Starting yesterday, I began receiving several emails with the subject “<firstname> <lastname> wants to be friends on Facebook.” I knew pretty much as soon as I saw the subject that it was spam. Not because the names were people that I had never heard of, but because I turn off all notification emails from Facebook and Twitter (you should too). Here is one example of the spam I received yesterday. I received probably 5 or 6 of them yesterday, to…
Twice in the last month I had to ride my bicycle from a VW repair shop in Bothell to my house. It’s about 4-5 miles, maybe half of it on a cycle/running trail and half on relatively busy roads. Yesterday I decided on a whim to ride all the way to work from my house, a total of 10.5 miles. I’ve noticed something as I’ve been riding. Garbage. Sure, we’ve all seen litter on the side of the road. But…
My birthday is coming up later this month. For more than a week, my youngest has been asking me, “daddy, what do you want for your birthday?” I don’t really want for much. I just bought myself an iPad (we’ll get to that), so really there isn’t much that I want from the kids besides a hug and happy birthday card. But the question got me to thinking. At dinner, both kids kept talking about dolls (American Girl dolls –…
At work every Monday, we have an editorial meeting at work where we discuss the current queue of articles, what’s going on in the news, and assorted other topics. A frequent topic of conversation recently has been around the strength of iPad sales and how Android tablets can’t seem to make a dent, and how Windows tablets that really try to draw on the strengths of touch are not really hitting any home runs. For a long time, one peer…
Two questions that I often get asked are, “when is the next iPhone coming?” and “what’ll be different about it?”. I’ve had a list of ideas that I’ve been throwing around for a while, and I decided to finally jot these down. First off – when does the next iPhone ship? September. No, I don’t know for sure. But things we know – iPod touches always ship around the time of Apple’s Fall “Music Event” where new iPods are traditionally…
I’ve been watching a lot of press response to the Windows 8 announcements yesterday. Steven Sinofsky first announced code-name “Windows 8” (Why the codename, guys? Put a line in the sand and name it.) with a new user interface (and the same old interface too) at D9 and Steve Guggenheimer discussed the future of hardware and ARM processors at Computex. Discussing both on the same day in separate venues was actually quite a logical split – it didn’t defocus the…
Since 2009, I have been working on a research project to learn a little bit more about spam. Though I have a fundamental thesis that I’m working on data to support (so far it looks good), the proof, as they say, is in the pudding. Last week, I started analyzing the pudding. Let’s start with the basics – I’m not a developer, I’m a script kiddie at best. I’ve written code before – but it’s in languages you laugh at…
When you travel somewhere, especially somewhere new, somewhere eclectic – do you ever buy your airline ticket, hop on the plane, and eagerly look forward to planning your activities once you arrive? No. No, you don’t. You plan a trip, buy tickets, get everything lined up long before you go. It’s been my contention for some time that buying a new computing device – smartphone, tablet/slate or other, is just like taking a trip. Also, unlike years ago where when…
Know what a loss leader is? It’s something you give a way at or below cost in order to get feet in the door of your store or to get people clicking through to your website. Enter the word, “unlimited”. Really now. Not many things are actually unlimited. Stars and planets exist for a long time, but unlimited? No. The universe goes on for quite a long distance – as a species, we’ll likely never know the answer to the…
This evening, in lieu of a transcript, I listened a few times to Steve Ballmer’s CES keynote – specifically around the 3:06:23 mark. Given my blog post yesterday, I was most curious as to whether I was correct that there would not be any x86 application compatibility for Windows running on ARM. Steve’s words are below, emphasis is mine: “We are very excited about the full set of partners for the next version of Windows. NVidia, Qualcomm and Texas Instruments…