clue free

Yet another DEVO-hat logo: oFono, a joint venture between Intel and Nokia to create an open source mobile telephony stack. Considering the parties involved, the site is surprisingly anemic. Maybe they just don’t want to lay out the cash. Open source panacea in effect, y’all.

Intel wants to be sure it has a horse in the mobile device race, and Nokia… well, seeing how anemic the Ovi store is versus the install base, Nokia seems to be adopting a shotgun approach to the future. Ordinarily, you could cut the big fish some slack while it got its act together (see: Microsoft discovering the Internet.) The problem is that it’s up against big fish Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM, and the little guppy that could: Palm. Right now, Nokia can’t afford to pull another 3650 out of its ass.

Yes. Barack Obama needs to show off how many (virtual) friends he has by having conversations with dozens of them in public — cyber-yells across the ether. What we would get would be his raw nuggets of wisdom, unfiltered by the Washington machine. What could go wrong? All that filtering and word-crafting is a waste of time when you’re just talking to your Twitter friends. You can trust them. Your enemies are only scrutinizing the old media.

And look, he obviously needs the publicity. It’s not like he’s well-known in… uhhh… well… countries with less than five television sets? Frankly, the mainstream media has done a rotten job creating a cult of personality around the Obamas. There is a danger in going too far with the paper-mâché, though.

Speaking as an honest-to-goodness latte-sipping New York liberal: I am not a big fan of the NY Times, but this may be the most horrible article they have ever published. If this article were posted on any half-decent ‘hobbyist’ message board (one dedicated to cars, or video games, or even cooking), the responses would take only three forms:

• “LOL”
• “nice troll”
• “Never post again.”

Come to think of it, the article may have ended up in the Tech/Lifestyle section because the editors considered it “too embarassing” to include on the Op-Ed page.

P.S. Meditate on the phrase “needs to tweet”. It’s fun. So fun. Needs to tweet.

The 80s marketing term “user friendly” begat one of the classic Unix quips: “Unix is user-hostile” (or: “Unix is user-friendly. It’s just very selective about who its friends are.”) Web portals, everyone’s favorite 90s busybox, very quickly became user hostile as distractions were, well, kind of their whole purpose.

Readability is a useful/controversial bookmarklet that strips away all the crap you find in typical web portals these days:

Even though AdBlock Plus has nigh-magical abilities to make certain websites bearable, the problem has gone beyond paid-placement ads as the site itself is screaming almost as loudly to draw you into another of its corners, like Wikipedia with colors. As the ALA article mentions, what should be an act of “reading” withers to “browsing”, a descriptor that was okay-I-guess in the era of black & white internet (which, ironically, grew out of a no-design, content-heavy, academics-only web.)

I don’t agree that publishers “just need to find something users are willing to pay for” (they won’t, and neither will they.) But I do think that a page could be taken from the attitude some forward-thinking internet music/game vendors have taken, which is to trust your users. While everyone else was DRMing everything up, these guys took a step back and said, “hey, if they’re already trying to pay us, why don’t we not assume they’re trying to steal?” The nuance in publishing is different, but the attitude is the same: goad the user into pursuing topics/authors further, and if you’ve done your job right, they probably will. “People get disinterested halfway through! We need to keep pulling them through to other pages!” Oh, boo hoo. They’ll probably be back tomorrow, and maybe next week. Until they figure out your content sucks and they move on to your competitors. You got the short-term ad bucks, but lost the war.

AIG will take another $30 billion from the government after losing over $61 billion in only three months. Please do not attempt to do the obvious math.

A modest proposal from Volcano Monitors in response to Bobby Jindal’s incredulity at their inclusion in the stimulus package:

The best solution for the problem is not to try and keep people working, but to let the people who still have money keep it. Then it will be easier for the starving and homeless people to know who to rob. Then the poor can be shot in self-defense, quickly eliminating the problem entirely with a bare minimum of economic depression and loss of life.

Them volcanoes are hardly a problem, though, yah? Other than that one time in Indonesia when one of them popped, generating the loudest sound in recorded history, 100-foot-high tsunamis (which hurled some boats 50 miles inland), blood red skies in Norway (7,000 miles away), and a shockwave that rounded the earth at least 7 times (measured on equipment in use 125 years ago.)

Nah, there’s no sense in getting prepared, especially since we hardly see natural disasters anymore.

It’s heartening to read the first chapter of the first Palm webOS development manual. The foundational UI principles laid out on page 9: “maintain a sense of place”, “avoid preferences and settings where possible”, “don’t use modal controls”… bode well for our rosy handheld future. Palm gear — which certainly didn’t used to be flashy — has always been my favorite platform for just getting stuff done. The To-Do list on PalmOS was fast, uncomplicated, and it was deep enough for 95% of what I needed. The generically-named* Tasks app on Windows Mobile, on its face, looked almost identical, but always seemed to be getting in my way.

Also heartening is that Flash will finally come to all smartphones except… yeah, the iPhone. How long will Steve Jobs’ walled garden hold up? Remember what happened last time everyone else built compatible/interoperable hardware except Apple? It was called the PC revolution of the Eighties. Since Apple is maintaining its old strategy (successfully) in new markets, I suppose they’ll be fine as long as they keep leaping into new segments: computers to MP3 players to cellphones to media centers to..?

Palm announcements at MWC this week did not include the expected Vodaphone partnership, although people did notice Vodaphone SIMs inside the Pre demo units. Some are speculating the silence was due to ongoing contractual wrangling between Palm and Vodaphone; I would guess it’s to guard Sprint’s aura of exclusivity until after the [rumored, debunked, rumored again] March 15th launch. I can’t be the only person in America more than happy to pay an import premium in order to avoid committing to Sprint’s sinking ship.

* I’d like to propose a ban on all super-generic program names. WinMo Tasks, Apple Mail: you are giving the Google grey hairs when I try to troubleshoot your “issues”. Please die.

David Campbell, the founder of Saks Fifth Avenue, said, “Discipline is remembering what you want.”

I’ve been laid off as of December 31st. Hardly unexpected, but not appreciated after more than five years of very above-and-beyond sacrifice (which, as a classy professional, I can’t talk about.)

I wore many, many hats over the years — IT guy, web developer, PowerPoint lackey, project manager, copywriter, proofreader, retoucher, strategist, audio/video engineer, roadie, Flash coder, Devil’s advocate, comic relief. On a personal level, it was extremely rewarding to be able to learn and work within so many disciplines. Constant challenge and stimulation and all those good things that make it nice to work somewhere. On a professional level, post-job-doing-everything, it makes it really hard to “sell” myself to new employers. When someone is looking for a good hammer, don’t hand him the whole toolbox. Forward movement is going to require more thought than usual.

For now, it’s important to catch up on the things ignored during that era; video games, movies, exercise, photography, reading for pleasure… Put that way, it’s a good thing this happened before I forgot why I’m supposed to bother.

So, after a few weeks’ rest, I’ll remember what I want, professionally. Geographically, it’s safe to say I want to live somewhere where astronomy can be properly appreciated on a daily basis.

I knew there was a good reason I resisted Facebook for so long. The insults started before I was even finished signing up!

Maybe I’m reading too much into this… “coincidence.”  But think of how Cosmopolitan magazine could run with this: WHAT DOES YOUR CAPTCHA SAY ABOUT YOU?, HOW TO TELL IF HE’S A SPAMMER (OR JUST HAS AN OPINION), and the classic 38 AURAL CAPTCHAs THAT WILL DRIVE HIM WILD!!

Saw my first Google G1 early adopter this morning on the subway. Unfortunately, he was doing nothing to dissipate its for-geeks-only image.

• CRT tan
• Skullet
• Giant backpack
• Apple-shaped physique (oh the irony)
• Grease spots on various parts of clothing
• Untied shoes

Long story short, the G1 was obviously the cleanest thing this guy owned. In the “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads, he could play the Linux box. So now, with character development out of the way, I can proceed to the point–or rather, observation–which is not that only iPhone users can be cool.

Keeping a safe distance from Our Hero, I watched as he panned up and down web pages and played around with a few of the built-in apps and the Android Market.  He was having a groovy time being a groovy person.  As we started to descend into the tunnel that leads to Manhattan, I noticed that his expression was cooling.  He started to fidget.  His face looked like he was wondering if he left hair in the shower drain, without actually caring one way or the other.  He put the phone away, briefly… then took it back out, used it for 5 seconds, and then just cradled it, stealing glances at the other passengers, not quite half embarrassed.

He seemed to have run out of things to do, and didn’t know how to reconcile this with the fact that he now had this shiny new toy.

I think this was his first smartphone.

Anecdotally, I’ve known plenty of geeks and gearheads who resisted smartphones for one reason or another.  Some sniffed at the quality of each converged component, preferring instead to lug around dedicated devices (including a full-size SLR, in one case. Giant Backpack Dorks of the world, unite!)  Others simply wished for the more straightforward interface and reliable performance of “a phone that is just a phone.”

When someone like this purchases one device that rolls telephony, web, email, calendar/to-do, media playback, video and still photography, GPS, and metric dozens of other yet-to-be-discovered functions into one box that fits in your pocket, there’s a natural expectation that you will never, ever, be bored, ever again.  A steal at only $179.99 with two-year commitment!

Well, yes, except that we always find a way to get bored.  People go broke filling their house with blinking distraction gear and still complain that there’s nothing to do.  Everyone gets to that quasi-zen moment when, surrounded by all your ass-kicking LED-sporting gear, you just can’t bring yourself to use any of it. Ironically, depending on how determined you are to vanquish boredom forever, you will experience the Moment more often than others.

The difference here is–rather than the rainy Sunday afternoon when this usually happens–smartphones have the potential to put this moment out in public.  This morning, one guy got there, on his way to work.

There’s a story on Gizmodo today about a blind, diabetic guy who is trying to sell his record collection.  He values it at $50 million, but even priced at $3 million, he can’t find a buyer. Somehow, this is surprising and upsetting to a lot of people.

The vast difference in appraised and asking price (and failure to sell even at 6% of the appraisal) tells me that the basis of my rant is well-founded, or at least, not entirely wrong. He owns millions of vinyl platters, relatively few of which are available on CD. This is much less a tragedy when one asks, “was there merit to their re-release?” Plenty of awful music came out back then, same as today — we’ve just had longer to forget it. People are constantly dismissing the whole of the new as inferior to the whole of the old, conveniently forgetting things like child labor, crucifixion, and The Doors.

Beyond all that, though, is the whole notion of hanging on to old formats and the “thingness” of things. To sidetrack for a moment: A few of my friends belong to an artist’s collective that specializes in fancy books and unusual/antiquated printing and binding methods. Hanging around in their studios, whippersnappers can learn why we refer to the upper- and lower-case, for example. One day, I was chatting with their president, Mark, and mentioned that I had read Moby Dick on my Palm Pilot 1000 in 1997.  And I liked it!  I thought it was a really good book, despite its complete lack of paper. This blew Mark’s mind, and some time later, he gave a talk at a fundraiser explaining specifically that they were making books “not for people like” me. Which was fine, because people like me bought electronic organizers and spent weeks seeking out add-on programs (written and distributed by programmers who were bored on weekends), and then took free ebooks and downloaded them to memory cards. Not to save money, but for convenience. Convenience in a perverse, head-scratching, weeks-taking way.

Big corporations (Amazon, Apple) looked at this, wised up, and put together systems (Kindle, iTunes) that took you straight to the good stuff without the slog. So now, the problem is that there are millions of people that see little worth in hanging on to old formats when the new ones are so much more convenient. The iPod’s original slogan should have been “1,000 songs in your pocket at no extra weight.” That was why I went through all that work to get Moby Dick converted; because then I could also carry The Hacker Crackdown and 1984, and still have room left over for Pocket Chess and HMaki, without looking like Giant Backpack Dork.

Getting back to the record collection: the discussion that doesn’t seem to be happening is that the old formats fundamentally limit our freedoms. Artificial limitations are a hallmark of DRM, which we all hate, but even LPs do this — geographically. [It might be more accurately referred to as a natural limitation, and then we get to throw the size and weight of this pile of PVC and cardboard into the complaint. And I'll point out that digital files can't grow mold nearly as well as record sleeves.]

With open digital formats, we can place-shift and format-shift to whatever degree we wish.  If I’ve had the foresight to put my digital jukebox online (whether in the cloud or on a NAS), I can be walking around in Guam and stream Boogie Woogie #5 directly to my phone if the mood strikes me.  If I am suddenly stricken with idiocy and buy a music player which requires some esoteric format, I can likely re-encode and re-tag my entire collection in a simple batch operation. There isn’t even a need for me to be in the same room as the hard drives in order to do this. It seems to me that given modern society’s disposition toward convenience, the good people fighting Big Media might push this point a little more.

Given all this, appealing to the collection’s size strikes me as akin to those signs you’ll see when driving across the middle of the United States: “Largest Ball of Twine in the US”; then, 300 miles later: “Largest Ball of Twine in the US Wound by One Man”. Yeah, impressive, but who cares?

So it’s a shame that he is unable to unload his life’s work for profit. Or is it? Isn’t that what we used to call a legacy? Where is the pity in his leaving this trove to society, free of charge, if it is a truly wonderful and precious thing? Why does it always have to be about the money? I get a really bad taste in my mouth over the thrust of this video, which seems to focus on the fact that this man has built something over the span of his life that he can’t sell at the end. I’m sure he isn’t the first.