Steve Cooper's Personal Blog

I got my iPhone delivered Saturday morning, and I have been playing with it heavily all weekend. This is a post about my initial impressions of the phone.

Unlike a lot of the people who would have reviewed the iPhone, I’m not a big phone fan. My previous phone was a cheap pay-as-you-go device, and I’ve owned a palm PDA in the past. I’ve owned a couple of iPods, too. So I was expecting something which felt like, well, a phone, a PDA, and an iPod mashed into a single box.

But this is something else. The combination makes it a different class of device from any of its constituent parts. It is quite hard to articulate how it is different, but it certainly is.

It has started to teach me something about application design, for a start.

Take the feeling of things being integrated and automatic. The phone is sold with unlimited web connectivity – 3g and EDGE and wifi – and has gps, and it has a camera. Now, I would expect to be able to take a photo, and then be able to look at a map, and then browse the web a bit. What I wasn’t expecting is apps that write blog posts, take photos, automatically geocode them with information from the gps, and then upload them to my site and inject them into the blog post. That makes it really easy to share stuff you’ve seen.

I never used the camera on my old phone because it was difficult to get the photos off. Once they were off the phone and onto my PC I would have to upload them onto flickr or FTP. Then I would have to get that URL and copy it into the body of the blog post. It was all such a hassle that I never bothered. Now, I can do it right inside the wordpress app that was free on the app store. So I’m going to be doing it a lot more, I think.

Which brings me on to the app store. There are an awful lot of apps available, and they really are very good. I have long experience with palm, and that always had a good community of developers and products, but thos is a level above. The app store seems to make it worth developer’s time to write apps; I suppose because apple deal with the money and the front end (the app store itself) it is easier to get something written. The small number of different phones must make a big difference, too. A friend of mine used to write java apps for phones, and spent a great deal of his time just making sure his app worked on as many of the hundreds of popular phone models out there. Since there are only a handful of different models of iPhone, I imagine that’s a lot easier.

Anyway, enough for now. I am just delighted with this gizmo.

Clare’s birthday meal at Red Chilli went very well. We had ten people, and that meant that we could share. Tried a bunch of different things, had good conversation, then everyone came back to our place and we had cake and wine. Thanks to everyone who attended; it was a great night out.

An interesting site for all my gamer mates; [The Game Crafter](http://www.thegamecrafter.com/home) is a site which lets you design your own card and board games, and package them up for purchase. [Hacker News](http://news.ycombinator.com/) had it linked as ‘CafePress for boardgames.’

Anyway, the barrier to entry has dropped significantly for producing home-baked games.

As a kid, I always enjoyed going barefoot. I used to spend summer holidays walking around without shoes, and my feet used to toughen up over those six week breaks. But then when I went back to school and got back into smart shoes, my soles would soften up again and my barefoot pleasure was curtailed.

So when, on occasion, I’ve daydreamed about the perfect shoe, it hasn’t been about the latest Jimmy Choos, but something more like the Vibram Five Fingers, a shoe I’ve discovered on the web. What I’ve always wanted, but never seen before, is as minimal a pair of shoes as possible; something that’ll stop my feet being cut to ribbons, but let me feel like I’m not really wearing shoes.

So here’s the Five Fingers;


What we’re looking at is a shoe which is basically enough tough rubber to save your feet from dogshit and broken glass on the streets, with just enough structure to strap it onto your feet.

So they’ve got a couple of interesting points; some in terms of health and fitness, and some social.

Healthwise, there’s evidence that training shoes might be pretty bad for your feet, and the fivefingers gets you back to something close to nature. There’s some folks who believe that [Homo Sapiens evolved to be joggers](http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~skeleton/pdfs/2004e.pdf); (Harvard Uni, pdf)

> However, although humans are comparatively poor sprinters,
they also engage in a different type of running, endurance running
(ER), defined as running many kilometres over extended time
periods using aerobic metabolism. Although not extensively studied
in non-humans, ER is unique to humans among primates, and
uncommon among quadrupedal mammals other than social carnivores
(such as dogs and hyenas) and migratory ungulates (such as
wildebeest and horses.

What’s interesting, from a health and fitness point of view, is that if humans are designed to jog, then the feet should be a bloody well-adapted instrument, and shoes might just be screwing with their optimal comfort. And in fact, a lot of joggers suffer foot and leg injuries. Some of that probably comes from hard asphalt, and some comes from poor footware.

From a social point of view, I have a restrained optimism. There are social situations that call for shoes; in fact, it’s pretty much unheard of to go without shoes. So in situations which require shoes, these may well serve well enough to get by; I’m wondering if I can away with them in the office.

Somewhere in between health and social norms is gym etiquette. My gym, at least, doesn’t allow people to wander around barefoot. So these might serve people who want to run barefoot on the treatmill or do kicking martial arts training on the heavy bag.

Now, [Wired](http://www.wired.com) described them as [“Ugly as a bucket of vomit”](http://www.wired.com/reviews/product/pr_vibram_fivefingers_kso) but they, like me, were intrigued and gave it a decent review. Personally, I really like the look.

I think I’m going to put this on my shopping list as my next toy.

I’ve just gone to the nearby coffee bar for a lunchtime latte, and I was bitterly disappointed. Filth! So I won’t be buying latte there any more.

Instead, I’ll be making cafe au lait in the office. Cafe au lait isn’t just white coffee; it’s a 50-50 mix of hot milk and double-strength coffee, and bears a remarkable resemblance to a caffe latte, just without the foam cap. It’s much richer and more luxurious than a white coffee.

If if you have fresh coffee and fresh milk, you can make a very passable cafe au lait in minutes. Here’s the skinny.

##Equipment:

– a cafetiere.
– a microwave.
– a large mug or microwave-safe jug, to heat the milk.
– a smaller mug, to serve.

##Ingredients:

– milk.
– coffee ground for cafetiere.

##Method:

The steps are; start the coffee brewing, heat the milk, plunge the coffee, then mix.

_Start the coffee brewing:_ To make the coffee, boil a kettle of water and either let it cool for a minute, or put some cold water. Boiling water can scald the coffee. I know this sounds precious, but it makes a difference; you won’t taste as much bitterness in the coffee, and you should notice more of the flavours.

Now you’re going to make double-strength coffee. I use two heaped desert spoons in a cafetiere that will make three cups (two mugs) of coffee, but then I half-fill the cafetiere. Give it about three minutes to brew. During those three minutes, we’ll heat the milk.

_Heat the milk:_ Take your large mug and half-fill it with milk. Nuke it for about a minute and a half.

_Plunge and mix:_ When that’s done, your coffee should be about ready. Plunge the cafetiere, then mix the milk and coffee about 50-50. You will end up with something that looks like white coffee, with some wisps of white almost-foam floating on the surface. You’re done!

Drink in small amounts; it’s a rich drink and you don’t need huge quantities. Save yourself from bad industrial estate caffe latte!