I mentioned on 08MAR06 that I was planning to dump Verizon Wireless in favor of Cingular. Well, I pulled the trigged yesterday and am now in possession of a fully functional black RAZR.

Less than a day, I’ve had the phone and the service, and it’s already a much nicer experience. I synced my AddressBook over bluetooth with no issues. I’ve taken pictures and transfered them off the phone, for free, using bluetooth. (Like you’re supposed to be able to with a bluetooth phone.) Coverage for both my home and work is great.

I swear, the birds are singing and the sun is shining now. It’s like being in a fucking Disney movie. There are squirrels running around my feet and a little deer sticking his head out of the bushes. I shit you not.

Good Riddance, Verizon Wireless. You won’t be missed.

Every story has its heroes and villains, and the history of Apple Computer is no exception. The world’s most lickable computer company has seen its share of good guys and bad guys during its 30-year history, and sometimes, the goodie is also the baddie.

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I’m not sure exactly who Pete Mortensen is (a quick google search reveals only a couple of wired articles, but nothing else) and so I don’t know what he’s been privvy to. No idea if he’s ever worked at Apple, but I expect he hasn’t. So, I’m assuming this article is written from the perspective of an outsider.

It’s an interesting read, and he comments on some folk that often don’t get much press, and that’s cool.

However, while he gets some of the easy calls right (Hero: Woz, Hero: Jonathan Ive, Villain: Spindler) I think he’s off base on a few others.

Gil Amelio should either bear both titles, or neither. On the negative side, he just wasn’t Apple material. He didn’t get it. He had a big fat golden parachute. He was, however, pivitol in the turning point that eventually removed the word “beleaguered” from the front of the Apple name… he bought NeXT and that resulted in the return of Steve Jobs.

Calling Jeff Raskin a false idol is a little harsh. He was part of the original four person Macintosh team and that’s worth something.

Michael Dell shouldn’t even be on the list. He’s not a villain in the Apple story… he’s motivation. A reminder never to become boring. Oh, and he’s good for comic relief occasionally.

The biggest mistake on the list, speaking as someone who was there at both Apple’s lowest times and the-future’s-so-bright phase we are in now, is an omission. Leaving Fred Anderson’s name off the list is a complete disservice to Apple’s story. He may not have been responsible for glitzy products like the iMac or iPod, but in his 8 year stint as Apple’s CFO he kept the company alive through the roughest waters it’s ever seen… even when we didn’t have a CEO. I fucking salute him.

Anyways, I have some other comments about some of the folks on the list that are still at Apple; but those are reserved for private conversations. :)

PS: If you’re into Apple History, and would like to read the stories written by the people who were there… check out Andy Hertzfeld’s Folklore.org.

Note: The “read more” link goes to the KatG podcast.

An anonymous listener mailed the Podshow contract to Keith and the Girl’s PO Box and they read it on the show. Take a listen to see how few rights you would have left if you signed. see also: www.keithandthegirl.com/forums/showthread.php?p=28947

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Adam Curry is a world class putz. First the Portable Media Expo hissy and the notorious Wikipedia fiasco; and now this. His crappy Podshow contract terms have come to light. Fuck him and the giant 80’s hair he flew in on.

Are ya kidding? Get to shoot guns, jump out of airplanes and come home to your family. It’s damned near perfect.

Every once in a while, there’s a TV show which I know will soon be cancelled because I enjoy it too much. The most recent inductees to this prestigious list includes: Firefly, Dead Like Me, Battlestar Galactica, Over There… You can see that I have about a 75% success rate in killing shows just by the mere act of liking them. Producers should fear me.

Now I have my sights on The Unit, a show about a Delta Force team. It’s like Rainbow Six on TV.

(BTW: This review is a little long, so I am testing breaking up the post into two sections. I won’t do this often, as I tend to prefer having the whole post in the RSS feed myself. Ah, ha! It still puts the whole thing in the RSS feed, it just splits it on the web page. That’s excellent. Much cleaner.)

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So, the Second Life Universal Binary Alpha runs quite well on the intel iMac. In fact, I can run it and World of Warcraft at the same time. Performance on both suffers (WoW drops to 15fps in Org), of course, but surprisingly both are still playable.

Of course, I can’t really play both at the same time unless it’s just socializing, or tradeskills in World of Warcraft. My machine might be able to handle it, but my brain can’t quite.

Anyhow, well done Linden Labs.

PS: Look, I found an Irish (looking) pub in SL.

About 6 days late, but I’ve learned that Second Life has an alpha version of their 1.9 client now. I haven’t tested it yet, but hope to give it a shot when I get home this evening. Zero Division will be milling around until I feel the need to go kill some Alliance peons in World of Warcraft.

The Mac Intel Application Info page has been updated to say “Alpha” instead of “In Dev”.

I’m going to take a couple minutes on this lovely Friday to pimp a couple of Mac OS X shareware apps that I deem worthy of my money. Both come from the same developer, David Watanabe. The guy really gets Mac OS X application design. His apps are useful, elegant and downright pretty. And useful. Yes, I know I said that twice.

I’m going to talk about two apps. One more pretty, the other more useful.

First, the pretty. NewsFire is an RSS reader. Yes, there are, what seems like, a plethora of these out there. And most of them are free. So, what got me to switch away from my previous favorite, NetNewsWire and pay 16.99 Euros for a new reader? The look and feel of NewsFire. No, really. A lot of RSS readers out there make me feel like I’m reading my email or Usenet (if you don’t know what that is, get the fuck off my blog) and neither of those tasks have ever really been pretty experiences. NewsFire, though, changes that. The display is elegant, and it just moves smoothly and easily. As feeds get new items they slide up to the top of the list (if you like) and when you quit it, it doesn’t just disappear, it fades away like it’s riding off into the sunset. It’s just sexy.

It has it’s useful features, of course. Smart feeds (i.e. smart playlists from iTunes or smart folders from the Finder) which is something I grew to love in NNW. It’s also got a great feature that allows to you ’scan’ a website for RSS feeds… very useful for when the site’s designer doesn’t make it obvious. One feature it’s missing i the “Dinosaur” list from NNW. That let’s you easily find feeds that haven’t been updated a while in case you want to prune them.

You might think this is expensive for an RSS reader… but I have one running pretty much all day… and good software design is worth supporting.

Second, the useful. Inquisitor is a very nifty extension to the search feature in both Safari and Camino. It allows you to have instant results, and suggestions, pop up for your search terms as you type. By default, it searches Google or Yahoo, and you can opt to search several other sites like Technorati, Flickr or Amazon. That’s the real power with this tool, in my opinion. That and the fact that you can configure other search engines with minimal effort. If you click on the screenshot to the right, you can see I’ve increased the number of instant results, left the suggestions at three, and added a custom search engine (Thottbot for WoW).

At 5 Euros (6.18 USD at the moment), it’s also very affordable. Small price to pay for a nice utility and supporting innovative app design.

Ok, I’m actually going to talk about a third app of his too. David also wrote Acquisition. That’s probably the most popular and successful of his holy trinity of apps and and so needs less pimpage than the others. It’s a P2P (gnutella) app that integrates well with iTunes, and has some other really nifty features and a great UI. I haven’t used it in a while, as I don’t need gnutella P2P apps all that often… but I bring it up because I just found out that he added BitTorrent support as well… very intriguing. I’m going to have to dig back into it again.

My comment spam (which you aren’t seeing, because I moderate all comments from non registered users) is coming from a couple of IPs in Amsterdam. Dutch fuckers. Now, I realize that the owner of this particular machine may not be the spammer. It could be a compromised PC that’s being used as a bot, yadda, yadda, yadda. I don’t care. Screw them both.

If you don’t take the security of your machine seriously and you connect it to the Internet, you are part of the problem. That means you, 85.255.114.130.

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No, this has nothing to do with the last blog entry I made about Superman… but that would have made for a great title.

Superdickery is not a porn site. It’s a site dedicated collecting and revealing evidence that Superman is a dick. The evidence comes straight from the source… the covers of various Superman related DC Comics. These scans are hilarious. I’m only a small ways into the site, but I already have a couple of favorites to share:

• Did you know Superman adopted Jimmy Olsen? Sound great? No. Not so much.
• Think he’s just mean to Jimmy? Nope, he screwed Bruce Wayne over too.
• But he must have been nice to Lois, right? Yeah, right.

Great stuff. Had me giggling like Frank Gorshin in my office cube.

PS: Oh, and by the way, on a related note… a big fuck you to Marvel and DC for trying to trademark the term super-hero. What a great example of collusion between industry giants to keep out independent competitors. Real nice. I guess Superman isn’t the only dick in comics.

Using some very intricate scientific formulae, the giant brains over at certifyr.com have determined that I am 19% Web 2.0 compliant. Well, if I try real hard, I’m actually 31% compliant. Depends on if I include some ambiguities such as “Founder has a blog”. I definitely marked mispelled/silly name though.

Ok, so it’s more aimed at web businesses, but it’s still amusing. Thanks to Eric for the link.