Companies used to have apprenticeships and train workers they needed for specific jobs.

Then came trade schools and colleges… and companies switched to expecting the workers would train themselves before taking the jobs.

Then came contract work instead of giving person a job. Because not only could you verify that the person had trained themselves, you could verify that they knew what they could do before committing to them full time.

Then came contracting entire aspects of the business. Why develop internal resources when you could maintain flexibility and outsource entire departments.

Now we have a venture capital system in many areas, whereby people develop their own companies "on spec*" checking in their progress periodically with richer people/companies with whom they have little to no contract, to show that their company can solve a problem or prove a new business process, and if this new company can solve that problem, they can be aquired or it's people aquihired and the people of this proven system can be placed under contract by the larger corp, which will also assume their "ip".

We call the people who sit at the top of this system: "Job Creators". We call these new little companies operating on spec: "start-ups", and we call the people who can get people to work in this "start-up" system: "founders".

Red Lanterns

I read/skimmed thru Red Lanterns #4-10. I was curious about the new Human Red Lantern character.

What a terribly pointless series. There are a handful of pages that tell 80s style Tales of the Green Lantern Corps type stories featuring various Red Lanterns, and those are almost ok if you take them as space/space-horror. But the Atrocious and Bleez stuff that goes on and on is just unreadable and the Human Red Lantern stuff is terrible.

It’s just awful, awful stuff.

Apple WWDC thoughts

New Macbook Pro looks very very cool. At $2K+ all I'm going to do is look at it, but still, very very nice.

Apple ditches Google Maps. The Apple Maps product looks good enough, and the turn by turn navigation looks cool. Tom Tom and Garmin's stock should completely crash now I would imagine.

iOS Facetime over cellular and iMessage integration with your desktop. Both pretty cool. Very nice flexible use of the cloud. Remind me again, what is it we use Facebook for? Oh yeah, communicating with people. If Apple announces iHistory or iTimeline, I'd hate to be Facebook. Oh, and the cellphone companies just became even dumber pipes.

Low end Macbook Air. Looks like a very nice value for what you're getting, at $999, the integration is probably worth it for someone with the dollars to spend.

Siri integration with BMW, Mercedes, GM, Land Rover, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota, Chrysler, and Honda. Sure Ford has that Microsoft partnership at the moment. I wonder how Ford stock will do after this announcement? Siri vs. FordSync? um, yeah, I'm sure they'll be fine.

iOS 6 in the fall, available to developers now. Works on the iPad 2. Cool for me.

• Siri on the iPad
• Passbook - a sortof Google Wallet type play that looks very very interesting.
• Siri knows everything about Sports now, not interesting to me personally, but it will probably be a killer Siri app for many. (Good luck pronouncing some of those sports stars names in Hockey and Baseball right though)
• Facebook integration. Lots of people will use this. It should be a big shot in the arm for Facebookers. I'm not one of those people, but it's hard not to see the signifigance. Are Twitter and Facebook platforms? or are they just Apple services now?
• Phone enhancements. Apparently Apple took the time to make iPhone a better phone too. The "Do not disturb" feature whereby calls go straight to voicemail the first time yet ring if the person calls back a second time is genius.
• Shared Photostreams. Yet another feature that takes a little Facebook territory away. I'm really interested in using this on AppleTV.
• Mail. Holy crap, you can now insert a photo after you've started composing an email, that took long enough. As to VIP. Well it looks like Apple now knows who your "close friends" are, and unlike Facebook who can't even get people to tell them that, Apple has your close friends credit card numbers too. That would seem to be useful somehow.

I was a little bummed that we didn't get any big Apple TV announcements, but then I thought about it, the begining of summer is not the time to announce TV. TV is a fall thing. Piggyback onto all those network TV show announcements and build up to the big TV selling event: Black Friday.

Overall, lot's of great incremental improvements. Sprint-upgrade or decent price willing (since technically a new phone won't be subsidized for me until next Spring), I'll probably look into getting an iPhone in the fall whenever they announce the next one. And if I have to wait past next fall into spring for a decent upgrade price, it probably won't be too bad since the iPad 2 will get the iOS 6 upgrade and I mostly use that at home and work anyway.

One last thing, Apple had a neat slide at the begening of the iOS presentation showing how many Android users were still stuck on 2.3 even though 3.0 and 4.0 versions have been out for sometime. That's Android's real problem is seems. Apple is upgrading once a year, and keeping 3 years of phones within the upgrade walls. Android's device makers don't seem to have the same commitment to upgrading their phones OSes. Maybe 5 years from now, mobile OSes will be so mature it won't matter whether you have iOS or Android, but right now, short-term, Apple is killing it with updates and revision rollouts compared to Android.

The ensigns begin to suspect that something's amiss when they discover that all the ship's old hands run and hide every time the members of the first-shift bridge crew come by, and after a few grisly deaths from their number, they begin to work it out, with the aid of a reclusive bearded prophet who hides in the ship's maintenance corridors, and who believes that they have been trapped in something called "The Narrative" and has even worked out its rules.

A big part of doing your work is defending your time and your attention so you can do your work.

Prometheus

There are some good philosophical bits in the movie. The above picture is from one of my favorite scenes from the movie.

The android David definetly has the most memorable role. Charlise Theron as Vickers is an entertaining character as well (Two good performances from Theron in two weeks now.)

Prometheus is not a movie for someone looking for a tight thriller or actioner. It actually has some pacing and touchstones that remind me of Moon. It's not as deep or as subtle as Moon, but if you don't like Moon, you may not be very thrilled with Prometheus either.

Prometheus was definitely overhyped and overmarketed. And there are way too many scenes in the trailers. I stopped watching trailers after the first one as is my practice for movies I want to see. I find the increasingly spoilerific trailers for movies these day do not add to my enjoyment of a movie, so if it's a movie I know I'm going to see, I stop with the trailers after the first.

Prometheus was a good sci-fi film for sci-fi fans, the sort of thought out sci-fi film you don't get too much these days. I reccomend for fans of the genre, go see, but keep in mind, this ain't exactly Alien.

Time to invent something new?

We've been fully moved into the house for a couple weeks now. Two whole weekend's of not moving too. Albehit there's still some unboxing going on and it's going to take a while to fully reclaim the garage and basement which have many boxes labeled miscelaneous still.

There are a few projects planned, a kitchen rack for Jennifer, a closet in the office to be converted into a glass display case for my action figures, and then various future yard and garage type projects.

I also have a web project or two that I'm going to do for Adam and Comfort as well.

Last week and this though, it's been nice to have the break from the past few months of house looking/buying and moving.

Basically, there's plenty to do to keep busy.

It would be nice if something new got invented though.

I've had my iPad 2 for about a year, and smaller Android tablets since May/June of 2010. So, I'm about 2 years into the tablet paradigm. If you want to consider smartphones to be the forerunners to those, I'm 3 years into into that shift, as 6/6/09 almost 3 years ago marks the purchase of and 1st release of the Palm Pre. I'm about a year into my second smartphone, the Android, HTC Evo 4G. (and just for a full post-pc record it's been about a year and half since I got the iPod Touch.)

Typing that out like that, it seems to feel like a much shorter period of time than I thought.

Three years post pc, (Do we want to count when I got a Linux Eee PC in November 2007? That might make it 4 1/2 years, I suppose.) where a mobile or a tablet are the computing devices I used most outside of work.

Wow, adding in the Eee PC to the timeline still doesn't make it stretch back that far does it?

Hmm… this little trip down memory lane is making me rethink where I was going with this whole invent something theme. In four and a half years I've been from PC to Netbook, to Smartphones, to iPod Touch to Tablets, that's actually a fair ammount of technology shifts. (oh yeah, now that I think about it, eInk readers are in there too.)

Anyway, over the next couple weeks we'll have E3 and Apple's WWDC. Possibly new stuff invented? Buzz is that there will be something new from Apple in the TV realm, and something tv'ish with the xBox from Microsoft as well.

I like TV, but I'm not sure anything with a tv will be as profound a paradigm shift as the netbook/smartphone/tablet trek has been the last few years. the only thing I see on the horizon that might be that sort of shift would be: Google Glass.

I'll take that back, a constant interactive, pervasive Siri headset would probably be pretty world altering. Not the push a button to talk/search sort of experience that they have now, but the real Star Trek always listening carry on a conversation, send info to your phone, or your tv screen, etc. that will be something that will really change things.

Who knows, maybe that's what Apple has planned for next week. We'll see, and I suppose, given the pace of the last several years, it probably won't be that long, before they invent something new after all.

Snow White and the Huntsman

Jenn and I went and saw Snow White and the Huntsman today. Ok movie. Charlize Theron is very good as the evil queen. The scenes with the dwarves and some of the walking bring a little bit of Lord of the Rings-lite to mind. Honestly except for the decision toward the end to put Snow White in the armor, it would have been a pretty good movie. I won't go into why that really caused the movie to fall apart for me here, so that I don't spoil aspects of the film, but the film is worth a weekend matinee viewing despite that story flaw, do see.

A blog post posts in the forest

Granted, I haven't been posting much during the week, but I think my blog reached a milestone this week as views on my current blog page completely flatlined. 0 visitors.

Social media killed the blog post star it would seem.