Adam's Blog

Imagine everyone's surprise this morning when IBM not only announces that they are working on an office suite package, Lotus Symphony, but that it's geared towards consumers, not businesses, and it's based on OpenOffice.org, and... oh yeah... the beta is available immediately! BetaNews caught my attention this morning, and it looked nice, so I downloaded it and took it for a spin. Lo and behold, this suite is the best OpenOffice.org offshoot I've used thus far. StarOffice and Openoffice.org are both nice products, but the layout and graphical tweaking done on Lotus Symphony is just great. First of all, the beautiful blue rounded tabs of each document make for a warm, modern, and welcome theme. The formatting controls on the right hand side are smartly available like Office 2007's "ribbon", Also, the buttons are attractive and easily decipherable and the best part is that I can actually find what I'm looking for. I've been using Office 2007 for a few months now, and my biggest pet peeve in Word is that I often highlight text as I read it and a floating formatting box pops up, often causing my to mistakenly format the text I'm reading. Symphony doesn't have that...

Google resolved their storage blunders recently and, in an unannounced act of reconciliation, I assume, extended my paid storage upgrade for a few extra weeks. But imagine my surprise when I got this email today: At first glance, you might think to yourself - that's nice of Google, warning you that they are about to charge your card, a service which they do automatically to prevent you from having to take any action or lose your data. Except if you see this: Apparently, they want me to pay $25 for 6GB of space, but everyone else gets the same thing for $20? My reward for being an early Google adopter is that I get to pay a steeper fee? Is Google the next "Boston Market," expanding too fast to keep quality at the same level? Lately, it seems like Google's apps are quirkier, their service flakier, and their support non-existent. Is it a mistake to continue to entrust all of our data to Google?

The other day, I griped about the new Bloglines beta. To my surprise and enjoyment, one of the Bloglines developers left a comment, and we exchanged a few short emails. Today, Bloglines releases beta 1.0.2, and guess what? My issues were specifically addressed! Let's examine: So what do we see? The font that made it impossible to distinguish bold from normal weight text? Gone. Now we have a beautiful font that makes it very clear which are read and which aren't. How about the visual indicator of which item you are hovering over? It's there! My biggest gripe was that items were only marked read on hover and by a keystroke, just like Google Reader. But what do I see in the teaser for 1.0.3? Hey-o! Score one for the Bloglines team! Way to utilize reader feedback! Nice work.

I de-friended Robert Scoble on Facebook today. Scoble is really big into Facebook, and has carried on about its value before. It was nice being a generation from so many big names in the tech industry, but it came at a price. I didn't de-friend him because of reasons named in my previous Scoble ramblings, but rather, because he simply ate up too much of my Facebook experience. Every time he friended someone, it was in my news feed. Even when I made *everyone else* a "high priority" and Scoble only a low priority, it was still mostly Scoble posted a video, Scoble added this app, Scoble removed this app, repeat ad nauseum. This is not so much a problem with Scoble as much as it is one with Facebook. Any one friend has a ridiculous amount of control over my Facebook experience, and as a result, they can water it down. Instead of focusing on what most people I know are doing, I'm overwhelmed by whatever has caught Scoble's attention. The Facebook experience is so customizable, and yet, in this area, there is a missing piece. You should be able to ignore people altogether in your news feed. If...

Forgive me, but recently, I happened upon a Rush Limbaugh newsletter whilst in a friend's house. The particular essay I read was on global warming, and it was so outlandish it deserves to be publically mocked. The crowd Rush caters to is an extremist crowd. They are fed the same nonsense they already subscribe to hook, line, and sinker with no actual debate, they are delivered the same neocon bile that has polluted our country, and they love it. With this discourse, his listeners aren't educated, they are masturbated; any indication of actual debate, discussion, or learning is a joke designed to ultimately reinforce their original, biblical, neocon belief. Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, Anne Coulter: lather, rinse, repeat. All serve the same dish of blind and unchallenged confirmation. But alas... Limbaugh's argument goes something like this: Global warming cannot exist, because God designed Earth and what God designs is perfect. Therefore, man could not be killing the Earth. Honestly, that's it. The most anti-science, anti-education nonsense I've ever ingested by someone far to bright to be doing so, but more than likely, like L. Ron Hubbard, probably so inflated from his brainless supporters he believes whatever he manifests. It's honestly...

9to5mac is featuring a fantastic article on lack of innovation by big companies. This particular article is about Microsoft, but ultimately, it's a bigger statement about the United States of America. In fact, it reveals everything that is wrong with American business. The concept of "distrust the customer" is growing, and it's forcing people to do the "wrong" thing more often. Who is most inconvenienced by anti-skip technology, FBI warnings, and CSS, the DVD content protection technology? There is no doubt: it's the legit DVD consumers! Because pirates crack that in seconds, so only the real, paying customers even have to see it. Who is put out by the online activation of Microsoft products? Not the pirates - the real customers! How do big dinsaur companies like AOL and Verizon and Discover Card, who have lost their ability to innovate and serve, gain customers? They don't, they just refuse to let their customers leave. And that is what's missing from life today: no one gives a shit about their customers anymore. Yes, these are the days of restrictive cell phone contracts, where military men leaving for duty abroad are fined $200 by their carriers for terminating their contracts. These are...

My cell phone saga stretches back for several weeks or even months. I decided to leave Verizon for AT&T GSM, then decided to stay with Verizon, and ultimately, bit the bullet after a month and a half of waffling. I had no intention of getting an iPhone, mostly because they were more money that I wanted to spend and because I expect rev 2 to come out by spring at the latest (or sooner?) But the fact is, at $299, I was probably going to get an iPod Touch, and the iPhone was just too compelling. So last Thursday, I went for it. Ported my number and just took the dive. Let me assure you: the iPhone is worth all of the hype. Yes, it doesn't record video, it doesn't have GPS, it doesn't have a flash, it doesn't do cut and paste, there is no SDK, and EDGE is no Verizon EV-DO. And yet, despite all of that, the iPhone is likely the coolest "gadget" I've ever owned. It's incredible; it's got technology never before seen (multi-touch) and it just... it makes people giddy to see it. It's tons of fun and it's easy to use. It was seemeless...

Ever wanted to view all of the MacUpdate universal binary apps, but limit it only to freeware? MacUpdate doesn't offer such a feed, but thanks to the incredible Yahoo Pipes, I was able to make the feed myself. I love that site, it's really amazing. http://pipes.yahoo.com/pipes/pipe.run?_id=6tbRfrJd3BG887G96UjTQA&_render=rss Enjoy.

Bloglines has been pushing their new beta site, beta.bloglines.com, and are already reporting many satisfied users. The new site is very attractive and much more modern looking, but do not count me among the satisfied. The new beta, as far as I'm concerned, is just a second rate Google Reader. In fact, everything about how Bloglines works has been changed to emulate Google Reader. My primary gripe is this: in the normal Bloglines, you click on a feed and the items are marked read. In the new version, you must scroll past each item and/or click on each item. If I click on a feed with one or two short items, then I click a new feed, those items are not marked "read" and stay in my lefthand sidebar. I do not care to address each item individually, which is what the new system requires. Also, even if I do scroll over each item, more often than not, the last item is not "marked read" and remains for me to address later. There are a host of other single key shortcuts, and I do find these useful, but make no mistake about it, these single key shortcuts are "borrowed" directly...

Over the last few years, a few areas of my politics have become more conservative. I am pro-death penalty. I am anti-welfare. I am pro-personal responsibility. I am for a system that penalizes attorneys who repeatedly present frivolous cases to government funded courts. So I've felt an introduction of some libertarianism in my politics. I have some areas that I am staunchy liberal though: I am pro decriminalization of marijuana and several other drugs, I am pro net neutrality, I am pro choice, and I cannot fathom why gay marriage should be prohibited, let alone introduce discrimination into the constitution. I am also extremely anti-war in the Middle East. So today I took a political test on vajoe.com to find out which candidate best matches my current beliefs, and lo and behold, I guess I am a very typical democrat. Every Democrat matches me closer than every Republican, and, as I expected, Ron Paul matches me best from the GOP - since he's barely even a Republican, more of a libertarian himself. It's also worth nothing that the "conservative" swing I've felt is more of a traditional conservative from the 60's than the kind we see today. Barry Goldwater would...