Chuqui 3.0

The worst product in the world

Church of the Customer Blog:

Its reason for being is simple: When citizens don't immediately cooperate or follow instructions, police officers or people in authority positions simply shock them into submission with a searing jolt of electricity.

You have to be careful about defining products by the way they can get abused, and using excessive hyperbole.

Yes, tasers get abused at times. But if a cop doesn't have a taser, he's more likely to pull out his gun. A copy with a gun out of a holster is a lot more likely to end up using it. Which do you think is the lesser evil? Getting tasered or shot?

Or if a gun isn't pulled, the cop's only real option is to close with the person and physically restrain them. Perhaps using his hands, perhaps using a baton. Many times, the person is restrained by multiple cops instead of a single cop with a taser. Not a small issue here, when a cop closes with a hostile person, that cop is putting their own safety at much higher risk, too.

Yes, taser abuse is bad -- but it's not the taser that's the problem here, it's the cop choosing to use the taser inappropriately. Remember Rodney King? That was before tasers; they just beat the crap out of him. Same problem, different technologies, same response; a taser, in fact, would likely do a lot less serious damage to a person than getting the crap beaten out of him by four pissed off cops with an attitude. And if it keeps that cop from deciding he needs to pull out the service revolver, then that's a blessing; tasers aren't fatal except in really extreme cases.

And abusive cops are abusive, with or without tasers. This is a classic case of not blaming the tool for the larger problem, which are those occasional people in a position of authority who abuse it. Or in some cases, a cop who feels their own personal safety is at risk -- and maybe makes a bad judgement call. Those are the real problems here.

critiquing your progress....

So one of the things I've been doing reecently is going back through my library and re-rating my photos. I finally decided on a new standard for rating them and wanted to bring everything into the new format, plus compare my ratings of older photos to what I consider my standards today.

That latter was both encouraging and scary. Encouraging because it's obvious the quality of my photos and post-processing has improved a lot in the last year, scary because of what I thought "pretty good" was a year ago.

This was all brought on by a couple of things, one the fact that I was re-arranging everything on my disks anyway, and needed to rethink how I used managed files vs. referenced files in Aperture (again), and partly because I have a secret project I needed to do that had a hard deadline, and that involved going in and finding some of my best photos. The end result of all of the re-arranging, by the way, is that now keep photos I'm actively working on as managed masters inside the Aperture system, and all other photos are in one of two referenced folders -- one on the disk, a second on an archive disk that's offline most of the time for masters of files that have been turned into non-primary images in a set.

I've tried using auto-set in Aperture, and I'm just not comfortable with it. Instead, I build sets manually. All of my projects in library are created by-day and by-topic, so if I've gone birding in Palo Alto, I'll store those photos as a project called 2007-11-23 (location). If I do multiple locations in a day, I create multiple projects. Within a project, I create sets of photos that are images of the same thing, which is defined very subjectively (for instance, in a recent shoot, I ended up getting some nice photos of a White-Faced Ibis (finally), and happened to get both left and right profiles. Each is a set within that project, with the best of each profile promoted to represent the set -- and the sets are not date-sequenced, because he was moving his head back and forth while preening.)

My rating defintions have finally settled down to this:

***** -- my best shots, period

**** -- high quality shots, but one step short of awesome

*** -- everything I consider worth keeping for some reason or another

** -- shots I consider "personal", basically, my library of "friends and family only" pictures. I do this mostly for convenience, I could keep them in a separate Aperture library if I wanted to (but I don't).

* -- photos that are secondary images of a set.

It's fairly easy to set this up, FWIW. after I do my first cull, I've gotten rid of the dingers and I've done a first cut on the sets. you can then open all of the sets, set all images in the project to one star, close sets, select again, and set to 3 stars. Then as you're doing your post processing and evaluation, higher quality images can be set to 4 or 5 stars.

That allows me to easily select all secondary images in a set and migrate them to the archive disk. the rationale is that I've chosen a better image, but want to keep it just in case -- but I don't need immediate or day to day access to them. So off they go to some place safe, but not taking up space on my laptop disk. So far, it seems to be working well.

It also means I can easily find what I consider to be my best shots, which is what I needed for this secret project. I hadn't planned on spending a couple of days re-rating everything, but once I got into it, I realized it made sense.

so now I have the photo library in some consistently rated. The way I did it was set everything to 3 stars, and then go through everything, rating the better ones as 4 or 5 as I saw fit. Once I got through it, I went through the 5 stars again, and re-rated down ones that in comparison with the other 5's didn't hold up, and then did the same with 4's, rating down or up as I took a closer look in comparison to their peers.

When I was done, I went and looked and the # of photos I rated in what bucket, just to see how it fell. I have a bit over 10,000 photos in my library now, o which 6,200 are secondary images in a set (that's about 2 images per "primary" image), leaving about 4,000 images as my "library", or my originals. Of those, about 1,000 (24%) qualify as 2 star "friends and family";

Of my "working set", 207 were rated 5 star, 889 were rated 4 star, and 1989 were rated 3 star, or 3085 images. about 7% five star, 29% 4* and the rest three star. I tend to be a severe culler these days, and in fact the next phase for me here is to go through the 3* photos and cull older images I used to think were decent that I now think aren't up to my standards -- I expect to nuke about 10% of the images, roughly. No, I don't particularly see the reason for keeping a bad image, unless it's interesting in its uniqueness or it has some other redeeming value (and my vacation snaps of substandard quality life in 2* land anyway; this is my attempting to start building a portfolio I'm not afraid to show anyone, the personal snaps have a different standard)

It's interesting to me how as I go back in time in the library, fewer and fewer photos make the 4 or 5 star rating, even though at the time I thought they might. that to me is very encouraging as an index of how both my eye and skills are progressing. I think having only 7% of the "keepers" rated 5* tells me I'm not being too liberal in my interpretation, but I think it makes sense to go through this exercise every so often to critically review my work, at least until my sense of "really good" and "top quality" stabilizes.

Another future project that this ties into -- I need to go back and re-title, re-caption and re-keyword photos; now, I can start with the 5* and then the 4* and work my way through. I picked up the Aperture keyword library for Controlled Vocabulary a while back and have been experimenting with it, now it's time to start implementing it for real.

Here's a photo I thought was good enough to post to Flickr last year (basically, 4* or better):

here's a roughly equivalent one I took within the last week, also in my mind a 4*:

amazing how one's view of things can change in a year, no?

okay, so what happened to the photo blog?

A couple of people actually noticed that I closed down Imaging Reality, the photo blog, and asked me what happened.

Here's the story.

Basically, when I started it, I was taking a close look at photography as a "career 2.0" option, and thinking about photography and photography writing as one possibility. the more I looked at it, the more I realized that (a) it wasn't really where I wanted to go right now, and (b) now is a rotten time to make "going pro" in photography a priority -- everyone else in the known universe is also thinking the same thing, making tough markets even tougher and making pricing tough -- even without the "microstock" movement (of which I'll probably talk more later).

All in all, after I launched it, I found that I just wasn't going to be writing much about the technical side of photography, and instead was more interested in the personal aspects of it, so I never really go into a rhythm of writing on the blog reliably. I made a decision to simplify things, so I merged all of the postings into chuqui 3.0 and shut down the old blog -- since I'm now viewing the photography content as part of my personal "me" instead of trying to build it as a separate entity as we've done with Two For Elbowing on hockey, that made sense.

So the postings aren't gone, they're now here on chuqui 3.0. Given I never really made a try to build readership on the other blog, I'm amazed anyone noticed (but thanks for doing so!). Photography talk will continue on and off, but here, not on a separate blog.

siliconvalleybirders.org

I've finally had some time to work on the new Silicon Valley Birders site (http://www.siliconvalleybirders.org/) I created, finishing up some things I hadn't gotten done and cleaning up some rough edges. Fleshed out the charters for the mailing lists and added a pointer to a flickr group for the photographer list.

One fun addition is that I've created a link blog for the site, so I can post items of interest to local birders; I'm displaying that on the home page of the site now, and there's an RSS feed for people who are interested.

For those not familiar with the site, it uses Mediawiki, and it was created to supplement the South Bay Birds mailing list with information about birding here in Silicon Valley. It also has information about San Mateo County, and we're starting to extend it to include Alameda county (I need help, I don't know that county well!), as well as some of the day trip areas such as Merced NWR that we visit. We're using Google Maps to document the birding areas and help people get directions and information on how to bird, and so far, things look pretty nice.

there are also a couple of new lists for people to use, one for non-bird-report chatter (SBB-Birdchat) and one for the group of bird photographers here in the region, SBB-BirdPhotography. For folks looking for bird reports in San mateo County, the Yahoo group Peninsula Birding is available.

Discussions on how to extend and improve the site will be on SBB-Birdchat. Feel free to pop in and offer your thoughts. And if you're interested in birdwatching here in Silicon Valley at all, whether you've been a birdwatcher for a while or are simply interested in starting, wander by, join a list, and we'll help you get started. If you have questions, drop me an email and I can help you find the person who can help....

followup: backups and drive failures: how much redundancy is enough?

Chuqui 3.0: backups and drive failures: how much redundancy is enough?:

Now, having said that -- it never hurts to fire up Disk Utility every so often to check the SMART status on the drives. Since I'm using SoftRaid for the RAID, it tracks and will show you disk errors. Checking that every so often can give you a hint something's up (like a bad block). And usually, barring Coke spills or clumsy fingers, a failing laptop drive will give you a two minute warning that things are starting to go bad.

Okay, so last night and this morning, I finished the round of leopard upgrades and disk upgrades on all of the systems here, putting a 250G drive in Laurie's laptop and upgrading her to Leopard.

All's pretty much well in the world now.

I did run into one thing that ties back to this whole backup and drive failure and redundancy thing... After I'd upgraded Laurie's mini to Leopard, I realized that the drive I was going to use for backups (temporarily while I finished everything else up) wasn't big enough; on the other hand, Laurie's secondary firewire drive on the mini was, and the new drive was big enough to hold her files, so I copied all of her data over to the new drive, and went to reformat the 500 gig drive to use as her time machine drive.

it failed -- I/O errors while trying to erase and partition. the drive worked fine under normal circumstances, and the data copied off fine, but it failed the reformat. One can only surmise it had bad blocks somewhere bad. It was also a drive that was three weeks out of date on the backups and stored most of Laurie's picture library, the backups being out of date, of course, because I was in the middle of this upgrade cycle and stuff was in a bit of chaos.

Which, of course, brings up the reminder that even a small window of risk in your backup cycle can be too small. In this case, no harm, no foul, but I now realize I had a disk that was starting to fail, and if the timing had been bad, we could have lost some data. Fortunately, no.

But that's led me down the path of wondering whether it makes sense to simple schedule copying all data to a new drive once a year, just to make sure it's on a drive that can be tested and reformatted. Or copying it off, reformatting, and putting it back. Just as one more sanity check, at least for internal drives.

For external drives, I'm seriously starting to wonder whether EVERYTHING ought to go RAID 1, not just the backup drives, but the drives that plug into the laptop are now all bus powered, that's a theoretical question at best -- but anything that sits with a power block, maybe the answer is to RAID everything. I haven't decided whether it's worth the money (probably not, off the top of my head), but it's a consideration.

But it's clearly a reminder that we need to be aware of the potential failure of things with moving parts, and these days, disks are about the last thing left that have moving parts in a computer system.

I've also been streaming my picture library up to S3 via transit, and that's going well. moving 60 gigs of data takes time, though, but once it's done, it's another safety option. I also plan on throwing laurie's photos, our itunes, and our documents. 100-125 gigs total, I think. And this is a freaking HOUSE, not a business. wow.

So...

Now both Laurie and I have a laptop (macbook pro) with an internal 250G drive; I need to order one more (thanks to the 500g failure) but we'll both have bus-powered 250G portable firewire drives to use with SuperDuper. We also both have another bus-power drive (mine is 100G, laurie's 80) for carrying around files that don't need to live on the laptop all of the time -- not absolutely needed with the new drive, but knowing both of us, we'll be filling it up rapidly. This gives us ~300g of space before we have to think about it again...

Laurie has her mini (100G) with a firewire drive (250g) as well. I retired my mini, and so I live completely on the laptop, which is my preference; I prefer not to have to worry which pair of pants a given file is in, so to speak.

Each of us has a dual-drive RAID 1 drive for time machine backups, hers is 500G attached to the mini, and once it's synced up, I'll set up a network backup of the laptop to a DMG on it as well using superduper. Mine is on the laptop, of course...

One of the "bad" things about Time Machine, and I don't know how they'll work it out, but they need to, is that a DMG is seen as a single file, unlike, say, a package. That means every time I fire up Parallels and run XP and do something, the underlying disk image XP lives in is modified, and then you end up backing up the whole thing again (in my case, about 4 gigs). For me, where I use Parallels pretty casually, it's not a huge deal, but for multi-OS warriors, this will really screw over Time Machine's utility. For those figuring all of this out, be warned.

Also, if you do major restructuring of your files, fresh copies are made, it doesn't reference existing ones. So if you move, say, 30 gigs of RAW pictures to your secondary disk, that'll eat up your backup space. Time Machine will clean it up eventually -- but be warned. And when you buy backup disks, make them bigger than you think you'll need. 3X your current usage isn't a bad start...

and, frankly, it probably makes sense to at some point run two sets of Time Machine backups and store one of them offsite, rotating them. From now on, for me, copying my backup to a disk to take offsite isn't going to be my standard model. It's going to be to keep two sets of RAID 1 disks, each configured for Time Machine, and one set active, one set offsite, and rotated in however seriously I feel paranoid. That's a BIT more expensive, but if you think about it, takes a lot less time and hassle and less prone to failure in the long run... and in backups, anything that reduces hassle is good.

That's one reason why you haven't heard me talking about using RAID to manage the offsite copies, or creaing a RAID of the laptop drive and a firewire drive. that's nice in theory, but in practice, unplugging part of the RAID (and breaking it), then plugging it in later and having the RAID software sync up and update turns ot to be at least as time consuming -- usually, it seems, more so -- than using SuperDuper or the finder to clone the backup disk. That means having to leave the drive on for a longer period of time, and having to plan better, and leaving a longer window where smething bad might happen, and...

I'm guessing/hoping that one of these days, I'll be able to use SuperDuper to back up a disk to S3. Once you get that synced in over the network, it's not hard to keep in sync, adn that solves the offsite. Keep an offsite copy, keep a bus-power bootable copy, and keep your primary day to day disk, and that seems like a nice way to handle this... A full restore from S3 might be painful, but not as painful as not having the data any more...

A great day birding...

While everyone else was out shopping, Laurie and I packed the gear and wandered off into the central valley to do some birding. We started a bit after 8AM, and drove out to Merced NWR, arriving around ten. The plan was to bird Merced, lunch on the way north, and visit Los Consumnes for the afternoon and sunset, hoping to get some good sandhill crane action.

Merced NWR was wonderfully active, with a good number of birders using the auto trail. It was an warm and sunny, a bit hazy, but almost perfect weather. The birds did not disappoint.

Friday was a banner day for raptors; before we even hit the refuge we were seeing red-tails (6) and kestrels (2) on the drive in. We started by birding the bushes up by the bathroom, catching White and Gold-crowned sparrows, yellow-rumped Warbler, Northern Mockingbird and another American kestrel, along with California Towhee and the rare and timid Black Phoebe.

At the observation deck, where the area is now partially flooded, the coots have moved in, along with various sparrows. Along with the crowned sparrows, we had a few song sparrows. One sparrow flitting in the dark I thought was a white-throated, but after reviewing the photos this morning, it's a song sparrow (why I like using photos later to verify my IDs....). One birder that was on the observation deck said he'd seen a Rock Wren but it flew out of the area and he never refound it. We never saw it, although we did see a Marsh Wren in the area, and some Bewicks Wrens out along the trail.

Raptors were the stars of the day -- by the end, I counted at least 15 red-tails on the refuge site, light and dark morph, half a dozen Northern Harriers, one turkey vulture, and four American Kestrels (two on the refuge) a white-tailed kite, plus the absolute surprise of the day, a huge golden eagle sitting out in the middle of the refuge on the side of a pond. One of the other cars at the NWR was also some folks from Santa Clara Valley Audubon and we'd been sort of birding near each other, so when I put the scope out on eagle and looked, I simply called out "everyone to the scope, now. And please tell me I'm seeing what I think I'm seeing". It was, but well beyond any possible photo op.. sigh. The red-tails were being very vocal, by the way. Lots of calling.

Shorebirds included the usual: black-necked stilts and american avocets, a long-billed curlew, willets, lots of peeps, yellowlegs, dowitchers and two or three other sandpipers I didn't try to ID out.

As we moved along the side of the refuge, we found the cranes and geese. There was only one sandhill crane in easy view, the rest congregating far out on the edge across the fields semi-hidden. We could hear them in a number of locations but they weren't being too cooperative. We did get good looks at the one for one of the people in the other car. Geese included a good number of Snow Geese (200-300 visible), plus Greater White-fronted (100ish), and standing next to them were a good number (25+) white-faced ibis, which was a life bird for one of the other birders there.

As we were scoping the geese (extra credit: "find the three Ross's in the group"), I mentioned that in my previous trip, I'd seen Pipits in the area. Laurie noticed some lumps moving in the fields, and I scoped them; Killdeer, not the hoped-for quail. Shortly thereafter, the pipits in fact arrived to make me look like a genius... And then we had a snipe fly through -- I didn't get a great look at it, unfortunately, but someone from the other car called it.

Along the back of the refuge, the folks in the other car stopped and hauled out their scope. We pulled in close -- they'd found a tree with three great horned owls. Two flushed and left, one stayed behind and kept a close watch on us.

In the back where the ducks congregate we stopped and scoped to look for interesting birds. It was primarily the usual suspects: Northern Pintail, Lots (and Logs) of Shovelers, Cinnamon teal, green-winged teal, mallards. Laurie saw a few Canvasbacks. Notably missing from the survey were blue-winged teals -- but as my photo shows, they were there, as I caught a pair flying off. The other car found a loggerhead shrike and pointed it to us, a lifer for me (so is golden eagle).

In among the ducks and shorebirds were one single snow goose and one white-faced ibis, the only individuals of those species to make themselves available for easy viewing. That finally gave me the opportunity to get some photos of an ibis that didn't suck...

Other notable birds included a woodpecker (probably acorn) that we saw in the trees in the first leg, but we were trying to get a look at a huge lump in a tree on an island in the marsh (a huge dark morph adult red-wing, it turned out) and it didn't stick around long, and about 20 white pelicans and 1-2 brown pelicans.

One exceptionally strange bird NOT seen: Canada Goose. None. Nada. Zero. Not one. Nowhere. I even checked with some of the other birds, and they hadn't seen any either. Strange...

After the ducks, we realized we were running late, so the last third or so of the refuge, which was still mostly cow pasture, we more or less skimmed through, but at one point I noticed a western meadowlark in the field and pointed it out to Laurie (we'd previously seen 3 earlier in the trip, which is when I took the photos). as we drove by, meadowlarks kept popping up and flying away from the card -- 5, 10, 15, 20 -- we ended up with over 30 meadowlarks all sitting up and visible in the field over about a 100 yard section of the cow pasture. Just amazing...

After that, we headed out, grabbed lunch in Merced and drove up to Consumnes, arriving there about 4:30. We parked in the secondary lot near the wetlands, and I was hoping to get Laurie some good looks of the Sandhills. Unlike my previous trip, though, the cranes were all in non-visible locations. You could hear them, but there were no cranes, no geese of any kind visible. Since it was already heading towards twilight, we didn't go looking for them, but walked the boardwalk (didn't see much, nothing unusual) then headed back to the car and watched the sunset. If my first sunset at Consumnes was an 8, this was about a 6, but we did have a few hundred sandhills fly in and settle down for the night, along with some canada geese (finally!), mostly as silhouettes. A group of about 20 did settle in within viewing of the parking lot so we got some so-so views of them. Oh well, if you want guarantees, go to Disneyland.. (grin)

As the light finally faded at Consumnes and we were packing up, I saw a large owl fly off into the marsh; it seemed about the same size as the great horned, but I'm not the person to pretend to ID something like that..

All in all, it was a bit over 300 miles for the day. In retrospect, that was too much ground to cover in one day, but it was fun to try once. We're probably going to try to get back to Consumnes in mid-december or early january, and out to Merced again probably in Mid-January, and hopefully hit each one up again around march, but we'll see.

Species list: (53 species)

Merced NWR area

Red-Tail hawk (20ish)
Crow
Northern Mockingbird
Red-Winged Blackbird
Brewers Blackbird
American Kestrel (6)
White-Crowned Sparrow
Gold-Crowned Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Savannah Sparrow
Black Phoebe
American Coot
California Towhee
Marsh Wren
Bewick's Wren
Northern Harrier
Black-Necked Stilt
European Starling
Mourning Dove
? Snipe
American Pipit
Sandhill Crane
Snow Goose
White-Faced Ibis
Yellow-Rumped Warbler
Great Egret
Snowy Egret (only 1)
Great Blue Heron (5-6)
Northern Shoveler
Northern Pintail
Canvasback
Cinnamon Teal
Blue-winged teal
green-winged teal
mallard
? Wigeon (heard, never seen)
Killdeer
Dowitchers
yellowlegs
long-billed curlew
Peep sandpipers
two species of mid-sized sandpipers
Gulls
White Pelican
Brown Pelican
Western Meadowlark (30ish)
Golden Eagle
Woodpecker (possible Acorn)
Great Horned Owl (3)
Loggerhead Shrike
Turkey Vulture
White-Tailed Kite

Consumnes:

Canada Goose

And a happy thanksgiving to you...

Just want to wish everyone out there a happy (U.S.) Thanksgiving. I hope you're having a wonderful turkey day, and that you're with those you care about and who are part of your lives.

How time flies when you're having fun.... A year ago at Thanksgiving, we were preparing to go out for dinner, because Laurie was just out of the hospital and neither of us was really up to or motivated to do much cooking. Tradition is nice, but sometimes, you just want to let someone else screw with the turkey and dressing....

Last Thanksgiving was sort of our first chance to exhale and realize that hopefully the worst was over (and for the most part, it was); in the two months prior, I'd left Apple and then started at StrongMail, Laurie was still interviewing, and then some "bad indian food" turned into a midnight visit from the paramedics and 5AM emergency surgery, followed by more semi-emergency surgery a few days later when things went sour (phone calls you never want to have: "your wife is going into surgery -- now. You probably want to be here. Oh, and don't worry, she'll be fine...")

So this year really turned into one about getting back to normal, whatever normal is when I'm involved. Laurie went to Yahoo, where she's off fighting the good fight and making sure that whenever you want to visit a site like this, you can. She had her final surgery in March, which wasn't the end of things, but at least it was the beginning of the end of it, but we really spent much of this year working together to get her past all of this and getting our lives back to some semblance of how we want things to be (successfully, I think).

I ended up deciding StrongMail wasn't right for me -- through no fault of theirs, I add. I went back to the plan I had started when I left Apple and took my sabbatical, and a month ago started up with Laszlo Systems; in retrospect, if I'd listened to myself, I could have gotten it right the first time, but I talked myself into making what I thought were good decisions for the wrong reasons -- but fortunately, I also was smart enough later to realize it and do the right thing. (but that's for a different posting, some other time...)

And for me, it definitely was the right thing; a few weeks ago, I woke up and realized I was happy, that I was really satisfied with my life again.

That may sound trivial or silly, but it's not, and it goes back over four years, to foo camp 1, when I first realized something wasn't right in my life. While I've hinted at it tangentially before, it's not something you can really talk about until you're sure you're through it -- and I know I'm finally there. (but again, different posting, some other time).

So the last couple of years was all about putting myself back together and figuring out who I wanted to be, and the last year was also really about supporting Laurie through her challenges and helping her get back to the life she wants. This next year, I hope, is about living the life I've come to realize I want and helping Laurie live her life as well, and making the changes we want in our lives to allow us to head into the next ten or twenty years we want to have together.

We just celebrated our 20th anniversary, and Laurie having celebrated one of those important but un-nameable birthdays that have zeroes attached -- and realizing just how close we came to having neither -- it's really changed how I view things and how I focus on life. you can get so tied up with work, and so focussed on planning for tomorrow that you don't realize that today may be it. sometimes tomorrow DOESN'T come. So life has to be a balance between thinking about later but not forgetting to live in now; and that's a hard lesson to learn, but one you should feel lucky if you avoid learning it the hard way.

And my Thanksgiving thought to all of you is this: think about what the priorities in your life are, who the important people in your life are. Are you putting your time and energy into your life in a way that fits those priorities? Especially here in Silicon Valley, it's hard to get your priorities screwed up and become emotionally tied in things, especially letting work take over beyond where it should. If you say "your wife" or "your kids" are your real priority, then why in the hell are you missing another soccer practice for that stupid meeting? it's about understanding your priorities and balancing the challenges of your life to match up with them. It's easier said than done -- it's very easy to get caught up in the flow and the moment, and think you can get to soccer practice tomorrow.

But what if tomorrow never comes? Don't think in terms of "what if I lose her tomorrow?", because down that road lies nothing but unhappiness and worry, but instead consider "if I were to lose here, what do I wish I'd done before it happened?"; and once you figure that out -- well, don't be an idiot, go do it.

Happy thanksgiving to all of you; and may your thanksgiving bring you joy and comfort and the company of those you care about, and may you have that for many years to come.

Will the Kindle succeed?

Backup Brain:

Dori says that she thinks the Amazon Kindle is a bomb, and she thinks that it will flop. Her argument is based mainly on its DRM. I think that it will succeed, become a big business segment for them, and will be the first of a new line. Neither of us has seen or touched one yet.

I straddle the middle line.

First, DRM only matters to the general consumer when it gets in the way of what they want to do. You'll notice that the DRM on DVD discs or the iPod/iTunes simply doesn't register with consumers as a problem, because the restrictions aren't things that affect them in a day to day, practical way; the people bitching about DRM on those platforms tend to be the uber-geeks and the anti-DRM extremists who are off on the edge of the bell curve. 39 trillions songs downloaded from iTunes tells you what "real people" think about iTunes DRM, once you get outside the uber-geek echo chambers.

On the other hand, look at all of those places where DRM has been used to try to force consumers into behaviors they don't like -- like, oh, the old DIVX platform, or music subscription services that don't let you put your music on MP3 players and carry it around, or when MLB changed its DRM vendor and tried to tell everyone with video under the old DRM "well, sorry. buy it again". oops.

DRM on the Kindle? We'll see. If it stays in the background and lets typical users do what they want? It won't be an issue. My initial thought is that Amazon isn't stupid, and they understand the consumer, and their DRM restrictions seem to be pretty well thought out for the most part. We'll see what consumers think.

But does that mean the Kindle will succeed? I'm still unconvinced that people are all that interested in spending that kind of money to carry books around; it's at best a niche market -- me, personally, I have Google Reader on my phone, and while it's nice owning a hundred books I can carry in my backpack, in practice, I'm only reading one at a time, and a paperback is even more convenient, and I can buy a lot of paperbacks for the cost of the Kindle.

So I don't think this product is "it". the streaming content and EVDO make it an interesting device, but I think it'll fall into a few niches: early adopter geeks who love new gadgets, and people who need to carry a reference library around with them (think O'Reilly safari in a neat little package). that presumes those libraries and books become available for the Kindle, not a guarantee.

But I still think it's going to miss the mark; it's not going to convince people like me to replace carrying a paperback, I'm not convinced the online stuff is "enough better" -- but I am convinced this kind of product will succeed at some point, and I think Kindle is the first ebook device in years to move this product design forwards towards the product that will ultimately succeed.

Kindle is, for me, the product that for the first time shows how this kind of product WILL succeed. Kindle isn't, I think, the breakthrough product, though, just the first one that shows some potential on how to build something like this that will break through. They've done many things right, including aggressive pricing of books (but not quite down to paperback price) -- but I just don't think we're ready for this, yet.

But we finally have a serious contender for a "good, commercial, practical" ebook reader. Congrats to Amazon for figuring it out -- and frankly, I'm not suprised it was them, but notice it's not coming from a "high tech" company? Because this is a product driven by consumers, not technology, for however much it depends on technology to be viable. Something high tech companies ought to be thinking about, because they need to get out of their echo chambers -- if Apple didn't prove that, this should.

But I expect Kindle to be at best a moderate success. But I also think that Kindle will be remembered as the product that led to the succcess of this market, where frankly, no previous ebook reader attempt came close. So at that level, it's already succeeded.

Software co-founder criticizes Apple stance on iPhone games

AppleInsider | id Software co-founder criticizes Apple stance on iPhone games:

"The honest truth right now is that Apple's not exactly hugely supportive of [games for the iPhone]," Carmack says. "When they finally allowed games to be put on the iPod... in many ways it's one of the worst environments to develop games for. You have to work on an emulator... just all these horrible decisions."

Are they horrible? I'm not convinced.

I've noted my thoughts on gaming on the Mac before; I think a similar thing is true for iPod and iPhone.

the bottom line here is -- ta da -- money. Apple doesn't get into markets where it doesn't see a way to make money. It much prefers to dominate those markets, because that leads to higher gross margins. it doesn't invest significantly in market segments that it's not convinced won't grow the business enough to warrant the investment.

On the mac? the cows have left the barn -- I don't care how much you invest in the Mac Gaming market, you're not going to impact Mac sales enough to make the investment back. The amount of money you'd need to turn the mac into a "first class" gaming environment with all of the hot games is massive, and against the competition of not only PC-based gaming environments, but the PS3, the XBOX and Wii, that's just a brutal market to try to get into. And it's not JUST making an environment that gaming developers want to develop to, it's convincing consumers to buy Macs instead of these other platforms to do their gaming on.

Think about the cost of that -- it's not just good enough to have games ship on the Mac the same day they ship on the PC, you need to start talking about exclusives, and "Halo 3" caliber exclusives. Not gonna happen.

Similar realities exist on the iPod and iPhone. My bet is that sales of those early iPod games, combined with market research, has convinced Apple that games on those platforms don't drive sales -- games are nice to have, but they're things people buy AFTER having decided to buy the device, not things that convince people to buy them.

I know when the iPod games first came out, I bought a number of them. I'm sitting here trying to remember last time I played one... I'll bet most people are the same.

Stop and think about it: what games, and how many of them, and which titles, would need to exist on an iPhone to make you decide to buy an iPhone INSTEAD of some other phone? Answer? if you're honest, you'll admit that you're either going to buy the iPhone anyway, or that you're not, and no game would make a difference in that decision. There are other factors that drive that decision.

And THAT is why Apple isn't putting a lot of focus or investment into games on those platforms. It's a "nice to have" feature. The devices will sell with or without them, and there's no real ROI on the investment. Until games becomes a sales differentiator in those market segments, it's not going to be a focus for Apple.

Ultimately, when Apple looks at this kind of decision, it's looking at a pool of money, and it's making a decision. That decision is not "should we invest in games for the iPhone", but "how do we spend this $xxx millions of dollars to make the most money back?" -- and it may well be that gaming on the iPhone might be a decent investment of that money, especially in a long-term building of the market -- but it certainly isn't going to be the BEST investment. In these situations, it's rarely "is this a good thing to do?" but "is this the best thing we could be doing?" from among any number of projects.

And the bottom line is -- games simply aren't going to "move the needle" financially for Apple. On the Mac platform, decisions made years and years ago aren't going to be unmade (one could argue that this is really Sculley's or Spindler's fault, and that Jobs is simply smart enough not to throw good money after bad), and on the mobile market, it simply isn't proven that games drives sales. My guess is if you care about gaming at all, you probably already own a Nintendo DS or a Sony PSP anyway, and the kind of games you'll see on your phone are those games you dink with in boring meetings when you think nobody's watching... (not that I'd ever do that, no...).

Burst.com takes $10m bite out of Apple

Burst.com takes $10m bite out of Apple over iPod, iLife patent infringement - Engadget:

Settling a two year old patent dispute with Burst.com, Cupertino's shelling out $10 million to license four (infringed) patents regarding audio / video technology in the iPod, iTunes, iLife, and QuickTime. Stings,

Does it? think about it. Apple is estimated to be selling 23 million iPods THIS QUARTER. The payout to Burst therefore equals about 40 CENTS per iPod sold this quarter. That's less sting that a mosquito bite to Apple.

No, the bottom line here is simple: patent trolling works, in part because it's easier and cheaper to just pay them to go away than it is to pay to fight it in court. $10 million is petty cash here; it's enough to make Burst go away, and likely close to what it'd cost in legal and staff costs to fight this out, where maybe Apple would win out, maybe not.

Burst wins, because they can take the money and run. Apple wins, too, though, because they don't risk a bigger payout at the wrong end of the legal fight, and can get this done and off the books. The only loser in this case is the legal teams that would have been paid to fight this one off if it'd gone through the entire process.