Letter Never Sent

Anyone who knows me knows how crazy I am about animals. I don’t love animals in the sense that I want to hug them or talk to them like children. I love them in the sense that they are the living embodiment of this amazing natural world that we live in. Each animal is a reminder of another view of existence, one that is distinctly different from our own. Animal life is fascinating in its diversity and in the way each animal is designed to exploit a specific way of life, a specific diet, a specific environment, etc.

Anyway, we went up to spend time with Jody’s family in rural Oklahoma for Christmas. Oklahoma is a secret of sorts. Until I started going I was unfamiliar with its beauty and austere charm. For a nature lover, there is a lot to love. Jumbled slate hills and oak trees and tons of animals from cougars to glow worms. It seems like every time I go I see something different. This time I was able to watch a bald eagle tearing at a fresh deer carcass from about 30 feet away on a frosty Oklahoma morning.

Unfortunately, the photos are fairly low-rez due to a camera inadequate for the task. Missing such an opportunity to take good photos has galvanized my desire for a good digital SLR and zoom lens. Any suggestions?

…but there is something fascinating about faux-reality shows like The Hills or Laguna Beach. If I’m ever channel surfing and happen across one of these shows, I’ll get sucked in. It has the approachable mundane-ness of a reality show with the story line of a high-production television drama. I have a hard time watching shows that don’t seem real enough. I just can’t forget that I’m watching something fake. I think this is why I also enjoy shows like Entourage and Curb Your Enthusiasm (although CYE has become more fake and unreal recently). All of these shows have realistic characters, realistic lighting and environments, realistic dialogue, and realistic wardrobes and makeup. If television taps into some evolved social interest, it stands to reason that the more real the simulation, the more effective it will be in evoking sympathy and interest. Look for the lines between life and entertainment to blur further.

Crucial Minutiae has a good take on it that is worth reading.

Research in Motion (the company that makes the Blackberry) should stay on its toes. While I think there is room for multiple companies and I love the Blackberry, they need to keep innovating in order to compete in a market that now includes Apple’s iPhone and eventually some Google Android-based products. I hope every company who makes smartphones is losing sleep over the competition. That fear will drive innovation.

Both Apple and Google represent a new breed of competitor far different from Microsoft, Nokia, Palm, or any of the other incumbents in the field. They are companies with Vision and, more importantly, companies with the resources to realize their Vision. Everyone can dream up radical ideas and strategies, but few can execute them.

While Apple is making serious inroads with the iPhone, Google is the company everyone should worry about because they can touch everyone else without trying to get a slice of the same highly-contested pie. Leaving aside their Android project (a free smartphone OS), let’s look at what they do.

Even though the iPhone is closed to other third-party applications, Google provides native software for the iPhone (Google maps and a special YouTube-viewing application). They also provide downloadable apps for every other smartphone platform. On my Blackberry for example, I regularly use five different Google applications: the Google Maps for Mobile app with My Location (instead of Blackberry Maps or GPS), the Google Talk IM client, the Gmail app, Google Mobile Sync (which syncs the Blackberry Calendar and the Google Calendar. I use this now instead of Blackberry Enterprise Server and Microsoft Exchange, which has saved me $30 a month), and Google Mobile Updater (which checks for new versions of Google Software). This is not including the website I visit the most via the Blackberry web browser: Google Reader.

The truth is, Google improves my Blackberry experience. I don’t know if that should make Research in Motion or Apple nervous, but it is definitely significant.

Leaving aside any speculation on their plans for the 700 Mhz spectrum auction or the potential success of Android, it is not difficult to imagine that Google might eventually be the most important company in the smartphone universe by continuing to provide better and better tools to as many people as possible.

I’ve been attending to my finances in my typical feast or famine fashion. I sat down and looked through my records after ignoring everything for a few weeks… checked my accounts, analyzed earning / spending and tried to see where I can cut costs. I have two checking accounts (one business and one personal), two savings accounts, and a handful of different brokerage accounts (partly due to having a few different 401k plans over the years and partly from chasing after the lowest commissions). As a result, the process can get complicated.

One thing I discovered is that I had some additional charges on my cellphone bill due to receiving a bunch of text messages from a few people I’ve been following in Twitter. (This was a case of poetic justice as I unfairly maligned Twitter in the past.)

To avoid future surprises, I signed up for a bulk messaging package ($5 a month). Then I called to have the plan applied retroactively so I could save forty bucks on my past bill. Many people would not have done this, but I enjoy negotiating.

The whole point of this is that I found another nice use for Google Calendar. Normally after such a conversation, I might make a note of who I talked to and what was the outcome, so I could safely forget all about it. This time I dropped an entry into Google Calendar and included all the relevant information. If I need to reference the event down the line, I can use Google Calendar’s search function. As Ron Popeil might say, “Set it and forget it.”

Christmas is a good time to remember fond memories of the past. On the drive home tonight, I was thinking about this one Christmas when I was about ten or eleven. After dinner one night, right before Christmas, my brother and I were finishing up the dishes and my Dad told us to take the garbage out to the garage. He specifically told us both to go, which was strange, but we did not give it much thought. We bundled everything up and took it out and put it in the trash cans.

When we came back in, mom and dad were waiting for us with bright looks of breathless expectation. My brother and I looked at each other wondering what the hell was going on and after a moment my dad groused at us to go back out to the garage and look around to make sure we didn’t “miss nothing”. When we did, we found two brand new BMX bicycles lined up and waiting for us. One was blue and one was black, but they were otherwise identical. As brothers do, we quickly decided who got what. I ended up with the black bike and Scott got the blue one. The fact that we had missed something so out of place and unexpected explained my father’s consternation. But this was quickly forgotten as we ran around screaming and laughing and inspecting our new ticket to boyhood freedom. Even though it was well after dark and cold, my dad rolled up the garage door and we took off riding our new bikes up and down the street where our parents could watch us ride and share in our excitement. My brother and I must have put a thousand miles on those bikes and had an equal number of adventures together, roaming around our little piece of the world.

I’m glad to say that we have had many happy Christmases before and since then, but that is the one that came to mind this evening some twenty years later. I hope that when I have kids that I can make their Christmas memories as half as good as my own.

I’ve been a little busy as of late, but I still wanted to share a few things with you that are either interesting or funny:

1. Marc Fleury (formerly of JBOSS before selling) has finally grown tired of playing PS3 and DJ’ing and has started working again. My hope is this will give him more to write about on his blog, which is always entertaining.
2. Phillip Greenspun makes a reasonable prediction that Obama will win the election in 2008: “The Republicans will lose the 2008 election. People are tired of war. Churchill was victorious in World War II and nonetheless his party was voted out of power in 1945 because, presumably, Churchill reminded the British of their sufferings against the Germans.” I agree with his point and that people are ready for something entirely different. I think Obama has a good chance, however I think the field is still open to the Republicans if they can field a new type of Republican candidate. 2008 will be the year of the good-natured, optimistic president. I think it could be Huckabee or Obama, really. At this time, both represent at least the appearance of an alternative to the usual cut-throat political calculation.
3. Two great tastes that go great together: Google releases a tool to sync Google Calendar with your Blackberry.

   Google Talk with my AIM and MSN buddies from the Gmail interface, all my email accounts filtered and used via Gmail, feed reading in Google Reader… My move to Google is nearly complete. If they can improve Google Docs and Picasa, I will be pleased.

4. Good quotation: “It is ultimately a cruel misunderstanding of youth to believe it will find its heart’s desire in freedom. Its deepest desire is to obey.” - Leo Naphta, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain via Ben Casnocha. It reminds me of the Frank Herbert quotation: “Seek freedom and become captive of your desires. Seek discipline and find your liberty.”

I must be getting old or inflation must be getting bad. Every time I end up at the store, I see things that cost way more than they should. Today at Target, I noticed they were selling Christmas stockings for $12.99. Thin, felt-like polyester Christmas stockings for $12.99. It struck me as seriously overpriced. Everywhere I looked I saw total junk going for way more than I would expect. Holiday goods are probably a special case because during the holidays consumers have a heightened emotional state when shopping. They’re excited about the holidays and everything that comes with it, so they’re more likely to buy stuff they might never buy otherwise.

The next time you’re driving keep an eye on the light poles looming over the Interstate. You might notice a red-tailed hawk keeping his vigil. The first time I remember seeing this was in Austin about 10 years ago, although doubtless they have been doing it longer and I just never noticed.

On one winter drive out to my uncle’s house in Southlake (an exurb of Dallas and Fort Worth), I counted five hawks perched on light poles between the opposing flow of traffic in a span of about 5 miles. My guess is these poles make a great vantage point for hunting the rats and mice that live in the close-cropped grass perimeter of our highway system.

In the short history of human civilization, many animals have learned to adapt to our ways. Rats and mice being obvious examples, but also animals we might forget like raccoons, pigeons, coyotes, and hawks. You could even count dogs and cats as animals that have adapted to us. The main requirements for living closely with humans seem to be that you must either be able to live without attracting notice (nocturnal lifestyle) or you must be able to keep from being captured (flight). In the case of cats and dogs, they have adapted by engaging our sympathies and our innate sociability. When we look at a cat or dog, there is a moment of recognition. Maybe this is due to their forward-facing stereoscopic eyes. Or, maybe it is something deeper.

As we encroach further on the natural world, animals will have to get better at adapting to a human-dominated environment or they will have to move further and further out of reach.

As you may know, I’m a smartphone enthusiast. I have owned a few Blackberries and have lusted after the iPhone every time I’m at the Apple store.

In reading the Google Maps for Mobile discussion groups, it’s apparent that people use many different types of smartphones, from Windows Mobile devices, to Blackberries, Nokias, and iPhones. As smartphones go even more mainstream, I don’t believe any one company will dominate in providing the devices. The technology and market will become more sophisticated, allowing more businesses and projects to flourish. Multiple hardware and software options will be available and a diverse ecosystem will emerge. That’s why I like Google’s approach. They are busy creating great software that can be used on the mobile web or through various applications developed for every platform. For example, Google has a version of Google Maps and YouTube developed especially for the iPhone. Similarly, they have created special downloadable versions of Google Maps and Gmail for the Blackberry. Everything they do for the handset manufacturers ties back in to their wonderful data services. They are the octopus sitting in the middle of everything busily collecting more data.

With the advent of the Google-led Open Handset Alliance, even more innovation should emerge, especially in the field of location-based services. The people working with Android™ have demoed some interesting location-based applications that show your friends where you are, or alert them when you are nearby. There are endless possibilities, especially when it comes to collecting location data, which is the big payoff for Google. I’ve noticed that in using Google Maps for Mobile version 2.01 that it keeps running even after you return to the home screen. Past versions without “My Location” did not do this. My guess is the map application stays running in the background in order to keep pushing data back to Google. Google says it uses the My Location data to improve the service and does not report back user information, but one could imagine other interesting uses such as traffic data, behavioral data (what stores do people go to), etc. It could then build a nice service based on this data. This could be used to fine tune their location-based advertising if tied to demographics. Advertisers would certainly like to know more about the habits of their most desirable customers and would love to have better ways to reach their audience.

If I made a list of all the things I wanted for Christmas, it would include two items. A new laptop and a GPS receiver. Unfortunately, the laptop is a little more necessary.

There was some good news last week that made everything better. Google released a really cool update to Google Maps. Now that Google has released a new version of Google Maps for mobile devices (with My Location), I can do 70% of what I would do with a standard GPS receiver (Garmin, TomTom, etc.) on my Blackberry, which, unlike most other gadgets, I always have with me. Using this new version of Google Maps I can determine my position to within a few hundred meters; close enough for things like driving directions and finding the nearest Starbucks. The Google Maps application does this by using your cellphone to figure out where you are in relation to the nearest cell towers. It works very similar to GPS in that instead of determining position by triangulation against orbital satellites, it just asks your phone where the nearest cell towers are and figures it out from there.

Google was nice enough to put together an informative video about how it works: