{ personal }

Ditching AT&T and the iPhone

Thinking about switching carrier and getting a new phone.  So sick of AT&T's service.  The other day someone left me a voice mail at 9:30 AM but I wasn't notified until 4:30 PM.  Never mind that it was a telemarketer, a 7 hour delay is unacceptable and I should switch carriers out of sheer principle. 

Then there's my iPhone.  I swear, underneath it all, the iPhone is running Windows XP.  So slow, freezes up all the time.  Sometimes when I'm taking a shit I'll pull out my iPhone to play a game and whatnot.  But by the time the game loads I'm ready to wipe.  Useless.

But switching carrier and phone is such a pain in the arse.  Been with AT&T--amazingly--since 2004.  Really don't want to deal with Verizon salesmen trying to convince me I need unlimited texting.  And moving over my contacts.. And moving over my music.  Well, I guess my music can't really be moved, since Steve Jobs has locked me into iTunes for life.  It says a lot when it's easier to get a divorce from you wife/husband than to sever from Apple.

I'll never buy another Apple product again (the iPad was my lame April Fool joke).  Apple epitomizes everything that is wrong with society.  Their CEO is a megalomaniac.  Their software is closed.  The company spends half of its budget on marketing, brainwashing us into buying crap we don't need.  I'll give it up though, they are brilliant at what they do.  To convince the sheep he is special is no small feat.

So that leaves me with HTC, because lets face it, the Chinese are taking over so I might as well jump on board.  Although technically some friends will say HTC is Taiwanese but it's all the same to me (I can say this with immunity since I'm not white).  The Droid Eris by HTC looks pretty nice, much better than that brick they call DROID by Motorola. 

4,294 Unread Emails

I saw this guy's inbox today and it had 4,294 unread emails!  WTF.  How can anybody reasonably manage and process that much data?  I really wanted to tell him about rules/filters but didn't want to come off as a know it all arse.  It really pains me to see such disorganization.  I suppose you can learn to ignore unimportant emails, but it's just so much easier to spend 30 seconds and create a rule.  I probably have 30+ rules setup, some of which direct certain emails straight to the trash.  My first rule is a "stop" rule that prevents further processing if I'm in the TO or CC fields so I don't miss any emails directly sent to me.  But almost everything else goes into some folder.  Can you really have thousands or even just hundreds of unread emails in your main inbox and still be productive?

Wolfram Alpha Can "See"

This is how Wolfram Alpha sees my web presence

Been reading up on Stephen Wolfram.  The guy is pretty bad ass, having received his PhD from CalTech at the age of 20.  What was I doing at the age of 20?  Same thing I'm doing right now, surfing the web for free porn and updating my Netflix queue.  Talented people do interesting stuff with existing knowledge, Wolfram seems to be the selected few who comes up with new knowledge.

Twitter Finally Good for Something

Every once in a while something comes along that just blows you away.  Saw a tweet from a golf buddy about Wolfram Alpha.  WTF is Wolfram Alpha?  Wolfram Alpha is a very ambitious project of Stephen Wolfram, the creator of Mathematica, for computing answers.  I vaguely remember using Mathematica in school to learn something about matrices, but had no idea it was so powerful.  Google lookups answers, Wolfram Alpha computes answers.   Here's the answer to 44th president United States,

Google can do something similar, but the difference is Google does a lookup/search, whereas Wolfram Alpha computes this answer with its models and algorithms.  Wow.

Second Fiddle at Google

You might have read Douglas Bowman's Goodbye Google blog about his decision to leave Google because the company is "filled with engineers" and won't let visual designers be daring in their design decisions.  I don't know Bowman and I'm sure he's a good guy, but his blog just sounded really whiny.  You're at Google--an engineering company--what do you expect?  Engineers run the show.  If you don't like it, leave and take your nice stock options, but to whine about how engineers paralyzed your work seems petty. 

Every company has a core competency and if you're not part of the core competency you'll have to play second fiddle.  If I were an engineer at a visual design studio I can't complain if the company is too artsy and won't look at problems from an engineering perspective. 

I have a friend, he's pretty high up at his company, with a fancy title and big office.  But at the end of the day, no matter how high he climbs the corporate ladder, he'll always be a small fish at his company.  His background is software but his company is a financial company.  The financial guys run the show.  When push comes to shove the financial guys win.  Without the financial guys there would be no software team for him to direct.

It looks like Bowman is going to Twitter.  At Twitter he can be a big fish.  I have no idea what Twitter's competency is, so artists and engineers can fight it out to see who'll be the big fish there.

Draggable Task Queue

I lead a pretty simple (boring) life.  I'm no Barack Obama, trying to juggle raising taxes on Americans, hiring my Chief of Staff, meeting with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, etc.  So all I want is a very simple, easy to use task/to-do list utility/program/service to help me organize my uneventful life.  Tried using Outlook's Tasks and Remember The Milk (RTM), but found both to be more complicated than I need.  Most importantly, I want to very easily prioritize my tasks.  Both Outlook and RTM have priorities associated with tasks, but to reorder tasks involves too many mouse and keyboard clicks.

So I've built my own draggable task queue web application.  The concept/philosophy is that all tasks go into one of three queues: personal, work and shopping list.  When a task is added, it goes to the end of the queue.  Tasks at the top of the queue should be completed first.  There is no status (not started, in progress, completed).  There is no start or end date.  No percent done.  It's that simple, tasks in a queue.

Now here's the selling point, to reorder tasks you just drag.  No need to update some priority from "normal" to "high" or from "5" to "3'--just drag.  Think Netflix queue.

I'm going to be so productive from now on.

Most Annoying Mac "Features"

It's been a while since I've bitched about my MacBook...

Why is there no "always on top" option for QuickTime?  I want to be able to watch videos while reading  documents or browsing the web.  With Windows, this is pretty easy.  Launch Windows Media Player, turn "always on top" on, launch Firefox and I'm good to go.  But in Mac OS Leopard there's no "always on top" option for QuickTime, so Firefox ends up hiding QuickTime, unless I want to waste valuable screen real estate arranging the two applications to not block one another.  Is there some sacred Apple design philosophy that the "always on top" feature breaks?

The other annoying Mac feature is you can only resize a window with the bottom right corner resizer.  In Windows and Linux I can resize using any window border or corner.  I can deal with not have a true maximize button, but it's really annoying to have to find the bottom right corner to resize a window.  Again, is there some sacred Apple design philosophy that I'm just not getting?

Here's this good OS--pretty stable, polished UI--but it's so annoying to use on a daily basis because of a couple of retarded missing features.  Who agrees?

Electronic Wedding Invitations

Went to Temple nightclub last night for a friend's birthday, fulfilling my yearly club going quota.  Don't even remember the last time I went to a club.  Don't miss it, too old these days to be up at 2 AM drunk in a loud place.  But it's good to go once a year to remind yourself that you're not that old.

Good thing I did go, though.  Through friends of friends I realized I got the date to my friend's wedding wrong.  My 2G iPhone's calendar says the 19th, but they all said it's the weekend after.  Guess I can't really argued with one of the bridesmaid.  Originally I thought it was the 12th.  Really should pay more attention to the "save the date" reminder and wedding invitation. 

This is why I want people to start using evites for wedding invitations.  That way I can track it better, sync it to my calendar, get reminders, resolve timing conflicts, etc., without the risk of human errors.  I know bride spends a lot of time on the wedding invitations, but the first thing I do when I get one is put it in a pile with all the other junk mail I get.  Then at the bachelor party I tell the groom, "mark me down, I'm not sending the RSVP." 

Electronic invitations are the way to go.  No one except you and your parent's generation cares for paper invitations.  Sorry if that sounded harsh, but that's the straight-talk.  And think of the money and effort you'll save.  So be on the lookout for an email evite from me soon (make sure I'm not in your spam filter).  Thinking September 9, 2009 (9.9.09) is when I want to get have my wedding.