Not that marketing isn’t often filled with lies, half truths and gotchas, but Steve Ballmer is a goober [CEO of Microsoft]. For example, you can watch this video on YouTube of him making fun of the iPhone. He thinks that on-screen keyboards are bad for computers because its difficult to type (apparently he’s never heard of muscle memory). That silly iPhone has all of its interface, except for two buttons, built into the touch sensitive screen. Who would want that? Apparently Microsoft. Witness the Microsoft Ultra-Mobile PC. It has a touch screen keyboard, and gets fingerprints on it just like an iPhone, only it doesn’t make phone calls. I challenge Microsoft to make sure its not speaking out of both sides of its bank account next time.
Category Archives: Product (Re)Views
Why Dyson’s Suck
My sister brought over her vacuum this evening. Due to a mixup in communication. She kindly left it for us to try out. Here are ten reasons why no one should buy a Dyson:
- You like a vacuum that has no suction power
- You like to wrestle with suction tubes
- You like to leave junk in and on your carpet
- You like to wrestle with vacuum bags and get dust all over the place due to that wrestling
- You like to replace vacuum bags
- You hate to clean your stairs and making it painful will keep that hate alive
- You like vacuums that are designed poorly
- Easy to clean vacuums that clean easily sound too good to be true
- You like vacuums that don’t have a powerful suction power
- You’re me and you don’t have enough money right now
I loved this vacuum. I’m going to save up and get one.
Good-Bye CNN
I used to subscribe to the CNN RSS feed. That was until this morning. But since their news tactic is to report very little useful in the headline, but sensationalize it to get reader attention, I’m done. For example take the twenty-eight inches they reported in Denver. And by Denver they don’t mean Denver, they mean up in the foothills. Because in Denver proper it was much less snow than that. After subscribing to the feed for some time now I’m determined to find another news source, temporarily I’ve subscribed to the BBC’s feed. Are there other alternative news sources online worth keeping up with? I don’t trust the local Denver Post because they’re just in-line with CNN with their business and reporting practices.
Why I Can’t Recommend Friends and Family Upgrade to Windows Vista
If you’re one of the readers of this blog who has ever asked me for technical advice, then this post is for you. Microsoft, next month, is releasing Vista, the next version of its operating system series, Windows. Vista has been touted as the next big thing from Microsoft. Its big already. Its a rhinoceros. Its horned, its blind, and its dumb – and it wants to take over your computer. After doing some reading and some research I can’t recommend anyone upgrade from Windows 2000 or Windows XP to Windows Vista. Windows Vista is advertised as a Porsche, but instead delivers the performance of a 1980’s Ford Taurus. Which to bring things into a more feminine perspective would be like being advertised marble counters but arriving to find painted countertops.
Windows Vista will require a degrading of performance because everything that is multi-media based will have to be reduced in quality. If you get a Blu-Ray disc and are excited to watch that blu-ray movie on your home computer on your flat pannel hi-def monitor – forget it. The quality will be degraded in an attempt at keeping the Digital Rights (as in you don’t have any) Managed. All sorts of encryption goes on within the processes of Windows Vista so that the data can be ‘protected’. To clarify about encryption think of it this way: your computer processes become slower because data has to be encrypted [modified to not represent itself plainly], sent somewhere else on the comuter, decrypted [modified to represent itself plainly again] and then possibly sent back in another encryptiong/decryption process. That means that the computer you have now will have to work harder just to get the same things done in Windows Vista that it has been doing in Windows XP or 2000.
Furthermore Microsoft can revoke a driver at any time which means that you could run a Windows Update to patch any number of security holes and then suddenly find yourself the proud owner of something that doesn’t work because Microsoft also slipped in a ‘patch’ that made the hardware you’re using not work because they ‘revoked’ support for it. Nice.
As a Non-Fear and Uncertainty guy I do want to add this: A new computer that ships with Vista will more than likely handle all of the things I’ve described above just fine. But know that the manufacturers are going to work hard to sell you on ‘Intel Inside’ or any number of other features that maks you think that the computer is powerful, but running Windows Vista will mean that you won’t get as much power out of it as you would running an older version of Windows or possibly a flavor of Linux [I recommend ubuntu]. Don’t be afraid of Vista, but be aware that your choice to upgrade on a current computer could be annoying and bring an older machine that’s barely Windows Vista compatible to its knees.
The one other thing to be aware of is that Windows Vista is reported to have a huge number of ‘confirmation boxes’. Those are boxes that pop up and ask if you want to do something, then ask again just in case, “Do you really, really, really want to do that?” Every review I’ve read has mentioned this. Be forewarned 🙂
But otherwise, if you’ve got a great graphics card and a monster machine, you should be able to have a pleasant Windows Vista experience 🙂 I just wouldn’t call it an upgrade. The best single-source review of Vista for computer owners is here. Thanks to Matt for that particular link.
Update: Here’s a terrific review of Windows Vista for those looking for a good, detailed review: Windows Vista Super Site.
Whipped Up to a Froth
If you go into a service oriented food supplier (AKA Starbucks) and you order something should the employees question you on your order? If I went into Burger King and ordered a squirt of chocolate milkshake on top of my fries and was fully willing to pay for a small milkshake to achieve the nasty sugar-salty-soggy conglomeration I’m after… then squirt the stinking milkshake on top of a basket of fries and send me to my grave. Quietly. Once I leave your whole store can roll on the floor laughing at the weirdo. But wait until I’m gone.
This morning as a treat to my bride I went to Starbucks and called her from there to ask what she wanted. She told me that she wanted a Pumpkin Spice Mocha. Which, as you may know, involves a large quantity of chocolate syrup, and a smaller quantity of Pumplin Spice syrup followed by a smaller quantity of coffee. Its kind of like a coffee beverage, but more like a sugar beverage. This is the drink my wife requested and so with confidence and certainty I ordered one. And the gal who took my order was shocked. How dare I order my wife a booger and scotch coffee drink. Was I sure? Yes, I did want a pumpkin spice mocha. But what she heard sounded like the worst coffee choice possible. Begrudgingly she wrote on the side of the cup the order.
So I’m pouring in heart stopping amounts of half & half into my large plain coffee and hear, “Mocha… pumpkin spice?!” As if someone had ordered that the froth be generated by beating the dairy with a used rag. For goodness sakes, this is Starbucks. The place took off as a national chain because consumers discovered that they could have what felt like infinite customization over something as simple as a coffee. And they coudl feel snobby and proud of it. They liked their fat-free-decaf-sugar-free-vanilla-latte and Starbucks was proud to charge them $4.53 for it. But I guess that’s changing now. Soon I will have to go in with a bag over my head, and once the employees calm down from thinking its a robbery and realize that I’m embarrassed by their conjectures and so I hide my face like the Phantom of the Coffra.
Strive for Five – or – How to Irritate Customers
I just got back from a run to the grocery store. Yes, it was 5:00 AM when I left. Evie wasn’t sleeping and so I ran to the store to get something. Upon trying to check out I went to the ‘express’ self checkout. I pushed the start button on the screen.
“Please remove the last item from the bag and scan it,” began the monologue. Its a monologue because the computer talks to you in a somewhat friendly voice. Forget that! I haven’t even put anything in the bagging area. I pushed start. So I moved to a different self checkout venter next to the first one. I hesitantly pushed the start button.
“Please remove youor hair in frustration as I also fail you in begining the self checkout process,” chimed the second computer. This was going to be irritating. So I moved to a third station where I began praying – I remembered that if I was Catholic it would have been at this time that I would have called on Saint Earnest who is the patron saint of grocery stores – I remembered that if I was Muslim I would declare jihad on this checkout station if it failed me – I also remembered that if I was superstitious I might have checked more carefully for black cats upon approaching the self checkout area of the store. Gingerly I pressed the start button.
“Please shoplift because this register is also a ticking time bomb of insanity,” cried the tiny, tinny speaker! Just then an employee walked up to the command center for the express checkout area and hit a few buttons. The computer reset the psychological profile settings and began working for me. As I checked out my two items I noticed stickers in front of the bags: “Strive for Five!” they declared. In small print they asked me to put five items per bag. Five items per… interruption: the employee is now walking to the other self-inflicted-mockery machines and having to manually cancel out of the transactions I just started. Offset by about 1.75 seconds they begin a litany describing what was wrong with cancelling out of the orders that they had failed to execute moments before. 1.75 seconds isn’t a long time except for when the sound of voices is correcting you and jumbling together in a cacophony of computerized trauma.
Back to the five: In my life I strive for various things. Striving is a word I would use to describe intense athletic challenge type effort. Striving is a word I would use to describe an energetic exertion pushing to achieve a deadline for work. Striving doesn’t enter my mind at the grocery store. Perhaps customers would put more than 2 items per bag in the self checkout station bags if the bags that the grocery store provided were not booby-trapped so that as soon as I walked out of the store with them they would rip down the side spilling the contents I had self-bagged at the self-checkout stand after self-selecting them as I walked by myself through the store. Or, I could double-bag my groceries and feel somewhat better about striving for five. Maybe next time I’ll quadruple-bag, put five items in the bags (96 oz. of Lactaid milk, 96 oz. of Orange Juice, two boxes of crackers on the ends so their sharp corners can stress the plastic film, and of course some eggs on top) and then begin the Russian roulette based walk to my vehicle. That would be striving.
Mens Dress Shoes
To continue on my series of ‘Randy pretends he has fashion sense’ type posts tonight I went to buy black mens dress shoes. Who designs these things? I swear to you that almost every shoes less than $100.00 they soles are made from recycled iron maidens. That is to say they’re incredibly uncomfortable. Considering I don’t wear them very often I can’t justify that sort of expenditure. Worse, the designs were very weird to me. I guess I didn’t expect to be as opinionated as I was, but some of the shoes literally looked like the bill of Scrooge McDuck from the Disney Ducktails cartoon. Done in black of course (or brown). Then there were some shoes that looked like they’d been cleaved in half by a random hatchet murdered, but then carefully and professionally stitched up so as to fake you out into thinking they were supposed to look like that.
To Jessica’s credit she has somewhere between 10 and 20 black shoes. I don’t think that 7 of them look any different to the other shoes, but she identifies small nuances that make the shoes unique. Tonight I learned about nuance. With multiple manufacturers making the same shoe styles I was able to pick out small curves that were cut differently, different lace types, and of course various types of ‘cushion’ inside of the shoes. I prefer shoes that feel like my Vans: soft, cushiony, and sporty. That way when some thug asks me to play a pick-up game while I’m dressed up I can easily get schooled in my comfortable shoes and sweat out a perfectly nice shirt and pants.
I guess I just expect to get schooled in style and comfort instead of looking like I killed a cartoon duck and then tried to implement the Spanish inquisition on myself.
Engineer It!
We went to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science yesterday and they have a traveling exhibit called “Engineer It!” Wow! What a great, great exhibit. I was totally floored by the great sections involving hands on activities for kids to really dig into science, engineering, and fun. I told one friend that I wanted to come back without the kids and have a go by myself since I could probably design an amazing rocket that flies 100 feet with pressurized air and get my name on a sticker up on the wall 😉
If this exhibit comes to your town and you have children between 3 and 103 (please tell me you don’t have children that are 103 years old) you should go. It’ll be here in Denver until January 1st – so get there if you have time!
A Product We Won’t Buy on Principle
Kraft cheese is now selling ‘Crumbles’ which would be crumbled cheese. And their advertisement offended my sense. They just took the song ‘Unbelievable’ by EMF from 1990 and turned it into “Crumbelievable.” Wow, that’s crummy advertising. It is also really, really amazing to me that EMF would license that song. Sure, they’re hurting for money, but you have to draw the line somewhere. Especially with such cheesey covers.
Look out for Outlook
I have been using outlook at the request of client. What a pain in the rear-end. Its like a pretend mail client. It is like driving an SUV in an Indy race. Sure, its a larger engine in size and weight, but the body also is heavy, the performance is weak and the thing is going to be
lapped by every car on the track within minutes. By every car I mean every other client including the web based client I work on for the client that requested I use Outlook, Thunderbird and carrier pigeon.