Photo of Philly air this morning

Got this in my morning Weather Channel Local Severe Weather Alerts:

Local Severe Weather Alert for Philadelphia, PA

…AIR QUALITY ALERT IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM TO 10 PM EDT TUESDAY… THE PENNSYLVANIA DEPARTMENT OF ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION HAS DECLARED AN AIR QUALITY ACTION DAY FOR THE REGION…IN EFFECT FROM 9 AM TO 10 PM EDT TUESDAY. AN AIR QUALITY ACTION DAY MEANS THAT AIR QUALITY WITHIN THE REGION MAY APPROACH OR EXCEED UNHEALTHY STANDARDS.

I remember these from Los Angeles and figured Philly’s industrial areas were as bad or worse, but this is for the whole region.

Lovely!

“The touch-based user interface is something we got from the handset market,” Kuittinen said. “And now that you have this innovation, it’s easier to go back to the tablet concept, and say, “Wait a minute, let’s add this.” All of a sudden the device is a lot more appealing and sexier, especially since you have multitouch.”

I’m all for an uber sleek device for mibile computing, but part of the usability of a tablet mobile phone (a la iPhone) is the shaking, gesturing, pointing, and pocketability. A tablet loses much of this and adds power, network, and protection issues.

Maybe man-purses will take on, too.

Hope all my readers are having an equally wonderful weekend!

Most of the announcements from @cnnbrk don’t include links to the breaking news article. They should. And they could do it with style since they’ve got a 3-letter domain.

Current links look more like: http://www.cnn.com/video/world/2009/06/21/von.iran.injured.youtube

Or they’ll use bit.ly (if they include a link at all): http://bit.ly/HnWNV

This could be much more easily inserted in a tweet as (non-working example) http://cnn.com/123xYZ

For that matter, why aren’t all of the major 3 and 4 letter domain news networks using shortened URLs for their tweets?

Fixed the Nokia N82 after describing in my previous post how to effectively break it…

Philip Greenspun is giving away his tank to charity – pretty nice, and he’s paying for the moving expenses…

The tank is complete with filters, lights, cover, etc.  I will pay for delivery, including a crane if necessary, to the school.  The tank is about 8? long by 2?x2?.

Twitter is currently down for database maintenance.

We expect to be back in about an hour. Thanks for your patience.

I wonder what kind of hell will break loose when it comes back up and sucks in the queued SMS updates… My phone is gonna go nuts.

Before Quantum of Solace, last night, a Coke commercial ran in which the lead actor-singer walks around his Christmas party describing everyone he’s invited. Amongst those attending were his “Twitter list.”

Wondering if this is the Twitter PR team buying product placement within an ad or if Coke knows Twitter has enough traction to elicit nods from theater attendees.

I haven’t found a streamed rev of the ad yet… I’ll embed it on this page when I get it.

Your current plan is not compatible with the T-Mobile G1. Please visit T-Mobile.com on your computer, dial 611 from your phone, or visit a retail location.

Today I had my most dissapointing experience with T-Mobile. I’ve been a customer and serious fan of their service since it was still Voicestream. Today they shut off my mobile Internet access without warning. Not cool.

This week I’ve been reviewing and testing the G1. I started without a SIM or plan, slipped my own Total Internet enabled SIM in, and was off and running. The first two days were good. 3G was snappy and no interuptions in net access took place. Overall, the T-Mo side of a transition to the G1 seemed solid. No notifications. Life was good.

Then yesterday morning, at the completion of writing a blog post for 40 minutes, net access was shut off. Coincedentally I was writing a post exactly at that time and I found out when I clicked “Publish” (the point where you submit the post). The message that came up is shown above, in an image taken with my iPhone 3G.

It was exactly 48 hours after I began using the device. Pretty much to the minute. No SMSs were sent about needing an upgraded data plan. No restrictions were placed on 3G vs EDGE. No warning, just an abrupt shut-off at a really inopportune moment. Note: Dave Winer knows a thing or two about this with his Comcast shut-offs.

If you’ve got Total Internet for $19.99, it’s not enough. There isn’t any grandfathering. Make sure you’re signed up for the G1 plan. You’ve been warned.

Post written entirely on a G1 in web based WordPress.

It seems like half of the spam I’m getting on Twitter is from a certain six figure income dot com domain (I won’t dignify their site with a link). My complaint about it in a tweet yesterday hit a nerve in quite a few people.

I’m pretty sure it’s one person, sitting in a basement somewhere, who is mass creating accounts and running some mass following scripts.

This is very easy and completely doable by a single person (then annoys thousands). There isn’t a way to filter followers with such criteria, but @chadspacey put a great idea up on Flickr. It’d take a lot of work on the back end, but is a simple and community based approach, a-la craigslist.

Gala and I did the traditional eating of the 1-year-old-frozen-top-tier-of-the-wedding-cake. It wasn’t bad at all.

This tradition is a bit crazy. We wonder how, as my brother-in-law pointed out, this is a tradition at all… It’s not like refridgeration and freezers have been around that long. Found this.

Obama – 4/21/2008

Clinton -4/11/2008

I completely dig Scoble’s method of using Twitter. I’ve been wanting to consume mass tweets and watch information pass…  It’s simply not possible to ‘flow’ when you’re using apps like Twitterific and only follow a hundred people (this setup is great for smaller numbers).

I’d been using Twitterific for a while, but it was clunky and limited to an update every few minutes. This required scrolling backwards in time and seeing what people had written as I broke one hundred friends. It was neither real-time or indicitive of a large enough audience.

Twitter supports XMPP (Jabber/GTalk). I’ve set up Adium with a GTalk account and switched my Twitter connections to update to the IM account. This has made it so all tweets are in real-time. Suddenly Twitter seems terribly slow as tweets scroll by as a trickle.

I’ve gone from a hundred to five hundred connections and it still seems slow – I’ll keep growing it. The major drawback to this setup is that you can’t consume it at all times. Your phone would blow up if you had this traffic going to SMS (it’d be great if Twitter offered separate SMS and IM settings). My personal preference is to follow the flow in the mornings during RSS reading and in the evenings while writing a blog post or other catch-up activities.

Wild thought… I wonder if the number of simultanious connections in the ‘flow’ will become a sign of one’s intelligence?

Using purely RSS, not a custom commerce site, you can buy great audiobooks from me (powered by iofy):

Some business books (a real-time search feed for business titles):

Business Search

Or something from Shakespeare (another real-time search feed for titles authored by Shakespeare):
Shakespeare

Also supported through iofy’s API is the ability to support your customers:

Have you downloaded content from iofy before? If so, you can get items from your digital locker (everything you’ve purchased through iofy is readily available here):
Digital Locker

Access your account here:
Account Details

And if you would like support and help with any devices, downloading, or listening…
Support