Category: Opinions

What I think about things

Google, almost there, but not quite

One pet peeve that I have with Google is their seeming inability to actually finish stuff.

Maybe it’s the nature of the Internet or a web 2.0 thing, but it seems that so few of Google’s wonderful offerings develop to the point where you can finally commit to using them and get rid of other paradigms.

Don’t get me wrong. I love Google and what they’ve done for Search and email. Their Gmail product is the best on or offline interface that I’ve yet encountered, and I was a die-hard Outlook user before that. (MR/2 before that, Lotus Notes at work).

The problem is, I use a PDA when I’m away from home. An iPAQ 3955 ig you’re interested. And the best PIM for syncing this device is Outlook. So my calendaring is in Outlook, my tasks are in Outlook and my Contacts are all in Outlook.

I don’t know what world most of the wireless PDA aficionados live in today, but it isn’t mine. I do not have Wi-Fi access most places that I go and I haven’t found a PDA-based calendar that can hold a candle to “Pocket Informant” on my iPAQ (well, maybe DateBK4 but that was in the heyday of Palm devices..).
I also use a Blackberry since I support these devices at work, their calendaring is staid and reliable but not very good for planning.

Google has a great contacts scheme in Gmail. Why can I not sync them with Outlook? Heck, Google owns ORKUT, why can’t they sync with each other and THEN with Outlook?

I also am enamored of Google’s calendaring app, but I have no way of getting the information from it to my iPAQ. Again, Google has created a kick-ass interface and then does not provide sufficient functionality to allow me to take advantage of it. It has to sync with Outlook in order for my iPAQ to have it available for me. It’s been out there for over a year now (nearly 2??) and can do some spiffy things, but still cannot do something as basic as sync with Outlook.

I just tried using “Remote Calendars” and “Companionlink” over the weekend to see if either was up to the task. Never mind that Google is in perpetual Beta so neither of these offerings are able to guarantee that they will continue to work flawlessly as Google’s products are tweaked. At least they are trying to bridge the gap.
“Remote Calendars” simply doesn’t work on my system – I have the feeling it’s either a conflict with GDS (ironic) or an old plug-in called lookout that I used to use with Outlook. And the “Companionlink” offering, which installed and worked right out of the box (so to speak) started duplicating some (but not all) calendar entries with each sync. I really didn’t need to be walking around with 20 reminders of an impending doctor’s appointment waiting for me next month so, after trialing to satisfy myself of the current state of the situation, I uninstalled it and will check it out again in another quarter or so.

The same can be said for Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets app. I keep a list of movies that I want to see on a little excel spreadsheet on my iPAQ. I like to update it from a real keyboard if I’m at home and so I use Excel. I would be just as happy to use the Google offering, except the only way to see the spreadsheet is to access the web, which I’m not doing in my local Blockbuster. The same applies for my weight and balance spreadsheets for flying, my groceries-needed spreadsheet and a half dozen other little lists that spreadsheets are useful for. Again, the ability to sync the files out of Google is needed.

Perhaps I’m falling behind the times and I need to shell out for some kind of unlimited data plan and a WinCE-based phone. But the offerings out there seem to me to be prohibitively expensive. I do play somewhat with these services from my Blackberry as such access is included with the corporate plan that we use but most small-screen access of the web seems to me to be lacking. It’s not a very rich experience and it is so very, very slow. My plan is EVDO for those who know what that is, so it’s pretty much as fast as you can get on a Verizon wireless device.

So, as usual, my desires are about a decade ahead of what is being offered. I can certainly keep doing what I’m doing now, it’s worked for the past few years, I’m sure it will work for a few more. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m either too eager, too small a demographic for anybody to care about, or simply looking in the wrong direction for progress as these (to me) obvious gaps in application offerings hang out there well beyond the point where I’m willing to wait to use the associated products.

Minority Report becomes Reality

And without Tom Cruise, thankfully.

Check out this YouTube video of a prototype workstation. The way the guy is interacting with it is exactly the way we should be using computers… I’m very excited for the future.

I suspect that the real future for the keyboard for the foreseeable future will be one that is physically rendered in addition to being graphically rendered. By this I mean that you will be able to feel the keys, either through some localized stimulation or through gross alteration of the screen, so touch typing can remain a reality.

God would be an atheist: Why can’t we all be Japanese?

From “The Institute for Humanist Studies”, this article titled “God would be an atheist: Why can’t we all be Japanese?” is a rather scathing critique of the impact of religion on civilized nations.

I largely agree with the assessment presented with the reservation that there are many secular influences (historical government, societal and even religious practices) that have shaped those cultures and can bear at least some of the credit / fault for the way they function today.

The portrait of Japanese as being overall better off than Americans just due to religion ignores the cultural submission to authority that seems to be much more prevalent in the Asian world than here. Further, population densities and thousands of years of civilization have helped make these folks who they are. But it also has constrained them in many ways and I do not believe it is as easy to express oneself in these rigid cultures. Indeed, a lack of cultural inertia is one of the best things that the US has going for it. Without the hindrance of centuries of tradition we are freer to explore and elucidate the world around us.
Unfortunately, religion does crop up whenever there is uncertainty, and when you are not that thoroughly grounded (only a couple of hundred years hardly qualifies as a culture) then you are just a babe and perhaps still do need your all powerful fables to help you sleep at night..

Mail-in Rebates and other Crummy Marketing Practices – take a stand!

When mail-in rebates started becoming more popular I was stuck dealing with them along with everybody else. I have to admit that my success rate was pretty high. Now I didn’t buy a lot of stuff that had these rebates associated with them but, in the beginning, I would get back a check for every single one that I submitted.

Then, last year, Symantec decided to decline a legitimate mail-in rebate due to “insufficient proof of existing product”, this after I had mailed in the first CD from exactly one of the products that they listed as a legitimate upgrade. Since then, life has become.. well.. busy. And I’ve noticed that the timeframe for submitting these rebates has decreased substantially, often to only about 15 days after purchase. Personally, I like to know I’m going to keep a product before submitting the rebate. I haven’t tried to return a product with the UPC symbol carved out of the box but I imagine that it doesn’t go over very well.
So I’ve missed some pretty hefty rebates recently, one for a laptop that we purchased, another for my Bellsouth DSL modem.

So I’ve decided that I’m fed up with them and now completely do not consider the value of a mail-in rebate when making my purchasing decision.

I recently purchased a 250 Gigabyte hard drive, it “retails” for $130 and I was able to pick it up for either $90 right then and there or to wait for a few days when they would have a mail-in rebate for $70 (making it a $60 purchase – pretty sweet). When I look at that choice I see a $90 drive or a $130 drive. So I went for the $90 drive. No fiddling around like an idiot cutting things off of boxes, no filling out little questionnaires, no printing neatly so they’ll be able to mail something back to me, and no waiting 8-12 weeks for them to maybe send me a check that can easily be mistaken for more junk mail. No, I haven’t done this yet, but I imagine that larger families must do this all the time.

The other thing that skews my buying choices nowadays is the digit “9”. I understand that human psychology views $29.99 to be a much better deal than $30.00 but it’s pretty brazen of companies to be using this on every product they sell all the time. How many times have you seen adverts indicating that this $99.99 puts this product in your house for under a hundred dollars (apparently there is no sales tax in those areas)?

I absolutely love, and go out of my way to patronize places that round prices to the nearest dollar. If they can include those insulting sales taxes in the prices too, I’m all for that. There is a local golf club that does this and, though it’s not the closest one to me, it’s one reason why I go there. Treat me like a reasonable adult, not a moron who needs to be misdirected, cajoled and fooled into making my purchasing decisions. If I want that, I’ll go see a magic show.

OK, rant mode off. I *am* a little curious if anybody who sees this feels at all the same way as I do about these things…

Doomsday clock – piffle I say

I’ve been reading about the so-called “Doomsday Clock” for few decades now and I have to say that it seems stupid and irrelevant to me.

Here you have an awareness tool that is modeled after something most folks can relate to, a simple analog clock. Therein lies the problem. Firstly, the stupid Doomsday Clock only started at about a quarter ’til midnight. Secondly, it is able to go backwards.

To me, the relevance of this kind of warning vehicle is completely negated by the fact that you can say “We’re only 4 minutes away from CERTAIN ANNIHILATION!!” (and yes, I remember when that happened). And then a little while say “Ah, things have changed… no worries, we still have more time.”.

1868

It’s alarmist and it’s faulty, and worse, it’s just a bad metaphor as it attempts to use something completely irrelevant to the conversation in trying to make its point. At least the wildly lampooned Homeland Security Alert Levels never claimed any kind of time component to them, which makes them a far better vehicle for non-hysterical situational awareness. Even if nobody understands what the heck the colors are supposed to mean :).

Getting Things Done

  Getting Things Done
David Allen’s excellent book is a must read if you find yourself awash with “Stuff” to do and trying to figure out what and when to do it all.Of primary importance is creating a system, how it’s implemented doesn’t matter, that you trust to capture all of the stuff that you need to do. Getting it out of your brain and into your system allows you to free yourself for more productive work without the nagging suspicion that one of those thoughts zipping around in your head should be being addressed instead of the task at hand.

It’s really a simple, basic approach to, well, getting things done.

How soon before Matrix-like virtual reality becomes an option?

What a truly astonishing era we live in today. The amazing thing is the fact that, 10 years from now it will be even more astonishing, and 100 years after that even more so.

This is a neat opinion piece I just read off of Dr. Steven Novella’s Neurologica Blog titled “Coolest NeuroScience Breakthrough of 2006“.

Superstitious nonsense

*sigh* At one time the Arab world was at the forefront of scientific literacy and achievement. Then they fell into an abyss of superstition, fear and ignorance that plagues them to this day.

Just because we (America) are on top today, does not mean that the same thing can’t happen to us. We really, really have to guard against this kind of nonsense.

I can’t verify if this article is true or not, but based on the Bush administration’s previous meddling in NASA science publications and this blog entry on Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog I am pretty confident it is accurate.

Park Service Can’t Give Official Age Of Grand Canyon For Fear Of Offending Creationists…

Time Magazine’s Article – “Why We Worry About The Things We Shouldn’t… …And Ignore The Things We Should”

Time magazine tends to cater to a pretty credulous mindset. If I want solid reporting and analysis of world events I favor “The Economist”, but I was pointed to “Time’s” December 4, 2006 cover story by a blog entry on Phil Plait’s “Bad Astronomy” blog.

I fly airplanes, I shoot guns, I don’t smoke and I do exercise. Mostly, however, I manage risk. Understanding what is safe and what is really dangerous, not just emotionally appealing, is key to focusing on and dealing with the real issues that face us today.

We really need to get a grip on the things that we allow our public leaders use to divert us from the real issues. Check out this article for some perspective.