Jasmeet.net Blogging in Bullet Time

Delayed Email

Crazy thought:

What if you could delay email?

Would it matter if it sent now, a minute later, 5 minutes later, or 10 minutes later? An hour?

Sometimes yes, but a lot of times, no.

The scenario where this could play out well: You sent an angry email to your boss. Accidently mailed naked photos of yourself to your grandma instead of significant other. Better yet, you realized to typo’ed an email with your resumé attached.

It’s time to make this a standard. Not just a feature in some mail clients.

When public humility doesn’t change you

In an effort to show that I don’t just blog about the iPhone, here’s a thought that crossed my mind that won’t fit in a 140 characters.

This week, Kitchen Nightmares featured The Black Pearl, a seafood restaurant in New York City. Chef Ramsey as always put a bunch of effort fourth to fix whatever problems they had, and was successful. With one exception; one of the owners named David.

Not willing to waste time or break out a Human Psychology book to explain his behavior, I hoped that Chef Ramsey’s hard work would pay off. However if the recent reviews on Yelp are to be trusted, things are not looking good.

Damn shame, I’ve been adding all the restaurants that Chef Ramsey’s fixed to my ToDo list of places to dine. Here’s one that probably won’t make it.

iPhone 2.1 brings about Google Databases?

I installed the latest iPhone 2.1 firmware this morning. While poking around the Settings app, I went on into Safari and found a tab called Databases and found a bunch of Google Databases, ones related to Google Talk and Google Translate. Apparently these are known HTML 5 Database Storage, according to this tweet. I don’t understand much on how it works, whether it’s supposed to work offline or what. My initial testing still shows that Google Talk still has to reconnect when you switch tabs.

As a funny aside for the URL above GoogleTranslatePhrases has an arrow (pointing to the right) which usually indicates you can click it to go somewhere.

I wish I knew what it all meant.

To the rest of you President-Running Twitter Bots

Dear @JohnMcCain2008, Thank you for adding me to your friends list. I’m not sure what I tweeted that would require your patronage, but I appreciate it. However, I would like you to know that I won’t be voting for you. Or anyone else. For I am not a citizen, I don’t even have a green card. However, were you able to change that status for me relatively soon? I might be able to sway my vote your way.

Same goes for the rest of you.

Twitter: Don’t Change

I’ve had so many things I’d been wanting to blog for a while now, I just, as soon as I log into Wordpress, I’m not inspired anymore. My buddy Jason Schupp put it best:

Jason Schupp: Yeah, that’s happened to me too, a lot!
Jason Schupp: I don’t know what it is. I’m starting to wonder if it’s the writing tool or what.
Jasmeet: you know where I feel I write best?
Jasmeet: Twitter.
Jason Schupp: Ha! Constraints are amazing.
Jason Schupp: Honestly. You give people a blank sheet of paper and a pencil and say “write about anything,” they’re going to flounder. Give them constraints and they’ll write something.
Jason Schupp: Twitter has the 140 character constraint.

So when I read posts like this, it just annoys me like a fly flying in the bathroom. Honestly, if you feel you ‘need’ for all these features that Twitter lacks, go use Pownce or some other service. Twitter works because of constraints and simplicity. When I go over 140 characters, I don’t think “I’ve hit a limit”; I think “I need to cut this down, or it’s not worth tweeting.”

Palm OS apps I’d love to see on my iPhone

Back in 2000, my dad gifted me one of the first and best gadgets, a Palm Vx. Back then it was one of the best mobile OS’s (IMHO). These days, I rock an iPhone and the App Store has kept me pleased for about 80% of the time.

In terms of quality between the two platforms, there’s no comparison. Palm OS isn’t being left behind in the dust. Mobile OS X is about to finish the race while Palm OS is still putting on its racing speedos.

However, I honestly feel these then great Palm OS apps shouldn’t die.

Vexed is a game where matching blocks makes them disappear, the plot of the game being to get rid of all the blocks. Currently hosted on Sourceforge, so obtaining the source code is not that difficult at all.

Trism’s Syllogism actually mimics this game. Still, would love to see Vexed ported and improved for this platform.

PortaPets were these demon-like tamagotchi-pets. You could purchase a PortaFish, PortaKitty, PortaPimp, PortaHo and there was the free PortaMonkey. The animation was pretty decent for a DragonBall EZ/VZ chip, imagine how much more animated they could be on the iPhone.

Unfortunately, seems like the site is defunct, and emails to them bounced. Not to mention the app in itself is pretty R-rated, what with the constant toy humping and what not, might not make it through Apple’s Strict ‘no-porn’ filter.

Traffic is a game where you where move the blue and green blocks in such a way that you make a clearing for the red block (car) off screen, where the arrow is pointing. Attempt each course and try to make the par, or under.

The concept is pretty simple, but it does get tougher as your progress, like any good game.

[UPDATE] Monday; September 8, 2008: There’s a version called ‘Blocked’ (App Store link) that I’ve just installed and is pretty much a really nice version of this app. And it’s a steal at 99¢’s.

[UPDATE] Saturday; September 13, 2008: Vexed debuts up at the App Store. Graphics could use some Adam Betts’ing.

It’s not a bar of Soap

oops?,
originally uploaded by Jasmeet.

It’s an eraser.

One afternoon I had the ‘need’ to do Macro Photography so I used my love for stationary as a subject. Propped the stationary outside (natural light) and used a single sheet of paper for a background. In only had an 18-55mm lens, so I tried to get as close as I could, with the help of a tripod. This is one of my favorites. I added a vignetting affect which seems to give it a nice glow.

Mayfly Project

I thought the last post would be the LAST post for this year.

How wrong I was.

I stumbled across The Mayfly Project and couldn’t help myself. I was a sucker for Twitter’s 140 characters, summarizing the year in 24 words? I’m a mad man.

So here goes:

[photography(film)],[good, bad(days)],[nomadic future, embracing immaterialism], [still(geek, dork, student)], [love, hate, sleep, laugh], [depression{therapy(zoloft)}], [nueva york, chicago], allergies.

My favorite part? There’s an easter egg in there.