H50.NET

Efficient Markets!

2009-06-09T09:23:00.001-04:00

Vero Possumus!

2009-05-29T13:40:00.001-04:00

The new Escalade is out.

Etched in Stone

2009-05-26T23:44:00.002-04:00

Obama: Don't Leave Home Without Him

2009-05-19T17:36:00.004-04:00

Obama's in your car, bank, power company, doctor's office, and now he's inserted himself directly into your wallet.

He's a Moderate, Remember?

2009-05-15T16:48:00.002-04:00

JJ Abrams Loves the Space-Time Continnum

2009-05-11T22:16:00.003-04:00

Will someone please get the guy a flux capacitor t-shirt?

Stole a Dollar? Spend Two!

2009-05-11T21:40:00.002-04:00

Is it Time for a Tax on Wealth?

2009-05-11T21:18:00.003-04:00

Soon we will all have the dignified pleasure of exchanging our savings accounts and retirement accounts for 100 year treasury bonds!

Look, Ryan Seacrest

2009-05-09T21:19:00.001-04:00

Here Comes the Government!

2009-05-07T17:06:00.001-04:00

The banks have to raise almost $75bn. I can only think of one source.

US Department of Wells Fargo

2009-05-06T11:18:00.001-04:00

Better go long banner makers!

US Bank of America!

2009-05-06T08:47:00.001-04:00

Now that Obama owns Bank of America, I think it's time for some redecorating at One Bryant Park.

iPhone EMail- I miss my BlackBerry

2009-05-03T23:17:00.001-04:00

The iPhone is great in so many contexts that I wouldn't go back to my
BlackBerry, but the iPhone's Exchange integration doesn't just lack
features that BlackBerry has; it frustrates, confounds and annoys.

I'll start with the obvious set of missing features that every pundit has documented:

Notes
Tasks
Search

But there are so many subtle features missing:

Offline sync

This has always been an unbelievable frustration for me. I live in New York, so I spend a lot of time without cell service in the subway, elevators, etc, and these are often good times to clear out your inbox. Well, if you do so on your iPhone, it won't sync read, deleted and moved messages, and it will pop up lots of modal error messages that are hopelessly obvious and frustrating telling you that you don't have cell service. The BlackBerry does it better.

Out of office reminder configuration
Creating filters on the phone
Separate phone filters from Outlook filters

I used to have some messages stay in my inbox, but skip the BlackBerry. In order to avoid receiving a certain message on your iPhone, you have to send it to a different folder globally.

Merged inbox view for all accounts including sent messages and text messages
Instant message view

Why do you have to wait two seconds to read an email on a device that can play 3D games? It's ridiculous.

Notifications

Do me a favor: turn on your iPhone, and tell me if you have an email or not. You have to unlock it, and if you have a password, this whole process takes many seconds.
Let's say you have 100 emails in your inbox, and you receive a new email. On the BlackBerry, there's a little star behind the number of messages read, but on the iPhone, you have to remember that it was 100, not 101, and then subtract in order to know if you've received a new message since last glance.
Stop with the modal dialogue boxes telling you that you're in airplane mode when you just put it in airplane mode!

The thing that bothers me most about these weaknesses is that almost all of them are simple fixes, and none of them have been addressed. Isn't there anyone at Apple who rides the subway and tries to manage his email? Am I alone here?!

Chrysler Bond Holders Hate Ice Cream and Balloons!

2009-04-30T14:41:00.004-04:00

Do we live in the real world? The political class is raking Chrysler execs across the coals because... they want their money back! Listen to this gem:

“It is outrageous that a handful of hedge funds and other creditors have refused to join all the other stakeholders in participating in the restructuring necessary to pave the way for a giant ice cream truck and balloon factory,” said Levin.

Well, that's not exactly what he said, but it may as well have been.

Review: MacBook Pro

2008-12-01T20:48:00.003-05:00

Well, I went out and bought myself a completely unnecessary piece of computer hardware: Apple's new 15" MacBook Pro. This was the thought process that led me to unload $2,000 on a laptop:

I haven't bought myself anything in a while
I've been using the same computer since 2006
I live in a smallish New York apartment, and I have a huge gaming rig taking up valuable real estate
I'm tired of how much Vista cranks my hard drive
This thing is ridiculously beautiful

So I bought it.

First Impressions

The first thing you notice when you get your hands on the MacBook Pro is that it feels like something organic. It's smooth and the fit and finish is incredible. Most pieces of electronics have loose fitting parts that you can manipulate even when they're brand new. This thing feels like it has been through millions of years of evolution before it hit your desktop. It's not really carved out of a single piece of aluminum-- there are a few pieces of aluminum-- but it feels great and I know it will last me a long time.

Nice Details

The hard drive is user-serviceable
The headphone jack has the same functionality as your iPhone headphone jack: it will use the iPhone headset's microphone and button
Software turns screen white when it takes your account's photo
The new multi-touch track pad isn't that big a deal, and it's not a mouse replacement, but it is a nice incremental improvement, and I was using it like a pro after about 20 minutes.
It has two video cards: a low power integrated card and a performance-oriented discrete card. Great idea.

Software / OS

The new MacBooks come with Mac OS X Leopard pre-installed, and when you start it up for the first time, the first thing you'll notice is that nothing happens. It just starts you up at the desktop and no craplets open. No Anti-Virus upsale opens. The desktop isn't littered with ISP offers. Nothing. Happens. This is really refreshing for anyone that's bought a pre-built machine from Dell or HP in the past couple years.

I won't make this a review of Mac OS X vs Vista, but let me tell you that the hard drive doesn't crank nearly as much. The computer sits still when it's not being used.

As you get more into the software, you'll fine my favorite new feature in Leopard: spaces. The idea is that you have multiple desktops to place applications. The new feature here is that you can assign an app to a particular "space" in perpetuity. I arranged my spaces as follows:

Adium IM Client and Firefox
Mail and Skype
iTunes and iPhoto
Terminal, Remote Desktop and System Preferences

I show the finder and any video game on all "spaces". The great thing about this usage paradigm is that you don't have to minimize all the time and applications start to have very defined locations (much like the dock vs the windows task bar: Firefox is always in the same spot regardless of when I started it), and this leads to better muscle-memory for repetitive tasks as the expected location of each application integrates with your subconscious work flow.

Complaints on the software side:

Flash 9 is dog slow. Upgrade to Flash 10 right away
Installing Warcraft 3 is a pain and VERY slow since the installer and the original software was built for PowerPC. It took way to long to get the patched Universal Binary that doesn't need to be translated.
No Google Chrome, but Firefox works well
The dashboard just feels like bloatware to me, and it's yet another thing to configure. I prefer my iGoogle page that is the same at work and at home.
I had to pay $20 for Connect360 to get this thing to stream to my XBox; this is free in Windows (obviously)
It's just difficult to get things like your Company's SSL VPN working in Mac OS X. Much of this software is biased to IE or Windows. I got it to work, but it was a project.
Lack of remote desktop. VNC is slow. There are non-free alternatives.
Keyboard is tough for gaming

Gaming

The only game I've tried on the system is Warcraft 3. As I mention earlier, it was a bit of a pain to install, but once you get it installed, it does run very smoothly and at the native, wide-screen resolution. All is not perfect, though:

Blizzard has done a terrible job adapting the keyboard commands to Macs, and I'm not sure some of the remappings I want to do are even possible without changing keys system-wide, which is possible.
The Mighty Mouse is not a gaming mouse. The little ball in the middle gets moved every time you attempt to right-click, which is about a 85% success rate, by the way.
It was / is not obvious how to minimize a game once it's full-screen. You hit Command-M, but it's not documented at all

That's about it for complaints in Warcraft 3, but I imagine I'd face similar problems with other games. Performance-wise, it's very good. Fram rates start at 120 when configured for the absolute best possible graphics and degrade only into the 70s in a heated battle. I was very impressed.

Hardware Cons

Well, there have to be a few negatives about this luscious hardware, right? Here are a few things I don't like:

It gets hot, especially when gaming
The battery life is OK, but not great. About 3+ hours in low power mode and about 45 minutes if you're playing a processor intensive video game at full speed.
The glossy screen seems a little Best Buy, but I'm getting used to it. At least it's glass, not plastic.
It's a little heavy for travel

Final Thoughts:

This really is a great piece of hardware. If you're a hardcore Windows user, I think you'll be surprised at the usability and stability this thing offers. It's also not your old, slow Mac. This computer is fast. It's a little overpriced, but it's built to a level of precision and detail that I've never really experienced in a piece of consumer electronics.

BUY

OIL

2008-08-15T13:06:00.001-04:00

It's all Bush's fault!

Giambi flips the bird!

2008-07-29T20:51:00.000-04:00

Alert

2008-07-29T17:46:00.000-04:00

Wrinkle

2008-07-28T16:40:00.000-04:00

Wrinkles

2008-07-24T16:37:00.000-04:00

Shirt

2008-07-23T16:57:00.000-04:00

Shirt

2008-07-22T16:58:00.000-04:00

Gravity

2008-07-21T16:36:00.000-04:00

The Art of Decadence

2008-07-18T23:40:00.001-04:00

Tshirt

2008-07-18T17:04:00.000-04:00

This is day one in an ongoing effort to use gravity to unwrinkle this
block alert t-shirt. Should take about a year.