Tag Archives: iWone

Pleasant Mobile App: Guidebook

I’m going to a conference this weekend, so I’ve been preplanning all my time slots (double- and triple-booked, of course, as I do). My last conference was DragonCon, and it used a DragonCon-branded mobile app that was built using Core-Apps’ EventLink and FollowMe platforms. It really struggled to keep up with the heft of DragonCon–every load of or task-switch to the app checked the servers for event info and friends’ statuses, I don’t think Twitter postings worked, and the app crashed pretty frequently on my iPhone 4, particularly when network conditions were bad.

I really, really hope DragonCon switches to Guidebook this year.

The conference this weekend is much smaller than DragonCon, but Guidebook is already a much smoother experience just for preplanning. The UI is clean and unbranded by the con itself, I can have multiple cons (or museums, or schools, or associations) in my guidebook without having to have separate apps for each. It’s quick and easy to see my personal schedule, and the app is fast and feels lightweight.

I want to see more apps this cleanly designed.

Flaky Friday (F)Links

I’m now fully in the flaky phase of the tattoo process, and am losing large black/grey flakes at a pleasantly quick rate.

It’s really, really hard not to encourage the process, though, especially when (squick alert!) attached flakes are catching on my shirt at work.

Grody!

Sleeping has been rough since Saturday. When it was all raw and fresh, it just (ha!) hurt badly. Once it dried out, it hurt to do anything that stretched the skin, like lie on my stomach. Or lie on my side. Or relax my shoulder.

The winning solution for sleep so far is to use a small pillow under the front of my tattoo’d shoulder so I can sorta sleep on my stomach and keep the shoulder propped up. It’s not unlike my sleep solution for when I first hurt my shoulder, except that was on my back.

An even better solution (thanks, Angi!) was to switch from using lotion to using vitamin E oil. So soothing. Difficult to avoid overuse, though.

I’ve been conflicted between wanting all this to be over with–to just have a damn tattoo already–and enjoying the strangeness of what’s happening. Now that the pain’s mostly abated, I’m feeling more in-the-moment.

Anyway, in the midst of all of this, I’ve finally caught up on some innernet reading:
Continue reading Flaky Friday (F)Links →

Wednesday Weekly Winkage

Not, of course, limited to Wednesdays. Today just happens to be one. …Barely.

I shall open with a video of Nayna, my belly dance instructor, from a couple of months ago:

I’m somewhere off to the left, wishing I’d brought my own camera. This was after class, so I don’t feel bad about watching my instructor dance instead of dancing myself.

Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place

There’s no particular theme to this week’s surfing, but there are some pretty pictures and good reads here.

  • The problem with waste – Note that the list of not-recommended screenings include things like screening for prostate cancer in men older than 75 or colon cancer in folks above 85. I glanced through the USPSTF's procedure manual, and it looks like they're taking into account a variety of factors (age, gender, race, etc.), but their information is only as good as the studies they're pulling from. How worried should we be about researchers' biases (ageism being the first that comes to mind)?

    "So we’re confronted with a set of screening recommendations with excellent evidence that aren’t paid for, and a list of screening tests that are recommended against that are paid for. That’s how you wind up with a system that (1) costs too much and (2) has sub-optimal quality. You pay for stuff that doesn’t clearly work and don’t pay for stuff that does."

  • The Tiny Life , Archive » E.D.G.E. – This is one of the prettier tiny houses I've seen, and the layout is simple but complete. I'm not sure how I'd finagle office space in there without taking over the living/dining/social area. Continue reading Weekly Linkage: All Over the Place →

Weekly Linkage: Politics, Money, and Some Music

The original posting of this was horribly borked. I may be switching link-posting plugins.

Can I have this woman as my Rep? (Courtesy of Prometheus 6.)


Continue reading Weekly Linkage: Politics, Money, and Some Music →