Some neato things

I meandered into the local WalMart yesterday for a quickie ice cream fix and found one of the neatest new ways to enjoy Hagen Daaz and Ben & Jerry’s Ice creams-single serve containers. Before you say “but wait, Jon, they have _always_ been single-serve containers,” these are about the size of one scoop of ice cream instead of an entire pint, otherwise known to me as “just enough to hit my need for an ice cream fix” when one has neither of these brands available on cones locally. Just the right size to consume, and not too big to require me to finish the ice cream before ice crystals start to form inside of the container. Both brands include a “spoon” of sorts in the package as well, but the Ben & Jerry’s one was made better between the two spoons (but, of course, the Hagen Daaz had better mouth feel and flavor when comparing the remainder of the package contents). Bravo & kudos for hitting on this idea!!

I survived the iPhone hype with my Crackberry intact-I’m still not sold on the iPhone, which seems to have little to add to my life feature-wise that my crackberry has not already given to me, all without the pain of having to use AT&T for the phone service–heck, VZW FINALLY got their “VCast” coverage to reach out into these parts after years of selling it to the local yocals–I wonder how long it will be before AT&T gets 3G out here… My Crackberry has decent Edge coverage here, so all could be worse (I travel to areas at times where Edge still has yet to arrive-the Crackberry shows GSM –in caps– when there).

Speaking of Crackberry, the Opera browser about which I previously wrote sucks; in particular, the UI is awkward for me still. I will play with it a bit more before I decide to get rid of it or not, but it is presently not looking too good for keeping it installed. I’ll keep you posted if this changes.

Also on crack, a decent app for rss is called Viigo-I make decent use of this almost daily to catch up on headlines, etc. And for those of you (like me) who enjoy Twitter, Twitterberry is a neat application. I wish that it kept up more with live links to my Twitter account so that Tweets appear automagically though (maybe for the next revision??? Please?).

And for those of you who like to know where police are taking radar, I recommend Trapster. It is a mash-up of Google Maps and a database of user-reported police radar locations. This is a neato idea, esp. for those who are into knowing this sort of information.

Kudos to AT&T, though, for their great coverage of the Lollapaloozer fest (I’m not a Perry Farrel, er douchebag, fan-sorry, but admittedly Janes Addiction was good at one time), which allowed me to “be there” while sitting on my couch in air conditioning while working on a few projects last weekend. Big letdown for me was Love & Rockets, who seemed at times to have not picked-up their instruments since recording the songs they performed. Big cheer for me was Jamie Lidell-damn cool!!! I could have watched this entertainer play for another hour easily. Another big cheer for Flogging Molly-impressive! I missed Gogol Bordello on the coverage, though (bummer), as I’d like to see them play a whole show sometime (I’ve only seen them play on Letterman).

I also just received a free training session from AppDev. It was the most difficult thing for me to install, which was finally (and frustratingly) found to be due to some weird conflict in Windows Media Player’s DRM settings. It was a bummer to have to go through all of the trouble to make it work, but the App Dev tech Zachary walked through a number of things to get this working. I’ll let you know soon what I think of the training DVD, as soon as I have time to go through it. Here’s a hint to anyone who is making one of these types of products–DRM is awful, and did not allow this licensed user access to the product for at least two days while troubleshooting why: if you’ve already verified a user’s credentials/license, please do not also make the content also go through a DRM-credentials-needing step.

Let me know what YOU think of these, and also what YOU think is neato…