So, when you’re all done playing Spore or SimCity on your iPhone, what’s it actually good for? I’ve been asked by several people what apps are most useful and must haves. Your mileage may vary depending on what you need, but here’s my picks and why I use them.

Beatmaker ($19.99)

Imagine Propellerhead’s Reason on the iPhone. This is it. Powerful and a little bit overwhelming. Sequencer and drum machine. Record your own samples on the phone. Effects. Different time signatures. If you write music with any sort of electronic flair, you must get this. It’s worth way more than $19.

Weatherbug (free)

Much better than the built in weather widget. Set up custom locations, see weather radar. The weather video is cute but I’m not the kind of guy who watches the Weather channel, either. But, hey…it’s free!

Twitterfon (free)

One of the top twitter apps. Many are great, but I found this one to be the most stable and full featured. You can search twitter for popular terms. It also lets you search within your location. It treats direct messaging like a back and forth chat. The only feature that’s missing in this (that Twitterific does) is that it doesn’t offer the option to save your spot or bookmark where you are. When you quit the app and come back, everything refreshes.

TouchOSC ($3.99)

If you’re a computer musician, you probably know something about Open Sound Control, the possible replacement for MIDI. This is a great little app that gives you four presets of screens with controls that send OSC data back and forth to your computer or musical instrument. They say eventually you can make your own layouts. Very nifty stuff.

Things ($9.99)

I know, I know, 9 bucks for a todo app? But it’s one impressive app that’s the companion to the desktop version.  I used to use OmniFocus, but I found it didn’t fit my workflow. I know this will sting GTD purists, but I like to have multiple tags on my todos and projects. Things eventually will soon have subprojects, too. It’s a great app that syncs Oh-so-effortlessly with the desktop. If you don’t already have a productivity routine in place, try out the desktop version for free to see if this would work for you.

Stanza (free)

My top recommendation. I love reading. I love reading older books. This one has ‘em all. Thanks to the likes of Project Guttenburg, you can get your hands on all kinds of book texts that are in the public domain. This is a superb eBook reader. The best one on the iPhone in my opinion. And I just found out that they are offering some purchase options for current books as well.

RulerPhone ($3.99)

This is one of those oddball ones that you are glad you have when you need it. It’s a way to measure dimensions and distance by comparing anything to a credit card sized object. You simple place a credit card in view near the object you want to measure. Snap a picture of the scene. Then, when you tell RulerPhone the dimensions of that card, you can measure anything else in the picture. Wild, eh? I’ve used it several times. There’s a lite version, too.

Pandora (free)

Music lovers most likely know about Pandora, the internet radio station that makes playlists based on the musical “DNA” similarities of other songs and bands. Now you can do it on your iPhone. Tuneage!

Instapaper (free and $9.99)

If you haven’t used the site yet, check it out: http://instapaper.com. You get a bookmarklet that you can click while visiting a page. Once clicked, it saves the page to your instapaper “pages-to-read” list. You then have a list you can read through later. The beauty of the iPhone version? It downloads the page text to your phone so you can read offline. I use this every single day.

Fourtrack ($9.99)

For the musicians who need to capture their quick and dirty ideas…and then overdub some more. This is a quick and dirty four track recorder. No frills other than simple compression to help even out levels. All it does is record and playback four tracks, just like the old cassette versions. It works great and solid, and you can download the recordings easily over WiFi.

FileMagnet ($4.99)

A great way to read Word Documents, spreadsheets, and PDFs on the phone. There’s a desktop version (free) to help you transfer stuff. It keeps your place when you are reading so you can come back later. It also lets you read in landscape mode. Definitely recommend.

Byline ($4.99)

If you use Google Reader as your RSS feed reader, you’ll like this one. It integrates with it nicely. Whatever you read on Byline is reflected in Reader and vise-versa. It also lets you specify if you want it to download the text for offline reading (like instapaper).

G. K. Chesterton:

[All] genuine appreciation rests on a certain mystery of humility and almost darkness. The man who said, “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall not be disappointed,” put the eulogy quite inadequately and even falsely. The truth: “Blessed is he that expecteth nothing, for he shall be gloriously surprised.” The man who expects nothing sees redder roses than common men can see, and greener grass, and a more startling sun.

From Heretics

Yep, we got nothing for Ian, our first born, for Christmas ‘08. Nada. Zilch. And we’re not bad parents.

Colleen and I chatted at length about this.  It’s kinda like buying for the guy who has everything. What do you get a 1.2 year old for Christmas? He’ll barely remember it. He’ll definitely break or lose whatever stuff we give him. He can’t read. What does he really want?

We’ve observed that usually, gifts given to newborns and young babies are mostly for the parents/caretakers. We want the kid to look nice, so we buy clothes we think look nice. We want to have pictures of the baby having fun, so we buy stuff we think looks like fun for the photoshoot.

Now, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s gotta be fun for the parents, too. But that was partly what drove us to be so allegedly “grinchy” this year. What does he really want?

Crinkly wrapping paper. Mommy. Daddy. Tickles. So that’s what we did.

Just so you don’t think we lavished ourselves with expensive consumer goodies while our son starved in his crib, we were low key all around.  Colleen and I exchanged a couple books we each wanted to read. She bought be a case of Christmas Ale (thank’s Great Lakes!). And Colleen got a new swim outfit. Our cheapest Christmas yet.

What about Ian? Oh, he had a blast diving into the pile of wrappings and tissue. And he had fun helping us pile them up in our recycling bag. And then we sat and rolled a ball back and forth for a good hour before moving on to other fun (like falling face first into a pillow).

Fun photos and a great time. Our first, non-infant Christmas with our son. We didn’t buy him anything. And I wouldn’t have traded that for the world.

I had three clients who needed Ruby on Rails applications running on their Dreamhost accounts. No big deal, I thought, since Dreamhost has supported Rails applications for quite some time and they were instrumental in developing Passenger.

Well, was I in for a surprise.

Two of the clients had complicated Rails applications with native gem dependencies, and the third wanted me to develop an app for him that would be much quicker with some of these gems, too. Dreamhost may offer one of the most flexible shared hosting environments on the planet, but sometimes you REALLY wish you had sudo privileges. I plan to write an ode to apt-get some time in the near future.

So I set out toward what turned out to be a 5+ hour ordeal. Out of the kindness (and some pride) of my heart. I share my installation notes with you, the internets, in hope of sparing the same pain and suffering I endured. In the end, you will have Git 1.5.4, Rails 2.1.1, Ruby 1.8.7 and peace of mind.

First, I needed git to work so I could have a local repository in each of the Dreamhost accounts. Yes, I could have them sign up for a Github.com account, but I wanted to save them money and I thought git was already installed. It was. But it was version 1.4.4, and it had some weird quirks. You didn’t type git init to initialize a git repository. You typed git init-db. I remember using git back before 1.4.4 but I don’t remember that syntax. Regardless, I kept getting “corrupt repository” errors when I tried to use the local git to access my pushed changes. Argh!

So, I used these commands to compile and setup my own private copy of git 1.5.4. (inspired by this link). I had to compile git with NO_MMAP because Dreamhost thinks that git uses too much memory with it’s memory mapping technique and kills the process. I also didn’t need libcurl for the install. Git works just fine pulling submodules from Github without it.

mkdir ~/tmp
cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/git-1.5.4.rc4.tar.gz
tar xzvf git-1.5.4.rc4
cd git-1.5.4.rc4
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages NO_CURL=1 NO_MMAP=1
make
make install

All of the resources I could find on custom ruby/gems installations were old but worked with few modifications. Here’s the inspiration for these instructions.

First, setup .bash_profile the way you like it. I did it this way:

umask 002
PS1='[\h:$PWD]$ '
alias ll="ls -l"
EDITOR="/usr/bin/nano"
. .bashrc

Then, setup .bashrc with the proper paths. This file is executed by all non-shell logins. That would include git and capistrano.

export TZ=EST5EDT # Sets my timezone to Eastern U.S. time
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$HOME/.packages/lib"
export PATH="$HOME/.packages/bin:$HOME/.gems/bin:${PATH}"
export GEM_HOME="$HOME/.gems"
export GEM_PATH="$GEM_HOME:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8"

Install readline for console support. You can’t do script/console without it.

cd ~/.packages
wget http://ftp.gnu.org/gnu/readline/readline-5.2.tar.gz
tar zxvf readline-5.2.tar.gz
cd readline-5.2
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Install openssl

cd ~/tmp
wget http://www.openssl.org/source/openssl-0.9.8h.tar.gz
tar zxvf openssl-0.9.8h.tar.gz
cd openssl-0.9.8h
./config --prefix=$HOME/.packages --openssldir=$HOME/openssl shared
make
make test
make install

Install Ruby. Substitute any earlier version if you need it. 1.8.7 was fine for me.

cd ~/.packages
wget ftp://ftp.ruby-lang.org/pub/ruby/1.8/ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
tar zxvf ruby-1.8.7-p72.tar.gz
cd ruby-1.8.7-p72
./configure --prefix=$HOME/.packages --with-openssl-dir=$HOME/.packages --with-readline-dir=$HOME/.packages
make
make install

Install Rubygems

cd ~/.packages
wget http://rubyforge.org/frs/download.php/38646/rubygems-1.2.0.tgz
tar zxvf rubygems-1.2.0.tgz
cd rubygems-1.2.0
ruby setup.rb config --prefix=$HOME/.packages
ruby setup.rb setup
ruby setup.rb install

Setup default gems. Feel free to install any others you need.

gem install rails hpricot rspec mysql ruby-debug ruby2ruby rake

Setup your Rails Environment. This is the most crucial. Even though you now have the most up to date rails gems in your path, you still need to freeze them in your app if you are using Passenger like I am.

rake rails:freeze:gems

Add the following lines to the top of your config/environment.rb. Remember to replace “USER” with your username.

ENV["GEM_HOME"]="/home/USER/.gems"
ENV["GEM_PATH"]="/home/USER/.gems:/usr/lib/ruby/gems/1.8"

Also, make sure you have your gem dependencies configured correctly. Passenger can get a little confused even if you have them installed in your local gem repository.

Hope this helps!

UPDATE:

Peter Boling was kind enough to point out that you should also install the “rake” gem. I added it to the gem install list above.

It was my first time at a Radiohead show. Very nifty stuff. Colleen came, too. We hung out with Andy Graham and Josiah Ley out on the green. The show itself was great, but alas, since we were on the lawn at the amphitheater, it wasn’t quite as energetic as I’d hoped. Not Radiohead’s fault, of course.

When Thom Yorke is dancing like a mad man or Jonny Greenwood bends down to start pedal tweaking every sound coming off the stage…it looked small. They had video screens and such but it was more for visual effect that showing closeups of what they were doing. It was a different way to use cameras, too. They were all stationary and positioned at different spots around the stage pointing at the players. Throughout the evening, the VJ switched cameras and mixed in some other trippy visualization stuff, too. Very surreal night!

Unfortunately, they didn’t play three of my favorite tunes. Fake Plastic Trees was my Radiohead inauguration. When brought to my attention by my friend, Jeff, I was hooked. And then the band just kept getting better. The next tune, Let Down…I’ve heard they’ve never been able to pull it off live. So I don’t know why I was expecting it. The last, Karma Police, was a real disappointment. Such an iconic song! But alas, they must be bored of it.

In Rainbows, their most recent album, was the most represented that night. Good thing, too. It’s a great set of tunes. Thanks for the fun evening. Even Colleen had a good time!

For the other fans out there, here was the set list of the evening:

• 15 Step
• There There
• Morning Bell
• All I Need
• Pyramid Song
• Nude
• Weird Fishes
• Pulk/Pull Revolving Doors
• National Anthem
• Wolf at the Door
• Faust Arp
• Exit Music
• Jigsaw Falling Into Place
• Idioteque
• Climbing up the Walls
• Bodysnatchers
• How to Disappear Completely
• –encore
• Videotape
• Paranoid Android
• Dollars and Cents
• Reckoner
• Street Spirit (Fade Out)
• –encore
• House of Cards
• Lucky
• Everything in It’s Place

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

- H.P. Lovecraft (Chapter 1, Call of the Cthulhu)

For a wonderfully snarky time, you need to check out crummychurchsigns.com. I made my first contribution to their collection!

I’m sure everyone has driven by at least one crummy church sign in their life. You know, the kind that make you cringe. Or maybe the kind you just stare at trying to figure out what in the world they mean. I suspect that traffic accidents go up proportionately around crummy church signs.

So this one here was so bizarre, Colleen and I had to turn around and go back. And then I got out and snapped it with my cell phone…

What in the world could this sign possibly have to do with a church? Peter Pan was a great book and all, but St. Vincent would probably roll over in his grave to see such trite sentiments attached to his name.

I’ll avoid ranting about how trite churches are in this country. Really I will. :-)

So if you’re in a snarky mood and would love to see crumminess discovered all over the world, check out crummychurchsigns.com. And don’t forget to think lovely thoughts…

I’m a big fan of fiction. Fantasy, science-fiction, you know, the wild and imaginative stuff. I enjoy the Harry Potter Series, Lord of the Rings, Chronicles of Narinia, works by Issac Assimov, short stories by Damon Knight, Riverworld series by Philip Jose Farmer, and the younger authors like Cory Doctorow…etc, etc.

So when His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman hit the news I thought I might enjoy them, too.

Sure, they are biting atheistic critiques of religious organization and thought. I’m not intimidated by that. In fact, I enjoy reading well thought out critiques on any topic. Arthur C. Clarke can be classed in this category to some degree. He’s an avowed humanist and pushes his imagination to the hilt to explore a world governed solely by natural laws that evolves far into the future. Breathtaking imagery. I respect him greatly. And the ideas are as fascinating as the man.

There’s a bit of controversy about the new movie, The Golden Compass. Apparently, the book is a blunt answer to blunt religious overtones in the Chronicles of Narnia. Many atheists and humanists have been hailing Pullman as *the* C.S. Lewis-like author for their side. “Finally,” they say, “fantasy children’s books we can read to our children!”

But the movie, in grand Hollywood fashion, waters down the language and graphic attack on organized religion…aka Churches. So the atheists are really pissed off. But wait…the watering down didn’t help at all among the religious crowd because the movie is still based on a book in a trilogy by a man who hates anything religious and wants to see it quashed. Show me a better example of, “you can’t please everybody”.

But they tried. Thus far, the box office results haven’t been good. The sequel movies may not get studio backing. But…that’s not why I’m writing this post.

Philip Pullman has raised the blood pressure of a key audience segment…fantasy buffs. Apparently, since he despises Lewis and Tolkien, he’s trying to distance himself from their genre. Check this out, straight from the FAQs on his website:

You once said that His Dark Materials is not a fantasy, but stark realism. What did you mean by that?

That comment got me into trouble with the fantasy people. What I mean by it was roughly this: that the story I was trying to write was about real people, not beings that don’t exist like elves or hobbits. Lyra and Will and the other characters are meant to be human beings like us, and the story is about a universal human experience, namely growing up. The ‘fantasy’ parts of the story were there as a picture of aspects of human nature, not as something alien and strange. For example, readers have told me that the daemons, which at first seem so utterly fantastic, soon become so familiar and essential a part of each character that they, the readers, feel as if they’ve got a daemon themselves. And my point is that they have, that we all have. It’s an aspect of our personality that we often overlook, but it’s there. that’s what I mean by realism: I was using the fantastical elements to say something that I thought was true about us and about our lives.

WTF?

I need to say that again.

WTF?!?!?

Does he really think he’s invented a new genre? Is he really that pissed at “fantasy” parts of stories? Who’s he kidding? His daemon characters aren’t real. He even says that. They are just as imaginary as elves and hobbits. They are part of a story that he believes relates to real life (starkly, as he puts it). Dude, give Lewis and Tolkien some slack! They at least believed they were doing the same thing. The hubris here is astounding.

Again, I have no problem with his desire to use fantasy as a tool to advance his concerns. He has that right in our country, and he has that obligation as an artist. But, hey, it IS fantasy! And that’s okay, Phil!

Philip Jose Farmer wrote an incredible sci-fi fantasy series revolving around Riverworld. To sum up, imagine for some unknown reason all humans that ever lived were resurrected on a single planet all at the same time. No one really dies and no one really knows why they are there. Yeah, this brief synopsis doesn’t do the plot lines justice. Bear with me, please.

Farmer’s plot is so fantastical that everyone knows it’s not supposed to be real. What’s wrong with that? That’s the point of fantasy. That doesn’t stop him from unwrapping all kinds of drama to reflect on the human condition. And Farmer is not pushing a religious agenda like Pullman accuses Lewis of doing.

In this instance, Pullman reminds me of “that guy” who easily grows agitated and ironically defends himself, “No I am NOT ANGRY. NO, I AM NOT SHOUTING!!!!”

Phil, you are a fantasy fiction writer. Yes your stuff is genre comparable to Lewis’. And yes, that’s okay. Get over it.

I read Dante’s Inferno when growing up and like most who were assigned it in school, we only read that first part and weren’t assigned the rest of the Divine Comedy. Alas I don’t remember many specifics so I’m curious to dust it off again. But this article I just read put a different spin on it and made me want to read the whole thing Dante wrote. Take this quote:

When it comes down to it, though, the real problem modern readers have with [third section about heaven] is the idea of heaven itself. T.S. Eliot noted almost 80 years ago that “we have (whether we know it or not) a prejudice against beatitude as material for poetry.”

Wow. As a poet I’ve often noticed how I enjoy mining for material in tension and conflict. I’ve even asked myself if I’m capable of writing something that conveys joy in ways that aren’t cheesy. It’s so easy being cheesy, after all. Erm….I rest my case :-)

Dante’s hell seems a more enjoyable read to me. His vision of heaven I assumed couldn’t be any where near as captivating. This article poked at that assumption and I hope it pokes at yours as well. Here’s another quote:

Dante’s hell flatters us: It allows us to stand in judgment, to delight in the friction between what we know and what the damned don’t; to see things, in other words, from the perspective of God. Paradiso, however, puts us back in our place. Though the poet labors mightily to “show the merest shadow/ of the bless’d kingdom stamped within my mind,” he never lets us forget that it is only a shadow. Once we follow him to heaven, it’s we who lack the inside information, we who stand on the wrong end of the irony. Previously we judged hell; now heaven judges us.

I love The Slate. I’m more and more impressed with them and especially their religious coverage. I’ve covered some other articles I’ve found interesting before, too. I hope they keep up this kind of grand cultural reflection. It gives news a good name.

I admire Radiohead. You may not. It’s actually becoming chic to “hate” them. I guess that’s inevitable in this day and age. Popularity is meant to be scorned. Anyway, for the lovers out there, you might find this article interesting.

David Byrne and Thom Yorke on the Real Value of Music

The article is kinda like buckshot hitting all kinds of topics. The first that hit me was from the included audio interview (on the sidebar) where Thom talked about their process to write “Videotape”. I love that song. Haunting. Rythmic. Fascinating lyrics. And apparently, not at all in the style that Thom wanted it done. The process they describe sounds familiar to me, and it’s good to see that even the “successful” wrestle over and over again with the details.

The second topic that hit me came toward the end. What’s all the fuss about: record labels suing people for sharing files, artists crying out about their interests, music moguls wincing at the thought of a changing business model (cause, you know, it worked so well for so long!). What about the value of the music itself? Read the article to get more context. Thom doesn’t answer the question and alas it’s only touched briefly, but it’s got me thinking. Must do some more processing…

I’m glad that Radiohead wasn’t taking their album release too seriously. Sure it was a big deal for a big name band to let fans name their own price for a download, but it really was a gimmick. An experimental and interesting gimmick, but just for kicks nonetheless.

Wow, this is a good day for my music. Another podcast also featured my music today in their lineup. Radio Orphans Podcast put Spit and Polish into their mix. It fit in well. :-)

They even gave me props at the end of the podcast, “What a great combination of electronic beats and the acoustic guitar, great songwriting. Yeah, he’s got a funny website: wavethenavel.com.”

Thanks guys! I’m honored. Great podcast, too.

Check out this episode to hear Spit and Polish along with other great music!

Paul of the Indy Music Sampler kindly contacted me via myspace about including Mystery Maiden on his weekly show. Sweet! I hadn’t heard of the podcast before, but I really dig it. Great selection of music. He seems pretty picky about choosing quality songs with quality songwriting…which makes his selection of my music a wise choice, no? Seriously, I am flattered. Thanks Paul!

Check out the podcast episode I am featured in. You can also subscribe to the podcast for regular indie music consumption.

Enjoy!