Reinventing the steel

By Josh Highland in Josh's Rambling

Growing up, I always had a respectable and clean haircut. When I graduated high school, I started to experiment with my hair, and shaved my head a few times, dyed it, and even had a fauxhawk for a while. One thing I never did was grow may hair out.

In september of 2005, I decided I wasnt going to cut it anymore. Well, its basically been 2 years and the long hair experiment has failed. I was tired of having to flat iron my hair, brush my hair out of my eyes, and having the wind blow my hair all over the place. The only awesome part of having long hair is headbanging and hair whips.

do you pownce?

By Josh Highland in internet, Josh's Rambling, web 2.0

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I really like pownce.com

If you dont know what pownce is, maybe you know what mySpace bulletins are…

If not, they are notes that you blast out to all of your friends, and they can look at them or not look at them if they feel like it. Also, if they feel like it they can reply to them.

Pownce is a website that functions sort of like that but has a major twist to it… they have a desktop application like AIM that you can install also. You can see the bulletins in real time, or you can look at the website.

All I know is that I love using pownce, it makes my day at the office go by a lot faster. Right now pownce is invite only, so if you would like to join, please send me an email (joshhighland at gmail dot com) and I will hook you up.

If you already have a pownce account, I’m here http://pownce.com/JoshHighland

iPhone, after the honeymoon

By Josh Highland in hardware, iPhone, Josh's Rambling

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I’ve owned the famed apple iPhone for about 3 weeks now. In that time I have grown to both love and hate aspects of the iPhone.

I understand that this is a first generation phone with the 1.0 software running on it. Despite knowing this, I dove right in and bought it.

I’ve had enough time with the phone to fully explore it.

below are the biggest problems with the iPone that I have

  • ring tone is too quiet even when on full volume
  • vibrate mode is too discrete, i want to to shake longer
  • text message notifications are to quite
  • no notification of missed text messages without turning the phone on
  • text messages can only be sent to one person at a time
  • horizontal keyboard mode is only avaliable in safari

I guess that isn’t a very large list of things that I want changed in the iPhone. Actually those are all software problems that could be fixed through a software updates. Apple hasn’t released any updates to the iPhone as of yet, so we will see if the problems I am seeing, are ones that Apples feels like they should fix.

decrease the lazy, increase the code

By Josh Highland in internet, Josh's Rambling, web 2.0

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I realized last night that I need to stop being a lazy web developer, and get off my ass and make something happen.

I’ve sat back and watched all of these awesome website applications come online, like digg.com, pownce.com, facebook.com and more, and I say “thats awesome, I wish I would have come up with that”.

The truth of the matter is I CAN do something like that, and I have the potential right at my finger tips for it to be big. For the last, almost 6 years I have developed a small but fun social network, notPopular.com, with over 25,000 members.

I’ve been admittedly lazy with the site and have let it go stagnant over the last few years. Its dated and worn. A number of time I have started building the 2.0 version of the site, just to trash it and start again. Last night I fixed a javascript bug that I had known about for 2 years… talk about lazy.

I work in burst of development, an idea will hit me and I will code like mad for a week, and then not touch it for 2 months. This is laziness. I need to stop this. I need to be steady with my development.

I love to code, I love new ideas for sites. Social networks are very interesting to me.

Many times I have felt left out of the online cool club, and I would think to myself, “If I lived in the bay area, things would be different, I could collaborate with people and make the next digg, pownce, or twitter”. or “I program all day for ‘the man’, I don’t feel like coding when I get home”. I’ve realized that those are just an excuses for my laziness. I need to get off my ass and do something about it. I need to develop web applications, if thats what I want to really do with my life.

This is my promise to myself, to complete the web projects I start, and to become consistent with their development.

If someone is reading this and has some awesome ideas for notPopular.com, speak now…. I’m on a roll

iSold out and got a iPhone

By Josh Highland in iPhone, Josh's Rambling

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For over a year and a half, I have used a windows mobile 5 based phone, the T-Mobile MDA (which is actually a re branded HTC Wizard). The MDA was such a great phone that I created a website for modifying and customizing it, MDATweak.com

I liked the fact that I could add 3rd part applications to it, like pocket putty (an ssh client), and the web browser was the best mobile browser on the market. I also liked the fact that I could sync my contacts and calender from outlook to the phone,

When the iPhone was announced, I was super excited about it. I was in a contract with T-Mobile, and was happy with with my MDA. I didn’t want to wait in the lines, and more importantly I didn’t want to pay the price tag for the iPhone.

Last week I was talking with my friends Bill Garoutte in my office, going over my list of reasons why I was not going to get an iPhone. As I was talking to him about how I liked my MDA phone, I managed to knock it off my desk. I have dropped my phone tons of times in the past. Its always been ok. This time was not one of those times… I was charging my phone through the USB connection on the bottom of the phone. The phone must fallen perfectly because the USB cable popped out. I picked the phone up and plugged the USB cord back in. The USB jack on the phone pushed up and into the phone.

The USB jack broke off the board inside the phone and was free floating inside the device! The phone still worked but without the USB jack to charge the phone, in a few days, my MDA would become a giant paper weight.

I called T-mobile, and they told me it would be almost $200 to replace my aging MDA phone. It was $300 to move up to the newer version of the MDA, the T-mobile Wing. Looking at the options, I was going to have to shell out some cash to get another phone, and I only had a day or 2 to figure it out before my phone was going to die. I talked to T-mobile about my situation, and the lady I dealt with was not nice to me at all, and wasn’t willing to work with me on figuring out a solution to get an upgraded phone without renewing my contract with T-mobile. I was so frustrated by the experience I decided to bite the bullet and move over to AT&T and get an iPhone.

I placed an order for two iPhones (the wife wanted on also) on July 3rd, and I received them in Saturday July 7th. So here I am with two new iPhones. I will post later with what I think about them once we have really started using them.