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2nd Foursquare First Friday

Well, there was enough interest for last month's First Foursquare First Friday, where we played Foursquare (Learn what Foursquare is here) during Missoula's First Friday downtown, that we'll be doing it again. @MontanaMonica went to the most art galleries from 4 pm - 8 pm and won a growler of beer from me.

Photos of the Missoula Inversion

So often when I go up to Snowbowl, the ski mountain just outside Missoula I see the valley floor socked in. It seems that one would only have to hike the M to get above the fog, and into what usually is blue sky and a sunny day. Most of the people in town (including me when I'm there) think that it's a cloudy, foggy day, but we don't realize that a sunny day awaits us 100 feet above our heads. Curious what makes an inversion happen? Learn why here. I've gathered a few of my favorite photos of the Missoula Inversion here, I hope you enjoy them:

How to get an iPhone in Montana

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I have an iPhone 3G in Montana with a (406) area code phone number that I brought over from Verizon (the phone number, not the iPhone) with me about a year ago. It works great! It took a little bit of work to get it rolling, but it's actually not too hard. If you're willing to jump through a few hoops, I'll explain in plain English how to get the coolest piece of technology in existence.

Before we begin, a minor background on the situation for the uninitiated. iPhones are currently only sold in the US on AT&T. AT&T is not available in Montana. The main option here is Verizon Wireless, which most of the Montanans I know have. The reason you can't get an iPhone on Verizon is because the iPhone & AT&T "speaks" GSM and Verizon & it's phones "speak" CDMA. However, Cellular One is in Montana and does "speak" GSM, so you can get an iPhone on Montana's Cell One. To allow an iPhone to get on a cell carrier that speaks it's language (GSM), there is a process called "unlocking" that allows your phone to get on any network. Unlocking is not illegal.

So, here's what you need to do to get an iPhone in Montana.

iPad Thoughts

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My buddy and I had an email back and forth that pretty much sums up my thoughts on the newly released iPad.

On Jan 27, 2010, at 1:04 PM, Flavio Loetscher wrote:

Apple once again shows the well elaborated line between user and hardware. A beauty of an iPad, I gotta say. It must be super awesome to read books on that device, share videos & pics, or even read the NewYorkTimes and use the apps. Starting with 499$ this is a great deal but in my opinion a bit unnecessary for iPhone users... having an iPhone is awesome, linking to your mac is even better - iPad truly is a new category of devices... it's pretty much luxury to watch videos on iPad when you could watch them on your macbook. And to type longer messages, I am not really optimistic with the iPad. Furthermore the apps will need to be updated in order to make them look good on the iPad.
I am really really looking forward to holding one of those babies in my hands. I kinda see a easy-going sunday in front of me - purchasing a book from the ibookstore, checking out newspapers and watching videos with it, nothing more. Or a great tool for conferences or in the kitchen for recipes... I am still very very happy with my Macbook pro and iphone which perfectly fit together. I see iPad as an additional tool for luxury. No money right now but if I bought one it would just be for fun :)

First Foursquare First Friday

As I'm sure you know, I've been a big fan of Foursquare, the location based game. And recently it has started to catch more interest in the Missoula Twitter community. I think that it would be a fun idea to play a game of Foursquare during Missoula's First Friday, the downtown art walk that takes place the first Friday of every month. The two ideas of what is being done is practically duplicated: going to multiple places, checking out new venues, and hopefully running into friends and other interesting people.

So here's what I propose: the person who gets the most points on Foursquare on Friday the 5th of February 2009 in Missoula, MT from 4pm - 8pm, I will give a growler of any beer from any brewery in Missoula. You can even keep the glass container. I know it's not too much, but I thought that it'd be fun for everyone who played the Foursquare First Friday game could met up at the brewery of the winner's choice the next day around 6pm-ish and all hang out, enjoy a beer, and chat. And of course, so I can give a growler of beer to the winner. To make it more interesting I was hoping more people would be willing to put up another small prize. Just mention it in the comments below.

Glacier Park is listening

Recently, I noticed that Glacier National Park had started putting out updates on Twitter. I love that park, live a few hours south of it in Missoula, and have been planning on going up there to snowshoe. So, naturally I became excited that there was a point of contact there that I could ask advice. I shot out a couple tweets asking where we could go and received no answer, much to my dissapointment. So I posted out this tweet:

Am disappointed that the updates coming from Glacier Park (@glaciernps) don't seem to have a human listening on the other end :(

About an hour after that, this message came in through my site's contact form:

David Restivo sent a message using the contact form at http://evanlovely.com/contact.

Hi, Evan.

I saw your Tweet regarding our participation in communication on Twitter. I didn't want you to think that nobody was listening in on the other end. I had seen your posts and questions regarding snowshoe and ski recommendations, so we tweeted where people could find that informaiton on our Web site. At this point, the park has decided to use Twitter as a one-way communicaiton tool only. Our social networking media page on our Web site better explains how we use each tool. http://www.nps.gov/glac/photosmultimedia/webcams.htm

iPhone Game Review: Little Metal Ball

I'm having a lot of fun with the iPhone game Little Metal Ball. Having been a big fan of Labyrinth (seen Labriythn 2 yet?), I was naturally interested in checking it out. Instead of the wooden maze approach, they take a whole level approach with many obstacles. You have the ability to jump and I feel like I've only seen the beginning of the difficult, creative levels they are going to through at me that will surely turn my love of this game to pure frustration. To capture the feel of the game better, I've filmed a good level (sorry about the slightly blurry video, but don't worry, it gets the point across) and I have several screenshots that I hope conveys the feel of the game well. Check it out if you're interested in another amazing addition to the iPhone games library. $1.99. Also be sure to check out the developer's trailer video for the game.

Geo-Tracking my Snowboard runs through Snowbowl

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I'm really starting to like geolocation and it's many uses. Recently I've been checking out the different things that my iPhone can do with it's GPS. Yesterday, I let iTrailMap 3D run while I boarded around Montana Snowbowl. It's really interesting to see where we went through the trees and where we still had to yet to hit. At one point I even took it out to see where I went last time, so I could pick the next line better. It's great cause it has a "you are here marker". Two improvements I could see would be better map resolution and being able to have a you are here dot on the trail map section. A little expensive at $5, but still really cool.


Link to app on iTunes Store:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/itrailmap-3d-ski-snowboard-trail/id294066...
- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Why Foursquare is Important to Businesses

Lately, I have been really digging Foursquare. I'm pumped that they made it available in any city now. If you're not sure what it is, then you should check out what @TheRealClint posted up about Foursquare on his blog. It covers the introduction bases well and even goes on to talk about why it's important for businesses to take advantage of it. I highly recommend reading it. My favorite point he makes is that if you become "Mayor" of a place and they give you a free coffee/beer/treat, you'll be inclined to come back. And then others will be visiting more often to see if they can take the Mayor spot from you. This, obviously, results in an increase of customers coming by.

Flickr Fail

Flickr Logo

So I discovered a disappointing fact about Flickr just now: if you are using the free account, you only have access to your 200 recent photos. The user's photostream, the recent photo feed for Flickr users, only goes back 200 photos. That's not too bad, but as soon as photos get past that 200 recent photos mark, they get taken out of every Set (basically an album) and even though it seems they retain there tags, you can no longer use your Tag Cloud found on your page to get to these photos. They're basically marooned. The only redeeming fact I could find is that if you have the direct URL to the photo, then you can still access it. However, the fact remains that all associations from the user's page to the photo are cut. There is no way that I could find that you can go to a user page, then find a photo that's older than 200 photos. I find this frustrating and disappointing. I've even had a Flickr Pro account for a year, uploaded many photos to it, then decided to not renew my Pro account with them. Afterwards, it was the same thing, all my photos were cut off from me, I have no idea how to get access to them. So basically Flickr wants you to have a Pro account for life: it's the only way I can see that a long term relationship can happen between this service and it's users.

How to Prepare Yerba Maté

There is a lot of confusion and poor documentation surrounding the proper preparation of Yerba Maté, I would like to share my method here. I'm not saying that my method is the perfect method and all others are wrong. I can only share what I know and use, and that I like it and it works well. I prefer using the traditional method using the Gourd and Bombilla (the Metal Filtered Straw), but there are many, many ways to prepare Maté.

New Site Launched!

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I am proud to announce the launch of my new theme on this site! Wahoo! This has been such a work in progress that I have been pushing along for quite some time now. The entire site is original work, which I am very proud of. The Panorama album as it is especially difficult to present those in there best light.
The yoga section was a late add, but I'm glad it's here at the onset. There is some solid knowledge laid down for the foundation in that section, but I hope that it will blossom into something much more fruitful in the coming months as I add more to the Ashtanga Yoga knowledge section. The shared section is basically just a stream from my Google Reader page of all the articles I click "share" on. There's some crazy stuff that happens in the world, that's where I share it. And, of course, the blog. I've made sure to keep the posts that I've done from my India trip and throughout the rest of the year, but I definitely hope to step up the posting, especially in the review section.

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