Warning… This is techno-drivel…

Sorry to my non geek friends…Stop reading before your eyes start bleeding.


I noticed that Blackberry is releasing a version of the BBM (Blackberry messenger) for iPhone,  in 2008 it was a pretty neat application.

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I used it a lot but it was only really useful if your friends also had Blackberrys.

The practical upshot is that I had a grand total of about 10 people that I chatted with using the BBM service.

I’ll admit that there was a momentary “OH Cool” when I read that BBM was out on the iPhone.

Then I thought about it.

I can’t think of a single person in my circle of acquaintances that still uses any blackberry device. 

Wow! 

I really hadn’t thought about how long it had been since I’d even seen a Blackberry, other than the one sitting at the bottom of my sock drawer.

So at this late stage in the game, why the hell is Blackberry even bothering? The single advantage to BBM was that you didn’t use your carrier text messages. BBM used Blackberrys servers and your data plan instead of .20 text messages. 

Who doesn’t have unlimited texting these days?

BBM used to be top of the line.

A big disadvantage was that you couldn’t just reach out to anyone. They had to have a blackberry and you had to exchange a PIN number. On the one hand, this completely eliminated SPAM on the other hand the initial sync procedure was a pain in the ass.

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How is BBM any better than Apples messenger or simply normal text messages?

There are far more of my friends today that have iPhones. Apples Messenger works across iPad, iPhone, and the latest Mac OS X versions.

It’s simple, efficient, and just works. Messenger sends via your data plan if it knows the other device is something Apple. Your iPhone will select text messaging if the receiving device isn’t Apple. 

Had Blackberry continued to dominate the smartphone market and serve their business market, BBM on iPhone and Android today would be a welcome application.

However with the minuscule presence of Blackberry in smartphone market and the growing BYOD (Bring your own device) paradigm. I think the BBM application will suffer a fate similar to Blackberry’s formerly ubiquitous phones, obscurity and eventual irrelevance.

Sad really, when a great company slips and falls like Blackberry has.

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Have you heard about Widows 8.1???


Apple will be releasing OS X Mavericks shortly.

As I think about Windows and how poorly the latest versions have been received by the general public.

It occurred to me, if Apple wanted to drive a stake through windows heart (too much TrueBlood), they’d release their latest OS for $19.99 on any Intel platform.

Compared to the outrageous cost of Windows, I wonder how many people would simply say, “yeah I’m done with Windows” and pony up the $.

Perhaps that would be a more merciful death for Windows than “The Death of a thousand fuckups” it’s experiencing now. 

Nah… Apple won’t be that merciful to Microsoft. 

We read your beads without ever talking to you…

 

NewImageWe know you don’t belong here.

We don’t have to ask, all we have to see or hear is the way you race your little wanna be drifter car with it’s flatulent exhaust into our neighborhood.

We know you’re out of your element precisely because of your dark windows.

We smile seeing you lock up your brakes when the pavement runs out.

We know you’re lost, led astray by your GPS.

We see your confusion at being lost because you don’t understand the failure of your technology.

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I’ll give you a little hint… Mountainous terrain and the mineral composition of the mountains can, and often does introduce errors in the GPS signal.

If you’re depending on your phone to give you guidance you better hope that you’ve got a cell signal too.

Not that I care… I personally wait for the day when one of your morons goes flying up my street, and straight into the wash.

I don’t necessarily hope that you die but I’m a big believer in Darwin awards.

Not that any of you would understand what the above sentences mean, you’re dumbfucks and you deserve what you get.

To you, technology is magic, never wrong, and using your mind, or eyes, or the barest shred of common sense is a totally foreign concept.

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You’re lemmings, sheep, Prey… People like you are why Americans in most parts of the world are thought of as morons and easy marks.

Thanks for that by the way…

When you drive off the road into the wash and your little POS car is broken, there is no doubt in my mind that you’ll try to sue the GPS maker or the county or the local residents for your stupidity. Because after all you’re not responsible for your actions are you?

Believe me, you hit one of the local kids because you were going too fast, on single lane residential roads & your bleached bones might be found in the mountains… eventually… if your family is really, really lucky.

Word of advice…

Slow down, remember that in your haste to get somewhere you often miss the beauty of where you are…

BTW, your phones navigation system will most likely work better too.

It’s one of those days.

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I fired up my computer and started rooting around for a link to a web site I know I have saved somewhere.

I can’t find it

What I did find is one of the strangest assortments of websites I’ve ever seen… And they’re all sites I actually took the time to save.

What was I thinking?

UH OH! 

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I just fell down the rabbit hole. The OCD is running wild (I’m actually only OCD about my computer…) I’m deleting tons of web addresses and wondering why the hell I saved them in the first place.

I’ve completely forgotten what I was searching for.

At the same time I happened to notice that I had over 3000 tweets… I found out that you can’t select them all and delete them. You have to delete them one at a time #lame.

But I found a little web app that will go through and delete your tweets. 

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I set it to automatically delete all my tweets older than 2 weeks.

Do I really need to leave online traces of my thoughts from a particular time? Nah…

Tweets are supposed to be ephemeral I think 2 weeks is long enough for a tweet to live.

I wish Twitter would allow us to set a “time to live” for our tweets. In fact, I just sent that request to twitter engineering.

OH! I remembered what I was looking for…. Oh crap! I forgot again. <– Damn senior moment! Squirrel!

I’m off to go be a grumpy old man…

“HEY… You kids! GET OFF MY LAWN!!!!”

I’m really going to go finish cleaning up my computer and try to get something constructive done today.

I hope you have a great day.

A Long day yesterday.

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It was a very long day yesterday. 

But I got to do something that I really enjoy doing.

I had the pleasure of making a brand new iMac dance!

I rarely get to unbox a brand new machine and set it up. Yesterday was a real treat for me. Brand new machine, brand new Time Capsule, brand new everything. 

And I got to transfer all the data from the old Windows machine to the shiny new Mac. At one point I had three memory sticks plugged into the back of the iMac and I was copying files from all the sticks to various directories on the Mac without really thinking about it.

The Mac never broke a sweat. But the client was surprised that I’d do such a thing and not worry about losing data. Then I dragged all the photos from the old windows photo directory into iPhoto. A little screen opened up showing the photos as they were being imported and the client was blown away.

Images flashing by, files being copied everywhere, configuring printers, and the Time Capsule, & never a hiccup.

It’s one of the reasons I’m a big fan of Mac. It took 2 hours to get the files off the Windows machine.

I wasn’t picking & choosing, I was grabbing the data from the users directory to the memory sticks in chunks. I got choosy when I was putting that data on the Mac.

The Mac sucked in all the data from the memory sticks in a little under an hour.

Very cool and a lot of fun.

I’m wiped out today though. Between sinus issues, the energy expenditure in concentration, and a very long day… All I want to do is sleep. I’ve got other things to do, I can’t sleep right now. 

Maybe a short nap later this afternoon 😉

OK I’m Giving up all pretense of…

…Thinking Windows or Android is close to equal to Apple.

As is well known I’ve been using Apple products in my personal life for a long time.

The Mac OS is based on a BSD UNIX core, and it allows you to access it’s UNIX roots if you need or want to. I’ve used that UNIX heritage in my work life, and in my personal computing since 2001.

It’s amazingly convenient sometimes to be able to get the GUI out of your way. 

After jettisoning the Android last week and having all my devices work in one environment I can only say… Damn! Why the hell did I wait so long?

I did Blackberry, I did a couple of Android phones and now the new iPhone. The all Apple combination is really very very nice.

Yeah, Apple has restrictions about some things but if I want to get around those restrictions I can. My iPad, my iPhone, and my Macbook all share data seamlessly. They’re always in sync, and it’s just so damn nice to not have to think about what data is where.

I suppose you could say that I’m a confirmed Apple Zombie now.

I know that I’d probably be just as excited if I was all Microsoft.

A Windows computer, tablet, and phone are supposed to have the same interoperability as what I’m enjoying now with Apple. I’d doubt if Microsoft missed such an obvious connection of devices.

I think that the problem for me was simply forcing an adaptation when I had only one device that was “the odd man out”

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I’m also blown away with the battery life on my iPhone. I’m in a crappy cellular reception area and I’m still only having to recharge the phone about once every couple of days. My Android NEVER got that kind of battery life.

The only glitch has been my dry skin. The fingerprint scanner doesn’t like it if your skin is very dry or in my case dry and a little cut up from working in the yard. I’m using the keypad code about half the time right now. But I understand the problem.

Even Siri is working pretty well on my iPad and iPhone.

I’m excited about the prospect of the new MacOS based on what I’ve seen with IOS7 and that Mavericks looks like it’s got even tighter integration with IOS, I figure my computing will be like magic.

I know, my windows / linux friends are all tossing their cookies right about now.

Those of you that know me all know that computers haven’t been a religion with me for a very long time.

I look at computers, phones, tablets, more along the lines of a pen.

Some folks like BIC, others like Parker, or Cross, and still others prefer Mont Blanc.

I’ll keep my Mont Blanc thank you very much.

I promise I won’t take your BIC away.