Wombat Mobile I should be coding or sleeping instead of this...

When I was reading about the pervasiveness of mobile devices in the Philippines, I was trying to think of an adjective, but couldn't come up with one. What's a word for a person or group that's totally into mobile phones and the corresponding untethered lifestyle? I've been trying to describe this subculture in conversations recently when discussing groups that I hang out with or people that I see on the subway or in malls, but nothing quite captures it.

I'm looking for something that could be used in the following sentences:

• After spending a few days in Thailand, it became obvious to me that this culture is much more ________ than I'm what used to in the U.S.
• Did you see that guy with the utility belt at the last Mobile Monday? Man, that dude was ________.
• My co-workers are still trying to wrap their heads around their calculator watches and StarTACs. In contrast, my golfing buddies are totally _______. They're checking hoops scores while waiting for the greens to clear and MMSing me while they're warming up at the driving range.

I'm sure there's a term for this. Sort of like the way the term "wired" was often used circa 1996 for someone really into online culture. That is, before the term assumed other connotations.

"into mobility"? "unwired"?

Or maybe something more along the lines of "otaku", which can mean completely different things depending on who you're talking to.

Hmm, I guess there might not be a good term for a mobile lifestyle/fanatic, or, as with most hype labels, by now it would have been used and abused ad nauseum. But then again terms like "Ajax" and "Web 2.0" are effective labels to capture interesting trends/movements that are generating a lot of excitement, and I'd argue that the mobile revolution is at least as important.

Interesting stuff in a P.J. Corkery column today. A greater blogger than I would insert some witty comments here, but I'm too tired and lazy today.

"Filipinos are also using text messaging to send protests directly to Mrs. Arroyo's cell phones, whose numbers are listed on various Web sites. One of the English-language messages reads in typically text-message language: "Hello Ma'am, Im vs lying n dishonesty. Pls resign." This isn't a tiny protest: The Philippines' 80 million people typically send 180 million text messages daily. The country has 30 million cell phones. …"

"Even the advertising apparatus of the cell phone industry is being adapted in the political war against Arroyo. Placards and posters have shot up around Manila parodying Cingular's name and signature blurry "x" logo. Behind the "x" appears Mrs. Arroyo's face and, where the word "Cingular" would appear in the ads, runs the Tagalog slang "Cinungaling," which means, approximately, "liar." She's in danger of political death by phone. … "
link

On a completely unrelated topic, here's a page that shows the phone numbers of a bunch of sports celebrities that the AP Sports Desk accidently published last year. Hmm, I've always wanted to ask Dusty Baker why he didn't pinch-hit for Mark Gardner back in 2000...

Heh, upcoming made-for-tv movies on CBS include a movie about Pope John Paul II with Cary Elwes as young pope and Ian Holm (Bilbo Baggins) as old pope. That's interesting.

And there's another movie with Cybill Shepherd playing Martha Stewart called "Martha Behind Bars".
link

I was perusing my logs last night and it was interesting to see how people stumble upon my blog. It made me want to experiment and see what would happen if I do less navel-gazing here and blog about stuff that might actually be interesting to someone else.

So, in that vein, I thought I'd start posting the notes that I keep when I'm researching buying crap. I often scour forums and review sites for even trivial purchases, and while I often end up with just a collection of links, getting this indexed in the search engines might save someone some time if they're in a similar situation down the road.

We've recently added another laptop to our house, a Dell Inspiron 700m, and we're going to need a new bag/case for it. I just went through this a few months ago, so it's still relatively fresh in my mind. I was torn between getting a backpack or a messenger bag, but I ended up with neither. I wanted something that didn't scream "steal this computer" on the subway, so I went with a Sumdex laptop sleeve from eBay that I could just use with my existing bags.

Here are some sites that I found useful when shopping for a notebook bag/case...

Manufacturers/Designers:

• Sumdex - sleeves, not very sleek, but cheap and good padding
• Shinza ZeroShock - better looking sleeves, but pricier. might be tough to find in US.
• Spire - cool bags that come with a protective sleeve
• booq - very slick bags, but pricey
• timbuk2 - lots of choices and colors
• Brenthaven - functional, conservative, look sturdy
• Boblbee - serious hard-shell cases for taking your laptop to the jungle. I'd consider these if I had a nice laptop, but I prefer to buy disposable, sub $1,000 Dells whenever there's a nice coupon code
• Manhattan Portage - meh
• Ogio

• genpi.com - Retailer with nice selection
• RoadWired - another retailer with a nice selection
• eBags - huge selection

• Ask Engadget: What’s the best gadget bag? - nice article on Gadget Bags/ManPurses with lots of links in the comments
• It's Not A Purse! A Buyer's Guide to Man-Bags - another good article with lots of examples
• arstechnica - Perpetual Laptop Bag/Backpack Thread

OK, it looks like I was premature in complaining about the lack of coverage on the Karl Rove story (it's been a long time coming).

Lots of things happening in the last few days. Here are my favorite links:

Comments from a former CIA operative

Good column and Q&A in the Washington Post

Interesting take on the press briefing on Monday

Flyers spotted while walking to lunch today:
SUMMER JOBS TO DEFEAT THE BUSH AGENDA: 8
SUMMER JOBS TO SAVE THE ENVIRONMENT: 3

Hmm, there's a new musical in SF.
Goin' Dot Com! - The Musical
One of the songs is called "Clickfarm Wizard".

Wow, I don't know what I was searching for when I stumbled upon this PSA created by my old high school. They've put a few together and they're pretty well done. I wonder what the story is behind the PSAs. I remember hazing being a big problem back when I attended there.

from IdeaMill

I just read an interesting article over at SiliconValleyWatcher.com.

Some of the noteworthy points include calling out Technorati, using conference panels to pitch products, and commercializing the blogosphere:

What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati's expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals. Mr Whitmore barely mentioned his company, and I didn't pitch anything, maybe I should have :-)

But I did get an interesting peak into the world of "selling the blogosphere" and how there is a large and growing number of companies, such as Technorati, that would like to make a lot of money from the work of millions of bloggers.

This resonates with a conversation I followed over the weekend:

"PR People Are Morons" link

"Given the assignment to discuss PR in the age of blogging, he invited a client, whose product actually has a reputation for being spyware, to announce a new version. And that was it. No one else on his panel, no discussion about the future of PR." link

"The word-of-mouth network is so efficient that if bloggers don't watch their brands they'll lose readership, respect, and, worse of all, if liars try to show up at conferences they will get called out and derided." link

A few thoughts:

1. I've been to more than my share of conference talks that turned out to be PR pitches. I used to advocate getting up and leaving en masse, but it turns out a better method is to call the person out in the Q&A and then blog about it.
2. I wonder if it really is effective when spammers are publicly identified.
3. Reading all the comments and trackbacks involved there's an underlying sense of dread of things to come which I'm noticing more often these days. It's not uncommon for people to always express the feeling of "thing were better before", but there seems to be a surge in the attitude that commercial interests and spammers are succeeding in diluting the conversation.
   
   We're already seeing interesting innovations crippled in their infancy like tag spam on Technorati and possibly My Web 2.0.
   
   I'm curious to see if the blogosphere follows the same path as Usenet (along with email) and evolves into something much less effective because of a diminishing signal to noise ratio as well as spam. Hmm, Usenet also had a strong sense of self-policing that occasionally turned into a mob mentality, but it never seemed to recover from the spam invasion when it hit the hypergrowth phase.

Wow, I'm full of energy today! I think I'm finally past this cold.

I did a lot of spackling in the morning and got bored waiting for it to dry, so I went to the driving range for the first time in many months.

I spent most of my time in the short game area and on the putting green before finishing up with some full swings. I experimented with a grip change on my right hand while doing some lob wedge practice and got some great results. Really consistent contact. This new grip effectively lightens my right hand influence and makes the club release feel much less hindered.

I ended up trying this same change on some full swing mid and short irons and hit some really flush shots. My irons are generally shorter than most people I play with, but this grip tweak has given me some great contact and added distance. I don't want to get prematurely excited about this change, yet, so I'll see if it still produces favorable results next week. I've been fooled by temporary improvements before.

Finished up with the driver and didn't see the same improvements. I brought along my Swing Speed Radar and swing speeds ranged from 98-104 with most around 99-100. I was averaging 103 mpg before my long hiatus, so I've got some work to do to get my speed back.

The Driving Range was empty and quiet, so it was a great time to just think with no one around, especially since my head is feeling much clearer now. I've been neglecting that fishy Event Planner recently because of my cold, but my motivation is back to add some more enhancements as well as work on some mobile projects I've been keeping on the sidelines. Huzzah!

I've been looking around the Net for Nyquil recipes. No, I'm not talking about the mixed drink(s) called Nyquil containing Jaeger/Sambuca/TripSec that "look like the red, but taste like the green". I still haven't shaken this cold, so I'm hoping for a way to spice up my evening Nyquil in a way so that I can accompany the fiancee and her chocolate martini in an after dinner drink.

I was thinking about maybe mixing Nyquil with shaved ice for a snowcone or with ice cream in a shake. Or possibly mixing some into one of my meal replacement protein shakes. Nothing crazy like the old Flaming Moe featuring Krusty's Kough Syrup, though.

Here are some interesting drink recipes featuring Nyquil:

Green Lizard

Ingredients:
1 bottle NyQuil® cough syrup
16 oz Sprite® soda

Directions:
Add ice, shake well. The sniffling, sneezing, coughing, aching, stuffy-head, fever, so you can rest, cocktail. This drink is very popular on the north slope of Alaska, which is technically an alcohol-free area.

http://www.drinksmixer.com/drink3991.html

Sweaty Italian

A combination of ice cold vodka and cough syrup. Not the most subtle of tastes, but when poured together, they separate, giving the appearance of an Italian flag.

Ingredients:
1 bottle NyQuil® cough syrup
16 oz Sprite® soda
Directions:
Pour all ingredients together into a shot glass, and serve.

http://www.drinksmixer.com/drink8010.html

It's funny, while googling nyquil cocktail, the fourth result was the omnipresent kwc blog. :)

Also, here's a nice Ode to Nyquil from http://www.iit.edu/~hockaly/ponyquil.html

Ode to NyQuil

O NyQuil!
As red, thou art, as the chilled blood of a cherry bat!
O NyQuil!
You burn with a fire in my throat that could melt the winter sky!
O NyQuil!
You bring upon me a soothing sleep that rests my aching nose!
O Nyquil!
You are far better than DayQuil!
O NyQuil!
Drugs like you that make me sleep are grand!
O NyQuil!
You make me write beautiful poetry!
O NyQuil!
Don't you think that any respectable ode has an excessive number of "O"s?

It has been brought to my attention that my blog entries are too damn long to read and I need to be more concise, so I'm going to try to blog in short, controlled busts for a while.

Just to follow up on parrakum's rant on new coverage, why doesn't the whole yellowcake/Rove/Plame story get one-tenth of the coverage that Michael Jackson or Tom Cruise gets? I'm wondering why I even bother keeping that block of news channels programmed on my tv.

I'm feeling especially venomous and snarkalicious today. I blame NASA for screwing up my cosmic balance.

Warm and Fuzzies...

• penetrating heavenly bodies
• Credit Lyonnais stuffed lions
• Celine Dion booed at Live 8

Anger rising...

• losing your ebay sniping skilz
• movies that haven't been released on DVD
• brevity

I had a good conversation with someone about loyalty to websites a few days ago and was thinking about this some more this morning. Looking at my everyday online tools, for some of them I'm actively looking for alternatives at the moment, while I'm too lazy to change others, and some of them seem untouchable.

RSS Aggregator - There's a whole bunch of them out there, but I still stick with Bloglines. It's simple and works well on desktop and phone. I came very close to exploring alternatives a few weeks ago when some feeds weren't getting updated, but things got better before I got a chance to look at other options.

Email - I didn't think I'd ever switch from using my own mail server, but the draw of gmail's spam-filtering and archiving was too much. I'm not looking to change at the moment, but the transition to gmail was much simpler than I would have expected, so changing to something else might not be too painful.

Blog Search - I started out with Feedster, then switched to Technorati, then a combination of Technorati and PubSub, and now I've switched back to Feedster. Search engines always seem easy to transition because I don't have a lot of ties to them, but it's amazing what little things affected my recent decision to go from Technorati back to Feedster.

Technorati's new UI brought some changes that just wore me down and drove me away. The first is I like having the cursor in the search textbox during the onLoad event. It saves me from having to click in there every time. Such a small thing, but doing it multiple times a day gets old.

The second thing is I tend to use medium-sized browser windows, and with feedster's search results I get 7 results displayed before I need to scroll down. With Technorati, I only get 3 results and they're the tagged results, not the normal results. I'm not finding enough posts that use tags enough that would warrant this priority in search results. And the tagged results often seem to be the from same people that are very tag-happy, and from some who appear to be abusing the system. To me, it comes across as 3 paid advertiser search results, followed by the real results I'm looking for, which is reason enough to take my searches elsewhere.

Finally, the slowness of Technorati was the last straw, so I'm back to Feedster, and anxiously awaiting Google to unveil something or some unknown player to step up.

Stocks, News, Sports, TV - It's shocking how long I've been using my.yahoo.com. My account there is using an email address from a startup I worked for from '95-'96. Still happy and not looking for alternatives.

Social Bookmarks - This is something where I've yet to find a nice home. I've moved on from del.icio.us and Spurl. I'm currently using Furl and StumbleUpon, but could jump at a moment's notice. Outfoxed actually looks pretty interesting, but I haven't gotten around to checking it out yet. I'm not even bothering with My Web 2.0 since none of my friends will join. This space really needs a leader to emerge. Until then, I'll keep looking.