i prefer pi

Today I met Mike Chapman and Matt Chapman, the brothers Chaps, the creators of a Flash site of some repute known as homestarrunner-dot-com. There’s something surreal about seeing the real person who makes the voices that I’ve been listening to for the past five years.

Generated by Spell with Flickr, from Annie, from Daniel, from del.icio.us.

Ordered by my perceived cost of implementation (easiest to most costly):

• On the “My Friends” screen, the ability to show friends who have no associated “friend details.”
• RSS feeds — at least two: one for events (information conveyed by the home page), and one for updated friend profiles.
• Auto-complete suggestions when you’re filling in friend details.
• No limit (or a higher limit) on the number of classes that you can list in friend details.
• Message addressing to “friend details” groups (i.e. send a message to everyone whom you knew from bus driving in 2004).
• Class history, so that you can find people who were in classes with you in the past.
• More graph structures, like cliques (groups where everyone knows everyone else), hubs (individuals in a group who are known by everyone else), and longest shortest-walk neighbors (people with the most degrees of separation from you).
• The ability to download all or some of your friends’ contact details to a file — popular e-mail address book formats would be nice, but comma-separated values (.csv) would suffice. However, this would reduce the incentive for visiting the site (and thus, fewer ad views), so I can understand why it won’t be implemented.

I haven’t been paying attention, obviously, because you can now get old Disney short films, episodes of Schoolhouse Rock, The A-Team and The Munsters, Saved by the Bell and Saturday Night Live commercial parodies and sports broadcasts all on the iTunes music store. At $1.99, it’s a good deal for some, a rip-off for others. Fie on those who say that downloadable video isn’t commercially viable!

Dave Brubeck and Ramsey Lewis in concert together? I’m so there.

Made it to Redmond (trouble getting housing; more about that later); work starts tomorrow; update on Tuesday?

I know that this isn’t Apple’s primary demographic or usage model, but seeing all of the ads for Lost reminded me…

I think that there would be at least some demand for iTunes Music Store kiosks. They’d have an iPod dock spot and high-speed internet connectivity, and you could create new ITMS accounts or use your own. The capability to accept cash as payment would be nice, but not as necessary as credit/debit and ITMS gift cards, which it could dispense. Items could be downloaded there, which would be a draw for those without broadband connections, and if you added a few high-capacity drives (maybe 1.5 to 2 TB worth), they could store popular items locally to reduce download/wait times (either by pre-loading, pushing at regularly scheduled or idle times, or by simply caching recent downloads). It would be nice to be able to walk into a Barnes & Noble or Starbucks and get episodes of a show that you missed. With a chain-wide rollout, you could do a tie-in with the store’s PA system (”Like what you heard? Get these songs today!”), or a customer loyalty program (get a song credit when you upgrade to Venti size, etc).

I don’t know how many iPod users don’t have broadband, however, so I’m not sure that they’d be worth it. Additionally, if the kiosks were heavily-used, there might be some issues with bandwidth for the retailer. I‘d use it while I’ve been on the road to get the last two weeks’ Lost episodes, but I know that I’m not exactly a common user right now.

When last we heard from our hero…

I was staying the night in San Jose. I got up on Friday morning and drove into San Francisco and spent about an hour in Chinatown, walking and shopping and snapping up the sights. I then spent another hour trying to get out of Chinatown — one-way streets and “overview” maps are not your friend in crowded urban cores. I fled to the Golden Gate Bridge, only to find that Carmen Sandiego had stolen it! No, not really, but seriously, didn’t anyone ever wonder how she managed to heist those things? One time she nabbed all 3,948 miles of the Great Wall of China…

I took photos of the bridge, and then of people, and then of people taking photos of the bridge, and then of people taking photos of people with the bridge, and then of people taking photos of people taking photos of…

There were a lot of tourists at the Bridge. From there, I headed north, and it didn’t look like I was going to see much along the coast that I hadn’t already seen (and a lot of cloud and rain), so I took the inland route along the 101. I stopped off in Sonoma County at some of the vineyards and wineries there (Trentadue, decent port; Clos du Bois, nice ‘00 Flintwood Chardonnay; Chateau Souverain, closing down, so I got an amazing ‘01 Cabernet at an amazing price). I got lunch at the Chateau dining room and walked around their grounds for about an hour, enjoying the beautiful valley view and fog drifting in and out of the fields. Got back on the road and rode on north around 2:30. There was a bit of a slowdown along the way, but not much. Driving through the mountains at night was really nice: the turns were long and wide and the roads dry and clean, so you didn’t have to slow down, and there wasn’t much traffic coming in the opposite direction, so my eyes didn’t tire out. I was bummed that I was missing the Redwood forests, so I stopped off in Redway and stayed the night. There was a great “Californian Créole” restaurant nearby named Cecil’s where I had dinner.

The next day was pretty uneventful, except for the time where I got locked in the bathroom at Subway. I took the 101 the rest of the way to the coast. I realized that it was going to take the course of my natural life if I took the coastal route up to Portland, so after I got through Redwook Forest National Park, I cut inland on 199 to Interstate 5 and booked it up to Portland. The National Park was beautiful — there’s an amazing stretch right as you enter where the Pacific crashes into surf on the west and there’s a freshwater lagoon on the east where I stopped and climbed the rocks for a while — but I thought that the 199 was even better. Stayed the night here and went to church with one of Mom and Dad’s friends from college, and I’ll probably stick around for one more night.

It really weirds me out how early things happen here on the east coast. We watched the State of the Union address the other night right after dinner (at 6:00), and the Super Bowl started at 3:30 this afternoon. I guess I’d better get used to it…

ETA in Seattle: Noon on Wednesday.