martinjy.com — Martin Young’s blog

Half-marathon training run #1

So. First training run today. I managed 6.57km in 33m21s during my lunch break, running along the Yarra from Fed Square to Punt Road, across the river, back to Anderson St, back across the river, up to the Hoddle St/Swan St intersection, along Swan St and around half of the MCG, then back to Fed Square.

My wife let me commandeer her iPod Nano / Nike + thingy until I complete the half-marathon, so I cleared all the old data and plan to track my progress from now until the run in October.

I reckon I had a bit left in me after the 6.5kms, but I didn’t want to push it on day 1 of the training. My legs will be sore enough tomorrow without pushing too hard this early.

@sebconn Go test drive a Subar…

@sebconn Go test drive a Subaru Forester XT. Great fun.

Flickr: first class on the late train

Flickr: Ceiling

Aussie iTunes Store now selling TV shows

I’ve been waiting for this one - iTunes Australia adds TV shows.

A quick look in iTunes shows there aren’t many there yet (only 23 shows, to be precise), and Aussie content seems to be Channel 9 and ABC only, but I’m sure the list will grow. I think I’ll buy/download one just to check out the quality.

Everybody needs a goal …

I just entered myself for the Melbourne Half-Marathon on 12 October. I’ve never previously run more than 8km in one go, but I’m running The Tan in 18 minutes (best time four years ago was 15.30), so I figure with a bit of training I’ll make the distance OK.

Stay tuned…

Flickr video: 60 second surf check

60 second surf check, uploaded on 21st June, 2008 by martinjy

A just over 60 second clip of me checking the surf at Point Roadknight this morning.

This is the first video made with the new Canon HV20 and Final Cut Express. It was difficult to get the file size and format right in FCE, but this seems to play OK. Now that I’ve found some OK settings I can spend more time on editing and production :-)

Get me out of here, I’ve had it

RSS - not best practice?

I’m curious as to why the web sites of two of the three principals of perhaps the world’s best-known usability consulting firm don’t offer RSS feeds for their content. useit.com and asktog.com use email as their notification method. Is RSS bad, in some way?

Personally I’d much rather find out about new content from gurus such as these guys when I check my Google Reader, which I do four or five times a day. Communicating about new content via RSS is a good enough system for many other experts who share their knowledge. Why not them?

I’m not saying remove the email option, I’m saying offer an RSS feed to complement it. But I’m sure they’ll never find this little blog, so I guess I’m stuck with it. :-p

Winter surf at Winkipop

Why I’m happy to pay $10 to improve my iPod Touch

So on Monday Apple confirmed that the iPhone / iPod Touch App Store will go live in a few weeks. They also confirmed that iPod Touch owners like me will have to pay a small charge (US$10) for a software upgrade so that we can download/buy apps from the store, whilst iPhone owners get the upgrade for free.

“Not again?!”, was my first thought, given that I paid $25 for the January upgrade. I have to pay to get into a store in order to buy stuff?

But I flip-flopped (a) when I read this blog post that suggests that 70% of all iPhone apps will be free, and (b) when I realised that any app that I decide to buy will improve the Touch’s usefulness to me.

That’s the beauty of this device. It’s not like the Walkman I bought in 1988 that had a never-to-be-improved set of features. My wife bought me this Touch last November, it became more useful for $25 in January with the software upgrade, and on June 27 it will become more useful again for US$10.

So the $10’s a bargain, in my opinion.

Things might be the GTD app for me

Since January’s iPod Touch software update I’ve been consistently using the the Notes app to manage my GTD. It works really well for me, with one slightly frustrating exception, which I’ll explain below.

Here’s how my process works:

1. I have four constant notes open in the Notes app: Today, Soon, Someday and Work. Occasionally I’ll also have other notes, like if I’m planning a trip I’ll open a new note just for the trip, but I never have less than those four. Notes uses the first line of your note as the note’s title, which works nicely on the Notes “homepage”.
2. In the morning, usually when I’m commuting to work, I’ll review all my notes, moving items between notes if necessary (and that’s the frustrating thing - no Copy-Paste on the Touch means I have to retype if I want to move).
3. I try really hard to knock over all the items on Today. Sometimes it doesn’t happen :-)
4. When I have brainwaves, or more often when my wife reminds me of something I’ve forgotten, I key the new item into whichever note is most appropriate.

That’s pretty much it. Sure, it’s a bastardisation of the Notes app, there’s no Mail integration (although there could be), no iCal integration, it’s not a real GTD app, etc etc, but I’ve been using it for almost 6 months, so I can certainly call it successful. It doesn’t feel forced, it doesn’t put me under pressure, isn’t a hassle, and I get stuff done. And isn’t that the point of GTD? Whatever works for you, geekboy.

Part II of the story. Today I read that web designer Elliot Jay Stocks was trialling an alpha software Mac OS X app called Things, so I decided I’d give it a 5 minute look, but not with any real enthusiasm. I want my GTD app on the device I carry around (almost) 24/7 - my iPod Touch, not on my laptop.

But after 2 minutes of trialling it I realised that Things works the way that my personal GTD process works, which was a big plus over the other GTD apps I’ve looked at and tried. And then I noticed this at the bottom of the Things homepage:

Things for iPhone is a full-featured task manager, that can be used on its own or as the perfect companion for your desktop version. It will be available for purchase from the iTunes AppStore.

Which is very likely to be in two days time.

I’m not sure how the AppStore is going to work - presumably it’ll be like the iTunes Store - but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that there’ll be some way of trialling any apps that aren’t free. I’ll also be hoping that Things works just as nicely and looks just as good on the iPhone/Touch as it does on my laptop.

Check it out at http://culturedcode.com/things/.

Experimenting with video devices

The other day I wrote briefly about the tiny Flip Video cameras. I’ve since discovered that whilst you can’t buy them in Australia at the moment, they might be here soon.

I’m attracted to the idea of the thing, but in my other blog post I wondered whether I needed one, given that I already own a 7mp digital still camera that has video capability. (I also own a cheap-ish Sony MiniDV camcorder, so three video devices seems a bit unnecessary).

I had a spare 20 minutes this afternoon, so I thought I’d shoot a quick video with both my current devices (at the same time), upload the vids to the web and compare the quality, speed of upload, filesize etc.

First, the video taken by my still camera (a Pentax Optio W20)

It took me 2 minutes to transfer the 90-second, 100mb .mov file to my MacBook via USB, 3 minutes to import it into iMovie, 30 seconds to crop it to 30 seconds long, 2 minutes to export it to .mp4 format at 640 x 480 (that’s native), and 2 minutes to upload the 4mb file to Revver over my relatively slow internet connection.

(the video’s not live on revver yet … so here’s a screenshot of it playing in Quicktime)

Second, the video camera (Sony DCR-HC26 mini DV)

3 minutes to transfer 90 seconds of video directly into iMovie via FireWire, 30 seconds to crop it to 30 seconds, 5 minutes to export it to .mov at 640 x 480, and 14 minutes to upload the 30mb file to Revver.

Ignoring the highly boring subject matter(!)…..

• even though the the vision on the HC26 is noisy (light was poor), it’s way better than the W20,
• sound is almost non-existent on the W20, but the hiss on the HC26 is pretty loud,
• getting the footage off the HC26 into iMovie was simpler than from the W20,
• the final file size of the HC26 video is almost 8 times larger than the W20, which makes for slow exports and slow upload times, plus more bandwidth when downloading/watching.

I hate videos with crap sound, so despite the long upload time I think the HC26 wins this round, but it’d be really interesting to see how the footage quality of a Flip stacks up against these two, and how quickly a Flip’d let me get footage live on the web.

Maybe there’s a sweet spot between the still camera’s file size and the video camera’s quality.

UFO, King St

Me, with long legs