Category Archives: Review

First Look at Mountain Lion OSX for Macintosh

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I purchased and downloaded the newest version of Macintosh OSX codenamed Mountain Lion. The download took a brief amount of time and once established I didn’t have a problem handling it. The first step was creating an independent system installer using a USB memory stick. I found some instructions that I remembered from when I did this with OSX Lion and the instructions worked well, up to a point. I was able to find the InstallESD.dmg file and I set up my 16GB memory stick with the proper format settings, specifically Mac HFS File System with Journaling and GUID partition map. The first issue I ran into was a strange memory error, that while restoring the dmg file to the USB memory stick, after the Mac was done really, in the verification step it failed with this odd arcane “cannot allocate memory” error. I went immediately to Google to look and found that if I mount the InstallESD.dmg file first, that *that* is the magic bullet. Turns out, it was.

Now that I have Mountain Lion on a USB memory stick I got a stock 24” iMac out of storage and set it up. Plugged the USB memory stick in, then the mouse and keyboard, main power, and while holding down the option key, turned it on. Everything worked as I expected it to! So far so good.

Once the system was up and running and in setup it prompted me to connect to a Wifi system, which was not a problem since I share Wifi from my primary work iMac (long story for another day) and it seemed satisfied. Then I ran into my first problem with Mountain Lion. During initial system setup I could not successfully log into any Apple ID. My personal one, or the one for work, either one didn’t work. The system allows you to continue without it and so that’s exactly what I did. Once I moved on to setting the time zone, this also failed, but I suspect it has everything to do with my shared Wifi coming from my Snow Leopard iMac and not something endemic to Mountain Lion. Instead of Mountain Lion successfully setting the time zone by it’s location I set it by hand. Not really a problem.

Once I got the system up and running, idle at the desktop everything was as it should be. My next step was to try to connect my test iMac up to my Apple ID. So logically I went first for System Preferences, then to Accounts, and there set my Apple ID. I was half hoping that setting it there would have had a chain reaction and set it everywhere else, but that didn’t happen. I noticed that iCloud wasn’t set up properly, so I found it in System Preferences, it wasn’t a problem, just a very weak annoyance. Then I tried the Mac App Store, had to do it again, same for iTunes. The only real irk that upset me was fiddling around with “Back To My Mac” feature which asked me to turn on sharing with a button that lead to the sharing panel. I was lost in there (no, not really, but I was in the headspace of an end-user) and it took me a while to notice that Apple did tell you where to go to set things up, so my one tweet about this being a problem is wrong, I was just hasty. I must say that much of this I will pin on me being in the “end user headspace” and not as an Admin, which I would have been much more careful and slow with in my approach to Mountain Lion. If you read and aren’t hasty, this isn’t a problem.

Every app that I’ve used worked well, some needed Java to be installed but the OS prompted to fetch it and install it for me without a problem so that was fine. Of the apps that work that I’ve tested, at least in that they open up are:

* Aqua Data Studio 11.0
* Dropbox
* iSquint
* KompoZer
* MarsEdit
* Miro Video Converter
* MPlayerX
* Music Manager (Google Cloud)
* OpenOffice.org
* Photo Wrangler 2.1
* Picasa (needed update)
* Postbox
* Seashore
* Spotify (needed update)
* The Unarchiver
* Transmission
* VLC
* What’s Keeping Me?
* XTabulator
* Zipeg

Of course, all the apps from the Mac App Store I assume work well. Dropbox was a non-issue, 1Password was smooth-as-glass, as I expected. But what really surprised me was Postbox. I recently fled Sparrow as an email client when they announced that Google was acquiring them. Postbox was my alternative. When I copied over Postbox and started it for the first time it offered to collect the settings form Mail.app which I didn’t think anything of and let it go ahead. Postbox seamlessly captured my iCloud email account and after I typed in my Apple ID password, I was up and running! For some strange reason, that really pleased me.

So, what is next? So far everything seems to test fine in Mountain Lion. There are some goobers from Lion that I still need to work out – such as secondary monitors in full screen mode being stupid, that sort of thing, and also to see if VirtualBox will work, but for the most part I’m satisfied that this new OS is exactly as Apple bills it, and they have done a very good job. There are some small irky bits and on my Twitter I’m sure it came across as being ranting-and-raving, but actually it’s quite good.

Next steps at work are tallying up all the people interested in Mountain Lion and figuring out how we’re to pay Apple for the licenses, then helping everyone set up Apple ID’s on their own. There is going to be a headache with all these new very independent and unmanaged Apple ID’s floating around in space, but if you want the Bright and Shiny you have to swallow a seed or two.

Wine Tasting

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I took this weekend, and extended it to include Friday and Monday and we’re spending it up in Traverse City, MI exploring the wine trail in the northern region of the lower peninsula again. We’ve explored this region before and have gotten to know many of the wineries and vintners in this area.

Yesterday we dove in and visited four wineries:

  • Blackstar Farms
  • Bowers Harbor Vineyard
  • Chateau Grand Traverse
  • Chateau Chantal

My experience in the first two was exemplary, the last two were abysmal. Now as to the why behind my experiences it comes down to how the tasting rooms were organized and run. Blackstar Farms conducted a very congenial tasting room and I quite enjoyed my visit. The pace was self-led and it provided me sufficient time to write in my wine journal.  The tastings here were free because we had retained the wine glasses we purchased the last time we visited. As for Bowers Harbor, this was a new experience for me, being happily surprised because the last time I was there I was so put out that I vowed I would never return to that winery again. The last time I was at Bowers, the tasting room manager didn’t listen to anything I said and just poured whatever they felt like pouring. Uh, no good. But this time? So much better! The new tasting room employee was wonderful. She was engaging and didn’t put pressure on us and listened to the wine order that I wanted and the wines I wanted to taste.

So, what about the last two?

Chateau Grand Traverse was very beautiful. It had a lot of curb appeal and a very impressive name. Big bold lettering, the stuff that marketing directors purr over. Once we got inside I noticed several things that were troubling from the get go. The wine tasting area was spooned up against their gift shop, which was top-to-bottom stacked with everything from snacks and dip-powders to books on wine. Very elaborate however rather distracting. Then as we approached the wine tasting bar a fellow greeted us (we won’t share names to protect the guilty) and immediately set the pace. The pace was best described as ‘breakneck clockwork’ as once we were settled and given a guide and a pencil we were under pressure to select six wines. The fellow behind the bar was one of a team and it became very clear that they had a script and a schtick to work from and they were playing it back to us. They might as well have been robots. The same jokes, the same affable smalltalk, over and over and over. There wasn’t even any attempt to mix it up even once, the script was that one-dimensional. The pace at Chateau Grand Traverse was a mad dash to the end. Just as you had swallowed the taste you had, Mr. Helpful was in your face making comments and analysis which trampled over the thoughts you were trying to form of the wine you just tasted. Wine is supposed to be savored and enjoyed, not chugged like cheap college beer. Our progression along the six free tastings was so rushed and harried that I gave up writing in my wine journal. What’s worse? They saw that I was writing yet cared not a jot that I may have preferred a slower approach. It was this that set me on edge, and so I decided that four tastes in that I was done. I was going to stop writing and stop thinking about Chateau Grand Traverse and after being told several times that “Number 14 is our BEST SELLING WINE!!!” I concluded that Chateau Grand Traverse was not, and never will again, get any of my money. Yes, their sweet Riesling was sweet, but it was also flat and dull. I could have mixed a simple syrup with grape juice and made something similar. So, whatever! After that I endured even more protestations from the staff that “Number 14 is our BEST SELLING WINE!!!” — Yeah! We got it! We aren’t buying it! And then our guide for the wine tasting just disappeared. He was replaced by another person, a woman who started us off on the same script and schtick all over again. If Chateau Grand Traverse was in the Twilight Zone, that would have done a lot to explain their dysfunction! Alas, I left Chateau Grand Traverse with the express desire to escape. Also I was filled with the urge to punish that winery for its rank obnoxiousness and rude behaviors, but instead of raising a stink I just left. I don’t want to go back. Yes, I was going to buy a bottle of their Chardonnay, but their staff made damn sure that wasn’t going to happen and thinking back upon it, it will never happen. In fact, if we do TC again, they will join the few other damned wineries we have abandoned. If we go, I won’t enter that establishment again. And yes, it was that bad.

As for Chateau Chantal, the wine tasting was okay, it didn’t suffer the same problems that Chateau Grand Traverse had, however their system for tasting wines wasn’t very conducive to a good tasting and this is because they categorize their wines by small black rhombus symbols, one symbol is for wines that you can taste for free and two are wines you have to pay to taste. You get three rhombus symbols, so three free tastes. You can’t taste-for-free their more expensive wines and those are all marketed as “Reserve” or “Select”. What can you taste? Basic wines that would have been good to drink out of boredom. The scores never broke 75 out of 100. So I tried three wines, all not very good, and at the end I didn’t taste anything that made me think that the “Reserve” or “Select” bottles were worth even looking at. If you are going to set a tasting fee, fine, but it’s far better, in a marketing sense to give your customers a sense of liberty by charging them some basic fee and letting them taste a handful of wines. If you want to make your customers really happy, set the fee to be the wine glass, then brand it and sell it that way, that way your customers are getting some small bit from you that they remember at home and they are more apt to try different wines. Paying discretely to taste “special” wines isn’t the way to go.

So, here’s a guide in a nutshell for what I think, from a customer’s point of view a wine tasting room should have:

  • The Wine Bar should be a centralized island or clustered along one side of the presentation space.
  • The staff should be friendly, scriptless, and be sensitive to the various approaches some people may wish to follow. The best way to assess how much interaction is important is to start with basic questions and ask the customers what wines they like the most. If the customer doesn’t know then you can ramp up your involvement and be more of a guide. If the customer does know, then proceed slower. If you notice the customer has paper, a book, or a journal, then slow the hell down. If a customer is writing about your wine, then that customer knows their palate and input from you should be limited to statistics of winemaking such as chapthalization, brix ratios, methods, and just one or two key points that are special to notice about what they are about to taste.
  • Tastings should ideally be with a small fee, between one to five dollars and if that’s the design then some token should be sold, a coaster, a wine glass, a wine charm, something. The best fee would be charged and then waived if the customer purchases a bottle of wine. That fact should only be revealed to the customer if they actually buy a bottle. Do not lead with “If you want to taste there is a fee, if you buy, we waive the fee.” Make the waiving of the fee a surprise to your customers. That will ensure repeat business, which is what you should really be after. One purchase does not a true customer make, repeat visits and repeat customers are the key. In a way, you should want to turn a customer into a fan. That’s where your value is!
  • Let your wine speak for itself. Do not let the tasting guide be a chatterbox. If the people coming to taste want a chatterbox, let them lead the guide forward, don’t start there!

I’m sure I’ll come up with more of these rules, so I may come back to this post and add to it, but these are some of the core things that wineries really should take seriously. It’s not enough to simply push bottles out the door, you have to engage with your customers and turn them into fanatics. The best way is with good wine, convivial and conservative wine tasting guidance and cultivate an air of happy engagement. If a customer feels welcome, feels like they are getting some basic respect and the wine is worth it, then they will no longer be simply customers, they will be fanatics.

Here’s a little example for you all, there is a winery in this region called Bel Lago. We walked in as new customers the first time we visited the region and now we are Bel Lago fanatics. We walk in and we pluck bottles off the shelf even before we arrive at the tasting bar because we know what we like and Bel Lago followed the basic rules and converted us from simple customers to fanatics. If you want to see how to run your wine tastings, visit Bel Lago. Feel the atmosphere and the environment there and learn from it. That is, if you want to sell wine and be successful. If not, then go to Chateau Grand Traverse and wind up their staff before their thinking parts run down.

He Who Integrates, Wins!

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Google has done it. They have released Google Chrome for iOS and updated Google Chrome for Mac OSX. I have downloaded Chrome onto my iPhone, which of course pushed an identical copy onto my iPad. Then I started Google Chrome on my Macbook and updated that as well, to revision 20.

Google Chrome is faster than Safari when browsing my SupportPress site, that’s a really neat feeling to see it zoom along. So, did I switch? Yes. All my devices synchronized for tabs and bookmarks and passwords? You bet your sweet bippy! I’m a capricious user, Firefox often times pisses me off, Safari sometimes does, and even Chrome pisses me off from time to time. But I’m willing to take my lumps if I can have a synchronized centralized clouded infrastructure tying all my devices together. Safari isn’t it, but Google may win because their technology wins.

So far, Google Chrome on iOS and Google Chrome on my MacBook Pro may win my personal and professional recommendation. But if you are using browsers of your choice, don’t switch yet. These Google technologies are still a little raw, especially on iOS. Only time will tell, like most things.

Gunnar Glasses

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About a year ago I discovered a company that made eyewear expressly for use with computers. Since I spend a majority of my day looking at computers it made a certain amount of sense. The glasses were not terribly expensive and they were polarized, tinted, and many reviews were positive so I went ahead and got a single pair to use. The company’s name is Gunnar, and they make a lot of "precision eyewear’ for gamers. I figured if it was good for gamers doing what they do, then it’d be fine for me.

I’ve been wearing my Gunnar glasses on and off since I bought them and they have served me well. There is a very slight magnification factor which I appreciate, I don’t need glasses right now, but I figure they may help combat eyestrain, and that they do nicely. The yellow tint may be helpful, the polarization definitely helps, but above everything else I have to say that my eyes don’t dry out so fast while I wear these glasses. Often times they’ll get a little too teary and I have to dry them, but it’s far better to have more tears than a deficit.

A few weeks ago, wearing my glasses I discovered that one of the very tiny nuts that hold the frame together had fallen off. I looked all over for a little brass-colored metal nut the size of a quarter of a grain of rice. So I contacted Gunnar customer service and asked them if they sold a repair kit for my glasses. The response I got back was amazing. Not only were they sorry my glasses failed, but they wanted to ship me free of charge a repair kit in the mail. I gave them my address and yesterday they arrived. It was an informal package, pretty much a sticky note with the pieces taped inside, then put in a mailer and sent via the postal service. When I opened up the mailer I could feel the little metal nuts poking through the sticky note paper. I opened everything up and there were 4 sets of plastic washers, metal washers, and the nuts. I sat at my desk with a pair of needlenose pliers and assembled the lost washers and nut on the one frame post that didn’t have any of that and tightened it down firmly like all the other posts.

It’s these little things that I appreciate. Other companies could just have rolled over and said “Buy another pair of glasses” but not this company. Because they are excellent glasses and the company has done right by me I want to recommend Gunnar brand as a good company to deal with and to buy from.

SupportPress In Action

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My first week with SupportPress has been magnificent. It was just in time as well, as we are looking down the barrel of a bunch of employee location movements which always requires lots of tickets and tracking because there are just so many discrete pieces to work with whenever someone moves from their established location to a new one, even if it’s temporary.

It’s also been a series of lessons when it comes to introducing new technology to regular folk. The adoption rate was much higher than I hoped for, as people were actually jockeying for “first ticket” so that felt really good. I’d estimate about fifteen percent of the staff have moved their communications channel to the help desk completely over to the new SupportPress system, while the rest have yet to break their old ways.

The old ways we still will respect. Having this new help desk system has given me moments of decision to make and learn from. Do I force people to only use the SupportPress system? Do I turn the office into a BOFH zone by forcing my clients to fold their entire communications structure into a ticket? Turns out I rejected that choice and elected to endure the steeper path of being, in what really turns out to be a human bridge, for my clients. So when someone drops by, someone calls, someone emails, or someone iChats us up, each time it calls for a ticket. SupportPress in this regard is really great, as we can create tickets on behalf of our clients and fill in all the details as if they penned the tickets themselves.

Another choice was one of statistics and performance. Now that the SupportPress system is providing us with ticket numbers and categories as well as ticket ages, the data is ripe for analysis, categorization, and the temptation to turn all of these raw numbers into performance metrics is very strong. This, as it turns out, is just another BOFH move that I simply cannot take. I refuse to use the raw data to measure any kind of performance metric – there is more to my life, to my assistants life than how many tickets we land or how old the tickets get before we tend to them. Here is a central tenet of mine, this system is meant to help only. It will never be used as a dashboard, it will never be turned into a yoke, or a bridle. The same way I rejected the before-mentioned BOFH move of forcing tickets out of clients, this is somewhat like the other side of the argument. The reasoning behind it is that I want people to use this resource. I want my employees (singular notwithstanding) to not fear that they will be lined up against some artificial measuring stick and slotted. I refuse to have First Trumpet, Second Trumpet, and Screwup Trumpet chairs in my orchestra.

There are other things that have occurred to me but I have rejected out of hand, brought about by SupportPress. I have considered and rejected a “Zero Ticket Friday” policy as fundamentally broken. What is so special about Friday that all tickets should be closed? If I institute that policy and some tickets are stuck in the waiting queue, do I penalize people for it? If you start making accommodations for things like “tickets can languish in the waiting queue forever” then what the hell is the point of the first move on this policy? Eventually it’s the self-defeating policies like these that create the bullshit of “It’s Friday, lets push all the tickets into the waiting queue.” It’s just dumb. So we aren’t doing it.

One thing that has come of SupportPress that we’ve noticed is that some of our clients have reacted less-than-happily about the sheer flow of SupportPress notification emails. The system sends an email when any ticket moves or changes, so clients could have at least two tickets (a start and an end) or up to double-digits especially if there are a lot of phase changes and clarification messages flowing back and forth. I personally don’t have a problem with notification floods as I am rather OCD about managing my email. I’ve written before on how I manage my Inbox – that any email has four potential destinations after they have been read. An incoming message can be stored in Evernote, sent to Toodledo, adapted and stored in SupportPress or outright deleted. Yes, I still use Toodledo, but I use it in conjunction with SupportPress. Some tasks, such as weekly reminders and such really fit better with Toodledo than SupportPress. Nobody really cares that much about getting constant notifications or trackability about daily, weekly, or even monthly tasks that I work on. Much of the regular things I do at work are “Andy does it, so we don’t have to worry about it anymore.” and so everything gets done and people can move on. That’s really helps illustrate the core features of SupportPress. SupportPress is designed to capture the discrete, non-repeating, highly interruptive traffic that any competent Help Desk must endure. There have been a lot of whitepapers written on the economy of interruptions surrounding Help Desk environments so going into it here would just be needlessly duplicative. The only really important thing to state about interruptions is that they are a necessary evil. People have to stop us to get help, it’s the nature of the beast.

SupportPress shines brightest when it comes to creating an abstraction layer between clients and the Help Desk. I like to think of the system providing a certain amount of slip between ticket arrival and first contact. In this way, SupportPress slays the interruption dragon that besets us. Instead of people electing to visit us or call us, which are the most interruptive, they can issue a ticket. We are notified that a ticket has arrived and that fact can be temporarily slipped in time so that we can conclude whatever function we are executing without having to endure the most dreaded thing of all, a context switch. Much like computers, interrupts and context switching is the number one gross consumer of time. These interrupts and context switches also threaten our quality of work. We can switch quickly but regaining traction once we’ve switched back to what we were thinking about before can be sometimes a maddeningly slippery proposition. I can’t count the number of times that interrupts and context switches have caused me lost time when dealing with a columnar data procedure such as checking items off of a long list. Where was I? Am I doing everything right? Why do I have this nagging doubt that I’m missing something? It’s this that I wish people would understand, and why when we ask people to issue their problems via ticket, why it’s so helpful to us.

So then we revisit an earlier point I had made, that I have elected to not force people to create tickets only. While this is true in spirit, I dearly wish people would on-their-own elect to use the less interruptive technologies available to them. The best thing for anyone to do would be to issue a SupportPress ticket outright, but if not that outright, then email or instant message also works well, because those technologies also include a modicum of temporal slipping that we really crave when we are knee-deep in some elaborate procedure. So while I refuse to force people to do a certain thing, I respectfully request that they do what they’ll do a certain way. Then it comes to how best to encourage people do change their course? First you have to let them know what it is that you’d like them to do, in a way, this blog entry may help with that as I suspect some of my coworkers read my blog and maybe they’ll notice the hint. One thing that can be done is rewarding people for using the ticket system by prioritizing those people who issued tickets with more force than we would otherwise pursue an incoming interrupt and context switch. It isn’t outright sabotage, but it does show that there is a preference and it’s in everyones best interest to respect us with the grace of a non-interrupt, and hence, non-context switching request. We’re driven to help and that is our passion and our purpose, but there is a best way to do it and for me at least, SupportPress is it.

So how much did it take for implementing this solution? We already have an iPage hosting account, wmichalumni.com, and frankly any host worth their salt would be just as good. I just like iPage because they are professional, no-nonsense, and cost-efficient. Any host can (and should) allow you to set up a free copy of WordPress.org. WordPress.org is an open source and free bit of software that creates a WordPress.com blog on a host that either you own or rent. The infrastructure of WordPress is actually perfect for what we are trying to do. The fact that it’s free is just a cherry on top. Installation of WordPress.org, at least on iPage is remarkably simple. It takes about 5 clicks and some little typing or usernames and passwords and preferences and the host creates a perfectly functioning WordPress.org instance for you. The theme, which is what SupportPress really is comes as a ZIP file for $100. Once you buy it, and then upload the zip file to your new WordPress.org site, everything else is pretty much a freefall into implementation. Falling down a flight of stairs is more complicated than installing SupportPress. Once the system is going, creating users is a snap, then introducing them is equally as easy, and before you know it, you’re up and running and your total outlay for the project was $100 for the theme and whatever you are paying your host.

So, then that begs the question of why we don’t self-host. I chose to not self-host because there is a field of tar which would ruin usability. iPage has unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage, and since we are already paying for it to do other things, it’s arguably ‘free’ to do our SupportPress infrastructure. I don’t have to endure needless bureaucracy and it’s available anywhere and anytime without me having to muck about with VPN technology or anything else. It’s not that what I am avoiding is that onerous, but this way is far far simpler and is much more satisfying to me in that the path that I took got it done. From zero to implementation with nobody to argue with, nobody to ask, nobody to cajole, and nobody peeking over my shoulder.

I think that any Help Desk, especially one in academia, but really this extends to any other industry as well could really benefit from SupportPress. I like to reward products that please me and do their jobs well. When I find a product, like SupportPress, I flog it for all it’s worth. My only regret with SupportPress is that I didn’t have this technology 10 years ago. I am blessed to have it now and I plan on continuing to use it and I plan on taking it with me wherever I roam in the future. If anyone has any questions about anything I’ve written here, you know where to get ahold of me. I welcome questions on this, SupportPress is that good.

Sherlock

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We sat down to eat dinner and enjoy some television. Our DVR had recorded the entire second season of Sherlock. When I say “second season” I mean three shows, each one exactly an hour and a half long. They are on WGVU’s PBS Station and they are underwritten, so there are no commercials.

These shows are superlative. They are so far beyond the lame floppy gasping wretches of American television programming that there really is no use even starting to compare. The first season takes your breath away and the second season is equally amazing. This show is beyond a pleasure.

If you get PBS and can find this show replaying, you really owe it to yourself to watch it. If you have Netflix then by all means order up the first season, pour something delightful to drink and enjoy every moment.

The Avengers in IMAX 3D

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We just returned from watching The Avengers in IMAX 3D at Celebration Cinemas in Portage. The movie was still as top notch as the last two times we’ve watched it but this was mostly a back and forth for me because classically speaking, IMAX sets off my acrophobia.

My experience with IMAX is set up around the design that many of the early cinemas had, which placed the audience on a kind of escarpment at a sharp angle to the movie screen. Each row of seats top was at the bottom of the next row and vice-versa to the other row. This leads to a very steep sense to “stadium seating” and so became synonymous with the IMAX experience. I was sure the theater that they built would throw off my acrophobia and prevent me from watching the movie.

Turns out, when they built the theater in Portage, they elected to go with a more conservative, relaxed, laid out design where the rows are arranged not very much differently than I am used to with how the seats are arranged at the Rave downtown. Stadium style seats, yes, but not with a pitch so sharp. The pitch is more like a amphitheater than some sort of “trying to screw you” design that IMAX prided it’s earlier self on rendering. Perhaps it’s because this theater had to cope with 3D technology when it comes to playback that lead to the seats being oriented that way. For that I am grateful. The screen is imposing and beautiful and vast, but it isn’t enough to immediately cause me to flee in acrophobic terror.

That all being said, and the presentation was well worth the high cost, even still, there was one problem. The 3D was applied post-processing, essentially painted onto a 2D movie. Without natural 3D capture several scenes that I was presented with caused my head to hurt, my eyes to ache and my tear ducts to water. About halfway through the movie my eyes were in full rebellion, watering like crazy. I would have preferred the movie in 2D and frankly, I’m growing very tired of this 3D whizbang. Perhaps it shows off my age, perhaps my eyes aren’t as young and spry as they used to be, but I had a very hard time processing focus while watching that movie. I had to really concentrate to bring some scenes into focus when watching a movie shouldn’t require the audience to do anything actively. Just sit back and watch.

All in all, I can’t see going back to the IMAX theater for many movies, maybe only for very special ones. The Avengers is a special movie, perhaps The Hobbit, Dark Knight Rising, and Spiderman may be worth it. But I don’t know if my eyes will stop watering and if I’ll have a booming headache tomorrow after my system starts to return to normal after coping with what I was exposed to at IMAX.

It may be that IMAX is a young mans thing, and I’m fine with that. After what I saw and what I felt, I’m amazed that more people weren’t grabbing their heads and wiping their eyes right along with me.

Of Clouds and Stones

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The early 21st Century will be known for the era of cloud computing. Just a little bit of what the cloud can do I’m actually taking advantage of right now as I write this blog post.

Google provided a huge space for people to upload their music and created a handy tool to upload their iTunes music up to Google’s storage system on the network. I took advantage of this offer and copied my entire iTunes library up to Google. That’s of course just half of what I needed to cloudify my entire music collection. I also need a client to play the content on whatever devices I want to use them on. Unfortunately the Google webapp for their Google Music service doesn’t work well on my iOS device, however there is an app called Melodies which does work fantastically well!

This has saved me so much time, expense and bother. Instead of having to buy a device with a big storage unit for my music I can simply stream my music off the network, using Google and Verizon (and Wifi if I have it, and that is almost universally ubiquitous in North America anyways) so now I have nearly universal access to my music, in a way having my cake and eat it too.

This wasn’t always easy, the Melodies app did have an issue with not being able to shuffle properly but after I contacted the app support staff and telling them what was wrong they fixed the app and it updated on my iPhone in a few moments. From that point I have realized something I never thought I’d be able to do, but play my music right off the network. It’s just one more way that devices, storage, computers, all of it are becoming increasingly abstracted away from my computing experience. I expect that sometime soon the notion of a computer will start to erode and evaporate as more and more of my life becomes cloudified, or perhaps the right word is enclouded? Going to have to work on the terminology.

Of course, people who I’ve spoken to about the cloud come up with very familiar complaints as to why they don’t want to join me. Mostly it comes down to a question of privacy, and that they feel the cloud would endanger their sense of privacy. I’ve thought about that point for a while, trying to come up with a position on it. I’ve honestly never really given two shakes about my precious privacy. What value am I coveting? So what if Meijers knows what I buy and when I buy it? So what if Google knows what music I enjoy? So what if I’ve been categorized and indexed? Where is the hazard? People regard privacy as some sort of grail-object. They protect it beyond all rational sense and I don’t think that any of us can maintain any sense of privacy any longer, at least since social networking became a mainstream part of our lives.

But then again, there is the fear. Where does that come from? People hiding who they are, what they think, what they buy from others because we’re afraid of, what exactly? Isn’t it a more comfortable life to simply be who and what you are and let the chips land where they will? A life exposed is a non-issue for those that are proud of who and what they are. I admit to having a definite cavalier attitude when it comes to my privacy, but what the hell do I have to hide? Or any of us? To me it has always been my argument that if I reveal elements of my life to strangers that somehow they’ll take advantage of that information and somehow misuse it or attempt to hurt me. Well, first and foremost they’ll have to endure the social awkwardness of being the ones to expose my “secrets” to everyone else. The key here is to own everything about yourself. Own your passions, own your foibles, and own your mistakes. Nothing about the past means anything, regret is a dull nothing. For example, Anthony Wiener’s crotch-shot being publicized lead to the end of his political career. WHY? I respect people more when they stand up and own whatever it is that others find outrageous. Here’s the thing, none of us are pure. None of us really have any place to stand and throw stones. Even Jesus Christ spoke on this very point. “Let him who hath no sins cast the first stone!” Well? So you have a picture of your tenty underwear out there? OWN IT. BE PROUD OF IT. In fact, go on a Playgirl shoot and show the world your junk. This idle and meaningless outrage is stupid and lame. I would pay real money to anyone who could prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that any random other human being isn’t a sexual pervert loaded with monumental loads of kink. All it takes is a shot of whiskey to get a man to drop his shorts and do highly entertaining things with his body.

So what it comes down to? Privacy bent to protect the image that we’d like to impress upon other people that we are all pure as driven snow? How silly is this, when we are as pure as driven-over snow! At least have the fortitude to stand up and say “Yes, that’s my junk shot! Do you like it!?!” Because in that, lies respect and honesty.

To people that feel differently than I do, I have a one word question to ask you:

“Really?”

Google Drive Failure

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Google Drive is a failure.

Google Drive was released yesterday, and I clicked the button on the website letting Google know I was interested in their product. I received an email late last night informing me that my Google Drive was ready. This morning, on a lark really, I went to the Google Drive website and clicked on the download link for the sync application to add to my work iMac. I downloaded the DMG fie without a problem and opened it up. I copied the Google Drive app to my Applications folder, like you are supposed to with Macintosh, and then I sat back and marveled at it. Google Drive, finally.

I’ve been a loyal Dropbox customer for years and back in January I sprang for the $100 a year expansion of my Dropbox up to 50GB. Everything I use connects to my Dropbox via the Dropbox API and just for the record, I am totally in-love with Dropbox. There is no reason for me to leave them as a customer. But even if you are loyal, it doesn’t mean you can’t explore. I have a professional account with Box.com through my work, and we arranged that after drop.io was consumed by the wraiths at Facebook. I have a personal Box.net account with 50GB but I don’t use it because Box only allows sync with paid accounts, so it’s not worth my while. Google Drive was just along these lines, just another option to look into.

So I started Google Drive on my iMac and I was asked to authenticate, something I expected. Then nothing. I started the app again and nothing. I opened up the Console app and here is what I found:

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e2ba80 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e37440 of class OC_PythonString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e332f0 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:44 AM Google Drive[22481] *** __NSAutoreleaseNoPool(): Object 0x2e32600 of class NSCFString autoreleased with no pool in place – just leaking

4/25/12 7:17:45 AM [0x0–0x221c21a].com.google.GoogleDrive[22481] 2012–04–25 07:17:45.119 Google Drive Icon Helper[22488:903] Inject result: 0

So, it’s broken. This isn’t the first time a new app was built that failed horribly on my iMac. If anyone cares, and perhaps if anyone from Google is reading, this is a standard 2009–2010 iMac running Mac OSX 10.6.8. The only thing different about this particular Mac is that the account has it’s home on an AFP-connected OD-domain’ed Apple xServer. A network home. This causes headaches for Adobe Acrobat Reader so it’s probably the reason why Google Drive collapses on startup.

Since I can’t run the application, and since it wasn’t designed elegantly to take into account those people who have network-based computers like mine – unlike Box.com’s sync app or Dropboxes sync app, I can only state that Google Drive is not ready for prime time. Google Drive is not ready to compete in the marketplace and Google has to go back to the drawing board and try again.

American Dining

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American dining has a cultural crisis looming on the horizon. Partially it is based on our weak-kneed economy which pushes many of these establishments to the edge of failure, so far away from profitability as to be sorrowfully laughable. Beyond the weak economy, American restaurants have a distinct series of problems that they really have to face.

The first issue with the American dining experience that strikes me immediately is that many restaurants that attempt to create a valuable dining atmosphere by dimming the house lights. The idea runs that if the lights are subdued then people will see it as romantic and attach those warm feelings to the place where they dine. In America, this is a problem because what is seen as good if you take it only so far is seen as much better if you take it way too far. Many restauranteurs have said time and time again that people eat first with their eyes. To see food is the first step in creating a lasting impression on your customers. In America the lights are so dim that it is nearly impossible for someone with 20/20 vision to clearly read 10-point text that is being held in their own hands. The lighting in these establishments is dimmed to the point of unpleasantness. You can’t really see who you are dining with, the food looks muddy and dull and the entire experience is one of tragedy. As an example of this, I just dined at an establishment, which shall remain nameless, in which the house lighting was so poor that I needed my smartphone’s illumination to read text on a card that I had in my own hands. When the food was delivered the lighting was barely enough to identify what was on my plate. It was the first step in a very unsatisfying evening. So, what’s the advice that I have for restaurant hosts? Turn up your house lights. If you are hiding in the dark then we can conclude one of these situations may be true:

  • The food is ugly, and so it’s dark to protect your mistakes.
  • The host is ugly, and so it’s dark to protect your feelings.
  • The guests are ugly, and so it’s dark to protect other guests feelings.
  • The decor in the establishment is ugly, and so it’s dark to cover the decorating transgressions.

The upshot is, when it’s too dark to read words on paper, when your guests are using their phones to find their food, then there is either something wrong with ugly or you are just trying too hard to amplify romance and have landed directly in the dimly lit antechamber of hell, a place that is referred to as heck. Many American restaurants have embraced heck to such passionate levels as to take the breath away. This is a shame, because in many of these establishments the only way you can navigate is with echolocation, so not having the sound of your breath bouncing off obstacles is a true peril for the diner.

The next issue has to do with communication. In this regard, there is way too much communication in the American dining experience. The procedure is always like running the gauntlet, the host is often nervous and like Mrs. Peacock they suffer from a pressure of speech. They arrive tableside and disgorge in an effluent of chatter. You cannot engage in a conversation because you are constantly being interrupted by a curious host who, wrapped up in good intentions is obsessed with making sure that everything is running smoothly. This has infantilized American diners. We can’t operate our dining experience without a chatty, clucking, obsessive hen buzzing the table every 2 minutes. Even here American restauranteurs make tragic mistakes, especially when it comes to effusive apologies. The protestations of sorrow from some hosts fly so fast and so thick that you often times wish they would just get a gun, load every chamber, point it at their heads and pull the trigger. If you are so sorry, then die for it. If you aren’t, then shut up. Some hosts just cannot leave well enough alone. That’s why in America dining is an olympic speed sport. How fast can you choke down the food? You have to because to endure dining is running a verbal gauntlet and since you cannot have a cogent conversation with a solid train of thought while you dine, it’s more advantageous to skip real conversation and switch to smalltalk which entertains nobody. All that is left is the food. In the dark. With perhaps an ugly host, you can’t be sure.

What is to be done about this problem? American restauranteurs need to take a page from the French way of dining. Collect the order, then silently orbit the dining room, spotting low beverages, spotting soiled napkins, that sort of thing. Be conscientious enough to spot silently and silently tend to what needs tending. If the diners wish to engage in an interruptive exchange they should be the ones to initiate contact. A fussing clucking chattery mother hen would have alienated every french diner in the restaurant. There is something here that bears to be understood. Keep your chattery teeth to yourself.

Then we get to the food, which begs the ancillary point of pricing. If you are going to cast yourself as destination dining, produce output that is worthy of your aim. Here’s an example – I just dined on a plate of chicken, green beans, and potatoes in a butter sauce for $18.00. There were three small strips of chicken, I would classify the cut as “chicken strips”. There was a small woman’s palmful of green beans and three 1-ounce scoops of potatoes. There was about two ounces of sauce. This was not a meal. This was 40% of a meal. To say I felt robbed was an understatement. Four diners, three with an appetizer course, 4 mains, and 1 dessert split three ways – I declined the appetizers as none of them suited me and I didn’t find the dessert choices appealing enough to partake. The table bill came to $128.00, we were two couples, split that bill in half and with tax and a standard tip of 15% my outlay for dinner was $76.00. What did I get for that money? I got very little. Scott got slightly more, but had to bark the cook into cooking his duck breast as the standard fare is apparently rare duck, which might as well be raw chicken for a health aspect to it. It boggles the mind. So, when you are busy charging your customers outrageous prices for fussy cuisine which does not match value for price, tread carefully when complaining to said customers about how little business you get to walk in the doors because of the prices.

What should restauranteurs do? I heartily suggest ripping a page out of the Gordon Ramsay playbook: Keep your food local, fresh, simply cooked, for fair prices and you will be a success. Deviate from that plan even in one spot, like obnoxious pricing for example, and you will alienate your customers.

So here I sit. I’ve paid a restaurant bill of $76 dollars and I’m going to go to bed hungry. I will never go back to that restaurant again, once bitten twice shy. As I was discussing it with Scott, this is the cost of the lesson to decline such dining experiences in the future. I just don’t have the wherewithal to financially support such endeavors. I can only hope that some people who run restaurants read this and take these bits of advice to heart. Turn on the lights, shut the hell up, and stop charging an arm and a leg for what amounts to being a pittance.