So Where Do I Go From Here?

I haven't written much lately. Well, at least not on this blog. My Tumblr blog on the other hand has been fairly active by comparison. And of course I'm extremely active on on Twitter, somewhat less active on Google Plus, and I keep in touch with my family through Facebook. So where does Blogger fit in? In the past it was a no-brainer to put whatever I wanted on my blog but now there are so many more choices, many of them more convenient and faster than blogging. Twitter is amazing in this respect and Tumblr fills the gap nicely when Twitter falls short. Tumblr even holds its own nicely against Blogger in terms of longer form writing, something I never really did much anyway....

So here I am with my old blog writing a post wondering if it will be my final one.

Although the new revamped interface for Blogger does look cool once you get used to it. Maybe I'll play around with it a bit....

Palm Pre Makes Yahoo's List of Phones Doomed to be Collectibles

The most interesting thing about this piece is that it lays the blame for the Pre's demise squarely at HP's feet. And I think they're right. Palm was putting out a new update every month, slowly but surely improving the Pre by improving webOS. And then Palm sold itself to HP and nothing. There was a lot of talk and a lot of promises but ultimately those promises were broken as HP made webOS the centerpiece of their mobile strategy but showed little interest in actually making new phones. And the frequent updates which Palm had been so proud of dried up.

The Pre's immediate successor, the Pre 2 is only available on Verizon and sales people tend to steer people away from it. The Veer, a tiny little phone which combines the best features of the Pre and Pixi phones with some nice, fast hardware is only available on AT&T and is similarly neglected. The Pre 3 which was announced in January has yet to debut anywhere.

5 Best Cell Phones Doomed to be Collectible - Yahoo! Shopping

Yahoo Thinks it's Still 1998

Gizmodo posted recent Yahoo ad where they take aim at Google: Yahoo Bitch Slaps Google In $85 Million Ad Campaign - Yahoo vs google - Gizmodo. I found the ad to be very striking but perhaps not in a way that bodes well for Yahoo. The thing that struck me was how retro it felt. Yahoo is basically promoting itself as a "web portal" even if the words never appear in their commercial. And for good reason, web portals were wiped out in the early 2000s by the bursting of the Dotcom bubble and by a new search engine called "Google."

Portals were all the rage in the mid to late 90s. They were huge, bloated pages that expected you to slog through tons of ads and links just to type in a few search terms. The result was huge, slow loading home pages at a time when most people still connected to the Internet through relatively slow dial-up modems. But they had "everything you need in one place"—never mind that if all you want is one thing, you'll have to wait for everything else to load and put up with numerous distractions.

And now Yahoo is for all intents and purposes trying to bring the concept back. The truth is that they never really abandoned the concept. When Yahoo started out it was more of a directory of websites than a real search engine. And they've stayed true to that concept even as the rest of the Internet abandoned it.

The bottom line is which page looks cleaner and easier to use?

This one?


Or this one?

Good luck Yahoo. I hope this turns out better for you than it did for these guys.

The Coming Age of Paid News

I haven't bought a real, physical newspaper in years. And yet I read online versions of newspapers aggregated through Google every day. And this Doonesbury cartoon does a pretty good job of encapsulating the results of an entire society doing the same thing. And certainly there is a lot of breast beating by journalists about the way that Google and Yahoo supposedly steal food from their mouths by posting links to their content. But the plight of newspapers is bigger than Google News, Google Reader, and bloggers posting links to their content. Linking to online newspaper articles drives readers to newspaper websites and generates at least some ad revenue. There is also an elephant in the room that the newspapers don't like to talk about when they talk about search engines and blogs linking to their content. Newspapers also make a lot of money off of classified ads. Or at least they used to. With Craigslist stealing the classified ad business which newspapers used to own, things start getting grim.

And forcing Google, Yahoo, or even bloggers to pay for linking to news websites sounds like a pretty good way for newspapers to cut off their nose to spite their face. (On a personal note, I actually had to look up that saying before I wrote it down, my original mangled version of that idiom was much more disturbing.) It doesn't bring back the classified ads revenue and it sets up a dynamic not unlike the one that currently exists with the music industry which is currently alienating an entire generation of its fans by suing people willy-nilly.

So what is the answer? At the moment there is none but there is certainly a lot of experimentation going around. Plenty of journalists have been pushed out of old media like newspapers, radio, and television and found a home on the web as bloggers. And some of the bigger blogging sites like Huffington Post and The Daily Beast are growing larger and have the resources to act more like traditional newspapers. (He writes having rarely if ever visited either website.) It's possible that big professional blogs will eventually replace traditional newspapers altogether. It's also entirely possible that in the future newspapers will go completely online and will rely on either contributions or on some sort of micro-payment system which is reasonable and convenient enough that people are actually willing to pay it. This is pretty much what is happening now with iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. While most teens still won't pay for music, older people are perfectly willing to trade a few dollars for the convenience of being able to download music from one reliable place at a low price. Or maybe the future of news looks more like TV and radio, multiple shows and channels all supported by advertising. I just hope that they don't overdo it.

Moreover devices like Amazon's Kindle promise to open up a whole new market for bloggers as they allow people to carry thousands of books and subscribe to hundreds of newspapers (which are updated every day), all in a relatively compact device. Of course these days tiny laptops are almost as compact and software similar to that of the Kindle's can be programmed for them. But laptops are real computers and their software can be hacked to remove the DRM software which controls what can and cannot be loaded onto the Kindle. The Kindle by contrast is completely "safe" from such shenanigans. This is why I think that in the end the newspapers' problems are more about control than they are about money. A big newspaper like the New York Times could potentially save a lot of money right now if they just gave all of their subscribers a Kindle but they will likely resist the move lest a user hack their device to read for free. So instead everybody reads for free.

As a post-script to these meandering thoughts I'd like to point out that many of the bigger newspaper bankruptcies have happened in part because they were mismanaged into the ground. And we certainly don't reward financial mismanagement in this country. OK, so we do; but the newspapers aren't too big to fail. Maybe the newspapers (and the mainstream media in general) need to ask themselves if they deserve to survive at all. While they are good at reporting body counts for the was Iraq, they did piss poor job of considering arguments that might have kept out of that war. Similarly, they've proven very good at detailing gory details of our economic crisis but did little to warn us that it was coming. And those who tried to warn us were generally laughed at. (I realize that the last link was a to a clip from CNBC, a cable TV network but radio and newspapers were every bit the enthusiastic cheerleaders to our exuberant economy which crashed so embarrassingly with every talking head on TV telling us that we had no way of knowing what was coming.)

Fondling the Palm Pre

I took a trip a Sprint store in downtown Chicago today for the express purpose of playing around with the Palm Pre. I was actually tempted to buy it right there and then but an hour or so of playing around with the Pre help cool my ardor. (Does this word mean what I think it means?) Which is not to say that I didn't like the Pre, only that I don't think its necessarily worth switching carriers and giving up my T-Mobile G1.

I arrived at the store at about 9AM and there was a line of about 20 people ahead of me. I had visited the store the day before and been told by a clerk that they had 32 Pres to sell and two demo units. So I was in time. A clerk offered me a demo unit to play with and I snapped a picture to test the camera. I was immediately impressed. The picture looked great and I snapped an identical picture with my G1 for comparison purposes. The picture quality of the two phones seemed roughly comparable. I thought that the Pre took a better picture but it's hard to tell on a three inch screen. What I really wanted to do was email the Pre's picture to myself so I could compare them directly. Alas, the email on the demo unit wasn't set up so I couldn't do this, grrr.

But the Pre I could still see the strength of the Pre's camera. My G1 takes good pictures when it has good lighting but the shutter speed is very slow. I'll often move it too early and ruin a picture. But the Pre I demoed had no such problem. It snapped the picture immediately. Programs on the Pre launch quickly, more quickly than they do on my G1. Unfortunately, the Pre I used was prone to strange and sudden periods of lagginess especially when trying to use the gestures. The Sprint staff insisted that this was due to fact thaty the demo unit was a month old and not yet fully baked. They insisted that the retail units had fully up to date software that the demo unit lacked. I'll take their word for it but it seems strange. Surely Sprint or Palm could have pushed out an over the air update to the demo units the night before to make sure they would perform like a brand new unit. After all, this was presumably an important day for both Palm and Sprint and you would think that they would do everything in their power to see that in store demos went off without a hitch. Oh well.

One thing that the Pre did very well was rotate the screen. Every time that I've played with an iPhone or iPod Touch it showed a small but noticeable delay when it rotated screen from portrait to landscape mode and vice versa. My G1 only recently got this ability and when it rotates the screen, it is even slower. But with the Pre screen rotation was instantaneous. This is clearly a fast little machine. The card view worked perfectly and felt very natural.

The Pre itself is quite beautiful. It felt good in my had and curves gently when open to hug the contours of my head when I hold it up to my ear. Unfortunately, the shiny, glossy surface is a fingerprint magnet.

As far as the gestures go, the most natural ones are the back swipe and the swipe up gesture which brings on the wave bar and launcher. They were very smooth and even fun to do—most of the time. Sometimes the wave would get stuck in the middle of the screen. Sometimes tapping on the launcher button would launch the phone application and vice versa. I also had trouble pulling off a lot of the other gestures. The double tap to zoom in on part of a web page tended to work perfectly but the pinch and squeeze to zoom in or out was flakey and unpredictable. Again the Sprint staff insisted that this was the fault of half-baked demo software and that the retail phones would behave properly. They were certainly helpful and patient with customers who were actually ready to buy, making sure that they didn't leave the store unless their phone worked. But they were hampered in that they couldn't just open a retail and use the phone unless a customer was ready to buy it.

I suppose from Sprint's perspective my complaints don't matter since by my own admission, I wasn't ready to buy the phone. And indeed, I can't even say that they've lost me as a customer. I was impressed enough by what I saw that I'll probably go back in a couple of weeks after the hype has died down and see if they have a fully baked demo unit to play with. But I certainly didn't fall in love with the Pre and buy it on the spot. Of course there were people in line behind me who were ready to buy it anyway....

The Pre launch reminds me of a failed television show called "Kitchen Confidential." The pilot of that show featured a brilliant chef at a restaurant whose opening night goes disastrously. But the food is delicious and the local food critic gives the place a thumbs up—after noting that they have to get their house in order to become a truly great restaurant. Right now Sprint and Palm respectively are Nolita and Jack Bourdain—they have a great product but they still need to get their act together to sell it.

In any case my plan remains the same. I'll wait for an unlocked GSM version to come out before I buy the Pre. I bought my G1 mostly because my Treo 680 was becoming too unstable and I hated the browser and hated having to hard reset it and reinstall my programs to get it to run properly. (The 680 is actually a pretty efficient PDA when it's relieved of its phone and Internet duties.) While my G1 can be annoying at times, it can get laggy and I sometimes have to reset it in order to get it to behave but for the most part, it's still going strong and I enjoy using it. I'm in the middle of a two year contract. I can afford to wait....

Back to the Future?

Today as the Palm Pre debuts with its fancy multi-touch technology which extends the multi-technology that Apple pioneered with the iPhone I find myself wondering if the this whole "giving your phone the finger" thing is such a good idea after all. Part of what makes me wonder this is something I saw in my Twitter feed. PC Software News has a link to an interesting product, a touchscreen stylus. And this isn't the first time I've seen such a product, Thinkgeek has them too. The point of the touchscreen stylus is that it provides better control which makes typing on the iPhone's tiny virtual keyboard easier. I can see that. I can also see that it might enable also enable better control for drawing applications as well. It's interesting how now that the last hold outs in the stylus driven touchscreen camp has joined the multi-touch party that people might be starting to get nostalgic for the old stylus driven touchscreen devices.

Palm Pre Almost Here

I guess a picture is worth a 1000 words. After months of hype, the Palm Pre will finally be released tomorrow and my feelings are mixed. My plan is (was?) to wait six months to a year for an unlocked GSM version. But every time my T-Mobile G1 acts up a bit I wonder if I should make the jump. Even though I love my Android phone, the fact remains that it still hasn't replaced my Palm TX as a PDA—Palm's old PIM software and third party apps are just so easy and familiar that it's hard to find Android apps to truly replace them. The Pre as Palm's latest and greatest could be the device I've been waiting for; it promises to be even more web savvy than my G1 and the Classic emulator would allow me to run my old PalmOS applications, the best of both worlds. And it promises to be compatible with iTunes which would give me a nice, big screen for those movies I carry on my iPod but never watch because its screen is too small....

While I'm eager to hold the Pre in my hands and actually play with it, I'm dreading the prospect of actually going through another upgrade. And then there's the prospect of switching carriers. I'm pretty happy with T-Mobile. They have good coverage and good 3G service here in Chicago. Sprint on the other hand had very bad coverage a few years ago and I have no idea if they've improved. For me Sprint really is the chink in the Palm Pre's armor.

I'll probably stick to my plan for now. I'll go and check the Pre out but I'm not planning to buy it. My G1 is very good for now and I'm still discovering new features since the Cupcake update.

HP Pavilion dv2—Occupying a Murky Netherworld Between Laptops and Netbooks

Writing about the UMID M1 has gotten me to think a bit more about small computers. I'm currently using a new HP Pavilion dv2. The dv2 isn't a netbook but it's not a full-fledged laptop either. And this bears out in the machine's specs. Armed with an AMD Neo processor which has been compared to Intel's Atom but runs hotter and faster, 4GB of RAM, and ATI Radeon graphics, the dv2 packs a nice punch in terms of real world performance even if it falls a bit short of modern dual core notebooks. It's only slightly larger than a comparable netbook but runs hotter and has less battery life. The result is a tantalizing machine, capable of being a workhorse computer while remaining very mobile.

The dv2 comes with an external DVD-drive which looks better than most external DVDs which is something you don't get if you buy a netbook. It is slimmer and more stylish than the average netbook. Most netbooks use Windows XP as their operating system and most laptops use a 32-bit version of Windows Vista. The dv2 is packing the 64-bit version of Vista which is faster and more secure than the 32-bit version but is not always compatible with every older piece of software. It also packs bright white LEDs which is something of a trend among notebook computers. They always seem to pack brighter and brighter LEDs every year.

But the thin profile of the dv2 is its most striking physical characteristic. At barely an inch thick, makes my Acer netbook and HP laptop look positively obese by comparison. It's a bit heavier than an average netbook but considerably lighter than a normal laptop. This really brings home the fact that this machine in just about every way—in terms of size, weight, performance, and even price—is in between traditional laptops and netbooks. I'm not sure that there is much room in that spot for this machine but we'll see.

It's always interesting to see the choices which are made by manufacturers in terms of the ports which adorn the sides of the notebook PCs. For older laptops this is not much of a decision since they are so big. With newer, smaller notebooks and netbooks it can be a real struggle. My old HP Pavilion has S-video, VGA, firewire, 3 USB ports, 3 audio jacks, ethernet and modem jacks, an SD card slot, an IR port for a remote control, and a proprietary port for an HP expansion dock which I've never seen used by anyone. And it has a built in DVD burner. My Acer netbook has a VGA port, 3 USB ports, an SD slot, two audio jacks and an ethernet jack. The dv2 is equipped similarly to the Acer machine but also adds an HDMI and an external USB DVD burner into the mix. This makes it more complete and more versatile than the average netbook.











But the battery life on the dv2 is only about two and a half to three hours. Impressive to be sure, but less than half what you can get out of a netbook with a six cell battery like the Acer Aspire One. Long battery life translates to long standby time and less need to plug in and recharge. And it runs hotter than most netbooks. So the question is do you want longevity or speed? Depending on your situation, you will probably want one or the other at different times.

One thing regarding the dv2 that I'm not ambivalent about is the keyboard. It compares favorably to the keyboard on my biggest laptop, my HP Pavilion dv9000. This machine comes with a nice big keyboard, complete with a number pad. But it's not without its problems. The right shift key for example is shrunken and scrunched up next to the up arrow key. As a result, I often find myself moving the cursor instead of entering a capital letter or punctuation mark and vice versa. The dv2's keyboard has no such tricks. Except for the function and arrow keys all of its keys are nice and big which makes typing a joy. One of the few things that is missing from the dv2's keyboard are dedicated Page Up, Page Down, Home, and End keys (to save space these have been remapped to arrow keys where they must be accessed using the Fn key.



While the dv9000's keys are fairly traditional with their trapezoidal mound shape, dv2's are much flatter. This makes them feel much larger than they really are while at the same time they also have a subtle curve to them that hugs your fingers as you type. This style of keyboard has been becoming more common in recent months and I certainly hope that it is the beginning of a trend.



While I have never been a huge fan of the touchpads that are so ubiquitous on notebook PCs, the dv2's is at least better than the ones you'll see on any netbook. It is a little wider for its size than you'd expect and that makes navigation on its wide 1280x800 screen a little easier. This screen resolution is quite a bit better than what you'll see on a netbook but about average for a modern laptop. While it's smaller size makes the screen crisp and sharp, it also makes everything look smaller so people with less than perfect vision might find themselves cranking up the font size on this machine.

Generally speaking, the dv2 is a fast machine with a lot of memory and a big (250GB) hard drive. But you might to pack an extra battery if you take it on the road....

Out of Twitter's Dog House

It seems that my account suspension at Twitter was a short one. I can now tweet again. That was pretty fast. When Blogger thought I was a spammer, I had to fill out a captcha form for months. Of course, I could still post. Anyway, it's an interesting thing to keep in mind with this Web 2.0. You are at the mercy of the company which controls the servers you are using. While this means that they can control spammers more easily. It also means that legitimate users are more likely to get hit by the same hand that slaps down the spammers.

With things like Twitter and blogging, this might not be so important but with GMail? A lot of people swear by their email. A ban can hurt a lot more. Worse yet, my phone's address book synchs to GMail's Contacts. A ban would be terrible for someone who depends on their phone.

Ultimately, the issue of ownership will have to be resolved before Web 2.0 applications can trusted for truly critical uses. If I am blogging, tweeting, and doing all the other crap that we do on the web, I'm generating content. It may be crappy content, it may be useless content, but it is my content and if a company can cut off my access to it, then it's not really my content is it?

Sad Little Flower Pot

Every spring, Chicago lines Michigan Ave. with beautiful flowers but not all of their arrangements come out so well. This little spinach, flower, and miscellaneous plant ensemble in a flower pot outside the Cultural Center for example has a rather odd and sad quality. I can't quite put my finger on it but it doesn't look right to me....

Google's CAPTCHA Cracked?

Slashdot reports that spammers are now claiming to have cracked Google's CAPTCHA system. This comes after reports that Microsoft's CAPTCHA system has also been cracked. And here I am always needing two or three tries in order to read Blogger's CAPTCHAs. It's a depressing state of affairs. It is now almost easier for spam-bots to send out penis enlargement ads and get rich quick scams than it is for legitimate users send each other pictures of cats....Now that I think about it, no one will ever notice the difference anyway.

First Post

I'm not sure why I'm doing a blog. Actually I am. I've always been a shallow nerd who follows geek trends. I got hooked on Usenet in college and I also had a crappy web page. Since then I've started several web pages, gotten bored, and quit. Now I'm doing a blog, years after it became trendy. So basically it's just more of the same I guess.

But I'm hoping to keep this blog going for at least a while. I've had several ideas kicking around inside my head for awhile, a couple of short stories that I never seem able sit down an write, and a couple of things I feel I need to "say" but have no idea where to say them. I'm hoping to put those things down here.