Armen Chakmakjian

2011 in review

In Random on January 1, 2012 at 12:58 am

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,100 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 52 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Free sells…

In Random on December 23, 2011 at 9:08 pm

So after 3 days into the 5 day free promotion of my book Urtaru hundreds of copies did the digital equivalent of flying off the shelves in the US, UK and Germany.  

Obviously there’s always a catch…giving away something for free means that the only payback I get is goodwill and hope of a recommendation. Merry Christmas to all new readers. 

My master plan however is for Peter Jackson, George Lucas or Stephen Spielberg to be one of downloaders so the movie can be made.  Hey you gotta think BIG! :-)

BTW if you want to read more about the book itself please stop by my website 

Kindle Fire 6.2.1 – Phew!

In Random on December 23, 2011 at 8:51 pm

So with a month under my belt with the kindle fire I’m mostly happy.  Being a technologist I have to admit I was giving it a long leash to find its way.  There were some weirdnesses in the experience and some quirkiness it apps that were comparable to ones on my iPhone that started to get under my skin.  Then I saw that Amazon was rolling out an update.  

Amazon rolling out an update generally means that if I didn’t know about it I’d be pleasantly surprised when I got it, but knowing about it and waiting was not going to work.  So I downloaded the app myself to my Air and hooked the fire up to the USB and then it restarted twice as described in the faq.  

PHEW! was my reaction.  First off the most noticeable change was the responsiveness of the carousel on the landing page.  It is now useful.  Also double taps to open an app or a link work without me trying 3 times.  Like I said, I bought early and knew that this was going to happen, but I had almost given up hope.

The next thing was that the famous WSJ app no longer randomly hung or crashed.  Last night was the first night in a while, reading the days news where I never got stuck restarting the app after a few minutes of use.

Another thing that got much better was that on the carousel, I could remove things I didn’t want to see anymore.  

I’m still not happy with the way that certain fonts are rendered, the Facebook app looks all washed out.  However, I did notice that Silk started to get a little snappier.  Not sure why.  

I am starting to use it more and more at night while I’m watching TV as the device I look up stuff on rather than my Air (which I can leave attached to my Tbolt display in the other room).  

The point of this is that (as I pointed out when I bought the team iPad at my last job) was that the device is all about content consumption.  Sure sure you can use garageband on an iPad…but I’d rather use the full version on my Air and if I’m going to type a story or a blogpost, I still need a real keyboard until the virtual ones get a better tactile feel (or voice recognition or direct mind link replace them).

So thank you Amazon for fixing the fire early in its life.  

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