January 4, 2012
On Android’s 400,00 apps and useless metrics

Imagine walking into a room full of your friends, dropping your pants and saying “LOOK AT THE SIZE OF MY JUNK”. To me, that’s exactly how these “look out, Apple” stories read.

If someone is touching your junk, then that almost counts. Let’s call that installs of apps. But until someone puts a ring on your junk (aka purchases your app and keeps it installed) then it counts for nothing.

The idea that Android’s Market will overtake the App Store simply by having “more” is asinine. This is where the Android Market still pales in comparison to the App Store. The level of devotion that users have to quality apps is huge. We’re at the point where people are seeing value for intangible products. Throwing “more” against the wall to see if they stick is a ridiculous metric.

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January 1, 2012
The biggest piece of truth that I know.

There are a lot of things that I know to  be true, but they vary greatly in their impact. Without any reservation, there is one thing that I know above all else:

Far too soon, tomorrow will be yesterday.

Just let that simmer for a minute. What do you keep promising yourself that you’ll do tomorrow (or the next day, or “some day”)? Stop waiting. One day you’ll look back and realize that too many tomorrows have come and gone. You don’t get them back.

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December 31, 2011
Auld Lang Syne for 2011

Looking back, 2011 was the single best year of my life. But each year should be better than the one before it, it’s simply a pleasant surprise when it does work out that way. I can truthfully say that this is the first year that I’ll be sad to see go, but I’m of course hopeful for the promises of 2012.

I don’t believe in resolutions, per se, but I figure that today is as good as any other to write down the things that I want to focus on in the upcoming year.

  • I got married in 2011. I will make sure to spend more time with my amazing, beautiful wife Candace.
  • I will make sure that time spent with my two kids is quality, not just quantity.
  • I will surround myself only with people who are positive, in an effort to be more positive myself.
  • I will find more amazing startups, truly listen to their stories and help them in any way I can.

There’s a lot of other things, too, but these are what are foremost on my mind. What sort of things are on yours?

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December 30, 2011
“Customer feedback” changed Verizon’s mind? More like an FCC inquiry.

In case you missed the news, Verizon said yesterday that it was going to implement a $2 “convenience fee” for customers who were paying in any way that wasn’t automated and monthly. Needless to say that this brought about some griping from the customer base.

So today we hear via The Verge that Verizon has dropped the proposed charge due to “customer feedback”. But don’t be fooled; everything about the dropping of the fee has to do with it catching the attention of the FCC and nothing about customer feedback.

Verizon knew what it planned to do, it knew the potential repercussions. When the FCC decided that it was going to step in, big red backed down. End of story.

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December 18, 2011
“Journalist” claims Twitter deleted his account for talking about OWS & NDAA. Not so fast…

In a post over on Business Insider, self-proclaimed journalist David Seaman is claiming that Twitter has deleted his account because he was “Talking too much about Occupy Wall Street”. In an eyeball-catching headline, Seaman says that Twitter is sponsoring the United Police States of America.

But Mr. Seaman “forgot” to mention a couple of key factors, and it’s worth noting that he’s now crossing a line where his protection as a journalist would be compromised. 

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December 16, 2011
The passing of Christopher Hitchens

Those who know me know my personal faith. It might surprise you, then, to know that I too mourn the passing of Christopher Hitchens, an outspoken atheist. But it’s not a matter of faith, it’s a matter of losing something of which this world is painfully lacking - an educated, honest and well-spoken voice.

For the past 15 or so  years of my life, I’ve read almost every single piece of work that Hitchens wrote. I consumed his words with gusto, not because I often agreed with them, but rather because they challenged me to think for myself, instead of accepting the conventional wisdom or knowledge of the crowd.

There aren’t words to express what the world loses when someone like Hitch passes. The only thing that I can offer is a suggestion to you to read and think for yourself, in honor of the mind that is now gone. His death is a tragedy, and our world is an emptier place because of it. Christopher Hitchens was one of the crazy ones, and his words and work will live on because of it.

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December 15, 2011
An open letter to US Congressman Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee

I wrote a letter to my Congressional representative. I urge you to do the same.

Congressman Blackburn -

It has come to the attention of many that you support the Stop Online Piracy Act, which is presently being heard in the House Judiciary Committee. Given your previous stance on Net Neutrality, I thought that I should have no fear that you would reject SOPA, but it seems that’s not the case.

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December 15, 2011
On news versus common sense

I’ve seen a lot of pitches lately, primarily from social marketing companies, that read like this —

“We found out that when people feel comfortable with a company, they’re more willing to engage with it. Further, we found out that when a company is willing to give something that the customer sees as valuable, the customer is more likely to give a Like, an email address or something else with personal value.”

Well stop the freaking presses.

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December 14, 2011
Debunking the Retina Display MacBook rumor

Just a quick thought here, but the idea of a Retina Display MacBook, as rumored on AppleInsider, makes zero sense to me for a few of reasons.

First off, it’s asking consumers to completely disregard their present hardware. Many users hook up an external display to their MacBook, close the lid of the laptop itself and then use the external as the only monitor when they’re at their desk. A “typical” high end monitor will have a 1080p display, meaning that you’d end up with a massive shift in resolution from the “proposed” standards that would exist on the respective MacBooks. Those standards? Get this:

  • 13-inch — 2560x1600
  • 15-inch — 2880x1800
  • 17-inch — 3840x2400

The second thing that immediately comes to mind is the cost of the display. Apple doesn’t typically change its hardware pricing all that much on a model refresh. Could the company acquire IPS displays that could do 3840x2400 resolution and still keep (even roughly) the same price? I doubt this very heavily.

Also, there’s a huge problem when you start talking bigger displays — battery life. The MacBook line has been famous for having quite decent unplugged working time. When you’re talking about a bump of this magnitude, you’re going to either have to give up battery life, or you’re going to make the device heavier by somehow cramming an even higher mAh battery into it.  Either way, this goes against Apple’s typical path.

Finally there’s the issue of usability. At that high of a resolution, on that screen size, you’d have to bump up the size of nearly every application and icon in order to make them comfortably visible. By the time that you do that, you’ve essentially killed off any benefit of having the higher resolution, other than having icons that look prettier. Bear in mind, it will take an inordinately long time for your favorite apps to update to higher-resolution graphics, so all you’re going to have is a pretty desktop wallpaper.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I don’t think I am. We’ll see. Paul Haddad from Tapbot brings up a valid point:

But right now, at that screen size, I simply don’t see the benefit to having resolutions that high.

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December 13, 2011
Welcome to the Internet, now please shut up.

There’s an unhealthy dose of insanity that happens on the Internet. The latest example of this is something that I saw over on Gigaom today, in the comments:

Now let’s pick apart what Stephen M is saying here. He’s insinuating that Gigaom is a site that is being paid, by Apple Inc, to post positive things about the company. In fact, Stephen even (rightly) points out that Apple is in the navigation bar at the top of the site, though he incorrectly assumes that the link exists because Apple Inc paid for it to be there.

Apparently it has never crossed Stephen’s mind that Om Malik, the founder and namesake of the Gigaom blog, is simply a fan of Apple. Of course, had he ever bothered to read anything that Om writes on his personal blog, that fact would have not gone unnoticed. But no, that’s too much work. Stephen would rather spout off his uneducated, hate-filled pie hole than to accept a simple fact.

There’s another fact that’s hard to accept, apparently, to the Internet readers of the world. Blogs are (often times) filled with the content that the blog owners and writers care about. It might seem crazy, but if you think back a few years, that was sort of the purpose behind blogs coming into existence anyway. And yet it’s all-too-soon forgotten, especially any time that someone writes about Apple, Android, Microsoft or Google.

I like a number of different products, and I write about a myriad of them. I’m a fan of Windows 7, I love my iPhone. I use a MacBook Pro daily, but I’ve also enjoyed using Dell’s XPS 15z, a Windows-based machine. Yet almost every single time I write about one product or another, I get accused of being a biased “fanboy” for a brand by some mouth-breathing neckbeard who hasn’t seen the light outside of mom’s basement in ages.

Almost as if on cue, John Gruber has just posted this quote from Paul Graham over on Daring Fireball —

“The third cause of trolling is incompetence. If you disagree with something, it’s easier to say “you suck” than to figure out and explain exactly what you disagree with. You’re also safe that way from refutation.”

In general, anything created should be done so with passion. Writing is not excused from this, and blogging is perhaps held to this truth at an even higher level. As bloggers, we’re exceptionally passionate about the subjects on which we write. Don’t mistake that passion for being a fanboy, but if you happen to, you’re welcome to close the window. Welcome to the Internet. Now please, shut up.

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