highest bidder

Microsoft needs to scrap internet explorer. What they need to do is sell the browser space on Windows to the highest bidder. This allows them to charge less for Windows.

harder

I’ve found it difficult to talk about what’s been going on in my life. I struggle to pick up the proverbial pen and let it find it’s way to peace and understanding. The thoughts that come to me aren’t the assurances I want, they’re the toppling questions that consume any free moment my mind may have.

I don’t know if what I did was the right thing. For the last little while my heart has once again felt half of what it should be. It’s something I grew to live with as those months in 2008 strolled along, but in 2009 it seems unbearable. What do you do when realize you’ve collectively fucked up the relationship with that the one person in the world that causes you the greatest joy? See, more questions.

I did what I did to salvage her life. To let her find someone that can give her the things I couldn’t give her. She may argue that I was the one that could give her those things, she may not even care any more and say that it truly is time for us to part ways. I did what I did because she needs a fresh start, to be able to love someone unconditionally, to take what we learned from each other and give it another chance with someone that is untainted from our own pitfalls.

Today and for the foreseeable future, I don’t feel like I have the energy to even think about moving on. My efforts are now being placed elsewhere and far from anything that could be remotely related to the word “love”. I guess what it comes down to is the notion that if I was to be with anyone, I would be with her. Over the last year there has yet to be a single person compelling enough to warrant a comparison, I truly doubt 2009 will be any different. Sure, in ‘08 I may have had a few flights of fancy, reveling in a particular day that was good. To be honest, I’d rather be doing nothing with her than doing anything in the world with them. That’s the odds I’m trying to overcome every night that I go to sleep. How can I pick my spirits up enough to cherish our memories, but to recognize my failures? How can I find enough hobbies so her beautiful face and sharp wit don’t visit me in my dreams? Who do I turn to when I want the comfort that she has only been able to give?

This last little bit of life has been harder than any of you will understand.

Natural Progressions and Design Decisions.

I’ve picked up working on twittle again. I heard a podcast talking about a “new” twitter client for windows built on WPF, and I decided to check it out. Blu (the client) has a lot of nice features, but it’s got enough flaws to make me want to gouge my eyes out. 1st problem, it takes up over 100mb of memory just to run. The next problem is that the window isn’t resizable. Another problem, which probably isn’t glaring to most users, is that it uses PNGs for all it’s UI chrome and animations… this is why problems #1 and #2 exist to begin with. The app just feels heavy… in an obese sort of way.

Like all things in life, having another entity doing the same thing you’re doing is only going to lead to innovation and a pursuit of making a better product. Twittle is still missing some serious features, in-line @linking to users mentioned in tweets is probably the biggest one (and the hardest to fix). What I have focused on is refining the interface to behave fluidly and without instruction.

Twittle 1.0.21 has seen HUGE improvements in the last 3 days to all aspects of the application, and it has a lot to do with competition…

1. Reduced Window Border Clutter – No need to have a 7 pixel outline around the app, I also rounded the edges to give it a softer feel.
2. Moved settings and refresh to be less prominent – The app auto updates itself based on what you choose and the settings window isn’t accessed often, so there is no need for these items to be at the top of the window.
3. Added tabs for types of info…
4. Followers is an interesting feature, I’ve never seen it done on another app, so it’s kinda cool to see who is following you, click on their latest tweet, and check them out. If you get an email that someone is following you, you can refresh and it will show them and their latest tweet.
5. Search was a no-brainer and difficult to implement. The search feed is not just an XML document like the other standard feeds, but an entire Atom feed. This meant troubleshooting the best way to handle the namespace and to parse the information. It’s still spitting out HTML in areas, which seems clunky, but if I can find an HTML parser for WPF it will do all the heavy lifting for @’s and #’s.
   I love the idea of being able to search for a specific word and watch the information come in. I can query “Macworld” and see all the latest news about the event. You’ll probably see twittle expand more on this issue as the app completes it’s more important goals.
6. Transparency effects have been refined – Specific UI elements now have a multiplier so it’s not just the entire window that goes transparent, but background elements go transparent without effecting the readability of the text. Version 1.0 essentially made the entire window transparent making the feature (and the text) unusable.
7. Code cleanup – Josh has helped me a ton in trying to modularize and shrink the codebase to reuse code wherever possible. This has been great in keeping twittle’s light feel, yet styled to not be boring.
8. ClickOnce – This was another great addition. ClickOnce allows people to get updates without having to “re-install” the application. This means users will always have the latest and greatest.

Live Writer 2009 and Windows Live Apps

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For those that don’t know, Windows Live Apps are Microsoft’s version of iLife. Windows Live Writer shines brighter than iWeb, but the other apps do tend to lack a little in implementation. The main advantage of the Live apps is that they are 100% free. This means that older computers that want a way to create movies can do so with Live Movie Maker. Same can be said about Live Photo Gallery.

The useful components of the suite consists of: Messenger, Mail, Writer, Photo Gallery, and Movie Maker (beta). Mail 2009 now includes a calendar component that syncs up to the web, without the need of a paid service like MobileMe. Apple’s take is that you can send static iCal files up to a webdav server, but if you want syncing or don’t know what a WebDav server is, you should pay $99 a year for the feature.

Live Photo Gallery doesn’t have the slick interface of iPhoto, but again, it’s free, and does the job. Live Writer will tie into just about any blogging platform… Wordpress, Drupal, Moveable Type, and Blogger to name a few. This contrasts with Apple’s insistence that iWeb creates static blog pages to then post to their $99 MobileMe service. Live Writer also has a stellar plugin engine that let’s you tie into your flickr, facebook, or other types accounts for cross-pollinating your information. Live Writer 2009 has also added a litany of features that make sharing photos, not only elegant, but also easy to do (see example above).

All in all it’s a great effort by Microsoft. You can see that they are trying to branch out to create useful and affordable solutions for the common person.

a little recession goes a long way

I’d like to preface my opinions that I’m about to divulge with one statement. I don’t like people losing their jobs, the idea that people cannot afford to put food on the table for their families or even survive is disheartening. That being said, it’s important to try and find a job that is sustainable even when the chips are down for the rest of the world. I would specifically recommend against advertising careers, or careers in cars or even careers in coffee.

We live in a world of glut and overall laziness. While we are lazy in some ways, we work too hard in others. On a fundamental level, the world does not need as many retailers as it has. Why do I have to go to one bed bath and beyond only to find out that the one closest to me doesn’t have the item I am looking for. Why wouldn’t we just have a warehouse for the region where I can make one stop, or even better, one phone call to see if they have an item? This is the Ikea approach. They don’t build a bunch of smaller stores that you have to hunt through to get your desired item, they have ONE place.

I make money because of a dying medium. In 100 years, there will be no need for large format printing. We are already starting to see this with digital cameras, digital photo frames, and phones. Why would I print a picture from Walgreens, when I can spend $150 up front to get a digital photo frame that will hold all the photos of my lifetime? I’ve now saved paper, hazardous chemicals, time, and money over the course of the lifespan of the photo frame. Better yet, why wouldn’t I put all my photos on my phone or leave them on my camera. I carry around one device rather than stacks and stacks of paper.

We do so many things in our world because, “that’s the way we’ve been doing it.” Retailers may look neat off the side of the street, but do we really need them any more? When I walk into a best buy, I know exactly what I am going to buy. I don’t let some under qualified kid read a label off a box to tell me if it’s good or not… the internet can give me every single piece of information about a particular product… and I don’t have to waste the gas to drive to the store.

We have too much excess in America. We charge $3,500 more for an American car because we made a promise to someone we couldn’t keep. We told an employee that we could pay their pension, and that it would be ok… now we are paying the price. It’s worse than our social security problem.

I see companies like Starbucks closing more and more stores, yet I wonder if they really saw a need to build 3 starbucks within 2 miles of each other (21st and 7th, 21st and State, 18th and 3rd West).

Another analogy is TV. A typical American probably spends about 40 a month on TV, and probably 30 on Internet. This estimation is admittedly a little low. Let’s say that American gets tired of racing home from work to watch TV on the broadcaster’s schedule… “HOUSE HAS MOVED TO AN ALL NEW TIME!” and they get tired of watching commercials. PERFECT, the cable company has a solution, pay an extra $10 a month to be able to watch a program on your own time! What a brilliant concept. I don’t know of a single show that you can’t get online… and with less commercials. But I’m going to continue to pay for content that is already advertising supported?

More and more companies will start paying for their glut, and because America bought into them, we will be the ones facing the greater challenges. I am far from impervious of this as well. My entire life’s foundation is built on something that can come crumbling to it’s knees with very little notice. The life that I have built is based on companies building largely needless empires of goods and services.

I guess what I am trying to say is that on an individual level, the recession blows, but we seriously need it… just like we needed gas to go up to four dollars before people realized they didn’t need to drive their SUVs for only caring one person… the driver.