iPhone 5 launch

Lots of commentary on the new design. My ultimate take on iPhone releases is that they are (like other phones BTW, it's not just Apple) fashion inducements. That is, every 2-3 updates they significantly change the look of the device. Change it enough that someone from 10+' away can immediately distinguish the new from the old.

Then it's just a matter of normal sales & marketing... if your brand is powerful, people want to be seen with the latest and greatest from a fashion point of view. There are people who care about the latest & greatest technology of course, but in my experience they are a distinct minority.

How fast...

... can a person's nails grow, honestly? (click, click, click) every fscking day!

Satire, surely.

There is apparently a guy "out there" whose name is Phillip Warton (not my son Philip), and who has a tendency to mistype his email (which must be some variation of p?warton@a_famous_domain.com) to match one that I use when he's signing up for newsletters, marketing email, etc. And sometimes even when he's sharing his contact information. What I can piece together about my friend Phil so far: he lives in the Chicago area, is somehow involved in the business of tending bar (or maybe he owns a bar?), has an interest in the local music scene, has had at least one fee-for-service contract end unhappily, and, as I just learned, just might be a a "socially conservative" Republican.

I surmise this because I have been subscribed (as Phillip) to a conservative GOP mailing list (I guess the equivalent to MoveOn.org, but run by the "I got mine" crowd) called GOPUSA and whose newsletter is titled "The Eagle." I kid you not.

Now, what prompted this post was a newsletter I received a couple of weeks ago, just as Rush Limbaugh's vulgar, misogynistic, specious, and revolting comments on Sandra Fluke were coming back to haunt him (inasmuch as advertisers started pulling their ads from his radio network). It came just after he "apologized" for upsetting his advertisers (that's sarcasm BTW), and the headline was what got me.

Rush, At the Tip of Liberty's Spear

While it obviously was not meant as a joke, it caught me by such surprise that I laughed out loud, and I mean really laughed.  Who could possibly use such soaring imagery to describe Rush Limbaugh*, one of the most base of the polemic conservative "shout radio" hosts?! And what on earth does Rush have to do with liberty? He's a commercial entertainer whose primary job is to keep his listener base in a constant state of outrage (or just plain old rage), I guess so they'll buy stuff.  His comments indicate he knows his audience well, and what sells with them.

I found the whole thing so awesomely funny that I want to start a movement riffing on this kind of absurdity. How about:

Lady GaGa, Lifeblood of the National Endowment for the Arts

Let's hear yours!

Peter

*His brother apparently.

Pro-environment?

Shooting some owls to save some other owls? Sounds like something Douglas Adams might have come up with...

That famous saying...

.... if you don't like the weather in Oregon, GTFO. Or find some way not to complain, okay? Waiting 5 minutes is NOT going to help.

Just need to say...

I still can't believe how much I love this car. I've been driving it for 4 years now and I like it more every year. Okay, yes, it has its downsides... it is thirsty, no doubt. It costs rather a lot to repair. (For example, the dealer charges $1,300 to - get this - replace the alternator. The factory radiator is so poorly made that it is considered (by owners, not by BMW) a wear part, like brake linings. The rear glass hatch struts cost $800 to replace because you have to drop 1/2 of the headliner to change them. And don't even ask about O2 sensors or catalytic converters.) It needs repair more frequently than a Honda or Toyota would. The ride is firmer than most people prefer. It is quite unkind to tires. It is a BMW, with all the reputation that implies. And it is a slushbox, alas, because Americans have proven too lazy to make it cost effective to import the six-speed here.

But man, is it ever an amazing car to drive. Tremendous amounts of torque available anywhere in the rev band. Startling, transitioning to just plain frightening acceleration. A top speed which is preposterous in the US, but which makes *relatively* high-speed cruising downright relaxing. I've cruised (on open highways, with miles of visibility and near as makes no odds zero traffic conditions) at 90mph and it's a very mellow experience.

And when you finally get it away from the light-to-light boulevards and off the highways, the most surprising characteristic of this machine is revealed. It feels - and I don't believe I'm exaggerating - almost as nimble as my old Mk II MR2 Turbo. Cornering is so poised and stable that even on unfamiliar roads you find you are not bothering to check the posted corner speed signs. You look ahead, point the car, and it goes. With all that torque, you can opt to be lazy and leave it one or two gears higher, yet still exit corners at speed. Or, you can use the power-band and launch into the next section of road. It's exhilarating, and the car's behavior on the backroads belies its size and, well, girth.

What makes this car so compelling to me is the dual-nature of its personality. The ride may be stiff but it's also supple. It goes like hell yet has the poise, cool, and quiet you'd expect in an executive sedan. It has lots of lovely, subtle touches that make me happy (like remote-window roll-down, the ability to program the fan to turn on at a specified time, turn-once start, auto-dimming mirror, heated seats, etc). The things inside it just work, without fuss. Compare that to my old MR2 Turbo. That was a great car - fast, precise, controlled, purposeful. But on a long highway cruise the ride made it uncomfortable. Seating positions were quite limited. It was loud inside. The interior controls worked well enough but felt plasticy and fragile. The sound system was very poor. It was twitchy. It was downright evil in snow and ice. Oh yeah, it also only had two seats. In other words, it was not an all-rounder (and that's okay, it was a brilliant car to own and drive and I still miss it). The 540iT is an all-rounder, an excellent one with lots of cargo space as a bonus.

Now, if you re-read the first paragraph above, you'll probably note that I have had this car in the shop on more than one occasion, and indeed I have.  When I do take it in, I get a loaner from the dealer. Their strategy is to give people a taste of the latest and greatest models so that when they get their old car back, they start to seriously consider replacing it with something newer, like the fancy car they were just driving. Over the past four years, my local guys have loaned me, in no particular order:

1) Couple of flavors of entry level 328 4-doors
2) Entry level 528i
3) 328iX wagon
4) 2011 535iX sedan (has a 300hp twin-turbo straight 6)
5) 2012 328iC with 92 miles (two door hard-top convertible)

They all had low miles (especially #5) and were in practically new condition. Each had its own cool-factors - the 328 wagon is a really well made and practical machine; the 528 was very quiet and had an enormous trunk; the 328iC roof is a marvel to behold; and the 535 was a truly blisteringly fast car. They had various excellent gadgetry like integrated BlueTooth (audio and headset), navigation, backup cameras, panoramic sunroofs, heated rear seats and steering wheels - cupholders for God's sake - which felt truly luxurious. All of them were very well behaved and drove marvelously. But each time I went to the dealer, turned in the loaner, and got back into my old wagon I breathed a sigh of relief. Imperfect it may be, but I wouldn't trade it for any of the loaners I've driven.

It is an amazingly satisfying car to own and drive.

Netflix CEO apology

Reed, about  your apology:

 

    Your mistake is fundamental and clear. You are making your company's growing pains into your customers' problem.

Peter

PS - attempting to be humble about not communicating clearly when it's blindingly obvious that people are angry about the price hikes is not helping your credibility.

Unintended Consequences

It is a really, really bad idea to give drivers such as myself a countdown on walk signals because they tell me exactly when the light will go yellow. Hard not to consider them a challenged issued. Need to stop that, I guess.


Peter

Just don't do it

I know you love your music. You might even love your iPod/MP3 player, which is frankly kind of creepy. I understand that you feel naked without something in/on/over your ears, hissing music quietly to innocent bystanders (and yes, being subjected to most popular music is the equivalent of assault IMO). But when you're on your bike, please: take them OFF. You are both a menace and are menaced when you ride with headphones in any context other than a spin class.

Menace: you can't hear people around you. Like me, passing you on your left because you're slow, calling out "on your left". More importantly, your mind isn't on your surroundings, so you aren't going to notice that kid shooting out of his driveway chasing a Frisbee until it's too late (and he sure isn't going to hear you, since you're on an essentially silent vehicle, not counting the hissing headphones).

Menaced: you can't hear people and cars around you. Like that car racing down the cross street, clearly oblivious to the red light he's about to blow through. Or the motor rev'ing as another driver prepares to turn across traffic into the driveway you're passing (and he's on his cell phone so he sure as hell hasn't noticed you). You can't hear that there's a car right behind you when you swerve suddenly to avoid the broken glass on the shoulder.

This _should_ be common sense. If you're using a bike to travel, take it seriously. Riding with headphones is NOT the same as playing the stereo in your car.

Local blogger mulls posting a rant...

I have decided that the word mull is overused by the media. How about this headline?

"Editors mull using some different goddamn verbs in headlines"

Seriously, what is it about this word that seems to attract those in journalism? It doesn't fit the "race to the bottom" mentality for dumbing down written media to appeal to a wider audience (double-meaning intended), as first effectively used by USA Today. How many people do you know who use the word "mull" in regular conversation? Probably not many, unless perhaps you hang out with journalists.

Now personally I prefer vocabularital variety (yes I made that word up), and I suppose I'd rather see more uncommon words in headlines and articles than fewer; but mull has jumped the shark. It's just overused. It's time to consider, ponder, wonder, think about, contemplate, ruminate, study, and mull over using some other words.

K, sorry, thanks, bai.

Peter (used to have a mullet)

Time sensitive humor

Apple is really having problems this year with bars and iPhones. First they lose a phone in a bar, then they lose bars on the phone. And now they're trying to put the guy who found the lost phone behind bars.

Yeah, snarky! iPhone 4 is still a very nicely done product.

Peter

EVO 4G: < Insert lame Star Wars droid joke here >

As sorry as I am to admit it, I did indeed hop on the hype bandwagon. Me = an owner of the world's first 4g phone. I've had this phone for a few days now and it's pretty cool even though I'm usually not fanboyish. As an iPhone* user for the last two years (jailbroken for some of that time), I've a few things to say about this device, even though no one will ever read this blog. :-)

Two things to keep in mind.
1) Someone comparing a new device to their old device (like I am doing here) is going to have a difficult time being objective about the differences between the two. Because that person (me) can't remember the details of the struggles they had when the old device was their brand new device. It's similar to end-user car tire reviews: when someone gets new tires, they always rave about how much more quiet they are than the old tires. Well, old tires are loud because a good deal of the rubber that was absorbing road noise is gone! So, yeah.
2) As you're reading this, pretend I wrote "to me" before or after all of my subjective opinions. It's really okay if you and I disagree on some of this stuff; it doesn't make either one of us an idiot, or lame, etc. Other things about your personality may, but not this.

Okay, enough philosophizing. Here we go.

Physical - what I don't like

There are three things that bug me.

1) Shape. Look at it straight-on from the top or from the bottom and you'll notice it is not rectangular - it is trapezoidal (ignoring the rounded back), the back being the longer side. So you get sort of wedgy pointy edges digging into your hand as you hold it. See?



Uncomfortable, silly.

2) Plastic. Probably a stupid fashion conscious nit, but I really wish the bezel around the screen was metal (I'm pretty sure it's a hard plastic). It makes it feel, well, plasticy.

3) Wakeup. There is only one button to "wake" the device (on the top). Would be nice if, say, the volume buttons doubled as wake up buttons. I'm sure there's an app for that.

4) Actually there are four things that bug me. The 4th is the recessed speaker grill... this is going to end up looking like the exhaust vent on the dryer before too long (i.e. lint stuck in all the corners) from carrying it around in my pocket.

Physical - things I like

1) Screen is lovely; physical controls are well done. People actually oooh and aaahhh when they see it. Not sure about the color cast, so I will look into color profiles to try to get it a little less green/blue.

2) Kickstand; well worth whatever space they sacrificed to hinge it. Just realize it's only for displaying/watching stuff, it's useless for interacting with the device (touch screen, phone falls over, kind of like the droids at the end of the big battle in what is laughingly called Star Wars Episode One).

3) "Home" buttons; I really like that they aren't mechanical. They also make navigating the device a lot easier. Now, ideally, they would be customizable (for instance I haven't used search more than once or twice). But they are very slick.

4) Heft; it seems to weigh exactly what it should weigh, given its size.

Usability - what I don't like

I'll start by enumerating what I don't like.

1) Phone widget. It's limited, and maybe I just haven't figured everything out yet, but one thing the iPhone does superbly well is the phone part of the phone. You have "tabbed" phone with contacts, "speed dial", keypad, voicemail, and missed calls all one touch away. With Sense/Android, these things are not well integrated. Since that's the main purpose of a cell phone I find this gap unhappy.

2) Voice mail + BlueTooth. Okay, honestly, how hard could this possibly be? When I'm using a phone function on the device and I have a BlueTooth headset connection (HFP protocol), use the BlueTooth device. Right? Right, but sorry! Playing a voice mail back through the visual voice-mail widget plays it on the ear-speaker. You can have it play on the external speaker, but not on the headset. That is just wrong. Workaround: call voice mail via the phone and of course it uses the headset. Wow.

3) Maps. Okay, the Google map app itself is very good. Navigation, layers, etc. all work very well and it's WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY faster than my iPhone 3G ever was. However, there's one thing that bugs the hell out of me: zooming. There are predefined zoom levels, and they feel very far apart. Why? It's extremely irritating, even though technically it's a nit. I try to zoom in a bit and it zooms back out when I let go. So I have to zoom in a certain amount to get to the next "level," and then it's further than I wanted to zoom (which is why I zoomed to where I zoomed in the bloody first place, thank you very much). If in reality they're only going to support preset +/- zooming, there's little point adding multi-touch gesture support. Grrr.....

4) Contacts. I probably just haven't figured this one out yet, but I'm confused as there appear to be two sets of contacts. One seems to have come automagically from my Google account. It never asked me to sync (was enabled by default) and now I have this weird, not-really-connected-to-anything "contact" list with no phone numbers (because I use Gmail for, well, email - imagine that). But the contacts in this weird list show up, for instance, when I go to add a contact to a group from the phone widget. Since I have some phone numbers for the same people from "before" I now have many duplicate entries. That is annoying, avoidable, and annoying.

5) Gmail. Gmail is treated as its own app in Android... whereas other mail is setup and configured through the mail widget. From a consistency POV I don't like that. I've added Gmail as a pop3 mail client and I nuked all the Gmail icons. :)

6) Media Player. I find the media player mostly okay, but I wish wish wish it had integrated support for podcasts. I really like having audio control through a headset button, but from what I've found so far, some apps ignore it while others fight over it. This shouldn't be too hard - an integrated media player app that responds to headset built-in media controls. Are we detecting a theme yet? Starts with "inte" ends with "gration"?

7) Scroll. I actually like the scroll, but I wish it weren't so jerky. I'd rather it just skip some draws instead of stopping and starting as it scrolls (that's my impression of what is happening).

8) It's a more difficult device to familiarize oneself with. That is the nature of a more flexible device. And to be honest, there were several things I didn't "get" about the iPhone for days/weeks after I got it. Nevertheless, from a pure usability out of the box factor, the iPhone is significantly ahead. That's the upside of being ultra-controlling about your platform. The downsides are significant, and widely documented elsewhere. I'm not interested in joining that discussion. :)

9) Battery. It just doesn't last long enough when "idling". I expect to kill battery life when I'm using the device constantly, but when it's just sitting on the desk or in my pocket it doesn't last as long as I'd like. However, with a full charge in the morning I can easily get through my normal day. So this isn't a huge issue for me.

Usability - what I like
1) Fast. It's 10x-40x than my old iPhone 3G when doing anything data. Even on 3G it's 10x faster; on 4G it feels effectively as fast as a decent netbook. I can't emphasize this enough - since I'm out of the house a lot, the speed at which I can look stuff up, check my email, map something, etc. is very important. I am swooning at the usability of this device for my needs.

2) Fast. It task-switches ~immediately upon request. It loads apps in 1-2 seconds. It downloads and installs apps in seconds. It takes a photo when you push the photo button. It records video when you hit the record button. It plays media when you hit the play button. Seriously, all of these things on the iPhone included lag times of 2-many seconds, except for playing music on the iPod. "Task switching" on the iPhone in particular was horrible. Going from, say, Safari to maps was just plain evil. I timed it on many occasions and it was often 20+ seconds before I could actually display my location on the map (with no layers turned on). Even on WiFi it was very slow.

3) Screen real estate. The screen is large; easily large enough for browsing "real" (non-mobile) websites. Touch response is excellent. On-screen keyboard is also very good.

4) Zooming is super, except for maps (see above). When you zoom on a web page it actually adjusts the margins and text wrap. What genius thought of that (15 years ago)?

5) Customizationability (wow, cool word there Peter). I really love how I can set up one of the seven "home" screens to, e.g. control the many radios in this crazy device. And another one to house the apps I frequent most. I like how I can get to so many settings. I like the context-sensitive Menu button on the home row, once I thought to use it regularly.

6) 4G. Even though I find Sprint's 3G speeds much better than I saw with my iPhone 3G and AT&T, 4G is another big step up. You do need a reasonable signal to get this extra performance, but even with a weak signal it's fast.

7) "Cool" factor. I love e.g. the live wallpapers; I love the weather widget that rains on the screen and runs wipers when the current local weather is wet (which is most of the time in Oregon in June); I love that the clock hands move from 12:00 position to the current time; stuff like that makes me happy. Call me simple.

Summary
Simple summary: I am keeping this phone. Yes the iPhone 4 looks cool, but the larger screen, faster networking, and non-Apple (non-controlled) platform are big enough drivers for me to switch to Android. The dropped calls, poor 3G performance I experienced with AT&T, and the pricing of the plan made the decision to switch to Sprint pretty straight forward. So far I'm quite happy to move on with this smartphone in my pocket. If I could just get the lint out of there first....

Peter
-------
* I know that it's not fair to compare an iPhone 3G (not even a 3GS) to a new phone running on the latest ARM platform; my son has a 3rd gen iPod Touch, it's a lot more responsive than my iPhone. I'm sure the iPhone 4 will be plenty fast compared to the EVO 4G........ but the screen seems so tiny to me now. :)

The more I drive....

... the less patience I have. Lord. I like to get where I'm going quickly, whether I'm walking, driving, or cycling. I don't grudge people who are not as "motivated" as I am. Unless they happen to be impeding my progress (and not just mine) for no valid reason. You know what I'm talking about - the person driving 62 in the passing lane when they:

1) aren't passing anyone
2) are hundreds of meters behind the car ahead in said lane

And I'm being a jerk when I briefly flash my brights in a vain attempt to call attention to such discourteous driving? I don't think so. Listen, when I pass you on the right, that's an indication that you're doing it wrong.

Please people.

Excellent tag line

Weekend Ride

Trying to get back into shape... so I did this ride Saturday (5/29). Give it a second to load because no, I did not ride around the world:



I am really liking MapMyFitness, though the route creation is a bit of a PITA (that's what you get when you try to use a web interface for something it was never designed or intended to handle).

Peter

Perfect new VP candidate for GOP

Miss California Carrie Prejean! She meets what appears to be the criteria for selection as vice-presidential candidate in the GOP:

1) Female

2) Conservative Christian

3) Beauty contest winner

Let the vetting begin.

Spicy != Gourmet

It has become trendy to make everything from cheese to split-pea-soup spicy (aka hot), and it's really getting on my nerves. I mean what the hell... does eating spicy food somehow indicate that one has an elevated palette? No. Does it mean one is more bold? No. Does it indicate that a food is exotic? No.

Can spice be added to prepared food after it is cooked? Yes. Can spice be removed from prepared food after it is cooked? No. When I go to a restaurant I don't want to have to specify that I like my Creme' Brulee "mild". Core blimey.

Blagging

Blogging is ... is ... okay I'll say it. Vain. Self-absorbed. Conceited. Embarrassing. I guess if I were funny or had something to say that the rest of the world just had to hear I would feel differently. Instead, I find it ludicrous.

But here I am anyway, blagging on my wobsite. My plan is to keep making fun of everything so I can't be accused of being vain, conceited, and self-absorbed myself. See? I'm above it all!


Yay xkcd, my favorite comic on the web... spend an hour or three going through the archives. If you're a geek/nerd I predict you'll be crying with laughter before you're done. And you'll deserve it too.