Pieces of G.

Portsmouth Breweries

Saturday was forecasted to be a crappy day here in Boston.  And they were right.  So Lynn, Amanda & I decided to head up to Portsmouth, New Hampshire for the early afternoon to check out their breweries.  Wise choice.

We first hit up Red Hook Brewery.  While it's on the outskirts of town, it has a great restaurant, so we were happy with our choice to go there first.  We started off with a huge plate of amazing nachos.  We couldn't tell if it was just that we were starved, but they were good.  They only got better when our 5-beer Samplers arrived.  Good sized portions of some really tasty beer for only $5.  The original ESB stood out, as did the Weiss beer.  Yum.  I had a turkey club that was served on a folded, grilled pita.  Different and delicious.  I can't resist a gift shop, so I bought a couple Red Hook pint glasses, a growler of the weiss, and a fun growler cozy to keep it nice and cold.

From there we made our way to the Portsmouth Brewery in town.  This felt more like a restaurant/bar in the middle of a fun town.  10-beer samplers were ordered.  Smaller glasses, but still a good bargain at $8.  We were able to taste some really great offerings, and some we didn't really care for (le chat noir - too coffee).  Again I couldn't resist the gift shop.  I bought a couple double bottles - hefeweizen and weiss - as well as a Built NY bag to hold them in.  Nice.

From there we strolled around Portsmouth.  The rain had let up, so we had a nice time perusing some of the shops.  Macro Polo is a fun store with a range of gag gifts to wallets and fun candy.  I bought a fun duct tape wallet that has portions that glow in the dark.  Sweet.

All in all, a nice little adventure.

Hidden Secrets of the iPhone Revealed

Okay, that's a bit too Penn & Telller perhaps, but there are some fun little nuggets somewhat buried in the iPhone that I've slowly been discovering.  I feel like in the past month especially I've dug up some good stuff.  I'll start off with the stuff that most folks know.  If you didn't, great.  If you did, I never said I was the great Houdini :)

Special Characters

We all know that you can find some add'l characters by tapping the 123 then the #+= button on the keyboard.  This provides us with some European currency characters, as well as the important hash tag for twitter.  But what about the eñe in spanish?  Or the upside down exclamation point for spanish?  If you simply tap and hold the "n" on the keyboard, the ñ will appear.  Same with the accented letter "e" or the exclamation point.  If you play around, you'll find other fun hidden characters lurking above the letters (ooh, m-dash!).

Keyboard Settings: Periods & Caps Lock

I'll admit it.  I never really got into the whole text speak.  Sure I LOL and might wonder WTF occasionally.  I am also a fan of FML - makes me laugh when I see it.   But I don't write "Wr U @? C U L8r."  With full keyboards, the inner English Major in me just can't stomach it.  I write things out.  I tend to still use proper sentence structure.  Call me fusty, but I can't help it.  

So I like that if I double-space after a word, I get a period.  That makes it nice and easy.  And while I'm not a big YELLER when it comes to texting, there are times when you want to write a bit in Caps.  And hitting the shift key each time is tedious.  There are settings for both these features.

Go to Settings>General>Keyboard.  Toggle "Enable Caps Lock" and "'.' Shortcut" to On.  Now when you double-space after a word, the period pops in.  And if you quickly double-tap the shift key, it'll turn blue and Caps Lock is on.  Pretty nifty.

Contacts View

I mentioned I'm a little old-fashioned.  I can also be a little OCD too.  I have set up my iPhone Contacts to sync with my Google Contacts.  I like having a back-up and over-air syncing is still pretty cool to me.  But the other day I realized I had 6 more contacts in my iPhone than I did in my Google Contacts.  Quite frankly, I'm still confused how this happened.  But to make matters worse, Google Contacts are sorted by first name.  My iPhone Contacts were sorted by last name.  Trying to eyeball over 400 contacts is tough enough, but when the lists aren't apples to apples, it's even harder.  Enter Settings.  Settings>Mail, Contacts, Calendar.  If you scroll to the Contacts section (near the bottom), you'll see that you can change both the Sort Order and Display Order.  While I prefer to sort by last name, it's nice to be able to toggle this when comparing to Google.  I'm sure there are other benefits to this toggle as well.

Screenshot
I'd seen plenty of people showing their Weather app image on Facebook to indicate a crappy/fantastic week of weather ahead.  I just presumed they had purchased some app that enabled this.  Nope.  The iPhone has a built-in screenshot feature.  Which I think is pretty cool. When you have what you want on your screen, simply push the top button and the bottom home button on your iPhone quickly at the same time.  The screen will quickly fade and come back.  That image is now saved in your Photos.  Pretty nifty.  It is great when you happen to be in 1st place in foursquare or something and you might want to share that with your friends :)

I heard at&t will finally be supporting the updated MMS features on September 25th.  I'm looking forward to that.  I'll be happy if I never see the following screen againg - scribbling down those ridiculous message ids and passwords - only to open a picture of someone's dog.  

Any hidden secrets that you'd like to share?

foursquare

I was skeptical about the iPhone app foursquare when I first signed on.  I felt like I'd signed onto this before in various incarnations.  And you hope your friends will sign on and that things will take off.  And they never do.

But the advantage of foursquare is that you can "play" against strangers.  And you can play against yourself and earn "badges".  So even if you don't have a full sampling of friends to follow, you can still have fun.  And I think that's why it will survive.  You can have some fun while you convince your friends to sign up - so you don't leave the service before your friends have checked it out.

Boston seems to be lagging behind other cities that have embraced foursquare.  But slowly but surely, things seem to be picking up.  Before I could pretty easily become Mayor of a place.  The other day I was ousted.  I was sad for a second, but then realized that it meant things were picking up - and that was a good thing.

Crazy August

Since I work two jobs during the summer, I tend to be busy all the time.  Thankfully, that's the way I prefer it.  I have quite a few friends that require down time to recuperate.  I do not.  Can I handle it when I have some time to myself?  I guess so.  Sometimes it makes me anxious.  But mostly 'cause I like to be on the go and don't want to think I'm missing out on something.  I'm a youngest - what can I say?

But there are some times when I feel a little overwhelmed.  Ironically, it's not the "I've got so much going on today!" moments that bother me.  Instead, it's when I look forward in my calendar a couple of weeks and I have NO time to squeeze things in.  I love being busy, but I don't like when I don't have some free space.  Again, one would think this because of being over-committed or something.  Instead, it's because I'm afraid someone is going to want to do something and I won't have the time.  And I realize that my busy schedule comes off a little crazy to people.   When I say, "I could do the first week in Sept" I think people might think I'm downgrading them.  I am not.  I truly just do my best to book up my calendar.

Which brings me to this month...

The first weekend brought me to Montreal for a softball tournament.  Took Friday off to drive up and drove back late on Sunday.  Awesome time.  We came in third.  I met some cool guys and it was great.

Monday I had down time.  I freaked fot a bit, but realized I needed to do laundry and it wasn't so bad.

Tuesday I had a work dinner and then met up with Stripes and Hooper after that.  Had a late Boozeday Tuesday with Hooper - we seem to bring out the boozy in each other.  But all is good when you wake up for work.

Wednesday and last night MGMT and Paul McCartney were playing at Fenway.  Not very lucrative, but I got to see a Beatle, so that was pretty cool.

Tonight, dinner/drinks with Jill & M.E.

Okay, i don't need to go into the minutiae - maybe it's too late.

I have Sox in town M-W of next week, then I'm off to Billyburg VA for nearly a week.  Couple nights off, then the Yankees/White Sox/Toronto are in town.  Which brings me to the 31st.  one more day, one more night of activity...

A much-needed massage.  Perfection.

Hidden Tracks - Trimming the Fat

I think the idea of hidden tracks on albums is interesting.  When you see a song come on your iPod and it's over 8 minutes long, you have a strong suspicion that you should wait during the pause around 4 minutes for some sort of gem.  And it's usually there.  In fact, so-called Hidden Tracks are often labeled on the track listing.

But what happens when you really like the hidden track, but perhaps you don't want to listen to another song for 4 minutes before reaching it?  Case in point.  I was watching Grey's Anatomy and during one of their classic montage moments, I liked the song that was playing.  Not sure if it's on purpose, but Grey's does an AMAZING job of eliminating dialog just long enough to Shazam many of their songs.  Anyway, Shazam tells me it's a Hidden Track of Brandi Carlile - Again Today/Hiding My Heart from The Story.  Lucky day - I own that album!

So I check it out and realize I like the Hiding My Heart song.  Great.  But when I'm in the car, I can't fast-forward to that song.  Annoying.

Ah ha.  There is a solution.

First you need to find the track on your hard drive.  If you go into iTunes you can right-click a song and have it show you where the file is.  Once there, you'll want to duplicate the file - so you can have the first-half song and the second-half song.  Go back into iTunes and select the first version of the song.  Then select Get Info.  This brings up a host of options.  You want to adjust the Start Time and End Time of the song.  For the first one, leave the Start Time alone, but adjust the End Time to where the first song cuts off.  For the other file, do the same, but adjust the Start Time to when the 2nd songs starts up.  You will want to rename the second song so you don't have two different songs with the same name.

Voila.  Now when you sync, you'll have two songs acting as two songs.  Brilliant.