My Personal Infocloud
So
I was a little surprised to see Cincinnati ranked so high as it is in some ways such a backwater in other regards. Still, it is good to see the city get even an occasional positive mention. I have certainly been doing my small part in the last 10 years to contribute to Cincy online presence.
Technorati Tags: cincinnati, online, rankings, socialmedia
So
If you are looking for instructions on how to update your AT&T Samsung Captivate to the latest version (2.2 aka Froyo) of the Android OS look no further than Samsung's site. And, please, avoid all of the sites out there that what you to register before they will give you this same link.
The process takes about 20-30 minutes to complete. After the update, all of your wallpapers and launch page layouts will be gone. No apps or data is lost, just the layouts, so you will need to recreate those.
Other than that little annoyance, I am noticing snappier performance overall from the phone so it is definitely worth the time to update.
So
Found a little time to clean up my Internet Footprint – that is all the sites that I have tinkered around with in the past and for whatever reason, never really found any value in them to keep me coming back. So I have gone back and delete my accounts; though I am sure the info will live on in Google for quite some time to come. Here is this weekend's harvest:
BrightKite – first location-based service I tried out. They've gotten out of that (crowded) space. 43Places – I found that I got a lot of people asking for advice about places I'd been but no one answering questions about places I wanted to go. 43People – This was an interesting thought experiment – for about a week. GetGlue – Hunch-wannabe without the correlations and meaningful recommendations. No thanks, I don't need any more virtual stickers. SCVNGR – Another twist on location-based services swizzled with a sort of treasure hunt vibe. Not really enough going on with this to try out or keep me coming back. Also, no option to delete your account. Abandoned. Box.net – this was kind of cool when it first came out; especially being able to access files from my mobile phone. Now Dropbox and Google Docs have taken over for this. Ning – they kind of shot themselves in the head when they switched to a all pay model – that made jumping ship an easy decision. check.in – promised to provide unified 'check ins' for all location-based services. Never really worked that well and probably won't make it out of beta. twine – crashed and burned on its own; morphed into evri which doesn't seem to have a point with all of the twitter search engines out there plancast – recommends all sorts of interesting sounding events – in Austin, Paris, and NYC. Not terribly useful if you aren't in those places. task.fm – reminders; except you need to remember to do to that site to get them – easily replaced this with google calendar and as a bonus automatically gets synced to my mobile phone.
And as previously mentioned – Gowalla is gone and FourSquare is now an entropy exercise.
So
It is kind of fun to listen to the 'pundits' slobber over the rumored iPad 2. They seem to not have a very long memories when they criticize (with a barely masked worried tone in their voices) the emerging Android tablets.
“There aren't many apps written specifically for the Android tablet” – yes, and this was very much true with all of the iPhone apps when the iPad came out.
“iPad has more business adoption than Android tablets” – um, which Android tablets? Most of them will be released in the next six months – businesses typically find it hard to adopt technology that doesn't exist.
Personally I find the walled off nature of iOS a hindrance for any serious use of the iPad. As I have said before, we travel with both the iPad and a cheap netbook and the netbook is the device that gets used most often. Android just provided a better fit for the way I want to use a computer and it looks like the tablet-specific Honeycomb version of the Android OS is just going to make that even better.
Technorati Tags: android, apple, design, ipad, netbook, opinion
So
I decided that in 2011 I am going to conduct an experiment in location-based entropy. That is, I am no longer going to update my Gowalla and Foursquare accounts and have already removed the apps from my phone.
I currently have 15 Foursquare mayorships (several of them in other countries!) – let's see how long it takes for someone to 'oust' me from all of those locations. I didn't use Gowalla as much, largely due to its clunky interface and lack of any real incentives so I have no ground to give there.
Foursquare is growing rapidly, but I have not found any real value in continuing to participate. I have also noticed that with Foursquare becoming more popular, a lot of locations have employees as the 'mayor' – not exactly what was intended, I am sure. In fact, Foursquare recently provided the means for owners of locations to kick employee 'mayors' out so that actual customers have a shot.
Technorati Tags: foursquare, gowalla, location, socialmedia, socialsoftware, webtools
So
What a disaster Mozy's recent decision has been. They are switching away from unlimited storage and charging rapacious rates for the new capped plans that replace them. 3 times the cost for infinitely less service – brilliant! First of all, I am not sure they can just change the terms of service and not honor the terms of the previous legally binding contracts. I suspect at some point there will be a class action lawsuit against Mozy from existing customers. If that comes to pass, I will happily join it.
In my case, in December of 2010 I created a new Mozy account for my wife's Mac and committed to a 2 year unlimited storage contract. Mozy is now telling me that on October of 2011 that 2 year unlimited commitment converts to the capped storage scheme – not even 11 months into a 24 month agreement! Further, I was paying less than $300USD for unlimited backup on three computers for a 2 year contract. Mozy now wants to force re-up me for nearly $1000USD per year.
No thanks.
Right now, Crashplan is looking like the best alternative – they offer unlimited backup, a much more efficient and feature-rich client and I can get a household plan that covers backing-up up to 10 computers for four years for less than what I am paying now for three computers under Mozy. Crashplan is even offering a 15% discount to users switching from Mozy. Here is the URL for the Crashplan discount: http://www.crashplan.com/mozyonover .
My initial testing of the CrashPlan Mac client shows it transferring data at about 5x faster than the Mozy client (that is uploading to CrashPlan Central over my crappy DSL). I also have the option of backing up data to a folder on a local (or external drive), to another computer on my LAN or even a friend's computer across the Interwebs.
It is probably going to take a few weeks to get my base data uploaded to CrashPlan so I can then go back to smaller incremental backups, but there is no way on this earth that I am staying with Mozy and their insane pricing. If you are a current Mozy customer, give CrashPlan a look (and even a free 30 day trial). If you are considering Mozy: don't – run away from that train wreck and spend your money with a less greedy and ethically challenged business.
Technorati Tags: badideas, backup, crapsupport, crashplan, data, dubious, mozy, storage, webtools
So
I think this post on Why More Americans Don't Travel Abroad gets it partially right. As a person who has been fortunate to have traveled to a fair bit of the world, I have my thoughts on this and I think it comes down to three things really: 1) Ignorance 2) Laziness 3) Cost Misperception .
Ignorance – I've seen and heard this one a lot. Here is a sampling of what I have been asked: “Why would you ever want to leave the US – it is the best place in the world!” “Do they even celebrate Christmas in Spain?” “What are you going to eat in Thailand?” “Doesn't everyone ride elephants in South Africa?” People really think that Spain is just like Mexico – um, yes, in the same way that England is just like Canada or the US.
Laziness – Apparently it just takes too much effort to get a passport and deal with money that doesn't look like the good ole 'merican greenback. Heaven forbid you have to deal with people who don't speak English and that you might have to learn a few words of a foreign language. Here is a secret folks: any place you go in the world, there are people who want to take your money from you and they are more than happy to speak your language (and are amazed if you even make the effort to speak theirs!).
Cost Misperception – Maybe this is an excuse more than anything but apparently people believe that it is really expensive to travel to Europe. Most every time that I have looked, it is the same cost or cheaper to fly to Europe that it is to the west coast. Frankly, I am amazed at the coin that people will drop to go on a cruise or to some barfhole like Disneyland (or even a cruise at Disney). Those costs would more than accommodate a trip out of the country.
I guess I am lucky that traveling is something that my family loves to do, so we save up for a trip once a year. And kids don't have to be an obstacle. My daughter has been traveling since she was six months old. At the tender age of ten, she has been to 17 countries (some of them multiple times). I am willing to bet that she has seen more of the world in her first decade than most Americans will see in their entire lives.
Technorati Tags: travel
So
Here is yet another proclamation on the death of the netbook because of tablet computers. I'm not convinced quite yet. My own experience shows that when we travel with both an iPad and a netbook, the iPad sees some use (in short sputters) but the netbook does the majority of the computing duties. Part of that may be that the iPad in particular is just so darn limited in what it can do (and, in many ways, too cumbersome in the way that it does/doesn't do things).
Technorati Tags: ipad, netbook, technology, travel
So
Ok, so I am going to exaggerate things a bit to make a point.
So basically what happened this weekend is that fundamentalist, right wing extremist mufti Palin (with help from fellow radical clerics Beck and O'Reilly) saw their fatwa against Democrats acted upon by a domestic terrorist from the radicalized province of Arizona. Six people dead (including a young child)and around a dozen more injured because mufti Palin's utter contempt for how the Democratic process works in this country and the conviction that political differences must be dealt with by threats of violence and ultimately murder.
Funny how things don't get characterized this way when a white Christian commits the terrorist act. In fact, I am convinced that had there been a shadow of a connection with the Middle East or Islam, the above description is exactly how it would be characterized on shout radio and Fox News. No proof would be necessary beyond the posits of the uninformed pundits. The muftis and clerics would be under arrest. There would be 24 hours news cycles with cries for justice (more blood, more violence).
Instead, we reliably hear the right practically defending the actions of this murderous lunatic and blovating about how 'it isn't hate speech' and that putting targets on named Congress members districts and using the term 'take them out' wasn't a call to violence. We hear them distancing themselves from the terrorist's political views by saying 'he's not one of us, he's just a crazy person'. And of course the clinging to the gun culture that feeble minds find important: 'gun's didn't kill those people in Arizona, a person did'. Yes, a person with a gun. A person with a gun that (ironically enough) was banned as an assault weapon until 2004 because of it's high capacity clip. Oh, and suck on this NRA: who stopped the shooter? Not some 'patriotic', high minded, gun toting, shout radio regurgitater, but two men with their bare hands.
Amongst the calls to attenuate the vitriol in political discourse, Fox and others are taking this as an opportunity for further fear mongering and political attacks. The comment sections on the local media outlets are filled with the kind of ignorant, right wing parroting that I have commented on before (and come to expect from the backwater thinking that characterizes much of Cincinnati).
I can only hope that the nation learns a lesson from this. Perhaps it will, but post 9/11 memories lead me to believe it will not be a lasting one. Which makes me ask, what will it take for America to become de-radicalized, where disagreements in principle or thought are dealt with in a civil manner rather than at the point of a gun?
Technorati Tags: currentevents, dubious, ideas, news, opinion, politics, propaganda