The review,

Some of my uses:

• Code snippets and Keyboard Shortcuts database, organized by app/language
• Client and Research Notes
• Account Info repository
• Visual Memory – anything I need to remember that I can snap a pic of
• Document Archive
• Blog post/Email drafting

Cool features:

• good tags implementation
• iPhone support for voice and photo memos
• easy web clipping
• text recognition on photos (in theory at least – I haven’t seen it work)
• horizontal rules! something Google can’t seem to get right, nothing like an HR to help organize a page
• good list support – making multilevel lists is easy (If only you could paste them into other apps)
• advanced searches on attributes, eg. creation date

The iPhone syncing works like it should, unlike Things for example, which you need to manually sync over a local wifi network. The ability to have the app on multiple computers, combined with the website and iPhone app means you pretty much have access to your data no matter where you are. And with a handy export to HTML, your data is safe and portable (if you remember to make regular exports). And yes, you can export all the notes in one click. Nice. Now that I’ve talked about how great Evernote is, I want to note how infuriatingly bad it is in certain areas. The main problem is the text editing.

Flaws:

• Use styles sparingly. The moment you set a style, say bold, expect everything in that note to default to bold. Even if you unbold, it often randomly reverts to bold again
• editing lists = suck. move a list item may change the styles on the whole list
• No decent tabs or table support
  • you can’t edit a table, so be sure to get the rows and cols count right the first time, or you will have to copy and paste all the values into a new table
  • the other day I was making a table, and a cell popped out into new column, making a discombobulated mess of a table. Nope, no way to fix it, save remaking the table from scratch like above
  • tabs are just a several spaces, so you can’t get things to line up pretty. Also makes it difficult to make a note of code that needs tabs to be readable

Here is my wishlist that I think would make this app flawless:

• fix the text editor
• make a function to revert a note to plain text, so you can edit on the iPhone (instead of just appending to it)
• ability to hide notes – Google docs got this right. Notes add up quick.
• Back button – where was I just before
• iPhone ability to edit pending notes – after I click save in the subway, if I get another idea I have to start a new note. Bummer. – Fixed!
• Font zooming – the default font-size is a bit hard on the eyes, and changing the font style, like I mentioned, can be a world of hurt

I’ve always thought it would be cool if there were a place out here where people could talk. So I created this BB Press powered Online Forum. Here’s to hoping that people actually use it!

Rosalind Wiseman is an author and expert on teens, parenting and bullying. The new website uses an interesting Wordpress feature: it’s the child theme of a Professional Theme called Mimbo Pro. Some other cool features it has are liberal embedding of video, multiple blogs, photo galleries, gCal event listings, and a User Forum.

The project was fun because I learned a lot more about Wordpress. I’m really getting into using it as a CMS.

• Call the Law, Outkast ft. Janelle Monae, Idlewild, 2006
  I’m hooked from the scatting in the beginning under the romping jazz piano, to the easy, on-story lyrics of Antwone, to the long-form evocative story that Janelle Monae twirls about marital strife.

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• Coffee, Aesop Rock ft. John Darnielle, None Shall Pass, 2007 Aesop flips easily into a west coast style, rocking sick cadences and metaphors, though still not sure what his lyrics are about. But John evocative Donny Brasco-esque moodiness with his extended vocals. “1967, Colt 45″.
  

1. Mambo Sinuendo, by Ry Cooder and Manuel Galban,  2003
   Classy, vintage Cuba/surfer vibe done by two guitarist giants in the game. Manuel Galban played on Buena Vista Social Club, which Ry Cooder introduced to the public.
2. Masada Guitars, by John Zorn, 2003
   Some of the best contemporary guitarists: Bill Frisell, Tim Sparks and Marc Ribot, tear up compositions by John Zorn. I think every track is incredible. The only album that compares to this
3. The Guitarist, by John Williams, 1998
   Exotic tunes, including Greek compositions and rounding out with some mellow Satie, woven together to make a great album.
4. Deviations, by Dominic Frasca, 2005
   A true virtuoso playing in the Minimalist genre.

1. Bond do Role
2. Cansei de Ser Sexy
3. Nouvelle Vague (they may be French, but they do Bossa Nova-ish covers)
4. Yeah Yeah Yeahs (ok, also not Brazilian, but hott)

1. Blonde Redhead
2. Pidgeon
3. Brazilian Girls
4. Tricky
5. Pixies
6. Sonic Youth

Intro
10 years ago we hailed the arrival of the Information Super Highway. Now, new technologies built on that infrastructure have increased information accessibility by an order of magnitude. The idea that in our lifetimes we had to search out information in physical libraries seems atavistic. Below I highlight some of the major trends in information consumption in the Geekdom.

Blogs > RSS
RSS has allowed push dissemination of content on the web. You can follow as many blogs as you like through a feed reader. I typically have over 1,000 unread posts in my Google Reader, due to the high quantity of blogs I follow.

For those who still are having trouble with the concept I suggest Common Crafts excellent video tutorial, RSS in Plain English.

The state of the art of RSS is advancing with innovations to help you deal with information overload such as Feed Scrub, with which you train your account to filter out posts you don’t want to read. I signed up for the beta, but until they create more advanced import and export options I won’t be trying it out (currently you have to import and export each feed individually).

Post Rank is another potentially interesting service which sieves your feeds for the most popular posts. It achieves this by looking at comment counts, tweets, clicks, bookmarks etc. And AideRSS integrates it effortlessly into online feed readers as a Firefox Extension or a Greasemonkey script. The interface is fugly, so I disabled it. Hopefully they’ll improve UI in future iterations.

Feeds of course, aren’t made by the magic feed fairy, one has to setup an RSS feed on their blog. Some blogs don’t have any feeds, or feed the wrong thing. Recently I’ve been ranting on Twitter about my new pet peeve, photo sites that don’t include the photos in their feeds. Enter Feed43 a web service that can create a feed from a webpage using regular expressions. Although it’s a bit daunting at first, anyone with mild geek-cred can get the hang of it after a couple shots. Check out the feeds I’ve created there.

Twitter
This is the blogging short form that is hot right now. You are limited to 140 characters per “tweet”, which is what makes this service unique: brevity. A lot of people are supplementing their blog posts with numerous daily tweets. Like RSS, this is a push service, so all the twitterers whom you follow’s tweets show up on your Twitter page.

Twitter is a service that is extending what the language of the internet. Consider the innovations in semantics: @replies and #hashtags are meta-language characters that have grown organically in Twitter to facilitate tweet tracking.

An interesting thing about Twitter is the myriad ways it’s used. Some use it as communication channel to hold conversations with their friends. Others to give status updates (it can update Facebook status). Some to share cool things they’ve found. Others promote their services. Others use it as the ultimate knowledge base, and others as a newswire. Most use it for a bit of all of the above. I grab tons of information from my daily Twitter browsing on a range of topics such as politics, tech, finance and the lives and opinions of people I know and/or admire.

The number of technologies growing up around this platform are too numerous to go into, but a few of the interesting ones I’ve seen are Follow Cost, which allows you to evaluate the posting frequency and @ replies of someone before you follow them; Yammer, which is billed as twitter for project management; and Twinkle for iPhone, which grabs tweets from your current immediate surroundings (useful to have at an event).

A lot of people still don’t get Twitter, despite it’s  popularity. If you want to learn more, again, I suggest again, Common Craft’s video Twitter in Plain English.

Instapaper
Possibly my most used iPhone app, Instapaper let’s you separate the long form articles you want to read later from the constant flow of byte size bits that you may consume fast and loose in your feed reader during breaks. In the past I would just skip things I didn’t have the time to invest in. Now I can just mark them to be downloaded to my iPhone, and read them on my commute.

Safari Web Clips, OSX Dashboard, iPhone apps, etc
And on and on and on… APIs mean you get the data any way someone can think up to serve it. Webclips and Dashboard widgets in OSX bring sites’ onto your mac effortlessly. The iPhone app store is creating a huge new marketplace for content providers. Even just checking your mail puts you in contact with data with (mandatory) RSS snippets at the top of the inbox.

Government
Notorious for its opacity, government is starting to open up it’s doors. With “Open Obama” taking office, his commitment to transparency, apparently, is much more than lip service.

1. Obama’s change.gov (now whitehouse.gov) & Citizens’ Briefing Book with it’s Digg model for voting up & down citizen commentary.
   
2. The House, and the Senate on YouTube, where you can see videos by your Representatives, and their debates on the floor.
3. OpenCongress.org, which allows you to vote up or down the popularity of bills, and features profiles of Representatives.
4. USAspending.gov, that has an open API (arguably the true measure of transparency) to let people develop apps that have direct access to the data, as well as tons of downoads.
   

Also, check out John Edwards on Twitter. Unlike Al and Barack, he updates frequently!

Life Feeds
The paradigm is not only changing on a website level. With the explosion of social media sites like Facebook for friends, LinkedIn for careers, Delicious for bookmarks and Flickr for photos, the Internet is increasingly a place inhabited by people. You can learn frightening amounts of information about a person involved in social media. Indeed, most people are so tickled by the fact that we are writing our autobiographies in the cloud, they are ok with the security risk.

On my FriendFeed page you can see an aggregate of my social media profiles. My About page has more in this vein.

Conclusion
Information accessibility is a good thing no-doubt, but there are a couple of perils involved with this explosion of means. People putting out life feeds are ever more at risk of reputation damage, and even identity theft. You are only as safe as your least secure social media site. The recent twitter hackings during Mac World, where Steve Jobs was pronounced dead (classy), is just one example.

Consuming myriads of info through a single source also means credibility diminishes in importance. It’s tougher to distinguish which is the reputable news source with the branding gone. This contributes to info-tainment. People can’t trust their sources, and they don’t care.I think we’re at a strange point in the internet where it is simultaneously maturing into a platform, while simultaneously deteriorating the credibility/quality of information.

[starrating]

The idea is simple: We love our girlfriends, boyfriends, spouses and mistresses, but let’s face it, we don’t show it nearly enough. You can subscribe to an iCal calendar that reminds you every month to do something nice for that special someone at Just Thinking of You (.net). The events have alarms and suggestions. Check the site for some examples.

I’m thinking about changing the design, but I wanted to get something up so I coded my first draft. Check it out and let me know what you think!

1. Financially things are still tough.
   • The peso is in flux, which creates multiple layers of complexity to doing financial transactions.
   • Inflation is on the rise: prices have risen almost everywhere (except transport) to match NY prices. According to my cousin, wages have gone up proportionally.
   • Coin crisis: You need change to ride the bus, only about 30 US cents, but coins are scarce. So much so that they can be sold for profit. No one has change.
   • It’s very expensive to buy electronics or clothing.
2. Police have improved, but can be potentially useless.
   • People aren’t so afraid of being kidnapped or harassed by police.
   • They have patrols now, if infrequent, and a 911 number like NY.
   • On the other hand, they answer directly to the Federal Government, causing problems. For example, a friend’s home intrusion alarm went off. When he got home a rep from the alarm company met him at the door, but refused to go in. There was a police man on the corner whom they approached, who also refused to go in. Aparently, he was being paid to watch that corner.
3. Security is still a problem.
   • Stickups remain common. A friend of ours was robbed at knife point while we were there.
   • People are still afraid to open store front businesses due to the high rate of stickups.
   • You have to LOCK all doors. Whether you’re inside or out.
   • When out in public, you must keep a close eye on your bag and personal effects. “Choros” (pick pockets) remain abundant.
   • On the other hand, kidnappings are now uncommon.
   • People decide not to live afraid.
4. The middle class is firmly right leaning.
5. Culturally, Bs As remains vital, mostly.
   • Cafe and night life remain vibrant.
   • The state of the art of Graffitti is maturing.
   • The art of drawing is well respected. You see many interesting sketches in the daily papers and in advertising.
   • Dogshit remains a problem.
   • While building remains strong, often, unfortunately to the detriment of beautiful historic architecture, most of the city is still very charming. The southern climate helps a lush abundance of old life trees thrive.
   • The “Asado” (barbeque) remains an essential stamp of hospitality. This time I tried “chinchulines” (lungs), kind gross, and “molleja” (a fatty, bacon-like throat gland), delicious! I passed on the raviolis de “seso” (brain).

Conclusion: Despite all it’s charm, it’s still dysfunctional on many levels. Under the right conditions however, it is still livable.

1. Les Fleurs Du Mal by Charles Baudelaire
2. Flesh Unlimited by Guillaume Apollinaire
3. The Dominant Wives and Other Stories by Eric Stanton
   
4. The Mammoth Book of Erotica by Maxim Jakubowsk
5. Men in Love by Nancy Friday
6. The Pure and the Impure by Colette
7. My Secret Life by Anonymous
8. Under the Roofs of Paris by Henry Miller
9. Cockpit by Jerzy Kosinski
10. Passion Play by Jerzy Kosniski
11. Story of O by Pauline Reage
12. A Sport and a Pastime: A Novel by James Salter
13. Little Birds by Anais Nin
14. Candida Royalle’s Under the Covers DVD
15. Emmanuelle DVD

It isn’t the fruit of my own research,

rather pilfered directly from She Comes First, by Ian Kerner. A good, informative read.