tab instead of a new window?

There is currently no way to force a window to open in a new tab for browsers with this feature. This functionality can only be set in the preferences of the browser (see other resources section below).

What if I want the new window to display at a certain size?

The only way to do this is by using JavaScript. I recommend the method outlined at Quirksmode.org.

Other Rescources

• http://reference.sitepoint.com/html/a/target – Sitepoint reference for the target attribute.
• http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Options+window+-+Tabs+panel – How to configure Firefox to open new windows in new tabs.
• http://www.tech-recipes.com/rx/1164/internet-explorer-7-open-new-windows-in-tabs-in-ie7/ – How to configure IE7 to open new windows in new tabs instead.

Of course all of this is moot since opening pages in new windows is a usability annoyance.

I’ve been a long time fan of Pandora, an automated music recommendation and Internet radio service. Users enter a song or artist that they like, and Pandora responds by playing similiar music. The recommendations come from the Music Genome Project, a complex mathematical algorithm to organize songs using more than 400 attributes. You can give a song a thumbs up or thumbs down to help tweak the station to your liking. Pandora has been my sole source of music while at work. Programs like PandoraBoy for the Mac and Open Pandora for Windows turn the web player into a standalone desktop app complete with keyboard shortcuts. Pandora offers it’s own standalone application with higher quality sound and no ads for $36 a year.

While the musical recommendations have been very good, my radio stations quickly become stale. The same songs keep coming up again and again and the only way to rectify it is to create a new station. You also can’t search out a song and play it on demand. You give Pandora a song or artist to use as a seed for generating similiar songs that make up your station.

Compare this with Grooveshark which provides the ability to listen to single songs from the 7-million song catalog on demand, save playlists, and embed both on other sites; all for free. The user interface borrows heavily from the iPhone with sliding menus and a minimalist design. The application is a cinch to use.

Hovering over a song brings up four small icons: play, add to queue, more info, and embed. The more info menu brings up more options like browsing the artist or song, adding it to a playlist or your favorite list that you can recall later, and a list of similiar songs. After you get tired of looking up every song you can think of, make use of the autoplay feature which keeps the songs coming based on your listening history. You can also like/dislike songs which Grooveshark suggests to further tune your song list. You can see it in action below thanks to ben westermann-clark:

Grooveshark is reminiscent of the golden age of Napster where nearly every song was available at your fingertips only without downloading anything. What’s the legality of Grooveshark? I’m not really sure, but the company claims to have license agreements with a long list of record labels. It doesn’t really matter since you can use the site without signing up, which you only have to do if you want to save songs or playlists.

The only thing Grooveshark is missing is a desktop client with keyboard shortcuts though it sounds like that is coming sometime real soon. In the meantime I’ll just use Fluid or Mozilla Prism with a nice custom icon to complete the effect. It seems crazy to use any other online or offline music client now that I’ve gotten to know Grooveshark.