*WEDDING.BLOG.LINK*

I'm getting a little impatient for the iTunes Music Store - Canada Edition to start up. The worst part is that they turned browsing off as well! How am I supposed to get my Celebrity Playlist fix this way?

I'll post hints I give to folks about using a Macintosh, artifacts of iLife (yours and mine), and generally helpful stuff along these lines from time to time.

Here's some advise I dispensed this morning:

Most people who are 'used to' windows don't know that macintoshes have contextual menus (windows calls it "right-clicking")

Pretty much anything you do with a 'right-click' in windows can be done with a control-click on a machintosh. Often times (more common in Mac OS 9) you can do a click-and-hold to get the same effect.

In this instance the comment was directed towards downloading a document from a webpage, (as in the Windows:IE convention "Save Target As...") but it also applies to changing desktop settings, getting info an files and folders and drives (as in the Windows convention "Properties..."), an 'open with...' dialog for files... it's really a one-to-one map with right clicking in windows.

My old buddy Mr. Hoo (2 C who Hoo is please see this post) is starting his "war". According to this article (there are many more out there for corroboration) Creative staged an iPod swap, in which he offered to exchange your old iPod for a new Zen Micro.

It was so popular that, eventhough the promotion was only run in Singapore there were a whopping 20 people who were willing to part with their old iPod and get a new Creative product. Apparently, this massive crowd was not only enticed by the ability to trade in their four year old iPod with a dead battery for a brand new Zen Micro (I can garauntee they will all be hocked for money to buy iPod socks), but also for the ultra-hip customization Creative added. While Apple is getting promotional help from the likes of one of the most influential bands of our time, having the back of the new U2 iPod laser engraved with the band member's signatures, the Creative guys are giving away players with a laser engraved signature as well - guess who Creative had sign their player.... well, 'who' is the question and 'Hoo' is the answer. He signed them himself. Now that's modesty, folks.

Wanna know a really crappy thing about being a developer:

Trying to build something that uses an undocumented ( in this case poorly documented is roughly equivalent to completely undocumented) API.

If you're going to exposes something that lets other developers use the functionality of your app from their own app, TELL THEM HOW IT WORKS!!!! Write down some instructions. And when you've decided you don't want to continue to update the rest of the world about what's going on with your API... STOP EXPOSING IT!!!!! Geez! It's so hard and frustrating and time consuming to write software around a crappy API that does unexpected/undocumented things.

So today I had to present what I've been working on for the past 4 weeks to two of my superiors (who have come to be pretty decent friends too, by the way).
It went better than awesome.

And tonight I am going to one of my favourite geographic locations in the world, to one of my favourite establishments in the world, to see a really great band, that has one of the best storytellers in the world as the drummer, with my favourite girl, in my own car.(mine's grey)

Sometimes things are just really wonderful and there's no real reason why. It's just some plain, 0ld-fashioned, happy livin', and that's alright by me.

Anyone with info (ie: resources, books, articles, examples) about using RDF in web pages should contact me right away. I greatly desire your assitance.

Do you suppose there is a genetic correlation between the size (outside diameter) of a person's finger and the inside diameter of that same person's nostril?
Could it be possible that a person's nostril grows to be the exact right size to allow the fingers that belong to the same person growing the nose to fit INSIDE said nostril without difficulty.
This would predispose the person (with genetically coupled finger and nostril size) to better cleansing/maintenance ability, which COULD lead to a more attractive appearance and thus to more success in perpetuating their own (nose-size-linked-to-finger-size) genes.

Is it perhaps the other way around, and the nostril grows to be the size of the finger because it actually gets stressed (stretched, pulled, etc) by that finger, and a person, in effect, molds their nose to the size of their own fingers through the course of nasal care.

On a lighter note...

Ok, so if anyone out there is an aspiring wanker and needs some good old fashioned mentorship to get you going, we've found your man. (that's him holding the sound card)

Who? Hoo? Who? That's what I said.

According to this article Spanky McDude up there actually believes he can overtake the iPod: he plans to (and I quote) "out market everyone" by spending $100M, he has "delared war". He says he has approx 600 engineers working on research and development of these things right now, and he plans to add 300 more.

So Hoo's sake I'm going to give a little lesson in North American marketting.

Ok, so first of all, dufus, (and Apple is the prime example of this) money spent does not automatically a good marketting campaign make. Similarly, many engineers do not automatically a good product make.

As exhibit 1 why Hoo-boy will undoubtedly be pounded into the south seas basalt he belongs in is that Apple doesn't spend nearly that much money on marketting the iPod now and they have won the whole frickin' market. Not only that, but Pepsi spent $100M on their first promotion with Apple giving iTMS songs away. Hear that Hoo: PEPSI spent. Another company spent $100M promoting someone else's product. I can see all the Fortune 500 companies lining up to dump $100M bones on the friggin' Muvo. (By the way, Pepsi has since put out about $1M for the iPod give away here in Canada too - Pepsi clearly likes the iPod as a marketing tool)
What's the major point from our first lesson class? I'll spell it out:

With the iPod, the product IS the marketing! They don't need to advertise it they way you do a regular product. Traditionally, you make a product and then convince the world that they can use it, and/or that they like it. Everyone already likes the iPod. That's a major difference.

Alright, moving on to exhibit 2, (this one's a little more shaky). There's no way Apple has 900 engineers working on the iPod. Actually they bought most of the "iPod" platform from another company, which was pretty small. Turns out that you don't need a LOT of engineers to do a good job, what you need is GOOD engineers.

Take a minute to just breathe that one in. I know it's hard to take.

Add in some good alluring, hip leadership, a heaping dose of really good taste (courtesy of Mr. Steven P. Jobs), and quality materials and craftsmanship, and you've got yourself a winner buck-o.

And the lesson:

The things that make the iPod interesting have much less to do with price and marketing than they do with quality, allure and taste. Hoo has not the taste or the allure, and the Zen lacks the, well, zen, to even come close to comparing to my lovely polished stainless steel and storm-trooper plastics of my 40GB 4G.

So thanks for following along folks. I hope that helps. Geez I gotta get back to work.

Just came across some interesting news on the interweb.

Anyone in search of a huge (And I mean real f@*%ing big) and cheap TV take a look HERE. I can't believe they're selling this thing on e-Bay!

(Anyone looking for christmas presents for me would be inclined to dig deeper on this one, I think....)

My Man, Robert Cringely has just written this week's piece for PBS.

In it, Cringely talks about a contract Microsoft was just awarded by the NHS in Britain. It's big contract, and it's a gamble for MSFT because they don't as of yet HAVE what they need to actually provide for the NHS. They will have to start from scratch. And they had to beat out EDS and IBM and Novell and huge companies like them who already have the technology available.

Now, normally I'd be pissed that Microsoft was trying enter into yet ANOTHER market and expand their money making ability AGAIN, but the truth is that the job of integrating health servies information and making it available and reliable is JUST NOT GETTING DONE! All the big guys in this business have been providing products that cost ten times more than they should (or were estimated to), take ten times longer to build than they should (or were estimated to) and on top of it all, they just plain old DON'T DO WHAT WE NEED THEM TO DO.

As far as I'm concerned, every doctor in Canada should be able to pull up my medical history in some type of anonymous research mode and compare what I went through to what they're dealing with in the patient right in front of them. ALSO, if I go see any doctor in Canada they should be able to pull up my entire medical history on their computer in a second and help me right there, regardless of what province I was born in or what province I live in now, or what the address on my driver's license is or ANYTHING ELSE!

Speaking as someone who builds software (for the enterprise environment no less) I know this is possible. For god's sake I could do it myself if we could wait 50 years for it to be done.

There is absolutely no reason why a company like IBM doesn't have a cookie cutter product that can be sold to (say) a government and integrated with any other government's system to share it's information - so New brunswick buys a solution and BC buys one, and they can share info with each other, and then the Feds decide that every province needs this, and so every province comes on board and they all share information together. - and replicated for EVERY GOVERNMENT ! FOR ANYONE WHO NEEDS IT!
For that matter, this should be done for the whole world!

It's stupid for this county to keep THIS database and this Province to keep THIS OTHER database and this federal organisation to keep YET ANOTHER database and so on and on and on and on and on.... (this, by the way, is how things are done now)

I don't see why the UN or some other international body like the Red Cross or someone, doesn't set up a standard for what these systems should support and how they should support them, and then let all the EDSes and IBMs and Novells and Computer Sciences Corps of the world start selling products/solutions that support this framework.

It would be a lot of work, but can we afford not to do it?

Though Yahoo!'s mail app is quite good, I CAN'T WAIT UNTIL I CAN CHANGE MY E-MAIL ADDRESS AGAIN!!! I already have a GMail account, and would love to be using it, but I've already inflicted TWO address changes on my loved ones this year, so I don't want to change again. (Every time I make a change I feel like I'm leaving more people behind who now don't know how to contact me and leave me with no way to contact them)

Sometimes when using Yahoo! 's mail app, I find that something will 'happen' to my message while I'm composing. Something like, my session will expire inexplicably (I would think that logging out and back in would provide me with A BRAND NEW session, but apparently it doesn't) and if for some strange reason the browser gets pointed to another page while composing, USING THE BACK BUTTON to get back to the compose page causes a page reload! (This could perhaps be more related to my browser than anything else - Maybe there's a setting that says "If I back up to a page, don't reload it EVEN IF - no, ESPECIALLY IF the URL has post data in it, so you don't mess up my partially completed web forms, you stupid piece of generally very good but still in need of fine tuning open source software". (By the way, IE is no better at this than Firefox) Alas, I fear until I find said setting I am doomed to suffer the wrath of neglecting "Joel On Software"'s cardinal axiom of all user interface design (Scroll to the bottom of the page).

A little while ago Apple had a big press event about it's new initiatives into the 'music' marketplace. (I use the quotes because I want it made clear that I do not think Apple is guilty (please excuse the CNN link)). During this press event, Steven P. drew the curtain off the what I believe is the first real Apple branded iPod case. And here they are, now for sale.



I, for one, think they are fantastic.
(It's hard to convey this type of wit via the interweb, but some people out there will remember that I carried my iPod around in one of my own socks for a few months until I got a decent case (it's better than decent!) as a birthday present [Thanks again Morgan!])

So here's the first real post, though I still haven't notified anyone of this blog's existence.

First of all, this thing just got started, and I only have access to the interweb from work (that's not entirely true, but it may as well be - plus my personal computer is really starting to show it's age [it's friggin ~5 years old now!]) so no criticism of the colors or the layout or whatever - it's template that part of this blog system. And speaking of 'this blog system' - it allows for great RSS feed happiness to happen. This is especially useful if you're using a browser that supports RSS aggregation (like the upcoming version of Safari) or has great RSS integration in the form of live bookmarks (like FireFox 1.0 - and if you're using Windows and NOT using FireFox as a browser you're probably insane, in which case most of my blog posts won't pertain to you anyway so just ignore this whole thing)

Second, I'd just like to say that I really am trying. I need to tell that world that I "really am trying" because lately (for about a year now) I've been working really hard to get in touch with some of the folks I've left behind over the years - people I've loved in the past and missed now that they were gone. I've really been working hard at it.

BUT, I think I may have not been working hard enough on the people that have recently slipped out of view for me. I can think of a few people that fit this description and some of you will undoubtedly be reading this post soon so take it to heart - but as an exteremely good example I just read a post on Matt's Blog about a great day that he had with sunsets and a romantic ring that I can only assume is for a girl who's name starts with "K".... I missed the boat completely on this one. I've been out of "real" contact with Matt so long I didn't even know he was seeing someone seriously - though I would have assumed it; he's a great guy and deserves to have someone wonderful around him so it's inevitable that he would.

So here's to M# and whatever happiness that sunset and that beautiful ring may mean for him (I've already promised to discover these things and more... perhaps a follow-up post will be necessary)

And here's to a newfound realization that while it's fine to attempt to connect with people from my past, it's unacceptable to do this at the expense of the relationships I need to foster that grew out of a more recent "past".

Till next time....

So.... Guess who just started blogging!

Hopefully lots of interesting stuff will pop up here over the next little while....

And hopefully I'll be able to keep interest in this thing long enough to make it something fun to do.

We'll see.

Off to warn some friends about this....