This is something you learn when dog crap is accidentally sucked into yours, and you have to take it apart and thoroughly clean every part.
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Vacuum cleaners have a surprising number of parts
More Father’s Day ideas…
in case nothing tickled your fancy off my prior list
- Clothes Climbing Robot. Ah how much fun this could be at parties.
- A nice Hasselblad medium format camera — hey they’ve cut prices!
- More realistically, something to challenge the mind from this list of book recos
- Love puzzles, and really love these puzzles
Again I am running way ahead of the number of progeny I have.
Recent books — Mosley, Adler-Olsen, You Lost Me There, Banks, Amis
- All I Did Was Shoot My Man by Walter Mosley. Great characters, but story felt a little slapdash.
- The Keeper of Lost Causes by Jussi Adler-Olsen. Part of the now flood of Scandinavian author mysteries. A good disturbing tale and a character with promise. But something is off in the book, dialog seems particularly colorless and flat — few idioms, simple structure. I doubt Danes as a society are colorless and flat. It is possible the author chose this style for the protagonist who is somewhat repressed. But I am wondering if it might just be a poor translation. Knowing no Danish, there is no way for me to verify.
- You Lost Me There by Rosecrans Baldwin. An introverted scientist finally comes to terms with his wife’s passing and his inability to really connect. Very compelling.
- Surface Detail by Iain M. Banks. Another of his books set in his Culture universe, this time concerned with virtual environments and their abuse. I find the Culture series to be always entertaining.
- The Alteration by Kingsley Amis. First of his I’ve read, a boy deals with his fate in an alternative world where the Reformation and Renaissance never really happened. An ugly world in many ways. “Alteration” is at play on many levels here.
Dan Barry — incredibly inspirational
Heard Dan Barry speak at USC grad this past week. What an amazing story. Was rejected by NASA for like 15 years running and refused to give up. Finally made it as an astronaut at age 37. An amazing tale of perseverance. If you ever have a chance to hear his story, it is worth it.
Nokia Lumia 900 and LTE networks — good and bad
Ok so I’ve had a chance to use the Lumia on an LTE network for most of a week here in LA.
The obvious good — data services are fast, it is hard to tell you are not on WiFi. This kind of speed is addictive, it is going to suck going back to slower nets in Seattle.
The downside — the battery drains fast. I was also using the phone a lot for nav so I’m not sure how much of my battery drain was due to LTE and how much for nav but the phone couldn’t last a day without recharge.
I also had to reboot the phone twice. Once, MSFT services quit working — bing search, Msft map app. Google worked fine, Nokia maps worked fine, but everything MSFT would just hang. Reboot fixed. (btw, the Nokia Maps app is much better than the MSFT maps app).
Secondly, at a location with so-so LTE service, where the phone kept dropping back to lesser data services and rates, the texting app hung. I could open it but could never type in text and the phone generally was unresponsive. Reboot fixed maybe but it may recur, the phone is feeling a little wonky again right now.
So how am I generally feeling about the device after a month+ of use?
- solid physical hardware, feels good and looks nice
- generally solid OS with some nice design touches
- some real problems with back button behavior. Most times the back button causes you to leave an app. Sometimes it causes you to go back in an app. And if you leave an app and then click on its home screen tile, the app restarts and forgets your place. So you have to learn to hold down the back button and use the task switch interface to get back in your app. This is all a pain in the ass. The back button shouldn’t sometimes quit and other times go back in an app. And reentering an app from the home tile shouldn’t forget where you are. Super annoying.
- solid 3rd party apps when they exist
- pathetic marketplace of apps — marketplace design and marketplace contents both are very poor
How can Fry’s have so much of nothing I need?
Today’s experience at Fry’s — I’m trying to set up a MythTV box and I need a cable splitter so that I can continue to use my normal TiVO box. And since this is all digital cable, HD quality, I need the large bandwidth splitter, not the crappy old splitters you find anywhere.
So of course, Fry’s has a huge selection of <900Mhz coax splitters and RG59 cable, and right in the prime display area for their TV component section. All of which is useless. And a teeny number of 2G splitters hidden up the aisle. “We specialize in parts that don’t work with most cable/satellite installs and will just frustrate the hell out of you!”
They could cut their floorspace and staff in half if they’d just stock products that might actually work. Who exactly is served by all these crappy parts? I bet 90% of the customers who buy the old splitters return them when they realize they won’t work. Or maybe it is all a scheme to get people to pay for professional install.
Watching TV on the iPad
I pay a large amount to Comcast/Xfinity each month to view nearly their entire lineup (ex non-English channels) at our home. And because we pay for a Time-Warner Cable sub as a gift for a family member, I also have access to a TWC account. A lot of dollars per month.
I’d like to watch all this content on my iPad when I am in a room with no tv or when I am out of the house, and I don’t feel like that is an unreasonable expectation given the dollars I spend.
So how do I watch on the iPad? Well as a start I downloaded as many of the branded apps for various channels and distributors as I could find.
- Xfinity TV app. Sounds great but is not useful. Basically a super duper remote control if I am in a room with a Xfinity branded settop box. Doesn’t let me see video, doesn’t do anything if I am out of the room. And since I am mostly a TiVo house, basically not much utility here. I had hoped/expected that Xfinity would give me an iPad app that basically acted as a dvr+tv, and would let me see all my streaming xfinity content. I was wrong.
- TiVo iPad app. Looks nice and for some things — remotely managing my scheduled recordings — it is fine. But for watching video? It blows. Apparently I need to have my TiVo and iPad on the same wifi network, and none of my tivos are on wifi, so I can’t watch video.
- Showtime app. Performs a distributor validation, only works on AT&T Uverse and Verizon networks. Seriously? I am paying a ton for Showtime access and you guys are going to squabble with Comcast and deny me this service?
- HBO Go. A reasonable app. Works on Comcast and works anywhere as near as I can tell, I can watch shows anywhere. So this is great but if the world we end up in is 57 separate apps, one per channel, each with their own UI and login, that will kind of suck. Imagine if your tv had no single guide but per-channel guides which each worked differently, and then different remotes for each channel. Barf.
- NBC. A decent experience. Seems to have all their recent shows, no crazy access control. Yes you have to watch ads but that is ok with me, I have to watch ads on TV too.
- WatchESPN — nice when it works, but only on TWC, Verizon, Brighthouse. Another case of distributors squabbling and screwing users.
- btn2go. no comcast. More distributor squabbling
- CBS sports. Claims to have live seasonal NCAAFB and NCAABB content. We will see.
So — I get very little of my content; I am prevented from getting a lot of choices due to squabbling between various members of the distribution chain; when I do get content, it is spewed across many different apps with all kinds of different UIs, guides, control interfaces, etc.
The whole set of players is really underdelivering to me. Is it any wonder people just seek out torrents?
Books — Goon Squad, Woiwode, Lively
A kind of melancholy grouping of books this week, all exploring time and mortality in different ways. I need to switch it up after these.
- A Visit from the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan. A half dozen characters and their interplay over their lifetimes. Time wears us all down, changes us, transforms us. The structure seemed a little gimmicky but maybe ok.
- A Step from Death by Larry Woiwode. A brutally honest meander thru the author’s life as he contemplates fatherhood and faces death. The narrative bounces paragraph by paragraph across decades, and in the hands of a lesser writer, it would be chaos. But it is excellent. And tough.
- How It All Began by Penelope Lively. A chance mugging sets off changes through a set of interconnected lives. Along the way the characters mull over the choices in their lives, the randomness of events, and the passage of time.
Like prismatic, don’t get wavii
In the last two weeks I’ve tried to use some recent news aggregation services. A billion people have been sending me connection notices from Wavii, and I just don’t get it. My feed is stuffed full of friend notices and really random news items and stuff that is duplicative of my twitter stream. Nothing worth looking at.
Prismatic, on the other hand, has been a pleasant surprise, I get much meatier links, with a lot more relevance, and doesn’t duplicate my twitter stream. Is it better than techmeme or other aggregators, I don’t know, but I am getting value out of it.
Why am I bothering with a Windows Phone?
Someone asked me this. A fair question.
At my core I am a learner. I read extensively. Try new technologies all the time. I am over-degreed and still aspire to a PhD someday (yes I know, tick tick tick…). I pretty much want to maximize the amount of learning in my day at all times.
Here is a nice quote from The Atlantic:
On the mobile side, we’re working with almost the exact same toolset that we had on the 2007 iPhone, i.e. audio inputs, audio outputs, a camera, a GPS, an accelerometer, Bluetooth, and a touchscreen. That’s the palette that everyone has been working with — and I hate to say it, but we’re at the end of the line. The screen’s gotten better, but when’s the last time you saw an iPhone app do something that made you go, “Whoa! I didn’t know that was possible!?”
That is how I feel. I’ve had an iPhone for years and I am not learning much new with it. The hardware is static. iOS is static. The sea of icons is boring. And it makes my thinking boring, I fall into the trap like everyone else of believing that this is just the way mobile phones are, there is no different way for them to be.
Has my Windows Phone dramatically opened new vistas for me? Not yet but it does have new elements and forces me to think about new things. That is good.
Are people listening to podcasts?
Until my recent post assessing the Lumia, I have never had a person in the last 5 years mention to me that they are listening to podcasts, nor have I seen a startup pitch mentioning them in the last several years.
Usually if something is in heavy use, I will bump into people talking about. But maybe there are people I don’t know doing this. Personally I don’t listen to talk radio, I listen to music — either my own, or off of spotify. But I’ve had comments on facebook, twitter, and here defending podcasts, so maybe I need to refresh my view of podcasts. Are people listening to a lot of podcasts? Are real humans (ie outside of the tech industry) listening to podcasts?
Whatever their use, I’ll stand by my view that putting podcasts on the first page of the marketplace is dumb — they don’t generate revenue. The whole first page of the marketplace is just a list of containers, this is even dumber. The first page should immediately present me buying offers — the special of the day/week; the hottest apps that I don’t have; the best recommendation for me based on what I already use. And then measure the hell out engagement and dynamically display new offers. Sure you need a “Browse” button in case people want to pore through the whole catalog but that is not the first thing I should see. This is not rocket science, take tips from the Apple App Store or the Steam Store or other leading app marketplaces.
Best recruiting tool ever — Valve employee handbook
Leaked today and linked to broadly — Valve new employee handbook
I’m ready to sign up and start next week. I don’t know that this model would work for every industry and for every scale company, but man is it compelling. Nice work, Valve.
Am I still using the Lumia?
I was asked this yesterday, and the answer: Yes I am, and I am satisfied with it, but it is not without issues. 
2 weeks in and I can report many good things and some less than good.
- Hardware. The phone looks nice, feels solid, the AMOLED display is beautiful, the camera is fine, this is a quality piece of hardware. I certainly don’t feel bad in anyway about giving up my iPhone hardware. I’ll be in LA in a little while and have an LTE network to use it on, and at that point I may say that the Lumia hardware is definitely better.
- Hardware accessories. The lack of compatibility with existing iPhone earbud/mics, the paucity of other alternatives, this is a problem.
- The OS. Very solid, looks nice, has some real innovation. The ability to pin content to the homescreen and to see integrated photos/updates from my closest family members is nice. The core OS seems fine.
- Bundled apps — mail, calendar, maps, dialer, ie. Very much a mixed bag here. The apps feel like they need another iteration or two. My mail inboxes should be automatically combined. When I compose a new message, use my default mail system, don’t make me pick. IE has some repaint issues on drag/resize. Calendar lacks a week view. Contacts seems buggy/wonky at times — lost a picture for one contact, another contact is just impossible to find. The apps all look ok but they need another round of usability work.
- Marketplace. Too much real estate given to things that no one uses — podcasts, ATT, Nokia. No strong merchandising. MSFT really needs to ramp this up. Why doesn’t the first screen of the marketplace show me the most popular apps I don’t already have, and the best apps for me based on my existing apps? And podcasts? Seriously, am I missing something, is there a huge base of podcast users? Is WP trying to be #1 among the podcast crowd?
- 3rd party essentials — Evernote, Adobe Reader, WordPress, Facebook, Twitter clients, RSS, Amazon, etc. These are all there and they work fine, I can get my job done.
- 3rd party inessentials — games, photo apps, etc. A significant significant weakness area. No Instagram, but apps that are kind of like instagram. Very thin on the hottest games but clones that are like them. No Draw Something but a WP-only clone. Very very weak.
- Cloud. With no native Mac support, I can’t get too excited about Skydrive. No iTunes Match like syncing of music. I’m no big fan of iCloud either to be honest.
- Dev Tools. I’ve written about this already, MSFT is not helping themselves at all — too hard to sign up for the program, too much VS crap to wade thru to just focus on phone development. I have created a few toy apps, the tools seem to work fine once you get there. Game development seems more complicated than it should since XBOX and WP development is commingled, this doesn’t feel like a wise commingling to me, but maybe some of the casual game writers love it.
OK so I net out with a decent phone and OS, but a lot of issues in all the surrounding pieces. I’m OK with the phone but it certainly seems like MSFT has to do much more to get to the strong #2 in the market, to be Pepsi to iPhone’s Coke. If you get one of these you won’t be unhappy, but there isn’t enough there to really compel anyone to switch from an iPhone or to get instead of an iPhone. And if the word on the street is true, that I won’t be able to update the Lumia to Windows 8, well, MSFT will kill any goodwill I have towards the phone.
Another awesome spring day in Seattle #frickingrain
Eat your heart out, rest of the world.
This Week’s Books — Design, Relativity, Capitalism, and the Short Serpent
After last week’s foray into the fanstastical I needed to get a little grounded again in my reading.
- Universal Principles of Design by Lidwell, Holden, Butler. Nice reference on 125 fairly universal patterns to follow in designing products or experiences. Nice reference, not really a book you read, but something you come back to time and again.
- How to Teach Relativity to Your Dog by Chad Orzel. I thought this would be even more approachable than it is. A reasonable walk thru relativity but it isn’t really that simple. There are chatty interludes with the author’s dog thru out the book that tend to lighten the tone, but the material is still what it is.
- Why Capitalism? by Allan Meltzer. An abstract defense of capitalism. Honestly put me to sleep. In flipping thru it looked like maybe it got more concrete later but I was gone by then. I guess if Allan Meltzer tells CMU he wants to publish something, then by damn it gets published, but something a little more engaging would have been nicer.
- The Voyage of the Short Serpent by Bernard du Boucheron. And then some fiction, but definitely heavier fiction. A noble mission sets out to reconnect with lost Greenland colonies, and finds itself ground down to survival basics just as happened to the colonists. Rough tale but very human.
Inside the light rail tunnel — highlight of my week!
Looking down the tunnel from the UW campus — thanks so much to folks at UW College of Engineering for arranging, and for Traylor for hosting. If Traylor hadn’t been so darn good at their job, completing this link early, we would have actually seen the borer in operation. But fascinating to see all the infrastructure to support the boring operation — the trains, material delivery systems, etc etc.
Pixar story rules — relevant for us all
At Ritholtz, who lifted them from Pixar TOuch who in turn lifted them from Emma Coats.
Great stuff, relevant for so much more than movie making. We all have stories to tell every day, many of these tips are relevant in so many settings —
- “Come up with your ending before you figure out your middle.”
- “Putting it on paper lets you start fixing it.”
- “Discount the 1st thing that comes to mind. And the 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th – get the obvious out of the way.”
- “Why must you tell THIS story? What’s the belief burning within you that your story feeds off of?”
- “What are the stakes? Give us reason to root for the character.”
- “Simplify. Focus.”
Does it make sense to use a hosted Windows desktop for development?
Maybe this is a goofy idea, I am just thinking about it.
I do casual development on OSX and Windows. I probably do more on OSX but would like access to both environments.
So I’d like to have a windows desktop machine with a full windows dev environment, all kinds of dev tools installed, pointing to my source libraries and storage. And I want it available to me everywhere — at home, at work, on the road, wherever.
Today I have all this set up on my home office machine. But that limits me, I can’t do dev at work, or on the go.
I could carry a windows laptop but…I already carry a Mac laptop and don’t want to walk away from that. I could put a vm on my mac laptop i guess, but I don’t always have a laptop with me, sometimes like today I am tablet-only, but would still like to do some work.
So I am wondering if maybe I should pay for a hosted windows desktop somewhere. And then remote into it from whatever machine I am at right now. But I am seeing prices of $25-40 a month for a full hosted windows desktop and this seems expensive. I am not using this machine 24/7 so I want a price much more suited for casual use.
Of course I could remote into my home machine. But a) this requires me tearing thru firewalls and nat and I find this to be unreliable, and b) this requires me to open up the home machine to remote ops and that makes me a little nervous about security implications, and c) this requires me to really manage that home machine well, keep it backed up and updated and running perfectly, and I tend to want to tinker on that machine and not be held to this level of reliability.
Another alternative is to accept that the entire tool chain just lives on the one machine, and of course I’ll use github or the moral equivalent for source storage, and all I do on other machines is edit. That is not a terrible outcome but I’d like to do better.
What I’d really like is something like c9.io which would let me develop win phone apps, as well as a variety of other targets.
Advice welcome!
When you are 10x behind in mobile apps, your tools probably ought to be 10x better
As part of my Windows Phone trial, I am going to dig into the developer tools. I’ve written a little throwaway iOS app, and i’ve written one with Parse (super easy!). So I’d like to understand the experience of writing a Windows Phone app.
App Hub seems to be the starting place. Like a lot of marketing-driven websites, there are a lot of words up here, and indices of more words, and pointers to more words. Not a lot of help for me to actually do something — Parse is a nice constrast, sample Parse code on the landing page and a signup button right on the first page which leads to a very simple signup. You can get developing with Parse in literally a minute; not so with App Hub.
Anyway, I followed the pointers and installed the winphone sdk. There are some words up here that talk about getting a Visual Studio Express edition and I am thinking, thank goodness, because VS is kind of a beast. Well I was wrong, I seem to have gotten a pretty significant chunk of VS with templates for all kinds of code projects. It actually took me a while to figure out where the templates were for winphone projects, and I actually found several, and couldn’t figure out which was the right one to start with. (I did have a version of VS installed a year ago and uninstalled it, but perhaps it left some residue behind which made my VS Express look more complicated)
So I figure I should sign up with apphub and get a developer account assuming there will be some guidance on what to do next. Well apparently tho that is a hard thing to do. My credit card transaction keeps getting turned down with no explanation. Munging thru forums and trading email with apphub support has revealed that this is a common issue, there is something very off with the Microsoft billing system. People wait for days to get their account approved. I’ve been told I need to use IE9 to sign up, that I have to visit 5 different subdomains and make sure my account information is 100% consistent across all those, that I may just want to give up and try again with a new account. I’ve tried everything to no avail. Oh and the billing site is incredibly slow.
So I struggle on. I have email in to several people for help. But some broad prescriptive advice for MSFT at this point: When you are 10x behind in mobile apps and mobile app developers, you should probably aspire to have tools and a developer program that are 10x easier to use. Some specific ideas:
- Fix billing. I’d argue to get rid of it all together, let any damn fool in the developer program, MSFT needs developers. The billing system has clearly been poor for years, it needs some energy applied to it.
- Radically simplify VS. If what I am seeing is what all developers see, it is too much. Too many templates, frameworks, language choices, etc.
- Make the developer website more about doing, less about telling. Developers should be developing code in seconds and minutes, not hours. They can go munge thru detailed technical material later, get them up and running in a dev environment with sample code fast.
- Melding the above two ideas, look at something like Cloud9. Host a dev environment right on the site, require no download or install, let people start coding in seconds. Cloud storage of code so they can pick up their coding anywhere, a cloud-based testing environment (I’m sure some of our portfolio companies like Skytap would be happy to help). Make it dramatically easier to get a dev and test environment set up.
- Talk with the Parse guys, they have figured out how to make it super easy to develop mobile apps, solving a lot of the backend issues that many developers don’t need to deal with.
This is just the beginning. I am sure MSFT has plenty of smart folks who have ideas. It is not a time to hold back, I’d look hard at bold steps to really change the playing field.
UPDATE: Some nice folks at MSFT helped me get this solved, but in a nonscalable way. Appreciate the help but doesn’t solve the problem for the mass market.