Sky's Blog

The ways I choose to get regular exercise are hiking and biking. I never could stand “going to the gym” and doing an indoor workout. It always seemed to me that there was little point in getting in the car, driving somewhere, parking, going inside to exercise on machines, getting all sweaty, then back in the car, and driving home again. And running was always hard on my feet and knees, so although I did run for a few years (up and down San Francisco hills), it didn’t really last.

I find that hiking 10+ miles with a 20-lb pack gives me an opportunity to clear my mind for 3 hours, see some of the city (or the surrounding territory), work off a thousand or so calories, take a few interesting photos, and see people doing a lot of silly things.

Read more about that iPhone app EveryTrail…

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I was amused and delighted by the topic, but a schedule conflict prevented me from attending a meeting at the Institute For The Future (IFTF) about “the quantified self” a month ago. The topic, however, is completely intriguing to me as I find my life increasingly digitized – as if it weren’t already. (See The Quantified Self Group.)

I picked up an iPhone app called EveryTrail, and have been testing it against measured walking/running courses all weekend, and also tried to use it to measure a walk from my house to the Ferry Building and back on Sunday (it was way off due to GPS inaccuracies in the skyscraper canyons of downtown San Francisco, but it’s spot-on when the GPS satellites are unobstructed, such as on the waterfront).

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It’s been a whole month since I wrote anything in my blog? What happened? (Or rather, what did not happen?)

Well, let’s just blame it on Twitter. Or on the new iPhone. Or on two clients wanting 70-hour weeks from me all month. Or on processing 4 hours of teacher training videos.

Nah, let’s just blame it on Twitter.

Twitter seems to have taken a big bite out of my blogging energy lately.

I primarily use Twitteriffic on my iPhone to both follow and to create new tweets, but I also love Twitterfox (a plug-in for the FIreFox browser) if I’m at a computer (it just pops up a little panel showing the most recents, and lets me quickly twipe a new tweet whenever I feel the need.

But why do I even bother with Twitter? – because I get stoked with a dozen new ideas every day! In the old days, “kids” used Twitter to vacuously and narcissistically communicate “I’m having breakfast” or “I’m on the bus” or “I’m at the coffee shop.” But somehow a large number of busy people realized that not only was this a waste of a good communication medium, but something better could actually be done with it – and now what we do is communicate concepts, places, activities and ideas of interest to our group. Someone might be experiencing writer’s block and need inspiration and put out a call for help that explains the concept she’s working on, and get back a half dozen interesting tangential ideas! Another might have returned from a trip and posted photos – and will put up a tweet pointing to the photos. Someone else will be at a conference and will tweet about each speaker’s primary concept.

You have to carefully pick who you “follow” (whose tweets you subscribe to) on Twitter, but once you have your list tuned well, you have constructed a channel that lets you really stay in touch with the ideas and activities that will surface as blog posts and news in the next 24 to 48 hours. And you get a real boost from knowing what your friends and colleagues are working on and thinking about.

Automattic released their WordPress app for the iPhone this week. Since I’m fairly mobile, I wanted to try it out.

For offline blogging from a laptop computer, I already use Ecto, which gives me substantial freedom in that I can create new posts even when not connected to the net. Having the ability to write on the iPhone whether online or off might be fun.

My first impression is that this tool will work fine as long as you don’t want to include any fotmatting, because it’s really a pain, on the iPhone’s touchscreen keyboard to get to the < and > characters – it requires several taps for each. So it’s probably only viable for text with a photo or two interspersed. For many people that’ll be OK, but it’ll be somewhat limiting for me.

I am, however, finding that a one-finger typing method while allowing the phone to correct the typos really is quite excellent! And the “fatter” I make each tap on the screen, the more accurate the algorithm seems to be.

I’ve had the app just quit out from under me several times, but I haven’t lost any data, so it’s inconvenient but not fatal. And I know it will get better with the next version.

This app looks like a keeper.