Current Events

Lets see. What are the 4 or so things which already suck about the whole iPad experience:

1. Its a tablet but it runs a phone OS.
2. You can run all the iPhone applications but you have to run them sequentially.
3. It will browse the web but you cannot watch flash on it.
4. You can read books on it but you cannot do anything else.
5. It will not do USB unless you buy expensive dongle-age.

Geez, then you gotta see what happens when Hitler heard about it. Thanks to Rich for this one,

Yeah Baby!

I’ll just run right out and get one now. What a sad waste of years of waiting. I’ll stick to my decidedly inferior netbook running Windows 7 which has a 250g hard disk drive in it that can do all the things that the iPad cannot. Even reading ebooks. This is an extremely sorry device and I cannot wait for the Linux community to root the thing and give it some meaning. If I were rich I would put a bounty on it and get a savvy Linux hacker a small fortune to put debian on it or something. Then it becomes useful.  It would mount file shares, run office applications, be a real convergence device or something. But hell no. It runs a phone OS. Back to one of the points above.

Edit 2.5

The so many thousand reasons why the iPad is so disappointing. Read them and weep. Some of the reasons may be BS. Others may be distorted or be a case like with me of pure and distinct Apple dislike fever; but other people may have purchased one until they heard about a few of my salient points above. Steve needs to gather the fanbois and do a state of the ipad presentation like Obama just did for the nation. He could tell us why:

1. Its okay for the iPad to run a phone OS.
2. That people really don’t want to load content directly
3. That iTunes itself is not evil and people should be glad to have the Outlook of digital media available
4. That iTunes is the only way now to sync data

That last few are really deal killers for me. I tried valiantly to get away from iTunes and it libmusicmangle.so approach.

I landed in Hanoi, Vietnam at about 1045pm and got through customs in record breaking time. Took all of 10 minutes from start to end. Very nice. I’m staying at the Intercontinental Westlake for a week or so. I’m here for our annual sales conference and to do a few presentations myself on our products and engineering focus.

After a week here, I fly out to Singapore next Friday for 5 days and then back home again. Not like my earlier trips where i stay gone for months at a time. Around mid-February, I will depart again for Singapore and India for engineering meetings, work and deliverables execution, and other stuff. I’ll be on the road it appears every 45 days for this year. That’s fine for me.

First night after flying 16 hours is kinda strange. I slept or rather fell unconscious for about 6 hours. I slept on the 6 hour plane ride from Narita to Hanoi. Luckily the flight to Hanoi was not too crowded so I had two seats to myself so I could stretch out.

This trip, I’m going with no real books. Instead, since I am an inveterate reader; I’m going with the world kindle. Folks tend to ask me all sorts of questions about it. Yes, its easier than lugging around 2 or 3 pounds of books. Battery life is decent. It links to my regular amazon account. Books are downloaded to it automatically. If you travel; its worth the savings in weight.

I also purchased a Lenmar 4 port international USB charger which lets me charge phone, iPod, kindle and even my PSP at the same time. Very handy. This is a great deal if you travel frequently. Just remember to carry the slightly different USB cables. Beats the heck out of carrying little travel chargers with plugs, etc.

Today, I find a cheapo Vietnam Simcard to use while here and also just rest a bit after the flight. Going to have breakfast here in a bit and take a look around the hotel boundaries. Maybe take some photo’s to add to my flickr stream.

Finally, don’t travel with the wrong OS on that computer folks. Leave Windows at home and use Ubuntu. Easier to manage, update, deal with strange networks. I’ve found Ubuntu Karmic 9.10 to be a very handy and capable OS. If you cannot do this; how about using a live CD instead? No real tracks of what you did, banking, etc. Give it some thought. Do you really need all that fluff and stuff on Windows 7? Probly not

Travel to Hanoi and have fun. Don’t buy paper books or hardbacks. Use the Kindle. I bought one and the idea of being set free from trying to plan out the books, carrying all that weight, and having something portable and easily packed in carry-on baggage is very nice. I read a lot so always in the past had to carry two books. Now, I carry a few more but they’re inside the kindle waiting.

I’m sitting at SFO in the International Terminal patiently waiting for my JAL flight to Narita and then on to Hanoi. Its pretty exciting since I have never been there. After a week or so in Hanoi, I fly over to Singapore for some days for work. Perhaps meet Art there for drinks at Raffles Long Bar.

Happy New Years folks. Hope you all have a happy and profitable year in 2010. If you went to Vegas in 2009, don’t worry. Its all forgotten and in the past…

The dude did something wrong. The dude paid his time. The dude is talented and got hired to play football again and won an award. How about we give him the same rights as the thousands of others who pay their bill to the so-called society and let them get on with life? If his life happens to be in the NFL spotlight, so be it. You all think anyone is truly a saint? If you do, I got this awesome bridge in California to sell ya.

Let the man go.

The ETC…

I always add one. I got my Moto Milestone and I’m stuck in a loving mood with it. Its a great device, has this kinda strange and quirky good looks. It does the phone thing well; but is that the only reason we truly get Android devices? I think we want them because we are discriminating and we don’t want stupid Apple phones that only come in one flavor, one hardware type, with no flashing of ROMs. There is no root on this phone (yet) but we saw the same thing happen when I bought my HTC Magic from Airtel in India. Inside of a month, the phone was rooted and we had great customized ROMs on it. It all takes time.

You may be tempted to think that its the same as the Verizon Droid; but it ain’t. Its unlocked which is the only kinda phone I’ll buy any more. It did have the battery cover issue which I fixed today thanks to this video:

It Works!! Thanks Droidsters!

Sometimes blogging brings about revelations. I told this story once about my take on some prehistoric rock art in the western Mojave Desert we stumbled upon. I felt that these early folks were telling a story; in effect writing a blogpost regarding an event, a happening, a direction. But the act of writing these things transcends them to another level; a more communicative and dialogue based event. They reach out to those that know them, those that never will, and try to catalog something which touched their lives. So what else is blogging? I think there are stages in modern blogging though and I’ve been doing it for awhile and seen a few of them.

• Stage 1. You need authority and links. You want to surf that wave and become the next great technorati author. Recognized, listed, linked to and from.
• Stage 2. Non bloggers discuss your blogposts in forum posts. Wow! Basically someone has taken the time to find your valuable meanderings and include something that you wrote. I published this one post once on using Mutt with gmail’s imap support and got a few emails back from non-bloggers about it. Very cool and it felt quite right.
• Stage 3. Everyone knows you and you reach the zenith and people just quote your words. When you reach this level, you don’t even have to really blog anymore. People know what you are gonna say before you even blog it. Omnipotent powers; but be careful. Don’t be like the guy on Friends and think I just said “impotent”.
• Stage 4 to 98. Variations on above…
• Stage 99. Well, you’ve reached the climactic and final stages of blogging nirvana. Now it occurs to you that none of those other stages really mattered. Links and authority, everyone knowing your name, non-bloggers knowing you. What you are writing is for the pure joy of writing because you want to and can. There is no ultimate reward of the blogosphere. No big circus tent or award show for the best and brightest. No emmy’s or oscar’s. Just the honest feeling you get and that each thing you write does not have to mean a damned thing.

Its my birthday so I can write on the wall of my apache server any damned thing I want. I don’t want honesty. I am not terribly honest at times and I lack other things too. The things which if I had I would not be human. I am not terribly social and I’ve known it for a long time. I’m what a rather famous archeologist called me once: “a somewhat private person; shy; with some brightness”. Thanks Phil!

Today is my last day in India. Tonight I fly out to Singapore for a day and night and then on Friday I fly back home! Going to be seeing a few international airports starting this evening. Gonna be very nice to get $HOME.