Updated website + more blogs

I’ve cleaned up my act.  It’s time that I regularly blogged about everything going on in the (technology) world that I care can gripe about.

I hope you enjoy my new site!  I plan to post multiple times a week on Android and iOS development, other Joomla projects I’m still working on, and how to take over the world (in 6 ~ 10 steps).

My resume is horribly out of date, but no matter! I pledge to update that within the next decade as well (it’s a bit farther down on my to-do list).

With a little luck, some of the stuff I blog about my be of interest to the other software engineers floating around the world.  I’m totally pumped to be attending O’Reilly’s Android Open 2011 conference.  Hopefully I’ll get to learn a heck of a lot that I didn’t over the three days.  A couple of my coworkers at SendMe are going as well, so it should be a pretty fun affair for us to see what the rest of the android mobile app world is doing.  At least those that have decided to trek to San Francisco.

Aside from that, I plan to post some new music recordings here and there on the site as I find time, and also post pictures of my adorable little nephews as I get new pictures in.  In addition I get some pretty nice photos from my other sister in Beijing, China (which I’m planning to visit early next year), which I plan to post as I get them as well.

My new years resolution was to blog more.  This marks the first blog post I’ve done in 2011.  As unimpressive as it seems, we’ll see if I can keep up to my goal and accomplish that little resolution I made such a long time ago (in a galaxy far, far away…).

Selling Smartphones

One of the biggest problems (in my opinion) with cell-phone carriers these days is the inability to really try a cell-phone before you purchase.  When a customer walks into Best Buy, they are expecting to touch, look at and play with the devices inside the store.  Best Buy stores (and other similar retailers) generally have a section of technology products that a customer can demo—be it a laptop, desktop or other techno-widget-device, however when it comes to cell phones everybody is lacking it seems.

When a customer wants to consider purchasing a product, the easiest way many sales veterans might advise would be to get the product into the customers hands.  At stores like Best Buy, Costco, and many cell phone retailers this is where they go insanely wrong.  They get a “model” of the product into the customers hands.  It’s a plastic rip-off without any functionality.  In the age of touch-screen-enabled devices and the mobile-app economy, the former ideology of placing a cheap plastic prototype on display for customers to see is a bit absurd.  How many people would actually walk in and say “Man, this plastic container fits my hand perfectly, so the phone’s operating system, applications, screen, etc., must all be great in the real thing.”  Nobody.

I’d propose fixing this problem by having the likes of LG, Samsung, Apple, Palm (HP) and all the other carriers get a device to put on display that actually works.  Maybe lock it down or disallow the addition of apps in the various models, but the days of a plastic model being the means for making a decision on a new cell phone are long gone.  With increased projections for cell-phone sales this year, it might be time to put some actual sales tactics to use for some of these stores.

Cable Company DVR vs. TiVo

I’ve got some positive news—my television picks up over-the-air content quite well, so I now have about 25 channels (everything from G4, HGTV and Animal Planet to local programming). I was thinking it might be time to consider getting a TiVo DVR. Then I started thinking it might be worthwhile to compare the features of TiVo to that of Comcast’s DVR.

I believe in this day and age, everything should be about HCI—Human Computer Interaction. If you don’t have an awesome, clean, intuitive user-interface, your product and user-base will eventually disappear. I firmly believe that Comcast’s DVR’s, if they weren’t subsidized by the cost of cable, would all be headed to the landfills because no one would want to pay for such a clunky device (even though most people do, they just don’t notice it popping up on their cable bills).

I’ve played with three DVR devices: Comcast’s HD-DVR, TiVo’s Series 2-DVR, and TiVo’s HD-DVR. There are pros and cons to all of them, and it’s notable that all devices have dual-tuner capabilities, but one device has a warm spot in my heart…

I’ll first mention why I do not care for Comcast’s HD-DVR. I don’t like monthly bills—and when a monthly bill is absolutely necessary, I want it to be as low a fixed cost as possible. I pay $40/month for internet via Comcast, which is quite speedy, and when I had the HD-DVR, that cost went to $90.00 for the first six months. Six months later, I saw my bill jump to $120.00, and being a person that doesn’t watch a massive amount of TV, I called and cancelled. The actual DVR lacked many capabilities, and was annoyingly complex. I was paying for HD-service and DVR capabilities, yet when searching for programs 1/2 the screen is taken up with the Comcast logo and new movies available for purchase. I’d prefer to see a full-page listing of as many channels and programs as possible, but the capability to remove advertising is nonexistent. Further, I don’t want to manually delete every show just to free up space on my box. I’m slow at watching programs, and 2 weeks is often not enough time to get me caught up on my shows, and so I get far behind on my DVR. It fills up, and in order to free up space, I have to go through and punch delete (a 3-step, slow process) on every show I decide I can do without seeing.

TiVo HD and Series-2 DVR’s have the same user interface, but their hardware specs differ. One can do HD, the other cannot. One has tons of storage space, the other has 80 gigabytes (which is still alot!). One costs $300.00, the other you can snag used for $30-40 bucks on eBay. After toying with the HD version, I decided on the HD box because of my interest in watching HD content.  There is one caveat with my choice—I had to get a cable card from my local cable company.  When I inquired about the little cards, I had some interesting responses from Comcast—I told them it was going into a TiVo, and that I wanted the “M-Series” card (M-Series = Multi Stream, I believe).  An “M-Series” card allows a user to watch one channel and record another at the same time.  The “S-Series” cards (or Single-Stream) only allow for one channel at a time.  The difficult part of this situation was that, in requesting the “M-Series” card, the phone support tech at Comcast was convinced that I’d have to pay to have a tech come out and do an “advanced install.”  I asked if I could just pick up the card and put it in myself (it really can’t be that hard, can it?), and was told that it was out of the question.  I caved and paid the one-time set-up fee for the tech to come out.

When the Comcast technician arrived, he had an M-series card in hand, popped it into the back of the TiVo, made a phone call to send an “Init” request to the mothership, and left.  I know what you’re thinking, and I blame Comcast (not the technician) for believing that I was too inept to plug in a card and make a phone call.  After reading the forums online, I found out that maybe it was best to have the technician come after all because there are users having great difficulties with CableCards in some cases.  Ah well, at least I got my HD service and TiVo up and running in under a week.

Well, there you have one more rant. Eventually I’ll find time to go back and proof read one of these, but that day is certainly not today.

Cable Bills!

Yesterday I got a bit frustrated, yet again, with the massive cable bill from Comcast. I get my Internet and TV from them, and realized that I only really need one of their services—high-speed Internet. When looking at the numbers, I realized that I could get the fastest Internet package for around $60.00. The package I had yesterday included a slower connection (12Mbps) and digital cable. Not only is their remote control utterly annoying to use (the buttons have a slow response time, and there are just too many of em’!), but everything seems so clunky to me. I needed a cable box, remote, wires galore, cable modem, more wires, a router, and a few more wires. And I had to pay more money.

The problem I was running into was that only one outlet was of enough quality to support high-speed internet—the same one the digital cable box was plugged into. That creates quite a bit of congestion in terms of wires mixing around in the TV stand. When I realized I was spending $100/month on cable TV and Internet, more than all my other bills combined (yes! you read that correct!), I decided it was worth it to, yet again, live without the TV. I did this for about 3 months a year ago. The difference was, at that point in time, I didn’t have a TV, just a computer.

Here’s what I’m thinking, I’ll save approximately $40/month by cancelling cable and snagging the fasters Internet connection speed. That $40 will go to a long way—I can go to a movie once a week every month, get popcorn and a drink! Or, I suppose I could put that money towards my daily cup of coffee—that’s three weeks of coffee paid for! Maybe I could put it towards my savings account, or invest it in something cool. I could use the $40/month to get a Sprint MiFi plan and then have the internet with me everywhere I go. I’m not sure what exactely I’ll do with the spare change—granted it’s not a bunch, but $40 x 12 months = $480. If I go without cable for a year, I can buy myself a pretty awesome gizmo next summer.

So, you may be thinking, what are you actually gonna do with the money??? I’ve decided my time is more well-spent reading. But I tend to go crosseyed if I read for a long amount of time, so I’m investing that spare change in Audible.com. These guys are professional story-tellers, and I can put it on my portable music device and spend the wasted time in front of the tube exercising my brain for a change. Novel, you say? Exactely my point!

But, alas, I can still watch TV online. There’s always Hulu and the big cable network websites to check out, so I don’t think I’ll starve myself of mindless (though oddly enjoyable) entertainment anytime in the near future.

Apple vs. World

Another day, another set of tech company feuds. Some of you may know that Apple, Google and the Federal Trade Commission are looking into whether anything is amiss when Google people and Apple people are on each others executive boards. Well, whoop-dee-doo. I’d argue they’re in different tech sectors altogether, but with the announcement of Google’s Chrome OS (i.e. Linux), and the fact that the second generation of Android-based smart-phones are on the horizon, maybe there is some credibility there.

I’m a big fan of strategy games, and I think the smartphone market is the perfect place to whet my appetite with a good bit of strategy talk. Palm and Google have said that each of their respective mobile-platform operating systems, WebOS and Android, are going to eventually support Adobe’s Flash standard. Great! Right?

Apple has continually refused to nudge on the Flash-support front, and, from the Apple point-of-view, I think this is a rather smart move. First off, Apple’s always going to tick off a few people that are really wanting to see Flash on the iPhone. However, as Apple continues to gain marketshare, up from 5% to 10% over the last year, I think we will notice companies think twice about putting any content in the public domain that cannot be accessed by the entire smartphone market. Translation: if Apple’s market share continues to climb, more and more websites are going to have to find a method of making their product or company available to their entire user-base, and that means stripping Flash from their websites and opting for XHTML (or HTML5 whenever that one comes to fruition).

So what does Apple gain from not supporting Flash? I think their goal would be to make obsolete the Flash standard. If every other smartphone has spent time to bring such functionality to market, and it becomes moot, that means Apple has that much more strength. Apple’s never been a company to be “open” and, in fact, remains quite closed. I think we’ll see that Apple, by slowing development and deployment of Flash-based applications, will erode the future need to become “open” on any alternative platform. We won’t see Apple cave to anyone if they can move this mountain (or rather, prevent it from moving). If users were really wanting Flash and started buying Palm’s Pre in place of the iPhone, I think we’d see the chink in Apple’s armor become bigger, but if users accept the lack of Flash functionality, the use of Flash-based applications will, in turn, dissapate.

The RIAA really wanted Apple to have DRM in the iTunes store, but after Apple got enough of the downloadable music market, look what happened… Suddenly the RIAA’s bargaining power was lost because Apple was strong enough to say that DRM wasn’t gonna fly with them anymore. Sure enough, if Apple gets to the point where businesses are purposefully not using Flash because they don’t want to alienate potential end-users then Apple has more strength down the road negotiating standards and formats. This is something that could be massively powerful for the company when they do support a specific technology…