I haven’t updated this in a while but if you follow my blog I wanted to direct your attention to tempesouth.com. Where you can find links to the scorecast, news and updates and track the progress of the team.
This is the first team from Tempe South Little League to ever win the District 13 Championship.
Go Tempe South!
When I first got my iPad, I was very impressed with the media capabilities. Watching Videos with NetFlix, Reading the Wall Street Journal, or USA Today and Epicurious is just gorgeous. It replaced my kindle the day I got it. And the games are decent, but there are still limits to what you can do with a touch screen (compared to a controller ) but the visual quality is outstanding.
Still, the one big draw back was creating content. Keyboard support is spotty, and there’s no easy way to flip between apps when you want to clip something from a website to put into a Pages document. Even creating emails felt like an iPhone app and not something you would expect to find on a useful computer with a screen this big. And don’t get me started about pen based input. It’s still a joke.
So I figured that the iPad would be mostly a reader or browser, until I saw Photosplash.
The first real program I used to create anything meaningful on my iPad was MaxJournal. During our vacation I kept a daily journal of what we did and attaching photos to it was cool. The iPad is still a nightmare to get photos on for me because I tied it to the iPhoto library on my home machine. Once you’re out on the road, getting photos onto it was not trivial. I had to upload them to a web page with another computer and copy them down. I know why Apple didn’t put an SD card reader on the iPad. There’s open, and then there’s open. Apple believes in open with their permission. But like Jobs wrote in multiple emails, if you don’t like it buy something else.
However, back to Photosplash. This is a very, very clever application that allows you to selectively color photographs. And for the first time, it’s a creative program that feels way more natural on the iPad than any other platform I could image. The gist of it, is that they made coloring with the tip of your finger feel intuitive, and natural. Like coloring with charcoal, or finger paints. The ability to zoom in – even beyond pixel depth, to smoothly trace a region or a line is just amazing.
In just a few minutes I was able to create these images, photos that would have taken me hours to do in Photoshop, mostly because I’d still have to figure out how to do it.
And for the cost of the program? It was well worth it. Now that I’ve seen it, it seems like it is possible – I can’t wait to see what else they come up with.
For quite a while I’ve used 1Password on my Mac to keep the 10,000 passwords I have to manage across all my accounts. This week I came across two tools that I’m very impressed with. The one problem with 1Password is that it doesn’t support google chrome (yet). And there’s no PC or Linux equivalent.
Well, Last Password (http://lastpass.com) is an amazing application that supports EVERY SINGLE browser I use. It stores all the information with one master password and early on I’ve been very impressed with it’s integration and utility.
The other nifty little tool I found via lifehacker.com. It’s a site called Password Card. (http://passwordcard.org). A Password card is quite clever. It’s basically a simple index card you carry in your wallet that allows you to create strong passwords and not have to remember them. How does that work?
Simple, you remember an index into the card, like square blue, or diamond green. Right now I’m playing with a triplet to recall like square white h9 or solidcircle purple v8. What does all that mean? You go to the solid circle symbol, then scan down to the purple row, and start reading off 8 characters vertically.
The reason for the 3rd option is that not all sites agree what makes a “strong” password. Some love the 8 random characters, symboles and digits, others need to see 9 before they thing a password is strong.
The genious of this system is that all you have to remember are simple things like a symbol name and a color, but the password itself is really difficult. You print the card, laminate it, and stick it in your wallet. Even if someone gets your wallet they won’t know what indexes to use to get your passwords. I’ve been using it for a few days, and so far I’ve been slowly upgrading all my passwords to “strong” passwords. It seems to work pretty well, especially with a tool like lastpass to help.
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Update: It’s harder than I thought it would be to remember things like color, symbol, direction count for each website. And as good as last pass is, it can’t cover every situation. Like desktop apps that need to login. For example evernote, or iCal, or Mail. Keeping track of the symbol / colors is trickier than I thought.
Well, after spending most of the Easter Holiday focused on my iPad I learned a few things.
My favorite apps so far?
None of the games have clicked for me yet, that’ll take some time but I know it’ll be a great gaming platform.
After a full day of use, my iPad ran down to about 18% of charge, so I threw it on the charger and grabbed my kindle. I started reading Bullpen Gospels by Dirk Hayhurst (funny but kind of depressing). I bought it through Amazon and started reading it on my iPad. When the batter got low I switched to my real kindle (v2) – but after an hour, I just couldn’t find a decent reading light – I went back, saw my iPad had charged to 40% and I snagged it and resumed reading on it. I may never use my kindle again.
However, there is one stupid thing about both the Kindle and iBooks readers – it’s the margins. Books have margins because (among other reasons) you need somewhere to hold the book without covering the text, or to take notes. But ebook readers a) don’t need margins for notes and b) I have the edge of the iPad or the kindle to hold. Why do I need another INCH of useless screen space? Can’t I just zoom to the width fo the content? This is the most stupid oversite in all these readers forcing me to use 1″ of screen for absolutely no reason. Get over it and let me zoom to the content width – just like mobile Safari.
The guys that nailed this are Marvel with their comic reader. I may actually start buying comics again. I think that was the first time I enjoyed reading a comic in 30 years. It’s better than the print editions.
So all in all, love the iPad. Will be interesting to see how much I really use it going forward, but it is now my default reader, of all kinds of media.
I forgot that I connected my blog to Facebook. So when I had to repost 3 years worth of articles to get my new wordpress site up and running the entire flood of articles appeared on my wall… and apparently a lot of other peoples.
Neat.
-Scott
I tried to upgrade my wordpress site and in the process lost all of my posts. Not a lot, but still, stuff I’ve been using for a while. Turns out 1and1 – my hosting company doesn’t allow you to give Wordpress enough memory to reimport all your old posts. So I backed them up, and switched over and PHLABT. Nothing.
So I found a work around (that I wish I had used before). Download all the posts into MacJournal and then have THAT software re-upload them one at a time. Now the dates are all wacked and I don’t know if the pictures made it but my stuff is back… mostly.
The biggest pain has been the formatting. Adding an image has been hugely problematic. But I think the basic functionality is now working the way it should.
After goofing around with Wordpress (see scottnovis.wordpress.com) I quickly learned that I could install a wordpress site on my own website with the same style I had before. Only with much more functionality. This is kinda cool.
I’m not sure how to put the site visit counter back in but this should be MUCH easier to update.
My Executive Summary:
Senior executive with multiple engineering degrees, excellent communication skills and a passion for delivering positive business results. Able to lead and motivate high performance teams to deliver innovative products on time and on budget. Extensive experience in strategic planning, operations, fiscal management, and business development. International business experience with diverse peoples and cultures.
About Management:
“Management is the art of getting people to work together toward a common goal, aligning their strengths so that their weaknesses are irrelevant” – Peter Drucker.
This of course is much harder than it sounds.
You can e-mail me at contact@scottnovis.com