An Entrepreneur Endorses the Invisible Hand

When Paul Graham says

“The first essay of his that I read was so electrifying that I remember exactly where I was at the time. It was High Technology Innovation: Free Markets or Government Subsidies?“

well I have to pay attention. I wasn’t disappointed and I don’t think you will be either.  One of the most insightful and best laid out speeches I’ve read; especially on a political topic, even if it is from 1993.

youtube on my tube, but still fell a bit short

We gave up our cable tv a few months ago and haven’t missed it much at all (except for the Olympics and a few Jazz playoff games). We have been watching some shows online with a laptop. So I figured I’d add the Opera browser to our wii (for a mere $10) and then we could actually use our big screen tv to watch tv.

I didn’t even think about not being able to install the plug-ins needed to watch the video from cbs, abc, nbc, and the cw. So it was a bit disappointing, but I’m still investigating.  youtube and google video work and there are some places tailored for browsing on the wii:

http://wii.stumbleupon.com/

http://wii.opera.com/

Apparently the bbc supports it with their iPlayer too

Google Chrome – Fast

I just tried out the new browser (still in beta) from Google. It was billed as being very fast, that’s why I tried it. On the web applications we develop here at work the thing is ridiculously fast. The rendering must be about half that of Firefox or Opera.

I have encountered a couple of small rendering issues, but nothing major in the few minutes I’ve been playing around with it.

The Day My Gmail Died

I use my gmail account for everything. I use the gmail extension for FireFox so that I’m always notified of new mail. I got into gmail very early by purchasing an invitation on ebay for $1 or something.

Well starting this morning I can’t login; it just keeps telling me that my username and password don’t match. It was working great last night so I just figured they were having some problems and it would come back.  By this afternoon it was time to contact them because all of our other gmail accounts are working just fine. I tried resetting the password by having it send an email to my secondary email address. Since I never received an email I filled out their form to recover my account. A few hours later I got an email stating they can’t recover my account because they’re not sure it’s mine. They’d love for me to create a new one and even included a handy link to do so.

I’m a big believer in web based applications and services. It is so nice to have everything managed, backed up, automatically updated, and of course accessible anywhere. Today I’m rethinkiing that a bit. If Google doesn’t restore my account (and I doni’t know if they will, I can’t remember half of the dates and info they want) then I lose a ton of stuff. Hundreds of email messages, dozens of contacts, important documents, unsent drafts, my iGoogle settings, all of my feeds in Reader, and access to our family blog (luckily we have more than one author on that blog or I’d be really upset).

What recourse do I have? It’s not like I pay Google for access, if they cut me off that’s the end of it. So far it’s been an unbelieveably frustrating experience. I know they deal with millions of users, but still they need to find a way to provide better service. It’s not like they don’t have the money to do it.

I know my account is not completely gone because I can still get my iGoogle page with Reader on the machine I was already logged in with. But on other machines it won’t let me in. Unfortunately I can’t get to gmail on that one machine.

In related news our phone isn’t working either, so if you’re trying to get ahold of me, well good luck…I’m pretty much off the grid.

Google, if you’re reading, please give me my account back. I’m really me, I promise.

Shelves, Space, and Sticky Fingers

Here I was thinking about ebooks and along come these two informative posts. Go ahead and read them, they’re pretty short and they outline all the major problems with ebooks today:

http://blog.businessofsoftware.org/2008/06/its-the-other-s.html

http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2008/06/do-you-own-tree.html

I love books. I’m not much of a collector of anything, except for books. The problem is all the shelves are overflowing. The obvious solution is ebooks of course, but there’s just something about a printed book. The other solution is to just clear out the old books. My wife is good at passing books along; that’s an interesting idea that seems to be going well so far.

Do ebooks work for you? They sort of do for me. Mostly on my Palm. When I purchased my palm awhile back I also picked up the LDS PDA Library for the scriptures and the included iSilo license. Of course that library has a lot of titles included so now I find myself usually reading something on the palm as well as a real book at the same time. This way when I’m home I read the real book and when I’m at the doctor’s office or the auto shop I can read the palm (I can’t include the dentist office anymore, ever since I switched to Dentist Dave they get me in too quickly). I enjoy reading on the palm more than I thought I would. It doesn’t hurt my eyes at all and it’s quick to navigate around. I haven’t really looked into purchasing more ebooks for the palm, but I’m guessing it’s not easy or as cheap as it should be.

For work we have a subscription to Safari Books Online which includes mostly tech books along with a few other categories that interest me like personal development. It’s great for reference purposes, but absolutely horrible to read through a book. It works by allowing you so many slots on a bookshelf (based on your subscription level), I have 5 slots and some books take up more than one slot. Once you place a book on your shelf you can’t remove it for 30 days. You can search your books and add bookmarks, but it doesn’t remember the last page you had open on the books. This is an astonishing oversight. Especially when every other ebook reader I’ve seen or used can at least do that much. It does have an option to go directly to the last book you had open when logging in, but it simply doesn’t work; no matter how many times you check the box. It also makes it very hard to print out any significant portion of a book. There’s also little support for offline reading.

With all the recent news on touch screen devices and support in Windows 7, the only part that really interests me is that coming out of OLPC. Check out this photo (the device doesn’t exist yet by the way):

This a pretty compelling idea. The OLPC project has come under a lot of fire for not delivering on it’s promise of a $100 machine (the current version is $188), for slow sales, and for OS direction problems (switching from Linux to Windows). But I think they’ve done a good thing by setting a high and worthwhile goal and working hard towards it. The new laptop, the XO-2, will have a major focus on reading. Most of education spending, especially in poor countries, goes towards books. So the idea is be able to buy a $100 or $75 laptop with capacity to hold 500 books instead of buying each book at $20 each. You get all those books plus a full computer geared towards learning and interacting. It’s a great plan and I hope they can pull it off. I also hope it includes a cleaning cloth; I know what things look like after my kids get a hold of them.

Maybe we’ll see the ebook market come around yet, but it sure has been dragging it’s feet.

Read more about the XO-2 here: http://blog.laptopmag.com/first-look-olpc-xo-generation-20

Not So Fast

The funny thing is I had to try that like a dozen times to get out of the sixties. And I had to do it on my laptop instead of using my favorite ergo keyboard in my office.

Anyway, typing speed isn’t really key to coding cause you have to stop and think so much, but it doesn’t hurt either. Navigating quickly around windows, files, and such is very useful. I’m always looking for keyboard shortcuts cause they’re just so much faster.

Here are some of the basics:

http://www.seoconsultants.com/windows/key/

http://www.helpwithpcs.com/tipsandtricks/keyboard_shortcuts_windows_xp.htm

Which seems easier to you?

Would you have your team of programmers add a feature to solve a problem? Or would you try to change the behavior of millions of users, probably ticking them off in the process?

Last night ebay sent my wife an email indicating that her listing had been removed due to the use of “spamming” terms being included in the description. Apparently the use of “Like New” dilutes the search results of those looking for only “Brand New” items.

Fine that’s a legitimate concern, giving users a way to find only brand new, unused and unopened items. But like new is also legitimate, isn’t that the beauty of ebay? Let someone else pay retail price and find out they don’t like or can’t use the item and then you can get it for a discount.

So how could they possibly solve this problem? Wouldn’t you just add a search option to filter out like new and as new and the such? Doesn’t that seem a little easier and friendlier than attempting to change human behavior and lose business in the process by de-listing items that already have bids?

Round and Round We Go

The catapult systems on aircraft carriers can propel a 45,000 pound plane from 0 to 165 mph in two seconds. Pretty dang impressive. Apparently many ISPs studied this amazing feat when building their own plans for customer expulsion.

I’ve been a customer of my current service provider for nearly 12 months now. That can only mean that we’re about to end our relationship. See they now want to charge me almost $30 more a month for the privilege of using their valuable service. Do they really think that after dealing with their unreliable phone service and less than stellar support they can increase my rates and keep my business? Seriously, who comes up with these plans? Let’s give new customers a solid introductory price and then jack up the rates once they learn how awful we are to deal with because they certainly won’t be able to find another service more unfriendly and incompetent than we are. Is there a hidden prize for turn over rates? Is this some kind ego thing that is beyond my simple minded comprehension? “We had another stellar year, we brought in 3 million new customers while jettisoning 98% of our existing customer base. It’s key that we remove all stale users before they contaminate us.”

I even called my current provider and said:

“I’ve been very frustrated with your phone service as it’s been down several times a month almost every month for a year. But the last month has been better so what kind of price will you give me to retain me as a customer?”

The reply of course was that they cannot offer any promotions to existing customers. You know because money from existing customers isn’t nearly as valuable as money from potential customers. I even explained that I can switch to either of their main competitors without any installation fees and get a lower monthly price guaranteed for 12 months. Still nothing they can do about it.

So we’ll be switching services next week. Already the new service isn’t doing any better. They offer the triple play: Internet, phone, and tv. I signed up for all three after verifying that I could drop the tv and not affect my 12 month rate. We don’t normally watch enough tv to justify the cost, but the Jazz could have a good run through the playoffs so I figured I’d try it for at least a month or two. But later they called and indicated that dropping the tv would result in a $75 fee. Again, let me get this straight. I’m willing to pay money for tv service for a least a couple of months, but they’d rather just not have my money at all than have to deal with the extreme pain of deactivating my tv?

It’s not really shocking to hear about the financial pains the network is going through. I expect at the current rate of things the merry-go-round will be spinning indefinitely.

A Little Spooked

Google has a blog search tool which allows users to set keywords and then receive an email alert when a new blog post that matches is found.

That’s a great tool, I’ll have to try it sometime. But when I posted about LibraryThing versus GoodReads, I got a comment from Tim the LibraryThing guy (who has been nothing but helpful and kind) less than 5 minutes after publishing that entry. How in the world did Google find it that quickly?

I guess I still felt like I was in my own isolated corner since I hadn’t told very many people about this site and I hadn’t gotten any comments previously; there really is no place to hide on the net.