Category Archives: Personal

Cringely says Adobe, I’d rather see Garmin

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I love reading Robert X. Cringely’s articles.  Always have.  He’s definitely one of my favorite writers.  In his most recent posting he states that Apple appears to be looking to unload its Pro applications in preparation to clear the way to acquire Adobe.  Interesting idea, but I’m not sure I agree as Apple’s Pro apps are some of the tops in the industry and Apple has made acquisitions that sure up that side of the business.  It might be nice for Apple if they controlled Flash, but I’m not sure any of that affects me much as a consumer.  Plus, those Pro apps only run on OS X, not Windows.  That may come in to play with the company that would want to acquire such applications.

While listening to my weekly fix of MacBreak Weekly, the topic of GPS came up and I was happy to hear that some of the folks on the show feel the same way that I do about the Garmin Nuvi GPS – it’s an excellent product.  So that got me thinking.  I don’t care about an Adobe acquisition as much as I would like to see Apple acquire Garmin.  I have used Magellan, Tom Tom, and Garmin GPS systems in my car and I have always felt the Garmin was the best.  I have the Nuvi 350, which fits easily in a pocket and takes us through turn by turn directions.  I like the interface better and I definitely like the maps better.  I’ve always found the Garmin to be very accurate as well.

Whether or not the rumors are true about the 3G iPhone having built in GPS, I think it is a safe assumption to believe it will be in there some day.  It’s just the way most phones are headed.  Nothing revolutionary, just evolutionary.  Many already have GPS included.  So why not take the best GPS technology and marry it with one of the best phones out there?  If not an outright acquisition, at least license the Garmin technology for the GPS solution that Apple uses?

If I remember correctly, I believe that even Garmin is working on a phone.  That could be an interesting product depending on how well they implement it and its final size, weight, and especially battery life, but Apple has already set the bar pretty high with the iPhone, so Garmin will have its work cut out for it.

So Apple, you know what you have to do; acquire Garmin, kill the Garmin phone, integrate Garmin’s GPS technology in the iPhone, wrap your interface around all that tech, and price it aggressively.  Oh, and figure out how to achieve decent battery life.  Easy, right?  So go get started already – I’ll be over here waiting with my credit card.

Driving more gently seems to be working

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I’ve owned a 2007 VW Passat for the last 10 months that typically gets anywhere from 350-370 miles on a tank of gas.  With gas prices getting higher and higher I decided to try to drive a little more “gently,” meaning less aggressive starts at lights and stop signs, a little slower on the interstate, etc.

Well, I had to fill up for the first time since trying this new method and I had driven 450 miles.  Not too shabby for making such a small change to how I drive.  That translates to less stops at the gas station, which translates to less money coming out of my pocket for gas.  That’s a good thing.

Loose Ends – Quick Update

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First, Colorado Springs is absolutely beautiful.  I’m out here for an HP Executive Briefing that went very, very well and the place is just amazing.  We’ve definitely added this place to our short list for future vacations.  I wish I had brought a decent camera as the one on my Treo700wx is as close to garbage as one can get.

Second, after sitting on a conference call for 90 minutes with a Treo that just kept getting hotter and hotter glued to my head, I finally broke down and purchased a decent bluetooth headset.  I picked up the Jawbone at the Palm store at the Pittsburgh airport of all places.  I know what you’re thinking, but their prices were actually better than the Apple store and they sell ones that are already charged.  Nice perk.  I picked up the black model.  The noise canceling seems really good and I can hear really well with this thing instead of the straining I used to do to hear from some of the others I have purchased over the years.  Hopefully this one is a winner.

Third, if you use VMWare Fusion, make sure to check out the update that came out tonight.  No problems with it so far, although anymore I tend to only fire up my WindowsXP VMWare guest to perform anti virus and Windows patch updates.

Fourth, are you running Firefox version 3 beta 5 yet?  If not, you should take a few minutes and check it out as the performance is excellent and it is very close to becoming my main browser, although Webkit has yet to let me down.  Very impressive release so far.  I think I heard the final release comes out in June.  Pick your operating system and try it out.

Fifth, I’m finding it harder and harder to avoid the iPhone as I am finding it harder and harder to find free WiFi where I need it.  The iPod Touch I use for so many things is nice when I have connectivity, but I almost wish I could have an iPhone with just the data plan.  I don’t really need the phone piece as work gives me a Treo that I have to have with me, but everything about the iPhone and iPod Touch is so much better that I can feel I will eventually break down and end up with an iPhone.  We’ll see how things look after the release of iPhone 2.0 in late June.

Lastly, I finally joined Twitter.  Why?  I don’t know, Robert Scoble told me to.  After having it for one short week I have learned that, for me, it is not a matter of being followed, but a matter of who you follow that makes it interesting.  I’m there as blindsquirrel.

That’s about it, looking forward to getting home.  I like seeing new cities, but I still can’t wait to get back home to Pittsburgh.

Advertising – How did this happen?

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I noticed when shopping this weekend at Kohl’s that it is not very easy to find clothes without some kind of advertising.  TShirts all have company’s names on them: jackets, sweat suits, even some pants have names or logos on them.  So what’s the big deal?

Well, usually companies pay to advertise – magazine, billboards, movie and TV placement, etc.  Big money exchanges hands.  Yet somehow it became acceptable for us to pay for the privilege to wear someone’s logo as free advertising; often times actually paying more for that privilege.

It just seems strange to me.  How did we let this happen?

So, I had to install WindowsXP today…

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Since VMWare Fusion has worked out so well, I was finally able to get rid of the last remaining Microsoft Windows computer in our house by installing WindowsXP on our shiny 20″ iMac.  We still need Windows for Quicken since the Mac version of Quicken is not even close to the Windows verion and can’t even import all of your Quicken for Windows data.  Since we’re giving our old Dell PC away I thought I would completely wipe the hard drive, boot from the WindowsXP CD and give them a nice, clean computer to start with.

I forgot how long this process takes when starting from scratch.  I had to load WindowsXP, then I had to use another computer to find any 3Com NIC drivers that would work, then I went straight to Service Pack 2 to reduce the amount of updates needed.  SP2 took quite a while to install, especially since it forces you to backup all your system files in case it has to revert back to them.

Then I ran Windows Update.  91 updates.  Wow.  After they completed and the system rebooted, I ranWindows Update again.  10 more updates.  Rebooted.  Installed IE7.  Windows Update.  More updates.  .NET.  Windows Update.  More Updates.  Might as well grab Silverlight while I’m there.  Oh, can’t forget Adobe Reader, Flash Player, and Shockwave Player.

It looks like I’m finally finished as I am watching it go through its (hopefully) last reboot now.  No way can there be any more updates for this thing.  Total time, somewhere between 4 and 5 hours – and I have Verizon FIOS – 15Mb of glorious bandwidth delivered over fiber to our home.

So thankfully it’s over.  Maybe I’m done building WindowsXP machines now.  The machine is too old to run Windows Vista, but I know from experience that Vista SP1 took somewhere between 1-2 hours to update on a brand new Dell computer.  That’s still a long time to me.

What did you do with your Saturday?

My Calendar makes it impossible to lose weight

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Most people tend to think of the calendar year as January through December.  Around here we don’t use the standard calendar and instead our year goes something like this…

  • New Year’s Day.  Say goodbye to our favorite foods.  Diet starts tomorrow
  • Valentine’s Day – Chocolate season
  • Girl Scout Cookie Season – speaks for itself
  • Easter – Chocolate and peeps season
  • Memorial Day – Cookout season starts
  • July 4th – More Cookouts
  • Labor Day – Cookout season ends
  • Halloween – Candy season
  • Thanksgiving – Stuff ourselves and then ease in to Christmas candy season
  • Christmas – Christmas candy season
  • New Year’s Eve – Parties and food

Then you start the year all over again.  Who needs a regular calendar?

Amazon MP3s – I feel a little dirty

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I was picking up some new music for an upcoming trip when I thought I’d look at the Amazon.com MP3 Download store.  I’ve done 100% of my music purchasing on iTunes for the last few years because it is just so easy the way things are integrated with my iPods.  I was surprised to see how easy Amazon has made it not only for those of us that use iPods, but OS X itself.

Amazon provides a decent downloader that brings down the music and adds it to your iTunes library automatically.  It’s completely browser based so it’s not as seamless as iTunes, but I think it’s about as good as we’re going to get with a vanilla web browser for a while.

But the fun didn’t stop there.  I picked up 3 “albums” (is that really still a valid term?) and not only were they $2(US) cheaper per album, but they even had one that iTunes did not carry – an old Radiohead album. $7.99 for the full album definitely has my attention.  The no DRM piece is a nice bonus as well, and I’m happy to take 256k MP3 files for less money.

I think iTunes finally has a little competition here and competition should be good for the consumer.  I felt a little like I was cheating on iTunes with the first purchase.  The second click was easier, and by the third click the guilt was gone and I was just begging to get caught.

Nice job Amazon, I’ll be sure to check your store as well as iTunes when i am looking for music in the future.

Microsoft Yahoo – Don’t Break My Yahoo

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While at home, I’ve done a fairly successful job of not using many Microsoft technologies for my Internet experience.  At work I’m locked in to all things Microsoft, at home I can use any technology I choose.

I use Gmail for my email, Google for my search engine, Adium for my IM client, Safari, Camino, or Firefox for my web browser, Google Reader for my news feeds, and Flikr for some of my photos.  But the most important page I hit every day is my personalized My Yahoo! page.

I’ve never been impressed with MSN.com’s pages and the new Windows Live sites don’t do much for you with an alternate browser or operating system.  I was not happy with Yahoo when they released the new version of their home page because I was so used to the old plain text look, but over time it has greatly improved, added Safari browser support, and is finally performing like the old version.

When Yahoo first released the new version I decided to try to make the move to iGoogle.  It wasn’t even close at the time.  We use the Yahoo Finance pieces a lot and Google’s instructions to import that data over to iGoogle sounded easy enough – just highlight all the data, including headers, and paste it in to the import field.  It almost never worked, and when information finally did import it never brought all the information I needed over.  Very disappointing.

So I went back to the new My Yahoo and that’s when things started getting better.  It’s become a great home page again – except for the massive ad that you can’t get rid of, but I worry that Microsoft’s influence would ruin the experience.

So I took another shot at iGoogle and was happy to see that things have improved a bit and they now have themes as well.  It is still not as nice as my My Yahoo page, but my iGoogle page is pretty darn close and I’m ready to make the switch if necessary.  After all, if Microsoft really got all the Web 2.x stuff they would never be bidding on Yahoo.

From the outside it sure looks to me like Microsoft needs Yahoo a lot more than Yahoo needs Microsoft.

Hang in there Yahoo, you can right this ship on your own.  If not, I’m sure there are better suitors out there that would make better partners.  Microsoft will take your best technologies, rebrand them, and you’ll be but a distant memory 5 years from now.

Hey, whatever happened to Excite anyway? ; p

Bodies Exhibition

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Today we went down to see the Bodies Exhibition at the Science Center.  Definitely different and I thought it was pretty interesting.  It amazes me how much time must have went in to preserving and presenting all those nerves, arteries, and veins.  Very intricate work.

They had a display that shows healthy lungs vs a smoker’s lungs.  Huge difference.  The smoker’s lungs were really black while the non-smoker’s lungs were pinkish and healthy looking.  There was a clear bin near the display that had a bunch of discarded cigarette packs.   Above the bin was a statistic I never knew – Every pack of cigarettes you smoke takes 2 hours and 20 minutes off your life.

I have no idea if that is true, but if so, it is sobering.

Merry Christmas (Sorry about our carbon footprint)

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Another Christmas is just about over.  Everyone is stuffed from eating all day and the kids are in a trance playing with presents they received.  It’s been a long time since I last updated this page, but the only things really going on have been at work, and you all know how I feel about mixing work and my personal Blog – I don’t do it.

So there has not been much to talk about.I at least wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas, even though it may not be the politically correct thing to say these days, but it’s still what we say in our house.  So I’m using it here.

Looking at all the gifts that were given and received today, I am blown away by how much power these things take.  Nintendo DS - rechargeable batteries.  iPod Shuffles – rechargeable batteries.  Digital camera – AA batteries.  Video camera – rechargeable batteries.  The remote for use with the Wii (for Guitar Hero III for the Wii! – that one’s mine) uses batteries.  Other than clothes and books I think everything needed charged or batteries.So how can we reduce that energy dependence that we just brought in to the house?  Any ideas out there?  I guess we can replace all of the regular batteries with rechargeable ones.  Overall I plan on replacing most of the regular light bulbs with the curly florescent ones.  The Christmas lights are all on a timer.  The thermostat is on a timer and we choose to nearly freeze over night and when we leave the house.

Any other bright ideas out there?  How else can reduce that might carbon footprint we put out every day?  I hope your Christmas was a good one.