Stuff to Think About

Best xkcd Comic So Far

2008-05-01T21:21:00.003-05:00

From xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

The Man Who Fell Sideways

I like. :-)

Will Smith?

2008-01-06T10:45:00.000-05:00

Who is Will Smith? THIS GUY is really Legend.

Check This Out

2007-12-27T21:25:00.000-05:00

This is just brilliant.

If you don't understand what's happening at first, it will become much clearer halfway through.

Disruptive Innovation

2007-10-23T22:04:00.000-05:00

Do you live in the United States?

Do you own a cell phone?

Are you currently under, or have you ever been under, a cell phone contract?

If you answered yes to all three of those questions, do yourself a favor and read this article by Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal. Or if you don't want to, or don't have the time to read the article, just watch Walt's video of it; the video is basically the same content.

The gist of what Walt is trying to say is this: the current state of cell phone service is broken. The cell phone carrier companies (Verizon, AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, etc.) have too much control. Here are three examples of the carriers' having too much control.

1. When you become a customer to one of these carriers, you have to sign a long-term commitment, usually a 2-year commitment, which has pricey consequences if you choose to break it.

2. When you become a customer to one of these carriers, you have a small selection of phones to choose from, and each phone is provided by the carrier itself.

3. When you get that phone, you can barely customize the phone to your liking beyond choosing a color scheme and ringtone.

Mossberg gives a careful analogy between cell phones and computers, explaining that we don't put up with the tight-grip of control when it comes to computer, television, or land-based telephone service (Would you ever consider buying a computer that let you customize the desktop wallpaper and the startup sound, but did NOT let you install any applications?).

So, America, why do we put up with this bullying? Most of you would probably answer, "I don't have a choice. I have to give in to the companies." And you'd be right. These companies have too much control. Mossberg writes that there are 2 ways to break the control. The first one is mostly beyond our control: government. If the government mandates a change, we will eventually be freed from the carriers' grips, but that would take several years.

Walt's second suggestion, however, is what I am interested in: Disruptive innovation. What is disruptive innovation? Let me paint you a picture.

Drivers: What happens when an accident causes a stretch of highway to shut down or slow to a halt? People find a different, faster route.

Music-lovers: What happens when CD prices become outrageous? People learn to share music over P2P networks for free.

Geeks: What happens when a router somewhere on the Internet goes down? Packets find another route that works.

Disruptive innovation is what happens when large numbers of people (or data packets :-D) are forced into something outrageously inconvenient. Disruptive innovation changes the status quo. It's happened dozens of times in the past, and it will happen again.

I can hardly wait until it happens to the cell phone carriers.

I know that disruptive innovation will eventually cure this disease under which we currently live, but what can we do now? The only thing I can think of is to stop signing these commitments. I urge you, dear reader, not to sign any more contracts with the phone companies. They will try to convince you to upgrade your phone and renew a 2-year commitment but please don't do it.

I created an online petition that you can sign. Click here. Please sign, tell your friends, and let's get the disruption started. The sooner we put our foot down, the sooner we will be free.

Don't Watch The Ex

2007-10-11T21:10:00.000-05:00

You know that feeling you get when you finish watching a movie that was terrible? That I-just-wasted-two-hours-of-my-life feeling? Halfway through these movies, there's usually a point where you say to yourself, "I should turn it off now and salvage what's left of my evening."

I just spent 89 minutes with that exact feeling. And I didn't listen to the urges to hit stop on the DVD player.

I want to congratulate the writers David Guion and Michael Handelman. Your flick "The Ex" is now my most hated movie.

You can put The Ex into the same category as Meet the Parents, where the protagonist gets the ever loving crap beat out of him for the first 98% of the movie, and then during the last 2% you get a ridiculously unworthy excuse-for-a-resolution. I hate these movies. Movies like these are the reason I so rarely watch movies that I haven't yet seen. I would have rather played Minesweeper for an hour and a half than sit through that crap.

I hope this blog post doesn't encourage anyone to rent (or heaven-forbid buy) this movie.

I feel robbed.

How the GPhone Could Change Everything

2007-09-11T11:32:00.000-05:00

Rumors of Google's mobile device have been circulating for over a year now. No matter how good the device will be at release, it is undeniable that Google will face a huge challenge in entering the mobile device market. Many people think that Google will inevitably fail if they tried to enter this game. Just listen to Don Reisinger at CNET, in his post entitled Future Implications: Why the Gphone will fail.

"Google will be met with a significant amount of competition that it wields no advantage over. Cell phones are a different ballgame and if you ask me, Google is ill-equipped to play this game."

But there is one simple way that Google could completely bypass this barrier.

Make the GPhone free.

That's right. Imagine being able to get your very own GPhone for free! Would you get one? I would. I would even be willing to pay the shipping cost. Google's official store could sell these puppies for $0.00 and charge a nominal shipping charge.

Apple has already sold over 1 million iPhones. I bet Google could give away 1 million iPhones in the first few days.

But how could Google possibly afford to give away so many phones? The answer is simple, and I know you all can see it coming.

Advertising.

Everybody uses Google to search the Internet, and Google makes 99% of its revenue from the ads that users click after performing a search. By giving away the phones for free, Google would be taking an initial loss, but the number of Google searches will increase drastically.

Google is working extremely hard right now to keep the cost of these phones as low as possible. They're doing this by using their own Linux-based operating system instead of the expensive Windows Mobile OS. Also, Google is rumored to be in communication with multiple hardware vendors including HTC and Orange. By working with several hardware vendors, Google is forcing companies to compete for the partnership, which will lower the cost to produce the phones even further.

Think about it this way. If you owned all of the gas stations in the United States, and you were able to develop cheap and stable cars, would you give them away to anyone willing to come and pick them up?

With this approach, I think Google won't have any problem entering the mobile space.

Why You Shouldn't Use Your Phone at a Concert

2007-07-15T18:32:00.000-05:00

glumbert.com - Why you shouldn't use your phone at a concert

I Want an iPhone

2007-06-26T19:59:00.000-05:00

It's too bad I'm trapped for one more year in my contract with T-Mobile.

Why Safari On The iPhone Is Awesome

2007-06-13T05:42:00.000-05:00

For a quick recap: Last Monday (June 11th) at WWDC 2007 (Worldwide Developer's Conference), Apple announced that the iPhone will not have an SDK (Software Development Kit). This means that developers will not be able to write software that runs natively on the iPhone.

Apple announced that instead of an SDK, they've brought Safari to the iPhone. Safari is a Mac Web Browser (recently Safari was released for Windows). This means that developers WILL be able to write software that runs in a browser, that will in turn run on the iPhone.

This announcement was met with a plethora of boos, like this post from Gizmodo:
Fast And Furious: No iPhone SDK Means No Killer iPhone Apps

The Digg article referencing that Gizmodo post has several comments expressing the Digg crowd's sentiment:

"Thank you Mr. Steve Jobs for helping me make my decision to buy a PS3." [link]

"That 'SDK' for the iPhone is a slap in the face to developers." [link]

[Steve Jobs] showed a lot of disrespect to all those people who came out there hoping to hear something exciting they could work on. He basically told a bunch developers waiting to build great apps to go build a html page. [link]

Steve Jobs should have listened to Ballmer. "DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS! DEVELOPERS!" [link]

It's clear that many people were expecting Apple to release an SDK like Microsoft does for the Windows Mobile platform.

Months ago, when I first heard that Apple would not release an SDK, I agreed with these quotes. I thought the iPhone would be a joke, that it would flop, and that it would be undeserving of being called a "smartphone."

But after learning that the iPhone's Safari will be able to run full-fledged Ajax applications, I've completely changed my mind.

Honestly, why is it such a bad move on Apple's part? As a developer, I am much more willing to write a web application, which I have been doing for a living for the past two years, than learn another programming language so I can write applications that run ONLY on the iPhone. If you are a developer, which would you rather do? Perhaps Steve Jobs is thinking about "developers developers developers."

Software can be written right now that would run on the iPhone at release. Dozens of existing web applications will run on the iPhone at release.

My only gripe with Apple's decision here is this: I've always been reluctant to purchase a mobile data plan (they're too expensive). If all my apps must be web apps, and I don't have access to the web, it would seem that I'd be completely unable to run anything. So I'd be forced into a data plan.

But wait.

Didn't Google JUST release a product that helps take web applications offline? Yes, Google Gears promises to do just that. Currently, Google Gears is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer. But if you look at the fine print:

You can see that Safari support is coming soon. :-)

With Google Gears, it will be much easier to develop web applications that don't require a constant internet connection. I think this will be an awesome partnership that helps broaden the possibilities for mobile applications (at least for those of us who might be without an unlimited data plan).

Just one example is Google Reader. I've always wanted to be able to use Google Reader on my mobile phone while offline. Then after reading some of my feeds, to be able to sync back up, marking as read the feeds I'd seen, starring the feeds I'd starred, and keeping unread the feeds I hadn't yet seen.

With iPhone Safari + Google Gears, things like this don't seem too far off.

Mobile Internet Data Plans

2007-05-31T13:30:00.000-05:00

Yesterday, my wife and I had an ultimate Frisbee game scheduled for 6:30pm. It was our third pre-season game. Our first two games took place at "Kennet fields." For some reason, I thought that our third game was scheduled to take place at "Stetson fields."

So it's 6:15 and we pull in to the Stetson Middle School. There were several sports fields, but every one of them was already occupied by either softball players or lacrosse players.

We spent at least 20 minutes driving and walking around the school looking for our fellow ultimate Frisbee players. No luck.

It would have been the perfect time for me to make use of my mobile phone's Internet capabilities. My phone has a 3-inch touch-screen and a slide-out keyboard. Packed in its holster, my mobile phone should have been ready to rumble, bridging me to the Internet so I could get help.

Unfortunately, I don't have a data plan. Why? They're just too expensive!

Am I just being too cheap or are these plans still too expensive for casual use? I would love to check my Gmail, read my Google Reader feeds, navigate Google Maps, have access to my Google Calendar, browse Digg, and otherwise just surf the Internet, all on the go.

My phone allows it (I have the T-Mobile MDA).
I definitely could benefit from the use of it (like yesterday).

It's just too expensive! My phone bill is currently about $80 per month, and adding a data plan would add $30. I just can't justify paying $30 per month for this. Am I alone here?

Why isn't the cost of these data plans coming down? The iPhone is rumored to have a $30 data plan. Cingular's data plans range from $35-$45. Verizon's data plans range from $30-$40. Sprint's data plans range from $40-$60.

Update. Turns out, Cingular has a pretty nice plan at $20 (Unlimited MEdia Net Data and 200 Text/Video/Picture Messages). Thanks for the heads up, readers!

Maybe it's just me, but I won't be adding a data plan to my account until the cost comes way down. I might consider it at $15 per month. At $10 per month, I'd switch carriers to get the mobile access to the web. But for now, I'll have to do without.

PS: My wife and I made it to our ultimate game. We ended up calling a buddy of mine, who was near a computer and was able to look up a phone number for us. Turns out, our game was at Kennet fields, 15 minutes away.

Microsoft Has Done It Again

2007-05-30T08:45:00.001-05:00

Twenty years ago, when less than 1 in 100 people owned a personal computer, Bill Gates and his cohorts had a vision. "A computer on every desk, in every home, running Microsoft software."

Today, Microsoft has another vision and it's arguably as ambitious as the first. Microsoft Surface.

In essence, Surface is a 30-inch digital table that will sit in your living room. It will interact with your digital devices such as your phone, digital camera, PC, or home console. More importantly, it will interact with you and your everyday objects.

This isn't a new "pc" or even a new "device." This is a new "product category." It's a new platform. A new way for us to interact with the digital world.

From the press release:

Customers in T-Mobile retail stores might place different cell phones on Surface’s interactive surface where product features, prices and phone plans would appear so they could be easily compared.

In the video, two phones are compared. To get a better view of the details, the man in the video simply picks up the phones and puts them back down on the surface, slightly farther apart. The information boxes grow accordingly.

Head on over to the Microsoft Surface website and check out the videos. You won't be disappointed.

Google + Apple + AT&T

2007-05-23T13:55:00.000-05:00

The official Google Blog today has a story about a new phone from Cingular, the BlackBerry 8800. This phone has GPS, so when using Google Maps for Mobile, the map automatically centers around your current location, with a blue flashing dot "exactly where you are!"

That's all really exciting, but does anyone else find it weird that The Official Google Blog is basically running an advertisement for Cingular (AT&T) that screams "Switch to Cingular!"

And what about Apple's iPhone being available only for Cingular customers? Probably more blatant than Google, Apple is screaming, "Switch to Cingular!"

To me it's awfully mysterious that these guys are pushing consumers to switch to a specific carrier. Do Google and/or Apple have any kind of partnership with Cingular?

Maybe it's just that Cingular is the carrier that's pushing the hardest to make these kinds of partnerships. Whatever the case, other carriers (T-Mobile, I'm looking at you) need to step it up or they'll start seeing mass exodus.

Haikus

2007-05-21T10:19:00.001-05:00

:-)

I got my Digg account back!

2007-05-03T14:56:00.000-05:00

I sent an email to Digg support, and received a response about 90 minutes later. The entire response is as follows:

We have unbanned your account.
--Digg Support

w00t! :-D My account is back!

HD-DVD Fiasco: Let the Truth Come Out

2007-05-02T06:59:00.000-05:00

Several very popular websites are now linking here, including TechCrunch and Wired, so if my site is intermittently unavailable, I apologize.

To recap: an HD-DVD processing key was submitted to Digg. That post was removed and that user's Digg account was deleted. I re-submitted the story. My post was removed and my Digg account was deleted. Hundreds of stories were submitted since then, some being removed, some slipping through the cracks.

Now, Kevin Rose (Digg's founder) announces on the Digg blog that our voices have been heard and that Digg's editorial crew will no longer be removing stories about this processing key.

This series of events brings up lots of questions. Ryan Block of Engadget asked what I think is the central issue here. "How did such a loyal userbase as Digg’s so quickly divert its all-consuming energy to defying — even damaging — the company to which it was so loyal?"

In other words, why are we doing this?

The answer to that question is simple. People want the truth.

If a single entity is responsible for giving the news to the masses, that entity has the ability to control it. Before the Internet, people heard the news from the television, radio, and newspaper. It was one-way communication. People heard what was broadcast, and accepted it as truth. There was no such thing as "user-generated content", or even feedback on a story or article.

Enter the digital era.

With the possibilities created by the Internet, every person has a voice. The truth can no longer be controlled by a single entity. The truth is the truth, and I say let the truth be told.

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is a hexadecimal number. You can't copyright a number. It's not illegal for people to disseminate this number. It's not intellectual property. Therefore, Digg was wrong in their attempts to destroy all articles relating to this number.

Digg was one of the websites that most closely fits the ideal: Allowing people to receive un-filtered content. If Digg begins censoring, another site will pop up and users will flock to it en mass.

We're not addicted to Digg. We're addicted to the truth.

How I got banned from Digg

2007-05-01T12:08:00.000-05:00

It all started last night. I'm reading my RSS feeds and I come across an article on Digg.

Spread this number. Now.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It's the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Movie studios are going ballistic over this leak, so Digg the story up and make it reach the front page.

Are you serious? That's awesome! Somebody found a key that allows Linux users watch HD-DVDs! Naturally, I wanted to find out more, so I clicked the link. Much to my dismay, that story had been deleted from Digg already. Why is this story gone? Who deleted it? How dare they?! They can't censor that kind of stuff can they? I go back to my Google Reader, copy and paste the entire thing into a new story, and resubmit it.

I went to sleep, and didn't think much about what I had done.

Until morning.

Upon reading my RSS feeds again, and come across MY story, on the front page of Digg!

I click the link and there's over 15,000 votes! I felt like a hero reading all the comments that people were writing. Comments like:

It's times like these when all I can say is: I love digg.
OMG THIS DAY IS BEAUTIFUL!!! I WANT TO HUG MY FELLOW GEEKS!!!!

Other comments say that Digg itself was down for 10 minutes because of the rate this story was getting dugg. People were getting 404s when trying to reach Digg. Even Duggmirror went down.

So I'm reading the comments, and every once in a while I'd refresh the page a few times to see how high the digg count would climb. And then it happened. First, the comments all disappeared, and then the story itself disappeared. And then, my digg account disappeared. My account is no longer valid.

There you have it folks, if you submit a story that Digg needs to censor, your account too will be deleted.

But wait. There's more.

My friend Chris Haley was smart enough to save the entire page at almost the height of its fame. At 15,492 Diggs, HERE IS THE FULL ARTICLE IN ALL ITS GLORY. All the comments are there. You can even expand the hidden comments. Thanks Chris!

So who knows what's gonna happen next? Leave a comment. :-D Also, please support me by Digging this article!

The Fox is Eating Lunch!

2007-03-20T11:51:00.000-05:00

The Google Personalized Homepage is becoming more personalized. Google released 6 themes with which you can skin the homepage. The available options are Beach, Bus Stop, City Scape, Sweet Dreams, Tea House, and Seasonal Scape:
The cool thing about these themes is that they change the scenery of your homepage depending on the time of day and the weather. You simply type in your zip code, and Google does all the rest.

I chose the Tea House them. As I write this post over my lunch break, the fox is eating lunch:

Water Bridge

2007-03-20T07:02:00.000-05:00

Check out this bridge.

It took 6 years and 500 million euros to build! At 918 meters long, this is the largest water bridge. It was built over the Elbe River in Magdeburg, Germany.

I found a neat trivia question about the bridge: Did that bridge have to be designed to withstand the additional weight of ship and barge traffic, or just the weight of the water?

Answer:
It only needs to be designed to withstand the weight of the water! Why? A ship always displaces an amount of water that weighs the same as the ship, regardless of how heavily a ship may be loaded. Neat, huh?

J2ME on T-Mobile MDA

2007-03-16T13:17:00.000-05:00

Has anyone been successful writing a J2ME application and getting it to work on a T-Mobile MDA?

Kid Does Something Amazing, Google Listens

2007-02-16T03:36:00.000-05:00

If you haven't heard already, check this out. It's an absolute craze right now.

In short, somebody has some kind of business idea and desperately wants to pitch it to Google. Fed up with the lack of response he's received after using Google's online business proposal form, he's flown to Mountain View California uninvited and wishing for the best.

Not many people know what his idea is right now. But his site has been covered by Digg, and one digger has done some rooting around in the internet archives and found what he thinks might be the big idea.

Google's Valentine's Day Logo

2007-02-14T07:18:00.000-05:00

Or should I say, Googe's Valentine's Day Logo?
Regardless, happy Valentine's Day!

Google Maps for Mobile App

2007-02-01T14:10:00.000-05:00

Google today released Google Maps for Mobile as a Windows Mobile standalone application, not a Java midlet. It has GPS support, which is very cool for those with a GPS-enabled phone.

So far, in addition to this release, Google has released Google Maps as a Java midlet, and a Gmail app as a Java midlet. All of Google's other mobile offerings are in the form of mobile-friendly websites, such as Google Reader Mobile and Google News Mobile.

I hope Google's mobile development keeps picking up. I still haven't been able to find a mobile RSS reader that synchronizes well for offline reading support.

Merry Christmas

2006-12-24T22:54:00.000-05:00

How Digg Began

2006-12-19T07:58:00.000-05:00

Many of you probably don't know what Digg is. Digg.com is a website that has traditionally been a news website. Now it aggregates news, videos, and podcasts.

Digg is really popular among tech geeks like myself because it started with only technology news. The reason it's so popular is that anyone can submit a story. And anyone can see the list of submitted stories. If you like the story, you can "digg it," giving it a +1 vote. If a story gets enough votes, it'll be sent to the front page.

Over the past couple of years, Digg has done nothing but grow! Here is an interesting picture of "how it all began." The guy in the picture is Kevin Rose, Digg's founder.

That picture just goes to show that anything can happen on the Internet. Who knows, maybe you'll be the mastermind behind the next monster website.

Not My Job!

2006-12-01T15:31:00.000-05:00

Check out what I found on Seth Godin's blog.

Not my job! :-)