A GThing Science Project

Here are some things I like for July.

1. Brown Cow Maple Yogurt

Tastes like dreams if dreams were made out of yogurt with maple syrup in it.

2. Purex 3-in-1 Laundry Sheets

How could something to do with laundry, a thing that I hate, make a list of things that are great? These sheets have detergent, softener, and anti-static stuff all in one. No measuring powder or liquids, just throw one of these sheets in with the laundry and transfer it with your clothes to the dryer.

3. Timbuk2 Freestlye XS messenger

It's small, it has pockets for all my gadgets including a sleeve for my iPad, phone, PSP, camera, etc. 35% off at Kirkham's in Salt Lake City.

4. HTC Evo

4G High Speed Wireless Data, 720p video recording, front facing camera for video chat, 8 megapixel camera, HDMI output, huge 4.3" display, Android bells and whistles, and a freaking sweet kick stand. Love it.

5. Nalgene Stainless Steel Water Bottle by Guyot Designs

A nice looking water bottle that I carry pretty much everywhere. To ensure its continued use I had to get one that I thought looked really cool and this is it. I've never been so hydrated.

"It is morally as bad not to care whether a thing is true or not, so long as it makes you feel good, as it is not to care how you got your money as long as you have got it."

--Edwin Way Teale Circle of the Seasons (1953)

Photo Courtesy LIFE.

A recent blog entry over at zerohedge has been making its way around the Internet. Since it's short, I will repost it in its entirety right here.

The government spent $175 million investigating the Challenger space shuttle disaster.

It spent $30 million investigating the Monica Lewinsky scandal.

The government only authorized $15 million for the 9/11 Commission.

And how much has the government authorized for the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission? You know, the commission charged with getting to the bottom of what caused the financial crisis?

Just $8 million.

You can tell alot about the questions which the government is truly interested in finding answers to by the amount of money it authorizes for the various investigations.

At first glance this seems like a gross oversight. First of all, we really spent 30 million tax payer dollars on the Monica Lewinsky investigation?

The financial meltdown is the biggest thing since things could be big - and we only spent eight million investigating it. That doesn't seem right, does it? I mean, it caused untold amounts of damage while the shuttle disasters were fairly self contained. The Lewinsky debacle didn't even do much damage at all in the long run. Eight million dollars?

The author than goes on to tell us how the government clearly doesn't care about getting to the bottom of the financial crisis. The implication is that they were involved or "they" are trying to protect those that profited from the fall of the American economy. Nefarious stuff, indeed. They're pulling the wool over our eyes.

Although everyone appears to have taken this hook, line, and sinker as evidence that the government is covering up or simply not caring enough about the financial crisis, there is a problem with the logic and facts that the author uses.
First of all, to imply that a set of completely unrelated investigations is comparable based solely on the cost of those investigations is an appeal to wealth and is completely illogical.
The amount an investigation costs should be the exact amount it takes to find an answer. The cost should not be determined in any way based on what previous, unrelated investigations have costs.

The author seems to argue we should be spending more money on an investigation into the financial crisis simply on the basis that we spent more on some other investigation. Doesn't he know money is tight? Doesn't he know what got us into the financial crisis in the first place?

There are lots of reasons costs might be different between two investigations. For NASA you have engineers, prototyping, hardware, and huge teams of people. With Monica Lewisnky you have DNA testing. There are a lot of things that might vary the cost. Also we're talking about criminal investigations versus non-criminal investigation versus informational inquiries.

There are certainly enough differences to show that you can't really compare the value of these investigations solely on cost.
This isn't to say that eight million dollars is enough, or that the investigation of the financial crisis is being conducted thoroughly enough. But if I was to make those claims, I would support them evidence and facts from which I would draw logical conclusions. I wouldn't frame some very specific piece of the data and draw wild unsupported conclusions from it.

The author of the article links to a New York Times piece where he got his eight million figure. In the same sentence as that figure is a figure of 38 million spent investigating the collapse of Lehman Brothers. Why doesn't he include that in his number?

The fact is that the eight million has nothing to do with ongoing criminal investigations and will most likely result in no prosecutions. The eight million is going towards the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, a congressionally appointed commission that is charged with finding what went wrong and how to prevent it. Citing this is the only thing the government is doing to investigate the meltdown is completely false, as there are many investigations.

As of January 2009, for example, the FBI had over 500 ongoing investigations regarding financial fraud and 38 specifically targeting companies involved in the financial crisis. How much money is being spent on those investigations? Many people have already been prosecuted and many more will be. I suspect that if you totaled all investigations you would find that the government is spending more money on investigations regarding the financial meltdown than on everything the author of this article cited combined. Most of these investigations were taking place well before the eight million was granted to the commission.

Lastly, the investigation being conducted by the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission is ongoing. It's hard to draw conclusions about its effectiveness until it is done. It is expected that they will release their findings at the end of this year.

This article is not interesting, it's sensationalist, false, and irresponsible. It makes broad implications based off of assumptions, incomplete data, and a tinfoil hat conspiracy theory. There is nothing about this article that is even remotely useful, worthwhile, or demands further investigation. It is 100% fallacious, meaningless, represents lazy reporting and an absence of fact checking or remotely adequate research. Since the person who wrote this took the time to look up the numbers I can only assume that they were either purposefully misleading or incredibly stupid.

So who is pulling the wool over whose eyes?

What's worse than pointlessly whiling away your life sitting at a red light in the middle of the night? Sitting at another one right after the first one finally turns green.

You sit there at the red light, looking ahead you can see every other light on the street is green. There are no other cars - it's the middle of the night. There are no cars waiting on the side streets for their turn to go, no pedestrians pushing buttons to activate cross walks. As soon as this light you're stuck at turns green, you're home free.

Only, you're not, because just as soon as your light turns green, the one at the very next block turns red. Rinse and repeat - stop and go traffic when you're the only one on the road, all night long until you finally arrive at your destination.

This experience could be equated to trying to brush your teeth while getting punched in the face every five seconds. Just as soon as you get started you have to stop, and it hurts every time.

Eisenhower, the guy who pioneered the first pope-mobile-like plexiglass bubble from which to be admired by his adoring fans as he was cruising around in his limousine, knew a thing or two about energy and transportation. He thought sitting at a red light in the middle of the night was a waste of energy. He hated red lights so much he made the interstate highway system, a place free from red lights where you can drive as fast as you want and never ever stop (as long as you keep it under 65, Dale.).

The city where I grew up, Denver, has a pretty good handle on things. The planners there seem to realize that stop lights are only necessary for part of the day and that when they are no necessary they can be flashing yellow on the main thoroughfare and red on the side streets. During the day, the lights are timed so that, if you drive the speed limit, you can hit all consecutively green lights.

Here in Utah it is the opposite. Lights run with long long cycles at 3am, and during the day the lights are timed to make you stop as many times as humanly possible. At least, that's what it seem like. I think the Salt Lake City planners wanted their city to be known as a fun place, but didn't quite get what a "red light district" was supposed to entail exactly.

Sometimes you will be sitting at an intersection where every light in every direction is red for minutes at a time. I don't know if there is some traffic control center where people are just messing with us, or if the damn things are malfunctioning. Neither thought is very comforting.

The problem is that here in Utah if you were to make an intersection flash yellow, people would not know what to do at all. It would be mass chaos. People would slam their breaks on, their heads exploding and their brains splattered all over the inside of their windshields. We still haven't figured out stop signs, surely blinking lights would be way too much.

Still, I think even this obstacle could be overcome with a few educational billboards (Utahns LOVE billboards) and generous applications of my horn.

So how bout it, Utah? Can we get some blinking yellow lights at night and some properly timed light sequences during the day? Then we can get to work on a proper red light district.

I've turned off auto-approval for commenters. I'm really going to miss constant messages from people who think I'm Bill Gates, but it's getting old. Until I return from outer blogness I don't want to deal with all the junk.

But if you're human and you have something to say, leave a comment and I'll get around to approving it, promise. If you're a robot and you want to sell me shoes or summer sausages or something, then just go ahead and 01100100 01101001 01100101 00001101 00001010.

Fool me once, shame on you.  Fool me a hundred time, we'll still keep giving you chances. 

Sony has a long history of doing wrong by their customers, the apologizing for it, then doing it again.  It's sad, really.  A lot of grew up in an era when Sony represented technology and awesomeness.  Sony was the Apple of the 80's, and the Walkman was their iPod. 

The sad thing is that since the Walkman, Sony has not managed to come up with anything really ground breaking or compelling.  They keep trying, but they keep failing - miserably.  Here's a history of Sony apologies and screw ups:

First there was betamax, which Sony invented.  It was a superior format to VHS in almost every way so it should not have been hard to get adoption.  But because Sony cares more about money and restrictive licensing than they do about costumers and actually being successful, it fell flat on its face.  If you had a betamax player, you were a sucker.

Then there was minidisc, my first real experience with Sony.  They had already apologized for how bad they miffed it with betamax and had promised to do better with minidisc.  I bought a minidisc player and even picked up a Yamaha MD8 multi-track data minidisc recorder (I dropped $1200 on it in high school).

It was sad that neither on the consumer side or on the pro (semi-pro, really) side of things Sony failed to deliver.  Their music software, required to use your minidisc player, was riddled with bugs and restrictive DRM.  They promised updates that never came, restricted licensing of their technology, and soon the format I had invested so much in was dead in the water, just like betamax.  I was the sucker.

So I vowed that I would never buy another Sony product again.  They just didn't seem to care about costumers, innovation, quality, or anything really, other than making tons of money.  They didn't seem to realize that if you do all those first things, the money will follow. 

About 10 years later I broke my Sony boycott to buy a Sony Reader.  Surprisingly, I had a great experience with it and enjoyed it very much.  Their software still sucked - really bad - but by this time there were 3rd party solutions that could do much better.  Overall, I thought the Reader was good - better even than the Kindle and other alternatives because of its openness.  You must really suck if Sony is doing it better than you.

After my good experience with the Reader I thought Sony had turned a new corner, so I slowly waded into their sea of products.  I bought a PS3 and received a PSP for Christmas. 

The PS3 is a pretty decent gaming machine, but falls short in other areas.  It tries to be a home media solution, but doesn't have wide format support or decent navigation abilities.  It's pretty weak, really.  Every update they come out with adds stupid features that encourage you to spend more money rather than addressing the most basic issues.

Speaking of updates, they just released one that completely removed a major feature from their systems.  They removed the option to install other OSes - one of the main reasons I bought a PS3 over the alternatives.  They simply removed it, no questions, no options.  If you were running another OS it was deleted and there was jack you could do about it.  Sony responded to criticism by saying "STFU and bend over, we don't care about you."

The update was worse for me.  I installed it and it physically bricked my entire system.  I can't even turn it on any more.  Apparently they used such crappy solder to put the thing together that it litterally melts itself to the point it doesn't work anymore.  This isn't even an isolated problem, either - it's completely widespread.  Sony doesn't care about this either - they'll just tell you to buy a new console or pay $250 to have it repaired.

I tried to get my PS3 repaired at first, but I realized that I don't even want it.  My Mac Mini is a vastly more capable media server for my TV, and I didn't even play games all that much on the PS3. 

There are lots of other problems I have had with Sony and their products, but for the sake of brevity I won't go into any more detail.  The bottom line is they don't give a damn about their costumers.  Suffice it to say that I will be re-instating my personal Sony boycott and will always recommend my friends and family away from Sony products. 

Here's a neat, bulleted list of things I'd rather do than buy another Sony product for as long as I live:

• Stick a red hot soldering iron in my eye
• Peal the skin off my entire head starting with my eyelid
• Get on a plane with a bunch of rapid terrorists
• Bite my fingernails off, one by one
• Pull out each one of my chest hairs with a rusty pair of pliers
• Sit on hot coals
• Be buried alive
• Buy a Microsoft product

I just sent the following letter to QWest. I'll let you know if I ever receive a response.

Today I received a flyer from Qwest stating that you were now offering fiber optic internet in my neighborhood with speeds up to 20mbps. Naturally, as a mouth breathing internet nerd I was ecstatic. I recently had to move out of my old neighborhood where I had 50/50mbps fiber optic and it was like living in sweet digital nirvana. Now I'm suffering with Comcrapst "16mpbs" - and I put that in quotes because they have some kind of different, slower, definition of 16mpbs than the rest of reality uses.

Anyway, I called up, credit card in hand to sign up for this new wonderland of digital goodness we call fiber. Turns out you guys were actually offering 40mbit connections in my area! This is like hearing someone you know won the lottery, and then finding out that person is actually you!

Unfortunately I found out the 40mbit connection costs some exorbitant amount of money - I have to sign over my first born and bring the Qwest gods the head of a rare goat only found on a specific mountain in the Himalayas or something. I don't know, I wasn't really paying attention. Anyway, I can handle the 20mbit connection advertised on the flyer for $45/mo. I can handle $45 a month and no goats have to be hurt in the process.

What I found out next shocked me to my very core (jelly filled! mmmm!). The 20mbit connection actually costs $68/mo ... or $75/mo depending on which part of the conversation we're talking about. Every time I asked it seemed to get more expensive. To get the good deal for $45/mo I have to sign up for a phone line.

A phone line?!?! Really!?!?!? What year is this? Who has phone lines anymore? What am I, a cave man? It's like saying "Yea, you can get an internet connection from us but only if you purchase our sharpened stone for scrawling hunting stories on the walls of caves!" It's madness!

Why would you force me to bundle a new service that modern humans would want with something surely from the cro-magnon era that only grandmas and people in 3rd world countries use. And all of this AFTER your salesman tried to sell me cell phone service. Why would I want something that requires archaic copper wiring in my house when I could have something that works anywhere in the country for the same price (plus brain cancer, possibly, but I don't like living in the future!).

Oh, and remember that sweet, sweet nectar of the gods internet connection I told you I had that was 50/50mbit fiber? Well, it was awesome, and it was only $50/mo (no lie). That's like 3x cheaper than yours and I don't have to find a flight to the Himalayas.

So the point of all this is to say that I would love to have your faster Internet, but I can't convince my room mates to pay more for something they don't care about, and none of them even knew what a land line was. One of them said "a land line? Is that how dinosaurs hunted for prey or something?" I don't know, room mate guy, I don't know.

So, all I'm saying is, come up with a different bundle. Preferably something that bundles the internet service with something that people under 30 have at least vaguely heard of and might even want (like, I don't know, TV service or nightly pizza delivery or something). Then, I would love to suckle and the sweet digital teet of Qwest high speed fiber optic internets.

"It's really a frustrating experience working with Apple on the [iPhone App Store] approval process, which is weird, because my other experiences with the company are so good. It's hard to reconcile that it's the same company."

-Jared Brown, iPhone Developer from this interview on crunchgear.

A couple people have asked me to review Palm's newest entry into the smartphone market, the Pre. Not only has Palm introduced a new an innovative hardware form factor, but they have also given the world an entirely new mobile operating system called WebOS. It's a pretty big deal. Bigger-than-Ron-Burgundy big.

When talking about the Palm's new phone, it's impossible not to talk about the current reigning champion in the smartphone space: iPhone. The best way to start out my review would be to tell you why I chose the Pre over Apple's more mature offering.

There are a few reasons, but the biggest sticking point for me about iPhone (this is how Apple refers to it - "iPhone" rather than "the iPhone") is their attitude towards developers. For a very interesting insight into the issue, I highly recommend reading The Future of The Internet and How To Stop It by Jonathan Zittrain. It's available for free download here. If nothing else, just read the introduction.

In the book, Zittrain compares iPhone to the original Apple II computer. When you bought an Apple II and turned it on, you got a prompt. The machine was waiting for you to tell it what to do. If you could imagine it, you could make the computer do it (within reason, of course). One enterprising company came up with the World's first spreadsheet software VisiCalc. Not only was the software revolutionary, but it started selling a lot of computers.

Here's the important thing: Apple didn't know that VisiCalc even existed until they started noticing a lot more computers going out the door. It was software that was beyond the scope of their vision. The Apple II became great because developers made it so, and this relationship between developers and computer makers is what is responsible for the current state of computers now. Give someone a sandbox, and they will create something great.

So bringing this all back to iPhone, the problem is that the platform can never fully become something beyond Apple's narrow vision for it. Evidence of this turns up every day when you hear about yet another app being rejected from the app store. You are so restricted in what you can do - no messing with the core OS, no interpreted code (that means no flash, no emulators, etc.), and nothing outside of Apple's as-of-yet undefined arbitrary moral code. iPhone is an appliance. It's a really nice typerwriter with lots of gee-whiz applications, but it's stagnant in that Apple choose a window of past technology and said "Here, you can make things within these limits and within these limits only." I don't see how the groundbreaking mobile technologies of the future can be born on such a platform.

So why is Apple winning? Why is iPhone the leading smartphone? I'm not ashamed to say it: it has been the best. Despite it's very fundamental flaws, it introduced a new generation of mobile computing. Until very recently there has been nothing like it on the market. With iPhone, Apple spurred the entire industry into a whole new generation. If it wasn't for them, I might now be reviewing a boring Palm OS phone or a Windows Mobile 6.1 phone.

So my argument would be that Apple is now winning not because they have the best phone NOW, but that they've had it for the last couple years. They have a head start - and the deserve it for the innovation that they've introduced and the bar they've raised in the industry. But, like the line of early Apple computers, a more open, more approachable, and more innovation friendly competitor has shown up. Unless Apple changes its ways (and quick), the same thing will happen to their phone that happened to their computers - they'll become second place.

There are two promising competitors on the market: Android and Palm's WebOS. I'm not going to talk about Android here, but I think it's awesome and am excited to see what will be done with it.

WebOS is a breath of fresh air. I'll say it right now: it's the best mobile operating system there is. Yes, it has its flaws but it's young and has a bright future ahead of it. Although their developer ecosystem is not in full swing, all indications show that it will be much more open (and innovation-friendly) than Apple.

The greatness of WebOS was really driven home for me a few days after I got the Pre. I was sitting there talking to my little brother over IM, as well as another friend who likes to send me lots of links to things he finds humorous or entertaining. The WebOS built-in IM program is more than adequate at keeping up with multiple conversations. My little brother was sending me links to mockups he had created for a website he was working on. I would click on the links and a new "card" would open within WebOS. I could view, rotate, zoom in and out on his mockups, then flip right back to the conversation and give him my feedback. When I was done viewing a mockup, I could simply flick it off the top of the screen.

The whole experience was exactly what I've wanted from a mobile device. I don't just want to be able to make calls - I want to be able to communicate - and the phone abilities are only a small portion of how I communicate with people. The conversation with my brother, and how it integrated with the mobile web experience, and how the whole thing was wrapped into the WebOS multi-tasking "cards" philosophy was so seamless and awesome that I was sold right there on WebOS. It's exactly what I've been wanting. Exactly.

Contrast that experience with the other leading mobile platform, and such an experience would have been a lot more frustrating. With every link I would have to sign out of IM, close the program, open up the web browser, manually type in the URL (having written it down on a piece of paper or something due to lack of copy and paste), look at the image, close out of the browser, re-open the IM program, sign in, and give my feedback. At that point, the experience is so cumbersome that it's not even worth it. The experience is outweighed by the amount of work involved and you just say "I'll have to check it later when I get to a computer."

My main fear with the Pre was that it would not be stable. Palm OS was always notoriously buggy and crashy. From my original Palm Pilot, the my Palm II, to my Palm V, to my Visor to my Treo, I never had a Palm device that didn't crash often and a lot of time take ALL OF MY DATA with it. I am happy to say that after a few weeks with the Pre, it has not crashed once, frozen, or become overly sluggish. It's solid as a rock and fast enough that I don't find myself sitting around waiting for programs to open or webpages to load.

Launching apps does take some time. It's comparable with Windows Mobile, and a lot slower than Palm OS and iPhone OS. But the benefit is that once it's loaded, it's loaded. You can keep it running for as long as you want and with as many other applications as you want. I'd rather open a WebOS app once at 5 seconds then 5 times at 2 seconds each on a platform that isn't capable of multi-tasking. Plus, once the app is loaded, it runs at full speed, regardless of how many other apps you have open in the background (I've had about 20 at the most).

With Synergy, all of my contacts are sync'd automagically from the cloud. Both Google contacts and Facebook are used as sources. Overall, the concept and execution are awesome, but it does leave a bit to be desired. Most of this is due to the fact that Google's contact application is in its infancy and advanced contact management is just not possible. The Pre also does not yet give you the ability to choose which groups from Google contacts to sync with, so you get EVERYTHING. If you're going to use this feature, expect taking some time to clean up your Google contacts address book.

Once everything it up and running, though, it's great. If someone changes their Facebook picture I see the update in my very own address book. If someone updates their contact info with a new phone number or email address, I have it without ever having to do anything. I think THIS is the future. Everyone manages their own contact information and what you have is never out of date.

There are a few other shortcomings with WebOS (lack of applications, for example), but most - if not all - are due to the platform's infancy. There are some features missing and a lot of things I'd like to see improved, but as is Palm has delivered a very impressive experience for a first generation operating system, and the updates are coming fast (4 revisions to date). I think it will take 6 months or a year for things to get really, really good to the point where people used to the number of applications on iPhone OS will start seeing WebOS as an alternative. The fact that WebOS will be available on multiple devices in a variety of form factors and on multiple carriers will only help things.

Will the Pre dethrone the iPhone? As I said, it's a better platform, but more important than the platform is what is done with it. WebOS opens a lot more possibilities than iPhone. However, a three generation head start is hard to catch up to. Then again, Apple did it. They went up against industry leaders like Palm, Microsoft, and Blackberry and destroyed them all within two years. It's not impossible that WebOS could do the same. My guess is that it will take a bit longer (given that the jump between previous generation smartphones and the iPhone was a lot bigger than the iPhone to the Palm Pre) and that both platforms will enjoy success for the next several years. That said, had iPhone and the Pre launched on the same day, I am confident that the Pre would have the larger market share today. Hopefully Apple ups their game and relaxes a little bit with their developers. Then things are really going to get interesting.