Tuesday, May 29, 2007

Back to People?

When it comes to booking travel, I'm just about ready to give up on the internet. First we have airline sites, then travel sites on top of airline sites, then travel site aggregators on top of them. Even with all of this wonderful disintermediation and reintermediation, we still can't get the best goddamn price! I mean you get the same thing everywhere you go. Whats the point? If you could go through typical cabin and ask everyone what they paid, you would get everything from $200 to $2000, and no rhyme or reason as to why people paid what. You could have rich businessmen paying $200 and regular folks paying $2000 for seats beside each other. I know the airlines like it as is, but there has to be a better way. Is there some kinda secret backroom deal the rest of us can't get access to? Me, I'm ready to go back to an actual HUMAN travel agent.

Saturday, May 19, 2007

the battle with technology

my recent battle with technology just shows us how far we need to go. My goal is to get everyone in the world connected to the internet, somehow. We've made some progress with the $100 laptop and now mobile apps being everywhere. Until we get a device in every person in the worlds hands which can both read and write to the internet, then all will probably eventually be lost. Technically, it is possible to have a simple device with a screen and a radio and a recording device which can both play and record off the internet. The problem is not the device. The problem is the infrastructure necessary to support the device. That is going to be the biggest problem going forward. We can create simple mobile read/write devices, but how do we connect them to the internet in the wilds of Somalia, when we cant be connected while driving up Page Mill Road??

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

Visions

These are cool : Twittervision and now Flickrvision. One wonders how many other visions there are out there. What else can be tracked on the globe? Of course the big difference between these two is that I actually learn more stuff from Twittervision than Flickrvision.

Friday, May 11, 2007

PC vs Mac

So during all of my technical difficulties, I got to use a MacBook Pro for an extended period. And while it was interesting, I don't think I will be switching to it. And its not the big things, its the little things. For example:

1: When I installed stuff, it would frequently just disappear on me. I should not have to drag stuff into the applications folder. Some software actually tells me to do this, while others just do it for me. Even the crappiest freeware shareware Windows EXE files on the internet have decent installers

2: The damn thing doesn't even have a Mic jack, just a line in. Whats the use of that? Ok so maybe it appeals to the musicians out there, but please, whats an additional 5 cent part in a $2000 plus machine?

3: Yes it looks great but its functionality is generally limited. I felt more at home with a 2 button mouse and I could use contextual menus. That is a MASSIVE time saver.

4: The whole same menu bar at the top all the time kinda drove me a little nuts. There were many times when I had no idea which program I was in.

5: Sometimes the dock would indicate that a program was loaded but when I clicked on it it never came to the front, so I had to reload it.

6: I spend a lot of time inputting stuff into web apps. Sometimes for no reason Firefox would just quit on me. So much of the Mac being less buggy.

7: A lot of the cross platform apps are insanely more advanced on Windows than on the Mac. Yahoo! Messenger doesn't even have archiving capability on the Mac.

8: You tell apps to load on startup and they don't - no explanation

On the other hand:

1: The webcam is very nice. Wish I knew the resolution of it so I could buy one like it for my PC. Too bad its a closely kept secret. I mean, WTF?

2: I miss my little bouncy icons when software needs my attention at the bottom. That was cool. Maybe vista has that?

3: The photobooth app is cool. My kids thought it was fun. I took a snappy "emo" shot of myself. That was entertaining for a few minutes.

So overall, its kinda a battle of form over function. If I used my computer for creative things, maybe I'd stick with the Mac. But I don't so I won't.

If you think about it, iPod, iTunes and soon iPhone are the real moneymakers for Apple. Maybe they should just give it up on the computer side.

Friday, May 4, 2007

Experiencing Technical Difficulties

Crud. When I woke up this morning with all these great show ideas swirling in my head, ready to record them for all of your enjoyment, I looked over at my laptop and it was hosed. I mean, really hosed. It has passed away quietly in the night, a victim of the dreaded BSOD, aka Blue Screen Of Death. For some reason, Microsoft sees fit to set up the system to auto reboot when this happens, so I can’t even read the error on the screen, before it fitfully reboots itself, over and over and over again. Afer toying with the idea of recording it on my Treo as in times of yore (say maybe the first 50 episodes?) I decided to spare you the horrible sound quality and skip the show. I also have a MacBook, so as I dropped of my PC to the help desk at work, I thought, hmmm maybe I can use that. But alas, that too was hosed. I fired it up and it just sat at this little spinning icon under the big gray Apple logo. Sat like that for about an hour. Problem with Macs is that they don’t even give you enough information to even attempt to diagnose the problem. I dropped that one off at the help desk as a picked up my laptop again.

See my previous post? How can it be that in 2007, we still have to resort to repair disks and boot disks and hours upon hours of downtime in order to just get back to where we were? So much lost time, lost money, lost, lost, lost. All the while, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs laugh all the way to the bank. There is no, mass market OS or system thats totally bulletproof. And I think thats unacceptable in this day and age. Why can we build embedded systems which work and work and work, but the simple PC being bulletproof confounds us? People woudl say that its the simplicity of the embedded systems - but some of those are getting pretty complex as well. Why not apply those principles to our lowly PCs and Macs?

Wednesday, May 2, 2007

Where's The Self-Healing OS?

Today, all of a sudden, just as i was about to start doing my show in the car, my laptop seized up.

Like every other morning I do my show, I take my powered up laptop into my car and put it on the passenger seat. I then plug in my Plantronics USB headset and listen for that ba-bump sound which means it connected fine. Today, nothing. In fact, worse than nothing. It locked up so solid not even a ctrl-alt-delete would call up the task manager. So I powered off. Powered back on and after some finagling, the laptop worked enough to record my show. it then promptly locked up again.

For the rest of the day, I'd be rebooting this thing over and over, sometimes it would work for a bit, then lock up again - forcing a full blown reboot. Sometimes the wireless would work, sometimes not. Sometimes the SD card slot drivers would break, then come back.

So my machines been flaky all day long. I thought to myself, self, this is 2007. Why can't I just run a little diagnostic which is just part of the OS which figures out whats REALLY wrong with my laptop and suggest a fix? What, is the Microsoft economy so fragile that OS's can't self-diagnose and self-repair themselves? If you ask me, we are WAYYYYY past when this should be rote for operating systems. They should all be self-healing by now.

Where is the self-healing OS? Do we really need this HUGE economy around fixing these things?

Tuesday, May 1, 2007

facebook, myspace, ryze, linkedin, oh my...

God, I think we need some kind of uber social networking meta-site where we can collapse all of our profiles into one place.

The only place I really filled out a full profile was at Ryze, and I hardly ever use that any more. I set up a MySpace page, but I just kept getting spam friend requests from people selling either stuff or themselves. I have a LinkedIn profile, which I used for a bit for my business connections, but thats also gotten a bit dusty. Funny how you can tell when people are looking for work or are about to start looking for work, they all seem to update their Linked In profiles. Maybe Linked In should sell a service to employers - if an employee is updating their profile, alert their HR that this person might not be too happy in their job. Now I have a Facebook profile, based on the prodding of some of my listeners.

Mebbe I should stick to one and just go with it. I'd love to see some uber service come about which just aggregates 'em all. Even better, it would be smart if one of the leading services, like Facebook, just figured out some way to gather the others' profile data. Are you listening, Mark?