Ahlschwede Blog

Peer Pressured

If TR, John, and Aaron all think writing a novel in a month is a good idea it must be! Count me in and brace yourself for the awesomeness that ensues when the guy who can't even keep his blog up to date and his emails answered in a timely manner tries to write a whole novel in Just. One. Month.

Omaha Music in Minnesota

Moving to Minnesota, I was surprised at how much I missed my preferred Omaha radio station, 89.7 The River. The River is a college station that's gone pro, but still supports itself with fund-drives in addition to advertising. It's got a distinctive voice in its programming.

Sad to say, I'm fairly disappointed by everything on the radio here except for their Public Radio stations, which, admittedly, are the best Public Radio stations I've ever heard. So, getting a little tired of listening to Public Broadcasting 24/7, I decided to start make iMixes of The River's weekly playlists. For those of you with iTunes the here are playlists for the first week of October, and a playlist from the Summer of 2007.

Eric's Visit

Last weekend my friend Eric came to visit me up here in Rochester, MN. Eric, his cousin Jennie who also lives here, and I spent Saturday hiking around Quarry Hills park.

Then on Sunday we went up to St. Paul to see my friend Tom at the FallCon comic book convention. He was there promoting Captain Spectre and his work on The Spider for Moonstone Books. We got there just in time to see him on a panel for  "Desperate Artists". They look pretty desperate, don't they?

15 lbs of Adobe

 

A big box of user manuals for Adobe's Creative Suite 3 was waiting for me when I got home today. I can't speak for their quality yet, but on a cost/pound basis I feel like I got a good deal.

 

iPhone probably doesn't run Flash

Ars Technica has posted that the iPhone definitly doesn't use an Intel CPU. Contrary to a lot of speculation that ensued from Jobs saying that the iPhone "runs OS X", this probably means the iPhone's browser won't run Flash. Flash is known to have a good number of hand coded assembly optimizations.

In a lot of ways it makes sense to leave Flash off,  Flash video (via YouTube and on the television network websites) compete directly with iTunes. However, they don't want to advertise this, because the fact that it isn't compatible with YouTube and MySpace really kills the device for the younger market.

Watching the keynote I was looking for any sign that it did run Flash. Having read the transcript, I knew there was one place I would get an answer - on the Amazon homepage where they currently have Flash on the right side of the page. What happened when Jobs went to Amazon? He  zoomed in on the left side of the page immediatly (away from the Flash element on the right) and navigated to the next page before the homepage was done loading. Why would he do that if he wasn't trying to avoid showing us that Flash didn't work?

This isn't to say that Flash won't ultimatly ship on the device; it's still a number of months before the iPhone ships, but it's probably not working on it as of right now.

Update: David Pogue confirms that the iPhone doesn't run Flash.

On Notice!

John's latest post inspired me to make this graphic, and for that... he's On Notice!

Create your own.

James Makes Games

6:40 AM, and I just got done posting the first game for my new project - James Makes Games. I'm making Flash games for the Wii (accessible via the Opera Browser), and my first one that's complete enough to post is Daily Sudoku - which I've posted at the catchy URL: Wiidoku.com. I still have a bunch more I want to do with that title, but it's nice to get it out there. (If you're viewing this on a PC the interface and size might seem a little weird - I need to make a version better suited for a PC later, right now I think it looks good on the Wii.)

The kanji on the icon is what I've been lead to believe is the kanji for "kanji" --- if I've been lead astray, please speak up!

It's... A New Car!

My old car finally shuffled off the mortal coil a couple weeks ago, and today I replaced it with this...

A 2006 Mustang! Sweet. (If I do say so myself.)

Suggestions for custom plates would be appreciated, you can check for availability here. The form lets you input 8 characters, but you can only have 8 if one is a space, otherwise it's 7.

What, no Ackbar?

Sadly, unlike some people, I don't look like Keanu Reeves or America's Sweetheart, Larry King.

Vox Blog

So, TypePad just sent me an invite to Vox their new blog software with extra social software aspect and a more Ajaxy feel, and I signed up. Check it out, but I'm not necessarily planning on updating it any more or less than here, just testing the waters.

http://jamesahlschwede.vox.com/