randomosity

I got the little Nike+ pedometer for my iPod last year to track my running progress. Yeah, that’s right its was purely for exercise sake…yeah. Yes, its a gadget. I like gadgets. And this one is very cool. If you don’t know the Nike+ doodad. There is a wireless receiver that attached to your iPod and a transmitter that you put in your shoe. Although Nike advertises particular shoes with a magic compartment for it, reality is, its easy to simply insert it into the tongue of the shoe or use a variety of means to attach it else where to the show and it works great.

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Having now discovered how easy it is to simply hit the back key on your keyboard and simply loose the longest blog entry that you have ever made…I start to rewrite this post. I am sure, you, the reader, will benefit for having a more concise entry, but for me the writer, arghhhhhh. That little ’save and continue editing…I wonder what that is for.

There has been an a hardly unanticipated flurry of articles as of late detailing with the question of whether or not to upgrade to Microsoft Vista when it is released at the end of the month. I am weighing in simply because I have something to say from hands-on experience. I have been running Vista for the past half a year or so on my Media Centre as part of the Beta programme. Surprisingly (or not) the question being asked is whether existing Windows users should make the switch - not whether OSX or Linux users would consider the change - interesting.

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Clever lads have run the CES address of Bill Gates and the Macworld Keynote by Steve Jobs through a variety of text analysis tools to get an idea of why one has greater impact than the other. The article demonstrates that there is a huge difference in the complexity of the message. Jobs delivers short, easily comprehended sentences, where Gates tends to be using longer sentences, with more complex language. The word clouds generated from the speech are not that different in terms of focus. Both featured most frequent references to the products being featured. Interestingly this contrasted with Michael Dell’s CES presentation which was seemingly used much more ambiguous language with less direct reference to particular products. There’s also a slider-based version linked to the article that offers an alternative way to view the clouds. Unfortunately unless you use the arrow keys (i.e. read the small print) it seems next to impossible to click on the magic spot to get Gates cloud displayed.
This exercise begs the question of magic however, and whether it is merely the message and not thew actual technology being presented that enthralls the audience. One would expect that the concept of the iPhone itself may actually be more appreciable than Windows Vista and Michael Dell simply didn’t talk as much about products because he didn’t have any exciting new product to introduce. Nonetheless, a fun little intellectual exercise.
Gates in fact doesn’t seem to have always had the product focus that he does now. There is a word cloud timeline of his communications and it is only recently that products have bgun to experience high frequency of reference.

OK. It’s hit hit every front page in Christendom in the last 24 hours and with one fell swoop, Jobs was able to eclipse the entire CES show, RIM stock took a huge hit and Cisco has announced its suing Apple for trademark infringement. The iPhone interface has Apple fanboys drooling (yes, myself included) and this has to be the most ingenious reaction…a cutout model of the iPhone that can keep us happy until we can actually get our hands on a shipping model sometime in the next decade. Brilliant.

It is interesting to consider the vastly different (yet similarly targeted) Apple eMate of 1997 and the OLPC pof 2007. Floating about the internet currently is a really cool screen capture of the ‘Sugar’ interface used by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project. OLPC seems to have stuck for the last little while. I know that for a time the project seems to have had a new name every week.
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This certainly seems like an appropriate place for an historian to be ;-) Ahh, but so much more, OldVersion is a website that is collecting links to older version of mainstream software applications under the principle that olde ris not always better. This one just had to happen. I have often thought about how I craved the very first verson of Microsoft Word for my 512K Mac. Oh what an exciting day when Microsoft introduced an industrial strength app to put MacWrite to the test. The wonder of this was that the application fit on a single 400K micro floppy (as they were technically referred to). If you had the single 400K drive you were subject to endless swapping of the system disk and the application disk, but oh, the power of the application and I restate…all on a 400K floppy. Now of course the average install of MS Word is somewhere in the range of 400Mb…and you know… that little 400K app had 80% of the everyday functionality of the bloatware we use today. This is all to say that I heartily agree that newer is not always better and a site that offer us the opportunity to use compact, efficient apps before they lost sight if what they were designed to accomplished is a very good thing.

Ok. I’ll admit I am rater late to the podcasting thing. I remember when they started showing up in as spoken word commentaries to download to your iPod and of course I had to try them out. They were still rather unformed and experimental and more importantly for me, I didn’t find myself with the time to dedicate to listening to a rant. I wasn’t moving around that much, so didn’t have the longer stretch in the car where these may have worked out. I tried a couple, but didn’t find any that really tickled my fancy, so gradually stopped looking for them. Then Scotty forced me to watch a Video Podcast a year and a half ago and I have started to find podcasts that do warrant a few minutes time. Moreover, they also generate some anticipation between releases. There are the zany ones (TikiBar TV), the informative ones (MoBuzz, GeekBrief) and the Crossovers (zeFrank, RocketBoom), or even the specialty ones (Wine Library TV, Food Guru). I am now subscribing and watching or listening to about twenty shows on a regular basis. For me these have really replaced TV. They are immediately accessible, frequently fresher than cable and certainly much more raw - not profane, often just less refined and thus seemingly more personal. There’s something to these. We can make the obviosu parallels to the printing press and pampphleting, or to renegade radio stations, but these are seemingly more powerful. Today, of all days, ime Magazine has picked its most important inventions of the year and YouTube is at the top of the list. Its there because there has been a shift in the ability of the obscure to rise to prominence and reac an amazingly universal audience.

All I know is that I am enjoying the entertainment and information charge that I can tune into whenever I have a spare moment.

So in my quest to push the envelope and also save the world ;-) I ran the United Way 5K at Mac today. It is my second year running. Last year I ran it after having run the Terry Fox 10K and very foolishly reasoned that 5K would be a cakewalk if I could run 10K. It’s simply half the distance and therefore quite easily accomplished. Yeah. 5K means you run a bloody sprint. So armed with this foreknowledge I paced myself well and was quite comfortable with it. It also gave me an opportunity to get a nice long run’s data recorded via my Nike + pedometer. I have been using this absolutely cool device for the past few weeks and find the ability to track my work outs a wonderful motivator. However………..

I started off running the 5K and in kicked my music. Great. I could hear it let me know as I was passing through km milestones…all seemed good. Runners started off before walkers and were running a longer course. After looping back and the following the complete course I was approaching a big digital time sign at about 3.2km into the course. felt like I have been running for longer, but I glanced at the iPod and Nike+ told me it was just over 3Km, so ran on by and started to do another loop. Found it curious that there were no longer race marshals on corners and was a little unclear as to how much of the course I had left to go. I knew that it was certainly not a full course again, but was confused. So, after running along the previous course I did some mental calculations and figured I would make a drop over to the return course and it should be about 5K. So…ran for another 7 or eight minutes and was approaching the big digital board again. Decided to actually ask the people there what was up. Here I discover that the first time around I had done 5Km, but was probably well between 7 and 8 km by this point. The iPod showed about 4.5km. When I read the instruction on the Nike+ its suggested that you *could* calibrate it, but it was not necessary. Let me tell you, it is clearly necessary. I got good exercise and a story out of it, and immediately afterwards went to the 400m track and did the calibration. I only wish I could not alter the previously stored information to reflect the fact that I had been previously running much greater distances than I realized ;-)

Moral of this story: technology has its limits…I guess we (I) do need to be reminded of that every now and then.

The iPod remains a pervasive example of a viral epidemic adoption. When did it hit the tipping point? I’ve still got my 1G pod although the battery gave up the ghost a long time ago. It certainly wasn’t in 2001. The unit was a luxury item and rather expensive. I think I paid close to $800 for mine in that first month after introduction. A couple iPod’s later, the fascination still remains, but my attitude has moved more towards the utilitarian value. I picked up a Shuffle for use as a USB key with extras. It continues to perform exemplary. As nice as the stainless steel back is from the 1G, the Shuffle makes much more sense and doesn’t mar when treated roughly. It’s there when you need it and holds a charge for ages. My Nano, bought after Apple intro’d the 2G Nano for a song, is the dock that holds my little Nike jogging device. Now, that is a cool use. So I have paid Apple my share to support the trend.

This article from wired is a brief narrative outlining the process at Apple that led to its release in 2001. I recall being aware as many were that the software on the pod was licensed from PortalPlayer, however, this shares some of the other ways in which Apple was able to get a product to market quickly. It wasn’t the first MP3 player, but it certainly was the best. My little 64Mb Sony pencil player (I can’t remember the product name) had the utilitarian value of the Shuffle in 2000. As the author notes, Apple identified as need, a market full of products that demonstrated limited innovation - and offered Apple an opportunity to reach a whole new sector. They did this very well. Licensing where necessary, subjecting the product to an effective refinement strategy and combining it crucially with a desktop software. Has anyone tried the crap Sony stuff. DRM is the debate, but Sony tends to rub your face in it, where Apple has hidden most of it and framed the reminder of its presence in tongue-in-cheek cheekiness - ‘Remember, Don’t Steal Music’.