Movity - great map data for your move

Yesterday I posted on the Tenderloin in San Francisco and today I had these AdSense ads from a really cool site called Movity.   It has some cool data for areas in which you might want to move, and if I didn't know better (well, I don't know better) I would think this it was inspired by the Sim City crime heat maps.   It looks like the site is in private beta, but a direct link to the San Francisco data is here.

Safe Haven Sites in the Tenderloin

The walk from the Union Square hotels in San Francisco to the Google shuttle stop at 8th and market is straight through the Tenderloin.   At 7 in the morning, while I have just gotten up, most of the action on that walk is on their way to bed.  It's a walk of being accosted by drug dealers, addicts, and worse.  It's not usual to see people laying on the street shooting up or smoking a crack pipe.  It's a little piece of Hell in what is otherwise my favorite city in the U.S.

So while looking at a map of San Francisco I saw this related map someone had made of Safe Havens in the Tenderloin.  However, it says they are for kids, elderly, and the disabled, not just a guy who grew up in a rural suburb in Illinois.  I guess I'll just keep walking fast.


View Safe Haven Sites, The Tenderloin in a larger map

From the wall in Lucca

From the wall in Lucca, originally uploaded by steveobd.

More longing for Tuscany. The wine, the food, the relaxing.

iPhone 4 and heat

photo.PNG, originally uploaded by steveobd.

The iPhone 4 runs significantly hotter than any of its predecessors. I can tell that from it just being in my pocket.

But it also seems to have less tolerance for heat. This is the message I got when I left my phone in my backpack outside in the sun for thirty minutes or so.

Note how the slider changed to Chinese, and although it was overheated, it still managed a screenshot.

iPod mini box

iPod mini box, originally uploaded by steveobd.

It's really insane how Apple used to package their products. There was absolutely no need to ship an iPod mini in a box like this. Compare it to the box for the iPhone 4, which is a larger device.

More on SPFX masks...Halloween is gonna rock someday.

I mentioned these SPFX Masks a few weeks ago and didn't realize what a big deal they were.  A bunch of them are actually quite scary.  I also didn't realize how expensive they were... $600 and up.   But pretty cool, and this company is doing an awesome job of YouTube marketing.  Here's the thug:

As if you needed more proof that mobile and desktop are converging

While cleaning out my basement, I found this CodeWarrior development kit for the Sony Ericsson P800 from 2001. I think it was an easy way to get an early P800, but when you think about it, it's a bit crazy that you used to have to spend big bucks for a development environment in order to develop applications for a phone.  This whole development system screams "embedded software" and not "application platform".

Developing for Android is now the same as essentially developing for the PC. It's all driving toward no cost licenses to develop. You can certainly do it for free if you want and need to with Eclipse.

Anyway, this was a great find from the time capsule from late 2001.

Comcast, the least fault tolerant part of my home network

I don't know if it's just me, but I've had Comcast for internet service for years - pretty much ever since they've offered it, and although I've expected the firmware in their devices to get better over time, it just hasn't.

Unfortunately, I live in an area with a lot of trees and a lot of strung power lines (as opposed to buried).   In the midwest, this is pretty much a recipe for frequent power outages.   This is a minor annoyance for most things, but a major annoyance when it comes to Comcast internet.  

In the said many years that I have had Comcast, I have probably had 5-6 different cable modems.   They have all been from different manufacturers.  I think they used to be Motorola devices, now they are mostly Cisco.  Getting to the point, whenever the power goes out, the Comcast provided cable box is the only piece of network hardware on my home network that needs to be manually rebooted.  I have 4 Apple Airports and various other switches from Netgear, Linksys, etc - and they all come right back to serving packets from a power outage situation.

Not the Comcast boxes - I have to do down into the depths of my basement, and pull the power on the Cisco cable modem again and reset it.   I've even hooked it up to a UPS now so it doesn't get powered down when the power goes out - and it's still the same issue.

This all makes me think it's a problem with the software in the mini-station that Comcast has on the lines outside - but still - in 2010, in the age when I can run Quake on my phone, can't firmware in all their devices detect "Hey, I'm not serving packets, perhaps I should reset my connection! Retry...."

This is the classic "two ifs and a do loop" that all managers think should be in code they didn't write - but am I crazy here?

Anyone else have this problem?