Life and living

My thoughts on the killing of Osama?

This was a man who had clearly declared and waged war against the Unites States. It’s hard to imagine he’d surrender. It’s hard to imagine his ability to get a fair trial with a jury of his peers. It’s hard to imagine his not making a mockery of the court and using it as a platform to incite more violence.

No one is arguing his innocence.  Is this not a man who would be sentenced to death?  What would we really have gained with a trial?  Would we have proven our case to anyone who doesn’t already believe it? Does that mean we should give up on Civil Rights?  Of course not.

How did the government, the military, and most specifically Obama handle it?

The decision to call for a strategic strike was spot on.  No drone strikes here.

The decision to provide a proper ceremony with a burial at sea spot on.

By all appearances, the strike team executed the operation with exceptional diligence and professionalism.

Would you have told the Pakistanis?

Yes, we did the right thing.  Yes, Obama deserves some (and not all) credit.

No, I don’t think we should hold mass celebrations – dancing in the streets, chanting U.S.A. feels crass and barbaric. So does publishing photos.

Yes, it’s sad that we had to take a life – any life. But sometimes that’s how it is.  Life isn’t as ideal as we’d like.

So Fuck you Osama.  You asked for it, and we delivered. Rot in hell.

Now let’s get on with working on building good will and celebrating life and not give him the power that he wanted to tear us apart.

I was recently the recipient of a twitter campaign that actually kind of worked.  And it was from, of all places, The Weather Channel.

Every day I get the random follower on Twitter.  A lot of times it’s spam in the form of some woman’s name followed by some random characters – these accounts are just that, spam.

But every now and then, there’s a ‘legitimate’ account that’s trying to reach out.  These are usually sites of one kind or another that are following me because of the keywords found in my bio (hiking, traveling, photography, skiing, etc.,).  Clicking through to these accounts usually results in a lame twitter page with a bunch of crud tweets.

Recently I was followed by @TWCFromtheEdge and today I decided to check it out.  It’s actually a new show on The Weather Channel that follows a nature photographer around.  The twitter account is pretty active.  The tweets are not that great and the account is not maintained by the actual photographer (lame).  But it’s clearly active, it’s targeted and there’s a link to the show’s website where there are videos, photos, etc.,

This is the first time that I can say that I was actually interested in a random follower – the site was actually pretty compelling (to me) and I would consider watching the show.

Unfortunately, they only make the shows available on TWC on cable, and not available streaming online so I don’t imagine I’ll actually watch.  (Who can remember to sit down at 8pm every Wednesday and tune in to The Weather Channel?)

But good job The Weather Channel for actually making a compelling pitch.  I wouldn’t have pegged you as the first.

Here’s an observation.

A lot of people see FaceBook as a waste of time.  I think this is primarily because they log in, browse some random postings from ‘friends’ and then log out, feeling like time’s been wasted.

I try to change that by creating content or sharing content that I think makes for more interesting reading/browsing.  Sometimes it’s stupid comedy, sometimes it’s political commentary, and sometimes it’s just something that interested me and I feel like sharing.

So one would think that the advice would be to have people create more so that the experience represents more of what they’d like.  And while I believe this is true, FaceBook doesn’t always make it easy.  Here’s an example:

This is a capture of a comment that someone left on the site:

and here is a capture of an article that someone linked to:

Note that when someone creates their own post, there’s no way to Share it – I can only Like or Comment but when someone posts something from elsewhere, I have the ability to Share.

In this way, FaceBook is emphasizing pasted content over original content.  Why?  It’s one thing to acknowledge that most people just want to consume, it’s another to make it difficult or burdensome to allow someone to create.

I know that blogging is all about time to market and speed and all of that (usurped only by twitter et. al) and that clear writing and good editing are the antithesis to this speed.  And I admit that I don’t always put the time into editing my own posts that I should.

But there are still certain warts that get to me.

Twice in recent memory I’ve seen notations like this:

…gross ticket sales in 2010 were exactly $206,899,900 million…

(courtesy Techcrunch)

Of course, the company didn’t sell over 206 trillion dollars of tickets.  They sold 206 million.  Or 206,000,000.  Just not 206,000,000 million.

Sometimes it’s the small things.

There’s been a lot of discussion lately on the tech blogs about Google:

Their forays into social have been criticized, The quality of Android over iOS is questioned, the future of the Chrome OS is uncertain, their Google TV platform seems crippled by old-world media.. Perhaps most disturbing, they’re being called the new Microsoft <gasp>.

I am a stockholder, a fan of many of their services like Google Voice, Gmail, and an owner of an Android phone so in many ways I think Google is a great company.

But where I am concerned personally, and the criticism that I’ve seen that I think is most alarming is in their search results.

Search is still the core of Google’s business (well, to be fair, advertising is the core of their business.. search is the most used interface that exposes customers to their ads) and I’ve seen some alarming changes to the quality of the search results that Google provides.

Some of the criticism is around Google surfacing their own content and services higher on search results pages.  This does not bother me as often that content is valuable.  Other criticism, that does resonate with me, is about the useless content-farm sites that fill the Google results.

I experienced this heavily just recently while working on my car stereo install.  Throughout the process: of selecting a stereo, determining the compatibility with my phone and researching installation issues I was plagued with horrible, useless search results.  What appeared at first to be a highly relevant result would end up being (upon clicking through to the site) a useless page with scraped content that was buried somewhere on the page with no relevance.

This has happened to me on several occasions lately and seems relatively new to Google.

After a while, bad results become easy to spot: many of them come from overly generic domains and many times the same preview content is displayed for multiple results.

These highest-ranked search results render the entire search useless.  Navigating through page after page of these useless content sites make it impossible to find the quality, relevant results.

Whether Google will be able to break into social, whether they are able to compete with Apple, whether they are able to fend off Microsoft are all good questions.  If they can’t maintain their search product it’s hard to imagine them succeeding.

A few months ago I decided to upgrade the radio in my car, to make my now 10 year old vehicle a little more interesting to drive. Since I hope to have this car for another 10 years, the ~$500 investment made sense to me.

I started out on Crutchfield, where I last bought a car radio back in 1989 (from their printed catalog, natch). The experience was very similar – pick out a radio, check the compatibility and then place the order. The web made the experience a little easier, but only just.

Since I’ve got the space in my dash, I opted for a double-height, touchscreen unit.  The first learning: Car radios have standardized sizes, either single- or double-height.  This was not the case back in 1989 when there were still slight variations in sizes.

So the car radio industry has learned in the value of standardization.  Or so it appears at first blush.  When you go to plug that radio in, you’ll soon enough learn the harsh reality that the wiring harnesses are different from vehicle to vehicle.  This is just unacceptable these days.  All radios have the same connections – speakers, antenna, power, possibly some steering wheel controls – and the interface for all of these should be universal.  But this is where Cruthfield shines.  They offer (free of charge) connector units with clear instructions that make it easy to connect the right wires to the right places.

The second learning: Customer service pays.  I knew enough about wiring up a car radio to know that I couldn’t just buy the radio from Amazon and save ~$50.  I knew that by paying that extra amount I would have access to Crutchfield’s customer service.  Throughout the install I had to contact customer service 3 times: once because I ordered the wrong part (replacement shipped free of charge); once because of difficulty with the steering wheel controls (replacement part shipped free of charge); and another call to the steering wheel interface company to validate my thinking and wiring (thinking was spot on, wiring unfortunately, not).  There is still an absolute value to these services – there are times when I know what I’m doing and I only want to pay the cheapest price and there are times when I don’t when I am willing to pay for some additional services.

Companies today need to understand who they want to be: The low-cost, no service provider or the full-service, higher-price provider.  Falling somewhere in between is following a path to failure.  Pricing information is too readily available to consumers and if you charge more without providing additional service, you will be ratted out.

With the unit fully installed and working, the third lesson is bad user interface makes for a bad experience.  While I like the features that the new radio provides (bluetooth, navigation, ipod integration, etc.,) the interface is really clunky.  The screen is not pleasant to look at, the buttons are not in consistent places, and key functions are not readily available in the default screens.  Too many gadgets today are plagued by horrible interfaces.  With a consolidation in capabilities, the best way to make your product stand out is through an excellent interface (hello.. Heard of  Apple?)

The Fourth lesson?  Allow configuration and customization.  With such a bad interface, I wish there were more option settings where I could set up the screens the way I want.  This is something Apple doesn’t really do, as they believe (often correctly) that their implementation is best for most users and therefore has no need for customization.  Even in Apple’s case, with their great designs, individuals will always appreciate being able to put on their own personal touch.  Non Apple products?  Don’t even consider that your interface is the best with no need for customization/modification.

Finally, the fifth lesson: Apps!  In the iPhone/Android world, apps rule: Your devices (and it doesn’t matter what it is: fridge, car stereo, television) needs app integration.  All devices benefit when you open up the capabilities to inventive developers.  I’d love to be able to install apps (the obvious ones like Pandora, etc.,) to my car stereo but there are other possibilities as well: points of interest are another obvious choice but what other capabilities could be thought of?