motorcycles, technology, music, business

I had the pleasure of traveling to Omaha for a 90 minute meeting on a Friday morning.

18 hours ago I would have said that first sentence with a healthy dose of sarcasm. Now, on my flight home, I can say that it truly was a pleasure to travel to Omaha.

Omaha is a city that’s both big and small, southern and northern, country and western.

Since I had a very limited time in Omaha I did my restaurant research ahead of time and also asked a few Omahans where to eat. I settled on The Grey Plume which finds itself in a recently revitalized part of the city. The sidewalks are wide, clean, and in good condition, unlike those found in Boston or any other ‘large’ city for that matter.

The Grey Plume treated me to a tremendous level of hospitality. I felt like I must have landed somewhere further in the south, yet the pulse of life is more at a northern pace. The food was quite good if a bit heavy. There seems to be an option to add an egg on top of any meal if it isn’t already included.

Before I ordered I was presented with a “first taste” which is a spoon elegantly placed on a rectangle plate laying on a rolled up cloth napkin. The “first taste” of the night consisted of brown butter, not sure what that is, grapefruit, and sage. It was a mix of heavy and light, creamy and citrus. A perfect compliment to the Omaha style.

I ordered the Bison Burger with a side of Duck Fat Fries. That’s right, potato fries fried up with the aid of fat from a duck. They were great but again significantly heavier than traditional fries. The burger was also quite good if slightly gamy and under cooked. It was not a traditional American burger experience as there was no ketchup or greasy cheese and bacon. It was a more refined burger with stringed sautéed onion, buttermilk cheese, and a collared green like lettuce.

For dessert I ordered something else fried with the aid of duck fat; a donut. A sugar donut fried in duck fat with a small scoop of heavy vanilla bean ice cream. The donut was great, the ice cream was too heavy and eggy.

I left feeling welcomed both to the restaurant and to the city. Sitting at the bar allowed me to see more of the goings on and interactions between staff and patrons.

I highly recommend The Grey Plume for its creative foods and welcoming hospitality.

When I later arrived at my hotel I was also greeted with a combination of southern hospitality and a northern pace. Maybe because the city of Omaha is still rather small the people are a bit nicer.

The one thing working against Omaha is the lack of direct flights in or out. Also their propensity to put an egg on everything they serve.

Otherwise, Omaha receives a five star rating from me.

Since upgrading to the iPhone 5, the added row of applications has almost been more of a curse than a blessing.

With my iPhone 3G (AT&T), which I kept for almost three years waiting for a Verizon iPhone, then finally an iPhone 4 (Verizon), for a little over two years, I had nearly five years of refining and curating the exact app and folder position and content.

Now with the iPhone 5 all that refinement and curating has largely gone out the window.

I have found that in organizing my iPhone home screen I have two primary goals or guidelines:

1. I like to group my similar apps together. Work apps go together, as do music, photo, social, and so on.
2. I also don’t want to put everything on my home screen in folders as that removes the quick access benefits of having them on the home screen.

With those goals in mind, finding the right set of 20, or so, apps is no easy feat. We all have application usage tiers. These tiers form and function very similarly to one’s circle of friends. The first circle of friends are those closest to you, whom you content regularly, and about whom you care a significant amount. As you progress through the circle of friends, the friends in subsequent circles become less close to you, you contact them less frequently, and you care about them less and less.

Application Tiers exist in the same fashion. With both friends and apps, the first tier or circle is not defined by a hard and fast number. I do not have on any given day exactly 20 (no more, no less) apps in my first tier. My first tier of apps is more likely to be closer to 12 or 15 apps leaving a more than a few spots unfilled on the new iPhone 5 home screen.

You might be thinking, “why not just pull from the second tier of apps to fill the spaces?” That is the natural progression of logic in this case, however my second tier of apps is larger than just three or four apps. That being the case, I would then need to create a sub-division of my application tiers in order to fill up the home screen of the iPhone 5. Not only is this not necessarily easy to accomplish it also has a high potential of infringing on one or both of my goals/guidelines.

And so continues the journey or iPhone 5 home screen perfection. Too many spots to either force me to use folders, like I did on my previous iPhones, and too few spots to fit all of my tier one and two applications.

This whole effort would be simplified if Apple would allow usage stats to be exported. This way I could see how frequently I open the applications on my phone allowing me to use actual statistics to help me refine my home screen. To my knowledge, as of the publishing of this post, no such app exists for a non-jailbroken iPhone.

Another aspect of this is that I desire multiple apps to fill the role of one. The best examples of this are the Weather and Accuweather apps, since neither are right I take the pessimistic Weather app and the optimistic Accuweather app and average them out. Another example is Waze and Google Maps. Google Maps, of course, owns the way-point and ideal driving directions but Waze has better, community driven, traffic and hazard reporting.

As to not bore you further, here is how my home screen stand as of January 14, 2013. I am sure this will change in the coming days or even hours. I am currently questioning the need to have Google Voice and Google Maps in their current position.

Last night I caught the night owl bug and stayed up until 1:00AM. At least I was able to make it productive.

After work I accomplished several smaller projects and tasks:

• Installed wall hanging guitar stands
• Installed exterior outlet in the front of the house with a switch
• Updated my website
• Broke my website
• Fixed my website
• Renewed my domain
• Strung lights around the front yard tree
• Added a spotlight to the front

A lot can get done when one has energy and stays up 4 hours after the rest of the family goes to sleep. One thing I neglected to do last night, though, was clean up after dinner. I was too distracted doing other things, obviously.

Guitar hangers for mine and my daughter’s:

I am not going to embellish the truth and say that I am a tight or close friend with Hunter, the bassist for AFI for the last 13 years. I will say that he and my brother were good friends and were in a punk rock band in high school, Little Seizures (I think that’s correct).

I have been following Hunter on Twitter for a while now and noticed a tweet of his referencing Boston in August. I contacted him, he replied, and after a few more DMs I had two complementary tickets to see AFI and Green Day.

I then invited my friend, Nick, who was flying back to Boston from California that day. He agreed to come and after picking him and his family up at the airport, we left for the concert. That is in large part why we were a bit late to the show. We showed up about half way through AFI’s set and then spent the majority of the remaining set in queue for tickets, security, and being ping-ponged about by ushers telling us where are seats were located. It turned out that we had tickets to the pit. You will notice from the photo of the ticket (see below) that both “GAPIT” and “Section GA8 Seat 19″ were listed, hence the confusion.

AFI sounded great. In truth I preferred their sound to Green Day’s. It was more balanced, whereas Green Day’s kick drum was over powering.

The sound aside, the show was awesome. I tried to ignore the vulgarity and over the top religious mocking and I did so successfully. Green Day has been together for 22 years and it only shows in good ways.

I really enjoyed the show, but I more thoroughly enjoyed conversating with Hunter, who is a very friendly and gentle soul. We discussed AFI’s songwriting process, and other professional developments that I may not be at liberty to divulge. I am sure it is nothing that anyone who cares would already know. So talking with Hunter and also his friend, now our mutual friend, Jenni was by far the best part of the show.

So, thank you, Hunter, and I will keep my eye out for AFI in the coming years. I hope for great things for you.

All photos taken with iPhone 3G using Camera+ app.