I told Maddie about the Wilhelm Scream the other day, and now we have to re-watch it in Toy Story (when Buzz falls out of Andy’s window) 4 or more times whenever we watch it.

“All ready to watch ‘Toy Story’”

I bought Maddie a Buzz Lightyear at Target last night. She’s been bugging us for one since the TS3 ads started. She was very upset that she couldn’t take it to daycare. I promised her she could watch Toy Story with Buzz when we got home. At the first sign of Buzz she yelled “I love him”, then started pressing his buttons, then repeating his lines, then back to pressing buttons. Daycare provider said she talked about him non-stop today, on the way home she asked to take him to a birthday party on Sunday. It’s nuts. It’s either her favorite toy ever or she’ll be bored in 2 days. I have to admit I wanted to buy her a Buzz more than any toy ever.

Just noticed I can finally use the “hold down the dot” trick to type .us in the email keyboard on iOS4.

I was wearing an old Flying Spaghetti Monster T-shirt this morning while dressing my 3.5 year old daughter. She asked what it was. I told her it was FSM, and she said he looked funny. What was he doing? Touching a man with his noodly appendage, of course.

The pastafarian in me is quite happy that she asked who FSM is before asking who Jesus is. Then again, I don’t wear shirts depicting Jesus.

It briefly entertained the thought of how fun it would be to raise her as a pastafarian. Think of all the fun pirate dress-up times. Unfortunately, it’s impractical to discuss Church of FSM dogma with a small child. It’s not long before you come up to the stripper factory, and that’s just not a conversation I want to have with her now. I think she’d have no trouble with the beer volcano though. I wonder if there’s a kid’s book version, like the bible comics? It’s not like there aren’t stripper-factory-level-of-craziness parts of the old testament or anything, e.g. Sodom and Gomorrah.

Simplenote and SimplenoteSync.pl do not play well together. Somehow the perl sync script seemed to think there was a conflict from edits on both sides. I did no editing on the web site or the app.

It has literally no way to deal with conflicts. It does contain a mergeConflicts subroutine, but it has no executable code. It’s listed as a TODO, but that won’t happen for an abandoned script. The author decided he liked WriteRoom better, just like I did. Perhaps because it already does all this. But there’s no documentation of any kind that mentions how to heal conflicts, and nothing in the Google group for it.

So, I’m off on my own. First, I copy and paste and then diff. I know where the problem is. Changed a verb tense, and then all the stuff I added in the last half hour or so (still all this was done within TextMate). We can fix that… Sync; touch; sync: no change. Delete, sync: deletes on both. Resave, sync: back to conflict. You know, on a document that doesn’t exist in either the web site or the iPad app. Delete the simplenotesync.db. Sort of works. Sync again. Now all my documents are duplicating three and four times. This is unacceptable. I could kill it all and start from scratch with the sync, but I know it will only happen in another week or so. I could actually write the perl script, but I have a day job and it’s just not going to fit in to my schedule.

I’m done with Simplenote. And it’s sad that it’s not the app’s fault. Just that it doesn’t sync how I want it to. Here’s hoping WriteRoom goes universal soon.

A couple of months ago I spent an hour puzzling over why I’d want to use Simplenote instead of WriteRoom. I couldn’t come up with a reason.

I now have a reason: the iPad. Simplenote works on it natively, WriteRoom is an iPhone app. I can’t bear to use many iPhone apps on the iPad. My TiVo remote, Soulver, and Softphone are about it. I especially can’t deal with one that requires a lot of typing. Either the keyboard is the right size, but in the middle of the screen, or it’s big (and blocky), but not the iPad keyboard.

I’m way more annoyed with the syncing mechanism. Putting the (abandoned) SimplenoteSync.pl in cron and sleepwatcher is sort of an approximation, but nowhere near as convenient. Plus, it won’t merge changes. Ick.

I’d use the suggested Notational Velocity, but I don’t think I’m the right target for it. The main file I use in WriteRoom/Simplenote is a log that grows over time (rotated monthly), and I want to use TextMate especially since it’s in MultiMarkdown. NV is supposed to be for small text files, and I use Evernote as my “shiny metal brain.”

WriteRoom was “use it” while Simplenote is “use it and think about the syncing process.” For now I’m sticking with it.

Thank you Tumblr, now my blog looks good on the iPhone.

I’ve been trying to work with the ipad a bit. So far I’ve found it to be pretty productive, even though I’m still finding the tools that I need. 

1. Evernote is so much more useful than on an iPhone. I finally installed the Evernote clipper into my Safari bookmarks so I can clip things from the iPad. I never even considered it on the iPhone.
2. GoodReader is one of my new favorite apps. I figured I’d need a PDF reader for this large screen. The system PDF view always choked on large PDFs on the iPhone and it has no storage or bookmarking capability. Part of my use-case for the iPad was reading the large PDFs that my work depends on. GoodReader excels in those two categories. It has every imaginable way of getting files on and off the device–literally I can’t think of another way that would be allowed by the SDK and the laws of physics. I’ve downloaded the free iPhone version limited to 5 documents, and may eventually purchase it. It would be one way to grab a document I need from the 3G network and get it onto a MacBook or iPad. I could do ad-hoc networking to the MacBook. The iPad would require a hotspot unfortunately. I do often travel with an Airport Express though.
3. iWork seems interesting, but I’m not sure how much I’ll use it for work. Mostly, I reference Word documents, Excel spreadsheets or Visio documents, I don’t create them. The standard viewer does pretty well with that. I have used them a bit for personal reasons.
4. Safari is nearly as good as on a Mac. It’s a big improvement over the iPhone. I’ve been able to accomplish some good web research using it.
5. Part of how the research went well is the focus that comes naturally with an iPhone. You see one app at a time on the iPad so everything is like WriteRoom or the other full-screen Mac apps.
6. The keyboard isn’t bad, but it’s not quite touch-typable and I keep trying to rest my fingers on the home row. I’m ok with it. Maybe I’ll get more used to it. I might end up buying the Apple Bluetooth keyboard.
7. I’m noticing just how slow my iPhone 3G is. Scary slow. I can’t wait until summer slow. OmniFocus in particular is horrific especially now with three sync clients going. I wish they could fix that, or maybe at least drop the compacting interval below 1h. 

(This post was mostly written on the iPad and partially on my MacBook at my desk.)

Bluetooth audio works great, but not at all with iPhone apps.