THE RETURN OF THE PODCAST IS HERE!

Episode 9 of the All Things From My Brain Podcast is here.

In this weeks massive, DOUBLE SIZED, MAXI-PODCAST, I am joined by a special guest on his very first podcast [...]]]> I said I’d do it, I warned you – you didn’t listen, did you? Well, now it’s TOO LATE!

THE RETURN OF THE PODCAST IS HERE!

Episode 9 of the All Things From My Brain Podcast is here.

In this weeks massive, DOUBLE SIZED, MAXI-PODCAST, I am joined by a special guest on his very first podcast appearance as we discuss the iPad, about Apple, Google, Blizzard, Doctor Who, Dollhouse, Torchwood – and the fact that his youngest son may be stalking me via iPhone.

With Episode 9 I am dumping Podbean and everything is going to be hosted here on atfmb.com. If you’ve subscribed to the podcast via iTunes, that link is in the process of being changed and you’ll have to resubscribe – I’ll let you know as soon as that’s ready and available.

In the meantime, click below and stream to your hearts content or you can download via this link by right clicking and choosing ’save as’.

~P

[podcast]http://www.atfmb.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/AllThingsFromMyBrain009.mp3[/podcast]

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When you installed the disk on your computer, a couple of things happened; first off, you could now dial into the AOL servers [...]]]> Back in the day, there was a company called ‘AOL’.  They provided a service to people.  You had to have a computer and one of their disks that would come in the mail.

When you installed the disk on your computer, a couple of things happened; first off, you could now dial into the AOL servers and ‘experience the Internet’. Second, your printer would stop working.

Anyway, AOL was what you called an ‘Internet Service Provider’, they provided to us, the consumers, access to the Internet through our modems.  Our modems used phone lines and essentially dialed a number (or a group of numbers) to gain access to the server.

Now, usually, these disks had a deal associated with them.  Some free hours versus the paid hours you had to buy.  “20 hours free!” and whatnot all.  In order to redeem your free hours, though, you had to call special numbers dedicated to those offers.

That’s where the trouble started.  You had a month to redeem your free hours by calling those numbers, only AOL didn’t have enough servers up and running to accept your calls, so, you got a busy signal.  A lot of people would go the whole month without being able to connect and use their free hours, which made them very upset.

I believe this would be the very first ‘bandwidth’ issue in Internet History.

AOL was sued over these busy signals and were forced to admit that the demand for their service was greater than their network could handle.  They tried their best to beef up their network, but it wasn’t enough and they ended up having to pay up on that lawsuit and now, their service is pretty much a long standing joke.

All because their network couldn’t handle the demands placed upon it by consumers.

…sound familiar, AT&T?

~P

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I’ve been around computers and technology for as long as I can remember. I cut my teeth on the Apple Color Computer II, then the TRS-80 (Trash80) from Radio Shack. I recall BASIC and DOS, played Pong, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sony Playstation and the XBOX-360. I’ve fond memories of dialing [...]]]> Faxiophiles

I’ve been around computers and technology for as long as I can remember. I cut my teeth on the Apple Color Computer II, then the TRS-80 (Trash80) from Radio Shack. I recall BASIC and DOS, played Pong, the Nintendo Entertainment System, the Sony Playstation and the XBOX-360. I’ve fond memories of dialing into a friends BBS for text based interactions long before there was such a thing as ‘Instant Messaging’ (or ‘text messaging’), and not so fond memories of dialing into something called ‘AOL’ (to get a busy signal all day and night) followed fairly quickly by the bliss that is ‘broadband’. I even remember sticking my finger into a plastic circle on a rotary phone in order to ‘dial’ it, and the heady sensation of the first time I ‘beamed’ a contact from my Palm Phone to a friends Palm Phone using LASERS (pew, pew).

In every instance, I saw technology grow and evolve, become something different, better, more advanced and, in most cases – more effective and useful. As something evolved, I didn’t hang onto the past, I embraced the future. I haven’t had a ‘land line’ phone in nearly a decade, for example. So many pieces of what were, at their time, technological marvels, have been tossed upon the midden heap throughout my lifetime and have simply become ‘worthless’ technology to me (and so many others) now.

For example – the fax machine (I realize that you may not consider these to be ‘worthless’ just yet but, read on).

The most revolutionary contraption of its day, the fax machine let people send information to other people instantly (more or less) that they would have normally sent via mail; letters, purchase orders – even marketing materials and fliers. I remember fax machines that v – e – r – y – s – l – o – w – l – y – c – r – a – w – l – e – d – a – l – o – n – g – a – s – t – h – e – y – s – c – a – n – n – e – d – a – d – o – c – u – m – e – n – t, and onesthatzippedrightthroughsofastyou’dmissitifyoublinked.

But, to be honest with you, I haven’t actively used a fax number since the late 90’s. I had one of those EFax numbers for a while (still do for work), but I rarely used it and just let it go away (and I rarely use the work efax either). Why? Well, because technology evolved again.

Along came the PDF. With the PDF or portable document format from Adobe, just about everything that someone could possible want to fax to me, can be sent vial email and PDF. It especially became viable when other companies started coming up with their own versions of ways to CREATE PDF’s – like the ability to save any document on a Mac as a PDF, or push a button in an Office doc and create a PDF – that sort of thing. Once you didn’t have to have anything particularly fancy to create one, PDF’s became the thing.

Which is why I am shocked when I talk to people who want things faxed to them or that they want to fax something to me or that we should fax together as if faxing is the pinnacle of technological achievement, the end all, be all of technological nirvana.

It feels like going back to DOS to me.  (I once walked uphill, in the snow, barefoot, across broken glass to get to school… or something, and you try to tell the kids today…)

“Wait – Fax? Seriously? You want to -fax- something to me? Um…”

With most people (I think), email has replaced the fax (right?), an email does just fine (Right?!). Email is simple enough (you can get one in a snap). Someone sends you an email and it can come to your phone or your laptop or your desktop or wherever you want it to show up. You’re not tied to a desk and a land line when you use email versus a fax and really, it’s not an additional charge – with a fax machine, you have an extra phone bill and who wants that?! It seems like a no brainer to me.

But then, there are people who are not so enamored of emails and PDF’s as I am. We’ll call them ‘Faxiophiles’.

Faxiophiles love their fax machines and their steno machines and their rotary phones and their #2, non-mechanical pencils because they are easy; plug them into power and a phone line and, for 99.9% of the machines out there, they are good to go (and the average #2 pencil just needs to be sharpened…). For the Faxiophile, email is the devils work (Or George Bush. Or Bill Clinton – depends on which side of the aisle you prefer). You have to ‘pop things’ with email, and figure out ‘maps’ and there are passwords and web things and and and – it’s just all so difficult and evil like Republicans or Democrats (again – whichever aisle…)!

I feel the pain of the Faxiophile, I really do. They like their world to be very simple, very easy, very black and white – square peg in the square hole. You need something typed up? Use a typewriter – no one has ever stolen your identity on a typewriter before. You need to make a phone call? That’s what that thing on the wall with the tangled up cord and the big buttons is for – never given -anyone- cancer, nor caused a car accident nor been banned by a local or state government. And when you need to communicate something that’s been written out, you send a fax.

Faxiophiles.  They’re out there.

~P

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There used to be more.  There still are alternatives out there, but I don’t use them for all sorts of reasons.

I was never a MySpace person.  The very first time I visited a MySpace page, it took [...]]]> When it comes to social media/networking, I think things have whittled down to two major players: Twitter and Facebook.

There used to be more.  There still are alternatives out there, but I don’t use them for all sorts of reasons.

I was never a MySpace person.  The very first time I visited a MySpace page, it took a while for everything on the page to load and then someone was screaming at me.  I realized it was supposed to be music – they had this little widget type thing on their page that played their favorite song, which happened to be someone screaming like a Yoko into a mic.  This put me off immediately.  For me, MySpace was all down hill from there.

I discovered Facebook just moments before discovering Twitter.  I liked Facebook.  I had that wonderful rush we all get when we first sign up with it and people we haven’t spoken to in forever suddenly find and friend us and the catching up begins.  It was fantastic.  Then, I started messing with Twitter.

Twitter was easy, much easier than Facebook.  In my mind, Facebook and MySpace had far too much in common.  Facebook was, in short, becoming complicated.  My use of the site waned.  Now, if you want to know anything at all about me, my day, what I’m doing, etc and so on – you have to look to Twitter, not Facebook, to find it.

Then, Facebook changed.  They made a conscious effort to provide updates in a more Twitter fashion.  I gave them a second look and really liked it.  I could go to Facebook and see all my friends updates in a single stream – it was fan-freaking-tastic!  I found myself warming to Facebook again.  I installed the iPhone app.  I added the Facebook column to my Tweetdeck.  Thing swere moving right along.

Then, they changed Facebook again.  Now we have not one stream, but three that I’ve counted so far – there’s probably others that I haven’t figured out yet.  Status Updates, News Feed & Live Stream.

With ‘Status Updates’, I would see some information from my friends.  You can click the image to see what I see when I first login to Facebook.  Now, people have told me that I can do this and I can do that to make things different, but so far – it’s all been crap.

When I login to Facebook, I see this page and on this page is updates that are hours old.  All the time.  For weeks, I thought that people simply weren’t updating Facebook anymore due to the lack of info and updates on this page.

To make matters worse, when I would update my own status, I didn’t see it on the Status Update page/feed.  And people were telling me that they weren’t seeing my updates anymore either and I realized that I was missing out on their updates, which weren’t showing up for me.  What the hell was going on?!

Enter: News Feed.

So, okay.  I click on ‘News Feed’ and I start going through this timeline and I can see stuff showing up from Yesterday.  YESTERDAY?

WTF?

Okay – so, on Status Updates, I see stuff 3 hours old.  On News Feed I see stuff from yesterday that didn’t show up on Status Updates for whatever reason.  What’s the difference between News Feed and Status Update?  I have absolutely no idea whatsoever.  When I go to MY page to update my status, it doesn’t say, “Update Status or News Feed?” so how does it decide where your update is going to go?  And why is there nothing newer than 3 hours ago?  Is everyone asleep?!  And why is MY stuff not showing up anywhere?!

…wait, there’s another button now – on News Feed, it says, ‘View Live Feed’ and has a number next to it.  Okay, let’s click that.

…

Okay, so, the answer is that Facebook is just stupid.  When I click on ‘Live Feed’, I now see ‘live’ stuff.  Stuff from a couple minutes ago – my own stuff, stuff that’s not showing up anywhere else (apparently).

Again, no rhyme or reason that I can see or that makes any sense whatsoever.

With this revelation, Facebook once again becomes absolutely useless to me.

The point is to be able to see what people are doing, leave comments, interact.  If you can’t find what people are doing because Facebook has randomly hidden it inside one of three timelines there is no longer any point to even trying.  It’s a waste of my time.

So I return to Twitter, where there is only ONE timeline.  Sorry Facebook, but you suck again.

~P

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Spam n. a disruptive, esp. commercial message posted on a [...]]]> It doesn’t matter if you have ten friends or a million on Twitter, I guarantee you, some of the people on that list are spammers.  Actually, there’s probably a good portion of them who are spammers.  I know you know who and what I’m talking about.

Spam n. a disruptive, esp. commercial message posted on a computer network or sent as e-mail.

Example: How many people on this list of my followers are real and how many are spambots?

Answer: Who the hell knows?!  I think 2 are real.  Keep in mind, this is a very small sampling and my followers list is cluttered with this kind of stuff.  I got an email today telling me that Carol Smith (belovedmuscle) was following me.  Um… Okay…

In the twitterverse, there are 3 kinds of spammers that I have encountered.  The first is the ‘increase your followers’ spambot that (I think) actual people (I think) have to sign up for (I think) which then puts out tons of crap messages on their account  like this:

I hate those more than I hate the others because they fill up my damned Tweetdeck column and burn through my API calls!

Next are the ones who start following me and then start spamming me with @replies which fills up my damned Mentions column on Tweetdeck.  ARGH!

Lastly, there are the spammers who may not even be intending to be classified as spammers.  These are the people who tweet and retweet the same things over and over again all day long.  Not like the above screen shot, oh no – see, they tweet something in the morning; it could be a link to their blog or an article that they found – it could be something interesting.  Wonderful!  That’s a legitimate use of Twitter!  I applaud you and your efforts to drive traffic to your site!

…but then they send the same tweet again an hour later.  Exactly the same.  Not even the link is different.  The exact same tweet, just an hour later.  WTF, right?  Maybe it’s a mistake?  maybe they aren’t aware that they’re doing that?  …but then they do it again an hour after than, and then again in another hour, and another, all freaking day long, using up my API calls and annoying the hell out of me.

That, my friends, is a spammer – someone who is sending a disruptive, esp. commercial message over and over again.

And that is the challenge Twitter faces moving forward – stopping the spammers and spambots from cluttering everything up with this crap every day. And they need to get a handle on this quick!  It’s only getting worse and people won’t stick around if it continues this way.

~P

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Technology

Judge orders Microsoft to stop selling Word (patent infringement)

Facebook launching Twitter-version of site?

Apple Stuff

Books/publishing

As you may or may not have figured out by now, I am most definitely an Apple head.  I’ve got 2 iMacs at home and an iPhone in my pocket and I love to discover new games and apps to play with AND I love to share those finds with the kind folks who read [...]]]> Well.

As you may or may not have figured out by now, I am most definitely an Apple head.  I’ve got 2 iMacs at home and an iPhone in my pocket and I love to discover new games and apps to play with AND I love to share those finds with the kind folks who read this blog and listen to my podcast.

A bit of an old school gamer, I am quite the fan of a side scroller.  S’why I like the games coming out on iPhone so much – they are simple to figure out, fun to play and, for the most part – they scroll sideways!   It’s also why I bought the Sega pack for my X-Box – SONIC!  ALTERED BEAST!  HECK YEAH!  But let’s get back to the iPhone for a second.  I was trolling the lists to see what was making the rounds in the Top 25 the other night, and I came across something that looked interesting.

Enter: Cartoon Wars

Cartoon Wars is a side scrolling game that you can scroll back and forth on, if that makes any sense.  The concept is simple: you have a castle and the computer has a castle.  You have mana and the computer has mana.  Use your mana to create your army and then attack the other castle and its army. Scroll to the right to see your forces attack the enemy.  If the enemy beats you back, you’ll find yourself scrolling left again pretty quickly.

It gets better.  Taking down the other army brings you gold.  Taking down the other castle also brings you gold.  In between battles, you can use your gold to upgrade your units or purchase new types of units.

You start out with your standard fighter dudes – they’re the stick figurey guys with the white heads shown above.  Next, you can purchase Ninjas, Gunners, Wizards, Dark Angels -the list goes on.  Each new class of fighter costs a little bit more mana – could be 10 (normal fighter dude), or it could be 400 (Dark Angel, I believe).  And each unit can be upgraded – so you can take a training Ninja and turn em into masters – depends on how much gold you have.

You also have a turret on the top of your castle that can shoot massive arrows out into the enemy forces.  Control of that thing is a little tricky.  I really thought I had it but then I upgraded the weapon between battles and everything went to hell and my boys got SLAUGHTERED!

So, Cartoon Wars is part strategy, part side scroller and though I didn’t know that I would like it, I find myself getting a bit addicted.  It’s taken over as my break time entertainment during the day.

It’s available in the iTunes store right now for $0.99 and is worth it.  Check it out in iTunes: this link will launch iTunes.

~P

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Does this spell the death of the instant messaging services?  Or has Twitter BECOME the new IM?

Prior to using Twitter throughout the day (Via tweetdeck), I would have several conversations going in either my AIM client or my [...]]]> One of the things I’ve noticed since joining Twitter is that my instant messaging has gone WAY DOWN!

Does this spell the death of the instant messaging services?  Or has Twitter BECOME the new IM?

Prior to using Twitter throughout the day (Via tweetdeck), I would have several conversations going in either my AIM client or my iChat at home.  Now, it seems like I rarely have a chat going at all.  Most everyone from my buddy list is now on Twitter.  If I want to know what’s going on with them, I just check their time line and vice versa.  I also get a lot of direct messages and replies via Twitter, so direct questions or comments come from there instead of my chat client.

Does that mean Twitter is the new instant messaging platform?

I think AIM believes it could be so.  I noticed when I upgraded to their AIM client 6.9 just last week (I use iChat at home, but AIM at work), that they were pushing the fact that you can keep up with your friends from other social networks including Facebook and Twitter.  It’s possible that they’ve had that support for a while, but it was the first I’d seen of it and it got me to thinking.

As easily as I, a heavy instant messaging user, found myself rarely if ever using the damned thing anymore – how many other people are doing the same?  Are AIM and MSN and Yahoo and all the other chat clients suddenly seeing massive drops in usership as people flock to Facebook (Who has an ‘in network’ chat client of their own) and Twitter?

What do you think?

~P

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I’ve been doing a lot of research on the subject for work, trying to convince the boss that it’s time for the company to embrace the trend and reach out to [...]]]> With all the different types of social media out there on the interwebz these days, it begs the question of how much is too much?

I’ve been doing a lot of research on the subject for work, trying to convince the boss that it’s time for the company to embrace the trend and reach out to the masses, so it’s never been more on my mind than it is right now.  As I grow my own presence out there, I find that I’m spending more time Tweeting and updating Facebook and checking out podcasts and blogs and bookmarking stuff on del.icio.us and digging sites – the list goes on and on.  There comes a point where there’s too much stuff to keep track of and not enough time.  You hit a sort of breaking point where you’re on overload – too much information.

Currently, I’m using software like Tweetdeck and Google Reader to keep up with everything on my computer(s), and similar software on my iPhone for when I’m out and about, but there’s only so much you can read and absorb in a day before your brain says it’s had enough and demands you play a little Xbox and zone out or take a walk without the internet in your pocket.

I don’t know how other people manage this stuff.  My Google Reader page has become stuffed with RSS feeds, some for work, some for personal and the list just grows and grows.  I try to trim everything now and again, as I did recently with those I followed on Twitter and I guess that’s the best anyone can do.

But there’s still the question of how much is too much?  I mean, I have podcasts stacking up in my iTunes, and I noticed today that I had 157 unread items in my Google Reader, and my own prolific tweets have gone down of late due to other distractions – so where’s the cut off?  Where do you draw the line and find that balance between staying up with all the stuff you enjoy and still having time to play a game or go for a walk or do whatever else it is we might want to do?

I’m still trying to figure that out.  How about you?

~P

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That’s right, Amazon has added an extra cool feature for to the Kindle where you can subscribe to and read your favorite blogs from your favorite new gadget.

Amazon allows Kindle readers [...]]]> If you’re one of the cool kids, you probably have a Kindle.  Know what’ll make you EVEN COOLER? Subscribing to my blog on your Kindle!

That’s right, Amazon has added an extra cool feature for to the Kindle where you can subscribe to and read your favorite blogs from your favorite new gadget.

Amazon allows Kindle readers a free 14-day preview before it charges Amazon’s prescribed rate of $2 per month.   Believe me, I don’t anticipate becoming rich off of this, but it’s a cool, convenient way to get my Brain on your Kindle, so it’s totally worth a mention here.

Plus, this as another way to reach out and get myself in front of potential new readers.

Check it out over on Amazon’s Kindle site.

~P

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