This wasn't posted last week? At least I got to update something.
Big Mike is still alive and well, it seems. To prove it, last Wednesday he rounded up the gang for dinner and drinks at Scotty's Brewhouse. It's one of the many places that are essentially B-Town staples but which I had never visited. The lady friend came out, too, meeting kaizokunoou for the first time. The beer selection wasn't bad (they have a beer completion challenge, too) and the food was actually pretty good if a bit expensive. It made for another late night this week, but it was good times.
There was a simultaneous break and return to tradition as I hit Yogi's last night. Back when I first started going there and working on my first pass at the Century Club, Thursday was the go-to day. Since that ended, I stopped going, especially after the departure of our usual bartender. These days, I know most of the folks back there, so any night is fine. I've just made it a habit to go on Tuesdays and Sundays with no real need for a third night. And Mondays when there is a special launch. Founders had the last two such events with their Imperial Stout and Kentucky Breakfast Stout tapped at 6pm on their respective launches. Tonight Bells gets that distinction. However, rather than launching at a sane 6pm or "at open" like most of their releases go, Oberon waits until midnight. I'm not going to force myself to that one, for sure. However, there is a meeting tomorrow morning that takes place in town. The folks I've talked to so far are saying that I should stay in town until then, meaning I don't have to drag my ass out of bed an an ungodly hour of the morning. I'll be conferring with my supervisor(s) and both timekeeping departments to plot my course of action. Should that work out the way I've been told so far, a midnight launch might actually be doable.
An article on one of the blogs I read discusses push notifications on mobile phones. The author's perspective is flavored by his experience with iOS, the iPhone operating system, which received that functionality two years after its initial release and were noted as a weakness of the OS prior. Push notifications allow an application that is not running in the foreground to alert the user to certain activities, usually selectable and always able to decline, without needing to open that app. The author disabled the feature for all apps on his phone and found he didn't miss anything. I'm more convinced it isn't the idea of push notifications, rather the implementation that is the cause. For everything that iOS does right, the disruptive and often uninformative pop-up notification system is among the worst every conceived. Like the much reviled web-ads of yesteryear, these messages show up in a box front and center on the screen, interrupting whatever you are doing at the time. The box can only display one item at a time, so if you have several updates on Facebook, for instance, you have to tap through them one by one. Any app can utilize them, though they do have to obtain the user's permission first. Some apps have infrequent alerts and may certainly benefit from these instant updates, but others can get too intrusive. Compare that, though, with an OS like Android. Rather than a text box, it uses the already present status bar at the top of the screen, assigning different apps/events with their own icon. For a received message, it will even display the text as it arrives before remaining as an icon with any others that have taken up residence. Dragging down the status bar reveals a list of each notice with details for certain ones (subjects of emails, install updates, SMS contents). This implementation is far less intrusive, far easier to deal with when there are multiple alerts, and most of the time far more useful.
There was a simultaneous break and return to tradition as I hit Yogi's last night. Back when I first started going there and working on my first pass at the Century Club, Thursday was the go-to day. Since that ended, I stopped going, especially after the departure of our usual bartender. These days, I know most of the folks back there, so any night is fine. I've just made it a habit to go on Tuesdays and Sundays with no real need for a third night. And Mondays when there is a special launch. Founders had the last two such events with their Imperial Stout and Kentucky Breakfast Stout tapped at 6pm on their respective launches. Tonight Bells gets that distinction. However, rather than launching at a sane 6pm or "at open" like most of their releases go, Oberon waits until midnight. I'm not going to force myself to that one, for sure. However, there is a meeting tomorrow morning that takes place in town. The folks I've talked to so far are saying that I should stay in town until then, meaning I don't have to drag my ass out of bed an an ungodly hour of the morning. I'll be conferring with my supervisor(s) and both timekeeping departments to plot my course of action. Should that work out the way I've been told so far, a midnight launch might actually be doable.
An article on one of the blogs I read discusses push notifications on mobile phones. The author's perspective is flavored by his experience with iOS, the iPhone operating system, which received that functionality two years after its initial release and were noted as a weakness of the OS prior. Push notifications allow an application that is not running in the foreground to alert the user to certain activities, usually selectable and always able to decline, without needing to open that app. The author disabled the feature for all apps on his phone and found he didn't miss anything. I'm more convinced it isn't the idea of push notifications, rather the implementation that is the cause. For everything that iOS does right, the disruptive and often uninformative pop-up notification system is among the worst every conceived. Like the much reviled web-ads of yesteryear, these messages show up in a box front and center on the screen, interrupting whatever you are doing at the time. The box can only display one item at a time, so if you have several updates on Facebook, for instance, you have to tap through them one by one. Any app can utilize them, though they do have to obtain the user's permission first. Some apps have infrequent alerts and may certainly benefit from these instant updates, but others can get too intrusive. Compare that, though, with an OS like Android. Rather than a text box, it uses the already present status bar at the top of the screen, assigning different apps/events with their own icon. For a received message, it will even display the text as it arrives before remaining as an icon with any others that have taken up residence. Dragging down the status bar reveals a list of each notice with details for certain ones (subjects of emails, install updates, SMS contents). This implementation is far less intrusive, far easier to deal with when there are multiple alerts, and most of the time far more useful.