for (pluginLib in pluginLibDirs) {
        fileset(dir: pluginLib.file.absolutePath){
            include(name:"**/*.jar")
            include(name:"**/*.zip")
        }
    }

You can read my ramblings about what happened here, but when someone told me I didn’t read the ToS, they really didn’t read it either. Not only does it say nothing about the age 13 being a magic number, but rather this line got to me:

2.3 You may not use the Services and may not accept the Terms if (a) you are not of legal age to form a binding contract with Google

In the US, that’s the Age of Majority or usually, 18. So, according to the ToS from Google, if you are under 18, you cannot use google search, YouTube, Android, etc…

For the record, my son has my consent to use the non-COPPA compliant gmail service. It blocks a lot of spam I don’t want him to get. At the least, I want him to get copies of the email is sent/received off of gmail servers.

I can’t say how angry this gets me. No notice, just ‘account disabled’.

Some bias I have that will no doubt color my impression of the services include that it has to work on my Linux computers and android phones. If I have to use windows or mac, it won’t work for me.  The following list is done in order in which I discovered the services, starting from what is hardly considered ‘cloud service’ now-a-days, to the real thing.

mp3.com (original site, defunct) The old site was a great way to find music, download and listen to it. I was able to find new artists such as Sarah Fimm. The current version of the site is useless to me. I have to mention the old one because it was really the first way I was able to find music online. Its not a ‘cloud service’ in that I couldn’t upload my music to it. But I do miss them.

Last.fm (formally scrobbler) was my first real use of online music. It logged what I listened to, and made suggestions of other music from friends I were connected to, or ‘neighbors’. Neighbors were people with similar music style, and I could find other bands to listen to. It didn’t work that well for me at first, but did expose me to new music so I stuck with it. Its not a way to manage my own music files, but does provide an online catalog of what you actually do listen. To this day its probably the best way for me to find new music and I’m glad I stuck with them.

Pandora is another service to expose you to new music, and discover what friends listen to. Some success for me here in finding new music, such as Mankind Is Obsolete, and Emilie Autumn. But I found myself going back to Last.fm to learn more about the band, and hear more of their tracks. Unlike Last.fm, I couldn’t really see or manage what I listened to in the past without an additional step of bookmarking. But unlike last.fm, I really could create a radio station (for free) and listen to it at work, home, on my Tivo or phone. This killed ‘real’ radio for me. I’ve not found new artists from Pandora anymore, so I guess I’m in a statistical maximum. I actively use them now, still free version.

YouTube was easily discovered as a juke box by others long before me. Suffice it to say its fun and easy to create ‘playlists’ of music other people uploaded and play in the background. The only issue is that to use it this way tends to be a time-sink. I do still use it, but not as much.

Amazon CloudMusic made me fall in love with Amazon all over again. Stuff I buy from Amazon (from when it came out, not before, but I’m not bitter) are hosted free on amazon, and listenable to my browsers, android phone, etc. I can also re-download it again from amazon whenever I want. I can create playlists online and they exist everywhere.  I can also upload free up to 20G worth of music (or other files) and listen to that music later as well. (Its only 20G if you buy an album a year, otherwise its 5G. For me, that’s not a problem.) Streaming works well, the android player is good for local music as well as cloud music. Browser can only handle cloud music. Can use a native app to upload music or the browser.

Google Music is similar to Amazon, but they only deal with music files, you have to use their native app to upload music, which until recently didn’t run on Linux. It seems more ‘buggy’ then Amazon as a player, but does work. Also, Google does not let you re-download your music, which bugs me. Playlists work fine. Right now, Between both of these services, I need to merge in features from Amazon and Google to be happy. I want to download again, don’t bug me about storing stuff I bought at amazon, and 20k files upload is a good place to be, more then 20G of storage. I’m less likely to use Amazon for that simple reason (and because uploading via the browser basically sucks, no linux client for Amazon)

GrooveShark is a different approach that is wining me over right now. You can upload what you want, listen on a browser or via the phone app if you have a paid subscription. You can listen to whatever was already uploaded even without an account. Lots of music choices. I’ve not paid for the service so I don’t know how good the streaming option is, but from a browser perspective, its the easiest way to create playlists, removing most of my usage of YouTube.

Spotify I mention only because its kinda like Grooveshark, seems more polished, huge library but without their native linux client (for free users) I can’t try it at all. Hopefully that will change soon, but since its been that way for a year, I doubt they care enough to change it. (Side note, on Spotify you can use it free on a paid OS, but you have to pay for it on a free OS. Feels weird. And no, wine isn’t an option here.)

Where does all this lead me? I use my android phone instead of my Cowon even though the Cowon has better quality sound. Browser instead of Banshee, currently enjoying grooveshark as my browser player. In the car, I use google music to stream, setting it to shuffle. Listen to Pandora via TiVo at home. I buy new music from Amazon, finding new music from last.fm, pandora and sometimes from Amazon suggestions. What’s apparent is that no single service is ‘perfect’, and each does something somewhat different. Last.fm is the best social experience for me so far, in that I can integrate it with almost anything. What’s really great is each service I list above is improving itself (maybe not pandora) so I have no question that they will continue improve over time.

Its a good time to be a music nut.

I figured out today that Android doesn’t combine instance messaging and SMS messaging in the same app, which pissed me off. Luckily, this made it all better.

Long live Mario^h^h^h^h^hAndroid!

Fundamentally, I’m fairly lazy in the food prep department. I try to make lots of stuff, but like most people I’m tired when I get home and don’t want to deal with it. While I’ve removed virtually all processed food from my diet, I didn’t really replace it with anything much. Salad, fruits and vegetables, which is good for you, but I still didn’t eat much of it. End result was large weight loss due to reduce caloric intake. But I recently realized that one component missing from my diet was iron.

The multi-vitamin I take is geared towards men and contains no iron; they assume men eat lots of meat and don’t need it. In the past few weeks I ‘forgot’ to make my beans that I usually make, and before I knew it, the amount of food with iron in it has dropped to almost zero. The result has been anemia, odd taste/smell sensations which can all be attributed to a nutritional deficiency of some form or another.

Since I became a vegetarian the amount of iron I eat has always been low, but never this low for this long. The impact on my health on my recent diet changes has been striking. Losing weight in a nice even pace, but I’ve had sleep disorders and a host of other issues that can be directly correlated to lack of some specific nutritional component or another. Being a vegetarian in a non-vegetarian culture is really difficult. Even though I’ve been doing this for about 14 years, I still struggle. The abundance of food in America is positive because people shouldn’t have these issues I brought on myself recently. Rather this abundance causes other issues that I’ve had to deal with up to this point. This culture I’m in makes it difficult to come up with rational choices on what you eat simply because you spend so little time dealing with it. You order it or buy it, eat it then do the next thing. Doing the ‘next thing’ is the American culture I grew up with. You go to the ‘next big movie’ or buy the ‘next big game/shoes/phone’. All those things take more time and resources then ‘food’ in America does. So quality food is really secondary much to our determent.

I’m being fairly reductionist here, but it seems obvious to me that the American culture relies on buying prepared food in some form or another. Canned food, sauces, frozen dinners, pizza, etc. You buy it because its easy to make and gets the job done. Each of those has issues with them (salt, preservatives, etc) that wouldn’t be there if you prepared them yourself. But the culture does not revolve around the kitchen, so no one wants to be in there. And if you go out all the time, then you have no clue what you’re really eating… giving the restaurant owner keys to your nutritional intake as well as your pocketbook.

So, how do I fix this? First change my multi-vitamin, at least that’s easy. Second, spend more time in the kitchen and get the rest of the family there too. I’m used to the format that if I’m cooking, Kirsten can do something else or visa versa. (I almost always clean the dishes, BTW). Also I need to get Jacob helping out in the kitchen more. I’m not sure I can fight this ‘next thing’ syndrome. That seems much harder then normalizing my diet.

I should also note that this is using the GAR deployment.

Android has scenes which is basically five cards (static size, unlike WebOS ‘cards’ that grow as much as it can). You can put app launches, shortcuts to web pages or widgets on it. (Widgets have no palm equivalent save the notification-only apps, which are kinda close.) Plus, you can create your own scenes. So I now have four scenes. Work, weekends, travel and games. We’ll see if I end up keeping all three. The wallpaper integration with the scenes is nice too. I still don’t like the method to switch between apps, but there is a real advantage with the ‘launch’ process Android has over WebOS.  Games wallpaper is… wait for it…. PacMan.

As far as Apps go, yes Android has 50,000+ apps and WebOS has ~2500. But I’d say almost half of the android apps are ebooks, different form of clocks or some thing else that is dumb and/or redundant, where less percentage of the WebOS ones are as crappy. So, Android really has only 10 times more ‘real’ apps then WebOS instead of 20 times. Of course, this still means Android  has more interesting apps then WebOS currently does, and enough where I’m not going to be able to review all their descriptions. (I did for the WebOS)

And, kudos again for the Evo hardware; though that battery cries out in pain. So far this phone has been really fun.

Hardware: Here there is no comparison. The Evo is fast and good looking. The Palm pre started with hardware issues (Slider, screen effects). Memory wise, the Palm pre plus is actually better, but evo’s expansion fixes lots of issues, and android 2.2 will make use of the SDHC card easy for applications. I got used to the pre’s keyboard, but honestly I don’t have a real preference (yet) between the on-screen one for the Evo or the slider physical one for the pre. I hate that using it takes away my screen real-estate, but not enough feeling there to really care. Size-wise, the evo is really big, almost too big, whereas the palm pre was really small, almost too small. (Same resolution). I’d rather error on big here though.

WebOS vs Android: Now this is very preliminary, so I can’t talk about much here. However, WebOS is far better in the area of multi-tasking from a usability perspective. You can easily see what applications you have open where the concept of ‘open apps’ is basically hidden from you in the android. Though that may be technically irrelevant, switching between apps (especially while talking on the phone) is far easier on WebOS then android.

The second thing that weirded me out was email/contacts/calendar integration. WebOS integrations seamlessly between Gmail, yahoo, facebook and corporate google apps account. One application for mail, one for calendar, one for contacts. Android has a gmail integration, and a mail integration. Two separate apps.  Now, gmail on android functions like gmail on the web browser, which is nice, but it makes no sense to treat these so different. Also, as of yet I cannot get my work calendar in my Android without having to share it with my personal gmail account. No question that palm having years to deal with these types of issues have paid off. Though I continue to be surprised that both integrated facebook calendar and contacts perfectly. (Where are my yahoo contacts?)

Apps is a no brainer. Android has more then WebOS.  But the apps ‘feel’ very different on the two devices. I’m not sure one ‘feels’ better then the other, but its a stark contrast. WebOS launches them, and switching between two active apps is as fluid as if you were on a computer having multiple windows open. Android seems to leave you in place when you go after the next app. You cannot see them as windows or are separate functioning applications. So WebOS has more of a computer feel to it and Android feels more like a phone. Which is better? Not sure yet, but my gut instinct is that I’d prefer the WebOS feel on a tablet. Honestly, I’ll have to see if this is just the process of getting used to Android after using WebOS for a year.

I’ll have to play more with media on the device to see how that is. I was never overly impressed with the pre there, and was still using my Cowon S9 (or even D2) instead of the pre. Evo will be well worth it if it functions well here too, though I’m really picky about that.  I’ll give another review in a few weeks and see if I change my mind from these initial impressions. I really was surprised that the Evo is not a ‘slam dunk’ as far as better then Palm pre… I do know that my wife would really hate to give up her pre.