Android Has a Month to Woo Me

Well my 3 year contract with Rogers came due on September 4th. I decided to have them park my number for a month while I put my iPhone away and decided to use my Android phone full time. Basically, Android has a month to woo me before I make a decision to get a fancy new Android phone or an iPhone 5.

Right now I'm using a Samsung Galaxy S running Android 2.1 and I totally threw it into the deep end right off the bat. My first day using the phone full time was on our trip from Sydney, NS back home to Ottawa, ON. The phone got used a lot to play games and look up info while we were waiting in lines and flying in planes. Sadly, on the drive home from the airport to the house the phone ran out of battery. This is a strike against the phone as this level of usage doesn't typically drain my iPhone battery down to zero.

Day two was a much more reasonable day of kicking around Ottawa but still by the end of the day the phone battery was drained. A few of my most frequently used applications on the iPhone are Twitter and Foursquare. On my Android phone Twitter crashes frequently so I switched to TweetDeck and Foursquare can never get a GPS location. So far things are not going as smoothly as I'd have like.

I'll continue to use the Android phone and see what I can do to improve it's performance and battery life. First up I'll see if I can get it upgraded to 2.3 but the Samsung software for this does not run on my Mac.

Books I've Read This Week

I was writing my review of How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe by Charles Yu but then a future version of myself stepped out of a time machine and handed me a copy of the review that I was writing so I quit as it is all too meta but at least it is all explained in the book.

One Piece, Vol. 21 follows the continuing adventures of Straw Hat Pirate crew. People it's pirates with mad ninja skills it's the ultimate expression of the Pirates vs Ninja meme.

Enchantment by Guy Kawasaki is just a fantastic book. Everyone should read this book to get a handle on how to compose one-self when dealing with others. This is targeted towards a business professional but it really is a great read for anyone, especially high school and university students who are yet to enter the work force. A lot of people will probably find this book to be common sense but I've dealt with a lot of folks who could benefit by reading this book.

See you next Friday.

Books I've Read This Week

The Shallows is an interesting book by Nicholas Carr where the main thrust is that our current use of the internet is killing our ability to focus. The author posits that it is caused by constant interruptions and short "sound byte" type articles we read on the web. Apparently our brains are adapting to multi-task.

Go Put Your Strengths to Work by Marcus Buckingham can be summed up with discover what type of work really energizes and excites you then go search it out. The book also lays out some steps you can do to identify your strengths and how to massage your job so you can use your strengths more.

Naruto, Vol. 46 again continues to push the story on at a rapid pace. One of my favourite characters bites it in this volume which is sad but it makes sense from a story perspective and isn't a death for the sake of increasing sales.

Akira Volume 6 is the conclusion of the Akira story. Not much I can say about this story but go read all 6 volumes.

See you next Friday.

Webcomic Wednesday: Ratfist

Ratfist is a webcomic by Doug TenNapel. You can see the titular character to the left as he is a sort of amalgam of Batman and Earth Worm Jim. EWJ is another character created by TenNapel.

The strip is at times silly and poignant but always worth a read. The whole story is collected so if you start at the link above you can read the whole thing and get a beginning, middle and end.

Books I've Read This Week

I used to do a weekly in depth review of a book I'd read the previous week. Starting this Friday I'm going to give some quick hits of books I've read in the previous seven days. Hopefully this will be the beginning of a running feature here on my blog.

Continuing my re-read of the Akira series I've reached the penultimate chapter in Volume 5. Some fantastic storytelling and line work in this book by Katsuhiro Otomo. I'm always struck out how much of Japanese popular culture was influenced for decades by the dropping of the atomic bomb. Akira in it's post apocalyptic world is another reflection of those fears.

I grabbed the The Geek Dad's Guide To Weekend Fun while attending OSCON at Portland's amazing book store Powell's. It is full of a number of good projects and I'm planning on brewing some root beer and creating a PVC drum set with my daughter.

Blackout by Connie Willis is a book set in the London of World War 2 during the Blitz with time travelling historians who've arrived during this critical period so they can record it for posterity. Great book and I'm looking forward to picking up the follow up All Clear.

Japanese Manga sure knows how to keep people coming back for more. This is the 45 volume of Naruto I've read and I look forward to every one. The story keeps rolling forward at a frantic pace which is a welcome change from the current spate of North American comic story telling.

Well that's it until next Friday.

Brew Strong K-Cup Coffee

Thanks to Lifehacker for linking to this post on the Instructables that shows how to brew better, stronger (sadly not harder or faster*) coffee. By combining a My K-Cup with any used K-Cup you can increase the amount of pressure used when brewing your coffee for better flavour extraction from your ground coffee. I think this is an excellent trick to add to your home brewing arsenal.

* If you prefer the Kanye West version here it is.

Our OSCON PhoneGap Slides

Well the PhoneGap presentation that Becky Gibson and I gave at OSCON this year seems to have been well received. Thirteen people have rated us so far giving us an average of 4.15 stars out of 5 which I consider to be pretty good. If you are looking for the slides and example code you can find it here.

Next up for me is an internal presentation at the end of the month and then I will head down to Ottawa chapter of CocoaHeads to talk about developing cross platform mobile apps with PhoneGap.

Update: Now available on SlideShare as well.