Here’s the killer-app for 2010: Anti-Social Media

So a former colleague of mine and an entrepreneur mused on his facebook page:

How many friends are too many friends? and how many enemies are too many enemies?
Or are a thousand friends few and an enemy too many?

Being a smart-ass, I had to reply to this:

Hey, you’re an entrepreneur, you should start a site called InYourFaceBook…instead of friending people, you enemize people. you sign up enemies instead of friends…play games, send them hugs (deadly embraces), molotov cocktails et cetera

to which he replied:

That’s it you are officially my mentor from now on 8-) what should I start with?

And since we were brainstorming at this point, I continued to let it flow:

Since this idea is the basis for ubiquitous anti-social media, you should start with a premise of a nixonian enemies list. Just list all the people you hate, call google through an api which returns last known email address and photo of that person. Then send out dis-invites to start

I thought about what I had said: “ubiquitous anti-social media” and cracked myself up.  Then I thought about my idea and tried to get it down to its core.   When I had peeled away the crust, the mantle and the outer core…what I was left with was spam which like a disease had already been invented and through its generations of evolution reached its zenith in the form of Twitter.  Twitter is essentially a way for everyone to spam relentlessly without it coming into your email box.

Since I couldn’t come up with an ROI for an anti-social media app that really satisfied a pain point that wasn’t already solved by Twitter or it’s copies, I kinda dropped it.  But being as how all my social media sites are all tied together through a single update, I will now hit “publish” on this wordpress blog and it will be tweeted all through twitterdom.

BTW just to make this worth your while, I’ve included the spam scene from Monty Python (note of course how the repetition of spam in this moves like a retweet through twitter):

I hope you all have a healthy, prosperous and Happy New Year in 2010!

Google Chrome Beta for the Mac

So I spent some time tonight using Google Chrome Beta for the Mac.  I use Chrome (as well as every other browser except opera) on a daily basis on my windows machine at work.  On my personal mac, I had Safari and FF3 on the mac side, and IE8 and Chrome on the XP partition.

For those who read my comments on Chromium…this is different than that.  Chromium is a whole operating system with a UI that is a browser.   This is just a browser running on Snow Leopard (AKA MacOSX 10.6.2).

I use Safari most of the time on my mac, but use IE when I need to do stuff on the xp partition for school.  I also notice that when I use the outlook web version for work, it just works nicer on IE8 than on safari.

So, as I said, tonight I loaded Chrome on OSX.  I have to say its pretty fast.  I’d even venture to say that blew safari’s doors off on javascript intensive sites.  Just to see what would happen, I went to mobileme and the iwork.com beta site.  Mobileme rendered flawlessly, while iwork.com came up and complained that chrome wasn’t supported.  nevertheless it allowed me to continue and worked ok…although it got hung up a couple of times.

I’m going to use it for a few days and see what happens.  I like safari (although there aren’t the multitude of plug-ins like on firefox) and it tends to work fine and fast. definitely faster that FF.  But this chrome beta screams in comparison to Safari on some sites…

I tried FB, twitter, mobileme, iwork.com, linkedin, my yahoo, yahoo mail, yahoo finance, digg, authonomy, cnet.com, googlewave, igoogle, wsjonline, and wordpress.  All seemed to work just fine.

Anyway, if you have a mac, and you see the invitation when on a google site (gmail or whatever) download it and see what happens.

Drrrroidddd

So I upgraded my old t-mobile htc g1 to a verizon motorola drrrroiddddd this past weekend.  It’s an awesome upgrade.  the G1 was dying under the weight of the software upgrades on 1.6 and the newer apps.  And t-mobile’s phone coverage was adequate but spotty.  Verizon’s phone coverage is much better.

Anyway the first thing i noticed was that battery life was way way way better than the year old G1.  This is expected from a year old phone battery, but the change was dramatic.  In fact i have yet to turn off 3g service, so they’ve figured out how to keep it up without me charging the battery once a day (that was the case with the G1 even in the early days).

All the other wireless settings (bluetooth, GPS and wifi) were setup the same, but seem for some reason to be more sensitive.  I can’t tell if that is true, but the setup for my wifi never misses…as soon as i enter the house, switch to wifi from 3g.  The G1 would do it intermittently.

Google maps with voice. awesome.  Used it already.

facebook app, (seems to have more features than on the G1), came up within a few clicks.

BAD Very BAD….yahoo email service is gone.   I’ve been all over the net and tried all the remedies, but it will not connect to yahoo.  I can go through the browser of course, but that means I can’t see email notifications.  I can pay yahoo $20 a year for pop service.  but why?   I also noticed that the yahoo browser program no longer is downloadable on the droid market.  C’mon guys, get along…

gmail works great and every time I get a message DRRROIDDDD…it is kinda funny.

I use Moxier mail to get my work email.  I can’t figure out Verizon.  They are SO NICKEL and DIME.  If I use their email program, I get charged for activesync like $30 a month or something.  But if I use my own program free…watch, they’ll cut me off now that I’ve talked about it.  I pay for unlimited internet so don’t touch it.  Don’t mess with me, I have followers of my blog, facebook, twitter and on YouTube you know.   And I play the guitar, so I’ll write a verizon nickel and dime ballad and sing it for the masses!

The phone has a 5mp camera.  I can’t imagine what the photos and videos are going to be like, but i can see doing more stuff.

One massive advantage for those of us luddites who like bluetooth, but still have wired full headgear with a boom mic, there’s an actual jack.  And not the usb appendage on the G1 that prevented you from charging and using a wired headset at the same time.

Oh did I say that QuickBase works great on the mini-chrome browser?  reports look pretty good and most forms come up in looking good.  On the G1 version of the browser (with the slightly smaller screen size) QuickBase forms seemed to go over the right edge of the screen a little bit if they were complicated.

On the suggestion of a friend, I loaded google sky maps.   it is awesome.  Now all I need is a clear sky app

With the deal/plan I got, I have visual voicemail.  Waiting for someone to leave me a voicemail

OK so the one thing that this cannot do is play my relatively vast iTunes library.    Oh well.   I’ll probably load imeem again or something to get the doobie brothers channel or something so that I can get some of my music.  I can put some on a card, or buy songs from amazon, but I just can’t see it.  not worth it.

One extremely awkward thing.  You can’t get to the dialer directly from the main screen like you could from the G1 button panel.  This proves to be rather annoying.  You have to (unless you have the bluetooth earpiece on) hit the home button and then select phone.   This is rather annoying.  C’mon google/motorola, some of us still call people from a phone…

All in all I’m pretty excited.  I need to get a mount to use it as my gps now and hand the nuvi to my wife for her car.  in the meantime its pretty cool.

As you know I love my mac, I’m intrigued by my AppleTV and thing the iPod Touch is an awesome thing and watch my iPhone friends browse effortlessly. I don’t get locked into anyone technology offering (heck I still use yahoo email)…..but this is a pretty damn nice smartphone.  Now if they could only get a kindle program for it  I mean, they have one for iPhone/Touch, they have a PC version and they have a Mac version now…

Physical stuff?  Screen is large and has great resolution.  keyboard is kinda strange.  It has a funny feel to it.  I didn’t care for the G1 keyboard (especially the fact that the button bar forced you to reach your right thumb over it to get to the right side of the keyboard.  But this keyboad is thinner and smaller in some ways.  It forces you to click less hard.  I’m still getting used to it, although after 3 days, it has trained me.

I’ll leave you with this final thought

Drrroidddd…

A Poll: Which Version of Bach Brandenburg Concerto #2 do you like?

This sounds weird but I tweeted which version of Bach I was listening to and I got all kinds of opinions on my facebook page

Please feel free to comment on why you prefer the one you prefer…I’m very interested…

My Favorite Dilberts…

Chromium Update – It seems to be working now…

So sometime over the weekend, the fancy button on the top left came to life and the apps were available (and it took my gmail auth).   I also suspect that there was a behind the back update to the service because I’ve done nothing with the partition since Friday, and this morning it was running without a hitch and wasn’t crashing every 3 minutes on me.   Congratulations to whomever did that.

As I said in my last post, I was waiting for a stability update, and I guess I got one.  Thanks.

Still not sure why I need it, but as long as its being a good citizen on my mac, I’m content.

Chromium OS…you CAN wait…

So I loaded up Chromium OS on my mac as a vmware partition alongside my XP partition. I will say that XP is more stable than Chromium — Kudos to Microsoft

For those of you who do not know, Chromium OS is the new operating system ostensibly for netbooks and tablets from Google.  It is really the Google Chrome browser living on top of the Ubuntu linux OS.  I found a vmware kit on gdgt and loaded it up.  I saw that people who had vmware 3.0 seemed to be having less trouble with it so I upgraded vmware in the process (I was going to do that for my later upgrade of xp->7 someday so what the hell, I’m all set now).

Ok I got around the weirdness in the various forum instructions that said I should use bridged network instead of NAT…I used NAT.  It did take a reboot (of just the partition) to get it to see the network.  You need the network the first time to log in because it authenticates with the mother ship the first time.  I haven’t experimented with seeing if it allows you to log in if the network is down.

I will say it comes up pretty fast.  and that’s important since it crashes every 3 minutes.  Oh and don’t hit the non-colored google wheel in the top left corner.  It asks you for your google login (which is different from your gmail login evidently since it won’t take that credential on me).

Since it is a browser-as-OS, you can get to your google docs and all kinds of other websites.

The only place that exposes the underlying linux is when you go into the preferences and you start mucking around in there with the filesystem. Then you see the familiar /xxx directories that most unix implementations have.

Overall I found it to be sluggish in performance and it curiously spent a lot of time getting itself back to norm.  which meant that sometimes it’d lose itself while I tried to click on things.  I wasn’t sure if the guys who built the vmware compatible kit forgot to turn off debug mode or something.

Ok experiment done, I did it.   My mac now has 3 different operating systems on it: Snow Leopard, XP and Chromium…and it still works.

No compelling reason to keep playing, hopefully the upgrade will be soon and clear up the bugs and slugs…

Oh and 10-12 years ago I remember the last time someone was trying to do this…the company was called Netscape…

#RIAUnleashed – notes from “UX for the development minded”

The slides will probably do this more justice, but these are my notes:

The presenter was Andy Powell from Universal Mind

We are surrounded by great experiences – nice cars, satellite radio online service (pulsar), gourmet food delivered inexpensively…the iphone (which changed the way we view what a phone can do)…the movie Pulp fiction (ok this was a stretch)

Defining Experience Design

people’s guesses

• looks nice
• works the right way
• how it works in its context

But what is really is is users/technology

The user wants to be inspired and makes the user come back.  If you can get them into the immersive place, where they have to be there, then you have got a good design

Styling is not design…skin and style at the end is NOT design.   Design is more immersive and is part of the process.

There are 4 steps to making a good design

1. Discovery (figure out what the need is)
2. Design (wireframes, user testing, prototyping, gives the user a good idea of the look and feel)
3. Development (making the design bring up tangible results for the underlying application)
4. Deployment

The presenter called this the 4D process

the process is a marriage of Ideas (users ideas) and Technology (the thing that is the right one for the problem)

Why are we doing this?   Because the technology facilitates a great design…look at the Dyson vacuum cleaner

The art & science of experience design

The path you eye follows is a circular clockwise movement.  There’s a reason that the apple on an apple is in the top left corner and the default icon sort starts on the right side of the screen.  Your eye will start on the top left in western society (it will be different for other cultures of course)

misused technology hinders experience

I’m sure we can think of examples

understand our audience/users

in order to do this we need to establish trust, so that they will give us feedback honestly and openly.  Trust goes both ways…the app can’t blow up (like twitter when crashes) on the user

Triggering emotion

we want to trigger a positive emotion.  Then he showed this ikea ad which showed this pathetic lamp in the rain…and then someone steps on the screen and says “what are you crazy, its just a lamp”

Emotion is the added value of design.  ”reason lead to conclusions, emotion leads to action”

environment also affects perception

think about different people’s reactions to snow (people who live in different parts of the country

What’s the story / goal?

good stories connect the user.    The elements of the story are lead character, ambition, conflict, resolution

How is the story being told?

must be from the user’s perspective — This is where Personas arise

Title (picture) overview characteristics goals frustration influenceers questions knowledge

Personas create Empathy

as developers we should be asking from the users perspective, he hits the button — what does he expect to happen?

Features are Dead -

focus on the solution and features will follow

Create User Stories

chart interactions, data access, system persona, actors, even inanimate things can be viewed this way.  These stories are crucial…developers write the stories.  This is the point where we take the wireframes from the designers and define what can be built.

Good UX arises from a collaboration between designer and developer

Notice the experiences around you…and bad experiences will start annoying the $#|+ out of you.  The ENTIRE experience is the key, the whole immersive experience.  That includes people interaction as well as RIA.

#RIAUnleashed – notes from “keeping front end dependencies under control session”

The real slides are going to be posted at some point by the coordinators, but just for my own sake here is what I typed as fast as possible

5 simple rules for better client performance  (these are yahoo’s recommendations)

1. organize and plan
2. location matters
3. load a component smart and once
4. maximized caching opportunities
5. optimize, minify and compress

Javascript

over time you keep adding libraries because something is missing

website application continuum

spry jquery prototype YUI EXT.hs Dogo GWT

<————————————————->

keep all your scripts in one central place

Classic pairings of libraries:

• cf + ext
• cf + spry (adobe)
• jquery + jqueryUI  (nice theme roller DOM manipulation)
• YUI + YUI (very comprehensive…followed their own advice)
• Prototype + script.aculo.us

Externalize (java)scripts at the bottom.

because scripts load their own stuff, you can’t render anything while the scripts are loading.  Only caveat, some scripts only run in the head.  Anyway will improve performance

Try to get your scripts load only once

manage loading from the client-side.  http://24ways.org/2007/keeping-javascript-dependencies-at-bay

Yui has a loading component

Ajile?  yes with a j

Server-side script bundling – coldfusion example given.   scriptalyzer

Minify and Compress

YUI compressor strips out whitespace and comments to minimize

optionally obfuscate your code

http://develop.yahoo.com/yui/compressor

There are other examples of

GZip over 1 or 2k

serve compressed files from the server to browsers that support it

don’t compress files already compressed

Browser Cache

use external scripts

set expire headers for caching (Google-hosted)

set expire headers on common scripts

configure entity tags (e-tags) on clusters (http://www.askapache.com/htaccess

She gave some example of the tags to use for these various options

JSLINT

will help you write more efficient code

CSS/Style Sheets

externalize the CSS files at the top

embedded styles are a bad practice

use core style sheet when developing

if you use YUI you can link to their common style sheets

the import directive will not be invoked until CSS is completely loaded.  (you’ll see the page loaded without the style then zap the style gets applied)

Use a link tag to avoid the problem

Minify for CSS

cascading nature of css is not effective as javascript

cssinclude Custom Tag

manage them on the server side (recommendation)

Please

o Comment Your CSS

o declare your most global rules first then the page structure

o try to minimize the declaration and stack/cascade the styles and then the classes

o put your rules as high up in the stack as possible (to avoid redundancy)

Reset CSS

comprehensive eric meyer (http://meyer.web.com/tools/css/reset/reset.css)

Yui

Toward Modular CSS

• build a grid system
• blueprintCSS

Working with Multiple CSS files

Good-organize by purpose

• framework
• core/skin
• hacks
• application sections

Problematic-organize by rule type (but useful for user-skinnable apps)

• colors/images
• typography
• positioning

Images: Organization and planning

• keep them in a central place
• separate structure and skin
• keep logos in one place
• use a naming convention for commonly repeated files

Images: Minimize file size

• PNG files are your friend
• jpegs for photos and continuous tones
• GIFS for simple illustrations
• use the comparison views of your image editor
• Fireworks to do the compress slightly better than photoshop

Images: Loading Smart

• minimize your image needs
• use css sprites for nav tabs
• do you really need an image—Use CSS3 for nonfunctional enhancements (like rounded corners)
• trim images to minimal dimension
• small tile backgrounds (if you do it 10000 times it reduces performance)

Essential tools

• firebug
• yslow
• firefox web developer toolbar
• safari web developer toos
• ie web developer tool extensions

Windows 7 is pretty stable a week into it…here’s how I got there…

I did my upgrade last week from that abysmal Vista 64 to Windows 7 64. First I’d like to recount how long it took. For that, I will show you my tweets from last Friday night/Saturday morning.  Let me say that I started the upgrade at about 10:30 PM on Friday night:

1. @alexbarnett was stuck in a damn loop that kept saying uninstall logitech, itunes and norton. after the 3rd tim it gave up and started
   • 11:23 PM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to alexbarnett
2. @alexbarnett now I’m just waiting for it to do its thing
   • 11:24 PM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck in reply to alexbarnett
3. This windows 7 Ultimate 64 upgrade is taking FOREVER…this is ridiculous
   • 11:56 PM Oct 23rd from TweetDeck
4. 1AM and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit is STILL installing…brutal
   • 12:59 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
5. This is why I use my mac for important things.
   • 1:02 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
6. @jeffmc this may be the last PC I use. Vista 64 was a disaster. Let see if w7 cleans it up…oh btw, still installing…
   • 1:52 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck in reply to jeffmc
7. OK Windows 7 is up…now I have to go through and get iTunes to install…just uninstalled the logitech driver that was uninstallable for 2y
   • 2:41 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
8. un-uninstallible that is
   • 2:42 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
9. yay! first time I’ve been able to install itunes on the pc since the 8.00 release.thank you windows 7. now can iPod touch can be upgraded?
   • 3:06 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
10. That’s been stuck with rev 1.0 software because I couldn’t install itunes after 8.00
    • 3:07 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
11. O & 1 more windows 7 test. The driver & software 4 my HP allinone printer wld not install on ths PC w/ Vista (crashed). lets see
    • 3:15 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
12. Printer driver up, printer software up…phew
    • 3:34 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
13. The ipod touch upgrade did not go well
    • 4:22 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck
14. Done, everything is working now (I think). Touch, printer, itunes, windows, outlook…Yes I did sleep in between
    • 10:25 AM Oct 24th from TweetDeck

 

So I started at 10:30 PM or so, got stuck in loop that took about 10 minutes as it barfed at me that I couldn’t do the install until I uninstalled logitech, itunes and something else that escapes me now.  After the 3rd attempt to boot off the DVD, it relented (like a GPS that finally gives up when you go on a different path) and started installing.

At about 11:30 I started getting impatient.  My upgrade of Tiger to Leopard on my powerbook only took about a hour.  What was this?

At 1:00 (Tweet 4 above) it was still marking and verifying files.  Mind you my machine is a relatively healthy quad 64bit with 4 gig of ram with a 3g clock so it isn’t underpowered.

At about 2:30 Windows 7 was up.  So that was approximately 4 hours to do the upgrade.  Then the fun part started.

The first thing I needed to know was if I could uninstall software.  Yes, uninstall on my vista 64 bit machine did not work.  I couldn’t take anything off.  It’d tell me that I didn’t have privs.  I’d even run control panel in admin mode and it’d still barf on me.  Drove me nuts.  First to go was logitech for the camera that never worked on this machine (even with the 64 bit driver).  Whap.   then I uninstalled something else can’t remember what now.  Then the real test came.   iTunes.

For over a year I could not upgrade itunes on vista 64 even with the apple vista 64 version of itunes. it would bomb during install and tell me that the windows installer wasn’t installed correctly.  Really?  so since my wife’s ipod touch and my apple TV were primarily used to connect to this machine, I couldn’t take advantage of new functionality (or even download new versions of the ipod touch firmware) because I couldn’t get to itunes 8.02  OR itunes 9.0

So I took a chance there.  I brought up itunes and then asked it to look for an upgrade.  Several minutes later, itunes was up.  YAY!  So at 3:00 I could have stopped and left work till another time…but there was real crime…no not the touch upgrade (which in my sleep deprived mode I was still willing to skip till the morning).  No, we bought a printer last year, an HP 5550c all in one.  But we could not install the drivers or the HP software.  It’d bomb 3/4ths of the way through the install and tell us to try again.  This seemed to be a manifestation of the itunes install issue.  In frustration we figured out how to use the windows photo viewer to do scans and installed the printer driver by hand to get printing working.  But I needed to know.  So I went to the HP site and got the Windows 7 software for this class of printer and Voi La! it installed.  yay…(tweet 12)

Now at this point I could have given up, but I figured since I was up, and I wouldn’t get this much concentrated time ever again, I started to do the iPod touch upgrade.  I paid apple 5 buck for the 3.0 software and hooked up the ipod, it backed itself up and then it started to upgrade.  About 4:00am the upgrade crashed.  Now the ipod touch was stuck looking for something to connect to and would not come up.  The software was wiped out.   I went to the apple site, hit the power and menu buttons simultaneously, cursed in colorful language, ascribed the situation to the scatological nature of all the connected  technologies and their famous steve’s and bill’s…and then I remembered that my macbook was at the other end of the desk.

“Aha!” I said to myself.  ”I can to reinstall the old software from my mac, and then reattach it to windows and have it wipe it out…maybe that’d work”

So as I was doing this, about 4:10 am or so, my wife comes downstairs and says “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”   I said, “Look, with my schedule, this is the only way I’d get all this done.  When am i going to have 7 hours of concentrated time to do this?” So she grumbled and went back upstairs.  So I did hook the touch to my mac, put the the 2.2 software back on.  Then I attached it to the windows machine.  The windows machine would make the USB device connected sound, then nada.  I was almost beside myself at this point.  I grabbed the can with the remains of my second diet coke of the evening/morning and said “Damn windows pos…I’ll reboot it.”   So I did a restart of windows (which of course wouldn’t go down on its own, so I finally succumbed holding the power button down for 10 seconds).  I then hooked up the ipod touch, doink sound, itunes came up, recognized that this was a wiped out version of the ipod touch and asked me if I wanted to reinstall my wife’s profile.  YES DAMMIT

So it did, then it reminded me that there was new software needing to be installed for the touch…did I want to do that?  YES DAMMIT

and then it installed. When it reinstalled it shut down all the sync settings for everything…so now I had to figure out what the touch’s sync settings were which took about 10 minutes and several syncs of calendars and music and podcasts et cetera till I got it right and didn’t overflow the 8G of memory.

And at 5:00am I was done.  I was going to tweet that I was done.  In fact the last tweet at 10 am (tweet 14), was actually what I had typed in on tweetdeck on my mac and forgot to hit return.

So the whole thing (remember an upgrade isn’t just installing the OS it is making sure that your machine and all peripherals are functional) too 7hours.

There’s my story…

Apple Time Capsule

So as I tweeted tonight, I received my 1TB Apple Time Capsule today and installed it to replace my aging Linksys router and to capture my dream of having a network disk mounted that all my machines could use (and maybe do some backups).  The real reason is that I need to back up all my important data on my Windows vista 64 bit machine that is just not cutting it.  Vista sucks and I have a W7 disk waiting, but I do NOT trust that microsoft with not destroy something (no matter what Walt Mossberg and Steve Ballmer say).  So I have a 24 hour backup going on to get 226G of important information copied to the time capsule and then I will feel safe to do the upgrade.  Why am I doing this?  Well Vista 64 sucks and my wife has an iPod touch that I cannot upgrade to the latest OS because windows vista is so screwed that I can’t upgrade iTunes (trust me I’ve done everyting including a bare metal install of iTunes…I’ve followed every web suggestion to play with the registry and msconfig, I’m done going down that path)

So rather than do the CNet thing and show how I opened the box, I’m going to cut to the chase.

1. 1. The software loaded flawlessly on my mac
   2. I set up the Time Capsule as both a disk and as a router
   3. I set up both a regular network as well as a guest network, both wpa2 et cetera et cetera
   4. My macbook pro connected to it.
   5. I went to connect my old powerbook (running osx) and it would NOT connect.
   6. I noticed that I had lost my connection on my macbook, and tried to reconnect to no avail (including the airport software that I just used to configure the device.  its scan button did NOTHING.
   7. I could not get the airport utility to see the time capsule anymore.
   8. My wired connection through it was working (my pc is wired to the router)
   9. In frustration I hit the reset button on the time capsule and saw that I was again able to see the time capsule on my macbook
   10. I reset all the stuff I did from steps 2-5 again and again all my machines got dropped.
   11. at this point I was so frustrated that even the reset again and did it again
   12. In desperation I connected my macbook pro to the “guest” network.  voi la a connection.
   13. I then asked to connect to the primary network…voi la again a connection
   14. did the same thing on my powerbook
   15. did the same thing on my G1
   16. did the same thing on my wife’s macbook
   17. What do I mean the same?  I connected to the guest network first then the private network
   18. Being the engineer, I reset the time capsule again, and re-setup the whole thing again and go the same results.
   19. Then I reset the time capsule and set up everything EXCEPT the guest network.
   20. Now everything connected to the private network first time…all 6 wireless devices.  No connection timeouts, nothing went wrong.

Being an Apple promoter, more technical than the average consumer, and persistent because of both an engineering background and Armenian DNA, I kept with it.  My conclusion?

Apple, you blew it with this device.    The fact that it not only dropped all the ancillary devices but the macbookpro with the airport software installed…

Well anyway, its up, i’m backing up my PC onto it AND I’m about to install windows 7-64 on my PC (probably tomorrow night at this point).  I’ve forwent the guest network for now since it just seems to complicate things.

It’s working and doing most of what I expected (including the dual band network for my apple TV to connect to) So I guess I’ll keep it.

Famous and Self-Abuse…

I’m reading Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir on the Craft on my Kindle.  I thought it appropriate since I’m trying to be a writer, why not get advice from arguably the most successful fiction writer of the last 30 years.   Now mind you I didn’t say the best, I just said most successful.  Truly, he is the Mark Twain of our generation, more on the fear side anyway.  Anyway, I’m about one-third of the way through the book and I just spent that 3rd learning about how poor he was, how much people in Maine smoke and drink, and how he became famous during a time he engaged in serious substance abuse.

I’ll admit, on those late nights 3 years ago when I wrote my book I sometimes had a glass of wine or a scotch on the rocks but to read his story, he doesn’t even remember writing Cujo.  Damn!

The reason I thought of this was that he finally started to get to the craft of writing about this third of the way through the book.  I was wondering if he was going to tell me at all.   Then my mind wandered to Michael Jackson and Oprah and Jim Morrison and CSN and Ringo and Barbara Bach and I started thinking:  Are there any famous people who don’t have a sordid or pitiful past?  Is it a pre-requisite to notoriety to engage in self destructive behavior, or live a lie for many years?

I wonder.  I’m also simultaneously reading a biography on Andrew Carnegie.  It’s fascinating also.  He was close to the richest and close to the most famous person at the close of the 19th Century.  But his story doesn’t sound the same.   I don’t know.

Hemingway is another notorious drinker.   What is it?

So as I sit here reading about these guys, looking for inspiration to write, sometimes play my guitar, do this and that and maybe school…I wonder, are they all so exceptional that they (unlike lots of other people who fail miserably) rose above their self-abuse, their sordid past…or was that past necessary for them to have nothing to lose so they could excel (aka not care about failure).

Just sitting here philosophizing…

Google Wave…WHY?

OK so I got my precious invitation to Google Wave and I went in, and started experimenting.  There’s some cool stuff in there.  It seems like a mashup of Friendfeed, Utterli and IM, with a sort of email feel to it.

My best description of what it feels like to use it is, if you ever watched that show “The Woodwright’s Shop” on PBS with Roy Underhill, with no power tools and all those chisels and planes and saws and the big workbench…all tools sitting there in one shop looking for a job to do.    Roy would appear with his little toolbox and build a barrel using the oddest plane to shape the boards into a curve…or a hand cut dovetails.   But without him, those tools are just sitting there looking for a purpose.

I just don’t get it.  I can use it.  I could see whipping up some widget for fun for it.   But I don’t know the answer to the following question:

WHY?

Obama gets the Nobel Peace Prize? Give me a break!

First off, I can say this because

• I voted for him
• I have a right to free expression
• I have to laugh

So lets get this straight.  Nominations were due on Jan 30, 10 days after the inauguration…so singlehandedly without most of his transition done, in 10 days Barack Obama changed the world peace situation.   What did he do wave his wand?

The Nobel Peace prize has been won by significant people AFTER they did something significant to change world peace…like Begin and Sadat, like Mandela, Martin Luther King, et cetera et cetera…Heck Mahatma Gandhi DIDN’T GET ONE!…it makes no sense to award one to a newly elected leader just for showing up and warming the chair!

What’s next?

• Obama wins an Oscar for his inaugural address?
• Obama gets the Baldridge award for running and efficient Campaign?
• Obama wins the congressional Medal of Honor because a some congressman noticed we had 1 extra in the drawer for 2009?
• Obama wins the Charlie’s Angels award for best imitiation of John Forsythe saying “Bosley”
• Obama awards himself the Presidential Medal of Freedom, because, well, he can?
• Obama wins the Silvio Berlousconi award for best swooning attitude?
• Obama wins on the Price is Right (except he had to play from the Oval Office)?
• Pope to issue an encyclical that called “Barack Obama est valde , es vos?”
• Barack Obama is awarded Stigmata by God for his service to humanity.

I like the guy.  I don’t agree with everything he’s doing, but he’s ok.  But that doesn’t mean I give him a medal for just showing up!

Amazon to sell kindle globally!

This is freakin’ awesome!  Those who have been following my blog posts and tweets know that my book, Urtaru, has a sort of international edge to it.  I’m hoping that the new markets that are being opened up!

A reuters article outlines it very well.  but on the amazon splash screen they have a long letter to customers about the new plan.

Can you tell that I’m excited.  If you don’t know what I’m talking about visit my book site

Apollo 13

Rented Apollo 13 this evening on my Apple TV in HD.  Great movie.  This is my 2nd time seeing it.  It conjures all kinds of emotions in me.  I was only 6 when the events recounted in it happened and barely remember it.  However I read Gene Kranz book “Failure Is Not An Option” a few years ago, and I think about it a lot now.

A couple of years ago, we went to Niagara falls.  On the way back across the border on the US side, about 2 blocks up and a right turn is an Aerospace museum.  We decided that on our way to Cooperstown to the Baseball HOF that we’d stop in this little museum.  The engineer in me was interested.

It was a wonderful place.  There was an exposition of that some guy donated of all the model airplanes he had ever built.  There were flight simulator setups for the kids to try.  There was a minature V-tol vehicle and with a couple of buttons you could change the engines from copter mode to jet.  There was a small crop duster helicopter you could sit in.  There was a Howard Hughes Spruce plane being refurbished in the hugest woodshop I had ever seen. It was like “The Woodright shop” on steroids.

There was a huge parachute and you could sit beneath it on vintage WWII airplane seats and watch Michael York in the Battle of Britain.

Anyway, why was this museum here?  Well, upstate NY was home to several companies that built airplanes or their parts.  Bell, Wright and several others were based there.  As you walked through the halls you could see pictures of planes and actual engines from these planes in cases.  And when you got to the back of the museum, just to the right of the 14000 model airplanes, there was a short hall of fame setup for engineers and test pilots of upstate New York.

Many people who have gone to Cooperstown (which I hadn’t gotten to yet that day) have mentioned that the Hall where the plaques of all the members of the Hall of Fame is awe inspiring.  And I have to admit that later that day, seeing the plaques of Ruth, Cool Papa Bell, Satchel Page, Tom Seaver et cetera was very moving.  However, walking through this area in the back of a museum that I had decided to visit on a lark, inspired something deeper down in me. On several 1 foot wide floor to ceiling panels set up in a sort of louvered window fashion which you could walk through were pictures of men with buzz cuts and pocket protectors.  Some of them, just the face, others looking up from their desks, others next to their planes.  Maybe a 100 year span of pictures. But they were all engineers.  Walking through those pictures was electric for me.   I was never a baseball player (yes I played, but I was never very good) so I looked at Babe Ruth as a fan of baseball.  However walking through the pictures of those guys who built planes, engines, flight computers, software, or were test pilots…well…whatever, you get the picture.

So tonight while watching Gene Kranz tell people, “Gentlemen, I want you all to forget the flight plan, from this moment on we are improvising on a new mission” just go to me all over again.  It’s probably only second to the scene in Lord of the Rings where Gandalf confronts the Balrog and say “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!” in taking the breath out of my lungs.

Later when the engineer who led the team to figure out how to build the CO2 filter came running from the conference room with his square peg in a round hole contraption so they could read the instructions to the crew…well that’s the most extreme version of the feeling that many of us have had in our engineering lives where the deadline was approaching, there was no turning back and we had to deliver…truly the movie isn’t even close to the drama that was going on in Houston and nothing I’ve ever done reaches that, but nevertheless I can imagine.  Anyway, here’s that scene again…

Snow Leopard…

Strange,  it didn’t seem to make much of a difference.  There were some cosmetic changes (expose and stuff), I feel psychologically up to date, but I don’t feel much else.

Just installed Snow Leopard

Will report more later…really interested in the quicktime editing and exchange 2007 connection…

R.I.P. Ted

People who know my political inclinations know that Ted Kennedy and I would have been on opposite sides of the see-saw. I never expressed much love for him mostly because of in my old liberal days (before I could vote) I held it against him that he tried to get the nomination from Carter in 1980.  And it was simple for me, at 16, to moralize that Chappaquiddik was enough a reason that he had no business running for president or stand in the senate.  (Hey I went to an all guys Catholic Prep School…we had real political discussions at lunch, we read the New York Times and Wall Street Journal during free periods).

Anyway back to Ted.  I was never a fan.  But the one thing I could say about Ted Kennedy was that even though I disagreed with him mostly, I always knew where he was going to come down on an issue.  I’d rather have a political disagreement with someone who was consistent than, lets say,  John Kerry  who could do 3 double back flips by the time he came down on both sides of an issue.

Anyway, there was a day 10 years ago that I stopped my diatribes against Ted.  After that event I might roll my eyes or harrumpf if someone advocated a position and mentioned his name, but I wouldn’t go on a tear about Mary Jo or William Kennedy Smith.  It was a scene shown on the local news live where Ted was on the boat as they pulled up the bodies of John Kennedy Jr. and his wife from the water.  They had just played the scene where John Jr saluted his father at the funeral, which always gets me teary-eyed.    Ted was on the boat, his white mane visible, as the bodies were moved onto the deck. He was identifying the bodies.  I turned to my wife and said, “No man should have to go through that.”   I never said anything bad about him after that.  I’d avoid his name and just say “The Democrats”.

Last year when word came that he had brain cancer, we had just started to be emotionally recovered from a friend who had died with the exact same condition.  I was pretty messed up from that and the news hit me hard.  We were at the dinner table and one of my sons made some offhand comment that teens say…something like “what’s the big deal?”  I turned to him and said, “He’s had enough tragedy already and no one deserves that.”

Tonight, I was watching a retrospective on his life on ABC.  They went through the controversies and then they once again played the JFK jr salute, Bobby in LA after getting shot, pictures of JFK Jr just before the crash and all kinds of pictures of the family.  I got teary-eyed once again.  I didn’t and still don’t agree with him on many things.   But I feel the loss.

R.I.P. Ted

Magazines on the Kindle

So, this evening I poked around the Kindle store looking at newspapers and magazines.  The newspaper subscriptions were just too dear for me.  Getting the WSJ for $15 a month when I am already paying something less than that for my online subscription seemed a bit steep (and losing my ability to tweet or digg an article was just too high a price to pay).   The Boston Globe was $10 a month.  That seemed a bit steep…I only get the Sunday Globe as it is in paper…just not enough of a draw given that I don’t read a local newspaper every day anymore.

So I looked at the Magazines.  I tried to find something that I’d read on a frequent basis.  Years ago I had a subscription to The Atlantic and let it lapse at the onset of the the Mosaic/Netscape era.  I really enjoyed the short stories and in depth articles.  I didn’t always agree with the poltical POV of the Atlantic, but I couldn’t say that the articles weren’t well researched and well written.  So I signed up for the trial subscription.

The first thing I noticed was that the navigation for the Magazine left something to be desired.  I expected a table of contents and I got a confusing table of sections that led you to the Articles, but no TOC.  It was just weird.  If they are attempting to come up with a new metaphor for navigation, its usefulness is lost on me.  And I’ll navigate my way through a lot of odd stuff.

There are a couple of Sci-Fi magazines that I may try, lets see if they allow me to navigate without scratching my head.

Oh and as an aside, flipping pages on the Kindle vs flipping pages on my wife’s iPod Touch:  The iPod Touch wins.  The touchscreen and the motion of flicking the page is much more natural than hitting the quirky buttons on the sides of the display.  Might I suggest that if you can’t make the screen a touchscreen on the Kindle, you could replace the previous and next page buttons with a touch strip just below the screen that you can move your finger across in a similar fashion to flipping a page that would match the expectation.

Anyway that’s just me.

Still loving the Kindle overall though…