Central Village

New Email

While I'm not blogging as often as I used to, I get more email about bands and CV related stuff than ever before. My personal email address is getting obnoxiously full and I want it back for friends and family. SO...If you would like to email me for stuff about this blog, please write to (centralvillagenyc at gmail dot com) After this week, any unsolicited or promotional email sent to my personal email address will be immediately deleted and, depending on the mood I'm in, tagged for Spam. So update your mailing lists! This is the only notice I will provide. Thanks!

Podcasts!

What a concept! What a specifically urban commuter, tailored-to-me concept! And yes, I am well aware this is neither a new or groundbreaking subject, but bear with me for a sec, cause I just got into the whole thing a few weeks ago.

It started with the Bill Simmons podcast when that whole thing started. Say what you will about the fella, but he still writes the only sports column I regularly read and reference in conversation. Sure there might be a few more eye-rolls these days than in the past, but for a guy pushing 40, he still feels remarkably relevant and fun. So he starts doing these podcasts cause he's doing another book and doesn't have time to write as much, and they're pretty interesting! Good guests, smart conversation with people who not only have something to say, but people who he usually knows and has a great back and forth with. It's a really entertaining listen, and once he started doing it weekly, I FINALLY went into the iPod podcast center and hooked up an automatic update thingy.

From there, I figured I aught to start getting into others. I have about a 20 minute commute door-to-door, and while i can get a few songs in if I wanted, there are plenty of podcasts that I can get a whole story told to me in that time. So now I have a few things going. There's weekly Simmons and daily Pardon the Interruption (which is annoying because it's always yesterday's news,) Then I hooked up with the Joystiq podcast, which is these three dorks (one of which sounds like the Electronics Boutique store manager in Phillipsburg, NJ.) talking about video game news that I BARELY have an interest in. Then there's the smart stuff. NPR's Fresh Air podcast is remarkably dry and oftentimes unlistenable, but sometimes there's a good guest on that makes it interesting. The Slate Daily Podcast, which is usually a narrator reading a column out loud that's already available on line, but it's short and usually good. Then there's the gem, This American Life, which judging from my iTunes, I am 338 episodes behind. I can't say enough about how great this show is, and I'm the last person with the Internet to talk about it so I won't embarrass myself any longer.

So that's all. Welcome back from 2004, or whenever this all got started. I don't have a video ipod so I'm not getting into those yet. Hopefully there will be a new iPod in a month or so that will be worth the upgrade. For now tho, I'm happy with the radio stuff. Like I said...ideally there'd be a 20 minute daily show that i could get into and listen on the way to work every day. I'm sure there's something out there. Any suggestions?

I'm off Google Reader. Again.

Every 8 months or so I convince myself that I should give Google Reader another go. So I export my bloglines, load it up and I go along my business for a little while and it seems okay, until i realize I'm reading only about 10% of my feeds because the damn thing is so slow. How did Google screw this up? If blogs are this next great big thing, how can this not be a priority? Either get it out of labs already or start over. I don't understand why on a site like bloglines can work so seamlessly and Google can't figure it out. I click on a feed, and all the new posts pop up and i can skim through them as i like. Instantly. No buffering, no loading. I click and they're all right there. Google takes at least 3 and sometimes as much as like 20 seconds to load up for each feed. Then if I've got more than 20 posts to skim, it freezes while it loads the next 20? How do you screw this up? It's especially bad for sites like engdaget, who post 1000 times a day and I don't care about a lot of that stuff, but I like to skim through to see if anything grabs my interest. I can't do that with Google Reader. Let me repeat that. I CANNOT READ ENGADGET ON GOOGLE READER. That's a serious problem, methinks, since there are about 80,000 people who subscribe to that feed, but it goes for all the biggies...Gawker Sites, News Feeds, Chowhound, Slate. I've forced to completely shut them out. I don't have the time or patience to wait, so i don't even bother.

So I'm back to bloglines today and all seems right again. I'm the biggest Google guy in the world. I rely on them for just about everything...email, docs, calendar, homepage. Everything. How can they not fix this???

My Unsolicited, Uninfomed Opinion on the iPhone

What can I say that hasn't been said? Well, why I don't have an iPhone. I haven't touched the thing. Haven't even seen one in person. But I'm normally an early adopter, a Mac user, and not 100% satisfied with my current iPod OR Sidekick. I'd usually go for this. My major hesitation is I want faster internet.

That's it.

A bigger hard drive would be nice, but I'm ok with my 1 gig nano so I don't mind switching stuff on and off. I just want my internet to be fast enough so that I don't ever have to hesitate when trying to get online from my phone. I do that on my sidekick all the time. It takes forever to load anything up and I want an improvement.

I'm sold on every other aspect of the phone at this point. I'd even pay that much and sign up for AT&T. But I don't want a fancy internet phone that takes 2 minutes to load up something like ESPN.com. That's like owning a fancy car in Manhattan. What's the point if you can't let loose?

Anyway, My T-mobile contract runs up sometime next year. I'm not breaking contract to get to this. By next summer, is the network going to upgrade to 3G? Or something better/faster? We'll see by then.

Ideally, they will come out with a new iPod by the end of the year that will have wi-fi, safari and the widescreen, touchscreen and everything. I'd pay for that. I'd pay big. This doesn't need to be my phone, but I everything else about it a lot.

So now what the hell am I supposed to do?

I was told I'd never need to delete another message...

Buddy List Update

It returned this morning. Unannounced. No explanation as to where it had been for the last week.

It's good to be able to check the away message of that guy who lived down the hall from me freshmen year again.

What the hell happened to my buddy list?

I know last night was a rough one (more on that in a minute), but the last thing I expected to find this morning is my AIM buddy list missing. What the frig?

So good

I recently signed up with bloglines, and now don't know how I got along before without it. It's perfect. Anyway, along with the blog RSS feeds, I've also signed up for some podcasts and other news sites through this. One of which is the YouTube "most viewed videos" feed, which sends the 10 or so most viewed clips over the course of the day.

Here's one I got today somewhat regarding the Apple v. Apple verdict last week. I love it. The full story below:

Following a court case involving Apple Computer and The Beatles' record label, a floor manager had run to reception and grabbed the man, thinking he was , editor of Newswireless.net, a specialist internet publication.

Actually, he was a minicab driver who had been waiting to drive Mr Kewney home once the interview was completed.

The unknown cabbie attempted to bluff his way through and, speaking in a strong French accent, sustained a (somewhat illogical) form of conversation. Meanwhile, the real Mr Kewney watched indignantly on a monitor in reception.

UPDATE: Brooklyn Vegan sent me this, which explains that this guy was not a cabbie, but a tech guy who was supposed to be at the studio for an job interview. I find this to be even funnier. Can you imagine being on a job interview, being walked from reception, then all of a sudden, they mistakenly put you on live TV to talk about a subject you haven't a clue about? Highest comedy. His facial expression when it all gets going is priceless.

Poor Tech Purchaces

This year hasn't been a good one for me as far as buying myself fancy toys. It started with Xbox 360 right before New Years. I like the thing, but there really aren't that many games out for it. And the ones that they have are really expensive aren't that great. I just bought a baseball game for my old reliable PS2, which I'll prolly be playing for the next 6 months pretty exclusively. I don't even play that many videogames to begin with anymore. oh well.

Next was a DVD player that upconverted regular DVDs to look Hi-Def on my big HDTV (which was a great purchase...2 years ago). It's not that it was broken or didn't do a pretty good job doing what it was supposed to do, it's just that I don't really watch movies in my living room, um, ever. I have enough TV to catch up on my DVR. When I do watch a movie these days, it's usually whatever's on HBO, Showtime, etc on-demand in bed while I fall asleep. So this was a pretty big waste of money.

Finally was my new phone/PDA device thingy. Huge mistake. Dumped my perfectly good sidekick for a fancy PDA device (Sprint PPC 6700) that looked great on paper but was a disaster in execution. Windows Mobile 5 didn't work right, the Wi-Fi was a headache and a major battery drain, my email never synced up right and no native AIM support, with the 3rd party apps barely being functional. I couldn't get back to my Sidekick soon enough. Yesterday, after waiting the 90 days required to return to T-mobile, I ate the investment on the phone and the contract termination fee and switched back. Now today I'm with my trusty Sidekick II for the first time in three months. It's very touching. The guy's not perfect and ideally I should have waited a few months till the Sidekick III came out, but I really couldn't deal with it any longer.

No point or moral to this story, just venting. I've already spent most of my upcoming disposable income on travel...Coachella this weekend, Chicago for Pitchfork, Nashville for Bonnaroo. Hopefully my redistribution of funds will prevent me from also splurging on a Plasma TV or God knows what else entices me for the moment.

Videogames are Awesome

By now I imagine everybody has seen the Jose Gonzalez 'Heartbeats' bouncing ball commercial. Some crazy Swedes made a spoof of the ad using the PC war simulator Battlefield 2. How cute.

Really, I just wanted an excuse to post an embedded media player. Have fun. (Via Joystiq)