http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewArtist?id=314857161
 
Okay. So you're in a theater watching "Transformers 2" and you desperately need to go to the bathroom. Yes, launching an iPhone app in the middle of a movie is not socially acceptable but neither is whizzing involuntarily right in your seat, so you go ahead and launch RunPee.
 
The app connects to a central site and sends you a list of all currently-playing movies. Tap "District 9" and it displays a list of scene and line cues from that movie designating the start of a good moment to leave for the bathroom without missing anything important. A timer tells you how much time you have left before the movie starts getting interesting again and there's a synopsis of any details you might have missed, to read on your walk back to the theater.
 
If this is an ongoing problem for you, and the phrase "Don't buy the 72 ounce Dr. Pepper at the concession stand" never occurs to you, you can launch the app and tap a Start button when the movie begins. The app will tell you at a glance how many more minutes you'll need to hold it until the next gap in the action.
 
This just might be the most brilliant thing ever.
 
I bet it won't make it into one of Apple's iPhone commercials, though.
 
("Say you have a bladder-control problem that affects your ability to see a movie without wetting the seat. There's an app for that.")

Spotted on my way to Coolidge Corner tonight:

The Daily Kos has a roundup of political cartoons commenting on Ted Kennedy's death. Lots of nice images of the Senator sailing off into the sunset, some slightly awkward and mawkish ones about being reunited with his three older brothers...and Dan Wasserman, longtime Boston Globe cartoonist, absolutely nailed it:

See the whole collection here:
 
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2009/8/26/772954/-A-Special-Tribute-by-Edit...

Those of you who don't have Massachusetts roots -- you probably won't be able to relate to the video you're going to see coming from the Land of the Cod over the next few days. Ted Kennedy was much, much loved.

The older folk were around for the full dynasty and losing Teddy is like finding out that a friend of theirs had just lost a son. The middle-younger folk like me came to know him during the Seventies and Eighties. We were perversely proud of the fact that all of his disgraces were personal ones, and all of his triumphs were on behalf of Americans in general and the people of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in particular.

The Younger-Younger folk got to know him after he'd sobered up. They knew perhaps the last living example of the true Distinguished Senator, an ardent fighter advancing the working and living conditions of those with the fewest friends in national politics, one of the few to correctly call "Bull****" on the case for war against Iraq.

Every disagreement I have with the concept of Term Limits, I owe to Ted Kennedy. Kennedy was a fantastic Senator; we could have had no greater advocate. He had a true passion for public service, he seemed incorruptible, and after 20, 30, 40 years in the Senate, he knew how the entire system worked and how to get things done.

What sort of blight-sighted system would use "he has too much experience" as a reason to boot such a man out of his job?

And what a story Ted Kennedy represented. Here's the pitch: you're the youngest child of a man who's frustrated by the fact that despite his wealth, despite his connections, and despite marrying well, he'd never be thought of as anything more than a Useful Irishman by those high in power.

Your father earmarks your oldest brother to get into politics. He's killed in World War II. So he lines up your oldest surviving brother and he becomes President! And then he's assassinated. Again, your oldest surviving brother is lined up; again, your oldest brother is shot.

And now you're next in line.

Oh, and you're in a near-fatal plane crash that kills two other people, including your personal aide, and spend months convalescent from severe injuries.

Okay...NOW what do you do?

It would seem as though the death of Kennedy's presidential ambitions gave him new life. It's a great illustration of the importance of finding your place in the world. If he'd been elected in 1980, he might have been a great President or he might have been a middlin' one. He might have won a second term, or he might have retired to Hyannisport after four years. Either way: what a terrible loss that would have been. We all would have been denied what were probably Kennedy's most productive and vigilant 25 years of public service.

We knew his death was near. I'm a little sadder than I figured. Mom loved the Kennedys. When there were arguments about the Kennedys -- inspired by a fresh scandal and usually instigated by Dad, who was from out-of-state and thus not necessarily a fan -- she would end the discussion definitively.

"When you have suffered, as the Kennedys have suffered..."

And there were no more words after the ellipses. I sort of stopped wondering what those words might have been, after hearing the phrase enough times.

I imagine that there'll be a public memorial...some sort of opportunity for the people of Massachusetts to pay their respects. I'll try to be there. The anniversary of Mom's death is coming up and I'll attend her memorial mass of course. But I think it'd have pleased her even more to know that her duly-appointed deputy was paying respects to a Senator whom she loved and admired.

Damn and blast. I don't know why the photo that I attached to that last post didn't come through. Well, here it is anyway.
 
The screen is very high resolution for its size. ASUS didn't have specs for me but I would guess it has more pixels than an iPhone screen...it "felt" like VGA or a little better. The surface of the keyboard appeared to be a brushed metal. It certainly had a reassuring heft.
 
The specs on the pub food: very thinly-sliced ham and some sort of salami, to be wrapped around bits of breadstick; toast with a very tasty bleu cheese.

I really should schedule more briefings in the late afternoon. They often happen in hotel bars, you see. Today I found that when you meet at 5 instead of 1, it's practically rude to decline a cocktail. (Particularly in the Liberty Hotel near Beacon Hill, which has a rather fantastic drinks menu).
 
Here's the general drill on product briefings. A rep is in town for a day or two. Either they're here to see me specifically or (more likely) they're off on a weeklong jaunt across the country. Cities containing multiple Persons Of Interest get priority. It's generally fairly casual; we chat for an hour, I get to see (usually) an early engineering sample, and we bounce ideas off of each other. I'm generally trying to figure out how excited I ought to be about this thing. The rep (he or she can be at any level of the company) is trying to figure out how interested I am...sometimes, it's early enough in the development of the product that they also want to know what I like and I don't like about it.
 
Some stuff is under NDA. Some stuff is completely open, as was this particular item from my briefing with ASUS: this is an entire computer housed inside a conventionally-sized keyboard, with its own dedicated little screen right on the device.

(Dammit, the photo I attached didn't show up. Check the next post.)

Yes, it's just an engineering sample. But it was a functional one and I must say that I was impressed. I've been waiting for a true, proper "living room computer" to come along...a design that truly makes sense for sofatop computing. Media Center PCs? Naw, I don't want to have a whole PC stacked next to my TV, though I like the power and ambition of the designs. Plug in a laptop, and tie into it with a wireless mouse and keyboard? Same problem as I have with the Mac Mini. We're dealing with user interfaces that were designed for desktop use. Plus, some of the most convenient operations are clunky. I'm watching a movie and I'm into it, but I've got 18 seconds of downtime while Burt Reynolds and Dom Deluise dispense with some important plot points and I just want to check up on Twitter. Do I tab out of my media app and open a browser window? Keep a Twitter client going at all times?
 
The idea of this keyboard PC is that you simply keep it plugged in via HDMI (or VGA, or a wireless video sender that costs extra). You now have a Windows XP PC with two screens. No need to obscure the Boxee window on your HDTV...just check for new Tweets on the little screen. When your attention is on the main screen, you can use the little display as a trackpad.
 
Let me make it clear that this isn't a keyboard: it's a PC. Turn it around and you'll find every port you'd likely find on a netbook, including Ethernet and three USB ports. (No SD card reader, though...I found that to be an odd omission). And it's a solidly-built thing with big, comfortable keys.
 
An actual review will come in a month or two when I get one in the office. It'll ship in October or November for $549.
 
If nothing else, I'm pleased to see a company that's brave enough to try something brand-new (or new-ish) in the field of desktop PCs. I've long been frustrated by the "Monitor, Tower, Keyboard" or "Screen And Keyboard Separated By A Hinge" duocracy of computer design. Even the iMac is barely a step forward. A computer that lives inside a keyboard? With a little screen for your "incidental" display needs?
 
Interesting. Very, very interesting.
 
Meanwhile, here I am at a pizza place on Beacon Hill. My one port wine cocktail was two hours ago and since then, I've had two slices of pizza. By the time I get to my car, it'll have been three hours.
 
(At my size, I probably had little to worry about to begin with, impairment-wise. But is one ever confident about answering "Yes" when the nice police officer asks "And have you had any alcohol tonight, sir?")
 
Again, I think I should arrange for more late-afternoon briefings. Not only because of the potential for a cocktail, of course. It's just that I usually try to set my briefings for 1 and when it's done at 2, I'm eager to rush home and begin what I refer to as "the second session" of work.
 
But when I'm out at 6? It's time for a nice stroll through the Public Garden as the sun is beginning to set. And it's dinnertime. And people are taking their dogs out for some air and to gather compliments from passers-by.
 
At the moment, it's a lovely little planet, you know.

There's one specific situation in which I'm just not good at finishing something: when the thing isn't actually important and there also isn't any sort of deadline attached. Importance and Deadlines give you the protein you need to batter your way through obstacles. When the thing is merely something your sort of interested in, you'll wrestle with it for a certain number of minutes, hours, or days until something Important or Due Soon starts barking for your time.

This is by way of explaining why I haven't made any real changes to the looks or operation of my blog...and why a Terrific Idea For A New One has remained stalled in its opening overtures. I have the domain, I have a Wordpress install, and I have the header art...what I most definitely do not have is that basic skill set that allows the mere Enlightened Amateur to make Wordpress do precisely what he or she wants it to do.

You know what I mean? I know what I want this new site to look like. Wide-ish box for the content. A wide center column with the actual postings, narrower columns to the left and right with lots of whitespace to as not to distract from the content. The "mascot" so to speak is the background image, pinned to the upper-left corner. A row of tabs at the top for rough navigation. And nice little styles for a variety of media content types.

This is something I hinted at in my Posterous review: Wordpress is as simple as it can possibly be. Which is not to say that it's as simple as anything can be. But Wordpress is first and formost a system for developing publishing platforms and those of us who want to control how every "i" is dotted and how every overscore is colored and shadowed need to adopt the mindset of a software developer.

(In the end, it's not so much different from when I blogged using CWOBber, my homemade blogging software. The first step in creating a blog is to build the tools with which you will build daily posts.)

We tend to overlook this. There are so many other services -- many of which have a nougaty center of Wordpress -- that make blogging into a true click-and-go system, and with a cozy level of personal customization as well. There's no rational reason to expect that building a Wordpress blog by hand should be as easy as Posterous, or even Squarespace.

So why don't I just go with one of those? Well, because

• I want to do more with Ihnatko.com and [redacted].com than what Posterous can handle.
• I want to have total control over where the content lives, and I want the ability to make regular backups of what I hope will be valuable content.

And admittedly,

• Cripes, the number of little services I already use that cost me $12 a month is enough to curl my nose hairs.

Squarespace is a nifty deal, but one of the fab things about getting virtual hosting through MediaTemple is that I can keep adding new Wordpress installations at no extra charge. I'm buying bandwidth. Whether I "spend" that bandwidth on one site or a dozen is completely up to me.

To learn is to live. I happily find myself in a line of work in which no time is wasted so long as I learned something in the process. (Ideally, something that I can then convert to discretionary income through publishing).

I had two illusions about Wordpress development:

"You can find an existing Wordpress theme that looks like the site you want. Download it, activate it, tweak it a little, and you're there."

Not really. There are thousands of free, professional themes for Wordpress that'll take you 75% of the way, but that's a bit like a ship that will take you 75% of the way to the Sun. You're still about 25,000,000 miles short so pack a lunch and wear comfortable shoes.

Also, good luck finding "a theme that's 75% close" to what you want. There are search engines that let you click and select sertain features ("Three columns," etc.) but on the whole you want a single checkbox that reads "C'mon, you know what I mean." It ain't there.

"I can build my own theme from scratch if necessary."

Indeed I could; indeed I did. But again, a Wordpress blog is a piece of software. The result of weeks of effort by a relative newbie is going to pale in comparison to the most trivial scrawlings of an experienced professional.

The power of Wordpress is its integration into the larger WP community of plugins and services. These things only work if the theme supports 'em. I quickly found myself back in my classic AppleScript Quandary, where I'd want to incorporate a feature to simplify posting, but the effort of writing that feature and making it work correctly far outstripped the effort required to just do it by hand every time, over my entire lifetime.

"I want to use this plugin with my theme."

"Okay: so here's how to incorporate support for the plugin architecture:..."

I've come to a conclusion: there are really only two solutions to my "I want a slick, custom Wordpress blog" problem.

I can simply pay someone to build it for me. Good. Satisfying. Do you want to spend the entire summer enjoying your new patio? Or do you want to spend May through August with a dug up backyard strewn with tools and supplies, ending with an amateurish barbecue deck that's finished just in time for Labor Day?

The difference is the ability to see your checkbook as a power tool. Honestly, give it a try. Put on canvas gloves while you sign it if it'll make you feel better. Yes, it kills you that you're spending all of that money for just a couple of days' labor. Think of it like this: you're not paying for the two days of labor. You're paying for the years of study and practical experience that allow this person to apply exactly the right procedure and technique without wasting time with inefficient methods, unproductive dead ends, unanticipated problems, or hopeless mistakes.

Not a satisfying solution for me, though. Experience is currency, for one. Currency is currency, as well, and all things considered I'd rather bash out an answer myself. I know CSS, I know HTML, and I have functional knowledge of JavaScript, PHP, MySQL, and the architecture of a Wordpress blog. I ought to be able to do this.

Which leaves me with Option 2:

Forget about finding a Wordpress theme that looks like it's just a few tweaks and styles away from what I want. Instead, I'll start with an utterly blank theme with every piece of WP infrastructure I'll need, and use it as the starting point.

So here's where I am right now: I've downloaded and installed the K2 theme. There are a couple of (old) tutorials on customizing it, and I'll prolly be dipping deep into that well.

Eh? Oh, well, yes, of course: if you have any suggestions or links to additional info or tutorials, or endorsements of other "blank" themes, I'd be pleased to hear them. Specifically, I'd love to compile a list of "See this CSS effect? See this popular webpage element? Here's how to make it happen" type tutorials.

(Dear Andy: please don't close this Firefox window before you've bookmarked the following multipart article about CSS tricks:

http://www.noupe.com/css/using-css-to-do-anything-50-creative-examples-and-tu...

Oh, and pick up some cold cuts on your way home. Ham and Swiss? -- Love, Andy.)

What's the worst that can happen? The worst that can happen is that I learn something.

I liked the movie "Apollo 13" but it did the world one great disservice: it put the phrase "Failure is not an option" into the lexicon. It's a deathly thing to embrace in any creative endeavor. At least it does if the maxim ends there.

It doesn't matter if you're a writer, an artist, an animator, or an engineer:

Failure isn't an option. It's actually an important and mandatory part of the process of creation.

If you didn't break it at least once, then clearly you never pushed hard enough to begin with. Granted, the ideal is to embrace Failure as part of the ongoing process and not as a desirable or acceptable result of that process.