Total, utter bewilderment. You find some sources, start reading, and tinkering and experimenting, and some of the bewilderment seems to lift, only to come back in spades when you run up against a scenario you didn’t anticipate, or a major technicality which you’d overlooked. It can be frustrating; it can become a huge time-sink. I absolutely love it.

I’m talking about jumping feet-first into a new area of knowledge or expertise, and trying to “climb your way up” through torrents of information, advice and opinion so that you build your own “world view” of the domain in question and possibly, if you invest the right time in the right places, become an expert (or at least a competent amateur) in the field in question.

I think most people have done it at least once in their lives - if only when studying at university or learning a trade. I can immediately think of 3 times that I’ve done it - getting used to the realm of literary criticism at UCL, first learning my way around the internet, perl and linux around 1998, and properly acquainting myself with the rich and impossibly complicated world of independent music, starting last year.

The reason I’m writing about this feeling now is that I’ve just embarked on a new “problem domain” - money.

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I saw the idea for Mojito cupcakes a couple of months ago on Slashfood, and was intrigued immediately, but didn’t have time to bake anything back then. A friend’s birthday a few weekends back seemed like the perfect opportunity to try out the idea, so I took a look again at VeganYumYum’s original page on the subject.

There were a couple of problems with just following the recipe, though. Firstly, VeganYumYum’s page wasn’t so much a recipe as a suggested modification to a recipe - specifically one from the book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World, which I don’t have. In any case, trying to follow a recipe whilst also following suggested modifications is kinda tricky (as we discovered). The original recipe was also vegan. Now, I have no real problem with vegan food, but I find Soy Milk to be kinda revolting, and on the rare occasions that I like to bake, I’m a bit of a traditionalist about it. I may try the vegan cupcake thing in future, but not this time around.

So the end result was that we found a “Full fat” Vanilla cupcake recipe and set about modifying it according to the Mojito idea.

What follows is a single recipe which (eventually) worked.

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Okay, so that title’s a little cruel and, yes, this is mainly filler to cover up the fact that I haven’t finished any of the pieces I mentioned previously. Soon, I promise… (again)

But anyhoo…

For quite a while, I was a big fan of Mark Morford’s SF Chronicle column. The writing was alternately breezy and frenetic, and each piece generally contained a kernel of truth or outrage which was… resonant.

Over the past year or so, though, the quality dropped. His politically-leaning pieces became directionless rants, and more and more columns were taken up with meandering rambles about consumer technology or science news.

At points, the only fun left was to play “spot the ‘Bush-ravaged’”, scanning each column to see how he’d managed to work that horribly over-used phrase of his into a subject completely divorced from Republican politics.

Today’s piece, however, is something of a return to Morford of old. It’s a little bit honest, a little bit brutal and a little bit sweet. It also contains the killer line

…whose biological clock is ticking like Dick Cheney’s pacemaker in a gay fetish dungeon…

…which made me accidentally snort tea this morning.

Since the column in question was apparently prompted by his newly single status, the headline here speaks for itself.

Okay, so I broke. It took twelve days, but in the end I just couldn’t wait any longer to get an iPhone into my life.

I’d rationalised against it for weeks before launch - “the keyboard looks like it needs some work”; “never buy 1st Gen Apple hardware”; “wait for 3G instead of EDGE”. But this thing seemed truly amazing - a whole new experience as far as mobile devices are concerned. Ultimately, I wanted in on the ground floor.

So I’m slightly late to the party, and possibly not adding much at this point (I really haven’t scanned the interblogwebnet to see what others are saying about their phones), but I wanted to write down some first impressions, partly for my own later reference, partly for any of the 5 readers of this site who might not have got their hands on an actual iPhone yet.

Getting the boring stuff out of the way first, yes, it’s amazing. The UI is fluid and responsive - the original MacWorld demo and the existent tutorials aren’t gussied up to make it look any better; it really works like that. It is, in short, a thing of utter beauty, and takes mobile usability to a completely different level.

There are several worries I had which have proved unfounded so far.

Battery life seems good. I’ve been using the phone exhaustively (hey, it’s a new toy) and haven’t run into any “argh, battery low” moments yet. We’ll see how it holds out in the long term.

The EDGE thing is less annoying than I thought it would be - the slight speed problems of the connection are more than made up for by the ease-of-navigation around networked content.

The keyboard is perfectly usable after about an hour of practice. In some ways tactile feedback would be nice, but… I’ve never found the teeny-tiny button keyboards on any smartphones to be any better.

All in all, if I was at Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola or Samsung right now I’d be sick as a dog.

That said, here’s the problem with being Apple. Their products are often so very nearly perfect. You can tell that a lot of very dedicated people have spent a lot of time applying a breathtaking eye for detail. The downside of this is that the smallest details which are forgotten (and there will always be a few) stand out so much more.

So, with the basic assumption that the iPhone is jaw-dropping, here are the niggles I’ve found in the first few days…

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*ahem*

So, this site fell a bit quiet again over the last… oooh, I dunno, nearly 8 months. Partly, that’s because I didn’t have much to write about, and (stubborn as I am), I refuse to contribute to the ever-expanding web of wiffle just so that my RSS feed contains some more entries.

But it’s also telling that the last blog post just about coincides with the time that I started planning the infrastructure needed to take Flickr from a 1-language interface to 8, a roller-coaster ride of a project which swallowed a lot of my thought-space and eventually time (I was working 16-18 hour days for the last 3 weeks), but which is finally done, and has been live to the world for a whole month now.

I’m proud to have done that, the minor glitches and post-launch issues (which won’t be discussed here, because this is my personal site) aside.

Immediately post-launch I was whisked away on a whirlwind tour (Paris for 24 hours, London for 5 days, Montreal for 3) during which I lost my luggage, had my camera and credit-card stolen, and spent a great deal of the scant “downtime” in interminable conference calls.

I wound up back in the Bay Area about 3 weeks ago seriously exhausted and disoriented, and have been slowly pulling my life back together since then. Which is where we come to this l’il update, and the (undoubtedly sporadic and random) resumption of me posting here.

In short, I’m back, baby!

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