OhRyan.ca

Ok. Cool…er Cuil. You’re not going to be a legitimate search engine until you strip raw HTML from your search results.

Apparently PETA has somehow managed to strong arm KFC Canada into adding a “Classic Vegetarian Sandwich” to their menu. I don’t really understand how PETA is in any sort of position to convince a multi-national like KFC to do something like this, but that’s beside the point. You can read PETA’s press release (including a buy-one-get-one-free coupon) here.

Being the early adoptor that I am, I just had to try one.

I’m not sure what to say…
It contains most – but not quite all – of the greasy goodness that I’ve been missing out on over the past 8 years or so. The taste and texture seems fairly authentic. I say fairly authentic because it reminds me more of generic frozen chicken burgers you’d buy at a supermarket, then the greasier, crispier type of burger you typically get at KFC. In fact, I’m almost certain KFC is using Schneiders: Meatless Chick’ n Burgers (which might explain why they’re only available in Canada). It would have been nice if KFC had given it a more KFC-like treatment.

Other than that, the “classic sandwich” itself – meatless or not – mighty disappointing, with only mayo and lettuce as toppings.  Next time I’m going to order it “gourmet-style” with tomatoes and cheese.

In Conclusion
The sandwich is pretty tasty. If you’re going to be heading to a KFC, I highly recommend it to vegetarians and non-vegetarians alike. With meatless alternatives like this there’s really no need to slaughter cute little innocent chickens for something that barely passes as a meal in the first place.

After waiting 10 hours for my phone to be activated, I’ve had my iPhone 3G now for just over 4 full days. I think this is more than enough time to write a quick review.

Data Usage:

Like every other nerd in the country, I was extremely disappointed and angry after Rogers released their initial price plans. My angry rantings even made Letter of The Day in the Winnipeg Free Press! The main point of contention was complete lack of an unlimited data plan, and egregiously overpriced data buckets (with 300MB/mo going for $30. ie. $100/GB).

Once Rogers Caved to public outcry I was back onboard.

So anyways, how much data have I actually used so far? According to the iPhones internal usage stats. I’ve sent 2MB and received 36.6MB over the celluar network, for a total of 38.6MB or 9.65MB/day. This puts me on track to use 289.5MB this month. Puting me under the original 300MB that we all found so offensive. Go figure. Even though I’m using less data I had thought, I like not having to worry about going over my limit.

Apps&GPS:

The apps make the iPhone. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to use another phone that doesn’t have an open-ish application platform.

My top 3 apps are probably facebook, twitterific and mobile flickr. It’s really cool to be able to take a picture from my phone and directly upload them to the web from my phone, inside the same interface. Jott and Evernote seem cool, but I haven’t had a reason to use them yet.

The fact that the apps know exactly where you are (down to 10meters!) has so much potential. I don’t know exactly what it might be, but there’s a killer app lurking in the shadows. That said, I have been a little underwhelmed by the location awareness. It’s just not quite fully … realized, like, “ok. I can see photos taken near by, so what…” Aside from that there are two other problems a) most of the data populating these apps is US-centric, so it’s completely useless to me; b) the attempts at location aware social networking depend on a certain threshold of users before they become interesting – because these apps are a niche within a niche, I don’t really see them taking off.

Bugs:

If the iPhone was a Microsoft product the blogs would be full of hate. I’ve come across a couple of major bugs so far! Namely:

• GPS stops working for no apparent reason. In the “maps” application the GPS locator just hangs and other apps are unable to pull GPS data – depending on how well the 3rd party app is written, this bug might or might not cause that app to crash. Though I can still continue to use all other features of the phone, if I want to use GPS again I have to reset it.
• Crashing! Apps – including official apple apps like Safari – just crash, randomly, for no apparent reason!
• Freezing! Yup, the phone has frozen on my once or twice.

The bugs haven’t been bad enough to frustrate me…yet. They’re more of a minor discomfort. And I’m pretty confident that Apple will push a firmware update soon.

Conclusion:

At the end of the day the iPhone is the nicest phone I’ve ever had. It’s definately worth the $200. Whether it’s worth the data plan remains to be seen.

CushyCMS is a new hosted Content Management System from Stateless Systems – the people who brought you bugMeNot.com, PDFMeNot.com and other similar services. It’s a dead simple CMS that requires no software install and no real programming knowledge. Found out about it via this Techcrunch post.

I don’t like to make judgements about things I haven’t actually tried, but this app is so simple that I think the video is all the explanation I need – I mean that as a compliment.

I’m a huge fan of simple solutions that solve specific problems really well and I think CushyCMS is a big step in the right direction. A lot of CMSes are extremely complicated to install, setup and do a poor job of actually managing content easily.  Cushy is simple to set up and simpler to use.

It does a few things that I can’t really call good or bad,  just “interesting.”
Hosting the CMS on a third party site definately makes it simpler to set up, but it has some obvious privacy concerns, you’re giving cushy access to your own site, not just setting up an account on an isolated service.
Using the CSS class property to define content areas is also interesting. I really want to say that this is a good solution to the complexity of implementing a templating language. I just can’t stomach the ideal of defining a CSS class that isn’t actually used to display a visual style, it’s just wrong; but I’ll admit, it is a pretty ingenious solution.

Even though I really really want to write a positive review about this app – I honestly think it’s a big step forward for simplicity – in it’s current itteration it has one serious flaw that makes it almost completely unusable. It is not at all possible to add any dynamic content! It’s only possible to edit existing HTML pages, with CushyCMS defined elements. The Administrator has to add individual pages with statically defined content areas. CushyCMS can’t even re-generate this content to create repeating elements within this HTML page. This means that Cushy can’t even be used to manage the even simplist newsletter, blog, photo gallery or photo gallery. Essentially, it’s only really good for managing what I would normally consider “static content areas,” things like about us, privacy policies, contact us pages, intro blurbs. For the most part this type of content doesn’t need to be updated often and therefore, doesn’t really need a management system.

Because of this, CushyCMS is almost nothing more than a glorified FTP client.

Stumbled across a tiny mysql shell – appropriately named ‘tinymy’ – a few months ago.

It’s quite a useful little bit of PHP code. Very lightweight and function interface and shell for MySQL. I use it whenever I need to verify the contents of a database table or test a couple of queries but don’t need a full install phpMyAdmin.

Thought I’d share.
Link