. . . I don't understand these iPhone frenzies.


Apple employee in England hugs iPhone buyer

. . . thank God that your life has so little hardship that a change in a social networking interface can hold your attention.

Also, to commemorate our chronic lack of posting, here's a picture of a monkey.

OK, first, full disclosure: I am a technologist. I have a degree in Computer Science. I even write software.

But I'm troubled by what's happening in our culture. Case in point: Google+. I only just heard about this, but it seems everyone is now "moving to" Google+ or wishing they could move to it or sitting on pins and needles waiting to be invited into it. We didn't even know what this was a day ago, didn't need it, and now everyone's buzzing about it. I assume it has more blinky lights or something? I guess it will give us a way of getting even more virtually connected to people we barely know and never see or talk to in real, physical life. Meta-life is more fulfilling, I suppose.

My inner conspiracy theorist is standing on a ledge right now. SkyNet had nothing on Google. They know everything about you, because you willingly have abdicated all your privacy to them. OK, OK, at Google headquarters they have a sign that says "Don't be evil". I don't want to be around the day someone there gets the bright idea to take that sign down.

But, what the hey. They've got apps!

Meh.

Just for fun, while I'm in this mood. Everything's amazing right now and nobody's happy:

I posted this a few years ago as yet another testament to my own cluelessness.

In my defense, I have a growing conviction that our lives in the West, in general, are too cluttered and clogged with gadgetry, entertainment, and the like. I'm trying very hard to simplify. So buying yet another gadget is generally anathema to me.

But a month or two ago, I bought a Kindle.

Oh my, this thing is great. I'm not saying it works great (if "great" is defined as feature-rich). It doesn't have a lot of flash or dazzle, and it doesn't even have a backlight. It just is great. I use mine as simply as possible, rarely expose it to the internet, don't use it as an mp3 player, etc. I just read on it. And for that, it's awesome.

Though it's an electronic device, it's been a vehicle of simplification for me, oddly enough. All the books I want in one nice, tight, light little package. And a battery life that has to be experienced to be believed.

And the books! Being naturally cheap, I've been reading primarily free ones. Classics. This device has opened up a new world to me. Russian short stories, Father Brown, Jane Eyre, Sherlock Holmes, Moby Dick, Dostoevsky, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Spurgeon. I downloaded the ESV Bible on it for free. I read more now than I have in decades, because it is so simple to just pick that thing up and start reading.

I am holding out on the iPad, iPhone, and even the Droid (had one for awhile. Gave it to my better half - she loves it).This is ironic, because I am a technologist. My peers at work are starting to talk . . .

But I do love my Kindle.

When I realized we were paying over $100 a month for two "dumb phones" and about to move to a place with no cell coverage in the immediate area, I decided to finally cancel our cell service with Sprint, whom we'd had a tolerated/hate relationship with for a few years. At first I tried to just get a less expensive plan. They said there wasn't one. The cheapest plan I could get was over $50 per phone for text and anytime minutes. When I could see that we could go with a pay-as-you-go plan with VirginMobile that cost $25/month and included 300 anytime minutes and unlimited data, I knew I'd be dumb not to switch.

So I canceled with Sprint. And we started up with VirginMobile.

A month later, I got a bill from Sprint for our first month without their coverage. I just ignored it. I already canceled, hadn't used their phones at all the month since, and I figured they were just behind in their updating the account.

Another month went by and I got another bill, with the previous bill past due. So I'd canceled my service and they were basically still trying to bill me each month. I called to see what was up.

I reminded them that I had canceled two months ago and asked why I should pay them for two months of service I didn't want, didn't ask for, and didn't even use. Eventually, they talked me down to paying a $55 get-them-off-my-back fee -- something having to do with switching over my wife's phone, whose number we transferred to her new phone.

I said: "Can I pay that $55 online like I have my previous bills?"

"No," the operator said. "These payments can't be made online; we will send a bill to your house."

I confirmed our new address.

I have not received anything in the mail, but today I got an email saying that $55 was past due and was being sent to a collection agency for non-payment. There was a handy button in the email for me to pay this amount online.

Sprint, you're dumb. I will never use you again and I will tell anybody who asks not to use your service either.

I've been contemplating the way so many "voices" today tell us exactly what we are going to consume, which, I think, dictates to a large extent how we're going to behave in our daily lives. For many of us, we happily oblige the cultural voices with nary a second thought (me included).

The voices say, "Yes, you will ..."

- Own a television (we own two)
- Buy a $100 cable TV package
- Carry a cell phone (we own three)
- Upgrade your cell phone to a smart phone
- Buy a car on credit
- Purchase a house, and the bigger the better
- Subscribe to the Internet (we pay $75 for slow satellite Internet!)
- Live in the suburbs
- Consume genetically modified corn (it's in everything, even non-food items)
- Spend hours of your life watching mindless TV shows and playing mindless games
- View pornography, especially the "innocent," ambient stuff in checkout aisles
- Go to college
- Live on two incomes

Some of the aforementioned stuff is blatant sin, and some of it obviously isn't. Some of the stuff I mentioned is even desirable or profitable for our well-being. The common thread, I think, is most of us (again, me included) simply pop the cultural pill without asking why we're doing it, or what the effect might be on our spiritual and emotional well-being. Television, for example, changes us, whether we admit it or not. The boob tube changes our feelings, attitudes and actions, and if you don't think it does, then ask yourself why 20 or 30 percent of TV air time is spent showing commercials, or why advertisers choose to pay $3 million for 30 seconds of your attention during he Superbowl?

Think.

Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should. -- Dr. Ian Malcom

HT: 22 Words

My kids gave me a pocket watch for Christmas. Color me old-fashioned, but I've wanted one for years now. There's something almost pleasurable about checking the time on an analog timepiece, taking in the entire hour in one glance -- the exact opposite of the cold precision of a digital clock. I'll probably carry it in my pocket forever.

Speaking of forever, I also got a Kindle for Christmas. When I first heard about e-readers, I thought, No thanks. Years ago I owned a PDA, and I tried to use it as a reader. I successfully read the yet-to-be-published debut Jared C. Wilson novel, Otherworld, on the PDA, but, despite that, I found doing extensive reading on backlit devices to be too cumbersome.

The Kindle is completely different. After getting used to it for a couple of days, I revised my e-reader position: I'll own one forever now. Till death do us part.



The Kindle's biggest asset is what your average e-reader dilettante would consider to be a liability: the lack of a backlit screen. Without getting into all the geek stuff about electronic ink technology (stuff I don't understand anyway), I can simply say that the Kindle doesn't have a backlit screen because books don't have backlit screens, and the Kindle is not supposed to be an iPad, it's supposed to be a book reader. I spend enough of my life looking at backlit screens, so it's refreshing to pick up the Kindle and feel like I'm reading a book. The machine doesn't get hot. Your eyes don't get strained. A full battery charge lasts for weeks. And it's easy to "get lost" in the material that you're reading, because you're not thinking about the e-reader, you're thinking about the book you're reading.

I'm sure Amazon will one day succumb to the critics' cacophony and come out with a backlit Kindle one day (in the same way that Barnes & Noble recently released a backlit, full-color Nook), but it won't be the same. In my mind now, an e-reader needs to reflect light, not emit it.

I highly recommend one.

We've been experiencing periodic slowdowns on the site for quite awhile, as some of you I'm sure have noticed. It's getting worse and we had a good, long outage this morning. I think it's the server we're on.

I'm working on it, to prove out that hypothesis. I will let you know when we've switched over to another server, or come to some other solution.

(Of course, if no one produces any posts, we'll be like a tree falling in the forest anyway . . . )

Are you tired of struggling with Microsoft Windows?

Two alternatives:

The cheap one - Ubuntu Linux



Linux is not necessarily for the faint-hearted, but it is a more stable OS than Wind'ohs, and you can run it from a CD or on a dual-boot option if you want to try it out without a lot of risk. It's a straightforward install, but you'll feel more at home with Linux if you have a strong inner-nerd.

And you won't spend hours on the phone with tech-support (I'm not sure there is telephone tech support) but you can find out how to fix any problem you have by googling for it. Someone else has gone through what you've gone through. There's a large and active ubuntu community out there.

PLUS - it is absolutely free, now and forever. And it comes with a huge library of free software to do almost anything you need. I use Ubuntu myself, and run Opera for a web browser, Thunderbird for email, OpenOffice for MS Office capabilities, plus a large array of other software. My current favorite app is the Lucidor ebook reader (I'm finishing up reading Dostoevsky's The Idiot as we speak - that book was also free). If you're a developer type like me, it's a fabulous environment to work in.

Free.

The second alternative? Not so free. But still great. Get a Mac.



Five and a half years ago I debated on this site whether to get a Mac. Some people were telling me that Macs don't last long and are non-upgradable. The Mac we bought in 2004 still runs great, and I've upgraded it two OS levels and for a larger disk and memory, and - full disclosure - I replaced the motherboard on it last year, but was able to do it myself. We recently bit the bullet and bought a new iMac, just to get newer capabilities and more performance. It is one sweet machine. Macs, by the way, run on top of a linux variant.

Not free. But awesome.

I'm so tired of updates on my computer. I get the dumb reminder, and it wants to install, (or it installs itself) and then it tells me I have to restart, and if I don't it'll eventually do it to me anyway when I walk away from the computer. And it's not just Window's, it's all kinds of programs. Feels like every program needs to update:
Virus Protection
Web Browser (in my case, firefox. They're the worst offenders. It's like once a week.)
Flash
Java
Adobe
Microsoft
Even the HP printer has updates...

And I'm sure there's more. It seems that every few days, someone wants to install an update which I wouldn't care so much about except that I have to restart my computer. And that's a pain, because I have all kinds of stuff I'm working on, and I hate having to remember what all I had pulled up so that I can go reopen it all again...and then I have to keep clicking "remind me later" over and over all day. Aaaargh! Enough Already!

Anybody know of a way around that?

I've thought of two ways:
1- A way for the computer to save all my stuff and restore it after the restart. The computer does save all my stuff,(it's called "hibernate") but a full restart cancels that out.
2-The computer could put all the updates in a bin, and do it all at once, once a month.

Am I the only one that gets aggravated by that?

Text messages cost the phone companies almost nothing. The reason it has to be small is because they hide the message inside a space they are using anyway.

TEXT messaging is a wonderful business to be in: about 2.5 trillion messages will have been sent from cellphones worldwide this year.

All four of the major carriers decided during the last three years to increase the pay-per-use price for messages to 20 cents from 10 cents.

Mr. Kohl’s letter of inquiry noted that “text messaging files are very small, as the size of text messages are generally limited to 160 characters per message, and therefore cost carriers very little to transmit.”

A better description might be “cost carriers very, very, very little to transmit.”

A text message initially travels wirelessly from a handset to the closest base-station tower and is then transferred through wired links to the digital pipes of the telephone network, and then, near its destination, converted back into a wireless signal to traverse the final leg, from tower to handset. In the wired portion of its journey, a file of such infinitesimal size is inconsequential.

Perhaps the costs for the wireless portion at either end are high — spectrum is finite, after all, and carriers pay dearly for the rights to use it.

But text messages are not just tiny; they are also free riders, tucked into what’s called a control channel, space reserved for operation of the wireless network.

That’s why a message is so limited in length: it must not exceed the length of the message used for internal communication between tower and handset to set up a call. The channel uses space whether or not a text message is inserted.

Professor Keshav said that once a carrier invests in the centralized storage equipment — storing a terabyte now costs only $100 and is dropping — and the staff to maintain it, its costs are basically covered. “Operating costs are relatively insensitive to volume,” he said. “It doesn’t cost the carrier much more to transmit a hundred million messages than a million.”

Once one understands that a text message travels wirelessly as a stowaway within a control channel, one sees the carriers’ pricing plans in an entirely new light. The most profitable plan for the carriers will be the one that collects the most revenue from the customer: unlimited messaging, for which AT&T and Sprint charge $20 a month and T-Mobile, $15.

Customers with unlimited plans, like diners bringing a healthy appetite to an all-you-can-eat cafeteria, might think they’re getting the best out of the arrangement. But the carriers, unlike the cafeteria owners, can provide unlimited quantities of “food” at virtually no cost to themselves — so long as it is served in bite-sized portions.

If that headline isn't enough to get you to read with curiousity (and possibly some incredulity) I don't know what is!

My favorite part is at the bottom in bold.

Miley Cyrus Says The Internet 'Wastes Your Life'

When Miley Cyrus left Twitter last fall — possibly at her beau and "The Last Song" co-star Liam Hemsworth's request — fans were upset at not being able to keep track of the pop star's every thought. And while they still may be mourning the loss of Cyrus' tweets nearly six months after she said goodbye, she doesn't regret the decision to leave one bit.

"I was kind of tired of telling everyone what I'm doing," Cyrus said in an interview with Movieline. "I hate when I read things and celebrities are complaining like, 'I have no personal life.' I'm like, well, that's because you write everything that you're doing."

Cyrus said that she realized the only person she was hurting by tweeting every moment of her life was herself. "So I was that person who was like, 'I'm so sad. I have no real, normal life. Everyone knows what I'm doing.' And I'm like, well that's my own fault because I'm telling everyone," the singer explained. "And then I'd tweet, 'I'm here,' and I'd wonder why a thousand fans are outside the restaurant. Well, hello, I just told them. So I'm just, like, kind of thinking it doesn't really make a lot of sense. Everything I'm saying is not really going with what I'm putting on the Internet."

Cyrus explained the benefits of not constantly being on the Internet: "I'm a lot less on my phone, I'm a little bit more social. I have a lot more real friends as opposed to friends who are on the Internet who I'm talking to — which is like not cool, not safe, not fun and most likely not real. I think everything is just better when you're not so wrapped up in [the Internet].

"I just think it's kind of lame," Cyrus added. "I feel like I hang out with my friends and they're so busy taking pictures of what they're doing and putting them on Facebook that they're not really enjoying what they're doing. You're going to look back and have a million pictures, but you're not going to be in any of them. Because you're not having fun, you're too busy clicking away. So I think, just enjoy the moment you're in, and stop telling people about it. Just enjoy it."

And what advice does she have for other teens wrapped up in their online life? Well, simply to get offline and get outside. "I'm telling kids, don't go on the Internet, it's dangerous, it's not fun, it wastes your life," she said. "And you should be outside playing sports or something."

Contra vs. Duck Hunt

There is so much awesomeness here, it may blow up your monitor.

Temple Grandin, Ph.D., is the most accomplished and well-known adult with autism in the world. Now her fascinating life, with all its challenges and successes is being brought to the screen. HBO has produced the full-length film Temple Grandin, which premieres on Saturday, February 6th on HBO. She has been featured on NPR (National Public Radio), major television programs, such as the BBC special "The Woman Who Thinks Like a Cow", ABC's Primetime Live, The Today Show, Larry King Live, 48 Hours and 20/20, and has been written about in many national publications, such as Time magazine, People magazine, Forbes, U.S. News and World Report, and New York Times. Among numerous other recognitions by media, Bravo Cable did a half-hour show on her life, and she was featured in the best-selling book, Anthropologist from Mars.

Dr. Grandin didn't talk until she was three and a half years old, communicating her frustration instead by screaming, peeping, and humming. In 1950, she was diagnosed with autism and her parents were told she should be institutionalized. She tells her story of "groping her way from the far side of darkness" in her book Emergence: Labeled Autistic, a book which stunned the world because, until its publication, most professionals and parents assumed that an autism diagnosis was virtually a death sentence to achievement or productivity in life.

Dr. Grandin has become a prominent author and speaker on the subject of autism because "I have read enough to know that there are still many parents, and yes, professionals too, who believe that 'once autistic, always autistic.' This dictum has meant sad and sorry lives for many children diagnosed, as I was in early life, as autistic. To these people, it is incomprehensible that the characteristics of autism can be modified and controlled. However, I feel strongly that I am living proof that they can" (from Emergence: Labeled Autistic).

Even though she was considered "weird" in her young school years, she eventually found a mentor, who recognized her interests and abilities. Dr. Grandin later developed her talents into a successful career as a livestock-handling equipment designer, one of very few in the world. She has now designed the facilities in which half the cattle are handled in the United States, consulting for firms such as Burger King, McDonald's, Swift, and others.

Dr. Grandin presently works as a Professor of Animal Science at Colorado State University. She also speaks around the world on both autism and cattle handling. At every Future Horizons conference on autism, the audience rates her presentation as 10+.

The Google-naut is coming...

Since Google is using its new Buzz social network in an attempt to take down Facebook, the #1 social network should return the favor: Facebook should tell Google to buzz-off. Permanently.

To protect itself from Google, Facebook content must never appear in any form as part of any Google product. Not ever, and Facebook should make the announcement today.

Here's why: If Google Buzz is ever connected to Facebook, it will be the beginning of the end for today's #1 social network.

As a Facebook user, the last thing I need in my life is another social networking service. I have lots of friends--business and personal--on Facebook. It plays an important role in my home and work life. What I don't need is for my friends to start dividing themselves into Facebook users and Buzz users.

I want all my friends on just one service.

Just as Google, Amazon, and eBay have become dominant in their markets, almost to the exclusion of all competitors, Facebook has become America's social network. We do not need another one and Google will someday regret trying.

Google is simply too late to the game and given its failed history in social networks--Orkut, anyone?--there is little reason to predict success beyond the power of Google's name.

For Buzz to succeed, it needs Facebook content. By denying it, Facebook can help secure its future and help wall off Google.

Given Google's modus operandi, Buzz will manage to somehow strip revenue from any social network that it allows it to connect. Eventually there will be just Google. Don't believe me? Sit back and watch.

Facebook must act now to stop this. It should never allow Buzz to aggregate Facebook content or send updates to Facebook users. If Facebook does this today, nobody will notice and not much of a stink will be raised.

There is no demand, at the moment, from Buzz users to connect to Facebook. Over time, however, demand will develop if Facebook doesn't take steps now to prevent it.

Facebook does not need Gmail as a client to attract and support users. And I don't need an e-mail service to divide my friends into Gmail users and everyone else.

So, if you are looking for me, I'll make it easy: I'll be on Facebook and not on Google Buzz. You'll thank me for not complicating your life.

Just give me one of these.

Most people I know are losing their minds over the iPad already. Gotta have something that didn't even exist ten minutes ago.

I haven't checked into the iPad much yet, but my guess is that my take would be a lot like Challies: iPad: The Greatest Disappointment in Human History

Yesterday I sat and watched liveblog coverage of the long-awaited announcement from Apple. To no one’s great surprise, they unveiled their newest device, the iPad. While everyone knew this tablet device was coming, everyone had wondered exactly what it would be. Apple has high standards when it comes to devices like this one and I, for one, was prepared to be amazed. Alas, I was disappointed. iDisappointed, even. I’m ready to declare that the iPad is the greatest disappointment in all of human history (at least since The Phantom Menace).

Tell me what is, in your opinion, the best free program or resource on the Internet. For example, some might say Open Office or Wikipedia, and those would be great choices!

A couple of days ago a friend of mine chatted me up about Ubuntu. Apparently it's a Linux-based free operating system. I'm not 100 percent sure I have the huevos rancheros to try to boot up a free operating system, though Vista does so often get on my last nerve. Still, I like the idea of geeks (like our very own Billboy and his Bloo software) who use their spare time to wage guerrilla warfare against the Axis of Evil: Microsoft, Google, and Apple.

(On a side note, I've done so many links on this post that I feel like The Anchoress.)

How does yours stack up?



The chart comes from an independent warranty peddler (hence the 2 year and 3 year time frames).

Via this post on chron.com.