I’ve just started Unit 1 tonight and I’m in the middle of the unit right now, but took a quick break to watch a video of Grace Hopper on Letterman (More on that in a bit).

Back to this Udacity thing. It’s an online unversity that’s being offered at no cost. There aren’t accreditation for taking the courses, but you get to learn from some amazing people. The course I’m taking right now is how to build a search engine. In seven weeks I’ll have learned how to build a search engine from one of the co-founders of Google and some other people.

There isn’t much more to say about it than that, but half-way through the first unit I’ve already learned a TON.

One of the things I learned is that late night talk shows used to have guests who were more than just entertainers. Sure, they still do that sometimes, but nothing like the video below that I was sent to as a side-viewing interest video from Unit 1.

Here’s Retired Rear Admiral Lower Half Grace Hopper on the David Letterman show.

I’m going to get back to the course now, but I thought I’d write up a post quick saying that if the late night shows would do more interviews like this one, I’d probably watch a lot more. Stupid pop culture.

We purchased a Canon Powershot ELPH 300 HS last night at Target while it was on clearance. We’re taking it back today.

Why? the pictures are grainy! even at normal viewing size for Facebook the images look grainy. The high burst mode is even worse making 12.1 megapixel pictures looked like pixels exploded. The flash left light artifacts on the pictures in lower light situations.

The video camera was great as long as you didn’t start zooming. As soon as you pressed the zoom in the lighting quality went to shit (even if you hadn’t moved the lens).

The last straw on this camera was that it didn’t charge via USB and had a proprietary battery that needed to be removed from the camera to charge at all, removing the ability to quickly get a camera up for cute moments.

So, Megan and I are looking for a decent point and shoot in the intermediate range (we don’t want a DSLR) so that we have something for when the baby gets here that will produce pictures that could possibly be printed on photo paper for hanging/saving physically.

Any suggestions?

A few months ago, Megan and I splurged on this set of collapsible measuring cups and spoons. We have a small house without a lot of storage space, and our storage drawer for measuring type things in the kitchen didn’t have quite enough vertical space to easily store all of our measuring cups (3 sets).

While continuing to try and save space, I decided today that I wanted another set of these since they are so very nice for the drawer and they clean really easily.

So now we have two sets of space-saving measuring cups.

However, we throw away the little silicone thing that holds the cups together. It looks a lot like a penis and after the jokes get passed around, nobody wants to use it to hold our measuring cups.

There are plenty of examples out there regarding customer service on the social channels that are good. Companies using their own customer service departments to monitor tweets and public Facebook posts or posts to pages that actually get handled. However, this falls apart for many companies that outsource their social networking channels as well as their customer service departments.

Social Network service can be ruined by having a marketing agency handle replying to reviews and postings without a direct tie to the company they are servicing. This leads to complaints falling on people that have no real power to help the customer having issues. I’ve complained about Comcast in the past regarding service issues, but their Twitter team is actually employees in the customer service department. Which means that they can listen and actually help fix issues.

My latest issue was with TMobile’s Twitter team. I had an issue lately with my bill after combining my wife’s and my accounts into one bill and contract. I was switching from unlimited text messaging my own account and 1000 message limits on my wife’s account (which she consistently used under 100). Because of the switch the messages that she and I had sent out since the last bill were thrown into a limbo state that their billing system thought was overage use. I got charged $45.20 + tax for the overage. The bill I got had just come through and wasn’t due to be auto-paid for another 20 days. I called in.

This is where the Service Theater idea comes in with outsourced customer service departments. The poor CS rep that I spoke to couldn’t do anything to help me. She told me that the money would be credited back to my account in the next billing cycle (March). I told her that what she was suggesting was ridiculous and that I would like to speak to a supervisor. She put me on hold for a few minutes to go check to see if a supervisor was available. Once she came back, she told me that all the supervisors were busy helping other customers and that it didn’t really matter since the supervisor wouldn’t be able to help me with anything either.

I don’t fault the CS Rep for any of this. Her hands were tied in regards with what she had permission to do. The calls are so scripted that delving off into uncharted territory leaves the agents unable to handle slightly different from the script. I wouldn’t even be surprised that the “my supervisor wouldn’t be able to help you” comment is on a script for ornery customers (which I was).

The last part of service theater was the twitter team. I’ve complemented Tmobile on their service before, and did so when I switched Megan and I to the same plan because we were saving money. They were very quick to respond on Twitter and always have been. However, when I complained about the bill I got silence. When I complained about the silence, I got silence. When the matter was resolved and I tweeted about it again, I got a reply that they were happy that it was resolved. When I questioned them on the fact they hadn’t replied to any of my complaint tweets I was told that they can’t respond to every one. I’m translating this to: We can’t do anything if you complain anyways, so we just don’t reply.

Luckily this whole thing had a good ending. My account isn’t going to get charged the extra $45.00.

Ever since we’ve got Jeff we’ve been trying to find a good toy for him to chew on and something that would last his intelligent chewing.

We’ve tried the compressed raw-hide bones, but they only last him for a few days and they’re $10.00 per bone so we try to limit how much time he gets on them so they last longer.

Yesterday we had to made a run to Petsmart to grab dog food, cat food, and kitty litter and decided to try out a new toy for Jeff. We got some good reviews from one of the employees including the quote “Someone came in and cleaned us out of the refills last week”.

We were not disappointed. The StarMark Everlasting Treat Ball was an instant hit with the pup. We stuffed the dispenser side with his favorite regular treats and he started going to town trying to get them out.

2 1/2 hours later he was still going on it when he suddenly decided to get a drink of water, head outside for a bit and then crash on the couch. So here’s Jeff post first-time treat:

Thanks to Jeff Sauer, I received a Google+ invite last night. Obviously I was excited about this after seeing the demo on Tuesday. There aren’t as many obvious areas for them to fix up as I thought there would be, but it’s definitely a beta product for the time being, but still pretty freakin’ cool.

XKCD probably said it best with their take on the release:

It really is almost like Facebook but there are a few key differences that may actually matter.

Circles

The basic premise is that you sort your contacts into Circles. Not unlike friend circles that you have in real life. Google isn’t far off in the idea that you share certain things about your life with certain people and with the exception of big announcements you don’t stray too far from those rules.

These Circles are the key divider in Plus that help format the rest of the site. They also seem to act as your self-made privacy filters. This is the key point, in my mind, that differentiates this service from Facebook. You’re not restricted to Friends, Friends of Friends, Network, etc. The service by default has it set to share to your circles & public (for now) but like labeling an email in Gmail thats how you select what circles your message should go out to.

Huddles & Hangouts

Tying into circles are two ways other ways of communicating with the people in them besides sharing links and status updates.

Huddles are a way for you to have a group chat that can also be carried over to your mobile device for further chatting (think of it as iMessage with a browser version and with multiple people seeing the messages at the same time and being able to respond).

Hangouts are the video chat equivalent to Huddles. You can have 10 people at a time in a room together. I haven’t tried it yet but there are a few examples out there that state that the service tries to make the person who’s currently talking take center stage in the room by making their video bigger. Also cool is that you can queue up videos for the group to watch as you discuss around it. I have a feeling there’ll be some MST3K like videos on Youtube soon which also means that you could queue up a MST3K youtube video and provide commentary on top of it.

Mobile & Instant Upload

I think this may be the key killer feature for the service. Google was good at maps and places on the map before foursquare even launched. Which means that their database is most likely much more detailed than the other services that offer local checkins.

I’m actually impressed with the mobile application. Even though it looks somewhat similar to Facebook’s Android app it functions a lot better (and doesn’t require nearly as many visits to the browser). Even though you can’t tag photos in the app yet, I’m sure that’s coming at some point.

When you install the mobile app you can apply Instant Uploads for images and videos that you take with your Android phone. When I initially heard about this and saw the demo I was a bit wary of it because I take some pretty blurry pictures sometimes and I didn’t necessarily want those uploaded to Plus immediately.

However the powers that be at Google made a good decision where instant uploads go into a private, only you, album first so that you can choose which albums those pictures will reside in. That is a win in my book. Convenience plus privacy at the same time.

Sparks

Google is amazing at finding relevant results when you search. They incorporated this into plus by adding a module called “Sparks”. I’m wondering how this module will evolve. I kind of want it to be the social version of Google Alerts where you could see how many new results have shown up, but this may not be feasible since if someone Sparks “Entertainment” they’ll be inundated with results constantly.

Photos, Status Updates, and Sharing

While I was a little bit disappointed that my photos would be moved into Picasa it seems like it’s a double duty type thing where not only are the photos up on Picasa but they are also on Plus (which means you don’t necessarily need to worry about storage limits, yay!)

The photo editing capabilities are pretty sweet as well. Allowing you to fix issues with photos that you upload.



Final Thoughts

When I showed Megan the service last night she totally got the Circles concept immediately and looked forward to being able to use something like it. She may even be an early adopter but the lack of friends on the service could keep her away for a while as well.

And as Jessica Gottlieb put it today on plus:

Oh thank gawd I didn’t work hard to create content for Tumblr.

I hit zero unread items today in Google Reader (shocking, I know) but the way that they go about building your recommendations is pretty freaking sweet.

Click to see the full image

Text:

These are items from the Internet that you might enjoy. Hit the smiley face at the bottom of items that you like — we’ll customize your list to help you discover even more stuff.

Awesome. And the stuff in that list was pretty much all marked with a smiley face by the time I got through it.

The title says it all. I’ve switched back and forth since 2008 between phones. Hopefully this switch to Android lasts for a while.

Here are the details:

2007: Purchased a Blackberry Pearl. Loved it. Hated leaving, but got a good deal to switch to Android

2009: Purchased a myTouch 3G. Loved it. I eventually started to miss having a physical keyboard though and I became jealous of a few friends that had the new Blackberry Bold.

2010: Purchased a Blackberry Bold 9700. Loved the messaging capabilities and the keyboard. Who knew that OS5 was pretty much non-functional browser wise. Especially with keyboard short-cuts that sites had taken the time to build in for easier web browsing from the phone. The switch to OS6 was even worse since the keyboard short cuts that were in the help file didn’t actually work (like using the spacebar to page down instead of scrolling and using T to go to the top of the page and B to go to the bottom.) Also the app selection is horrible.

2011… 2 1/2 hours ago: Ordered a myTouch 4G. At some point it will get here and I’ll be back to getting sweet apps and using voice control and actually feeling like I have an up to date phone.

So long blackberry, I won’t be back.

Update: All Locations now closed

Megan and I watched America’s Next Great Restaurant every week while it was on. Tonight we took the opportunity to go try out the winner’s restaurant in the Mall of America, Soul Daddy.

Before leaving work today I saw a story on the Star Tribune that said that Jamawn Woods, the winner, would be at the restaurant tomorrow. However, we were surprised to see him greeting everyone at the restaurant tonight.

He’s a very nice guy and seemed genuinely happy to see people come in. I never saw him go into the back while we were there. He was busy greeting, talking, and taking pictures with everyone inside and out of the restaurant.

Now for the food. Neither Megan or I were disappointed in the quality of the food. It’s all made fresh there everyday and everything is simple enough that it’s very believable.

None of the meats come with any sauce on them off the line. It’s up to you to add sauces on your own. They have three (which I can’t remember the names to and can’t find reference to them anywhere). There’s a hot sauce, medium mustard sauce, and a delicious and sweet (Megan insisted I say this) barbecue sauce.

I ordered the Roasted Pork Meal with the Cheese Grits and Wild Rice Salad. You get a choice of Whole Wheat Biscuit or Corn Bread Waffle with a meal as well. I went with the Corn Bread Waffle (wow). Without sauce the meat was well cooked and not dry. With the sauce it was very tasty. The fact that you add your own sauce is a nice touch since there’s no complaining then about them adding too much sauce.

The Cheese Grits were excellent. I am a bit biased since I love me some grits, but I’ve never had them with cheese before.

The Wild Rice Salad was very tasty as well. With a mixture of wild rice, parsley, and pecans with a nice sauce. They were an excellent choice of side dish to offer. Megan would like me to add that this was “scrumptiously delicious”.

I’m glad I went with the waffle corn bread. I added the butter that comes with it as soon as we got to the table and by the time I was ready to eat it the combination of butter soaked into the honey infused corn bread was enough to make me want to get another one, but I held back (this time).

Megan ordered the Country Style Ribs meal with sides of Wild Rice Salad and Green Bean Salad with the corn bread waffle.

She added the barbecue sauce to the ribs and couldn’t stop talking about them while she ate them. I didn’t even have a chance to try them, which means she liked them.

The green beans were excellent. They are fresh and I happened to see a box in the kitchen of fresh green beans that had a “Product of USA” label on it. The sauce they put on the beans is perfect and doesn’t take away from the taste of the beans.

Megan mentioned that they should offer a wet-nap when someone orders the ribs. While we were leaving Jamawn approached us and asked us what we thought. We were honest and told him that we’d be back, but that he should add wet-naps for rib orders. His response was “YES! thanks for the tip, I forgot that my fiance had mentioned the same thing”.

I’m not going to try and say it was the best food ever, but for the price and the casual environment it was very good food. I’d definitely recommend stopping in if not at least for the waffle corn bread (which was a reference to his original idea on the show “Wings n’ Waffles”.

Good luck, Jamawn!

Update: The Mall of America location is the only location left after the NY and LA locations closed

Update 2: The Mall of America location closed on Tuesday or Wednesday 6/28/2011 or 6/29/2011 due to slow performance and slow business

Best waste of $200.00 ever. However, thanks to Petsmart’s really decent return policy we didn’t waste it… it was like we had our money in a non interest gaining savings account.

How’s that for a review.

Just in case you’re wondering here’s the post from when we bought it.

Also, here’s the full review that I left on Amazon.

My wife and I bought this thinking that we would be able to spend less time cleaning the litter for our three cats. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think it could do it on it’s own so I made sure there was a secondary box for them to use. However, once they got comfortable peeing in the thing is when it all fell apart. They’d pee near the blades and at that point they wouldn’t move. We’d have to use the little scraper that comes with it and scrape off everything and scoop out the clumps manually to get it to work again. Then you’ve got to constantly change out the litter since the pieces that it was able to get left trailers behind which were too small for the blades to move out. Forget about it if the pee clump is JUST small enough to be moved all the way. The amount of litter that this thing will push out before the little trap door opens makes a bit of a mess.

Thankfully Petsmart (where we bought it) has a really good return policy. We got our money back and the day we brought it back we noticed that the damned thing had gone on clearance for $50 less than we paid for it on sale.

So, goodbye to you, LitterMaid Elite Mega Automatic Self-Cleaning Litter Box and hello again to the 10 minute process of manually cleaning the boxes.

Megan and I were in the mood to get out of the apartment last night and decided to try someplace new.

Burger Jones opened up in Saint Louis Park in 2009 and right away I had read some not-so-friendly reviews of the food and the pricing there.

Megan and I both figured that since the place had been open for a while now that they’d maybe fixed some of the issues that had been brought to light early. Maybe, but not really was our observation.

We got there around 8:15 to a restaurant that was about half full at the booths. We were seated pretty much right away. Our server came out right away and handed us menus and took our drink orders. I was impressed with the on tap beer selection. It’s no Old Chicago, but it’s pretty good. Also, their happy hour offering looked pretty good with $3 taps on all taps.

I was turned off right away by not only the lack of choices in the appetizer area, but also by the price. An order of onion rings for $6.99? That better be a stack. Not so. They are big, and pretty tasty, but there’s only 6 of them so essentially I paid more than a buck a ring.

Megan got the Black and Bleu burger. The first thing she noted was the staleness of the bun. It was like two day old bread with no structure to it. Personally, the buns at McD’s are fresher and tastier. When we brought this up to the server, he mentioned that they had switched buns and he didn’t like these either. I tried a few bites of her burger and it was pretty tasteless except for the strong taste of the bleu cheese. I like bleu cheese so not liking the burger because of it was a little confusing. The bun didn’t help.

I got the Hangover burger which comes with two strips of bacon and a fried egg. Burger Jones typically only cooks their burgers “some pink” or “no pink” but I asked that mine be made medium-rare, because you’re eating a burger not a sloppy joe.  My burger came out perfectly done to my standards (which I was a bit surprised about). The meat itself was pretty tasteless but the egg and bacon saved the day for it. Nicely crisped bacon, and a sunny-side up egg was perfect. However, my bun was completely stale.

I got the cheese curds as a side to my burger. They were delicious. I’d get those again if I planned on going back.

As far as prices go, it wasn’t cheap at all. After 2 burgers, 1 onion rings, 1 appetizer of onion rings, 1 side of cheese curds, 1 smore malt, and 3 beers our total came to $59 and some change before tip.

Megan and I both agreed that we wouldn’t be going back there again. It’s too expensive for a meal that we could have bettered at SmashBurger for $30. Also, for the prices we paid I expected a good bun and more than tasteless burger.

Image Credit: Mulad

The list could keep going for the small intricacies of what people search for (which is something that Google and Bing are pretty good at figuring out), but the real question is whether they want to get into the game of providing search results based on how they think the data should be displayed.

Does this open up search engines to legal issues if they display the results incorrectly? In most cases the answer is no, but people and governments are pretty well known to try and find someone to blame if something goes awry and the right person is doing the shouting.

If I have a new business and the first review published on the web is a bad one because a customer screwed up or I screwed up is my page rank going to be negatively affected and for how long? I, for one, don’t think that Google and Bing want to get into that part of the business. After all, they are search engines, not business recommendation engines.

Consumers

Obviously, consumers have to do a better job reviewing a product before they purchase. The old “you get what you pay for” analogy is true, but now you have to add “you get what you didn’t read about”.

How do you navigate a review site and pick apart the 1 star reviews from people that can’t be pleased and the 5 star reviews that look like they came from a brand representative (yeah, that happens).

The uninformed consumer is never going to go away just like the informed and overinformed consumer isn’t going anywhere.

Also, keep this in mind. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is. Oh yeah, and read the refund policy of any site you plan on purchasing from.

Photo Credit: lawgeek

The movie is titled “The 41-Year Old Virgin Who Knocked Up Sarah Marshall and Felt Superbad About It”.

There will be no spoilers in this review since I couldn’t finish the movie or even get more then 30 minutes into it before Megan and I looked at each other and said “We’re done”. Basically the title is the only clever/funny thing about this movie.

The juvenile humor was appreciated for the first few minutes that it went on. After that it would have been good to mix it in somewhere, or have a specific character with that kind of sense of humor. Knowing that the movie was supposed to be a spoof I figured there’d be some sort of story line, however between the 5 minute opening scene of acting to the song “Morning Wood” (yeah, that kind. Link is to a possibly NSFW video) and the 15 minutes it took for them to get to the point where they look at the main character and realize that he’s a virgin there was nothing of value, nothing actually funny.

The one positive note for this movie was the casting. They found actors who looked damn near all of the characters we all know from the movies mentioned in the title.

I don’t suggest this movie… at all.

Locale ($9.99 | website | android market) lets you setup “Situations” based on battery level, contact, location, orientation, and time. Surprisingly the location option isn’t based on GPS but rather cell towers. Once you have a situation setup you can attach settings for your phone. Besides specific situations, there is also a default area that you can set your phone to when you’re outside of any recognized situations. This was a major feature for me since I have an in-car bluetooth system, but I didn’t want to have bluetooth always on, but did want it to still auto-connect to my car’s system.

Before purchasing I read through the comments on the android market. The reviews were mixed, but the majority of the lower rated comments talked about how locale killed their battery life. I’m a little confused about this being that I’ve had my phone unplugged for 10 1/2 hours and Locale is boasting a 2% usage rate which is less than the 3% that my Phone idle process is registering. I’m running a myTouch 3G with 1.6 installed which means that I would notice any phone slowness as well, which I haven’t.

When running, the app keeps an icon in the notifications bar so that the Android auto-process kill feature doesn’t kill the Locale process when the system runs low on memory.

Overall I like the app, and I won’t be taking advantage of the 24 hour refund period that the android market allows to return apps. I manually do what it does automatically every morning when I change my phone to vibrate while at work and then change it back when I leave the office.

There were a few inconsistencies that I noticed, however. I downloaded the “Locale SSID Plug-in” which allows you to set a wireless network situation that activates when in range of a specifically named wireless network. My settings change successfully when I come into range of my home network, but since once I’m connected to that network the app no longer recognizes that it’s in range and pushes me back to default settings. This isn’t a problem for me since I don’t connect to the wifi at work because it’s always overloaded with people (that’s another whole conversation).

If you have regular situations that require you to change your phone’s settings this is a good app for you. There’s also an app called “Tasker” that sells for £3.99 (currently $6.14) that does the same things and is Locale compatible.

Initial Thoughts

My first thoughts when receiving the Droid X was that the screen was HUGE. Not quite as big as the HTC Evo, but still a big screen. The body is relatively thin for it’s size but the side with the camera is a bit awkward due to it adding another 25% of thickness in that one specific area.

Form Factor

The phone has a mini-HDMI port for displaying videos and images on a compatible display which is a pretty decent feature for a phone that touts itself as a media device. There is also a red camera button on the same side as the volume buttons. During camera mode the volume buttons act as zoom buttons, but the zoom feature isn’t available during video recording. The video recoding itself is capable of recording up to 720p video. However because Gmail limits the size of attachments those without another email address on the phone will be unable to send those images via email.

Without the included 16GB SD card the phone has 8GB of internal storage. This is more than enough for anyone with itchy app download fingers.

The size of the phone itself fits decently for use with two hands, however it’s almost too tall and wide to be able to handle well with one hand. I got the opinion of 4 women as well and they all said the phone was just a bit too big to consider using on a regular basis (even for a purse phone). Also what was mentioned was that for one handed usage it’s impossible to touch the opposite side of the screen with your thumb.

Here are some images of the body of the phone (Click for the larger size): Flickr Set Link

Motorola Custom Software

I have so far not been impressed with any of the custom home screen overlays beyond the native android interface. I do like the fact that you can have up to 7 custom home screens. The tech specs on Motorola’s site say nine, but I can’t find any options to add more screens. During my initial use of the phone I had some issues with the video and regular camera custom applications. The video wouldn’t exit or respond to screen touches (it’s supposed to display the interface when you tap on the screen when you aren’t recording). Also, the camera got stuck in a weird orientation which I was only able to fix by removing the battery (A regular power off/on didn’t fix it).

The custom social networking application is relatively useful since you can add your Twitter, Facebook, Myspace, other email, other Gmail accounts to the phone and have a global address book. However without the right settings you’re soon stuck with a contact list that can easily reach over 1,000 contacts since there isn’t a smart-merge feature. My normal contact list has about 200 names/phone/addresses in it, but the people I follow on twitter is over 500. Add my 200 some Facebook friends and I’ve got a 900 person contact list. During setup I was asked if I wanted to merge all the contacts onto my main Gmail list. I’m glad I declined that option.

For the size of the phone and the amount of apps that it can run concurrently without slowing down the battery is pretty limited. I’m sitting at 50% power right now and it was fully charged when I turned it on this morning. This isn’t very normal since the screen has been set to auto-brightness (about 25% typically). The battery use monitor doesn’t take non-system applications into consideration like the battery use monitor on the myTouch 3G (Android 1.6). Granted I’ve been showing the phone off, taking a little video and have Wi-Fi on, but this phone wouldn’t make it out of the office and to a night out like the myTouch does for me (mine turns orange around 1am on a night out after a day of normal usage).

Video and Images

The media capabilities of this phone are very good. Pictures are snapped and stored quickly and it has a relatively fast shutter speed with good low light images that taking in a lower lit bar or room will not give you completely black images. The ability to keep the LED flash on during video recording is also nice, but you shouldn’t shine those lights in anyone’s face for too long since they are extremely intense. Also, battery power will likely suffer if used too much.

The 8MP images taken (see below) are nice when not viewed in larger size, but upon closer inspection show a lot of pixelation

Here are some images from the camera (Click for the larger size): Flickr Set Link

Final Thoughts

While I’m impressed with the overall ability of the phone to display images, video, and gaming; the phone almost seems too big. It rivals some digital cameras in height and width, but not overall image quality. However this is almost to be expected since the images used from the camera would almost certainly be viewed on a smaller screen, displayed as a smaller image on the web. They almost certainly wouldn’t be printed out onto anything bigger than an 8×10 (but that’d be pushing the quality).

It’s definitely a fast phone, but with the Motorola custom overlay the updates based off the Android version will be delayed from non-customized phones (Android 2.2 is out already but this is still running 2.1 and looks to be until late Summer).

Full Disclosure: I have been given a Verizon Droid X to tryout. The phone was enabled with a data plan, talk, and text messaging for which I am not being charged. I am receiving no other compensation for use of this phone or the reviews I write about it. I am not a current Verizon Customer and have not been offered any free phone service beyond what I get through trying out this phone.