The costs of indirection

A friend of mine recently asked me if I’d like to add a badge to my blog, linked to a promotion/monetization system. I thought my email reply was worth sharing here. I’ve anonymized things a bit….

I’m a great example of why badge-based blog monetization is a tough sell. I currently follow 208 different blogs (really – I just checked my OPML file) but I do so almost entirely through Google Reader, or one of the iPhone/iPad apps that transcode my Reader feed into a more suitable format. I only click through to the actual blog website in a few cases a day – where I want to see any comments, or when I need access to the original HTML for some purpose. (And the latter tends to be dictated by the blogging software being used by the author.)
So even though I have a number of favorite blogs, I’m never going to see a badge. [And of course I’m never going to see – or click through – on any advertising, which is a problem for the blogger.] Furthermore, I know that my blog is in the same boat: from blog-related email it’s clear that I have many more readers than those who show up on my site. (Perhaps if I started using Feedburner I could find out exactly how many….)
The only entity that knows what I read, and how much time I spend on each posting, and if and when I click through, is Google. And they’re happy to tell me – see the “Trends” section on the Reader home page. But nobody else gets a look-in.

Here we go again

Half an hour from now I’m starting another burst of travel. Tonight I fly from SFO to JFK (trying out the United p.s. service for the first time), so that I can attend the Cloud Expo at the Javits. On Wednesday I’m taking the Acela up to Boston, where I’ll be staying until Sunday. Back home for a week; then off to Xi’an on May 3 for a couple of weeks, and from there I’ll fly on to Nice to attend the TM Forum Management World conference. By then I hope that either the Icelandic volcano will have subsided, or the airlines will have figured out how to fly me home from France!

The week's twitterings – 2010-04-18

  • Dinner at Vo in Oakland before the Mark Knopfler show at the Paramount. Shaken Beef – mmmmm! #
  • First time at the Paramount Theatre – what a wonderfully over-the-top celebration of Art Deco! #
  • Who was that shy singer from Alabama who opened for @MarkKnopfler? And who was the brilliant guitarist who accompanied her? #
  • 40 years ago I saw Pink Floyd perform "Saucerful of Secrets". Tonight I saw Mark Knopfler perform "Telegraph Road". What more could I want? #
  • Picked up BT keyboard; curious if I could use iPad+KB instead of MacBook on my trip to NYC (CloudExpo) & Boston next week. Verdict: no… #
  • Reason: can't sync *all* my state (inc.business confidential documents) between iPad and cloud storage (?iWork.com). Close isn't good enough #
  • Forget about volcanic ash, global warming, and the War on Terror: here's a real crisis! No more cricket bats!! #
  • Changing travel plans: I'm going to Nice next month for TM Forum, but now I'll spend two weeks in Xi'an before flying to France #RTW #

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Mark Knopfler in Oakland

Last September, my friend Kyle forwarded me an announcement of the US tour dates for Mark Knopfler, which included a show in Oakland, California on April 13, 2010. It seemed a long, long time in the future, and I was worried that I might be traveling in China, but no matter: that very day I ordered two tickets from TicketMa$ter. They arrived. I added the date to my diary. And life went on.
Last week I realized with a shock that the tempus fugit stuff had been doing its thing, and the concert was taking place this week. I hunted for the tickets, and couldn’t find them. Never mind: a quick email to Ti¢ketMa$t€r resulted in the order being converted to “Will Call”. And so this evening I picked up Kate from the apartment and we braved the traffic and spine-crunching pavement of Interstate 880 to drive up to Oakland. We parked without difficulty, picked up the tickets, had a wonderful nouveau-Vietnamese dinner at Vo’s Restaurant, and went to the Paramount Theatre (which is worth a blog entry for itself).
Now I’ve been a huge Dire Straits fan ever since they released their first album in 1978, but I have never seen Mark Knopfler in concert – with D.S. or solo – before tonight. I know the “Alchemy” concert recording so well that I can play every number in my head, note-perfect. (And I was recently delighted to discover that the DVD of “Alchemy” is finally due for release this year!) So it’s fair to say that my expectations were unreasonably high, which also meant that my fears of being disappointed were also spiking up.
I was not disappointed. It was a simply wonderful show.
If you want to understand the lyrics to a Mark Knopfler song, you have to listen to the studio recording. In concert, he often mumbles the words and skips whole phrases. But it really doesn’t matter, because you can supply the words yourself, as you listen to the exquisite musicianship from Mark and his band.
It was a long set. I haven’t found the setlist on the internet yet, but I’m sure I will soon. (UPDATE: Here it is.) They played songs from most of Mark’s solo albums, and of these the standout was a glorious “Sailing To Philadelphia”. And they did five Dire Straits’ numbers: “Romeo and Juliet”, “Sultans of Swing” (yay!), “So Far Away”, “Brothers in Arms” (as powerful as ever), and (be still my beating heart) “Telegraph Road”. Complete. Uncut. Glorious. One of my favourite songs ever.
Forty years ago, I saw Pink Floyd at Essex University, and they played all of the numbers from the “live” disc of “Ummagumma”, which had just been released. I can still remember the quasi-spiritual experience of listening to “A Saucerful of Secrets”, with Dave Gilmour’s wordless “celestial voices” soaring over the mellotron. Today I saw Mark Knopfler and his band play “Telegraph Road“. It was another almost spiritual experience. What more could I ask for?
Thanks, Kyle!

Quitter! (And about time too.)

I was worried that MrDeity was getting a little stale in Series 3, but they’ve just bounced back with a wonderful piece to finish the season:

Perfect timing, right after Easter, to remind us how illogical (and immoral) the whole Original Sin/Redemption nonsense is.

The week's twitterings – 2010-04-11

  • Must-read (& widely-tweeted) piece by @rlove on iPad/iPhone v. Android approaches to memory allocation and task mgmt: #
  • Just took "Which Crazy Writer Are You?" and got: Edgar Allan Poe! Try it âž” http://cli.gs/dsjXp #
  • After four(!) repairs, HP decides to give me a new laptop. But they fix&return the bad one and then send me a box to ship it to recycling… #
  • I've decided to attend Cloud Expo in NYC (even though SYS-CON bugs me). I'll take the opportunity to visit family near Boston after the show #

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iPad thoughts after a few days

Herewith a few of my thoughts about the iPad after living with it for nearly a week:

  • If you only read one review of the iPad, make it this wonderful essay by John Gruber over at Daring Fireball.
  • The KeyNote and Pages apps look beautiful, and work pretty well, but they are going to be useless to me until Apple puts some kind of decent synchronization in place. I don’t care if the iPad is synchronized to the web (via Me.com or iWork.com), or to my desktop (via wifi); it just has to work seamlessly and automatically.
  • We need printing. Via wifi, of course.
  • The most beautiful iPad app is Emerald Observatory.
  • I really need a nice case. As I noted, the Apple-supplied sleeve uses a clingy rubber-like material, which makes it really hard to insert and remove the iPad. (The word “fetish” came up while I was trying to describe it to a Chinese colleague, which provoked an urgent search in my Chinese-English dictionary app!) Right now I’m using the sleeve from my EeePC netbook to protect the iPad, but I need a decent – and attractive – case/stand combo. Twelve South are working on an iPad version of their lovely BookBook cases, but there’s no ETA on that.
  • Right now I mostly use the iPad for web surfing and watching Netflix content. Email is OK, but I’m looking forward to the unified inbox in 4.0. I haven’t found the perfect iPad game, although watching Jim land a 777 at SFO in X-Plane was pretty compelling.
  • I use iPhone apps on the iPad only for convenience, not by choice. At 1x they look odd; at 2x they are too jagged.
  • The future lies in pure iPad apps, that take advantage of Adam Engst’s insight:

    The iPad becomes the app you’re using. That’s part of the magic. The hardware is so understated – it’s just a screen, really – and because you manipulate objects and interface elements so smoothly and directly on the screen, the fact that you’re using an iPad falls away. You’re using the app, whatever it may be, and while you’re doing so, the iPad is that app. Switch to another app and the iPad becomes that app.

The week's twitterings – 2010-04-04

  • Shake, Rattle, Seattle – http://nyti.ms/bGHtAM Good thing I moved – even if I am now a few miles from the San Andreas Fault #
  • If you want to join the iPad party… we will be at the Palo Alto University ave store all night starting at 6 pm Friday. (RT @Scobleizer) #
  • OK, it's April, so it's probably time to schedule my next trip to China at the end of the month. #
  • Bought HP laptop in November; returned for service (same defect) 3 times since then. Got it back today, plugged it in: flash, sizzle, smoke. #
  • RT @Carnage4Life: Love @gruber's response to Doctorow's anti-iPad screed – http://daringfireball.net/2010/04/kids_are_all_right #
  • Everybody being photographed with everyone else at the iPad party in Palo Alto…. http://twitpic.com/1cwi6z #
  • Sitting in front of a cool iPad sign; all the photographers are asking our names for attribution/release purposes http://twitpic.com/1cwrgf #
  • The no.1 #ipad question: does anyone know of a commercially available USB hub that implements the "Battery Charging Specification"? #
  • Any #ipad users with a Targus ACH81US USB hub? It claims to have two "Always On" ports with "twice the power". Can it charge the iPad? #

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Yes, I did get an iPad

Long-time readers of this blog will know that I have an abiding interest in portable network devices, dating back to the MS-DOS based HP 100 with a packet wireless modem in the early 1990’s. Things like the Sharp Zaurus showed promise, but quickly disappointed as they failed to garner adequate market share to create a viable ecosystem. Recently I’ve been relying on mobile phones: iPhones in the USA, and a G1 Android in China and Europe. I’ve also untethered my MacBook Air by equipping it with a 3G USB modem, of which more anon.
This morning at 7am I lined up with the other faithful at the Apple store in Palo Alto, and around 9:05 I was clutching my 32GB iPad and tendering my long-suffering Visa card to the applauding (really!) Apple employee. And right now I’m composing this blog entry on the iPad using the WordPress app.
My first reaction is that Apple have got it pretty much dead right. Sure, there are some areas that could be improved, but in general it feels natural and harmonious. As Stephen Fry wrote in his review in Time, this is the kind of device that Douglas Adams would have approved of. Don’t Panic. The FOSS bigots have got this wrong: I don’t care that this is relatively closed, any more than I care that my DVD player is closed. It’s an easy to use information appliance.
How about the applications? iBook is sweet, though it’s no Kindle-killer – indeed the Kindle app for the iPad has most of the same usability features. The Netflix app is wonderful, and is going to change the way I watch movies. The ability to run existing iPhone apps is a nice bridge, but after a while I found myself going through and removing a large number of apps that iTunes had brought over for me. This isn’t a phone, and I don’t expect presence- and location-based apps will be very important. (However I was pleased to see that Skype just worked!)
So what about communications? You’ll note that I didn’t wait for the 3G version of the iPad. The key for me is that I want to be able to use this device anywhere in the world, especially in China. So I’ve taken my AT&T USB 3G modem, paired it with a portable WiFi hotspot from Cradlepoint, and I can use this to provide net access for any of my WiFi devices (and those of colleagues). When I get to China, I will substitute a China Mobile 3G modem, and my iPad and laptop(s) will be able to connect without fussing with SIM cards.
Best touch: the “rotation lock” switch. Most annoying: the fact that it’s almost impossible to get the iPad out of the rubbery (and rather ugly) Apple case.
UPDATE: In response to a couple of queries:

  • I’m currently on a 5120 MB/month plan from AT&T which costs me $60. The modem was effectively free after rebate. I don’t expect to use that much data, but we’ll see.
  • All the PDF files I’ve tried display just fine in portrait and landscape modes.There are several reasonably-priced PDF reader apps which claim to give a more iBook-like experience.
  • As for viewing AVI files, I haven’t tried – see this thread at MacRumors.

Weird Apple pricing

One of the side effects of switching digital cameras has been that stuff takes longer. More pixels per picture (and new modes that generate more images) means that it takes a lot more time to do even basic photo management. And I’m not actually very well equipped to handle this: for perfectly good reasons, it turns out that although I have quite a few computers, they are all pretty puny by current standards. I have a Mac Mini and a MacBook Air, both with CPUs in the 1.6GHz range, both with fairly slow disks. The MacBook Air has 2GB of RAM, the Mini just 1GB. (The fastest machine I own, my accursed HP DV4-2045DX laptop, just went back for service – AGAIN!)
So naturally my thoughts have been turning to getting some horsepower. A Mac, of course – that HP has cured me of any interest in Windows. I figured that I wanted something like this:

  • At least 3GHz 2+ core CPU
  • 4GB RAM
  • 500GB HDD
  • Superdrive

My first impulse was to simply get a new Mac Mini. However after maxing out all of the options, I got:

  • 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo
  • 4GB RAM
  • 500GB HDD
  • SuperDrive
  • Wireless Mouse and Keyboard
  • Total price: $1187

That felt quite a bit more expensive (and slower) than I’d expected. Out of curiosity, I looked at the minimum configuration iMac:

  • 3.06GHz Core 2 Duo
  • 4GB RAM
  • 500GB HDD
  • SuperDrive
  • Wireless Mouse and Keyboard
  • 21.5 inch LCD
  • Total price: $1199

So instead of buying a Mac Mini I can spend an extra $12 and get an iMac with a 15% faster CPU and a stunning 21.5 inch LCD. Something doesn’t make sense here….