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Amazon released a Kindle app for the iPhone tonight, so I bought a digital book to read on my phone.

When you first “open” the “book” it shows you the first page of the first chapter. I guess this makes sense for people who want to dive right into reading, but I’d rather thumb past the cover art and the forward and the little quote that authors often include before the first chapter. I feel like that’s part of the experience of reading a book. But I get the desire to jump right in.

The really strange part is turning pages. Maybe this is too much of a departure from the book metaphor, but when I get to the bottom of a page, I want to continue scrolling vertically downward to read more, not flip a page. I looked for a setting to change the behavior but didn’t see one.

Now I’m curious how other book-reading apps handle this stuff. :)

The stuff I bought for myself while Festivus shopping just arrived. Criterion Blu-ray edition of Wes Anderson’s Bottle Rocket and the original recording of A Charlie Brown Christmas on CD.

I first saw Bottle Rocket on a trip to visit my uncle and cousins in Florida. The trip must have been shortly after it was released for rental. I thought it was a great little film the first time I saw it and my appreciation for has grown with each successive viewing. The Blu-ray version is (for some reason) cheaper than the DVD version so that’s the version I bought. (I don’t have a Blu-ray player so I’m hoping my brother is as excited about seeing it as I am.)

The Charlie Brown Christmas soundtrack is something I’ve been meaning to get for years. The newly remastered version was on sale from both iTunes and Amazon a few weeks ago but all the customer feedback said that the original version was a drastically better edition. So I bought it on CD and ripped it to my library. I don’t have a very strong connection to the movie but I love the music. Very happy to finally be able to listen to the whole thing.

I’ve got a good feeling about today. I think Obama’s going to win big. I think California is going to reject Prop. 8. And I think we’re all going to be better off for having voted our hopes instead of our fears.

And if you haven’t yet, go vote! I hear you can get free coffee! :)

Thank you George. :)

I was a little nervous about taking my iPhone to Canada as I’d heard horror stories of rampant international data usage leading to $3,000 phone bills. It turned out to be no trouble at all to make sure the phone wouldn’t go nuts overseas. First, AT&T has this page of tips which essentially boil down to:

• Turn off the General → Network → Data Roaming setting. (Which was already set to off when I checked it on my phone.)
• Change the Mail → Auto-Check setting to “Manual”.
• Use Wi-Fi networks whenever you need to access data.

The first one is the most critical as otherwise the phone will use any cell network it can find to send and receive data.

One thing these steps don’t protect you against is voice and SMS usage. I didn’t use the phone but I sent a few SMS messages which cost 20¢ per message.

The iPhone is, hands down, my all-time favorite gizmo. Since the rumors sites have me pretty much convinced that I’ll soon be buying an a new version of the phone, and since the App Store is coming soon, I wanted to note a couple of things I’m hoping for:

• Thinner, Lighter, Faster

  Apple is so good at this stuff, I have no doubt that the next iPhone will be noticably thinner and lighter than the original, yet capable of running native and web apps faster and more reliably.

• Native Feed Reader

  Google’s Reader is easily my favorite feed reader on the iPhone today, but there’s a huge opportunity for Brent Simmons and the NewsGator crew to step in and steal all the marbles. I don’t know if they’re working on it, but I hope so.

• Contacts and Calendar Mobile Syncing

  I have to plug my phone into my computer to sync my contacts and calendars. What is this, 2007?

• Native IM Client App

  Of course, this one is obviously in the works, but I’m especially looking forward to it. AIM’s IM-via-SMS stuff is great, but native is native.

• Video Chat

  This seems like kind of a silly rumor to me but it would just be SO DAMN COOL. The kind of “living in the future”-awesome that Apple brought us with the original iPhone.

• One more thing…

  Post Keynote Update: The new, native, TypePad for iPhone! It was a pleasure to be able to work on this with Stephane and Ray, and extremely exciting to hear that Michael was asked to demo it at the WWDC Keynote. Congratulations to the team!

I’m finding it very difficult to rank the Indiana Jones movies after seeing this latest installment. One thing I’m quite sure of is that Raiders of the Lost Ark and Last Crusade place higher than Temple of Doom and Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

But despite the shortcomings of the 2nd and 4th films, they’re both still pure Indy gold and you can’t help but love them. Harrison Ford just owns that role so completely, and the villains are just so comically goofy, that you just have to shovel popcorn into your mouth and enjoy it.

Update: Sounds like a few other people liked it too. Time to make another one!

I went to a university with a brand new, state of the art gymnasium. I think it was essentially free to the students and you could literally get lost inside it. I spent probably 15 minutes in that building the entire time I was there.

After college I didn’t make any effort to join a gym although for a while I was living on Nob Hill in San Francisco, working on Market Street, and walking to and from work every day. I’m not sure what the elevation change was exactly, but that was probably close to the best shape I’ve ever been in.

Tabitha, unlike myself, needs to go to the gym. She can’t not. When I started going with her about a year or so ago, I found it pretty brutal. But of course its grown on me considerably and these days I almost, almost, look forward to going.

Tab and I went to Monterey for the weekend and had a really nice time relaxing, eating well, wandering, and generally taking it easy.

We made a point to go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and tried to see pretty much everything, including the behind-the-scenes tour.

My main camera’s battery turned out not to be as charged as I thought it was so I spent a lot more time goofing off with the little video camera than I normally do. Expect to see more videos of otters appearing on Flickr soon. :)

Update: It’s starting already!

My office generously keeps the kitchen full of drinks and snacks in order to help us optimize our blood sugar levels. Over time, I’ve noticed that as the distance between my desk and the kitchen decreases, the number of trips I make to the chocolate drawer has increased. Exponentially.

So this last week, every time I wanted to get some M&Ms, or a Mini Baby Ruth, or a York Peppermint Pattie, I got a glass of water instead. I drank a tremendous amount of water. I’m planning to keep this trend going for as long as I can.

Update: We’re in week three of operation no-snack!