The Iron Yuppie

I've already commented on my thoughts on the Google Deskbar's user interface and human being's user interface. My comment in the last blog about the 3D Modeler interface reminded me of a recent piece of technology that also failed the interface test.

Scoble recommended Pandora... and he's absolutely right. It's just great. I use it mostly for dance music, as other types of music I prefer to hear the entire album as the artist intended, rather than single cuts. But the real problem is that it's sitting in a browser. Terrible! It needs to be a nice rich client that can sit on your desktop and persist long beyond a browser session. Does it really make sense that I want the music to stop just because I close my browser? No!

Caught this on Boing Boing

Boy this is cool. As I've mentioned before, what I'd really like to see is something like this but for cities with simulations... who wouldn't like to take a shot at redesigning their city to reduce traffic? Any how, a particularly cool thing is how it's totally readable in 3D modeling apps, which really is the best interface for them. Very nice!

I haven't tracked it, but Yahoo has a Stock Screener as well...

10 highest rated stocks (thanks Kirk Report)

Publish an Web Feed and you've won a customer!

Stock Screeners 10s from MSN Stock Screener (from The Kirk Report)

I once tracked this for a few months. It's actually pretty hard as the top 10s move around pretty regularly. I wish they put out an Web Feed (hint!). Anyhow, it really did pretty well and beat the market over that time, though I did not account for commissions or potential taxes.

Yeah, this about covers it. (thanks Gawker)

I'm telling you, this is one of the first times that new technology has so profoundly changed daily life for me so quickly in a long time. Both of them come thanks to MSN.

The first revolves around the upcoming PDC. I was trying to figure out what hotel to stay at when I went to the LA convention center. I went to Virtual Earth, and typed in Los Angeles Convention center. A link comes up. Then I type Hotel. Within 20 seconds I can see every hotel in the area and immediately judge which ones I want to go see. The best part is that attached to each of the links is the address and phone number! This simply could not be easier (unless, i suppose, they had pre-defined links listed for indicating what other people had followed up their search with...). Check it out!

The second comes from the new search functionality on MSN Mobile. Maybe not my MOST hated thing about cell phones (but certainly up there) is the $1.00 that 411 on a cell phone costs. I have the Internet, this is absurd! With MSN Mobile, from my phone, I go to http://mobile.msn.com/search/default.aspx (already set as a favorite). I type a word, and my address, and it looks up all the items in the area, displaying the address, phone number and distance. Awesome! But even better, it SAVES my address, so I never need to type that again. Oh, now that is great. No more 411 for me... EVER.

This is also the first time I think I can unequivocally say that MSN beat Google. Yes, I'm aware of Google maps and Mobile.Google.com, but they lose in a head-to-head for the following reasons. Google maps doesn't (to my knowledge) let you overlay one search on top of the next search, and though the scrolling is nice, it doesn't have anywhere near the mouse integration (on the scroll wheel for example) that Virtual Earth does. Second, Mobile.Google is fine, but it doesn't save your location on your phone, which I view as CRITICAL considering I want to type in as little as possible. The only other thing that catches my eye is that it's kind of a weird URL... mobile.google.com/local instead of mobile.msn.com/search ... this is admittedly a minor point, since I'll probably set a favorite anyway. Both of you should remember who I am and my last 5 searches too... again, help me type less!

Tour of Seattle via Scoble

Boy, Scoble's not kidding... this is really awesome. Just a great mix of video and Google Earth.

Comment within the Mini-MSFT Blog

This is both the good and bad of blogging, wrapped up in a tiny shell. The people who you want to hear are able to post, and mostly anonymously, because the site is not affiliated with MS. However, it's tough to keep the signal to noise high and not have it turn into a bitchfest. All said, I think there are some great comments in there. This comment in that blog is the most profound:

The most pronounced change I've noticed in my 8 years here is this: when I came to MS, I felt like my executives and I were on the same team--we all worked hard and worked together to achieve common goals, for which people were rewarded in proportion to their contribution. This is no longer the case. The executives live in a whole other realm and see employees more as a cost than as a resource. Hell--this is true even with some middle managers.

If I were an executive at MS, I would be freaking out about a comment like that. If your employees don't feel you are on their side, you've got some REAL problems.

Google's Chat is Live

This so clearly points to the core strategy for Google. Make your data more structured and searchable than ever before. They will come out with a way to categorize and sort every bit of information that you put into a computer so you can search and use that data long into the future. Whether or not it's what links you click on, what you type in mail, blogs or chat, what phone calls you make to whom and so on. I don't think this is a bad thing(tm)... the company is just trying to help users make sense of a world where our data sits in a thousand different places. But you better be ready to buy into this philosophy if you want the full experience. They're not going to do anything malicious with it... but in order to give you what they think you want (total access through computers of everything you're interested in as quickly and as easily as possible) they have to know this level of detail about you. Fascinating stuff!

Holy crap, they've almost caught up with disk drives!

1 TB DVD Recorder

Too bad it's currently going on sale for $2k. Bring that bad boy down to $500-$750, and I finally have a backup solution for reasonably sized disk drives. Huzzah!

Ali G Punks Pammy?

The only problem with all this absurdly funny stuff is that it can only go on for so long until everyone knows about it. Oh well, enjoy it while it lasts.

Planning a meeting? This tool is just invaluable!

World Meeting Time For Tokyo and Seattle

Obviously you can set anything in there, I just happen to have a meeting I have upcoming. Nice and simple!

Even nicer when you have a meeting between people in, I don't know, Abu Dhabi, Abuja, Acapulco, Accra, Adak and Adamstown. I'd like to see you schedule that in Outlook.

Also great about Screenhead's post is that it reminded me of the great line from that movie Firefox:

"You must think in Russian... think in Russian... etc"

HOLY CRAP. Check this little guy out.

Space Worms via Screenhead

Screenhead's got the number on this one:

The most instantly hard flash game weve ever encountered. Essentially, you dodge a you-seeking missile, which learns faster than you do. When you finally figure out how to get anywhere with this game, you feel so instantly clever that your artificially-inflated ego is bound to make you act like a complete ass towards at least one random stranger.

One generally goes through three stages in a game such as this. One, how the hell do I do this? Two, ha ha, I've figured you out, now I dominate! Three, THIS IS GODDAMN HARD, I'm going to quit and blog about it.

Obviously, I've passed all three levels, and am now on to stage four (only for the advanced): I will dominate this game in order to prove what a big man I am so that when people later ask me about it I can boast.

I had to be informed about this from someone else... I'm hardly the geek you came here for!

MSN search for Taxis in Seattle

and for comparison...

Google search for Taxis in Seattle

I wish that MSN would use the virtual earth interface instead of that fairly annoying map point one. Anyhow, though it's close, Google's the winner on this one, not only for the niceness of the search results (better table layout) but the maps flow and drag is just so much nicer, especially in how fluid it feels. MS has a very nice additional search, and parses better, but the best feature they have is the ability to click on the letter of the search returns and have it center and highlight the item in the map. Pick your poison... either is highly recommended!

Chinese Security Guard Jumps to Death

Holy cow, that's some desperate ass shit. The worst is he probably could have afforded the treatments if he hadn't (totally selflessly) given the money to his sick mother. If we could do one ridiculously idealistic thing around the world, it'd be to focus people on delivering a way to back off the edge of Maslow's need heirarchy. In addition to being a really shitty place to live, people on the edge of life tend to do some crazy stuff. Of course, that's probably overly simplistic. I mean, some ungodly number of people are starving all the time, and this guy was not starving, just in brutal pain. Sometimes no one wins.

Man, you've got to love these guys.

Without the underwriters' option, the proposed offering of 14.16 million, or 14,159,265 before rounding, appears to be a nod to the digits found in the mathematical figure pi and yet again underscores the unconventional approach the company often takes. - Google to sell stock with price sky-high

Priceless!

I'm in NYC on business... I've always loved it here, but in a few ways this visit feels like a little of the shine is off the golden apple. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I finally feel a little bit more at home in Seattle.

One thing I have noticed is that for the same level of society, the quality is a lot better in Seattle. Let me explain. I'm a lower-middle-upper-middle-/ower-upper-middle class guy... I probably spend too much money and this means I get to see a little bit of what the upper class might see. Sometimes, I'm really lucky and I get to see how they live. Like I bought an apartment that was an amazing deal and now appears to be worth all kinds of money. I'm about to buy a car, and thanks to insane lease deals, I'll probably get a nicer car than I deserve. And my work gives me access to a gym that is just ridiculous.

Let's focus on that last example. Let's say my gym costs about $150 a month. Thanks to my company, I don't see the cost, so I really have no idea. And let's say the average person in Seattle makes $50k. If the average person in NYC makes $75k, and you joined a gym that was $225 a month, I feel like the quality in NYC would never match that of Seattle's gym. It'd be smaller, dirtier, less features and so on. I know space is a premium, but that's really no excuse. In order to have a similar experience in NYC, I feel like you'd have to spend $500 a month, which is absurd. It's a rich person's city. That doesn't mean I don't love it, but that's what I've seen on my most recent trip.

I was really touched by the Startup.com story, mostly because it echoed my own experience in a startup of that era so closely. Amazing to see that even with $60M, they suffered the exact same growing pains we did. Anyhow, here's a link to an interview with one of the founders featured in the movie...

http://www.publicdatasystems.com/wash_post_071801.htm

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Looks like I found my news reader for the forseeable future.

Great News

Pros:

• Fast fast fast
• Single button to next unread
• Really cool newspaper format lets you see all the stories in a channel on one page
• Ties into bloglines

Still to be worked on:

• Allow to default to show all stories in a channel or group on a single page without having clicking the "Next>" link and/or the next one
• Once you reach the end of a channel or group, the same key that advances you in the group should move you to the next unread channel or group (even better if it all appears on one page, see below)
• Ability to view all the stories across the channels in a channel group in a one page newspaper format (separated by the same header you currently have at the top of the page)
• Custom ordering of the channels or groups

UPDATE: Looks like it does #3, but I was just thrown off because of the "Next>" button. This is an area where a scenario type focus can really help... it's always annoying to have to switch keys (let alone modes of input) to continue doing the same thing you're doing, which is basically going from news story to news story. That's why having to hit a different key to go to the "Next" page, or having to use the mouse to find and click the link is such a pain.

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Ah Angrybot, show me the way.

Your homework is to eat bleach and die.

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MSN has a new RSS reader.... I guess. I'm not sure what the hell this is, actually.

Filter.MSN.com

They also have one on Start.com. I'll tell you, though, I hate them all. All RSS readers. Nothing works. I have some requirements:

• Let me read everything in order from page to page just by hitting the space bar
• Combine the news stories together so you get a single page (less empty space... no need for an entire window for each story)
• Allow ordering and grouping of blogs
• Be super reliable about what I've read and what I haven't, and make that portable from work to home to mobile
• Load the page in under 10 seconds

I was close with Bloglines... very close. And that's what I continue to use. But it fails on the last two really badly. And it really feels like it's getting worse. But I've tried everything else: Feedburner, RSS Bandit, NewzCrawler, NewsGator Online, NewsGator Outlook, you name it! It's funny because I didn't even care about blogs a couple of years ago, and since I've started having all this trouble, I feel practically disconnected. I promise, if someone comes along and solves this, I'll pay. Really!

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God forbid I actually defend Microsoft. Defend Microsoft! The 22 year old me would slap the today me across the face and punch me in the balls. Anyhow, I had a bit of an interesting experience the other night that was further exacerbated by the absurd furor in the past few days over a name.

Incident one: I was sitting talking with a very intelligent person from another company chatting about Microsoft’s RSS strategy. He was absolutely convinced that MS was trying to take over RSS by handling the APIs. I can guarantee that is not the case. Well, not quite guarantee; I don’t know every person in the company and I can certainly only speak for myself. But, I am as sure as I can reasonably be on this one that, like practically every business decision that ever gets made, the singular reason this decision was made was because MS is trying to make life easier for the people they care about (in this case computer users and developers). That’s it. No big conspiracy plot. No thoughts of megalomania. MS talked to developers who produce RSS applications; they say they hate handling downloading content, handling subscriptions, handling content and so on. MS said “hey, we can solve that for Windows users by providing that functionality for them”. If the developers want to use it… great! They can use it! If they don’t want to use it… great! They can do it themselves! If someone else wants to build the exact same APIs on another OS… great! MS looks at it as their job is to build tools and technologies that make the lives of Windows developers and users richer. That’s their only goal.

Some may feel that MS may not deserve a fair chance due to perceived wrongs in the past … fine. But the past is the past. There is absolutely nothing MS can do to change that. MS is doing everything they can possibly do to be open with their decisions and developments in RSS. Really! There are no secrets!

Anyhow, I explained this to him, and he seemed hesitant. I don’t think I was very convincing. It’s one of these things where I try and imagine myself on the other side of the conversation, trying to convince myself. Ultimately, when you don’t believe a person’s perspectives, it’s usually possible to just have a conversation with the facts. I’ll be interested to have that conversation after the PDC and a little more is public.

But then it got even worse over the past few days, pretty much epitomized by this:

Microsoft exec defends RSS rebranding

The Blogsphere seems to be aflame with the audacity that MS rename RSS to Web Feeds. First, anyone who thinks that RSS has brand equity beyond about 2000 geeks, I would encourage you to walk down the street and ask the first thousand people you see if they know what RSS is. I’d be fairly surprised if more than 2 could answer correctly. For a few historical instances:

AM/FM becomes “radio”
VHF/UHF becomes “television”
HTTP becomes the “Web” or the “Internet”
HTML becomes “Web Pages”
AAC becomes “Tracks” or “Songs” and is listed but once on iTunes’s home page

There are many others. Consumers don’t know and don’t care about the underlying technology, and that’s what RSS is. Further, RSS isn’t even a noun… it stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. You can’t subscribe to a “Really Simple Syndication”… that just doesn’t make sense. Mr. Winer, I have nothing but huge respect for you but let go of the name. Please. I’m not even saying that MS should name it, but it’s got to be named. It’s time.

My reaction to this whole thing has been a bit of a feeling of helplessness… in both situations. We have really done everything we can to stretch out… propose what we are doing before we do it, be open and explain everything. But it never fails … anything attempted is just buried in thousands of negative sniping comments. It’s not the only commentary, there are plenty of positives as well, but it seems practically impossible to get even a reasonable majority of positives. It’s just very frustrating to try and do everything right and still end up with all the insanity. If I could say one thing to the outside world, it'd be the following... "We're doing our best! Really! Help us help you!"

D - LUSG

This guy has been getting a lot of coverage in the media.

http://www.thefatmanwalking.com/

I find the story really quite inspirational and would probably like even MORE updates on his weight and health. I mean the guy is going to come out the other end as strong as an ox.

For me, though, Tour de France riders are always going to be the best method of making me understand of what the human body is capable when it comes to diet and exercise. Those guys burn 6,000 calories a day... they eat as much as they can and still lose weight. Nothing could be a better example of how easy it is to balance diet and exercise. Calories in > calories out? You get fat. Calories in < calories out? You lose weight.

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Man, what is it about the simple games that keep you going for hours. Example:

Sugar Crash

I won't get into a huge rant about how modern games are crap, because I don't think they are. But I will show this as an example of how it doesn't take much to keep humans occupied.

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Interesting bit on Marketplace earlier on the demand generation of drug companies. The interesting part here is that I don't think the drug companies are doing anything really wrong. Yes, they're coming out with studies that accentuate (in the public eye) problems that their drugs will help solve. In this case, people are tired and don't get enough sleep. So they propose their drug which does help solve the problem. Ok, a teeny little bit grey (on the quality of the research) but this is not world ending. The fact is, though, some people DO have trouble sleeping and, to the extent that this helps them, the drug is a GOOD thing. Those people no longer have that problem.

Here's the detailed article. I think to the extent that real critique or coverage of a drug is in any way stifled, that is a Bad Thing(tm). But just posting your results and letting people know that you have something out there that helps whatever problem your results point to is pretty low on the evil scale.

Further, this line from the piece:

This doesn’t mean that news executives consider such income when they make story assignments, but in places where the wall between the news side and the business side has weakened, the temptations are stronger than ever.

Technically, it is accurate; the temptation is stronger than ever. But I worry that it is a scare tactic... yes, it requires very little for a piece to go from negative to neutral or get killed (which may or may not have anything to do with the advertising budget) but, to my knowledge, there's very little proof of a wide spread epidemic of stories being killed. I suppose this is why more openness in public media is a Good Thing(tm).

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TV will kill you and your children!

or

TV will save humanity!

I probably fall into the former camp more than the latter, but this is exactly why it's so hard for Joe Random Individual to figure out what to do when it comes to raising his kids, eating right or generally doing good things. I'm sure there's a way to rationalize two totally opposing views like this, but I don't have it. And I doubt that 99.999% of the population does either. So we go along, choosing the sources that seem to make sense from us and reading them (or more likely, just skimming the back of the books) and using them as a guideline for our lives.

I was thinking that the way out of this might just be to try to imagine what evolution had in mind for us. If we evolved (and by evolved I mean during the time period from the primordial soup to about 50,000 years ago) to be creatures that would benefit from a lot of random stories and flashing lights, then TV would be good. If we evolved to be creatures that could react to those stories and flashing lights, but that was a bastardization of areas of our mind that were really tuned for other things, then TV would be bad.

But then I came to realize the possibility that maybe evolution was done with me, meaning that the way our bodies were originally designed no longer has any meaning at my age. Basically, we are just sperm/egg carrying machines and our single goal appears to be to shoot them out as soon as possible, have kids and get them old enough to an age where they can do the same. If that's the case, then I am WAY past that age and, evolutionarily speaking, I'm off the map. Much like the salmon who swim upstream to spawn die right afterwards, perhaps that's what we were intended to do after hitting the appropriate age. Though I do believe in God, I've never been a fan of thinking that humans had some higher purpose that we were living for. Generally, passing on our genes and leaving the Earth a better place than we found it was pretty much the extent of my thoughts on "why we were here", whether you did that at 15 or 75. So does this mean I should just pop them out and shuffle off this mortal coil?

Actually, I think evolution will again be my saving grace. If there's one thing that evolution has going for it, it is that whatever you've got costs something... food to keep it alive, personal space, energy to heat it, keeping it out of pain or not broken, and so on. The very fact that my femur CAN survive for 90 years indicates that, evolutionarily speaking, it's a good thing that it can last for 90 years. Otherwise, it would have gotten the heave-ho long ago. So what to guide me for another 60 years? Who knows. Maybe I'll find my reason for living on the Discovery Channel.

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Last week's episode of Six Feet Under was absolutely brutal... check out the summary here and, of course, with added snark here.

Couple of things about the episode that are just priceless. First is the title... I love it when a writer packs in every available nook with meaning... in this case "Ecotone" wonderfully describes the entire episode. To quote Nate: "It's an area where two ecological worlds overlap. You know, like wilderness and civilization." except here it's Nate's wilderness, and everyone else's civilization. Just beautiful.

Second is the fight between Claire and her date. Nicely, neither was portrayed as infinitely knowledgable and certainly both arguments had their flaws. But the thing that resonated with me was how passionately both people seemed to be talking past each other. It wasn't even really ideological... they both basically had their positions and were just reciting. I find myself identifying with one quick exchange which I think rolls up my biggest problems with the war. I'll paraphrase:

Republican Guy: "Bringing democracy to Iraq freed these people from a brutal dictator"
Democratic Girl: "That wasn't the point of the war."

Both are right. The fact is that IF the purpose was to free the Iraqis from a brutal dictator, there could be a thousand ways to do it. Invasion simply does not seem to be the most efficient way to do it. You could massively fund opposition parties... you could get the CIA in there and incite some riots... you could assassinate him! There are a million ways to go about removing a bad person from power and invasion is not optimized for accomplishing that goal in the shortest amount of time with the lowest cost and the highest rate of local support. Invasion is optimized for the goal of removing a threat as quickly as possible, and very little else. Basically, if you defend the policy of going to war in the way that we did you really have two choices... 1) Accept the fact that we did it to remove a threat, first and foremost or 2) Believe that we went in to free the Iraqi people and did it in the worst possible way. Given the state and length of the insurgency, I do not see how there could be any middle ground.

And for those that say that changing governments is hard work and takes a long time, I don't understand why this was so much more complex than Japan after WW II, or the Czech Republic or Russia, or Kosovo. Substantial changes and no long running insurgency there.

My bro is traveling the world spreading the poison^W gospel that is Xbox.com.

Check out where he is here!

I always find it cool when someone I actually know is a big time blogger. Scoble is so big and friendly that EVERYONE knows him, but I've known this guy before he was big time :)

Anyhow, he's got a really cool post about the stuff you can do with the search provider in IE 7... check it out!

Much respect to the IE team... if one guy can do this much cool stuff on your platform, you've got to be doing something right.

I never really take many vacations. I mean the kind of vacations where you just sit around and do nothing. I love them. I spent the last 5 days in Hawai'i and, wow, it's amazing how recharging that can be. Anyhow, I'm back and let the blogging commence!

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My friend writes me:

R:http://www.planarity.net/
R:Try it, you'll like it.

Three hours later, I can report with some authority that, yes, I do like it.


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Am I going to Hell because I find this so hilarious?

http://gorillamask.net/psychomom.shtml

Yes. Yes I am.

I know it's probably fake, but I can't imagine any human creating some of the sounds in this video.

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