Brian @ Wongside

That didn’t take too long.  Within an hour after the WWDC keynote was finished, Apple updated their website to advertise the brand-new iPhone 3G:

My friend Andrew introduced me to this website. You’ll only have an appreciation for Goosh.org if you’re kinda geeky and have an appreciation for a Unix shell-like environment. Pretty creative, and definitely geeky.

Just type your search query at the command line prompt. As the instructions indicate, you can also type “h” or “help” to get help.

A bit like Unix, it is slightly case sensitive. The menu options are case sensitive, so “h” is not the same as “H” and “help” isn’t the same as “Help,” but the search terms are based on Google’s engine, so they are not case sensitive. So when searching for “wongside” turns up the same results as for “Wongside.”

Unfortunately, Steve Jobs no longer does live webcasts of WWDC. So I’ll be relegated to hitting F5 on my keyboard while watching this page on Ars Technica. Come on Steve! Give us something to celebrate!

Just for the record, this is what the Apple Homepage looked like this morning.

Hopefully there will be an update later today.

WWDC, the Apple Worldwide Developers conference is tomorrow. I can’t wait. The rumor mill has been spilling thoughts of a 3G iPhone, so I’m excited to see what they release. Yay!

I’m off to the Young Adult Retreat this evening. We’re headed off to Camp Hammer, in the Santa Cruz mountains. I’m really excited about getting away this weekend. Work hasn’t been so great, so this should be fun!

So I spent a lot of time yesterday looking at ME-50s to purchase. I looked all over Ebay, Guitar Center, Amazon, Musician’s Friend, and even Craigslist.

For a while I even considered the Boss ME-20 because it’s about $100 cheaper. But when I found out that the ME-50 has tap tempo and the ME-20 doesn’t, I nixed that idea. Per the advice of my friend Ryan, I decided that if I ever got a delay pedal, the one feature it would have to have is a tap tempo.

Fortunately, for me I found a guy who is selling his here in the Bay Area. It was listed on his Craigslist post as used for $200 but negotiable.

He’s all the way up in Pleasant Hill, which is kinda far. So I asked him if it would be possible to reduce the price because of the exorbitant cost of gas ($4.33 at my local Shell, and $4.47 at the Chevron). I offered $150, and he bit, so now I’m off to Pleasant Hill to pick up an ME-50 effects pedal.

See ya when I get back.

I’ve been thinking about getting one of these nifty effects pedals for the last couple of weeks. I’m on the worship team for the ALCF Young Adult Retreat this weekend, and we don’t have any effects to use on the electric guitar. Normally, we’d use the effects available at church, but they’re going to need them in the High School group on Sunday, so we really can’t borrow them.

The biggest hurdle is that they’re pretty expensive. Musician’s Friend has them for about $300. Amazon has it for about $230, but that’s from a random user I don’t know at all.

So we’ll see. That’s a lot of money to be spending right now.

Wikia Search is a new wiki-style website brought to us by the same people behind Wikipedia. It looks pretty cool because the results are all user generated, and updateable in real time. Type in a search term like “Wongside” and there aren’t too many results. But this morning, I added the main page of Wongside.com to the list of search results.

The results can be updated, changed, annotated, promoted, demoted, etc. all by the site’s users. Of course, since the site is entirely user generated and policed, there is potential for abuse, but I think the concept is pretty cool. Though Wikipedia isn’t always accurate, for the most part, the information generated by the users is good. So I’m hopeful that Wikia Search will be successful, even if it doesn’t overcome Google as the search king.

Ars Technica has an article on a relatively new company called Backblaze that intends to make backing up one’ files easy and transparent.

I think the concept is really cool, and great for people who don’t want to deal with the hassle of backing up their machines with DVDs or tape. Everyone knows that’s a pain. I like the fact that they do versioning of your files, keeping daily and weekly versions of your files. This means that if data was inadvertently erased last week, I could still go back and get a prior version without losing my data.

I also like the idea that it’s only $5/month, for unlimited storage. That seems pretty reasonable to me. I also think their restore options are pretty cool. You can download files directly from the website for free, or you can pay to have DVDs or a USB hard drive mailed to you. Sounds pretty good to me.

Right now, it’s invitation only because it’s still in beta, but I’m excited about the possibilities.