Sleep And Water

I spent most of last week over at Google I/O, a big Google-run event for developers, known for awarding attendees hot new gadgets, and treating them to exciting news. This year was not a letdown in that regard – I left with an HTC EVO 4G, and got to be there for the Google TV announcement. Google TV is actually really exciting, I’m optimistic about it and I think its approach is the right one.

Getting my phone was an unsettling experience. I walked outside after picking up my EVO to open it up and check it out. As I checked out its fancy camera and the amazing hi-def screen, I overheard a couple of conference center staff workers, out for a smoke break together. They were trading heartbreaking stories about their bad health care, caring for their aging parents, and their difficulty in amassing any savings. I went back inside, walking past all the other attendees sitting outside, unwrapping their own phones. When I got back, I sold the phone on Craigslist, and it went for $600.

I’ve visited San Francisco five or six times now since first stepping foot in California in January of ‘09, and it’s a beautiful place – but the divide between the Silicon Valley crew, and the people that their disposable income ends up going to, is surreal. And of course, Google I/O was not appreciably any less white or male than any other tech conference I’ve attended, something I noticed almost as soon as I walked in. I like a lot of things about San Francisco, but I fear the bubble of Silicon Valley.

In brighter news, my Congress app has been featured on android.com and on the Market app on phones for a week and a half now, and has been getting about 5,000 downloads a day. I’m getting a lot of good user feedback, reviews are appearing online, and it’s a great burst of momentum just as Google Summer of Code begins – my SoC student Evelina and I are doing a lot of work and releasing rapidly. It’s motivating, and timed well with the upcoming midterms.

Some of the user comments on the Market thread have been partisan or ridiculous or both, but nearly all of them, left- and right-wing alike, seem to love the app. After returning from a display of Silicon Valley’s excesses, it’s particularly refreshing to know that I’m working on projects that regular people use and appreciate.

Yes, it is definitely time to get back into the world of output. I don’t know why I shut down the way I do sometimes. I felt really inspired on my way back from Mississippi, which is the mood in which I wrote my last post on the iPad, but that faded away pretty soon. Rather than an essay, here’s a few things that have been keeping me busy these last few months.

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I’ve been going through training as a 2010 Fellow with the New Leaders Council, which is a “progressive leadership” organization. I’m pretty sure I’m not a leader of men, but it has been fun. NLC brings in some pretty amazing trainers to impart their experience and wisdom on campaign organization, national security policy, fundraising, and the like.

It’s a very different scene than what I’m used to. As you can guess, it’s the sort of thing that could be very awesome, or very douchey, based entirely on the people within. I was happy to find that the people are super cool, genuine, and smart, and I’m honored to be making the friends I am there. My class’ll be throwing a fundraiser with Van Jones on Wednesday to raise money to give another class the same opportunity next year that we had.

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Something else: somehow, Ohnomymoney got the attention of the NY Times, and my site and I will be making an appearance in the Sunday Magazine’s May issue about money. I went through a photo shoot in my apartment on Friday for the piece, so I feel reasonably confident that I’ll make the final cut (I’m one of 3 subjects). This is certainly the biggest media exposure I’ve ever had, for one of the most small-time projects I’ve ever done (it gets about 2 hits a day). So I’m worried that I’m going to come off as pretentious – a vulnerability of mine, which any reader of my blog is already aware of (see?).

I’m more just excited though, and it only makes me feel more strongly that every kid in the world needs to be given the skills to build a website on a whim at any time. If something that I cooked up in a week with rudimentary logic, minimal display, and chintzy graphs can get attention, imagine what kind of an Internet we’d have if the people building it weren’t so heavily slanted towards white male yuppies (which also seemed to exclusively comprise the audience of the Hot Chip show I attended Saturday).

Anyway, you can see just how rudimentary it is if you want, as I took this as motivation to rewrite the code for Ohnomymoney entirely, and open sourced it. That was all under-the-hood work, though. I’d like to expand the site before the end of May to have better graphs, with annotations and user comments and the like, but…we’ll see.

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I spent a ton of time over the winter adding information about bills to my Congress app for Android, which took a lot of work and was hugely satisfying to accomplish. This also resulted in the creation of a community service for the same data, friendly to mobile devices. It was enough work that I burnt out a bit and took a complete break in April, but I’m ready to start pushing again, to get full bill text and voting records out there.

I’ll also be fortunate to have help on it this summer, through Google’s awesome Summer of Code program, where students are paid to work on open source community projects. Google announced the final list of accepted students today. Evelina Vrabie, who is getting her bachelor’s in Computer Science in Romania, will be helping me make the app all kinds of awesome this summer. She submitted a great proposal, and now I’m doubly motivated to make a great app.

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Also, I played a lot of Final Fantasy XIII.

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So I’ve kept busy, but I still need to write more. I want to redesign this blog from scratch like I do every couple years, and I want another blog so I can put down my thoughts on politics – I even registered captiveslog.com for that one. I guess we’ll see how my ever-fickle output pans out this summer.

On my way back from Memphis this evening, I read a fiery response by Greg Knauss (one of my favorite writers) to Cory Doctorow’s rant about why he won’t buy an iPad. Now, Doctorow’s rant is just begging for pissed off responses, especially because he ends his title by saying he doesn’t “think you should, either”. An obnoxious tone, to be sure. He also handily dates himself by making a metaphor to Hypercard.

So it’s completely understandable why Greg Knauss and Jon Gruber and Joel Johnson are all calling his post out as condescending, reactionary, and basically just snotty.

The problem with it all is that I think the larger point is being missed – we have allowed Apple to frame the debate as usability versus openness. That gains in one come at a setback in the other. How did such a lie ever take root?

Jon Gruber’s response’s closing line:

Something important and valuable is indeed being lost as Apple shifts to this model of computing. But it’s a trade-off, because something new that is important and valuable has been gained.

And Greg Knauss’:

Yes, yes, this simplicity will come at a cost, of course, just like every other aspect of modern life. But for the benefits of cutting-edge technology in its full flower — to even begin to reap what the future has to offer — it’s more than a fair trade. It always has been.

If we didn’t believe this lie, people like Cory Doctorow, Alex Payne, and Mark Pilgrim would not have to so passionately argue that openness is more important than usability, and people like Knauss, Gruber, and Johnson would not have to smack them down with the obvious fact that people just want to get stuff done. Instead, we could all simply ask Apple for the things that are missing.

The iPad could have the exact same user experience – and still allow alternate music players, web browsers, and other competition on the Store.

The iPad could have the exact same user experience – and charge less than $100 for its development kit. Or simply only ask for money from developers who will ask users for money.

The iPad could have the exact same user experience – without restricting the user only to what is on the App Store. The iPhone version of our door opener app will soon be unusable for our office because apps made by friends, for friends, can be made in limited number and eventually expire. And now we have to scramble to find an alternative.

Why do so many Apple fans put up with this garbage? Because Apple tells them it’s necessary if they want things to Just Work. It’s not. Apple just wants to control things. Apple thinks this will make things better. It won’t.

And Apple has already proved that it won’t: when their competition began to show that phones can have a great user experience, while being vastly more open and capable, Apple knocked over the checker board and sued. Using software patents of all things, the legal validity of which is so flimsy and bogus and exploitative that they are not allowed in Europe.

As long as Apple is allowed to falsely frame this debate as a choice between our security or our ideals, then we all lose. Doctorow watches his world collapse and all the fellow techies he thought were his friends lovingly embrace an authoritarian regime. Greg Knauss lashes out at crusty old hackers getting in between him and the shiny, worry-free future Apple has promised us. And all of us get screwed over because we didn’t challenge Apple to do better.

I’m not frustrated with Apple. They are doing what they do best, and their creation of the digital music market shows they can be a force for good, if they have competition. Debates like this one make me seriously worry about whether competition to the iPad would even be taken seriously.

If openness is seen as the opposite of beauty, then no matter how easy or intuitive your user experience becomes, once people hear you’re “open” or “customizable” (or God help you, “open source”), you’ve already lost – people already know you’re unusable.

I bought a Nexus One on launch day, dropping $530 (+$30 tax), and it has been totally awesome. For the time being, it is the fastest, thinnest, most crisp phone in the world. It is both gorgeous and powerful.

Because of the Nexus One, I’ve been using Google Wave to talk with a couple of friends, since one of them bought one. I’ve been on a wave or two over the course of the day, seeing notifications in my tab bar, or by my Wave Notifier Chrome extension, and responding when new stuff appears. Just picking up keyboard shortcuts and simple familiarity of use has warmed me considerably to Wave.

While I still don’t see its place in my life longterm yet, there is something unique about Wave that I like: it compels me to write a paragraph at a time. Nothing else does this. IM and chat services encourage me to write in sentences, and more often just words and fragments, and email has me write little essays that seem to come with lots of overhead. I have spent evenings writing a handful of emails. And at the same time, I’ve lamented that speaking in IM and chat hasn’t been proselike enough to keep my writing mind in shape. But with Wave, I’m writing real paragraphs at a rapid pace, and I can detect how refreshing that is to some languishing parts of my brain.

Though this predates me getting the Nexus One, I’ve been addicted to Android development lately. It’s sure not because it’s easy; it’s a time consuming and occasionally insanely frustrating endeavor, and each new type of thing you want to attempt can come with a high learning curve. But, putting something of your own out there in front of people, engaging in the feedback cycle, seeing reviews roll in, and putting spit and polish on something you feel proud of – those are rewarding qualities. Developing for the web comes with some of that, but there isn’t the same kind of connection to community.

Or maybe it’s all just novel. I’m not really sure yet. But I feel a lot more motivated on side projects than I have in a while. I worked my tail off over the last half of the holidays to get Campyre out the door, an Android client for the popular web chat service Campfire. Over the last few days, I pulled similar marathon hours to put up a nice update to Congress, the Congressional pocket directory app I put out last fall. “Congress” has actually attained a consistent level of downloads, ~100 per day, for over a month now. It seems to me that that is evident of at least a little word of mouth, and its continued growth is extremely motivating.

I think it boils down to enjoying a feeling of ownership. That, and running away from all of my ambiguous life problems.

Burn the ships, and focus on Android. – Motorola CEO Sanjay Jha’s strategy – goodbye to Nokia and Microsoft, and a huge bet on the freest, most powerful thing around.

The Motorola Droid phone rolls out on November 6, and every publication around is giving it hot reviews. It’s running Android 2.0, a badass update that impresses on all fronts. Verizon now becomes the 3rd major carrier to go Android, joining T-Mobile and Sprint.

At the same time, Google put out free turn-by-turn GPS navigation, with voice commands, traffic view, satellite view, street view, and view view, for any phone running Android 2.0. Buy a Droid and put it in the little cradle dock it comes with and it automatically enters “car mode” and starts doing all of that.

Gizmodo cleverly notices that if you zoom in on anywhere in the United States in Google Maps, the copyright notices shrink from 5 companies to just one: Google’s. They’ve mapped the US all on their own, presumably as they were doing all that Street View work, and that’s why they can now turn their phone into a completely viable car GPS. Something no other software or mobile company that hasn’t personally mapped the US can do.

I’ve never felt more solid about my love and optimism for Android than right now.

Anybody who read this blog a year ago (JESUS TIME GOES FAST), back when Android first came out knows that I started out a as a huge evangelist. I foresaw myself doing a ton of Android development, especially starting out as a freelancer – I figured I could make Android dev at least a small part of my revenue stream, and hop onboard a rapidly growing community and platform.

Almost all of that has come true! I still am a huge evangelist, and Android is a success and a rapidly growing community and platform. There are 3 American phones out there right now running Android, and many others across the seas. And by the end of this year, the Tao and the Cliq, both from Motorola, will be out. I’ve predicted from the getgo that the combined total of Android phone users would outnumber iPhone users by the end of 2010, and I’m still feeling good about that.

The only thing that didn’t come true was that I didn’t actually get all that involved in Android myself. I’ve been a passionate consumer, of course, but all of my energy for development seemed to fall into a black hole. It had a lot more to do with that period of my life last fall, which, all said, was one of my low points. I didn’t have a lot of energy for anything, besides surviving, and being miserable isn’t conducive to joy and experimentation.

But lately, I have pretty much been living, eating, and breathing Android. It’s kind of nuts. I have a personal project that I mentioned before going on, and a more interesting Sunlight project happening, a pocket Congress of sorts. Working on both of them has created a sort of synergy I wasn’t expecting, and my skills and enthusiasm for working with Android have increased dramatically. I find myself reading more Android-related forums, and paying attention to Android questions on StackOverflow, and answering any I can. I’m learning a ton.

It’s like I’m behaving like a real developer. Which is unsettling, because I’m not one and don’t want to be. And like many of my obsessions, this is bound to eventually ebb. But for right now, I’m managing to find joys in smaller things, and not constantly dwelling on angst about how to be building towards the larger things. I don’t know if I’d call working around-the-clock and constantly getting 6 hours of sleep whose deprivation I don’t even feel “stopping to smell the roses”, but for right now, it’s serving the purpose.

Lately I’ve been having a lot of fun working on a new personal project, a Campfire app for Android. I’ve owned a personal Campfire for a few years now. There are several good reasons to prefer it to IRC (and a couple good reasons not to), and it’s been a great social hangout and outlet to me for a long time. The benefits of having an Android app are immediate, most notably the ease of uploading photos from anywhere.

There’s really not a large overlap between the Campfire and Android crowd, honestly, which is probably why I’m the first person I know of to attempt a Campfire app, but if you’re interested, the code lives on Github, with everything else I build. I’ll be releasing it for free on the Market before too long, and I expect to make more money on it than I made on the night-minute-guarding app I put on sale for $1 earlier this year.

It may be MySpace, but they just proved that OpenID can be just as slick and easy as Facebook Connect. MySpace makes a good point that a huge portion of their users make vanity URLs (myspace.com/crazygirl), which makes them natural candidates for OpenID.

They also cite the user experience summit that Facebook (!) hosted not too long ago as a big help. Couple big wows there: Facebook did something that helped their competitors, and that Facebook supports OpenID at all. It actually shouldn’t be so surprising, because in fact, Facebook joined the OpenID Foundation board two months ago.

I’ve met a lot of people who’ve been very, very skeptical about OpenID. Obviously, I’m a huge fan, and Facebook’s and MySpace’s joint and strong support is a big step towards justifying my position. Yes, OpenID’s user experience has been terrible, but that is a fixable problem, it always has been, and now, it doesn’t seem so ridiculous anymore to predict that Facebook will make FBConnect OpenID-compatible in the medium-term future.

To get arrogant for a second, I don’t think I’ve ever jumped on board a new technology (or a presidential candidate) that turned out to be a fad, or a failure. I may seem impulsive, but I have good instincts. So to change the subject suddenly, I can tell you right now, it is not even debatable to me that the Android userbase will surpass the iPhone userbase by 2011, or more likely: the end of 2010.

This conviction has also met a lot of skepticism, but honestly: it is obvious, and it should be to anybody who’ll look up from their iPhone and notice the barrel of phones coming out from Samsung, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, HTC, LG, probably Acer, and possibly even a bunch of netbooks, over 2009 alone. There don’t seem to be many phone makers who aren’t making an Android phone. And that’s to say nothing of the huge grey market in Asia, where phones usually fitted with a knockoff iPhone or Windows Mobile interface can have a lawsuit-risk-free OS instead.

OpenID and Android are a huge part of the future of the web and phones – which before long, will be difficult concepts to separate.

Today I finally beat Red Stone, the craziest puzzle to be found on the Android Marketplace. I’m pretty sure it’s one of my greatest achievements. The idea is to get a red block out of a small bottle, where there’s very little room for sliding blocks around, and the shapes bedevil your efforts. It’s a truly brilliant puzzle, and it surely dates back decades, if not much longer.

Somebody recorded himself finishing it from scratch on YouTube. There are even a couple of videos on YouTube just showing the Congratulations screen at the end to prove they won.

The achievement is especially valuable because I realized that I’d seen this puzzle before. Sure enough – I had, but upside down. Right when I downloaded Red Stone it made me flash back to Lufia 2 (an SNES RPG with A-class puzzles), and I was pretty sure I’d seen it before. I could never beat it back then, and it riled me…but now, my 13-year old self has been avenged.

I’m subscribed to a few of the official Android mailing lists, and one message came along today that got my attention – a link to a New York Times article on how touch screen phones can help blind people, using the G1 as an example. Some excerpts:

Since he cannot precisely hit a button on a touch screen, Mr. Raman created a dialer that works based on relative positions. It interprets any place where he first touches the screen as a 5, the center of a regular telephone dial pad. To dial any other number, he simply slides his finger in its direction – up and to the left for 1, down and to the right for 9, and so on. If he makes a mistake, he can erase a digit simply by shaking the phone, which can detect motion.

Now that is brilliant – software that centers its UI wherever you first touch. Hell, I could see that being useful even for sighted people, like a stereo remote control app – just pick up the phone and start jamming with your thumb and it’ll do what you want. And for the future:

“How much of a leap of faith does it take for you to realize that your phone could say, ‘Walk straight and within 200 feet you’ll get to the intersection of X and Y,’” Mr. Raman said. “This is entirely doable.”

The article makes a good point, that it’s not just enough for software to read the text off signs; the problem is that the blind won’t know where the signs are to begin with. Maybe that’s the sort of thing that a massive, free map/geoinformation system like OpenStreetMap would be good for helping, by including a sign layer. Or maybe you could just have a huge camera on your chest.

I’ve decided not to get huffy and private about my good ideas, or worry about people stealing them. It’s unlikely someone’s going to steal my idea unless they get as excited about it as I am, and I’d prefer the additional motivation I’d get from hearing feedback and suggestions.

So here’s some of the Android app ideas I’ve had lately, and would like to set some time aside to work on. Let me know what you think.

Read the rest...

"Hey FYI, I picked up my G1 from Walmart last week (one-year contract). It is awesome and I'm so glad I did. Have been loving it ever since. Thanks for helping me over the cold feet!"
-- Craig

That’s person #5 who I’ve convinced to get a G1 and is happy with their purchase. Fortune passes everywhere.

Today I went to MobileCampNYC3, a BarCamp centered around mobile (that’s smart-person for phone) technologies. It’s a “BarCamp”, so as one of those “unconferences”, it attempts to be organic (as well as free). People signed up for speaking slots all throughout the day by making little signs on pieces of paper and taping them to the big wall schedule in the room/time they want. I went because a.) Erin Sparling told me to, b.) I’m an Android zealot, and c.) I could use the social interaction.

Read the rest...

I still don’t even have my G1 in my hands, but already I can tell that it is going to be a huge success.

• Besides Google’s official marketplace, I know of two alternative marketplaces already, both looking sweet.
• There are also a bevy of news sites, blogs, and forums – AndroidGuys, AndDev, HelloAndroid, Phandroid, AndroidForums.
• Not to mention the mailing lists, all thriving. It’s tough to keep up with it all.
• And then there’s people like this guy, making things they think are just awesome.

As for me, I’m working on a couple (free) app ideas of my own that I hope to have out in the couple weeks following the election, and I hope to make Android app development a significant part of my income stream in my post-election world. The market for it is there, and I’m convinced it’s here to stay,

I’m basically done with Android and G1 posts for a while, but one final note. I listed under my philosophical reasons for preferring the Android, the fact that apps made for Android aren’t subject to Google’s approval (barring viruses and malicia). I’d like to ground this point in reality. Somehow, I had missed the news story, now a couple weeks old, about an app called Podcaster being rejected from the iPhone App Store by Apple for competing with a feature of iTunes.

This isn’t a conspiracy theory; this was Apple’s stated reason for rejecting it. The guy who made the app paid Apple the $100 for a developer’s license, and he says he put two months of work into it. After being rejected, he then started using Apple’s licensed “Ad Hoc” method of distributing applications, and Apple even shut that down, and that’s after 2 weeks of terrible, terrible press. More recently, Apple denied a Gmail app that “duplicated the functionality of… iPhone application mail”.

Apple has also started appending non-disclosure agreement legal wording to its rejection letters, to stifle bloggers from talking about Apple’s reasons for rejection. To quote that article, “Because of the company’s restrictive non-disclosure agreement (NDA), iPhone developers are legally banned from sharing programming tips, discussing code or asking questions of one another in forums or over e-mail.” (emphasis mine)

This sort of hideousness is why open source advocates like me insist on companies giving up a level of control over their platform, and leaving people their freedom. Apple is, 90% of the time, a smart company who “gets it”, and even they can’t be trusted not to pull disgusting garbage like this. Don’t forget about their kill switch, so that they have total control over every app on every person’s iPhone. Jobs says they would be “irresponsible” not to have a lever like that to pull, denying the alternate perspective that they shouldn’t bear that responsibility in the first place.

In the meantime, Apple can enjoy the intense negative reaction from their decisions, and Google can build a place where people are encouraged to experiment without worry of treading on a huge corporation’s business model.

I pre-ordered my T-Mobile G1 today. Here’s the important new info:

• $179 for new customers and upgrade-eligible customers. ($300 for upgrade-ineligible customers.)
• Pre-ordering doesn’t mean paying that money today. It will get put on the first bill after you actually get the Android. This is the “take the phone now and we’ll bill you eventually” model, as my friend Ed says, and it’s a model I like.
• Data plans at $25 and $35 per month, not counting voice plan. Minimal voice + minimal data = $55. Next lowest voice (my current one) plus minimal data = $65/month, which I’ll do.
• It has an Amazon MP3 store app pre-installed, which is awesome because Amazon MP3 is way better priced than the iTunes store, and MP3s are way better than any DRM. I already use Amazon for all my music buying needs.
• Boy scout surprise: it’s got a compass.

It was the coolest just to see a major mobile carrier talk about open source in such glowing terms. The mobile industry has always been the most closed, most greedy, and most unfriendly industry I have ever had the displeasure of seeing and working with, so this was a huge breath of fresh air. Apple went a long way, a huge way, towards changing this, pushing AT&T’s competitors out of their comfort zone, and raising the bar of quality for everybody.

But, a commitment to open standards and development has been completely absent from the entire iPhone story, a flaw in an otherwise amazing phone and software culture. The G1 not only rectifies this, but brings a phone that is great in its own right, to a different carrier and set of subscribers, with the promise of coming to even more. It’s got its own cool ideas, and, most blessedly, gives Apple much needed competition. Apple’s iTunes music store vastly legitimized and stabilized the industry for buying music online, and made it a viable alternative to piracy, but it took Amazon’s MP3 store to force Apple to offer songs without awful DRM. Apple is a force for good, but it has to be arm-wrestled into being a force for great.

Ultimately, Android will be good for the iPhone, and it will be great for all of us. October 22nd can’t come soon enough for me.

Update: Ed rightly suggested I tell you what the T-Mobile rep said to me in the store yesterday. I was told that if I wanted the full discount (which I’m not eligible for), I should call Customer Care and ask them. I replied that I had done just that, and when they asked me how many times, I said ”...Once.” The lady winked at me, smiled, and said, “Third time’s the charm.”

According to today’s latest reports/rumors, the Android will be $200 (with 2-year contract), and its data plans will be super low (~$20). I’d heard $25—$35/month for the unlimited plan, and even at that rate, it would be awesome. Also here are all known specs.

So, let’s summarize the practical reasons to buy an Android:

• Costs the same: $200, but much lower monthly rates than the iPhone’s $70/month or more.
• Includes a physical keyboard (hidden unless you need it) if you hate virtual keyboards, while many apps also offer a virtual keyboard option.
• Memory is in microSD, so you can upgrade your capacity without buying a new phone, and if you do buy a new phone, keep your original card. I found 8GB for $40.
• Can also be bought for $400 without a contract if you hate contracts.
• You belong to T-Mobile and don’t want to break your contract.
• You’re not under contract, but still don’t like AT&T.

And now the philosophical reasons:

• It costs nothing to develop and distribute an application for any Android phone.
• You can create a controversial app, or one that competes with Google directly; Google will not control the marketplace.
• You are supporting an OS not locked to any particular carrier or physical phone. Benefits to Android are benefits to the entire mobile marketplace, not just Apple.

If you guys can think of any more, I’d be happy to add them to the list. The Android is a great idea, the HTC Dream looks sweet, and it sends a strong message to Apple to keep the Internet open, even the mobile one. Especially the mobile one.

I am hurting for the new Android phone from T-Mobile. It’s called the HTC Dream and it is going to be sweet. Pre-orders, for existing T-Mobile customers, should start on Sept 23. I’m already registered for the Android Forums!

The reason I want an Android instead of an iPhone is because I think it will be better, and because I think mobile software development should be free, both as in beer and speech. Right now, the iPhone, with its Apple Developers’ Program, whose developers’ license costs at least $100, and its Apple-controlled App Store, is neither. My reasons are philosophical, but others have more practical reasons as well.

So, a few guys went and did an unofficial prelude to Portal. The trailer is pretty basic – it’s a new map pack, though also with new dialogue and a story. They seem to be getting plenty of buzz, out of people’s plain hunger for more Portal. It’ll be free when it’s done, so keep an eye out.

I’m surprised more people haven’t signed onto this list of sites who’ve dropped support for IE6. The site is only a few days old, though. I added this site on there, cause seriously, f IE6, and any other browser that came out in 2001. The browser market is moving away from IE anyway. That said, I like a lot of things about the new IE8 beta, try that out.

The new DS game Final Fantasy Tactics A2 is totally destroying me. I haven’t responded to a game with this kind of addiction in years. It’s a long, long game if you want to do everything (and I do), so it’ll likely be affecting my life in a net negative way for many weeks to come.