Timo's Prosthetic Brain

Chromebook Evolution

2011-12-24T19:00:00.000-07:00

Google has continued to knock out updates for Chromebooks since they shipped, but I have to say one thing...

That new login screen sucks! The white background makes it look extremely cheap and ugly. Can we please go back to the black login screen? Pretty please? Ugh.

Gratifying Results from Predictions Past

2011-12-24T18:37:00.000-07:00

What could more gratifying than a prediction coming to pass? After all, we make them with as if we can somehow see directly into the future and actually know what will come to pass. That makes it taste so much sweeter when one does in fact come to pass, reaffirming our self sense of understanding about the trends shaping our world.

About a decade ago I predicted that in the future all devices would one day have touch screens. Touchscreens already existed at the time, and had for quite some time, but I had just started working with them on industrial automation projects, and instantly recognized their value and potential. Most of the touchscreen devices that I use every single day were yet to be invented. I had marveled at them while watching STTNG (although the greater marvel of the time was how they created the illusion of touchscreens without actually having any), but now I was working with them every single day to make very real and useful interfaces for end users. It occurred to me that the touchscreen was THE natural evolution of all end user interfaces for electronic devices.

That decade since has been absolutely filled with examples that show that I was right. Our phones, music players and tablet computers now have them. They are beginning to show up in cars, TV remote controls, household thermostats, security systems, desktop computers, and much more. However, the thing that drives my point home for me recently is that I just saw a touchscreen on a refrigerator the other day.

My rule of thumb is simple. If it is now, or could logically be made electronic in the future, it will get a touchscreen, barring examples where such an interface could never make sense. Any device which is smaller than a touchscreen would need to be, or which is unusual enough in shape will likely never have one, but all other devices are fair game. Although discounting the creativity of the designers to implement them in seemingly impossible applications is probably a bad idea.

My second rule of thumb is that even the touchscreen itself is but a stepping stone on the path to even better interfaces. It is not the destination, but rather an obvious step in a chain of evolution that will continue beyond it. The touchscreen will make scores of electronic devices better and simpler, but it is not the end of interface evolution by any means. It is a creative leaping off point towards an even more rapid acceleration of improvement, from a position of great usefulness and productivity.

The fact that touchscreens will make electronic devices better merely sets the stage for us to advance further and faster going forward along the technological path of evolution. They will help open up the raw power of our electronic devices for easy exploitation by the users of that technology, creating another explosion of creativity and productivity. That will make for an even more interesting future with even more possibilities.

Fleeting waves of epiphany

2011-12-22T09:35:00.000-07:00

What I wouldn't give for a machine that would pour epiphanies into my brain, one after the other, a constant stream of mind enhancing clarity to keep me from slipping back into my old sleepy ways. Ah, but alas, there is no such thing.

Sadly, if you were expecting me to say "but wait, maybe there is...", well, no there isn't. Although that would have been the perfect lead in to a pitch for such a device (be it a real one or a scam). If somebody ever makes one, sign me up, I'll take two of them!

I still get my epiphanies the old fashioned way. Randomly, when I least expect them. Usually they don't last very long either. For a day or two I'm excited about my epiphany, but then I go back to life as it was, and even forget all about it. We are creatures of habit, and epiphanies threaten to break us out of those habits. Habits usually win out in the end.

Last night I watched Limitless, which I'll summarize as "a movie about a guy who finds a drug that expands his mind and uses it to change his life". It has drama and action, and the plot is a good concept that could have been better executed, but it lead me to another epiphany. I don't need to artificially expand my capabilities to accomplish great things- I just need to actually start using the capabilities that I already have. I could say the exact same thing about nearly every other human being on the planet as well.

We sabotage our success with fear and doubt. We allow others to tell us that we don't have what it takes, or that we don't know the right people. We end up believing that we can't when in fact we all probably can. We don't need help to get it done, we need to believe that we can actually do it and start trying. We need to get off our collective lazy asses and start doing.

I'd swear I've had that exact same epiphany dozens of times before (deja vu all over again). So I'm wondering what I could do to make my epiphanies longer lasting, to keep the energy needed to act upon them alive long enough to get things done. How do you make the same epiphany stay fresh in your mind for prolonged periods of time? I'd love to have the answer to that seemingly simple question. Call it my new holy grail... until I move onto the next idea here in a few oh look shiny!

Information Transcendence

2011-11-28T23:33:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking a bit lately about the power of information, as well as its true meaning and value. Although we've reached a point where we often consider information itself to be valuable, we sometimes forget the reason why it has value. It has value because it enables work to be done.

Information becomes useful when it is acted upon. Better information enables faster, simpler and easier accomplishment of some task using fewer resources. Thus the manipulation of that information to facilitate more efficient use of it becomes useful work in and of itself.

I'm fascinated by the clever ways that new information tools are used to transform how work gets done. Every time that new uses emerge it changes our perception of value both towards the tool itself and the information being handled by it.

My major thought to be pondered now: how will our information tools, and the information itself be transformed by the current explosion of information sharing and storage that we are experiencing now? What impacts will that have on society? How rapidly will this change take place?

A disturbing obeservation

2011-11-19T15:12:00.001-07:00

We got a little bit of snow overnight, lightly covering the ground and the rooftops with snow. When the sun came out everything that wasn't in the shade melted away.

The disturbing bit came when I looked at the rooftops. I could see from the melt patterns exactly where the trusses were. The trusses had slowed down the transfer of heat, leaving snowy parallel lines. That heat came from inside the houses, from furnaces working harder than they ought to have to to warm up homes that are leaking heat through the roof (among other places).

Insulation, or lack of it seems to be the problem. In my own home I've noticed that some of my exterior walls seem inadequately insulated. I'm pondering solutions to that, but it's difficult to fix something like this once the house is completed. On the other hand, the roof is easy to deal with. All you have to do is spray in some more insulation (being mindful not to block the vents along the edges), or lay down some rolls of insulation over what you already have.

My proposal, in the form of a voluntary code to follow (I hate the words "there ought to be a law", and advocate mandatory beatings for all people who utter them), is that we begin building our homes with 6" studs instead of 4" to allow for 2 extra inches of insulation. We should also start using an extra couple of inches of insulation in the roof area. Reducing heat loss reduces the total amount of energy required to heat or cool a home. Of course I know that 2x4's are cheaper than 2x6's (slightly), and that 4" insulation is cheaper than 6", and that the average consumer is more concerned with price than energy efficiency, but in some respects there is a right and a wrong way to do it, and under-insulating is the wrong way.

This voluntary code could take the form of some certification that home builders could earn. It would be accompanied by random inspections of homes they are in the process of building to certify that the builder remains eligible for the certification after the initial process. Certified builders could display the certification logo, assuring home buyers that the home meets the minimum efficiency standards of the certifying agency (non-governmental, since we want something that is useful rather than political and corrupt). Any certified builder found to be not in compliance is fined and subject to 100% inspection for an entire year during their "probationary" period (or they can opt to not pay the fine and lose the certification for a minimum of one year). Uncertified builders displaying the logo would be sued to the fullest extent of the law (at a minimum for violating a copyright by using the logo without authorization).

Why Microsoft is on the rocks

2011-11-01T19:17:00.000-06:00

It doesn't take a genius to see that Microsoft isn't doing well lately. Although many would dearly love to be failing as profitably as they are managing to do so, nevertheless, the long term prognosis sucks. Why? Lack of innovation.

When Bill Gates ran the show Microsoft shamelessly stole from anybody who dared to innovate, and that me too attitude propelled them to the dizzying heights of extremely profitable mediocrity. Now, however, things are different, with Steve Balmer "leading" the fail train.

The most classic failure I've seen in recent times is the decision to embrace the Windows 8 concept over the elegant, disruptive, innovative Courier concept. Courier was so slick that it could have been an Apple concept if it weren't for the incorporation of a stylus (as well as finger based touch- Courier used both, and did it well). People drool over Courier, but Windows 8 is a screwed up mess that lacks direction and function. Balmer made this choice after a round of committee think and consensus building, which is the exact opposite of leadership, and he surrounded himself with committees full of visionless idiots. Visionless idiots much like himself.

Even Bill Gates could not have saved the day here. He personally recommended to Balmer that Courier be cancelled. Perhaps because there wasn't yet an Apple product to shamelessly copy in this segment (Courier predates the iPad), but also because it lacked email. I can see how email was important, but to choose "we should kill it because it lacks email" over "why don't you add an email client and it will be killer" is beyond stupid. If email was so damned important, why did they remove it from Windows 7 anyway? Yes, answer me that! It seems like a no-brainer to just ADD EMAIL and call it good. The email thing was all about Exchange being important to their business model anyway, and they have allowed Apple to steal their thunder since iPads support Exchange email. What does Microsoft have now in the tablet space that supports Exchange email: nothing at all. Unless they plan to add email back into Windows 8 (and my experience with it says otherwise), this isn't going to change anytime soon.

I first saw Courier months before the iPad was announced. I loved it. It was "bet the company" awesome, exactly the kind of new blood Microsoft needed to shake up the company and make it alive again. It was disruptive on a level we had only seen from Apple up to that point, and that is exactly what got it killed... and why Microsoft is dying right before our eyes.

On the other hand, Windows 8 is a whole different kind of disruptive. Disruptive to work flow, instead of enabling it. Disruptive to ease of use, disruptive to intuitive process, disruptive to pre-learned skills. Disruptive to future viability of the company. Disruptive to the continued success and dominance of Windows, and their other core business: Office. The irony is that while Courier might have been potentially disruptive to Windows and Office, it offered an alternative that could replace sales of them, while Windows 8 only offers a deterrent to buying future Microsoft products in the form of destroying those same products from within the products themselves.

I predict that we'll see Windows 9: We're Really Sorry Edition within a year of the release of 8. Too little, too late? Maybe. It takes more than a year for people to make big switches, so PC's will still be sitting on desks, waiting for a worthy upgrade that isn't more trouble than its worth.

I'm also predicting that next year is the year that Steve Balmer gets his pink slip. After that, maybe they can right the ship. Bringing back Gates won't fix it, he's no longer useful in any meaningful way. They need new blood.

Sometimes I just need a project

2011-10-27T15:13:00.000-06:00

I recently got my hands on a used quad core Dell. It's a hand me down, which is unusual for me since I'm usually the one doing the "handing down". Nevertheless, it came to me used, and now I'm trying to fix it up.

It had numerous issues when it fell into my lap. I have already fixed a few of them. For starters, it was pulled right off a desktop as is, from a company that had it attached to a Windows domain. Which made it completely unusable, since there was no way to log into it and un-join it from the domain without actually having the domain controller available to bless the unholy divorce. So I wiped it clean and installed Windows 7 on it. One problem down...

Problem 2 is also easy to solve. The graphics card was designed for high end CAD work (for a user that I happen to know has never used a CAD program), and is not terribly good for gaming. I've got it running passably on WoW with the settings all turned down, but the frame rate could still be better, and I'd like to have the candy turned on at some point. So I'm looking for a better graphics card.

Problem 3 is that the CD/DVD drive does not work at all. I've tried all the settings, from cable select to slave to master, and none work. It has power, and the drive tray opens, but the computer never sees it at all. Since this is not rocket science, I'm figuring it is bad. I'm going to have to replace it or do without it.

Problem 4 is Dell's fault. The idiots shipped it with two cores disabled in the BIOS. Why waste the money putting in a more expensive CPU only to shut off half of its power? Dell should have known better, but then again there's a reason why Dell's sales are down- bad decisions all around driving customers into the arms of other PC makers. This is not a "just enable them" problem either, as the option is do so is also disabled in BIOS. There is an update, but in classic chicken or egg form it requires booting into DOS to apply, and this machine has never had DOS on it. Nor does it have a 3.5" floppy drive from which I could boot to DOS (I still have my old DOS floppies). I could make a DOS boot CD (using FreeDOS), but the CD drive is toast. The updater will not run from Windows. So installing this BIOS update could prove challenging until I fix at least one of my other problems first. I want my four cores though, so not fixing this issue is NOT an option.

Problem 5 is that it needs more RAM. 2 GB is not good enough anymore.

I'm beginning to feel like a mechanic working on a used car now. Still, fixing these issues is a lot cheaper than going out and buying a new quad core machine, and when I'm done I should have a fairly decent gaming machine for a few months. Until the next big game comes out anyway. In the meantime it does a great job running Windows 7 despite its shortcomings. I can't wait to get it to its full potential!

April fool's day?

2011-10-23T12:37:00.002-06:00

When I went to log into Warcraft the other day I was met with an announcement about the next expansion- Mists of Pandaria. Since playable Pandarens has been a rumor for ages and ages now, I had to check my calendar and make sure Blizzard wasn't just messing with us for another cheap April fool's day joke. Indeed, they were not.

My feelings are pretty mixed about it. New race: cool. New zones: cool. New class: cool. New talent system: hold on! New pet battles: wtf? No flying until level 90: hate it.

As if the hunter class wasn't pokemon enough, now we have full on pokemon for everybody in the game with fighting vanity pets. Um, ok. Not my cup of tea, but whatever, I guess. I suppose at least now they have SOME function in the game besides "hey! look at my cool vanity pet!". It does amuse me to think about leveling up my singing sunflower and having it go medieval on somebody else's pet. I would have to snicker and giggle watching it deal damage while singing "there's a zombie on your lawn" in that cheerful voice.

People either love or hate the new talent system. Since I agonize over each talent point instead of just plugging in whatever they say to plug in on Elitist Jerks, I'm comfortable with the current system. Now they're changing it completely, and my previous builds mean nothing. Will different actually be better? They've messed with it before, creating anger and chaos in the process without really making it better, so we'll see if history repeats itself.

I need some clarification on the flying issue. Are we losing it until 90 everywhere, or just in Pandaria? I'm not going to like either answer, but if it's the first one, I'll be much more angry.

Some of the things that I love about the upcoming expansion are amusingly the things that some people hated the most. Like playable pandas. I'm not sure why some folks hate that. Fine, don't roll a panda if you don't like them. Problem solved.

I like the new monk class. I didn't see any real hate about it either. You won't have to be Pandaren to play it, which silenced many would be haters, although I'm sure worgen and goblin fans are angry that they don't get it. I'll roll a monk, but I don't spend a lot of my time on hybrid classes because they usually don't do anything terribly well.

Perhaps the most interesting prospect of all is that Pandarens get to choose between horde and alliance. No other race gets to do that. I've always thought it was stupid that we didn't get that choice before. It goes to show that game worlds can evolve in complexity and realism (without losing out on fantasy, which is crucial). I like this improvement to gameplay, even if it does seem like a cheap way to only introduce one new race for an expansion.

I'm still trying to do my homework on this upcoming expansion so that I can know what to expect from it. I'll probably keep on playing, unless I get tired of the game (which could happen long before the expansion arrives, judging by Blizzard's past history). I'm an addict, so pulling the needle out isn't exactly easy.

Fruity Goodies

2011-10-16T18:50:00.001-06:00

I got iOS 5 loaded on all of my iDevices the other day. So far I have to say that this is a worthy update. Easily the best yet.

It's not hard to say that the best iOS5 experience is on the new iPhone 4S. After all, that is the new hotness. It has the best of everything to found, and things like Siri that are only found there (unless you are still rocking the old version of Siri from before Apple bought it- I have a copy of it still).

Things like iMessage are killer though, and you'll get that on anything new enough to run iOS5 (for instance any iPad, iPhone 3GS or newer, and recent iPod Touches). The cell phone companies must HATE iMessage, because it circumvents their overpriced and overly profitable texting networks to give people free texting (between iOS devices). Outrageously expensive texting plans now have their days numbered.

Notification center is awesome. I love the customizability of it too. I can control whether or not something private will be displayed on the lock screen, and whether I get an icon badge, banner, or pop-up alert notification.

I haven't made up my mind about iCloud. I like the idea of it, but will I like the execution? We'll see, because it's way too early for me to give an opinion on it given my limited use of it so far. I did have some issues getting my contacts merged up to the cloud, so I ended up synching those with my Mac once to re-populate my contact list. Supposedly they are in the cloud now.

I won't talk about Siri here, because that belongs in a review of the iPhone 4S. Nobody else gets to have it yet. I'd bet money that it comes to future iPads and iPod Touches. Also, I have yet to use it, but only because I still have a few things to learn first (like how it supposedly knows where I live and work so I can dictate location based reminders such as "remind me about x when I leave home").

If your device can run it, you should get it. Just remember to back up before you do it! It restores data from that backup after installation, so you MUST do this. It will warn you to back it up, but a few idiots have ignored the warning. Not many really, but they have whined loudly about it on the web.

Shooting yourself in the foot

2011-10-13T11:15:00.000-06:00

When I first saw the screenshots of Windows 8 I thought it looked interesting. I could easily tell just from the photos that it was a massive shift, basically an all new paradigm for Windows in which they were effectively taking the "windows" out of Windows by emphasizing full screen apps and shifting over to a very touch oriented interface.

Trying to use it is an entirely different matter. The touch emphasis has left it rather difficult and painful to use with a mouse. Nothing you remember about using Windows really applies anymore, and trying to make some of these new things happen with a mouse is downright painful and irritating. There's still kind of a desktop, if you click on the desktop "tile" in the Start screen (no more Start menu, now you get a side scrolling screen full of "tiles"). Clicking on what looks like the old Start button takes you back to the Start screen, with it's tiles and green backdrop.

I had to Google how to shut it all down. Apparently there's this new charms menu, and shutdown is available under Settings. Yes, "I want to shut my computer off" is now a setting. Yeah, I scratched my head on that one too.

I may try to install some applications so that I can figure out if there's still some way to launch them. With the Start menu gone, what happens when you install software? Does it get a "tile" on the Start screen, or does it show up in some interesting new place that I've yet to discover?

Honestly my initial impression of Windows 8 is that Microsoft has decided that it wants to make Linux and Mac OS look like attractive alternatives for long time Windows users because it now only cares about tablet computing. I've been to a few Microsoft launch rodeos before, and quite a few of them were accompanied by moaning and bitching (especially Windows ME, which was bloody awful, and Vista which nearly every company decided to skip over), but I'm telling you right now that you've never heard moaning and bitching about a new version of Windows like you're about to hear for this one. Frankly it will be well deserved on Microsoft's part, since it appears that they have every intention of finding ways to drive away their customer base. I don't even know why Steve Balmer still has a job there, because the company is being run into the ground.

If you aren't planning to get a touchscreen tablet computer to run Windows 8 on, you should be considering skipping it altogether. Trying to use it on a desktop with a mouse is only going to make you miserable and angry. Same for laptops. This release is pretty much exclusively aimed at tablets with touchscreens, at least in its current form. Customer feedback might change that, but then again it might not.

I thought Microsoft was on the right track with Windows 7, but they seem to have lost their way since.

Anticipation

2011-10-07T12:12:00.000-06:00

I pre-ordered my new 4S this morning, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm still using an iPhone 3GS, so for me it's an awesome upgrade. Can't wait to actually get my hands on it and start making Siri jump through hoops for me. Honestly, the new specs are good, but Siri was the deal closer. Although I'd have probably bought anything that they announced the other day as long as it was an upgrade compared to what I already had. I'm on the every other generation plan, have been right from the start when I waited in line the day the very first iPhone launched.

Honestly, even though I've been a cell phone user for ages (you might call me an early adopter), cell phones sucked before the iPhone came out. That's why I was excited about the rumor that Apple was planning to get into the cell phone business. I figured if anybody could save us from crappy designs with clunky interfaces that required memorizing key sequences to go through menus that were poorly thought out and organized, it was Apple. That they most certainly delivered too.

My first cell phone was the classic Motorola brick. It's screen was a single line of alphanumeric digits that glowed orange red. I can't remember if it had an address book for storing numbers, but it would have been so cumbersome to use that I merely typed in every phone number I was going to call instead, and then hit send. The thing was heavy enough that you could bludgeon somebody with it (some folks used them to fight off muggers). It had a detachable antenna that was almost twice as long as an iPhone is.

Since then I've had several Nokias, and a few more Motorolas as well. In fact if there was a cool phone, I often had to have it. I had the sleek, almost futuristic (at the time) looking StarTAC, with it's pull out antenna and flip open clamshell design- possibly the very first clamshell phone. Sadly the StarTAC was actually junk (very expensive junk), and it loved to just randomly turn itself off when I wasn't paying attention to it. Later I got the hot phone of the day, the RAZR. The RAZR had a crappy interface, and the Verizon version of it, which I also had later on was MUCH worse, but it had nice features for its time.

I actually replaced the faceplate of one of my Nokias with this cool retro looking "tortoise shell" faceplate. It was pretty retro awesome. The phone itself was nothing special though, just some basic Nokia bar style phone. I got quite a few compliments on it. The retro look was a conversation starter. I'm not sure they make anything remotely like it for iPhones.

As for the people that were disappointed that Apple released a 4S instead of a completely new looking 5, so what? I can see how that doesn't look like much of an upgrade over a 4 (although it is), but if you have a 4 now you shouldn't be looking for a new phone yet. People buy new phones way too often if you ask me. Who really needs a new phone every year? Get some use out of it, get your money's worth before you trade up to the new hotness.

Sayin goodbye

2011-10-06T19:31:00.000-06:00

When I got up this morning I saw the news that Steve Jobs had died. I had a few things that I wanted to express here about it.

I admired his vision, and the things that he managed to accomplish during his short time on this earth. He was one of my heros, and I aspire to be like him in some ways.

I'm not one of those emotional people, and I'm not distraught by his passage. Still, there is some sense of sadness, as if an era has ended with him.

I will continue to be a student of his user oriented design philosophy, even in his absence. He will be missed.

Disconnected

2011-10-05T16:24:00.001-06:00

I saw a rant on G+ this afternoon from somebody that I follow there complaining about sites that force you to use your Facebook or Twitter credentials to login to them for things like commenting and whatnot. I found it interesting that people ever tolerated this, let alone reached the stage where they could complain about it.

I have never tolerated it myself. I don't want to give another site my Facebook or Twitter login info, even if they promise to be good with it. Not going to happen. I don't want every service I ever use to be integrated with my social networks either. I really do like keeping things separated. That way I can maintain a little tiny bit of privacy in a world that seems to increasingly demand that I surrender all of my privacy (which is not going to happen, demands or no demands).

So again I find it fascinating that the situation was able to move far enough along to get people angry about it. Sites like that should have failed early in a big way, because nobody should ever tolerate it. Ever. They only got their foot in the door because people behave like idiotic sheep sometimes. When the shepherd says "hand over more privacy" and you actually do, then you deserve to be compared to the other sheep. Baaa!

You might think that I'd be saying "quit using social networks!", but in fact I'm not. Social networks aren't the problem, the users are. We need to pay more attention to the myriad ways that we are willingly handing over too much to people who have proven unworthy of our trust repeatedly. We need to start doing something that makes our brains hurt: think! I don't blame the tools, I blame the users (for being tools- lol, couldn't resist that one).

An open letter to Microsoft about Office 365

2011-10-04T15:51:00.000-06:00

Dear Microsoft,

I signed up for your free trial of Office 365. I now only have a few days left, and although I wanted to make it my solution of choice early on, after trying it out in my test environment I won't be buying it.

My test environment does not look like the target market that you envisioned for this product, yet I still felt that it had potential. My test environment consisted of Chromebooks that are not running any flavor of Windows. I was willing to accept that some features would not be available as such, especially where they concerned integration with existing desktop installations of Microsoft Office.

I was not however willing to accept that I would have vastly reduced functionality in the Outlook Web App, especially since that was to be the cornerstone of my use of the product in my chosen environment. I attempted to get this corrected by providing feedback early on in my trial, since it appears that this could be resolved fairly easily with some extremely small changes that would take at most minutes to implement and perhaps a few more to test. This was not done.

As a result, I also started a trial of Google's competing product. I had no reduced functionality to contend with there, as every feature worked equally well on the Chromebook compared to a regular desktop machine. I understand that this was of course by design, but nevertheless, it was an important fact for me. It is worth noting that I tried your solution first, despite their solution being the 'tailor made' one for Chromebook users.

Therefore my decision has been made. Google has won my business. My company is just getting started, and it will be starting up with Google as its cloud service provider. Microsoft has passed up an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with us. At this point nobody knows for sure how far we'll grow, and thus how big an opportunity Microsoft has really passed up. One thing is extremely clear to me now though; we are a Microsoft-free company as of this moment, and that is now likely to never change.

I hope this serves as a lesson in the consequences of not taking several minutes to consider the simple and reasonable request of a potential customer that has actually gone to the trouble of starting a trial of your product.

Sincerely,
No Longer a Potential Customer

When sharing isn't caring

2011-10-03T22:39:00.000-06:00

I've been contemplating the consequences of society's move into the social networking era for a while now, but some scary new applications for putting all of that social data to use have emerged that really give me pause.

The scariest of them all are social network aware facial recognition systems. Facial recognition was creepy enough when it was owned by law enforcement types and only scanned federal databases for matches. Now we're getting closer to wide open availability, with systems that can scan all of the completely public photos shared (and often tagged) on sites like Facebook. Someone could snap your photo with their mobile phone, upload it to a cloud powered facial recognition service, and get all the dirt on you they ever wanted. Dirt that you shared, or that your friends shared about you. Where you live, your phone number, places that you frequent, where you work, who your friends are, what your political leanings are, and stupid things that you do while drunk (and where you do them).

Well, they could if you (or your friends) shared all of that about you. People now share way too much. They post personal pictures, with the people shown in them tagged, with location data added. They share phone numbers so that friends can call them. They share their hobbies, favorite music, politics, sexual orientation, pets photos, favorite foods, pet peeves, problems, hopes, dreams, goals, ideas. Sometimes they share literally everything. When Facebook adds a new category of information to share, they can't wait to fill in the blanks and start sharing (like relatives and relationships).

We underestimate the power of information. Information is transforming the world around us, and still we are oblivious. How much information do you really need to give another person in order to give them the advantage over you? If you think that information is useless to others, then all you need to do is watch a con man or a "psychic" in action. Information IS power!

As I said before, it was dead scary when it was only the government doing facial recognition. We'll never be sure what they have stored about us in their databases, but it may turn out that Facebook has even better data about you, available publicly and for free, and now anybody can use it for any purpose. The feds only know mundane stuff like how many times you've been pulled over for speeding, or the time you spent in prison for knocking over convenience stores. Facebook has the real juicy dirt on you.

Think about it. Carefully.

Growing pains

2011-09-29T10:26:00.000-06:00

I seem to spend a lot of time talking about Netflix here. Probably because Netflix keeps finding ways to screw things up.

I'm guessing that a lot of people did what I did, and switched to streaming only when Netflix hammered us with the 60 percent price hike for keeping disc in the mail (which is now Qwikster). Only Netflix apparently wasn't prepared for the consequences: that people would be streaming even more content on-demand from their already over capacity servers.

The net result is that lately Netflix is down more often than it seems to be up. It used to take some of the sting out of it when they would offer me a credit on my bill every time they screwed up, but those days are apparently gone (and they couldn't afford to dole out that many credits anyway, or they'd be paying people to *attempt* to use the service).

I don't feel like I made the right choice. Netflix and I are about to go our separate ways. They just cannot deliver anymore, at least not reliably. I'm not sure if I want switch to Qwikster or go with something else entirely. I'd like to stay with a streaming solution. I'm not sure how I feel about Hulu, but it might be worth a shot. I'm open to other suggestions if anybody has one? If you're using something else to stream on-demand, feel free to comment!

One thing that I won't consider is going back to cable or satellite TV for content. I'm done with that.

Did HP give up on the TouchPad too soon?

2011-09-26T11:35:00.000-06:00

For some reason I was thinking about this again yesterday. HP dropped a bundle to acquire Palm and their WebOS, then failed to market it or invest much in the way of resources in it, save for adding the TouchPad to their line. Then they announced that they were shutting it down and put the TouchPad's on fire sale.

Only a funny thing happened then: they almost instantly sold out of TouchPads. Apparently for $99 each there was huge demand. Unprecedented demand. Prior to that sales had been, shall we say, quite awful. Are there lessons to be learned here? Yes.

Now nobody should expect HP to sell them for $99. They can't possibly make a profit at that price, and making profits are the reason people start companies, make products, and try to sell them. Only smelly hippies think that profits are bad, since profits make jobs possible. Yet the fire sale tells us that the price was too high, and that lowering it will make it sell better. Basic economics, it would seem, but sometimes we need these lessons to remind us that econ 101 wasn't just boring lectures about supply and demand. It shows the world that there is a price point at which people would actually consider something other than an iPad.

Obviously the product itself would have to change to face this reality. It would have to be redesigned for lower cost, which might require some sacrifices here and there in terms of capabilities and performance. This would have to be an all new version, perhaps with new suppliers and new contracts with lower cost parts and more efficient manufacturing, transportation, marketing and sales to make every part of the chain less expensive.

I'd even go against the traditional wisdom of the tech industry and put the plant in North America. Since you'll get killed competing against the insanely low price of labor in China, this would have to be a massively automated plant, with a small handfull of extremely skilled workers to keep it running (but not to do actual assembly work- I refer back to getting killed by the Chinese again on that). Then you ship by rail instead of trucking it, where possible. In fact the plant should be right next to a rail line.You save the fairly steep cost of having it shipped over from China (and when fuel prices go up, you'll be glad you did).

Of course I'm just spouting off what I'd do. If I had to bet, I'd say that HP will go ahead with their plan to dump WebOS altogether. The change of leadership was probably more for show than anything. Blame the previous CEO for the current dismal state, but then stay the course and hope the investors won't notice that all you did was distract them with a little slight of hand. That never happens, right?

Printing in the cloud

2011-09-23T16:06:00.002-06:00

Last night I picked up an HP color Laserjet printer for my new business. I was a little nervous because the store I bought it from was plugging it as having ePrint, even though the box did not list that as a feature. A nice employee went in the back and looked it up for me, and came back saying that it's listed as feature in their information.

I found out why the box didn't mention anything about it when I got home. You add that as a feature by downloading the latest firmware update. There was a flyer about it in the box (I'd have put a sticker on the outside about it too, but I don't run HP. We'll put that on Meg's to do list). That was a huge relief for me, because I wanted to try a printer that could directly support Google's Cloud Print. After all, I sort of bought into the Chromebook strategy, and this is a key component of the whole package. We need to print sometimes, even in this highly digital age where paper seems a bit like a dinosaur.

I couldn't find any settings for Cloud Print in my account settings, so I had to Google it. Once I found the right page, all I had to do was enter email address of the printer, and it was ready to go. Effectively this makes the printer very much like an Internet only fax machine, where you email an attached document directly to the printer and it prints it. HP let me customize the address to something that I could remember, but the default is basically like @hpeprint.com. If spammers ever find it, you can make a white list of permitted senders easily enough, because it would be a free for all if you don't block them (I haven't had an issue yet). Spammers will be looking for these printers at some point, I guarantee it, just the same way that they abuse our ancient fax machines with junk about vacation getaways and time shares.

Spam potential aside, the functionality is awesome. Any device that can send email attachments can now print, from your mobile phone to your laptop on the road. Of course other companies are starting to offer the same thing, so this is gaining momentum.

I found that directly hooking the printer up to Google Cloud Print made some of my previous quirks go away. For instance, the quality level is higher on the print, and I only get one copy of the document now instead of two (when sending it to a printer shared from a computer, Google seems to always send a second duplicate print job right after the first one). Google can and should fix those quirks, of course, but at least by going the direct route you can avoid them.

I really need to put the printer itself through it paces and do a review on it, now that I have it, but my office is slightly torn apart for some remodeling at the moment.

Can HP pull off a revival?

2011-09-22T20:34:00.000-06:00

When HP announced that Meg Whitman was the new CEO, I had kind of a WTF? moment. Then I realized that she could hardly do any worse than the previous guy, so maybe it's time to rethink the situation.

HP hasn't exactly charted the best course for itself over the last decade. Buying Compaq was silly. Buying Palm was silly. I'm not I agree with their strategy on abandoning Unix, although that one could be debated endlessly. Cutting off WebOS at the knees suddenly after having spent so much for it only to let it mostly whither on the vine was stupid. Splitting off their awesome line of test gear into Agilent was stupid too. Announcing that they were selling off their PC business was colossally dumb.

Meg could simply reverse a few of the more recent idiotic decisions, before they really take effect at all. She could actually put some effort into marketing WebOS products instead of letting it die. She could reverse the decision to seek a buyer for the PC business, and actually try to fix it instead of giving up on it. She could work on fixing the culture of the company so that it has vitality and innovation again.

Their are bright spots that should be maintained too. HP makes great printers that are somewhat competitive in the market. Sure, they have a sketchy history with printer drivers (don't get me started), but the actual printers themselves were awesome. Their ePrint feature also rocks, and HP should put it in every networkable printer they make from here on out.

Bottom line Meg: the awful choices that the idiot before you made should not serve as a guideline for how to run HP (unless you intend to run it into the ground).

To Warcraft or not to Warcraft

2011-09-22T10:52:00.000-06:00

About once a month my WoW playtime expires, and I have to decide if I want to keep paying and playing. Alternatively, I could quit altogether, or take some time off (from both paying and playing). It usually comes down to whether or not I've been neglecting the important stuff so that I could play WoW, which is frequently the case with me. I'm addicted, I'll admit it.

Not all addictions are alike. On the one extreme you have smoking, which just might be the most painful addiction on the planet, if you've ever tried to quit (I have, and successfully I'm happy to say). Some addictions are so powerful that willpower seems to pale by comparison. Others are much less so, and I'd say Warcraft definitely falls into that category. There's no actual withdrawal when you quit WoW. There's temptation to play again, but you can't feel the urge to play all over your body. You have to be extremely weak minded to fall off the wagon if you really intend on quitting WoW, although I'm sure some do.

I sometimes take a week off from the game when my time runs out. This time I may take two. I have so many things to get done this month it isn't even funny. I could use the break anyway. When you log into a game and feel too tired to commit to anything more than running some easy dailies, maybe you need to take a break. It should be invigorating and exciting to play, and you should be wanting to experience all that it has to offer instead of just dailies. WoW is not a job, although some fools play it that way. We already have a job (well, most of us do, in spite of the awful economy), one that actually pays the bills, and no game should ever become just another job. The motivation to play should come from the thrill of playing, not from "I really need to get to level 85" or "I really need to work on my inscription".

Mixed results

2011-09-20T21:37:00.000-06:00

Today I finally got into Google+! There isn't much to do with it just yet, but I was able to follow a subset of the folks that I follow on Twitter already (or rather, add them to my "Following" circle). I don't actually know anybody yet who is on Google+ that I might add to any of my other circles, let alone enough people to make my own circles for. Which leaves Google+ looking slightly like Google Buzz with a much sexier interface, as neither one is likely to have anybody you actually know in real life using it. Some of the celebs that are on it don't use it well, while others thrive there. It mixes elements of public and private social sharing quite well if you take advantage of it fully, so it actually can be like Twitter and Facebook at the same time instead of only like one or the other. Only possibly better than either, if more people join it.

Sadly though I did not get into the Diablo III beta, which would have been much cooler than getting into Google+. Which is why being nobody kinda sucks sometimes. If anybody actually cared about my opinion, Blizzard would have tossed me a beta code ASAP, but instead I'm waiting with the other losers to get my hands on the retail box if it ships before I die of old age. Considering how long it takes for Blizzard to get a game shipped, I'm only slightly kidding (although Blizzard's record is shiny compared to something like Duke Nukem). I'm being a little harsh on Blizzard, but I still love them (and I could love them so much more with one of those beta codes in my grubby little mitts...)

What's in a name anyway?

2011-09-20T07:26:00.000-06:00

I snickered a little when I saw the new name for the old Netflix disc in the mail service: Qwikster. However, I think I broke out in full on laughter when I saw that somebody already had that name on Twitter. Yes indeed, @qwikster is a barely comprehensible, foul mouthed, dope smoking idiot who only tweets about weed and bitches. I can only imagine how much money Netflix will offer the guy to simply make him go away. I guess he'll be able to get all the dope and bitches he wants then!

The fight continues

2011-09-16T14:18:00.000-06:00

Microsoft has decided to completely ignore my request for feature parity on Chromebooks for Office 365 with the Outlook Web App. The thing is that Microsoft is sniffing the user agent and feeding Chromebooks the inferior lite version of Outlook Web App. It works fine for the Chrome browser on other platforms, which do not have any special advantages over Chromebooks in this regard. They could easily give you the full experience, as nothing is missing for it. They simply choose not to perhaps out of spite for Google daring to offer up some "competition" in their space.

I wasted some time looking for an extension that spoofs the user agent string, since a little lie would easily fix the problem here for Chromebook users, but alas, there is no way to do it. Literally the API for extensions does not include that feature, so it cannot be done.

I'll hammer on Microsoft some more. They deserve to have to keep reading my requests if they are going to be assholes about it. Also, note to Google: add something to the damn API that allows extensions that do user agent spoofing, pronto! I mean it! What, you aren't coding it up yet? Get on it! Now!

I need to do a little more testing, but I'm not sure these Chromebooks are going to get the job done after all. They're just enough inferior to a (full) Linux based solution at this point for me to consider that route again. I do like my Chromebook though. We'll see. One thing is abundantly clear though- Microsoft doesn't want my money if I do buy Chromebooks, and they won't be getting it if they don't shape up.

Gettin it done

2011-09-15T12:43:00.001-06:00

Consider the state of the economy and the current political environment, and the general instability of it all, I can understand why businesses on both sides of the political divide are standing still right now, waiting for something to happen before they expand production and hire people. If you're on one side, you're waiting to see how bad the taxes will be to pay for all this senseless spending, and if you're on the other side, you're still waiting for all that spending to start doing some good. Sure, there's a small percentage of companies getting direct government funding that are cranking up production lines and hiring, only to flame out later when the money is all gone (like Solyndra, but many more to come) and lay everybody off.

We've been playing a fool's game here. It's time to change gears. We cannot compete on labor intensive products, because the Chinese can and will crush us with both vastly cheaper labor and cheap government funding. Yet we MUST manufacture goods in order to continue our existence economically speaking, because the notion of a service economy is absolutely never going to work at all.

I think we lost our way sometime after the industrial revolution, which was a key factor in creating our privileged, class mobile society with a large middle class. Business grew to be impersonal as industries consolidated into just a few extremely large players. Mass production was critically important, but having too many employees at a single company led to a disconnect that created a somewhat cold and uncaring environment, creating an space in which the diseases of communism and socialism could breed unchecked by basic reality. I think companies need to get a lot smaller, and a lot more automated, and we need to have a lot more companies in total, with a workforce considerably more skilled than ever before to support it. We need a more diverse business ecosystem, filled with many small companies where everybody actually knows the boss (and vice versa), companies that are like family and work together to operate as lean as possible. Companies that are streamlined and efficient, with smooth flowing communication and little or no bureaucracy. Companies that spend more time getting the job done than making buzz word filled reports that nobody actually reads.

We don't need more government spending for that, we need a business side revolution, from the trenches. The old ways of thinking aren't an option anymore, we need a new course. Otherwise this bus is headed off the cliff, and nobody can stop it.

This new way of thinking is what I carry forward into my upcoming business ventures. My company will be like a close knit family, one where I personally know every single member of the team, and we will work together in a streamlined fashion to get the job done. Nobody is to waste any time putting reports on my damn desk, because that doesn't get products made and sold, and I certainly don't ever need an anonymous army of employees who are just a number to me showing up to punch a clock so they can get paid. Trouble lies down that path.

Don't get me wrong, I'm still deeply pessimistic about every possible course that our government might take going forward. I have analyzed every path, and they all measure up to shades of awful, with a side of complete collapse. Picking one course over another is like asking "how fast would I like to see it all come crashing down?". I'm saying that we need to get over worrying about it. It's time to get back to work, and forget all about this stupid economic voodoo our government is so intensely focused on. We can't fix stupid, but we can build companies and start making products again, if we do it right. Who's with me? Ahem, raise your hand dummy! Yes, I mean you there! Let's do it!

Things to do when Netflix is down (again)

2011-09-13T20:43:00.000-06:00

Reboot and cross your fingers (which never works)
Stream some angry music on Pandora and blog about it (check)
Go play Warcraft instead
Cancel your subscription and switch to something else (not sure what though)
???
Profit!

Netflix has been a little squishy lately. Yesterday I think I had to request the same show about two dozen times before it could actually play it. Tonight the service is MIA altogether. Sometimes they try to make nice and offer a refund after they screw it up, sometimes they pretend it never happened. Last time this happened they played dumb instead of owning up to it. Wonder which it will be this time?

The funny bit is that I ended my disc in the mail service from them just a few days ago (officially, as I made the change a few weeks ago, but it only just now ended on the 10th). Perfect timing to make me ask myself "did I pick the right service going forward, or should I have dumped streaming and kept disc in the mail?"

I've learned my lesson though from past experience. Quit the app as soon as it can't connect, don't try again! It will delete your login info, and make you type it over again (try doing that on a PS3 remote- misery and pain). That same lesson applies to both the PS3 client and the Apple TV client for Netflix (and typing it in again is major pain on either one for exactly the same reason, although you can at least plug in a keyboard on the PS3).

Rethink

2011-09-13T11:55:00.000-06:00

Sometimes you have a moment where you realize that you could do things just a little differently and maybe get better results. For me, that time is now.

Instead of barking about how Microsoft failed with Office 365, I changed course and actually sent them feedback. After all, I have a free trial going right now, and there's a feedback link, so why not explain to them exactly what it would need to do in order to be worth $6 per user per month to me and my new company? Might not a little feedback from somebody who wants to give them money if only it would do just a little bit more speak more than rants on some guy's blog?

What, might you ask, did I suggest to them? This:

Outlook Web Access needs to have the full experience for Chromebook users, instead of the lame "lite" experience (the lite version sucks ass, really). I want the fancy AJAX and graphics and IM stuff that the regular experience offers on every browser on every OTHER platform. No reason to leave Chromebooks in the cold, except out of sheer angry spite. Outlook Web Access is the main reason to get Office 365, but only if the experience isn't crippled.
The Office 365 version of the Excel Web App needs graphs, like the free version has. Explain why the hell I can't have something in the PAID version that I already have in the FREE version? Seriously?
Printing. Duh! Preferably print to PDF, which I could actually make use of.

I was polite about it too. No sarcasm, no snark, just calmly worded suggestions. Fingers crossed.

The future of corporate IT

2011-09-11T13:14:00.000-06:00

When I take a look at the tea leaves, based on emerging trends, I see the following future for employees at corporate IT departments: a pink slip.

Over the next 5 years I see the trend of moving away from in house servers and expensive software licensing to cloud based options accelerating rapidly as the technology matures and the cost savings become more obvious.

In a way I see this as a continuation of the previous trend towards outsourcing corporate IT support (but not the servers or the licensing). Only now you can start thinking about outsourcing the whole package, potentially saving thousands of dollars per user per year. All while reducing complexity and management headaches.

I see it moving up the chain, from the smallest players and new startups all the way up to the largest companies with the most resistance to change. It will migrate up the chain as younger workers that got their start in cloud based environments move around and find higher positions at other companies that aren't yet cloud based.

Does that mean corporate IT will be dead in 5 years? No. It means that in 5 years it will already be painfully obvious that it is dying the inevitable death of obsolescence. There will still be some need for it in those shops that actually provide cloud services to other companies, but that won't be able to sustain the growing pool of unemployed IT workers.

There may be a bright future for IT workers that decide to start their own cloud based IT service companies, or those that manage to get hired on at one. For everybody else, the pie is shrinking, and it may be time for a career change.

Which cloud based IT companies are likely to come out as winners in this transition? It's way too early to tell. I'm not counting anybody out yet, but the window of opportunity to step in and cement your position of dominance is closing already.

Reflecting pool

2011-09-11T09:13:00.000-06:00

I deleted my other blog. The one that I neglected for almost a year, because I've been too busy with work and World of Warcraft to bother with it. You might say that I'm on a mission to downsize the junk in my life, the extra stuff that wastes my attention when I could be doing something productive (or when I could be relaxing with something more fun and satisfying to unwind).

I'm cleaning up a lot of things. My dining room table was covered with tools and junk mail and the odd computer that I was working on at some point and pushed aside. I cleared it off the other day, and it really changed the whole atmosphere of the space. Less is more, simpler is better. Having my table back so that I could eat there again was awesome.

This blog hasn't been through a major upheaval for several years (I've been blogging here for quite a few years now, but all the older stuff has been deleted). It may be time to shake things up again. Inject some new energy into it. Since I'm still the same me that I've always been, interested by the same stuff and motivated by the same things I always have been, we're probably just looking at a name change and a clean up of the old posts that probably didn't belong here anyway (I get off track now and then). I keep going through an almost seasonal manic cycle of zen moments followed by angry lashing out, separated by periods of intense geekiness. Every year I tell myself that those angry moments will go away, but they sneak back in. Yes, sometimes the world pisses me off, and I can't help myself but to tell you all about it.

Back to my main point: less is more, simpler is better. The heart of the matter, the reason for making this post. It's not the epiphany that I had this morning. Rather sadly, it's the epiphany that I had years ago, the one that I have to keep coming back to when I lose sight of it and become lost. I get lost, and then re-emerge from the darkness to proclaim that once again I have found the light. It is a dance.

Transformation is a painfully long process, fraught with setbacks along the way. Am I the angry geek, shaking his fist at the world, shouting "We're all doomed! The end is near!", or am I the zen geek, sitting calmly while saying "I shall let the chaos pass over me."? Am I contributing content to the group consciousness, or noise? Do I represent order, or chaos? Which is even the more desirable of the two?

My journey is far, far from over.

Comparing Google Apps and Office 365

2011-09-10T21:09:00.000-06:00

Some folks consider these two to be extremely different products that are not comparable to each other. Yet on a certain level they are similar and comparable. If one evaluates them both as cloud based web app front ends to a cloud only infrastructure, which they both can be, then comparisons can be drawn accordingly.

It must also be noted that Microsoft never intended for anybody to actually use Office 365 in this manner. They meant for it to be an extension of Windows and desktop Office, rather than as an alternative to it. This philosophy shows in just how little care and thought they have provided to the web front end for it, which is abysmal and broken, with no continuity between the different parts and no useful integration between them either. The web versions of Office in this paid version were also inferior to those found in the free Skydrive offering, as I noted in a previous post.

Google conversely has made things flow rather nicely, with a continuous look and feel between apps and integration that seems much more carefully planned (in fact actually existent). Yet Google charges less for it, and even offers a free version for companies or groups smaller than 10 users. Google lets me email a document that I have created in the cloud, or even print it (Cloud Print could use some work, but not everyone will be using it).

It is also worth noting that I have prior experience with Google Apps. I used it for a year at the office. I never felt frustrated by it or swore I'd never use it again. Conversely I gave up on Office 365 about 20 minutes into my 30 day free trial. This time last week I had all but decided that Office 365 was the obvious choice, so the turnaround is fairly large here.

There are reasons to go with one or the other. If you're a new startup looking to short circuit this wildly expensive IT headache that the folks from Redmond have built for us, you might want to go lean with Google Apps and never need to hire an IT department at all. Conversely, if you're an old line company firmly lodged in that expensive Microsoft world, there are cost savings to be had by making Microsoft host the servers for you with Office 365 (and your IT guys won't fight it as much as a move to Google Apps, since there's long term job security in maintaining Microsoft software on the desktop).

Giggles

2011-09-10T13:29:00.002-06:00

Even though I had pretty much ruled the option out already, I went ahead and set up a trial of Office 365 today. I came away unimpressed.

It's almost like Microsoft actively worked at making the experience suck with a Chromebook. The Office Web Apps that come with Skydrive are all much more feature filled and more stable than their supposedly identical Office 365 cousins, and they all work with Chromebooks, unlike their Office 365 versions. The experience is very different between the two, and Office 365 ends up being a total mess.

It was a free trial, so it only cost me my time to set it up. Microsoft is missing a good bet here by being too focused on Windows. This could have been their big move into a platform agnostic cloud world, but they couldn't let go of the Windows Everywhere paradigm. They failed.

On the other hand Google has bent over backwards to make sure that all of their offerings work great with Chromebooks. You could call it sneaky, but it just makes good business sense.

I couldn't help but be intrigued by Google's free 10 user version of Apps. I keep thinking that surely there's a catch, but I'm going to check it out.

Tangental spaces

2011-09-10T11:34:00.002-06:00

I'm usually talking about it or high tech toys here, but sometimes I veer off into other topics. Today I wanted to comment about industrial automation hardware and software for a change.

Here's an industry so desperately in need of a shake up that I can't imagine how it hasn't happened yet. It's dominated by shockingly overpriced hardware and software, and the software is often bound by draconian software protection that makes the likes of Microsoft look almost tame by comparison. Setting it all up involves complex configuration that often requires many hours of planning and research (if you haven't used it before). It's difficult to use, and I'm being kind here by using the word "difficult" instead of something more appropriately horrifying and blunt.

Every player in the industry is guilty here, but Allen Bradley seems to be the king of creating both an awful user experience and using pricing designed to rob its foolish customers blind. Their hardware is somewhat good, if bizarrely complex, but we need brand new words to describe the sheer awfulness of their software or the magnitude of the greed involved in their pricing.

In the back of my mind I start designing something better, something that just maybe could shake it all up. I started thinking about customer centric designs that are really targeted at solving their needs in a simple yet powerful way at a price that is budget friendly instead of budget busting. None of those adjectives describe anything that you could buy today, from any supplier of industrial automation gear.

However, that project is on the back burner. It needs working capital, which I don't have (or investors, which I also do not have). One of my goals is to build my way up, one little company at a time, until I have that capital to make it happen.

Speaking of little companies, I just bought the domain name for my very first one. I'm hoping to launch next month. Once I do get it off the ground, there won't be much time left in my schedule for this blog. Which is not to say that I'll shut it down, but I will be posting less often when the time comes. That whole "putting food on the table" thing kind of takes precedence here.

To Chrome or not Chrome

2011-09-09T21:43:00.003-06:00

After what seemed like a long and painful wait, I finally have my Chromebook tonight. So you might be asking me, what are the pros and cons?

It's a tad early for a complete list.

Printing is the number one failure I've seen so far. Google Cloud Print sucks. To make this product really shine, local and lan printers need to be supported. Cloud Print doesn't get the job done, and it is the only option you get. Put another way, Cloud Print is the worst printer support I've ever seen, period. A glaring problem, to be sure.

The browser is OK, pretty much the same Chrome I use all day, every day. Scrolling needs a little work though, as it can be slow and jumpy with some pages.

My dream of using Office 365 might be shattered. Microsoft's Office Web Apps don't appear to have any printing capability of any kind. There's a print function referenced in the help files, but it isn't there. At least not where the help file says it is. Maybe if you use Internet Explorer, but since that will never happen, it might as well not exist at all. So Office 365 is out, since it is basically Office Web Apps for paying customers (plus a few goodies). Too bad, because I was willing to give Microsoft my money since they have the better web apps (as long as you don't need to... print). That's what you get for tying a web based product to tools that only exist on Windows!

My next step will to evaluate Google Apps as an alternative.

Google Cloud Print quirks

2011-09-09T18:19:00.002-06:00

Does anybody know how to get Google Cloud Print to quit printing two copies of every print job? It's wasteful, not what I wanted in the first damn place, and seems to be the default. I can't find a way to change it either. Google?

My very first test print after setting it up spit out two copies (at an irritatingly low resolution that I also cannot change). Google to needs to step up their game here.

Back on track

2011-09-08T19:40:00.002-06:00

I seem to have gotten off track a bit with angry posts about shipping of late. That's not like me. OK, it is like me, but it isn't how I want to be. You can't learn anything from an experience like this until you first actually have the experience. Checking that off of my list now...

I should have my Chromebook tomorrow. It took 10 hours to travel the incredible distance of two miles between my town and the next town over today, but alas this evening it is actually at the post office in my town. I'm moving back into my happy phase now.

In a few days I'll have a review of it, and maybe some nice unboxing photos too. I can already tell that these things aren't for everyone, but I'll examine the realistic target audience for it instead of whining about the things that it was designed not to do (which is what most reviewers seem to be doing with them- whining that they can't install Office or Photoshop on it).

More waiting

2011-09-08T09:04:00.002-06:00

I thought my Chromebook might be delivered yesterday, but that didn't happen. It had been down in Denver the afternoon before, so I figured that it would be easy to for them to deliver it yesterday. I underestimated the inefficiency of our postal service.

Today I tracked it to the next town over from mine. That's about two miles away. It was there at 5AM. How hard would it be for them to get it to my town before they deliver today? Not hard at all, but perhaps completely impossible for the postal service. It would be nothing for me to just go get it, if they'd let me. It's so agonizingly close, yet I may have to wait until tomorrow.

I used Amazon's free super saver shipping. I think I payed too much. Grrrrr!

Lesson learned. However, I'm sitting at home today, waiting, on the off chance that it will be delivered today. Pure idiotic hope drives me now, and we've all seen how well that works.

The waiting game

2011-09-07T11:24:00.002-06:00

My new Chromebook might be delivered today. I'm kind of excited! I really want to put it through it paces and see what it can and can't do. I have a pretty good idea already, but nothing is ever exactly as you expect.

It was shipped postal, so tracking is a complete afterthought. Sometimes they track it, sometimes they don't, depending on if they feel like it or not when it arrives somewhere. They don't give a damn about tracking, it's really only available so they can check off tracking as a feature. I won't shed too many tears if the postal service shuts down when they run out of money, assuming there isn't a really expensive and pointless bailout for a service that nobody cares about anymore (or maybe they'll just raise its debt ceiling and let it dig the hole even deeper). My company uses postal shipping a lot, but only because for really small packages it is cheaper than UPS (and because international shipping is always cheaper with postal). We'd muddle through if it went away, no big loss.

Blogger feedback, other notes

2011-09-05T21:09:00.002-06:00

My Chromebook finally shipped on Saturday. I was afraid that I would be waiting until Tuesday for it to finally ship, since most places don't do any shipping on Saturday, so it's a huge relief. Almost seems like they must have read my blog post about it and realized that they screwed up. Now I've moved on to the "can't wait to get my hands on it" phase.

I switched back to the old Blogger interface. I went to add a post and it seemed like they had made it all even more white and bland than it had been a few days ago when I was complaining about it. I'm deeply dreading the day that they make it permanent for all of us, because I absolutely hate the new interface. Bland bland bland bland. My eyes were bombarded with so many white photons that my retinas have screen burn. I tried to provide feedback, but something puked when I submitted it, so Google may never know how much it sucked trying to find things in the sea of mind paralyzing whiteness where contrast is seemingly considered taboo. Yes, it was BAD, and not in the good way. I don't much care for it with Google Docs either, but it seems to have less white and slightly more contrast than Blogger did. I'm glad that I'm leaning towards Office 365 instead of Google Apps after getting acquainted with the new blandness of all things Google. Yuck!

How not to take care of your customers

2011-09-03T09:08:00.002-06:00

I ordered my Acer Chromebook from Amazon early yesterday. The status was listed as In Stock. This evening there is still no shipping information, only "Shipping Soon". Usually Amazon is pretty good, but they sure dropped the ball this time. Since they wasted the last two business days not shipping my order, and this is Friday, it won't ship until Tuesday. After all, Monday is a holiday. So the product that I ordered on Thursday doesn't ship until the following Tuesday?

I did select the "cheap bastard" super slow shipping, but I never guessed that this meant "we'll ship it when we're fucking good and ready to ship it". Seemingly the point is "we're going to make this suck enough that you won't be so cheap next time". Best Buy didn't carry the Acer's at all, or I would have just gone there and snagged one off the shelf. Next time I won't get the cheap ass shipping (since paying for shipping is still a lot cheaper than stepping up to a more expensive Samsung model)

Good thing I'm not in a terribly big hurry to get my hands on it (I would have paid for better shipping if I was, to be sure).

Note: I meant to publish this on Friday instead of today.

Crazy course changes

2011-09-01T19:46:00.000-06:00

After my epiphany yesterday about the computing platform that my company will use, I decided to take the first step today. I ordered a Chromebook. Yes, I'm going to eat my own dogfood. I really need to see what it can do. Unlike some reviewers that I came across on the web, I know EXACTLY what to expect from one, in detail, before it ever arrives.

I ordered the cheapest Acer model, at $349. I couldn't see paying $50 more for a Samsung. I mean $50 is $50, and I could spend that on something more important.

For the first few weeks it will be essentially a toy. However, long term it is an investment, as my personal machine when I get started. I'll have two computers on my desk though, as I still need a Mac for Photoshop and HTML 5 development. During my "get acquainted" phase I will use it exclusively when I'm working on things for the new business. I need to see exactly how it works with the tools that I have chosen to build the company on (and my company will be very web oriented, so most of its tools are web based).

Now I'm facing an internal debate over whether to use Office 365 or Google Apps as the base. I have used Google's solution before, so it comes down to how well Microsoft's offering works before I can make the final decision. The Google option is slightly cheaper, and well integrated with Chromebooks, but is less satisfying to use than things like the Excel Web App or Outlook Web Access. I'll be testing both from my target platform soon enough.

Today's random discovery

2011-09-01T13:02:00.000-06:00

It seems that webkit based browsers such as Safari and Google Chrome are completely unable to view web sites using self signed ssl certificates (which you might do while testing, before you submit your CSR to an "officially blessed" signing "authority" to get the warm fuzzy that your cert is "trusted").

On the one hand, folks need to know that the site they are shopping at is secure, and certificates signed by authorities helps provide that false sense of security. I used a lot of quote marks both to reflect that I had no respect for what they represent, and to show my personal disdain for a process that seems to largely exist purely to make signing authorities large sums of money for zero work (it's 100% automated, start to finish, no human intervention required on their part).

This little webkit bug is causing me grief because I'd still like to do some testing on my new site before I pay a signing authority to bless my certificate. It NEEDS to be fixed, ASAP!

So White

2011-08-31T18:59:00.001-06:00

I switched to the new Blogger interface tonight. It's so... white. I think my eyes are experiencing bland overload! The layout is fine, but could we please get some color up in this bitch?

Not sure about the new editor window either, but we'll see.

New directions

2011-08-31T18:53:00.000-06:00

It occurred to me that my latest experiment with Linux wasn't going to get me the answers that I needed. For instance, a straight up Linux distro isn't what my future startup needs at all. Sure, I could use one for that purpose, but it wouldn't be optimal. When I looked at where I was headed with that, and how I was going to put the pieces together, I saw that somebody had already rolled the optimal solution in an easy package, for less than I had planned on spending. I was reinventing the wheel, only with no conceivable benefit for having done so.

What I needed to get my hands on instead was a new Chromebook. If I'm going to try to run a company on Linux, with a total cloud focus that is 100% browser centric, that is the optimal solution, in theory. As luck would have it, the printer that I chose today is fully compatible with Google's Cloud Printing (the printer has an email address just for that feature), so document printing should be possible with the device. All I need to do is get my hands on one and start testing it by learning to live with one all of the time. Can it get the job done? I'm too cheap to get one with 3G, so the standard wi-fi models will have to do.

It doesn't bother me in the slightest that Chromebooks will never play WoW. If I'm trying to run a business on them, I want that to be the case anyway. I'm not paying people to play fucking video games, so no big loss there. Bad enough that it can play Angry Birds (which will be a firing offense, should I ever catch anybody doing it on company time).

Since Google has taken a "who cares about desktops?" approach here, I'll have to add on things like a keyboard, mouse and display to make them more usable in a desktop environment. A little hint to the Google folks, but I'd like to see a real desktop version someday. In the meantime this will have to do.

Anybody out there have real world experience with these? I'm especially curious as to how they work with Office 365, since the Google Apps thing didn't cut it for me, but Office 365 looks like it might. I'll be testing it with Office Web Apps on Skydrive initially, although I may give Google Apps another spin too.

Up, one step at a time

2011-08-30T08:07:00.002-06:00

I made some progress on my house this last week, so I'm kind of excited. I've got half the flooring done in my master bedroom, and my new bathtub is almost ready to go into the master bath. What's even more exciting for me is that I've tackled the flooring entirely on my own, without any help at all, and it's going very well so far. I'm finally starting to feel like this project might actually get done some day.

I've also been laying out the details of my new company as well. I searched long and hard to find a niche that I think will be profitable for years to come, one that I could finance without taking out a second mortgage on my arms and legs (I hate debt anyway). I won't say exactly what that niche is, but currently I believe that I have a head start over the competition in getting into that niche. I also have experience with the IT required to make it work. I'm almost done planning, and I might start setting up the new business in the next few weeks. I won't be running it like a stereotypical "startup", where you go get investors, hire a bunch of people and start buying the best equipment money can buy until the money runs out and you shut your doors. At first it will be just me, running it out of my house, on a tight budget, financed with my own money as cheaply as possible. Using as many cloud services as possible to reduce my costs and equipment needs.

Speed bumps

2011-08-29T16:21:00.002-06:00

This weekend I finally tried to play World of Warcraft under Linux. The experience was not satisfactory in any way. I had issues with the frame rate that made it almost unplayable. I know that some folks out there are having better luck with it, but I can't ever see myself playing the game that way.

Without the need to play WoW under Linux, I have the option of removing the proprietary graphics driver (the game won't play at all without it), after which I can run regular updates. Also, windows drag more smoothly under the open source driver, so I'm tempted to switch and not look back.

I'm sort of left asking myself what I'd actually do with it though. At least for now. Browse the web? Maybe. It's safer that way, to be sure. I'm going to leave it installed for now, and try to use it whenever I'm not interested in playing WoW. Or perhaps when I NEED to not be tempted to play WoW (so that I can get some work done).

This is kind of why I chose the dual boot route anyway. I like having options. More options = better.

Meanwhile back at the ranch

2011-08-25T07:26:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I had a minor setback with my Linux system. Well, minor for me. It would have been major to somebody who was new to Linux. After messing around with the graphics a bit too much, I got the machine into a state where it was no longer possible to get the graphical environment loaded or configured. I uninstalled an re-installed Linux to solve it. After which I decided that running the updater was no longer an option, just in case it might sneak in a kernel update again. Now it's working just fine. There needs to be some way to tell the updater to always hold back kernel updates, for those of us using binary only drivers.

Then I got Diablo II running. Unlike WoW, where the framerate appears to be higher than in Windows, here the rate seems to be lower, and the mouse is less accurate during gameplay. Getting sound working required me to switch Wine from full DirectSound to emulated, after doing some Googling on it. Also I had to map a drive into the Wine environment so that it could see my expansion CD to play the game. The 3D perspective option was not enabled under Linux, despite my considerably advanced 3D graphics (compared to when the game was made, anyhow).

Everything is stable at the moment, so I'm in "don't mess with it" mode. I'd love to have some sort of weather app, but I haven't found one yet. I'll keep searching, since this seems like such a basic thing these days.

Getting settled

2011-08-24T07:44:00.002-06:00

Adjusting to all Linux all the time has been mostly uneventful. I installed Chromium, which is the base open source project for Google Chrome, and I'm running updates now. I deselected the kernel updates, and then it re-selected them for me without any warning, so apparently I'm getting them whether I like it or not (I have a binary only driver for my video, so this could be bad). I'll know after a reboot if my video is going to be hosed or not.

The updates are done downloading now. Seemed to go pretty fast for 197 updates, but I'm used to Windows, where it takes ages to download, and then you're merely ready for the next wave, and then the next wave, and so on and so forth (on a fresh installation). On Linux you get ALL the updates that are available in one single shot, and then you're up to date (until new ones are released later in the day, of course).

I'm thinking of installing some of favorite games for testing later on, like Diablo II. I miss that game a lot.

Time to reboot... fingers crossed!

New project: one month with Linux

2011-08-23T15:51:00.002-06:00

I kind of fluctuate back and forth between thinking that Linux is the greatest thing ever and thinking that it may never grow the hell up to become a serious operating system. Depends on when you ask me about it. I have the many years of experience with Linux to form a valid opinion about it, going way back to before most folks had ever even heard of it yet. I made the switch to Linux so many times over the years that it would make your head spin, but I always ended up leaving it for one reason or another. Fun and exciting always gave way to "if only it could do this...".

Fast forward to the present. My main Windows machine is nearly devoid of installed apps. I've been moving to the cloud as fast as I could. It has two things installed on it: Google Chrome (because IE is not secure at all, and I hate it), and World of Warcraft. My bookmarks are synched across every machine that I use anywhere that has Google Chrome on it, and Chrome can run on anything. Warcraft is a tougher nut to crack, but today I got it running under Linux without much pain. That leaves... absolutely nothing!

So I have decided to spend a month with it. I chose Ubuntu 11.04 for my distro of choice. I know it is regarded by elitists as the "noob" Linux, but I really don't care about that. I'm not spending 2 days downloading and compiling each individual part of Gentoo just to be 1337 enough to say I had done it (I have done it, just not recently). I wanted it to be ready to use right out of the box, which it was.

I talk a lot of trash, now it's time to back it up, eat my own dog food and see how it goes. This isn't the first time I've done this, of course, so I know what to expect. The difference now is that what I need from an OS has changed with the times, and for a change this just might work. So here goes...

Update on kicking Windows to the curb

2011-08-23T13:11:00.003-06:00

I took my troublesome Windows machine to work with me so that I could get Linux installed on it during my down times. It wasn't as easy as it should have been, due to some unusual circumstances that only certain Dell owners would run into. Instead of creating a direct partition to install it into, I wound up using WUBI to install it from within Windows (you can uninstall it that way too, using this method). This way it just creates a file that acts as a virtual disk, installs some code to allow you to boot into it, and changes the NT boot menu to allow booting into Linux as a second option. There is no disruption of any kind to your existing installation of Windows. It looked like messing with the partitions was going to be a pain in my special circumstance, so this approach avoids that entirely. The regular installation process was not meant to be used on Dells with recovery partitions, and is confused by them utterly (something that could be easily remedied, cough *ahem* cough). Therefore I recommend the WUBI method instead, which is easier, painless and works great.

For WoW support I installed Wine. I also installed the "proprietary" driver for my video card, to make sure I was getting the maximum performance out of it, with DRI enabled (it was, by default, luckily). Then, following some simple instructions that I got off the web, I launched it from my existing installation (done under Windows), which looked something like this:

wine /host/Users/Public/Games/World\ of\ Warcraft/Launcher.exe

If you install via WUBI, your Windows files are mounted at /host, as seen in my example above.

The game launches perfectly. The launcher window displays news, and hitting Play takes you into full screen mode. The opening screen seemed to have fluid motion, giving me the impression of a much higher frame rate than I get while running it in Windows. I did not actually try to play the game yet, since my play time is expired and I haven't purchased more time because I'm taking a week off from the game to get stuff done around the house.

When my one week break from is over, I'll be back, attempting to play the game under Linux. Nowadays most folks are saying this just works, the first time they try it, so I expect to have good luck with it. However I will update you with my progress.

Breaking Windows

2011-08-23T07:46:00.002-06:00

I've had the very real sense lately that we were entering into a post-Windows era of computing, where Windows simply did not matter anymore. Sure, I still rely on it for an ever shrinking number of tasks, but I see the light at the end of the tunnel now.

I've been trying to get rid of Windows from the beginning. Most people these days aren't familiar with the humble origins of Windows, so they don't know just how much it sucked early on. I do, however. It was most worthy of my scorn in its early incarnations.

This weekend I got fed up with my main windows machine (I have several, despite being a hater). For weeks now it refused to install a Windows update. I investigated, but Microsoft was utterly useless when it came to providing helpful information about the error code I was getting, so I finally had to just Google it. I found forums with self proclaimed Microsoft experts offering up one stupid opinion after another about why you might get this error code. One guy said "disable the firewall", which was the most fucking stupid suggestion ever (no, I did not try that, he was obviously a fucking retard). Some said to just wipe it and start over, but I do that often enough as it is. Finally one guy said it was probably a hard drive error that caused it, and that I should run chkdsk. That actually fixed the problem!

My big problem with this incident is that Microsoft made the error code, so they ought to have a clue as to why you might actually GET this error code. They could just add that to their "help" thing that you call up when diagnosing problems with Windows update instead of making me fucking Google it. In fact the obvious remedy should be suggested when the update fails, to facilitate my getting the computer working again. Don't make me Google it, assholes!

The irony is that it makes me want to wipe the machine and put Linux on it. I expect to have to Google my problems on Linux (rare as they are these days, since Linux has gotten so much better). Linux is free, so it doesn't bother me not having good support. I'm not paying them to create a flawless user experience, so when I don't get one, I'm OK with it. I feel like they try very hard, considering there is no financial gain on their part if they succeed. It isn't perfect by any stretch, but I just don't care.

World of Warcraft is holding me back, but only just. I understand why they don't port it to Linux, considering what a horrible failure Linux has been as a gaming platform (on the PC). Since my Mac can run it even better than this crappy Dell can, I'm severely tempted to go ahead with the wipe. Or maybe I'll dual boot it and try to run my existing installation of WoW under Wine... which might be fun!

Headed in the right direction

2011-08-22T12:11:00.002-06:00

It seems to me that the big players in the GPS industry may have made the right choice when it comes to survival in an era where cell phones all have GPS now. The obvious choice: make navigation apps for smart phones.

GPS is succumbing to the same market force that other small portable devices are facing. It's a feature being incorporated into cell phones, because people like carrying around fewer small devices. It faces the same future as portable mp3 players, low cost digital cameras, and PDA's. So the natural solution is to become a player in that market. Fortunately smart phones are quickly becoming dominant market players in the cell phone industry, so it makes more sense to port your code to a smart phone app than to create your own phone. After all, why not focus on your market strength instead of competing directly against established veteran players in another market that you don't even understand yet?

Oh, the create your own phone approach has been tried here. I think Garmin did it. I saw the phone, and laughed. They might have gotten away with making their own Andriod phone, but they made something completely unique and incompatible with anything out there. You couldn't help but look at it and ask "Why?".

Conversely, I just bought their iPhone app the other day, and I'm quickly finding that it's at least as good as my Garmin Nuvi. I'm sick of my Nuvi though, which is why I sought to replace it. The windshield mount keeps falling off, so I had to re-attach it every time I drove the car, which meant waiting for it to boot up, which was painful. The phone app launches in seconds, and is ready to go ASAP. I keep track of miles with GPS so that I can boost my MPG by coasting with the engine off a lot, so I always have my GPS running while I drive, whether I need navigation assistance or not.

I'm not sure what the procedure will be for updating maps on this thing, but at least with an iPhone app I know that I'll be able to update the maps right from the phone itself instead of having to download some PC app to download it to the GPS over USB like I had to do before.

Navigation apps for smart phones are cheap compared to buying a separate unit. Dirt cheap. Seems like an easy choice in what is quickly becoming a smart phone world.

The great Netflix switchoff

2011-08-22T07:21:00.002-06:00

The date of Netflix's massive price hike is fast approaching. On September 1 it becomes 60% more expensive to keep both streaming and disc in the mail. I'm predicting that thousands of people will cancel one or both services. Maybe hundreds of thousands of people. It could be the biggest disruption to a company's revenue stream ever.

Or maybe the revolt will fizzle. They gave us two months to get used to the idea up front. That's enough for lesser minded folks to simply get used to it, or even forget about it entirely. Although many of those folks will quickly remember what's going on as soon as they see the charge on their cards. A 60% hike in the price does not go unnoticed.

I'm about to switch off disc in the mail. I'm finding that it isn't what's important to me anymore, and getting rid of it lowers my total bill instead of raising it 60%. I'm invested in streaming now, so I'm more reluctant to give it up.

So which will it be? Massive uproar, or fizzle? I see only downside long term, regardless of which happens. Long term new subscribers will be reluctant to get both services, or may even opt for alternatives such as Hulu or others. Some existing customers will quit, many will reduce their services. I have trouble seeing that as a positive for the company. Also, a huge amount of goodwill was burned in the price hike, and getting it back will be difficult. It doesn't help that last time they had a massive service disruption they didn't offer the usual discounts to customers.

The future of the company is iffy here. At a time when all companies are in jeopardy due to extremely volatile economic conditions, making such stupid moves is not a good idea. The service Netflix provides is a luxury, in a time where luxuries are becoming increasingly difficult to justify as budgets tighten across the nation.

Connections

2011-08-21T08:15:00.002-06:00

For a long time I've been spouting the imminent collapse of the global economy, but you might be asking why I thought it was going to collapse. What are the forces in play, and how might it move around the globe?

It's not unusual for a government to create an economic house of cards. The people are usually complicit in its creation, but government creates the environment in which it becomes possible. We see this quite clearly in Japan, with its amazing real estate bubble that seemed to bring awe inspiring wealth, and the subsequent collapse that completely crippled their economy for decades (it has yet to recover).

America isn't in a very different position right now. Our collapse actually started in the 90's, during Bill Clinton's presidency. It began with the infamous dotcom bubble. People inflated the value of dotcom stocks to amazing heights, given that these companies had no products and no business plan whatsoever. Then the creators of these companies cashed out, making instant profits. Vast sums of money were diverted away from ventures that had real products and a business model and into dotcoms, which were built entirely on vague promises that anything dotcom would make you rich. Then it all collapsed, and the wealth that was diverted away from real businesses that make real jobs evaporated with it. The bubble created a false sense of wealth, seemingly made real by the fact that it created temporary tax revenues for the government that put it into surplus for a few years. The crash created a recession, and put the government back into deficit spending.

Our next bubble was already forming. Set in motion by threats made by Bill Clinton against the banking industry, real estate lending kicked into high gear, and a housing boom was created. Then it took on a life of its own when it seemed that housing had nowhere to go but up. Meanwhile the people at Fannie and Freddie were cooking the books so that they could make huge bonuses even while they were bleeding money due to a glut of bad loans. The two entities continued to push the bubble, and the bad loans continued to pile up higher and higher. Hearings were held repeatedly to scrutinize what was taking place, but Fannie and Freddie had constant protection from Chris Dodd and Barnie Frank that enabled them to continue cooking the books and building the problem.

Finally it all began to collapse, as mortgage after mortgage went into default. This was precipitated by a rise in oil prices that crimped finances for many people, but was made considerably worse by the fact that the banks were loaning money to people who really had no business buying a home in the first place.

It would have collapsed quickly, and passed, but the government decided to "help". As a result, home prices continue to decline even now, undermining the psychology of the economy. Real recovery isn't possible until prices hit bottom.

Meanwhile, we have the spending issue. People inherently know that current spending equates to future taxation, regardless of what the government may say to soothe them. Projects are on hold until that spending issue gets resolved, and since it has not been resolved, they remain on hold indefinitely.

So we have high spending in a severely bad economy. With the looming threat of higher taxes. There has been some inflation due to printing extra money, but not enough to ward off the threat of higher taxes. There has been some puny cuts in how much spending will grow over the next 10 years, but not enough to ward off higher taxes, or failing that a debt default. Therein lies the real problem: the growth in spending has put us in real jeopardy of a debt default. Joe Biden might be saying we'll never default, but anybody with an active mind can already see the default coming. We resolved absolutely nothing in the debt ceiling debate a few weeks ago, apart from squabbling over whether we default in one month or another month.

The interconnections begin to really come into play when we default on our debt, as we will unless something is done. Our banks are completely dependent upon the government for income now. They borrow money from it at 0% interest, and then loan it back to the government by buying up debt issues like bonds. The gap between the two is their main profit now, and the banks foolishly consider this income to be safe. They consider loans to be secondary now, and they treat savings accounts as if they were completely unnecessary (and under this business model they are). A debt default will completely cripple our banking system instantly. There will be a run on the banks as people panic about their savings, stressing an already bankrupt government that was guaranteeing those savings via the FDIC. The money just might not be there when people show up to withdraw it (indeed likely won't be there).

When people start losing their life savings as these banks go under, the rioting will start. We'll collapse into a full economic depression, our imports from other countries will slow to a crawl, and other countries that depended upon selling to America will begin to collapse too. A wave of debt defaults will sweep the globe. Rioting and looting will be epidemic. Governments will collapse. Anarchy and terror will become the norm. Millions will die.

Then we'll brush ourselves off, and start building the house of cards all over again. Only bigger and faster next time.

For my Tweeps

2009-08-25T19:09:00.006-06:00

I decided that since I'm linking people into my blog from my Twitter profile, it might be a good idea to do an introduction of sorts here. I've seen this done elsewhere, and it seemed like a good idea at the time. So here goes...

I enjoy picking up followers, although it isn't my life's ambition, and I don't measure my personal awesomeness by the volume of followers that I get (which is a good thing, since that would peg the value fairly low). I'll pretty much let anybody follow me, as long as they behave, whether they're genuinely interested in my tweets or not (and most aren't). Even spammers, as long as they don't misbehave by using @mentions to bombard people (spam tweets without @'s are OK, as long as they don't have trending topic tags in them).

I try to keep my tweets entertaining, at least on some level. You won't be hearing about my adventures with the toilet, unless of course there's an awesome drinking story involved. You aren't going to care if I'm "sitting on the couch", so I won't bother you with that. I try to crack jokes about my adventures in this world, and some of them might even elicit a grin or a snicker (I was aiming for full-on laughter, but I always miss). It's OK if you laugh at the feebleness of my jokes too, since at least then laughter was involved. I keep my tweets fairly clean, despite the fact that in real life I swear like a sailor.

If you were hoping that I would follow you back, and I didn't, don't be disappointed. I do check out my followers (ESPECIALLY if they have cute profile pics). If they have something interesting to say, I might follow them back. I don't need to see tweets about people taking a shit, and I'm not following anybody who tweets the occasional ad, even if the rest of their output is interesting. If you tweet incessantly, like every other minute, I won't be able to cope with the volume, so I won't follow you. If your profile is just an ad for a triple X dating site, I'm not following you. I'm looking for Tweets that are real, interesting, funny, thoughtful, original. From the heart, or even from the hip. Not from the "API". Also, I'm not a grammar nazi, but if it isn't intelligible I won't follow it. Too many slangy mispellings and abbreviations or too much texting speak causes my brain to revolt against the suffering. If I need my Captain Crunch secret decoder ring to figure out what you're saying, I'll read something else instead. I do come back and take another look at your tweets occasionally, so I might change my mind and follow you at some point, if you make it interesting or if the ads disappear.

I'm not a follow nazi, but I am curious to see who's coming or leaving. I'll never ask why, or beg you to come back. We're all free, and there are no strings attached here. Follow or unfollow as you please. I can usually guess why I get unfollowed, and it doesn't bother me a bit.

As for what I am, since that sort of influences what I'll tweet about, I'm a big fan of anime, sci-fi, gadgets, computers and anything related to outer space. I don't care for sports at all, so you'll never see any tweets about that. I listen to mostly electronic music, stretching from ambient and trance to dance and house, but I have rock roots and I still consume metal. I also like J-pop, which is weird because I hate all other forms of pop music passionately (where hate is not a strong enough word to describe it). I play video games now and then, but I'm not hard core about it, although I usually own every possible gaming system. I'm selling off my Wii though, as I never play it at all.

I make a point of not tweeting politics, even though my own political opinions are as passionate as anybody's (they sneak into my blog now and then, but I won't beat my tweeps over the head with them ever). I tend to get turned off when others tweet politics. People aren't able to use the appropriate level of tact needed for polite discussions about things political, so I view all political discourse as being generally uncivil by its very nature, and thus vulgar.

At this point you've either left already, or you're thinking that I'm a cranky, hateful bastard. I am, but I still love people. I wouldn't be on Twitter (or have a blog) if I didn't love people. I may think that most people are fucking idiots, but i still love them (usually). I'm looking forward to meeting interesting people, through their Tweets, and I want people to get to know me that way as well. I won't try to sell you anything, I won't preach to you, but I will give you a glimpse of my inner workings, of my "soul" as it were.