u l t r a m o o k i e

Apple’s pulling out of MacWorld. Meh.

Apple’s sending the clown Phil Schiller instead of Steve Jobs to do the last keynote. Meh.

The announcements:

• iLife:  Meh.  Look!  Flickr and Facebook integration, finally.
• iWork:  Meh.
• iWork.com:  Oooh, this could be interesting in the whole “we botched me.com” way.  Hopefully Apple has learned its “cloud computing means lots and lots of uptime” lesson from the horrible me.com launch.
• MacBook Pro 17″:  More than just meh.  Super.  No, Ultra.  No, Ubër-meh!  The rumor of non-user replaceable battery is true.  Apple promises 8-hours of battery life, I’ll believe it when I see it.  The whole thing is very “meh” in my book.
• iTunes Plus:  Non-DRM music.  Whoa!  Ground-breaking.  Well, not really.  I switched from iTunes Store over to Amazon’s music store a long time ago.  The biggest reason being that Amazon sells MP3s and that is universally accepted by devices:  My car, my phone, my PS3, etc.  Even if Apple offers up all their music in DRM-free format, they are still offering it in AAC format, making it a pain for me.  So:  Meh!  The other reason is that (as a cohort gently words it):  iTunes is ass.  Yea, iTunes plain sucks.

For its last MacWorld, Apple went out with a whimper.  If this was the last time Apple was going to attend MacWorld, it should have been a bang-up keynote.  Rather, all we get is this Phil character with lackluster announcements.  I have been a jaded Apple fan for a while now.  This MacWorld has made me worse.

Flame away Apple fanbois.

To the lady in the Wells Fargo parking lot on Lawrence and Arques:  Don’t be mad at me, be ashamed of yourself.  I flashed my highbeams at you because:

1. You were driving in the wrong lane when I flashed you.  Yes, you were coming head-on with me.  So, it was a friendly:  “Hey!  Watch the hell out!  We’re in front of you” type warning before I rammed my SUV into your craptacular late-90s Corolla.
2. You parked in a red zone.  Hello.  Red zone.  They didn’t paint the curb red to make it look pretty for Christmas.

And lady, please, get this through that thick skull and in your little monkey brain:  Your family member jumping out of the car to run into the bank to do whatever they need to do.  That does not count as an emergency.  So, turning on your emergency blinkers does not permit you to drive the wrong way in traffic and park in a red zone.

So, don’t give me that angry look as I drive by, feel ashamed that you are showing off just how ignorant you are.  If you can’t remember “don’t drive on the wrong side” and “don’t park in a red zone“, then maybe you should just ask yourself this before doing something:  Would I do this if a cop were behind me? (Sadly, I am guessing that you might.)

Sigh.  There are a lot of people that should have their drivers licenses (which are a priviledge, not right) revoked.

I just finished reading Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club for the third time (in my short life).  It is an excellent read.  This is one of the rare occasions when the movie is better than the book.  Do not read any farther if you haven’t seen the movie and read the book.

This post isn’t about what the book is about or what themes were presented or how we are all not unique like snowflakes.  This post is about my observations about the book and movie.  The movie and book run parallel to each other up until the end.  Sure, there are little differences — like how the narrator in the movie uses the name “Jack” and the narrator in the book uses the name “Joe”; or how in the Cadillac scene, it is a space monkey driving and not Tyler — overall, the structure and story are the same.  The ending of the movie is completely different and I prefer the movie’s ending.

The ending of the book puts the narrator, who initially thinks he’s dead, in a hospital.  Project Mayhem monkeys end up telling him that plans are still underway and that they expect him back.  This is anti-climactic.

The ending of the movie has more of a punch and makes more sense in the overall arc of the story.  By the end of the movie, we know that Tyler is dead, we know the world is going to go into chaos and we have some sort of closure.  I am a big proponent of movies which are open-ended, I think open-ended movies are better. But, for some reason the way in which the Fight Club movie closes things off makes for a very satisfying experience.  The way that the book leaves things open-ended feels like Palahniuk wanted one last clever thing, but didn’t quite get it right.

I am not saying that the book sucks.  I just prefer the movie’s interpretation of the book.

So, I have to ask, for those of you who have read the book and seen the movie:  Which do you think is better?  Which stands out?  Book?  Movie?

Welp, Christmas is over.  I got a stash of loot including The Dark Knight on Blu-Ray and a cool Speed Racer Lego set from  my wife (and something else, mentioned later); Batman PJs from my sister and brother-in-law; a fatherly-looking robe that is really warm and cash from my parents.  The biggest gifts I got where for my eyes and ears.

The big gift from my wife was a Sony PRS-505 electronic book reader.  And the gift cash from my parents went to getting a Sony STR-DG720 receiver to replace my aging Sony STR-SL-7.

The receiver sounds like heaven when compared to my old one.  I didn’t pay extra to get the STR-DG820 for DTS-HD MA and Dolby TrueHD decoding because my PS3 does the decoding itself.  All I have to do is send the LPCM stream over to the receiver and it will pump out all that uncompressed PCM goodness to my 6.1 speaker setup.  Games sound better.  Movies sound better.  The addition of the sixth speaker in the back really didn’t make that much of a difference, but that’s OK.

When Sony originally released the PRS-500 and I laid eyes on the screen at Borders, I was sold.  If you have seen the screen, you know why.  The screen has no refresh, it looks like paper and is really easy on the eyes.  When the PRS-505 came out, I wanted it but never got it.  Then the PRS-700 was announce and I waited.  At the time the PRS-505 was released, the Amazon Kindle was also released.  Why didn’t I ask Santa (ie. wife)  for the Kindle instead?

First, it is fugly and white plastic.  For a device that is to be held for hours, white plastic may not be the best material to make the device in.  And I’m sorry, the ugly stick hit the Kindle two or three times.  The Sony Reader is elegant, minimalistic and when wrapped in its faux-leather cover looks like a book.  The body of the Sony Reader also looks like it was carved out of a single piece of metal, very cool.

Second, is DRM lock down.  Yes, you can put non-DRM Mobipocket and text files directly on the Kindle.  But, if you want to put PDFs, Word, HTML, JPEG, GIF, or PNG files on there, you have to email the files to Amazon who will then convert it for you.  The files can then be transferred automatically back to the Kindle at a cost of 10c per item.  Of course, you can be stingy and have the files sent to you via email, then you can put them on the device via USB for free.

With the Sony Reader, I can drop PDF, ePub, RTF, JPEG, GIF, TXT, LRF, and PNG files directly on the device and it will pick them all up.  What’s better is that it supports ePub (the new ebook standard) and also Adobe’s Digital Editions.  By supporting Adobe’s Digital Editions, that opens up the market for books to not just Sony’s eBook Store, but all stores that support Adobe Digital Edition.  And on top of that, there is a growing number of libraries that have digital versions of books online in Adobe Digital Edition format (like the San Jose Library).  This allows me to check out books from the library for free.  Not too shabby and great for cheapies like me.  This sounds strange, but Sony opened up their reader device and I appreciate that.

Sure, the Sony lacks wireless and needs a PC.  That is not a big deal for me.  But, I can definitely see where that is handy, especially for those who are not PC savvy or that have Macs (since the Sony eBook Store software works only with Windows).

There are other upsides to the Kindle.  If you like newspapers and magazines, the Kindle store has them.  The Sony store does not.  Also, when looking at different titles on the Sony store compared to the Kindle store, I see that Amazon is subsidizing the price of the books.  Books are generally $3 less for the Kindle when compared to the Sony Reader.  Of course, you make up that difference by augmenting the Sony Reader with free checkouts from the library, which the Kindle cannot do.  Also, there seem to be more titles for the Kindle when compared directly to the Sony store.  Though, by opening up the Sony Reader to other bookstores, that negates that benefit — for instance, I can read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy for free from my library on my Sony Reader, it is not availble for the Kindle on Amazon.  Oh, the Kindle has a dictionary, Wikipedia access, web access, paid blog access and a keyboard.  None of them killer features for me.

I did not ask Santa for the PRS-700 because the touchscreen overlay really made a mess of the readability on the device.  The contrast of the screen is lower and the overlay causes for terrible glare.  Thank goodness Sony had the right sense of mind to sell and support both the PRS-505 and PRS-700 side-by-side.

Anyways, hope everyone had a great Holiday season!  What did ya’ll get for Christmas?

I have been playing with Evernote for the last few days and I love it.  I had seen it around when I had my iPhone, but I never did get a chance to try it.  Now, I am hooked.  I am a digital packrat, I like to collect  stuff I see from around the web.  For that, I had been using delicious (and will continue to for some stuff).  Delicious is great because I can bookmark, tag, and store links for stuff I find around the web.  To the extent of storing a link, delicious is the most awesomeness tool.  But, what if I wanted more?

Evernote offers the “more” part.  I can easily save a whole page or the juicy part of the page into my Evernote notebook by highlighting and clipping.  This can’t  be done with delicious.  What this lets me do is save the actual page and make it searchable in my Evernote database.  This also makes the page available even if the original page has been taken down.  And, the best part is that the Evernote application for my Windows Mobile phone lets me read the pages without much fuss.

But, it all goes beyond that.  I can email links, text and photos to my Evernote notebook and it will get stored.  I can make audio notes that will get stored in my notebook.  Text in photos get “OCR’d”, so that if I take a picture of a page in a book and the text is legible, that text is made searchable.  Win!

The emailing part is nice because with delicious, I had no way of saving links to delicious on my mobile phone.  I could send an email to myself with the link and that would work.  Using this same technique, I send the link to my Evernote notebook and it gets stored there.  Much cooler since it makes it searchable.

There is a Firefox add-on that works across all platforms that I use (Windows, Linux and Mac).  It makes clipping from the web über-easy (btw, “uber” is not as über unless you have umlauts!).

There is also client software for Windows, Mac, Windows Mobile and iPhone.  The Windows client can install itself onto a removable drive and be taken anywhere, that is a neat feature.  The client software itself is very useful.  You can run it without having it sync up with the Evernote servers — in other words you can keep your stuff private.  Or, you can run it and sync some or all of your notebooks with Evernote servers — this is nicer since it allows you to have access to your digital mind anywhere.

Evernote also has a web interface for your notebooks, so you don’t have to have to install client software to access your information.  Notebooks can also be made public, so you can share some of the stuff that you are collecting.

All-in-all, I am really love Evernote.  It is a very useful service and I will continue to use it.  This is a digital packrat’s dream service.

So, I switched back to mail2web a little more than a month ago.  Previous experiments and finds can be found here and here.  So, after a month of usage, I am pretty happy with my experience with mail2web.

• There is little downtime with them.  One night in November, the servers did not respond for a while.  That caused for my phone to not sync.  But, it was brief and service returned quickly.  I did test their email support and in the middle of the night, they got back to me within the hour.  That was pretty impressive.
• Their servers are usually pretty fast.  Though, I would not call them blazingly fast.  During peak  hours in the day and at night, they sometimes get bogged down — not to the point of being unusable, only to the point of being annoying.  No complaints since the service is free.
• Push email is instantaneous with mail2web — as it should be since it is “push” email.  I don’t carry my work pager with me while I am oncall anymore.  I redirect the pages to my mail2web account, which then pushes them immediately to my phone.  This saves me from looking like Batman with all things hanging off my belt.  This is also useful since my wife and I can save on text messenging bills and overages — we can both use mail2web to send instant “text” messages to each other — and even get past the 140 character text limit.
• Because mail2web is a true Microsoft Exchange server, I get more than just contacts and calendar events pushed to me.  I also get tasks and mail.  The Google + Nuevasync solution only pushes contacts and calendar events.
• The web interface (OWA) while using Firefox is pretty basic — and a bit fugly.  But, the web interface while using IE6 is pretty similar to the desktop experience of Outlook.  Which is fine with me.  Either way, I don’t have to install Outlook on my desktop to use the service — which is a win in my book.  And, I can use the service on my Windows, Linux or Macintosh notebooks.  That is a huge win.
• I will just reiterate that the service mail2web live is completely free.

So, yea, I’m happy with mail2web live.  It is Hosted Exchange for the cheapos like myself.  There are ads on the service, but that is fine with me.  If you have a device that supports Exchange synchronization, give mail2web a try.

So, Yahoo! is Steve Ballmer’s favorite toy.  But, does he really believe the words coming out of his own mouth?  Maybe I am overthinking this.  This is a quote from Ballmer after his recent toying around with the Yahoo! stock price:

Look, the fundamental basis for doing the search deal with Yahoo has to do with critical mass in the advertising marketplace. It doesn’t have to do with technology, or any of these other things, it really is a market phenomenon. Together we would have more advertisers…which means we’d have more relevant ads on our page. We’d have higher monetization levels possible in front of us because there would be more people bidding on more key words. Most importantly, Google would have perhaps a real credible competitor sooner.

Seriously?  From one Steve to another:  If Microsoft is doing a search deal with Yahoo! only because it thinks that putting Yahoo! advertisers with Microsoft advertisers would make a boatload of money, Microsoft has missed the point.  Yes, there might be a small gain in advertisers and advertising dollars.  The reality is that the gain will not be twice as much (or however much Ballmer thinks it might be).

Here is how I see it.  Say you’re a small business, you sell maggots to fishermen.  You have $5000 of advertising dollars to spend on search advertising.  Currently, you are spending it equally between Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft.

Next month, you find out that Microsoft has done a search deal with Yahoo!.  Do you continue to spend double what you spend with Google on a Microsoft/Yahoo! combination?  No.  Suddenly, with Microsoft doing a search deal with Yahoo!, the game has gone from a three-player game to a two-player game.  How do the advertising dollars get split?  In half.  Half for Google and half for Microsoft/Yahoo!.  It is the logical way of spending your money.

Yes, by combining Microsoft and Yahoo! search in some wacky search deal, the dollars do increase for Microsoft.  But, more importantly the dollars also increase for Google.  It does not make sense to me, but hey, who am I?  Microsoft would actually be helping Google make more money with a search deal with Yahoo!.

Maybe my math is wrong?