Screaming At The Rain

When it rains, some people get umbrellas. Some people just don’t go outside at all. Some people say fuck it all and just get wet. And some people like to stand outside and scream at the rain for hours on end. And then they run around to all the neighbors to organize a committee to stop the rain. And then they hold a news conference to announce the urgent need to stop the rain. And then they get the biggest megaphone they can find to yell at the rain to stop. And when that fails, they insist on telling me a 2 hour story about their valiant efforts to stop the rain. And then they complain about all the wasted time spent and how nobody would help. And maybe I should get involved. Because it’s VERY IMPORTANT that the rain be stopped.

I prefer to waste my time watching football instead. Unless I watch the Jets, it’s usually a lot less frustrating.

Too Bad HP Stopped Making Touchpads, Because It’s What I Want

The problem with the Amazon Kindle Fire is that it’s not really a tablet. Oh, it’s big enough for a tablet, and it’s categorized as a tablet, but it’s not really a tablet at all. And this isn’t some snarky bit about the flavor of android running under the hood. It’s all about what a tablet is. Put simply, a tablet is an iPad.

That might seem like an exaggeration, but just look at the numbers. Pre-iPad, the tablet market, if you could call it that, was a moribund graveyard of expensive laptops jimmied up with a clunkier version of Windows (nobody thought that possible, but hey, they did it anyway) and a pricetag that could buy you a pair of netbooks and then some. Post iPad, well, all that’s pretty much sold well has been the iPad. And then the best selling tablet of all time came out, the iPad 2. What’s the current market share? 85%? So I don’t think I am going that far out on a limb when I say a tablet is an iPad.

And the manufacturers agree, they’ve all been gunning at the same specs. Galaxy Tab, Playbook, HP Touchpad, etc. Nearly equivalent specs, nearly equivalent price, nowhere near the same success. Which makes perfect sense. Can’t compete on price, those parts are expensive. Can’t compete on OS, Apple has been developing iOS for several years now (and as RIMM and Palm/HP/Android have discovered, making a tablet os is hards, yo). And can’t compete on ecosystem, there’s an app for that, but it’s on iOS.

What are you going to do, make marginally better hardware for a higher price and try to top the luxury brand and category leader? After a certain price point, all you’re selling is an ultraportable laptop, and oh yeah, Apple owns that category too.
The key, therefore, is not to make a tablet.

The smartphone market is already kinda crowded, and if it weren’t for carriers desperate to grab subscribers and lower their churn rate, it’d be a pretty pricey market too. Thanks to carrier subsidies, prices hover around the $0 to $200 level, so they’re oddly considered “cheaper” then tablets. But that’s just the subsidy distorting the hardware market. Why not subsidize a $700 smartphone by $500 when you’re signing up suckers to a 2 year commitment of $2400, and that’s assuming they never go over their data/sms/minute/roaming caps. Thanks to fat profit margins, the market’s already got plenty of players.
What’s still wide open then? Why, the not a phone / not a tablet market, of course!

Wha?

You heard me.

Not a phone, not a tablet. But something that maybe plays some movies, maybe some music, Angry Birds (of course), and some basic web surfing. Not as pricey as a smartphone or a tablet, so the profit’s not there either. But that’s OK, because if there’s no fat margin to be had, Apple’s not interested, and that means the market is wide open.

And that’s right where Amazon has put itself with the Kindle Fire. It’s got a color screen, you can watch movies, you can surf the interwebs, and you can play Angry Birds. It’s also where the Nook color is, the Kobo is, and where a dozen other android faux-tablets are at. It’s also where the iPod touch is at, and that, btw, is the real competition for the Kindle Fire. But more on that in a second.

The sure sign that the market is open is that there’s no standard, no category defining product. Is it 10″ tablet lites? Is it 5″ iPod Touch-ish personal media players? Is it 7″ hybrids? Is it about being portable? Is it about staying at home? Is it a netbook, briefly creating a new category before being cannibalized by subsidized smartphones on the low end, and iPads on the top end?

Who knows, but it’s a category searching for answers and consolidation. Amazon Fire makes a very strong case for defining the category. Amazon can loss lead the hardware for back end software sales. But Apple’s Q3 revenue numbers belies how hard that is. App store and iTunes combined don’t rival any one of the hardware sales units, and that’s with the category leading online music store and category leading app store ecosystem. To cut costs, fancy tablet features had to go, including the cameras, the 3G, the processing power (it’s no slouch, but why do you think there’s a middle layer of Amazon could services between the Kindle Fire and the internet at large).

Apple too seems to be struggling with their entry. iPod touch packs much more raw processing horsepower and front and rear cameras, but at the expense of puny memory and smaller form function. Most disappointingly, the latest hardware upgrade involves no upgrade. Up the memory on the entry level iPod Touch to come close to matching the Kindle Fire, at the smae price point, and you have a very compelling product. But besides a big price drop, no major changes, which suggests Apple is struggling to hold onto profitability without ceding the category to budget players like Amazon.

And that’s where I find myself longing for an HP Touchpad. The ebay price for the hardware is $250, a little on the high end, but what you get is the best of both worlds. Hardware and camera that are competative, and a third choice in software that’s not as locked down as iOS, but still friendly enough for mom, unlike GingerHoneySandwich 7.2.13b. The only problem, of course, is that HP never sold them at that price, doesn’t make any more, and may or may not support webOS going forward while HP crubles apart, Yahoo style.

It’ll be interesting to see where the market takes us a year from now in the not a tablet / not a smartphone category.

Run!

To the guy whose girlfriend got so violently upset that someone “stole” the seat she was “saving” for you on the subway:

Run. Now. As fast as you can. Don’t look back. Just RUN.

All that anger, smug superiority, and contemptuous vitriol. One day that shit is going to land on you. And then it will. not. stop.

RUN.

(a little backstory: I was sleeping on my normal morning commute, when all of a sudden I felt someone brushing up against my knee, and it was this young kinda punk chick in a pink top doing the usual subway bum rush to get the seat next to me. I was a bit annoyed that she was giving the bum rush to a lady with two kids and a strolled with a third, all while brushing my knee, and without so much as an “excuse me”, but whatever. And then, she goes all ballistic. She’s yelling at this lady next to her. She’s threatening to punch this lady, there is all this racist bile coming out about Chinese people, and I haven’t heard this many F-bomb drops since .. well, ever. Seriously, Sailors and cops don’t curse this much. From what I can gather, after grabbing the seat next to me, pink chick tried to save the seat next to her by putting her purse on the seat, only to have some Chinese lady push it aside and sit down. keep in mind that the boyfriend is OK with standing, and says as much nine times over. And it’s not like pink chick was so concerned about her boyfriend sitting that she ever once volunteers to give her boyfriend her seat. Oh, and for someone cursing up a storm for 20 minutes non-stop about how rude all Chinese people are, did I mention that neither I nor lady with 2 kids and a stroller got even a token “excuse me” as she bum rushed the empty seat? And finally, putting your purse or your bag down means shit. Seats are for people, not packages. I see the Chinese people do it all the time, rush the train and then throw their bags down next to them for their friends. And I hear the same white people like you complain about how totally rude that is. And it is. Bags mean nothing, the only thing “saving” a seat is someone’s ass in it. You don’t like it, too bad, we’re all tired and you can shove it.
But my point isn’t a commentary about subway etiquette, it’s about the need to avoid perpetually angry people. I’ll bet if the situation were reversed, and the Chinese lady put her purse down on the seat, pink chick would have pushed the purse aside and then spent the entire train ride cursing up the same storm about how rude Chinese people are, trying to steal “her” seat. Pink chick is bottled fury, self-centered entitlement fulfilled, rude and vindictive towards all that she holds in contempt, and that includes all her friends (based on the few parts of her conversation that were not about the seat). One day boyfriend is going to do something she perceives as “wrong”, and then he’s never going to hear the end of that shit until he’s dead. And maybe a few more years after that too.)

Brooklyn Is Closed, but Manhattan and Broadway Are Open For Tourists, So Everything Is OK

I’m very tired of Mayor Lindsey, I mean King Bloomberg, saying everything is fine. I understand high priority streets and areas need to be plowed. What I don’t understand is why High Priority always means Upper East Side and Broadway.

Supposedly the city needed, NEEDED, King Bloomberg to serve a third term for his administrative expertise that only he could bring. So far, a drunk monkey could do a better job (at least a drunk monkey doesn’t pretend that everything is OK). Not plow streets? Pretend that Brooklyn and Queens don’t exist? We needed a third term for this? Where is the value add that required a change to the city charter, a special one time only third term, and a few hundred million dollar ad campaign. At least a new mayor would give a damn because a second term might be in jeopardy. But not King Bloomie.

I guess what I am trying to say is: Do us a favor, actually screw that, do your fucking JOB, and send a god damned plow to Brooklyn instead of re-plowing the same cleared Upper East Side streets. Some of us have to get to work where we’re expected to actually do something, unlike being Mayor of New York where you can conveniently ignore 2+ million people. I mean, so long as tourists are getting to see Broadway shows, who cares about those pesky outer boroughs.

PS – In case you didn’t get the memo: SEND SOME FUCKING PLOWS TO BROOKLYN!

Boycott Flying, No More Nude Children Scanners

Don’t ever underestimate the power of a name.

The Estate Tax was about rich people passing on millions to their spoiled rich children, the kids who you hated growing up. But the Death Tax is all about giving up your money to the government just because you died, unfair! Estate Tax reform went nowhere, Death Tax reform suddenly gained LOTS of traction. Names are important. There’s a reason they call it Partial Birth Abortion and Right to Life, and not Late Term Abortion and Pro-Choice.

By now you should have heard the story about the guy who nearly got arrested because he objected to being groped by airport security. All because he didn’t feel like going through a backscatter x-ray machine. Of course, the alternative is a physical inspection that would get your fired at work, arrested on the street, or pay a fair bit of money to get in Amsterdam. The idea, of course, is to make the alternative to the scan so unpleasant that the scan would seem nice in comparison. Of course, like I said, names are important, and the TSA would prefer you use the nice antiseptic inoffensive technical terms like backscatter x-ray or millimeter wave scans.

People in general don’t care how something works, they care more about what it does for them. It’s not an internal combustion engine self powered carriage, it’s my ride. It’s not a flat panel LCD with built in digital receiver, it’s my big screen TV. It’s not a backscatter scanning device, it’s naked-vision. Only, we’re still settling on a good term for these things, something that’s quick and catchy and descriptive.

Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic prefers Federal Dick-Measurer, which, while accurate, suffers from being slightly obscene and also ignores half the population. BoingBoing.net prefers the term naked scanner, which is better but still lacks a certain emotional punch to it. Flyertalk.com seems to have adopted Nudo-O-Scope (or NoS for short), but to me that seems sort of kitschy and cute, certainly not something with ominous overtones. I’ve also seen naked scanner, virtual strip search, and radiation scanner (well, that’s true too, it does use radiation, and that concerns some people, like the airline pilots unions).

Personally, I prefer the term nude children scanners, because that’s what they do. They have your child stand in the machine, with their legs spread and hands up (like they’re being mugged of their privacy). And then a guy in a dark room looks over a picture of your naked child, with the ability to zoom in if anything needs further inspection. And then, after seeing your naked child, it’s your turn to let the guy in the dark booth see you naked.

Supposedly no cameras or cellphones with cameras will be allowed inside the booth, but I somehow doubt that the TSA employee going into the booth will be given an “enhanced” patdown grope and squeeze like you would if you choose to opt out of the pornography scan.

So next time you fly, or you take your children flying, remember it’s either let someone see your kids naked, or let someone grope your children. Happy flying!

Psst, the unofficial list of airports with nude children scanners.

Voting Deserves A Sticker

I voted today, as I do every first tuesday following a monday in November. And as usual, I made some playful banter with the poll workers, half of whom didn’t get my jokes. I also forgot that the cute girl works the polls, and was thus totally unprepared for flirty bantor, and instead came off as a total ass when she talked to me. And, as usual, it was totally empty in the morning, to the point where I was actually Voter #1 in my election district.

My annual complaint is that my polling center doesn’t give out those iconic “I Voted” stickers. I joke that I like to show off to people that I’m better then them (and so when cute girl called me out this, I was unprepared for conversation … with the cute girl! …and I just repeated the punchline. Saying something like that once is a joke, twice is being arrogant.). It’s half true, it is a missed chance to display superiority. But more importantly, it’s a missed chance to do something more important: get people to vote.

Early voting doesn’t increase turnout. Mail in voting doesn’t increase turnout (it actually decreases overall turnout). What increases turnout is good old fashioned civic peer pressure. People seeing other people voting, and pestering their friends and family and neighbors to vote. And a simple, cheap, and totally non-intrusive way to do that is to give people who voted a little sticker to proudly wear, to show off to the world that they voted.

It turns out that subtle phsycological triggers can have profound effects. There’s a whole subculture of economics devoted to teasing out the practical and impractical iimpact the little differences can make. And the evidence is building that your mother was right. If John and Tim and Mary Sue jump off a bridge, you would too. And if you saw that your neighbor and your coffee shop barista and your coworker voted, you would too. The key is letting people know that these people voted, that there is peer pressure out there, and you’d better get on that bandwagon.

Next year maybe I’ll make my own sticker to give out. Because I Voted. And the polls are open from 6am until 9pm damnit, so you can too. So vote already!

Waiting for Peek9

Oddly enough, I still have a Peek Classic even though I’ve transitioned long ago to Blackberry. Inertia is pretty much to blame, although I also admit that I wanted a backup in case I dropped my phone in the sink, or something alike. Haven’t used it in a while, and never really thought much of it.

Until I came across an article in engadget describing a massive outage for the Peek. Naturally enough, I am curious, and head on over to the peek website. Of course, there’s nothing there. Service outage that bricks the entire customer base, and OF COURSE there is no mention of it on the main webpage. I mean, why would you want to inform your customers that, I dunno, the ENTIRE SERVICE IS PERMANENTLY DOWN … FOREVER? It is mentioned in the blog (which is not easy to find, btw) and the remedy seems reasonable enough: free upgrade to the new hardware that will reconnect you to the network. Plus maybe some comped service for the inconvenience. Check you emails for updates, kids.

Well, it’s been 3 business days since Epic Fail, and I don’t have any emails in my inbox, and yes I checked my multiple email accounts and the spam filters. Peek has been pretty reliable about tapping my credit card every month for the $14.99, you would think they’d be just as reliable in sending me an email letting me know that, by the by, we are experiencing Epic Fail. In fact, had I not read the engadget article, I very much doubt I’d have ever known what is going on. And what is going on it a very strong argument that maybe instead of blowing $180 a year on a redundant service that doesn’t work, I should take the money and put it to more practical work, like burning it for warmth (Seriously, when is anybody going to turn on the heat around here?).

I figure by Friday if still no email, or even the miraculous delivery of the replacement hardware, then it’s a sign to just cancel the service once and for all and be done with this little startup that can’t. I just thank goodness that I don’t use this thing anymore as my primary email connection. Or maybe that’s the moral of the story, don’t ever depend on Peek to be your primary communications device. I’m a little sad that it seems like this little startup is about to get killed in this manner, but at the end of the day I would like some service in exchange for the monthly bill I get charged for. If I wanted to spend money on a service I don’t use, I’ll join a gym instead.

Bowling Update

Game 1: 120
Game 2: 120

Foursquare = Fail

i’ve been trying to use Foursquare for as long as I’ve had phones that could support it. I like the idea, and as Facebook demonstrated by jumping on the bandwagon that twitter and foursquare have been riding for a while now, it’s a hot idea. Combining microblogging, location data, and social networking, one hardly has to even bother posting updates. Your social world sees where you’ve been and what you’re doing, and can even join you if it wants to. The commercial world gets to see what you buy, where you spend your time, and what demographic you fall into. Win win win (well, Privacy lose, but if you wanted privacy get the hell off the grid). So why hasn’t Foursquare taken the world by storm? And more pertinantly, why don’t I use Foursquare more often?

Nearly everytime I take the train from Brooklyn to Manhattan, I end up going over the Manhattan Bridge. It’s a rare chance to contact and be contacted by the wider world, before reentry into the blackout that is the NYC subway system. On average, it’s usually about 3-5 minutes to cross from end to end. It’s long enough to check and respond to a text message or two. It’s long enough to check on your voicemail. It’s long enough to call people and tell them you’re on the bridge and you’re running late. What it’s not long enough to do is checkin on Foursquare.

The Foursquare checkin process is suprisingly cumbersome and data transmission intensive. It begins with a login, which takes time and bandwidth. And then goes to basic checkin, which is gps/cpu and bandwidth intensive. The fourth step is selecting a local venue from the database list. If your venue isn’t on the default list, more bandwith and time gets chewed up looking it up from the main database. And if that weren’t enough, checking in with the venue is a further two step process that involves getting the venue details (including a map, mayor details, and comment box); and then FINALLY actually checking in. Even in ideal conditions that don’t involve spotty signal and moving train, each step chews up time and bandwith.

The process, to put it simply, just takes too many steps and too much time. Many a time I’ll be at a venue, start the checkin process, get distracted halfway through, and just abort the checkin. And every single time I cross the bridge, it takes too long to checkin at all.

There needs to be a simplified process. Something that doesn’t take 4 steps, doesn’t require 5 minutes, something that doesn’t depend so much ojn pretty but entirely useless graphics (wtf do we need a map on the venue checkin page), and something that, I dunno, fucking WORKS.

That would be a pleasant change from the current constant consistant fail that is Foursquare.

Fill It Up, Unleaded Please

For a change, today’s commute how was rather pleasant and smooth. What made it so much more interesting was the addition of an old faded green Chrysler Corsair (?). And by old, I mean at least mid 70′s. How do I know? It didn’t have a righthand side mirror. There used to be a time long long ago where that wasn’t a standard feature.

Of course, it would have been a good thing to have considering that the young lady behind wagon wheel (no power steering) was flinging the steel brick of a car in and out of traffic at the drop of a hat. Admittedly, she was doing a lot better job then 90% of the other drivers I see out there, myself included. But it got me to thinking about old school stuff. Like how the righthand side mirror was an option, the fuel intake hid behind the license plate, and there was regular gas and that newfangled unleaded.

Whenever you pulled up to the station, which half the time was still manned by a person, you had to specify unleaded and not regular lead gasoline. Every gas cap, and even the gas guage on the dash, was very clear that the car took unleaded gasoline ONLY. It’s something that sticks in my head, never EVER ask for regular, UNLEADED ONLY.

Whenever I drive through Jersey and I get gas, it’s such the rare event to have to verbally order fuel, I revent back to my childhood self (back when I was 4 and eager to be the one spending money at the pump), and always order unleaded. My family laughs, it’s all unleaded, why do I ask? And my answer is simple, because Regular Unleaded MAKES NO SENSE. You don’t ask for regular decaffinated coffee, you’d never order regular diet soda, and what does regular fat free milk mean? Regular = Leaded, period. The proper order of things is unleaded, Extra, Premium (or as people who know better like to say, unleaded, gullible, sucker).

And now if you’ll excuse me, I have proofread my rant about those damn crazy kids and their “music” which is really nothing more then just loud noise.