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Betaworks now has an office and I needed a new mac for my apartment (the old one is going to the office). If you’re not familiar with it, Apple has a 24 hour store on 59th and 5th ave in New York City. I decided to go there at 3am and buy my mac.

During the day, the 5th ave store is packed. There are people buzzing everywhere, using the free internet, listening to music, playing with iPhones, etc. Lines to buy things are painfully long and just try to get a Genius Bar appointment.

When I walked in at 3am, there was virtually nobody there (that was expected) and Apple employees outnumbered the people in the store. They had around 15 people in red shirts walking around. The Genius Bar was empty with a couple of experts ready to help any zombies with computer problems. The rest of the population was as follows:

• Internet users: Checking craigslist for apartments, checking their e-mail, looking for jobs.
• Stoned people: Like a moth to a bright light, the Apple store apparently attracts high people. I smelled it on at least 3 people.
• Buyers: It appeared that a few people were buying things.

When I told an employee I’d like to buy a computer, she looked at me a bit funny. I’m guessing they don’t sell too many at night. She also informed me that they get paid more to work the graveyard shift.

Overall, I’d recommend going at 3am. It’s so artificially bright that you get a Casino effect in your brain and forget that it’s the middle of the night. You’ll also have zero lines anywhere and a strong Apple employee to people ratio of 3:1 (instead of the normal 1:500). And of course, great people-watching.

If you see this then you’re on spiffy new servers hosted by Amazon’s EC2. Hopefully they can handle the load a bit better. Right now I’m on a 2 webserver and 1 db server configuration. It’s a bit small, but I built it to grow pretty easily.

I actually had 2 dbs clustered, but funky stuff was happening with missed heartbeats on Amazon’s new NAT addressing. I started a thread about it on their forum here

I think new yorkers can be defined by this one photo from an elevator I was in today.

My new site, cliqck is now online. It allows you to keep a log of the things you buy and why you bought it. You can also see what your friends are buying as well. It’s got a lot of nice features to it and I have a few other enhancements coming up soon (such as popularity lists, etc).

So please go sign up and play around. I hope you guys like it :)

(UPDATE: Thanks everyone for the great replies! Also, please digg this if you like it :) )

I love exploded diagrams of objects where you see every piece of the thing. I had the idea to try and make a real life version of one, and picked my iPod to be the victim. The catch was, I wanted it to work even in its exploded form.

I was a bit unhappy with the result because of the clarity of the resin. There were too many bubbles (and was an error on the last pour). At first I was just going to shelve it, but yesterday decided to at least put the photos online.

The most incredible thing about it is it still works perfectly. I encased the internals of the dock too, so it can be controlled, charged, and listened to, by a wire underneath (that sticks out a bit, hence the lego support legs).

Front view:

Side view:

Closeup side:

Bottom view:

Turned on:

New website hopefully opening up today. Check back soon.

I was recently at the Borough Hall stop in Brooklyn when I passed by this phone.

It takes a second to figure out what happened and realize that was not a happy phone conversation. Could you imagine seeing this conversation? He (or she) hung up that phone so hard that it split in half. Any Hulk sightings recently in the subway?

I always go through the same three steps to download a file (in tar.gz format)

1. wget the tar.gz file I want
2. untar it
3. remove the original file I downloaded

So I made a bash script that does those three steps in one. Use it the same way as wget (# simple.sh http://path/to/file.tar.gz)

#!/bin/bash 

# change this to whatever extension you'd like to handle
ext=".tar.gz"

# flags to pass to tar
flg="-zxvf"

wget $1

file=`ls -t *$ext | grep -i -m 1 "^.*$ext$"`

if [[ -n $file ]]
then
    tar $flg $file
    unlink $file
else
    echo "Could not find the downloaded file."
fi

You can download it via this link (Remember to make it executable and to change its extension)

I personally hate when different mp3s play at different volumes. You have to constantly switch the audio level to compensate. Unknown to me, iTunes has an option called “Sound Check” under the Playback options in Preferences. It normalizes your songs, so that their volume remains constant during playback! It does this without changing the original mp3. So you can always switch it off.

Why is this not a default option? Who would not want this?

Today was the last straw. While setting up a network printer, (so that my laptop could print via wi-fi), Windows Vista’s print spooler crashed. It never used to crash. Now it crashes…Every time. I put the error message into google and out came thousands of forums posts. People everywhere were complaining about Vista not working with their printers. Printers?! This isn’t some arcane function people use irregularly. After 2 hours of trying everything and rebooting several times, I realized this was just a big ‘ol vista bug.

On my desk, I have Windows running on one screen and an iMac sitting to the right of it. The iMac is usually off.

After almost pulling my hair out, I calmly put down the laptop, walked over to my desk, and switched my Mac to my primary computer. I’m now in the process of dumping all my personal files onto the Mac as I slowly phase out my Windows computer.

The hours I’ve dumped into repairing Windows has finally gotten to me. My introduction to Vista was a 5 hour install time that blue-screened twice and asked for my valid Vista CD-Key 10 times. I don’t need that kind of stuff anymore.

Goodbye Windows.