Now I’m watching the third and slowest download meter and wondering why it’s three. Each time it shows a progress bar for “downloading the update” it is progeessively slower. You have to determine this on your own, because they conveniently leave out any indication of how much there is to go, whether in megabytes or time. And each update takes no fewer than three downloads… They kill your enthusiasm after building it up.

“Oh, this is going really fast, it won’t be long now!” Then you find the first was to keep you in the room, the second to scratch the fabric of hopefulness, and the last to arouse your rage. Ingenious really, though avoidable by … oh I dunno … TELLING me how big this thing is?

I’m wasting time that I could be wasting by burning bandits…

Only the web browser appears to use the proxy server which means you can’t use all the snazzy apps and must fall back on the HTML versions which are generally terrible and provide no notifications. Some won’t even let you use them that way at all (*cough* Pandora *cough*)!

Downloads don’t work correctly. At least, I’ve tried downloading attachments from Gmail and a file from another web server and neither completed. They stick as “In Progress” but don’t actually make any progress … ever.

Rather than making the setting per SSID (e.g. WiFi network) which would be correct and really just, fucking sensible, it’s global. This means that every time you get on your corporate wireless behind the firewall, you get to type in the massive proxy server. Then when you leave to a coffee shop or home, you delete the whole thing lest nothing work at all.

If I had never owned an iPod Touch I wouldn’t know how broken this all is. From the iPod Touch I was able to specify the proxy on only the wireless networks it mattered and all web-service-based apps respected it (Google Voice, Pandora, App Store, Instagram). Why is this so messed up!?

• This is to the Samsung Galaxy Phone what the iPod Touch is to the iPhone.
• The “4″ actually stands for “4 inch screen” not “version 4″. Thus the 5 is a 5in screen. Quite a confounding naming scheme if you ask me and the 5 reminds me of an awkward adolescent. Even the 4 is just a teeny bit larger than I would have preferred.
• It’s cheaper and feels more industrial than an iPod with a few more features (GPS, flash, micro SD slot).
• There is no “quick start-up” guide so I put the battery in and plugged it into the USB-walljack adapter, thinking I ought to charge it first. After waiting an hour I tried turning it on but nothing happened so I unplugged it, popped/replaced the battery, and tried again — voila! WTF?
• The touch screen feels like a second-hand citizen with more controls done via buttons than swiping so the result is an amateurish blend of functionality and finish.
• It took me a while to get connected to the corporate WiFi and the device made no attempt to inform me that the lack of a proxy was what was preventing it from getting to internet services.
• Trying to sync to Gmail, for example (continuing the previous point), said it “Might take a few minutes” and then a couple later it finally said I had a lousy connection. It probably could have determined this faster and reported something much better like: “You appear to be behind a firewall”, “Wireless is not connected” (seriously, the first time I wasn’t connected at all and it still spun for a good minute or two … doing … what?)
• Can’t setup Google Account behind a proxy which makes no sense considering all those services are HTTP-based.This also means that you can’t browse apps in the market place, so it’s essentially an isolated toy until I get home or to a coffee shop.
• The Task Manager and the details it provides is awesome for a power-OCD-user like myself, but I wonder who else cares?
• The plastic casing looks cheaper than an iPod but doesn’t scratch up in nanoseconds which is nice.
• Damn, this is 3.55mm too, so it looks like I need an adapter for my “nice” headphones.
• Web browser looks ungainly. I logged into Google Voice and the interface you’re presented with is a pile of dung compared to what you see in Safari on the iPod. Actually, scratch that, it just looks like a pile of dung (no comparison necessary).
• There is a settings button for the onscreen keyboard right next to the period. Bad, designer, no donut!
• I like the three buttons at the bottom better than the iPod’s one button, but it took me a bit to figure out how to use them (configure, home, and back). The “back” button is the best because you know exactly what to press to escape whatever you fell into.
• I totally dig that the buttons vibrate the device ever so slightly, it provides tactile feedback that the iPod completely lacks.
• Go away input box, how do I make you go away?! Why can’t I scroll when you’re in my face?!

So far I’m satisfied with the purchase, but I wouldn’t recommend it to the average consumer. It feels designed for nerds who are willing to explore and put up with usability harshness in favor of more powerful capabilities. Based on what I’ve seen, I also get the since that a Samsung Galaxy Tab is probably far inferior to the iPad. I wonder if Amazon will shrink the Kindle Fire and make their own pocket device (Kindle Candle?).

Anyway after a very brief encounter with the G0ogle+ sausage party, I decided its unnecessary distraction and my opposition to such services required me to separate from it entirely. You could press from me similar statements to my reasoning for leaving Facebook. My arguments remain the same. A couple friends have asked me to re-join, but a friendship isn’t based on a website and I’m not truly losing out on anything by not being there. Here is what I put in the feedback Google requested for my “why”:

Philosophical disagreement with social networking services; not just this one, but those that attempt to “tie everything together” and synthesize personal relationships into news streams, celebrity gossip, and tabloid drama. None of this improves my life or my friendships, but rather detracts from good time I could spend on them.

Our latest, contemporary concept of networking is a method of publicly keeping score. There is potential in useful uses, certainly in business cases that come to mind where such a thing is quite profitable, but as an independent individual it reverberates with more negative effects than positive.

The reason I hear most is “I like seeing what so and so is doing” which as a stand-alone statement is totally fair and completely, unrealistically high-level. This is as much seeing what someone is up to as reading singles advertisements to find out about personality. Typical feeds are amalgamations of random distractions arising from a sea of boredom, fishing attempts for attention, and public affirmations of worthiness. Look how important and awesome I am; wish you were here!

If you want to know what so and so is up to, why are you waiting until they happen to post anything anywhere? Call them, write them, talk to them. We need up to minute details on others’ egos like we need any other real-time information … we don’t. We want it. We crave it. This is not the same thing. You can’t do without social interaction, but you can do without this sad excuse for it. Of course, having an non-publicized, meaningful relationship often means no one else knows how deep it goes … and that matters?

These things happen to me on occasion. I completely destroy nearly all traces of a project or pile of files built carefully up in a Jenga tower on the illusion of security. I obliterate their presence, their history. I annihilate them with balefire. All this is done under the guise of knowing what the hell I am doing.

The last time I pulled such a carpet was when I had set up my own NAS and a simple backup task to sync with a FTP server. Over the course of several months my little Netgear ReadyNAS slowly corrupted thousands of files, one each time it had problems in the middle of a transfer and had to reset. The bad assumption about atomic operations on my part caused the permanent, irretrievable loss of many photos.

This time I hit reset on my Google Code repository where I had been “archiving” little files and the pics from my cellphone. I misread the option to mean two things: 1.) it wasn’t instant and 2.) it would keep the files but remove the history. I didn’t anticipate a nuclear blast wiping every bit off the face of the planet. I pushed the red button. That was easy.

The sad part is that I don’t even know all of what I lost. How much has been uploaded to my web server and how much is gone for good. This is where we are with any sort of hording, you don’t know what you have or what you had even after it’s disappeared. It isn’t akin to the loss of kin where suddenly you recognize all the worthless hours you spent in petty quarrels. No, we heap dusty bytes on the digital pile, stuffed in the back of virtual closets, and have no concept of the treasures and trash therein.

If you could only keep a dozen photos from a single year, it would be enough when you’ve gotten too infirm to take more. It doesn’t seem that way now. Every precious scene belies a miracle eager to be stored, but for what? We’ve all seen that one photo that is enough to transport our mind, our hearts, and yet we believe more is necessary. Is this so later we can spend all our time flipping the pages in a vain attempt to animate the past in a picture show of hollow puppets?

The truth may be that I haven’t lost anything, because there was nothing there in the first place. Why keep every scrap of every year, every month, every day, carrying the ridiculous burden of an entire life? These things don’t improve our memory, our focus, or magnify our love. It’s a habit and a paranoia and possibly a tenuous grasping of reality.

Although Internet Explorer reportedly holds around 70% marketshare elsewhere, I consistently see it beaten to a pulp by Firefox and now … woh … Chrome. I don’t have good presence on non-Google search engines, though, so this is skewed in that way.

I am seriously considering reselling this 4th generation iPod Touch, bought from eBay. I have to keep  saying fourth, because there are some significant differences between it and the 3rd. The most pertinent at the moment is the size of its jack hole which on mine is a mini and previously a full-size. I bought an adapter but only too late as my previous earbud plug had stretched something inside so that it’s not quite a hot dog in a hallway but the connection isn’t always properly made and sometimes it quite literally spits it out without so much as an apology on taste. Perusing the prices for potential repair whether by myself or having experts do it has only given me goosebumps from frugality gone to the weeds. I simply want it to be over and I wonder to the point of actually having it work as advertised.

You see, it isn’t particularly good as a portable music player. It’s a bloody pocket computer minus the cells and plasma. And for that it isn’t bad, but it’s not great either. The fact that it fits in your pocket and does so many things trumps its annoyances, but then there are little pinpricks of irritation here and there that you can’t help but wonder what people are smoking when they talk of Apple’s slick and encompassing designs. Yes, coming from an old curmudgeon like me, this doesn’t mean much.

The iPod Shuffle is much better for music on the go (durable, no locking mechanism, tactile buttons, can be operated by feel rather than sight, long battery life, normal headphone jack size) but has its limitations in size and organization. Since there’s no screen and every track must be skipped through, you really must have exactly what you want to hear on it at the time, but whose taste changes so infrequently. Wouldn’t it be cool if Apple created an adapter to attach a Shuffle to a full-size iPod/iPhone and with a couple swipes drop in the albums you desire now?

Anyway, if I push and twist the jack just so it stays in place on TouchFiend (what I named my “iTouch”). And then I can use Pandora which is great minus the loud commercials (“More, it’s my favorite word” … AUGH!) and giant ads which are hard not to “click” when you’re trying to close them. Where’s my SProxy app? Yarrrr! I’d be running that now to drown out Starbucks’ redundant music selection except that the WiFi has been unreliable and the pod keeps losing its signal. This is something I’ve noticed across the franchise in the three or so stores I’ve visited in the past month. What happened? Also, I think I’m addicted to music.

Finally, what I actually set out to do this morning was to examine the last code I left behind for FanSiter. I’ve jotted down several pages of brainstorms, in pencil no lest, over the past few days and as part of restarting I wanted to see where I’d left off. I hadn’t intended to reuse so much as relive, partially so I could leverage (kinda hate that word) some of it for migrating the data to the new system. After searching high and low, including this blog, I finally realized I hadn’t checked in a key file in my last usage of generating static HTML files and thus there’s no going back anyway. What a relief, I thought I’d have to guiltily stare out old code as it settled an accusatory expression on me and assumed a parental-esq Joel line: “Rewriting? Haven’t you learned anything?”

Well, yes, I’ve learned quite a bit by writing it four times. I’ve swayed between publishing platforms, data stores, picture services, employing contractors, and trying crowd sourcing. Is there a clear takeaway of what’s successful? Maybe, but then I guess that’s not a clear yes, it’s a muddled yes. The architecture astronaut is my nemesis and there’s a big difference between pie in the sky dreams to solid long and short-term goals. And in order to achieve anything, there must be recognizable stages whereby I can leave it off at that point and, if I never touch it again, be satisfied that it’s done enough.

Additionally, you are what you read, and to maintain motivation I must synchronize that material with my current project. In this case I’m devouring The Success Principles while avoiding favored tomes of philosophy, spirituality, psychology (sorry Jung, I’ll get back to you), and fun fiction. I know that in a few months I want to be traveling the world, but reading about that now is only going to make me more restless and then I’ll regret (yet again) not having finished anything while I was in a settled spot.