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.

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?

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”:amazon 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”:amazon 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”:amazon 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.

“MGoBlog”:http://mgoblog.com/content/bcs-doubts-college-football-stadium-can-host-college-football-game rips apart the rationalization from BCS leaders about hosting of college football playoff games.

The proposal to host these games at schools was awesome and would have created some terrific games with terrific atmospheres, college football is all about atmosphere. Moving to neutral sites blows. The BCS really thinks that a school like UM in a smaller city can’t handle the logistics of a playoff game? Have they been to a Michigan football weekend with a major opponent like OSU or ND?

The BCS may have valid reasons to favor neutral sites (bowl sponsors plyIng them with $), but these are not those reasons.

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”:wavii.com, 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”:getprismatic.com, 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.

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”:http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/04/the-jig-is-up-time-to-get-past-facebook-and-invent-a-new-future/256046/:

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.

2 Macs, Windows, iPad, Winphone. Seems as nice as dropbox, and I get 25G free because I already had an account I guess? VS my 2.5G with dropbox. This seems very compelling.

Leaked today and linked to broadly – “Valve new employee handbook (pdf)”:http://cdn.flamehaus.com/Valve_Handbook_LowRes.pdf

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.

Until “my recent post assessing the Lumia”:http://theludwigs.com/2012/04/am-i-still-using-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.

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”:http://theludwigs.com/2012/04/when-you-are-10x-behind-in-mobile-apps-your-tools-probably-ought-to-be-10x-better/, 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.

Eat your heart out, rest of the world.

After “last week’s foray into the fanstastical”:http://theludwigs.com/2012/04/books-land-of-decoration-mirage-monster-hunter-international-westing-game-man-from-primrose-lane/ I needed to get a little grounded again in my reading.

* “Universal Principles of Design”:amazon 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”:amazon 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?”:amazon 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”:amazon 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.

“SPLK on Yahoo Finance”:http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=splk&ql=1

At “Ritholtz”:http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/04/21-pixar-story-rules/, who lifted them from “Pixar TOuch”:http://www.pixartouchbook.com/blog/2011/5/15/pixar-story-rules-one-version.html who in turn lifted them from “Emma Coats”:https://twitter.com/#!/lawnrocket.

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.”