Category: General

I’ve been following the facts surrounding the Virginia Tech tragedy and this morning I read two articles that I thought were interesting. NewTeeVee looks at the VT killings in the context of a culture addicted to fame. While I don’t agree with where the article ends up (the article concludes with these instructions for next time: “Guns are dangerous. Be nice to loners. Wait for the next tragedy. Cover it.”), I like the perspective it takes. And then there’s this article on a refrain that’s emerged from people talking about the killings on Facebook: reach out to loners.

Start here and click through these twenty photographs that won this year’s Pulitzer’s Prize for feature photography.

Maybe Lost hasn’t jumped the shark after all… things haven’t been as bad since the Hurley-asteroid episode. But I haven’t made up my mind if I’m still watching because I really like the show or because I just want some answers.

Anyways, for the Lost fans out there who are also fans of SNL and Andy Samberg, you can’t miss this video:

I’ve received two online photo albums today from different friends of mine and both used Picasa Web Albums. I hadn’t told either of them about Picasa (though I’ve told lots of other folks about Picasa!)

While there hasn’t been a lot of coverage of it, my guess is that Picasa Web Albums is slowly becoming a gorilla in the online photo sharing space because of the quality of the Picasa client and because of it’s tight integration with Picasa Web Albums. I don’t have any basis for this claim other than 1) I keep coming across more people using Picasa and 2) I’m involved in product development and I think I can recognize a ‘hit’ product when I see one.

Quiet ‘hits’ — as in successful products and companies that aren’t spotlight-seeking and maybe aren’t even that ‘sexy’ — are often the most interesting ones.

Update: In the comments, Brent asked me how Picasa compares to Flickr. My response:

Flickr may be better for some things (larger critical mass of users, better for bloggers IMO, flickr used by a lot of “influentials”, there’s a social network built-in), but for the sequence of 1) take photographs, 2) import them into computer and 3) share them with my family and friends, the Picasa experience kills the Flickr experience. From Picasa’s camera import capabilities, to the ease with which photos can be corrected, selected and, otherwise, prepped to be shared, to the two click upload process (which takes care of resizing your photographs and more subtle issues like correctly handling albums that get uploaded in multiple parts) to Picasaweb’s actual interface for viewing photographs. Maybe it’s unfair to compare Picasa and Flickr when it comes to the camera->computer upload and the computer->web upload steps, because Flickr doesn’t really contend in those areas at all (somewhat in the computer-web upload area, but their little uploader client is almost a non-contender). But even if you compare the web interfaces themselves, Picasaweb’s interface, I think, puts flickr’s to shame. It uses keyboard shortcuts so when I’m in album or slideshow mode, I can zip through photographs quickly. It seems to pre-cache the next few images so it feels faster than flickr. And best of all, they dynamically resize the image so regardless of the size of my monitor, the image fills most of the page — this is a big one!

I just listened to John Hodgman talk about “pooping upside down” on This American Life. Funny guy.

(on a side note: Dear This American Life, please make it so I can link into a particular segment of one of your shows. I wasn’t really interested in the prologue or the other stuff — only the segment with John Hodgman.)

It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if this report that MediaPortal may have stolen code from an MCE plug-in developer’s code were true. The MediaPortal folks ran Google Adwords that contained our trademarks ‘SnapStream’ and ‘Beyond TV’ a year or two ago — which is perfectly fine. But a trademark owner has the right to ask Google to suspend any ads that use their trademarks in the United States — which is what we did in the case of these MediaPortal ads. So what did we see a week or two later, after Google blocked them from running those ads? MediaPortal was running the same ads, but with our trademarks mis-spelled to avoid the block that had put on their account. Sigh. The other thing about the MediaPortal folks that I’ve seen is that they (= their users, their developers) frequently troll blog postings and forums and often post just for the sake of promoting MediaPortal and not because they have anything meaningful to say.

UPDATE: The Mediaportal folks seem to be apologizing for their rip-off. Good for them.

While I’m as excited as the next gadget freak by all the talk of the new Apple iPhone, the mythical Google phone, and Palm’s next SmartPhone-move, the new HTC S730 (aka the HTC Wings) could actually be my next phone. I have the Cingular 2125 right now and the clincher for me is that the HTC Wings is about the same size and weight as my 2125 and it has a slideout keyboard.

Cingular 2125 size/weight: 116mm x 46mm x 18mm, 106 grams
HTC Wings size/weight: 100mm x 50mm x 19mm, 120 grams

For some reason, I don’t know of too many SmartPhones in this size/weight category. Don’t other people want something small that easily slips into the pocket without taking up too much space and can be held and operated with one hand? More info on the HTC S730 (aka HTC Wings) at PDA db.

I’ll be at SXSW interactive this week/weekend — if you’ll be there, drop me a line (contact information in the right margin).

After this past Wednesday’s episode of Lost, I had been thinking about writing something about how I thought Lost had ‘jumped the shark’ (thinking about writing a blog post is something that us newbie bloggers do a lot). But it turns out I don’t need to write anything because Dave Zatz has it covered. After the great television that Lost created in its first season, I’m sad to say that things have officially taken a turn for the worse and they’ve lost me as a fan.

As I mentioned here on my blog last week, I had Blurb print the same book for me as a soft cover and as a hard cover and while I loved the hard cover, I wasn’t so excited about the soft cover. I thought the only difference between the two books would be the quality of the covers. But actually, the print quality of every page of the hard cover was better than that of the soft cover. I had a friend ask me more about the quality difference so I went and scanned one of the same pages from each:

A photograph from the hard cover:

…and the same page from the soft cover:

Admittedly, this photo didn’t have the best lighting to begin with, you can tell that the soft cover provided a lot less color depth.