Differing Attention

I've got a couple people that send me texts, quite often. Thing is, since I've gotten the iPad, my phone isn't my main device. It's quite common for me to come home and put my phone on the charger in the bedroom and not pick it up for the rest of the night.

My iPad however goes with me throughout the house. Eating a snack in the kitchen, on the side table while watching tv, on the nightstand, kicking back in the living room reading an ebook.

I see my emails or social mentions pop up on my iPad constantly, and generally respond fairly quickly to them. Even voice calls go to Google Voicemail which generates an email that shows up on my tablet.

Text Messages, not so much. If I'm not leaving the house for awhile, or I'm in for the night, I might not see a text until I pick up my phone and leave for the the next day.

Even at work my phone often sits on it's charger, while my iPad walks all over cubeville with me.

So whereby for many people, their phone is the center of their connected universe, me not so much. If you're message doesn't pop up in the iOS notification area, it might be awhile before I notice it.

Been doing the moving into the new house thing all month, so haven't really been blogging at all. In fact, just last night I got my desktop set up in the new office.

Jenn's been posting alot of blog updates though. On April 1st she has pics of me putting together basement shelves and tables and such. On the 3rd she had a nice write up on our laundry chute.

On the 5th she had this nice picture of Palmer park which is now a short walk from our home.

On the 7th Jenn posted a write up of wide ranging Saturday activities Curtain shopping, baking, lawn mowing and more. Pretty standard suburban fare. There's some great cheesecake photos there too.

On the 8th, Easter Sunday, Jenn has a write up of us going to her parent's house for easter and a rediculous mad dash through Ikea.

On the 9th, there was the hanging of the living room drapes.

On the 11th, we had Comfort and Adam over!

If you are following this blog for any sort of personal reasons, you really should follow Jennifer's blog as well she has alot more photos of me than my blog does and is alot more regular about posting.

Draw Something

After seeing numerous Twitter people tweeting in my feed over the last week or two about Draw Something Jenn and I finally gave the game a try. And we both ended up liking it.

One part Win Lose or Draw and another part Hangman pretty much sums up the game. You are presented with 3 words of easy, medium or hard difficulty to draw. You pick one, you draw it and submit the drawing. Your friend then gets to watch you draw and tries to figure out the word based on the picture and the scrabble like tiles and hangman-like blank letter count they are presented with.

Like Words for Friends the fun iPad/iPhone scrabble game, Draw Something is asynchronous, you go then I go turn taking at your leisure.

It's a fun game that I'm sure I'll be playing more of in the coming weeks/years.

Hunger Games

Went to AMC Star Theater Sunday morning and saw Hunger Games. Sunday morning Star Theater viewings are starting to become a regular thing with Jennifer and I. Shows are $4.50 before Noon, and in this streaming, DVD, Redbox world that makes alot more sense to me than the $6.75 matinees or the $9.75 evening shows.

In anycase, I was suprised that I very much enjoyed Hunger Games. I was expecting something on par with Twilight, but the movie way over delivers on that expectation. I haven't read the Hunger Game books, but I did enjoy the subtle world building and the fresh take on a post apocalyptic American future that seemed a little more realistic to me than the ususal Road Warrior style stuff.

Most of the main characters were young, but in the context of the movie their youth made sense. Plus you really can't go wrong with Woody Harelson and Donald Sutherland in supporting roles. Those two and the lead actress who plays Katniss really do an excellent job.

While not a deep movie, there were actually a couple points in the movie that made me think, which is always an admirable quality of good SF.

And while this isn't a visual spectacular on the scale of the much more miserable John Carter (which I saw a couple weeks ago but was so unimpressed with I didn't see the need to comment about in more than 140 characters, there are a handful of nicely done visual effects in Hunger Games that work very well. I was especially impressed with all the work that went into the design of the Capitol and it's residents.

I'd reccomend seeing Hunger Games in the theater, while to some extent it's being way overhyped in the media right now, ie: it's not as good as some are saying it is or that it's box office sales would currently imply, it is good in an indy SF kindof way and I enjoyed it.

We picked up an Apple TV yesterday. So far I'm very impressed with it.

As you can see in the promotional image at right, it's a very tiny device. More hockey puck than electronic in appearance. There isn't even a power brick, just a small slender cord that plugs right into the wall.

In anycase. Netflix streaming over wifi seems to to work well. And I'm very impressed with video podcast feeds on the device. Quality on the video podcasts varys but the ones in HD are stellar. You can also stream a bazillion internet radio stations which is pretty cool. And the photo screensaver has many options and can stream from your Flickr feed or iCloud Photostream.

If you subscribe to Youtube channels, this device is killer for playing those back too.

You can also mirror your iPad 2 screen to the Apple TV, which is great for putting all sorts of things onto your TV. And the "Remote" app for iPhone/iPad let's you use your iOS device keyboard to type in searches quickly as well.

I was a little skeptical of the device at first, but after one day I'm pretty much sold. Killer little device on it's own, and an Awesome little accessory for your iPad 2 or 3. I reccomend it.

Random Non Sequiters

About once every month or every other month I like to post some rambling blog post or another about something I'm thinking about. Usually this involves much typing about tech. So with yet another of these installments her I go.

I think I last rambled along these lines on 2/1. Where I talked mostly about novelty of the internet wearing off a bit. That attention was going to continue to gain in scarcity, and getting in the middle of indirect transactions was the near term way to go, since we are in a world of digital abundance and noone really wants to pay for much online. Twenty odd days out, I think I still more or less agree with those musings.

Going back to 1/14/12 it looks like I got off on 3 tangents:

Tangent 1 - It looks like I rambled on for a paragraph about whether you should buy an iPad 2 or an iPad 3, I'm guessing that paragraph came out of a place of just seeing way too much iPad 3 speculation that month, but really does anyone much care until they announce or officially release the thing? No, not really.

Tangent 2 - 3D Printing. This topic was pretty much at the top of my list in December and January. Now I'm just a little disappointed that these things don't look like they are going to be anywhere near reasonably (sub $500) priced any time soon..

Tangent 3 - CES. Yeah, nothing much came out of there.

On 1/2/12 I mused abit and posted a positively weird video about Social Media. I mused mostly about the future social media tech solutions not being corporate ones, maybe I was a bit hasty in that, maybe they will be corporate ones, but maybe they'll be corporate solutions not quite used as intended.

So what's on my tech mind now?

Video anywhere. This week Yahoo launched some new video comedy channel or something. I really don't know what that's about. All I know is that Bill Maher helped them launch it with a 1 hour stand-up stage show: Crazy Stupid Politics So, I booted up the Mac connected to the TV and we watched it for an hour.

When it comes to video, I don't really care if it's downloadable, on Hulu, Netflix, Yahoo or whatever. Your "web station" branding doesn't matter, all your station branding really tells me is: Oh that's on such and such, I won't be able to play that on my iPad. That's what video site branding is reduced to in my head, is that site iPad friendly or not. Other than that, I don't care, I'm relying on my various informational streams in RSS, Flipboard, etc. to notify me of the what and where of the content I'm interested in, there's loyalty to the content or individual creators, but not to the station or production company brands at all.

Books anywhere. I got a Kobo eReader this week. Won an eBay action for it last week for $46. The device is listed at $99. But you can regularly find it on sale for $70 at Kmart. Essentially it's basically the same eInk screen as a 2nd generation Kindle. It's light, it has an SD slot, it has an online store, wi-fi and for the most part, you hit the next button, the page changes and you read. It's a lovely example of technology getting completely out of your way and just letting you do the thing you want to do without spending much time thinking about the technology itself.

Data anywhere. Dropbox did a great little update to their Android software last week. If you have it installed on Android you can check a box and every time you take a photo, your picture will be uploaded to Dropbox's cloud with out any action on your part at all. This is cool because it means photos taken on my phone are automatically synced to my desktop or automatically accessible on my iPad. I'm sure in another couple years most of our data will function like this. Cloud syncing and cloud accessibility looks poised to become more and more a reality. And it's kindof neat.

Data independence form the device that creates it, is going to continue to be a really cool if invisible progression in tech. We've already forgotten about floppy disks, we've almost wiped CDs/DVDs from our data memory. USB sticks are next. (Desktop harddrives have some life in them yet though, I think.)

Sharing everywhere. I'm not sure we're close to this yet, but Pinterest made a neat step forward the last month or two, in helping people share and save, while categorizing. I'm sure Facebook had grand plans to get this accomplished but, services like Pinterest, Instagram, and Foursquare are really letting people segment their types of sharing better, I think, than one monolithic social site can. Different people use it in different ways, but I think there is a consensus developing that people, in the near future, would rather segment their sharing by service than by categories, circles or whatnot within one services.

Probably enough rambling for now, more later at somepoint soon, I would imagine.

There are alot of note taking apps out there, someone at work asked me what I used, I set her the reviews below, and decided to make a post about it here.

Notetaking programs

Notes Plus - $7.99

This one I keep coming back to and using, it's not as simple or intuitive as some of the others but I like it. One nice feature, it will allow you to email a single page as a pdf, whereas alot of similiar apps email the entire "booklet". Most of the time I write in one booklet so being able to email a single page is useful.

Drawpad Pro - $1.99

Notes Plus above has a smoother vector line, but for the most part, you have to use the little zoom panel to write in. In contrast, Drawpad Pro let's you pinch to zoom and use your entire screen. The lines are raster and not as crisp, but I find the pinch to zoom let's me get alot more notes on one page, I'm using this one about half the time now. This app also has alot of pre-built paper styles to write on like, lined paper, graph paper, parchment etc.

Clibe - Free

Clibe isn't something I've used for work at all, but it's a really pretty app, it would be great for putting together a travel log or something similiar, it's free, so it's worth a look.

Notetaker HD - $4.99

Not much different than Notes Plus, but is a little less polished in my opinion. There are alot of apps that use the the "zoom window" to write in, and this is yet another one.

Penultimate - 99�

This one has one of the smoothest flowing inks, and is a little more attractive like clibe. It alows you to import pictures and write over top of them too. If it had pinch to zoom or a magnifying window for writing I'd use it more.

Phatpad - $4.99

Phatpad is interesting, smooth text writing but it also allows you to convert your handwriting to text. You lasso the part you want to convert, select convert to text and it tries to recognize your handwriting. I find this to be hit and miss with my handwriting and don't use it much.

Sketchrolls - $4.99

This one is I really like and use if I'm in a meeting where I just want to write notes all over the place. This was my top pick for awhile, it's a very designer way to do notes. It simulates a long scroll of paper. Basically you get a "sheet" of paper about 5 times taller than an iPad screen.

Bamboo Paper - Free

This one is made by Wacom, it's very clean and simple, very similiar to Penultimate. It worked better before iOS 5. As the iPads multitouch gestures interfere with it a bit. But it's free, reputable company and worth playing with a bit.

Capture Notes - $4.99

Capture notes is an insanely over featured note taker, it has multiple books, audio recording, little flags to embed audio at specific parts of your page, picture inport etc. Personally I find the whole app abit overwhelming and haven't used it much.

Protakinote - $2.99

This isn't really a notetaking program per se, this is really set-up to do to make little handwritten checkbox type lists. Cool though.

Not notetaking but related:

Dropbox - Free

Dropbox is a must have, it's the easiest way to upload pdfs and other files from work and be able to access them on your iPad.

Paperport Anywhere - Free

Paperport Anywhere. Will let you take pictures of paper documents, it will convert them to pdfs and store them in a dropbox cloud that you can access from your iPad or your Desktop later. Very useful.

PDF-it - $2.99

Actually an iPhone app, but works great on iPad too. Sometimes taking notes on paper is the easiest thing, but then I take a picture with my ipad camera, import the pictures into PDF-It and can quickly make a single PDF of notes that I can email. I use this fairly regularly.

Goodreader - $4.99

Not a handwriting notes taking app, but GoodReader is fantastic for everything else, it reads and lets you make notes on PDFs, doc, ppt and xls files and more. While I play around with alot of notetaking apps, I really haven't needed any other document reader since I got Goodreader. When I get an email, I just press and hold the attachment and then select Goodreader, once the document opens in Goodreader, you're good to go.

Photopen - Free

Nice free app. Take a picture of a whiteboard or something, and then use a red pen to draw on it, easy, simple, free.

Taskboard - 99�

Taskboard has really nothing to do with notetaking, but I use it as my todo list. You have columns that you can move little cards around on, it's very visual. It's like a little virtual screen with index cards, you move the tasks around or pull what you are working on to the top. I have collumns for "now", or "on hold" etc and I move projects around as needed.

Thoughts I�m Having

Novelty on the internet is harder to come by now, and it doesn�t last as long, lots of things have been tried. There was a time when people liked the internet but didn�t quite know what to do with it, so anything novel was entertaining. Now there�s plenty of content, professional and amateur alike, and novelty to fill ones time on the internet is not as prized since its not as necessary.

Attention is going to continue to gain in scarcity though. With so much to do and see, there�s less time available to spend on the messages that others want to put in front of you, since you�re so busy keeping up with the content and messages that you want to keep up with.

Indirect transactions. People don�t want to pay for things, especially if they can get them free. So more and more companies online will continue to need to find ways to take advantage of and get in the middle of transactions. Indirectly if at all possible. Advertising is the most classic way, but people are going to get really good at avoiding messages they aren�t interested in, and the internet is already too good at metrics that show just how much the public ignores their messages. Just informing isn�t going to work as well in the coming years, there will be a rise of various platforms that more novelly facilitate the actual transaction whereby they can get a cut, And likely an indirect cut at that, since people dislike paying for services even less than for things.

Toys

Got some various deliveries this week.

First up, the Polaroid Pogo Zink Instant Mobile Printer. About $45 on Amazon. Neat little device. It prints on special Zink 2x3" paper. The printer does not use ink. It actually raises a color image out of the special Zink paper. The paper costs about 40 cents a sheet. And each sheet is also sticker backed if you want to stick your photo somewhere. Since there is no ink, there are also no smudges. Printing was really easy. I just went into my phone's blutetooth settings, connected to the printer and then from the photo gallery I could send the photo to the printer and it starts printing immediately. No app needed on Android.

Next up, I got a cool external battery sled for the iPad 2. I just gave this a test drive this morning and so far it seems to be worth the $34. It has a 8500 mAh rechargeable battery, nice LED status indicators and it can charge/pass thru using the standard apple iPad connector. With the iPad in the sled my battery indicator went up about 1% every couple minutes with the device on. I haven't yet tested the charging speed with the device off. But the fact that it can positively charge the device while powering it is pretty cool. The iPad already has an impressive 10 hour charge, with this sled, I think my entire day will be more than covered.

Last but not least I got this kitchy 7" tall Steve Jobs figurine for $11, although the price seems abit higher at the moment. The figure comes with a little iPad 2 and a little iPhone. Probably not an authorized product, but a neat desk toy.

Protest

Here�s my thoughts on protesting.

Four forms of protest.

One. Be Visible.
Be visible, vocal and be somewhere that you shouldn�t. Be embarrassing or bring shame, and thereby damage the status of your opposition.

Two. Boycott/Blockade.
Deny new money to those you oppose. People with enough money can buy gated communities, country clubs, islands etc, and ignore your visible protest.

Three. Theft/Destruction.
The next step from a boycott/blockade (ie not giving someone something) is to take things they already have. If One, visibility and Two, denying new money doesn�t get their attention, then Three, taking things from those you oppose is the next step to get your point across. (re: Boston Tea Party)

Four. Violence.
If, One, Two, and Three do not work, then Violence is the next step. It is very hard to ignore people engaging in violence against you. (Re: Revolution)

One and Two, our society tolerates, there are hurdles to jump over before Three and Four are accepted by the mass public. There are also few loopholes whereby the government will tolerate much of Three or Four (or even an active rather than passive expression of Two). So by using Three and Four, you are likely to also make the government your enemy. That ups the stakes considerably. The government is larger than Disney.

As to SOPA, I think it�s interesting that government officials are as ready as they are to attack something as popular as the internet. But I think SOPA is not the real issue. The real issue is what it always is, extreme concentrations of wealth and power. That is what needs to be spoken out against and adjusted. I�m not sure if there is a black banner for that.

3D Printing

There is a $1,299 3D printer available now. The Cube No assembly required. Considering that my first laster printer was more expensive than that, it's not too outrageous. I'm not sure my desire to print small widgets in plastic is quite at the $1,299 level though. Hopefully within the year they get the price down to about half that.

CES

I'm not sure I saw anything much out of CES that was that interesting but here are what few thoughts I have.

The Lytro camera was probably the coolest thing I saw mixed in with the CES coverage and that is hardly new.

Cheap 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwhich tablets should be plentiful later this year. At least if you import them, my guess, it'll be well into fall before any mainstream retailers start featuring truely useful cheap devices at a low pricepoint.

Makerbot had a cool thing on display with their Replicator announcement, but jacking up the price to $2K doesn't seem at all likely to broaden the dissemination of 3D printing to the masses at all. They seem to be doubling down on the more intense hobbiest.

Despite even more 3D TV stuff this year, I still have no interest at all in getting or watching one.

I was interested in the Dragon Nuance, and the perpetual Siri rumors that it looks like you will be able to talk to your tv soon. That moreso than 3D will be very useful.

I'm not sure what to make of Microsoft's Kinect for Windows either. Kinect for Xbox is $149, but Kinect for Windows is $249. For that price I don't think they are going to get much mainstream penetration for the device when people are routinely picking up desktops and laptops in the $300 to $500 range. Pity, because Kinect is a pretty neat thing.

All that said, I'm not sure exactly what I would have liked to see...

It would have been cool maybe to see some heads up glasses stuff. (There was some, but nothing that looked at all ready for mainstream.) Perhaps we'll have to wait and see if Apple has any future interest in iGlasses, since I imagine they'll have to likely be closely integrated with a smartphone to be useful.

I would have really like to see someone take a stab at a low cost 3D printer. Perhaps because most of these companies are geared toward solid state electronics, something like 3D printing is just requiring too much mechanical engineering to interest the ususal players and mass roll out of such a device may take longer than it otherwise would if we we're just talking chips and screens.

I'm kindof suprized that noone is really going anywhere with phone connected watches. With the interest in the iPod Nano and otheres, it seems like someone would have stepped up and found a way to roll something out by now, perhaps the miniaturization involved just doesn't let them do it for a price that would work though.

I think also there was only one camera announcement that was using Android. That's sort of suprizing, you would think Point and Shoot Camera makers would be all over integrating that OS, apps, and wifi into their devices.

There were a couple demos of some tabletop large touch monitors, but nothing that looked even remotely close to hitting mainstream, a shame since we are years now away from the first looks at things like Microsoft's surface.

Overall, it looks like we'll just have to wait now to see what Apple announces at their handfull of events this year.

Social Media Musing

Facebook is a giant public space. Everybody is there.

We don't hangout much in giant public spaces though do we?

We hangout in small bars and coffee shops, a friends backyard or living room. We hang out in the work breakroom, a church lobby, or a school event.

But rarely do we go down to a local arena and mix with 500 of our friends plus each of their 500 friends.

Facebook has done big.

But how do we move back to small? How do we create the manageable suburban culdesacs, the gated communities, the private clubs, and the polebarn out at a friend of a friend's house in the social media world?

It won't be Facebook Pages, Facebook Groups or Google Circles. Those places all have advertising and big corporate logos, sponsorships and etc. The places we really like to hangout, don't have ads, aren't brought to us be a brand.

One service, can't set this up. The solution is going to need to be more atomized than that. A small black box on my home network perhaps, a background app running on my desktop, or maybe it's a bunch of independent apps all writing encrypted to some random cloud data store, don't have the keys? You can't enter.

Maybe it's not even available all the time, maybe such a hangout only goes online from 7pm until 10pm. Hangout, chat, share, download and at 10, flip the sign to "We're Closed" as everyone goes home.

Facebook doesn't seem to be the final answer yet though.

Holiday Tech Doldrums

This has got to be the most boring couple weeks for tech news junkies.

Shortly before Christmas, the RSS feeds dry up like an drought put upon riverbed.

At least we have CES in a couple weeks, but even with that, I'm not really that optimistic.

It might just be a long techless winter.

Spent some time reading January 2011 thru November 2010 of my own blog this evening. Some stuff that caught my eye.

A look back at January 2011

Right around this time last year

Looks like I was thinking about tablets and blogging. I properly predicted Apple would reign supreme on the tablet front for another year. You didn't need to be Nostrodomous to figure that out though.

Looks like I was talking about the ever decreasing visitation of my blog. That's a trend that hasn't changed. Visits of 1 or 2 a day are not an uncommon statistic.

I was fascinated with a then new to me Kinect. I still am, but it's a shame that Microsoft hasn't been able to move faster to capitalize on it's capabilities. Maybe they will this year, or maybe the Kinect will just be a Microsoft Surface type thing that actually made it out of the lab before it was left to die.

I had some thoughts on check-ins, and went so far as to call it a fad. That might have been a bit strong, but it seems that little has happened in the checkin space over the last year. It's a useful utility at times, but doesn't seem to be much of a revolution.

January of 2011 I was talking about how Egypt shut down their internet and how Lieberman wanted a kill switch for ours. Looks like they're still working on that vis-a-vis SOPA. I'm sure they'll figure out how to get that thru eventually.

I notice that I had a link to Facebook statuses becoming ads you can't opt out of, that's not here yet, but it's coming soon.

RFID seemed to be a bigger deal. Not much seems to have happened with that this year.

Google was holding a Honeycomb event. There was alot of excitement but I'm not sure Honeycomb made much of a splash and now the tech world seems to only be focused on Ice Cream Sandwich.

Amazon had launched it's Kindle Singles, that worked out really well. I've bought some of these myself.

comiXlogy was talking about selling digital comics thru retailers. I'm not sure that really went anywhere, but it does seem like comiXology is still rising.

I completely forgot that Windows 7 has voice recognition. At the time I didn't have Windows 7 at home, and now I do. Microsoft are really should do a better job of trumpeting the capabilities in already has out there that people don't even know they on the computers.

I found a recipe for homemade Oreos I still haven't tried.

This is still pretty much true

I think alot of the social internet stuff that was exciting last year, is mostly becoming just another utility as we go into 2012.

Oddly enough we were just talking about Anne Hathaway as Catwoman last January, and the first real trailer just came out last week and the movie itself is still 6 months away. Crazy.

Ha. pretty much nailed the Touchpad.

Seems we we're worried about RSS dieing that was probably abit premature, but the slick Flipboard and Zite apps and their preselected feeds probably still aren't helping the cause much.

I still need to make one of these seats.

I seemed to be interested in the Looxcie. They have a newer one now, but I still haven't convinced myself I have much use for one.

Same post above has mention of 3GS iPhones for $50. I think those have worked out pretty well.

Back in January, we got our first look at the new Spider-man. And that movie is still 6 months away too. Methinks the hype cycles for superhero movies are just much much too long.

I had gotten Jenn a Snuggie that actually worked out pretty well.

A look back at December 2010

Last year on the 26th I made a sock puppet This year I picked up a jacket on the 26th for my Muppet. Not sure what it is about Christmas and puppets lately.

One thing apparent, I took many many bad iPod photos in Dec 2010

The Craig Fergeson Doctor Who Youtube last year around this time was awesome though:

QR Codes seemed to be a bigger deal They're around right now, and used occasionally but still not much of a splash and like RFID seem to have died down.

Last year I linked to this Jonathan Coulton Shopvac song. Still some really really good commentary on US suburban life in this song.

Last Dec, I was playing with iPod video and we did my Lego Mini Fig video series.

At least according to last December's blog, it was a slow news month, alot like this year. Maybe we should go back one more month to...

A look back at November 20110

Amazon had their Price checking app which got considerably more mainstream press this year

Interesting 2010 link about Student Loans exceeding US credit card debt. I wonder how that statistic has been doing this year?

There were a link or two about selling things via social networks, I've yet to see anyone use such an app on either my Twitter or Facebook though. The occasional post selling something, sure, and some indy comic book people promoting their sites or ebay, but never anything as complicated as Yardsellr.

Oh yeah, in 2010 there were some tablets besides the iPad.

Hard to believe that the Social Network movie came out over a year ago Good article looking at Facebook and the movie at that time.

It's been over a year since Jon Stewart's Rally to Restore America. There was a good speech.

Nothing really became of that though. And The Daily Show has been more or less lost in the wilderness since that.

Well that's some stuff that caught my eye and is probably enough for now. Here's to hopefully an interesting 2012!

Multiple Monitor Madness

That USB additional monitor adapter worked so well that I immediately bought a second one (the box actually says you can use up to five.)

So the Red LCD monitor above is on the primary machine off of the VGA input. The Yellow and Cyan are both LCDs hooked to the primary machine using the usb monitor adapters.

The Green monitor at far right is actually a CRT I pulled out of storage (but I ordered a cheap 15" flatscreen online to replace it shortly) The Green and the Purple are hooked to a secondary PC.

The above mentioned 5 monitors on 2 PCs are also connected together via Synergy so that one keyboard and one mouse sweeps across the whole set-up.

There's also an iPad (Lime-Green), Phone (Brown) and a PocketPC (Orange) hanging out on the corner desk- The Pocket PC is nostalgic mostly.

It's not an expensive set-up. The components are pretty budget, excepting the iPad, you could probably do all the above for less than $1500 if you wanted to. It's kindof cool and kindof nuts all at the same time though.

We don't have flying cars but, the internet and computers are neat, if you squint, and blur things out of focus abit with a pencil filter for example, the present does feel very much like the future.

Maybe we'll get monitor paint for our walls, or VR augmented reality glasses that will bring the whole real world into a computer virtual reality soon enough. And when that happens this whole era will seem exceedingly quaint, but at the moment when you think of what it available on a modest budget it really is quite wondrous the tools and toys that are available.

Neat.

hmmm

Was going thru a pile of junk mail on the table� noticed that there was a new Thinkgeek catalog in it. I mentally noted "New Thinkgeek catalog, cool". then, rather than look at the catalog in my hand, I walked into the other room, picked up my iPad, launched the Google Catalog App and started looking at the Thinkgeek catalog on the iPad instead of the paper one.

This was all fairly unconcious.

Social Media

Social Media is no longer a seperate thing. It has been assimilated.

Institutions

The article I posted via Posterous on my blog before this one is really good stuff when it comes to institutions.

Balance

True Balance, homeostasis, equilibrium does not exist. It's desire is hardwired in though, and there are many things that take advantage of that.

The above makes alot of books not work.

But also you can have alot of fun with the knowledge.

It's December

I just sortof noticed.

We're almost to 2012.

I’ve recently added more people/companies to Google+

I’m having a hard time seeing how this thing scales.

There are some people that really use this alot. But they are very verbose, so it is very time consuming to skim their posts to find out if I should read now or later etc.

I like Twitter’s model. You have 140 characters to sell me on your topic if you want to go long. It’s very efficient.

I realize that with Google+ I can view posts by circles instead of the main stream. but I have 10 circles, granted that isn’t alot, but hitting 10 different streams takes awhile. Plus it’s not sorting by people that is my real issue, it’s weeding out the people who post alot from the people who only post a little.

I’m fortunate that the people I follow in Facebook do not post a lot of links, mostly my Facebook contains personal updates from people. So when I look at Facebook, I’m in a “personal context”

Twitter is built for speed, it’s a newswire… I dive in and see what’s happening now, and the short updates make that easy (plus I can favorite and come back to lengthy links later)

Google+ feels more like a bunch of short blog posts all mashed together. Generally I manage blog posts in my Google Reader. In Google Reader, I have blogs in categories by topic, but I also cross index blogs in high priority categories like “Hot” or “Top” and I check those categories more frequently than the topic area tags.

Do I need to do that with my Circles in Google+? Do I need “Succinct Friends” and “Friend who post alot” to separate the two? Do I need to do the same with Work, Family and Internet People, Companies, and Industry Categories as well? Or do i just pick essential people and Put everything into a mishmash “Check first” (While Hot works for news feeds, i think it might be misconstrued on Google Plus) and leave everything else in individual circles to catch up to later?

But does that work? If I mark a story “read” in my Hot category, that story will no longer appear in my “Tech” category if the feed is double categorized. But there is no way to mark a post “read” if it’s in two circles in Google+ is there?

Dunno, I’m thinking at the moment that Google+ really doesn’t scale.

Your Brand

If you are an individual, you do not have a brand. You have a reputation, and you may have trust .

If you produce or market a product, you may very well manage a brand, if people are more familiar with the brand than you the single individual behind it.

If more people know about you personally than know about your “brand”. At best what you have created is a nice logo and identity package.

If the logo and identity package would continue to live on if you were no longer behind it. Then maybe you have a brand.

If people would rather talk to your brand than you. You might have a brand.

If you’ve ever driven a pick-up truck with a hound dog in the back, you might be a redneck.

er, wait a minute, what was I saying again?

They�re, Their, There

According to wikipedia, only 27% of the worlds population speaks English. So 73% of the world�s population isn�t going to use any of the above at all.

It�s ok, at least they�re in a language you can read.

Social Media

Heaven forbid someone encounter a differing viewpoint on even the most mundane of topics.

Remember people, all social media should be positive, supportive, and reinforce the person your replying to's existing viewpoint.

Afterall, there can only be one viewpoint, and if someone is presented with one that differs from theirs, then either they are wrong or you are wrong, and trying to figure out which is which is very stressful.

So stop stressing people out.

(Plus did you stop and think that maybe their DVR didn't record the game, and the cat threw up in the hall again, and an 8am meeting just popped up on their work calendar for tomorrow, so obviously the person is going to blow up at you on your reply to their post about whether Grape or Orange creamsicles are better. Grape? really, you've got to be kidding me. You're a Fncking idiot.)

Immortals

Went to a $4 showing of Immortals at Rivertown theatre. Not a great movie. Plays fast and loose with Greek Mythology, but to a certain degree it has some "outs" for some of it.

There are plot holes you could drive a truck thru, as well as what could be 30 to 40 minutes I'm guessing that they cut out of the theatrical version of the movie (which is the only thing that could really explain a couple abrupt scenes that I can't possibly imagine were intended to be that mashed together.

There's alot of bullet time fighting, and alot of violence. Again not a great movie, but not the worst Greeks/Gladiator movie of this genre that I've seen either. It's mostly this thing happens, then these people go here and then this thing happens, big fight at the end, etc.

I'd wait for a DVD or if you want to see the bullet time fighting on the big screen, catch a cheap show, but I wouldn't recommend a full $10 showing.

Thought to think on

From the below Rushkoff interview

The rate at which we do business and make profit is actually driven and determined by the debt structure of the company rather than supply and demand.

Rewriting the above just abit:

The rate at which we do business to make profit is actually driven and determined by our debt structure rather than supply and demand.

Even if you are "debt free". You'll need to buy groceries next week. You might want a new iPad next year. The roof will eventually need to be replaced. You could get sick.

There are future debts to be incurred. And even without growth, there is a lifestyle to be maintained. Question is: at what cost.

That part of the article has sparked me for the day to think about debts.

Douglas Rushkoff interview

I just read a Douglass Rushkoff interview and it has some very interesting ideas on the rise of the corporation, from its beginnings in the late Middle Ages, through its adolescence in the Industrial Revolution, to its present global and virtualized maturity.

There's even a nice pic from a classic episode of Star Trek within it.

There's also a nice little snippet from Monty Python and the Holy Grail

But I digress...

Here are a few snippets I liked:

That�s a totally different way of understanding money. Land was no longer a thing the peasants could grow stuff on, land became an investment, land became an asset class for the wealthy. Once it became an asset class they started Partitioning and Enclosure, which meant people weren�t allowed to grow stuff on it, so subsistence farming was no longer a viable lifestyle. If you can�t do subsistence farming you must find a job, so then you go into the city and volunteer to do unskilled labor in a proto-factory for some guy who wants the least-skilled, cheapest labor possible. You move your whole family to where the work is, into the squalor, where conditions are overcrowded and impoverished � the perfect breeding ground for plague and death.

-snip-

It is. And because people don�t believe in that abstraction, because they�re used to grain receipts being based in something real, precious metal was required for the king�s currency � silver, gold; they had to use something that was considered valuable so people would believe.

-snip-

Fast-forward to the 1970s. After four or five centuries of people believing it, Nixon realized that people now do believe, so the currency can be taken off the central metal and just be based on belief. That�s when they started putting �In God We Trust� on paper money, when it was taken off the gold standard.

-snip-

The money supply has to grow as a function of interest. The rate at which we do business and make profit is actually driven and determined by the debt structure of the company rather than supply and demand. This is what Adam Smith was actually talking about. Adam Smith was not a free market libertarian, he was not a corporate industrialist the way the Economist or the Wall Street Journal likes to paint him. Smith said that economies only work in scale, they only work locally. He was living in a world where everyone was a farmer, and he hated corporations as much as he hated central government, because he knew that an interest-based economy does not ultimately work. And that is because debt is not actually a product. There�s nothing there. Nothing. Yet that�s what it was made for. The debt-based economy was invented so that people with money could get richer by having money, that�s what it�s for. I�m not saying it�s evil, it was an idea. But, it doesn�t actually work. If the number of people who want to make money by having money gets so big that there are more people existing that way than actually producing anything, eventually the economy will collapse.

-snip-

Slowly over time, as corporations attempted to extract more and more value from people, both as workers and as consumers and ultimately as shareholders and investors in our own 401k plans, we all basically outsourced our lives. I outsource my job to a company. I outsource my consumption to a company, I go to Wal-Mart, I go to Costco. I outsource my investing and savings to companies, I give it to Citibank, instead of the local banker or my credit union or my restaurant or my children or my cathedral. All of our interactions have been mediated by corporations � you don�t work for me and I don�t work for you.

-snip-

Our currency is not the only money. There are other kinds of money, just like there are different kinds of media out there, and they all encourage different behaviors. Computers encourage certain kinds of behavior, television encourages certain kinds of behavior. A gold-based money encourages certain kinds of behavior, a centralized currency encourages certain kinds of behavior, and a demurrage local grain-based currency encourages certain other kinds of behavior. The kind of behavior that our money encourages, intentionally, by design, is: hoarding. This is currency that earns interest over time so you want to hoard it and not spend it. And that�s OK if you need that tool.

-snip-

They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it�s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from �the masses.�

-snip-

It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and � this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let�s put these vets in a house, let�s celebrate the nuclear family.

-snip-

They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing � there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard.

-snip-

Everything�s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he�s got a stake in the system. True, he�s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home.

There's also some great thoughts about the concept of digital in the back third of the article as well.

But let's stay, for a moment, with the last several quotes above about the Suburbs and the nuclear family. I find this whole construction fascinating, but I don't necessarily find it completely external. I do not believe this lifestyle was completely put upon people I think the masses chose it to some extent. There are lot of insecurities that come with a society with tight social ties. Whims of society are not always preferable. "We are a nation of laws, not men" the statement goes. There is some appeal to the notion of being an individual instead of a member of society. Like anything though, the pendulum can swing too far to any one side. And its very likely that our current pendulum does need to find its way back a little more to center.

In anycase give the above full article a read. Good Stuff.

Limited

Made some reply posts about Chrome OS and Tablets over on someones Google+. Was going to link to them here, but then noticed that the Google+ post in question is "limited" so I can't link to it.

So, I guess I won't link to it then.

(Not that they were earth shattering thoughts or anything.)

Amazon Fire

I got a chance to play with the Amazon Kindle Fire for a little bit at Best Buy today. I was pretty impressed with the experience. Amazon has managed to hide the nastier unrefined bits of Android and create a very nice media consumption device that still can run enough apps for some light content creation as well.

One of my favorite art apps on mobile: Autodesk Sketchbook Pro was installed on the device and when I launched it, drawing was fairly fluid and responsive.

I also browsed a DC Comic on the device and the screen was clear and the book looked very nice as well.

Overall I think the iPad is still a much stronger offering, but at a savings of $300, the Kindle Fire is a very nice value. And for someone who doesn�t want to spend $500 to $700 on an iPad, the Amazon Fire is the first real consumer focused alternative tablet I�ve seen.

After playing with it, I even briefly considered whether it�d be worth my owning one just to have a 7" device. But between the Phone, iPod Touch and iPad, I thought it might be a bit too comical for me to start carrying around 4 devices of this type :)

In anycase, very nice looking device, and I think Amazon will be the one competitor to iPad to watch over the next couple years.

Nook Tablet

I also got a chance to briefly play with the Nook Tablet in store today as well. It�s not a bad device, but it feels far less refined than the Fire. I can�t say that I�d recommend the Nook Tablet over the Fire unless you fancy yourself having Hacker tendencies and really want the SD card slot (which the Fire does not have) And if that�s the case, I think such a person should probably step up to some of the other more general purpose Android 7" tablets that are out there or go for one of the numerous no-brand imports that are available from sites like dealextreme.com

Closing

Neat devices though. The whole post PC world seems really tangible right now for those that might want to go down that road.

Paid Apps might have an advantage

I generally check out the Apps channel on flipboard every day. There are several sites in that channel that post daily lists of apps that have lowered their price significantly or to free. So I often discover apps that have been around awhile but I didn’t know about until the price drop.

But Free apps have no real way onto those lists, they are already free afterall so they can’t be featured in the ubiquitous price cutting/sale articles.

Free apps have to rely on the much more infrequent articles that profile new feature updates or category round ups.

The argument used to be, do humans want to be specialized like insects.

The new argument may be, do humans want to be reduced to a switch.

Red light, green light. On track, off track. Positive, negative. Profit, loss.

Killing time with iPad

Catch up on Twitter, Facebook and Google+

Catch up on email

Catch up on Flipboard, Zite and Google Reader

Try a new Notetaking app (Capture Notes 2)

Up next, NBC Nightly News App and then probably a little progress on an eBook.

Time flys when you are having fun

Do you work in an office only 3 days a week? How does that work for you? I think it would drive me batty on a permanent basis. With the Thanksgiving weekend coming up I’m only doing 3 days this week, and 4 next week. With various standing weekly status meetings and weekly occurring activities . A 3 day week is a pretty nutty pace, half the time seems devoted to preparing not to be here and the other half feels like it’s going to the status updates and minor weekly routine.

Couple that with being in the middle of Christmas (which is a pretty busy time for my employment) and you get some wheeeeeeee fun to say the least.

I think existing social media is dying. I also think newspapers are dying. However, newspapers still generate alot of business, and social media will still generate alot of business.

Social media will likely even continue to die upward, in that more and more people will continue to get on it. But that doesn't mean that they will continue to use it in as authentic a way as they have at it's inception.

Noone cares much about the yellow pages, but they continued to drop it on people's doorsteps long after people really stopped using it.

And in anycase, businesses don't have to care about whether or not social media is being used as intended. Businesses mearly need to rate social media as a cost proposition. How effectively can a business drive sales using social media and at what cost?

Don't get me wrong, there is alot of refinement yet to happen in how business uses social media. And there will continue to be that refinement.

I also think that people will actually prefer to talk to businesses online over all but there closest friends, which for most people is actually quite a small real number.

People prefer to transact with large faceless corporations, and they will continue to do so. ie: While people like the occasional entertainment of going to a local farmers market, most people prefer the efficiency of a superstore grocery of some kind. Transactions in social media will be no different.

Let's face it, people can be flakey, they forget to call you back, they drop their ends of agreements, they don't follow thru. Companies do generally follow through on what they say they are going to do. The bigger they are, the more likely they will follow thru and keep their stated commitments. Impersonal sure, inhuman? likely, but efficient, predictable, reliable. I see no reason why people won't gravitate toward primarily interacting with corporations and their automated filters online for this reason.

Again people will keep their few close friends and family, but after that, as in the real world, most other transactions online will be of a corporate, automated bent.

But social media is dying, upward, but still dying.

Snapping Doc Pics

Played around with Snapter a Windows program that let's you build PDFs from webcam taken stills. It's sortof tricky to find now as the company that makes it has discontinued it. In anycase, it did not work as well as the iOS apps: Genius Scan or CamScanner for detecting the boundaries of a page and straightening them, so I probably won't use very much.

Network file fun on the iPad

Also played around this morning with an iOS app called Filebrowser. Fairly simple access to your windows shares. It has "Open In" option so you can browse your network share and open the file in another app.

I've also been using iOS Air Video. It requires a Server on your PC or Mac. But once you install both, you can stream pretty much any video file pretty much instantly, directly off your networked PC hard drive.

Brighten up those dark photos

I've also been digging: ACDSee Camera Flash which is a nice little app that does natural brightening and adds a simulated Flash to your iOS Photos.

Vector Art on the Go

Need an Illustrator type app for your iPad? Try Inkpad I've been digging it.

Junkmail Catalogs on your iPad

I've been a big fan of Google Catalog for looking at retail and mail order catalogs. I've also recently discovered Catalog Spree. It's also worth checking out.

Get things straight!

Like photo apps that do one thing and one thing well? Try Image Straightener It does exactly what it sounds like.

Read me my Tweets

Want to try a fun twitter app? Checkout Tweet Speaker it reads your tweets to you.

Do you keep score?

Check out iKeepScore Universal App for iPhone and iPad, perfect companion for any board game. (Includes a nice dice roller and coin flipper too.)

Get it Write

iA Writer, Writing Kit, and enso Writer are 3 apps I can recommend. iA Writer is a nice clean distraction free writing environment. enso Writer is pretty clean as well (and is universal so you can use on iPhone and iPad), it has some sketching and split screen HTML preview options that are nice. and Writing Kit allows you to mark up your document in Markdown and export HTML to other apps etc.

Oh and if you want to try Markdown on your Windows PC, take a look at Write Monkey

Of the emergency broadcast system. The broadcasters:

• in your area

• in voluntary cooperation

• with federal state and local authorities

Have developed this test

to keep you informed in the event of an emergency.

This has only been a test.

Instead, for Thiel, the bubble that has taken the place of housing is the higher education bubble. �A true bubble is when something is overvalued and intensely believed,� he says. �Education may be the only thing people still believe in in the United States. To question education is really dangerous. It is the absolute taboo. It�s like telling the world there�s no Santa Claus.�

Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated.

Most important of all, the long-ago prophets of the information age seemed to have forgotten basic economics. When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important. Late-20th-century America was supremely efficient at growing food; that was why it had hardly any farmers. Late-21st-century America is supremely efficient at processing routine information; that is why traditional white-collar workers have virtually disappeared.

� The same is true for individuals. The royalties that the Four Sopranos earn from their recordings are surprisingly small; the recordings mainly serve as advertisements for their concerts. The fans attend these concerts not to appreciate the music (they can do that far better at home), but for the experience of seeing their idols in person. In short, instead of becoming a knowledge economy we became a celebrity economy.

� Now if you want to devote yourself to scholarship, there are only three choices. Like Charles Darwin, you can be born rich. Like Alfred Wallace, the less-fortunate co-discoverer of evolution, you can make your living doing something else and pursue research as a hobby. Or, like many 19th-century scientists, you can try to cash in on a scholarly reputation by going on the lecture circuit.

� But celebrity, though more common, still does not come easily. That is why writing this article is such an opportunity. I actually don't mind my day job in the veterinary clinic, but I have always wanted to be a full-time economist; an article like this may be just what I need to make my dream come true.

Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesnt mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. "Fortune" is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

3. Money is like a child—rarely unaccompanied. When it disappears, look to those who were supposed to be keeping an eye on it while you were at the grocery store. You might also look for someone who has a lot of extra children sitting around, with long, suspicious explanations for how they got there.

4. People who say money doesnt matter are like people who say cake doesnt matter--its probably because theyve already had a few slices.

5. There may not be a reason to share your cake. It is, after all, yours. You probably baked it yourself, in an oven of your own construction with ingredients you harvested yourself. It may be possible to keep your entire cake while explaining to any nearby hungry people just how reasonable you are.

6. Nobody wants to fall into a safety net, because it means the structure in which theyve been living is in a state of collapse and they have no choice but to tumble downwards. However, it beats the alternative.

7. Someone feeling wronged is like someone feeling thirsty. Dont tell them they arent. Sit with them and have a drink.

8. Dont ask yourself if something is fair. Ask someone else--a stranger in the street, for example.

9. People gathering in the streets feeling wronged tend to be loud, as it is difficult to make oneself heard on the other side of an impressive edifice.

10. It is not always the job of people shouting outside impressive buildings to solve problems. It is often the job of the people inside, who have paper, pens, desks, and an impressive view.

11. Historically, a story about people inside impressive buildings ignoring or even taunting people standing outside shouting at them turns out to be a story with an unhappy ending.

12. If you have a large crowd shouting outside your building, there might not be room for a safety net if youre the one tumbling down when it collapses.

13. 99 percent is a very large percentage. For instance, easily 99 percent of people want a roof over their heads, food on their tables, and the occasional slice of cake for dessert. Surely an arrangement can be made with that niggling 1 percent who disagree.

In the next week, well be making some highly requested changes to Google Reader. First, were going to introduce a brand new design (like many of Googles other products) that we hope you love. Second, were going to bring Reader and Google+ closer together, so you can share the best of your feeds with just the right circles.

As a result of these changes, we also think it's important to clean things up a bit. Many of Reader's social features will soon be available via Google+, so in a week's time we'll be retiring things like friending, following and shared link blogs inside of Reader.

We think the end result is better than what's available today, and you can sign up for Google+ right now to start prepping Reader-specific circles. We recognize, however, that some of you may feel like the product is no longer for you. That's why we will also be extending Reader's subscription export feature to include the following items. Your data belongs to you, after all, and we want to make sure you can take it with you.

• Your subscriptions
• Your shared items
• Your friends
• Your likes
• Your starred items

Like always, the new Google Reader will be a great place to read and share your feeds. And in addition to Google+, you'll still be able to share to almost any service using Send To. We're looking forward to launching the new features very soon.

"To sell and promote the physical book in our store showrooms and not have the e-book available for sale would undermine our promise to Barnes & Noble customers to make available any book, anywhere, anytime."

Civilization Advances By Extending The Number Of Important Operations One Can Do Without Thinking About Them