I belong to a music sharing group where each week we post a new track with some bits of commentary. Mainly its just a way for some like minded folks to discover new music.  I've decided to cross post my picks for the week here so that I can shared them with the world and preserve a copy for myself on a service that isn't owned by a "rich creep" (more on that reference later). Anyhoo, I hope you enjoy the weekly music post. Thanks. -- The Management.

I’m a huge Foxygen fan. My pick this week is a band formed by their drummer Shaun Flemming. Recording under the name Diane Coffee, “My Friend Fish” is a delight for those of you who can’t get enough Foxygen. This album is tasty. I’ve starred at least 4 tracks and it’s hard to pick a favorite among favorites. If you put a gun to my head, “Tale Of A Dead Dog” is a sweet cut that tips it’s hat in the direction of some prog rock forebears. Hope you like it.

spotify:track:2PLktgIgyPlGzo26ngdWyB

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I woke up in a hotel room in Cleveland Ohio yesterday morning. Mid way through my morning routine I discovered my iPad 3 was missing. It wasn't in my bag but it only took a fraction of second for me to realize where it was. The night before I had flown to Cleveland from Chicago on a late flight. Minutes before I had dozed off I had placed the iPad in the seat back pocket in front of me.  It happened to me once before but in that case someone from the airline called me thirty or so minutes after I left the airport to tell me I left it behind.  I received no such call this time.

I had configured the "Find My Device" feature of iCloud on this iPad which has helped me locate it a few times when I've misplaced it or left it at the office.  So I thought I would just login to iCloud and see if my iPad was at the airport locked up in some lost and found cabinet with dozens of other similar devices, scarves, gloves, pens, sunglasses, etc. I was flying back home that night so I figured I could just pick it up on my way out of Cleveland. I clicked on the link to show the map with the location of my iPad. There it was indicated on the map as a bright green dot but it wasn't at the airport. Crap. It was at a residential address in a suburb of Cleveland, a bad suburb of Cleveland. Shit! It looks like someone involved with turning that airplane around last night decided to take it home.

I called the airline.  Explained the situation.  I filed a missing property report. Gave them the current location of my iPad. While they were sympathetic they advised me to call the Cleveland police. At that point a bunch of thoughts entered my mind.  Maybe the person brought it home because lost and found was closed?  Maybe they were going to bring it back to the airport when their shift started again? If I get the cops involved would I be making someone's already difficult life way more difficult? Damn it! Who's dumb enough to steal an iOS device and leave it on! Since my iPad had a lock screen the person who took it couldn't just get in and wipe it. I decided to use the "Lost Mode" which allows you to send a message to the device. I wrote, "Hi, I want my iPad back. I won't press charges." and I included my phone number.  Within minutes someone shut the device off.  The green dot on the map turned into a grey one.

I called the police and filed a report. They asked me all the details. They also took the address that I had obtained from iCloud. The officer who took the report mentioned that this has happened before and they didn't have any luck getting the device back. He said he would get back to me. I felt bad involving the police. They probably had way more important stuff to deal with than this kind of petty crime.  But they took all the information and said they would follow up.  I thought that would be the last I would ever talk to them again.

I was in town with one of my account execs to meet with a customer so I was in meetings most of the day. It was in the back of my mind the whole time.

About an hour later, during a customer meeting, my phone rang. It was a Cleveland number.  Since I was with the client I let it go to voicemail. During a break I called the number back.  The person who owned the phone had set up a "ring back tone" which is basically a song that plays instead of the normal ringing sound.  The song the person set up was the theme song from Hawaii Five-O by The Ventures. I laughed out loud because I had a pretty good idea this was the number of an officer from the Cleveland PD.  Turns out I was correct.  After he picked up my call, he said they had looked up the address, talked to the airline, and confirmed that a cleaning contractor lived at that address. He said he didn't have a warrant or anything but he was going to go over and "knock on the door" and call me when he knew anything.  My hopes of getting my iPad back were lifting at the same time my thoughts about the person who took it were sinking. They were in deep do-do.  At this point even if they brought it back to the airport lost and found the airline and the police knew they had walked off with it.  This person was going to lose a job over this at a minimum.

Fifteen minutes later my phone rang again. I couldn't take the call so I called back when we got to a break in the customer meeting.  I called back, listened to the the Hawaii Five-O theme, and then the CPD officer picked up. He said he had no luck getting anyone to answer the door but he had a feeling someone was in the house.  They probably knew they were in trouble.  He said he would try again later. I went back to my meeting.

Our meeting with the customer was over and we had a lot of time to kill before our flights home, so we decided to take a quick tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  As we were buying the tickets I noticed I missed a call.  It was the CPD officer.  I called his number back, listened to the Hawaii Five-O theme, and the officer picked up. He told me he had recovered the iPad from the person who stole it. I was blown away.  I thanked him profusely. He told me he was going to drop it off with the CPD at the airport. I would need to fill out some paperwork but I could pick it up on my way out of Cleveland.

I consider myself lucky. This wasn't a cheap iPad. It was a 64GB model with wifi and cellular.  It would not have been cheap to replace.  I did have iCloud "Find My iPad" turned on but a more competent thief would have turn the device off, making it impossible to locate, and just DFU restored the device back to factory settings. (iOS 7 would have eliminated that but I did not upgrade that device. It was still running iOS 6.) Finally, the CPD did a great job connecting the dots and retrieving the device. I am very grateful.  As for the person that took it, they have probably lost their job over this. I feel bad but taking that iPad was dumb. It would have been so much easier to have done the right thing. Hopefully they won't do it again.

Oh... one other odd thing happened. Toward the end of our tour of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame we entered the Hall of Inductees.  There is a film loop of all the Inductees accepting their awards, performing and giving interviews playing in the hall. When we walked in the inductees from 2008 were up on the screen.  One of the bands inducted that year was The Ventures.  Life is weird.

 

 

Ever since it’s introduction in iOS 6, the iOS Passbook has become an indispensable feature of my iPhone. At any given time it contains at a minimum 3-4 passes and at times I have as many as 10 items stored in Passbook. I put everything I can into Passbook. Airline and train tickets, museum and event passes, and store loyalty cards all get stored in one convenient place. I’m delighted when I interact with merchants that support Passbook and I try to avoid those that don’t. Using Passbook has eliminated having to print boarding and other travel related passes, which has probably saved me quite a bit of money on paper and ink jet cartridges over the last few years. Typical boarding passes print in color. The extra info junk printed on every airline boarding pass, even though the boarding pass doesn’t take up one full sheet of US Letter sized paper, typically results in two sheets of paper are used for a single pass. All of it wasted. Not so if you are using Passbook. Passbook even ensures that the right pass is available on the lock screen of my phone just when I need it. This feature works great with travel or timed event related passes. When it’s time for me to hop on a train the train ticket is just there on my iPhone lock screen. Because I travel a lot, this reduces travel stress and anxiety. Before I leave home I don’t have to remember where stored my printed boarding pass (”Is it in my bag or my jacket or on the printer?!?”) In boarding lines, I’m not fumbling around looking for the right ticket. As someone involved in the business of software and technology, I like to think I’m making the world better and delighting customers with the work I do. I can wholeheartedly proclaim that Passbook has simplified and enhanced this small part of my life. I hope someone at Apple picks this up and forwards it to the team responsible for creating this magical feature of iOS. I’d like to let them know how great that product is and buy them a few beers.

I recently returned from a three week, three country, trip in Europe. It was a family vacation, no contact with the office, and we had an amazing time.

I’m a firm believer in packing light. I try to stick to the “one person, one bag” rule which is difficult to achieve when it’s your wife and teenage kids you are trying to convince. It was practically impossible when we first started traveling  but over the years I’ve been winning them over.

twitter.com/stevegio/…

My iPhone goes with me wherever I go but this trip I decided to leave the laptop behind and travel exclusively with the the iPad. At first my family protested and even I had some concerns, but other than my wife and daughter missing a full keyboard, it was a big success. Here are some take-aways for anyone on the fence about further lightning your load by traveling all iOS.

Gear and Cellular Connectivity

I took my iPhone 5, my old iPhone 4s, an iPad 2 and an iPad 3. I left my US AT&T SIM in my iPhone 5.  I have an international calling plan on this phone normally, but I only used it sparingly to call the US.  I also took along an old iPhone 3 for my wife.

I dropped a Vodaphone pre-paid SIM in my iPhone 4s and the iPhone 3 for local calling in Europe so we had a low cost way to call each other and to make local calls. I paid a bit extra to get data on the iPhone 4.  This worked well but Vodaphone was not the best carrier for data.  There were some areas where the data wouldn’t work and we covered a lot of ground.  I guess I could have called and debugged the situation, I was on vacation, and it wan’t the end of the world. Paper maps, train schedules, etc still work fine in the modern age.

Power and Charging

I took the iPad 2 and 3 so I needed the small power brick to adequately charge these devices. Fortunately the brick deals with the different voltages all I had to do was buy the Apple World Traveller Adapter Kit to get the plug adapter I needed. It’s a little pricy but it comes with any possible adapter you would need in the world and it does work to adapter you laptop power brick if you need it.

Network Connectivity

While I did use European SIMs for two of our iPhones, I did not do that with the iPads.  So we were limited to WiFi only. Don’t let this discourage you. WiFi is pretty ubiquitous in Europe.  Each of the two apartments we rented, the three hotels, and the one B&B we stayed at during the trip, all had free WiFi access. Many cafes and places you’ll find on-the-go also have WiFi.  That’s handing for looking up train or tram information while dining al fresco. We had zero issues finding good bandwidth for email, web browsing, and uploads. It made researching places we wanted to see and getting map directions easier.

Photo Upload/Backup

I take a lot of pictures when we travel. This trip was no exception. This was also one of the reasons I felt most apprehensive about leaving the laptop behind. After a day of picture taking I normally sync my SD card to iPhoto, then use iPhoto to upload to Flickr. Since I’m not doing a lot of photo editing while I’m on vacation I do this primarily to make sure I have a backup of my raw photos in multiple places and to clear out my SD card.

To interface my iPad to my SD cards I used the Apple iPad Camera Connection Kit. Getting the photos to Flickr turned out to be slightly more complicated. Flickr upload is apparently broken in the iOS version of iPhoto.  I searched around the App Store and discovered PhotoSync and it worked just fine uploading all my photos to my private set for archive.

Local Apps

One thing we discovered is that many European museums, cities, and points of interest have iOS and Android applications that you can download.  Some of these apps help plan you visit, get the latest information on special exhibits, and even enhance your tour.  The Louvre in Paris, for example, had an audio guide you could download for the iPhone. We found a number of these applications very useful.

Other Travel Apps

Trains, Trams, and subways are the way to get around European cities and almost all of them have iOS apps to help plan your trip. Some have English versions if you don’t speak the local language but most can be operated with minimal local language skills. I found it fun to try to figure out some of the advisory notices.  I found these apps indispensable and many worked without a network connection. Also get local weather apps! They are more accurate than the ones you depend on in the US. Most US based weather apps will not have good coverage for some areas.

Entertainment/News/etc.

We filled our days with sight seeing but in the evening it was nice to come back to our temporary home read books, news, catch up on email, or play a game. For this kind of down time it goes without saying the iPad excels at home and it worked just fine outside the US. The only thing to watch out for is that most video services like Netflix and HBO Go would not work overseas.  One notable exception was MLB At Bat which allowed my son to witness the collapse of the Phillys much to our chagrin.

Mailbox

You can imagine what you email inbox looks like after three weeks of vacation.  I cheated a bit here and did check my personal and work email every day for anything urgent.  One tool I found made it so much easier was Mailbox. I’ve been using it on my iPhone and iPad to make processing emails for actions and I love it.  The killer feature for me on this trip was the ability for Mailbox to “snooze” messages until a later date.  That meant I could scan all my work email, respond to the critics, delete the junk, and then “snooze” all the other messages that could wait. This kept me with a clean inbox, and conscious, for the entire trip. Of course when the “snooze” date arrived so did all that email. All good things must come to an end I suppose.

Conclusion

Leaving the laptop behind was no problem for us. I think our iOS devices were more than adequate to help us travel and keep us connected and informed. The web and apps are everywhere.  They make our lives easier at home and enhanced our travel experience abroad. The reduction in weight and bulk of dealing with an extra laptop bag was worth the trade off of not having a full sized keyboard and access to non-iOS apps. It kept us light and agile which made traveling from place to place easy. I think we made a great decision.

Last night I dreamt that I arrived at the office early. No one was there. I plugged my laptop into the monitor on my desk and refreshed my browser to access my Gmail account when, instead of the normal inbox view, I was greeted with a slick splash page.

"Welcome to Google+ Messages!" blared the interstitial. As I clicked through the slick web tour, festooned with beautiful photos young people, I read how I would be enjoying a new social messaging experience! Google had taken the next step in the evolution of messaging (which looked oddly like Facebook Messages) and integrated Gmail into Google+. I could now share messages with people in my circles, who could comment on every thread. My entire email inbox was splayed out into an activity stream with +1 buttons.

Like Taylor on that beach far in the future I screamed, "YOU MANIACS! YOU BLEW IT UP! OH, DAMN YOU! GODDAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!"

Then I woke up. It could never happen...right?

I hope that thought went through everyone’s mind when Google launched Keep. It certainly was on James Fallows’ mind when he saw the announcement.  The name of this product must seem like a cruel joke to Reader users. What incentive do they have to keep any of their free (or even paid) products running?  The free products don’t bring in any revenue and what they consider strategic today may not be tomorrow.

A better proposition for end users is to depend on paid products from a smaller company that wants to build a sustainable business. Beware of free. Why invest in Keep when Evernote exists?

“Officially, Google declared that “sharing is broken on the web”…As it turned out, sharing was not broken. Sharing was working fine and dandy…“ – James Whittaker “Why I left Google”

Whittaker’s exit post is an interesting look into one person’s take on what’s going on at Google right now. The few lines above really struck a chord with me. Whittaker goes on to state that sharing is happening a lot, mostly on Facebook, which is true but it doesn’t have to be that way. Yes, it’s easy to share on Facebook (maybe too easy) but starting a blog and publishing on your own site isn’t that much more difficult. Discovery isn’t a problem either since Google search indexes everything and if you want notifications services like Twitter, or better still App.net, can replace the wall/activity stream of content gulags like Facebook and Google+.

Whittaker quotes his daughter as saying “social isn’t a product…social is people and the people are on Facebook.” Quite true. But the people are also all on the Internet and it’s full of great ways to connect and share that don’t involve turning your life over to one company. It might be easier but why give them all the power? Because everyone is there?

I have to admit my Type 2 Diabetes diagnosis had not surprised me. I was in denial about my weight, lack of exercise, and poor diet. Once I got the news, I didn’t sit around feeling bad about it. I sprung into action. It was as if I gained a few extra points of IQ, recognized my exact position, and made an immediate resolution to beat it. I surprised myself.

The plan was simple. Lose the weight by altering my diet and starting an exercise program. By getting my weight under control, I might get my body’s systems back in balance, and reverse the diabetes. I wanted to take a data driven approach to everything I was doing. I wanted to watch the variables and measure results. I also believed seeing the results, viewing the data, would keep me motivated. If you can’t measure a system, you can’t improve it.

In those few days after my diagnosis I set a weight goal. Given my height and build I should be somewhere between 180 and 220 lbs. So I needed to lose about 50 lbs, a big goal. I had decided that reducing carbs and getting more proteins, an Atkins like diet, would work for me. I had had some success with it in the past, now I had a good incentive to do it right this time. My weight was the big variable and tracking it would be critical. You can screw up a low carb diet and actually gain weight. Measuring my weight every day would help me fine tune what I was eating. I wanted this data capture to be very simple, so I ended up buying a Whithings Body Scale. Data capture is automatic. You weigh yourself and the scale updates your data over WiFi on the Withings site. You can view the data on their web site or with a free iPhone app. It’s pricy but it simplifies and makes weigh-ins more fun.

The second part of the plan was to get moving again. I did enjoy running in the past but though the easiest thing to do was to start walking. I set aside time every day to walk. The calories I would burn in conjunction with the low carb diet would help me take off the weight. I thought eventually I would start running again as the weight came off. For tracking my exercise and calories burned I chose RunKeeper on the iPhone. I love this app. Again it makes data collection, tracks all aspects of my workout, and keeps me motivated by alerting me to personal bests like “Most Activities in a Week” or “Longest Distance in an Activity”. For testing and tracking blood glucose I’m using a Contour Blood Glucose Meter and the BGluMon - Blood Glucose Monitor iPhone app. This part of my toolset isn’t so automated but it is simple. The Contour unit it pretty easy to run although it does take some time to getting use to jabbing yourself for blood, but these new monitors require so little blood. (A tip from my doc: stop sticking your fingers. You can get all the blood you need from the outside edge of your palm.) BGluMon is also pretty simple to use and it was the easiest most helpful app I could find to run stats on my blood glucose readings. I’ve shown the graphs it generates of my numbers to my doc during visits. Very handy.

The one big variable I’m not tracking closely is my calorie intake. I can’t seem to find a tool that will help me do this with minimal fuss. My rational here is that if I can keep the carbs out of my diet and if I can keep my meal sizes down, I won’t need to sweat the calories in count. I’d like to fix this eventually.

On December 28th 2012 I was sitting in the examination chair in my ophthalmologist’s office. He was jotting down some notes on the eye exam I’d just taken and failed. Since November of that year my distance vision was getting worse. It was so bad I was having trouble reading street signs while driving. Degrading vision isn’t uncommon in 40-somethings so naturally I just needed glasses. Then my doc hit me with some questions.

“Have you been thirsty, like a lot?”

“Yeah.”, I replied.

“Peeing a lot? Especially at night?”

“Yeah.”

I don’t even remember the third question because in that moment I new he was going to tell me. I had diabetes.

2011 was not a great health year for me. Work/Life was out of balance. I had let things go. I flew 100 thousand air miles that year. I was on the road getting little or no exercise. My diet consisted of fast food and big nighttime meals with clients. I had ballooned to 282lbs. I’m not sure what I was thinking, but subconsciously I felt the bill was coming due. I had already set up an appointment with my General Practitioner for the day after my eye doctor. In hindsight I should have flipped those appointments around.

“You are diabetic, or pre-diabetic.”, he said. “Your GP should confirm this. Oh and don’t waste money on glasses just yet. The problem with your eyesight is probably just executes water and glucose swelling the lenses in your eyes. It’s likely to clear up once you get the sugar under control. Ok?”

“Sure.”

“And loose some weight.”

I walked home in a mental fog. When walked in the door I told my wife the news. She wasn’t surprised and didn’t hit me with the “I told you so” routine. She was great. We knew this would mean big changes but the lifestyle modification (better diet/more exercise) wasn’t a bad thing. Still I think I stayed home the rest of the day, sitting on my comfy chair, expecting to literally explode or something. It’s funny. I had had periods of “healthy living” in my life but I had always fallen off that wagon. People always warned me this day would come. It was a wakeup call. Thankfully it wasn’t in the form of a heart attack or something really debilitating. This diagnosis (or pre-diagnosis) seemed like a second chance.

The next day at the GP he checked my blood glucose which came in at a whopping 384. Normal blood glucose is around 100.

“Wow. You are certainly diabetic. Most likely type 2.”, he said raising an eyebrow. “I’ll need to get you on some meds…”

“I can’t fix this with diet and exercise?”, I interrupted.

“No. With these numbers your body needs some help. Take this prescription get it filled and take it immediately. Test your glucose in the morning with this monitor I’m giving you. If it doesn’t go down tomorrow you may need to get to the hospital. It should go down, but call me either way when you test.”

He took some blood for an Ha1c test. It’s a test that yield a sort of 3 month average of blog glucose levels.

I had some questions. He took the time answered them all. Turns out, he is also diabetic. An insulin dependent type 2. He explained his trajectory through diabeties-space. I couldn’t ask for a better doctor/coach for this phase of my life.

“What about alcohol?”, I asked bracing myself for the answer.

“No booze for now. Especially on the medication I’m prescribing now. Later, we’ll see.”

I had expected this. I figured that I’d ask. I know there are diabetics out there that do drink, but I didn’t want to deal with too many variables at once. Shutting down the drinking would be ok for now.

“The best thing you can do right now: take your meds, watch your diet, and loose weight. It can be that simple.”

The next day, I tested. My blood glucose was 200. I called my doc. He was pleased. He told me it should continue to decrease but to call him if it didn’t or if it got too low. No hospital visit for me. My Ha1c number was 14.7%. Not a great number. A non-diabetic person will have an Ha1c number between 4% and 6%.

That’s how it began. I made some big life modifications that day. I bought some tools, started my exercise program, my diet, and started tracking my numbers. I also set a big goal. I wanted off the diabetes medication. I was going to turn my body and the disease around.

I’m playing with Writing Kit and I think I love it.

There Is No Non-Human Moral Authority

All moral laws are humanly produced. The question is which set of human-created laws we should follow and why.

Excellent essay. I wasn’t aware of Big Think until today. Making it part of my regular reading. That’s probably a great way to start the new year.

When the first plane hit we only noticed the lights flickering and the chirping of the power supplies attached to our computers. A few minutes later the phone calls started coming in from family. Something hit one of the trade center towers. I was on the phone with my wife listening to her telling me to leave the city and come home, when the second plane flew past our building and crashed into the second tower. This time we all heard the plane hit and we felt the blast. I went out into the street to see what was happening. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw. Both towers on fire, paper and other debris was raining down from the damaged floors above. My first instinct was to run to the site. I had friends there in those buildings and I wanted to lend a hand. My heart was pumping and I felt numb. The only thought in my head was to help. Get to the towers and help. People I passed were in shock. Some were crying. Sirens were screaming everywhere. A woman fainted her friends caught her. I didn’t understand why, what did she see? When I got a block away from the south tower entrance I saw a police officer. He was directing traffic and people away from the area. I asked him where the people in the building who were evacuated being taken. He didn’t know. I asked him how I can help. He couldn’t say because he didn’t know. I looked up and for the first time I saw people falling from the buildings. It was like time stopped. I had never seen anyone die before now I was watching, helpless, as many people were losing their lives violently at their own hands or in the fire raging 80 stories over my head. At that instant I was enraged and impotent. I wasn’t ready for this. There was something horrible happening that was out of control and no matter what I did there was nothing I could do to make things better. Then I looked back at the police officer and he said the best thing I could do would be to go home to my family. I walked/ran back to my building. I went back upstairs to the 7th floor. I called my wife to tell her I was safe and that I was going to try to make it to the Staten Island Ferry and leave the city from the south. I started to get off the phone with her when I heard her say, “Something’s happening….”. I felt our building shaking. “I’m coming home. I’ll be OK. I’ll get in touch soon.”, I told her just as the phones went dead and the power went out. I walked out into the hall. I knew the elevators would be down so I made my way to the stairs. I opened the door to the stairway and it was pitch black. There were no emergency lights. Feeling my way down and trying to count the floors as I went, I started down from the seventh floor. As I got down to about what I had estimated to be the second floor, I met three other people who were making their way down. Thankfully they had flashlights. The doors weren’t marked but we got to the bottom of the stairway and opened the door out to what we hoped would be the lobby. We stepped out into the room and it was still dark. “Maybe we’re in the basement?”, one person said. I noticed the marble on the walls. “No.”, I said. “We’re in the lobby.” “Why is it so dark?, another person asked. Then I heard someone shouting, “Help us!”. I spun around. Where was that coming from? “Help us!”, I heard again. This time someone came around a corner. It was a black woman. Maybe a police officer. I couldn’t tell she was completely covered in dust. She was having difficulty breathing. It was in her eyes. “Water!”, someone called behind her.There were people streaming in from the street. They were also covered in dust. “What happened?”, I asked. Another police officer passed by and said, “The tower fell.” Just then a janitor came from behind us in the hall way. The second officer asked him where we could get water. He fumbled for his keys and opened up one of the ground floor offices. There was a small kitchen in there. The few of us who were not choking were helping people into the kitchen, getting their eyes and throats clear, and helping the people who were coming in from the street. A person in a wheelchair, a woman with a baby, a British film crew. When things stabilized I opened an office door that faced West Street. I looked out the window and saw the entire street, as far as I could see covered with grey dust. A few people were stumbling, half/running, down the street. I banged on the window trying to signal them to go to the front of our building. Someone walked in to the office with a handheld camera. He was looking at the video he shot only moments ago as the tower collapsed. I couldn’t believe my eyes. By then people were talking about this as an attack. Quick rumors were circulating about more planes in the air. Someone said the Pentagon had been hit and the White House. As I turned away from the video and walked back to the window a police officer burst into the office and shouted,“Everyone away from the windows! The second one is coming down!” We all ran out of the office and back into the hall. I felt a shudder, like a small earthquake. When it stopped I ran back to the office and looked out the window. I couldn’t see anything. Just brown/grey dust blocking out the sun. I decided as soon as this dust settled enough that I would try to make it to the ferry. I walked back to the office with the kitchen. I grabbed an empty water bottle, filled it from the tap, and put it into my bag. I found some coffee filters and wet them down. They would do as dust masks if the dust didn’t clear completely.I walked to the lobby entrance. The dust still choked the streets and I could almost make out the trees in Battery Park only a hundred feet away. Someone had a radio and was listening to the confused reporting in those first few hours. The Pentagon had been hit but not the White House. There were still planes unaccounted for but no other buildings have been hit. It was definitely a terrorist attack. Cell phones were useless. No one could make any calls. Someone walked outside to smoke a cigarette. They walked outside into that terrible cloud to smoke. A few minutes later the dust settled some more. I decided to leave. I walked outside. There were no sirens I could hear. It was strangely quiet. I walked down into Battery Park. A merciful wind was keeping the western side of the park closest to the the water free from smoke. People were congregating into this small oasis of clean air. A police officer announced that they were going to try to evacuate people from this area by boat. The injured would go first. So I decided to wait. As I was waiting my cell phone rang. It was a colleague. She asked if I was OK. I told her I was fine and if she could call my wife to let her know where I was and that I was safe. She said she would and we hung up. I tried to make an outbound call but I couldn’t get a signal. At least my wife would know I was safe. I waited a few more minutes and tried the phone again. This time I got though to my home. I told my wife my situation and bits and pieces of what happened. I told her how I was getting out. I told her I loved her. People from the crowd started asking me to use my phone. I was afraid if I hung up I wouldn’t get another signal so I asked people to give me their names and the phone numbers they wanted to call. I relayed them to my wife and we got messages to about a dozen families, including two NYC Firemen who had just escaped the tower’s collapse.Finally some tug boats pulled up to the seawall. One by one they loaded up people who were waiting in Battery Park and they took us over to Liberty State Park in New Jersey. During the short ride across the bay no one spoke. We all just looked back in horror and grief at the spot where the World Trade Center had been standing and was now burning ash.

Originally published on giolist.com

Mike Lofgren, Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult

An unemployed worker in a breadline in 1932 would have felt little gratitude to the Rockefellers or the Mellons. But that is not the case in the present economic crisis. After a riot of unbridled greed such as the world has not seen since the conquistadors’ looting expeditions and after an unprecedented broad and rapid transfer of wealth upward by Wall Street and its corporate satellites, where is the popular anger directed, at least as depicted in the media? At “Washington spending” - which has increased primarily to provide unemployment compensation, food stamps and Medicaid to those economically damaged by the previous decade’s corporate saturnalia.

Probably the central political mystery of our time.

From the looks of the cascading Chrome logos being projected up front, today’s keynote is likely to be all about the Chrome browser, and my least favorite Google project, Chrome OS.

Vic Gundrota back up on stage today. 600k viewers getting access to the various live streams.

Today’s keynote will be about the platform none of us owns: the open web.

The stats: 160 million active Chrome browser users today.

Lot of work went into making chrome work well on Mac and Linux, they have also moved to a 6 week dev cycle. Lots of security and performance gains being made. The good news is that all modern browsers are aggressively implementing HTML 5.

Speech. Demoing adding speech API with one line of HTML 5. Great demo. Speech recognition for search worked flawlessly. Also demoed speech translation

JavaScript performance is good and potentially good enough for most applications. Wonder why this is downplayed.

2D canvas performance can leverage GPU support and it works well. Web GL also shows great performance gains for web graphics. HTML 5 apps are going to be getting better. Which makes me wonder why Google is propping up Flash.

Chrome Web Store in now going global. It’s being translated in 41 languages. In app payments will also be available. In app payments can be integrated with very little code. In app purchases will cost publishers 5%. That’s a lot lower than 30%.

Angry Birds publisher is showing off Angry Birds for the web. All HTML 5 Web GL and Canvas with hardware acceleration. It gets 60fps on most modern platforms and with browser client side storage you can play offline. They built some Chome specific levels. When in app purchases go live the Mighty Eagle will be available in Chrome. Previously only available only on iOS. The whole app is hosted on App Engine.

Arron Koblin showing off a new music project on the web. The demo and music are fantastic. It’s like being immersed in a 3d animation. Amazing. It has a mine craft like build environment so you can contribute to the project. Uses the 3.js library. Very nice demo of the state of web graphics.

Of course with all this capable on the web why do we need an OS? Enter Chrome OS and the Chrome Book. Sounds like the next generation of the cr-48. Lots of improvements: better hardware and firmware. Demoing file management using PDFs, music, video, and photos via the new Chrome OS file manager. Including importing photos from an SD card right into Picasa. Great integration which is available via an API to all Chrome OS developers.

Disconnected access will also be improved. GDocs, gmail, and calendar will use these features.

Chrome books will be built by many vendors. Samsung, Acer but man are they ugly. These devices will cost about 300-500 USD and will be available shortly from Amazon across the world. Available June 15th.

Of course this type of device plays well in the enterprise. As most apps become web based why do we need computers with full OS stacks. 50k companies applied to test the cr-48. Google surveyed these companies and they reported that 75% of there users could switch to a Chrome Book. Google has created a web console to manage Chrome Books in the enterprise. A fuul hardware and software system for 28USD per user per month. Wow. 20 USD for schools and government. Also available June 15th. This is pretty nice. It’s the future. Maybe I was wrong about Chrome OS?

Looks like everyone here is getting a free Chrome Book on June 15th.

Yesterday’s announcement of Google Music seemed pretty sedate. I think being sandwiched between Amazon’s Cloud Storage announcement last month and the impending Apple cloud announcement is bad for Google. Don’t get me wrong. This is a good first step for Google but Music is basically not that much different than most music locker services. It requires you to upload your catalog (that would tie me a while since I have about 16 gigs of music), you can stream it to any device, and you can cache tracks on your devices for those long plane rides. They did add a “genius” mix feature but that’s not very exciting. So overall I think this will be great for existing Android users but not a killer feature that entices people to choose Android over iOS. I believe Apples offering will likely be simpler to use (I believe you won’t have to upload anything to get tracks into the cloud) and it will have all iTunes features with maybe some interesting extras. We will have to wait for that shoe to drop. It should be more than a music locker. Simpler is better and I believe that in the consumer space simpler trumps open for most users. Things are improving in the Android space, but they have a long way to go.

Huge crowd, heard the attendance was 5.5k give or take. There was a veritable geek stampede getting into the room this morning. Not sure if there is any big news that hasn’t already been leaked. The Google music service launch, growth in Android market share, and possibly some more info on Honeycomb. It’s all going down in about 12 minutes.

Vic Gundrota upon stage. His review of past IO conferences ends with a shot at Apple. (You stay classy, Vic.)

Hugo Barra kicks off the Android keynote. Review of the Android numbers. Still focused on activations which is the wrong stat. 210 available devices (mostly phones) is still impressive and 200k app in the Android app store. A healthy market, no doubt.

Two new services being announced today. One must be the music locker.

3.1 Honeycomb being released today. Good stuff in the update: resizable widgets, better USB support, and more. 3.1 will also be available on Google TV.

Next release, Ice cream sandwich, in the 4th quarter. The top priority will be device choice but it looks like the OS will become more homogeneous. Like iOs. Unlike iOS some of it will be open source.

Cool head tracking demo using the device camera to adjust an Open GL scene.

Android market now adding movie rentals. Terms are similar to other online rental outlets like iTunes. You can stream and “pin” a movie to a device which downloads it for playing movies on planes. No tethering to a computer to pin the content. So music must be next.

Music beta. All in the cloud. Uses a client app to move files up to Google’s servers. So far it looks like Amazon’s Cloud Drive. Looks like they have a “Genius Mix” feature like iTunes. All demos are showing off both phone and tablets. Of course no tethering required. The service launches today in beta. It’s free while it’s in beta.

Barra announces an industry group that will govern how updates will happen to Android mobile devices. Should help speed the rate of Android updates.

Android Open Accessory is a new open standard and API for device interconnect. Demoing using an Android device with an exercise bike. Interesting idea. It’s a hardware and software solution based on Arduino. (wow) this looks like a great program for building Hardware that interfaces with Android devices.

Android at Home is an extension of this idea but they are short on details on the hardware and software that drives the simple X10-like lighting demos. Still pretty new. Not available.

Looks like Google and Samsung are giving us all Galaxy Tab 10.1! Thanks! Nice way to wrap up the keynote!

There was a lot of talk on the Interwebs about baked vs non-baked blogging platforms. To summarize, a “baked” blogging system renders all content to static HTML and moves that content to a plain old HTTP server. The alternative is to have a blogging system that renders a dynamic page for every request. The advantages of the former is that nothing serves up faster than static HTML files. It will keep you site from getting slashdotted (does that still happen?), fireballed, etc. if you happen to write something interesting that people want to read. My original blog, giolist.com was for the longest time a statically hosted site before Google eliminated publishing static HTML using sftp from Blogger. The closest I came to a meltdown was a while ago when I posted something that Dave Winer liked and linked to from scripting.com. Of course because it was all static HTML my site never went down even though it was hosted on a puny Linux box running Apache. This incarnation of my blog is hosted on Wordpress.com and I’m not sure it would handle the traffic if I were to come up with something profound. I find myself wanting to go back to a “baked” system partly because of the scalability factor but also because of the simplicity. Using static HTML doesn’t preclude interaction or other dynamic elements. You can still do interesting things with JavaScript includes like twitter badges, or photo streams in the margins of your site, and of course Disqus is more than happy to host your comments if you want them. I’ve been looking a lot at systems like Jekyll and Hyde but I’ve also been looking at rolling my own blogging system again. A short list of requirements would include:

• Markdown support
• no database, all posts are generated from files
• no server-side CGI required or exposed to the Internet
• plugin API
• functional but not overly complex templating system
• post on the go from an iOS device
• Dropbox integration (although if your file based I think you get this for free)

It’s an interesting project I’ve been thinking about a lot lately. It might just use one of the open source projects as a base, since it’s easier to add some of the features to an existing system than starting from scratch building everything. The templating engine could be a pain and there are lots of good ones out there in many languages. I wrote one ages ago in Perl. I’m not sure I want to do that again. The idea of writing my own system seems right. Now if I can only find the time. sigh

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“I don’t even care if they listen to what comes out. I’m concerned with getting it out. Just giving people the option of something other than the norm of American entertainment.” – Frank Zappa

I have been called a whore and a traitor by my friends, but I did it anyway. Last week I turned off my Motorola Droid, and activated an Apple iPhone 4 on Verizon. – Technology Viewer

This sounds a lot like how I felt when I switched from a Sony Viao 505 running Redhat Linux to my first G4 Macbook. Sometimes its just about getting stuff done.

...when normal people — not gadget bloggers and geeks like us — need to consider an alternative to the iPad, they’re not just thinking of Apple’s lack of “openness” (as Google so vaguely and poorly defines it in relation to Android) or the iPad’s lack of some individual hardware feature. Buying an alternative means giving up Apple’s entire ecosystem. That’s worth it to some buyers, but it’s incredibly impractical for many.

Interesting post from Marco Arment. He may be right. A tablet probably can’t be successful without the kind of support ecosystem and the seamless integration between hardware and software that Apple can provide. My favorite part of the article is how he divides the tablet community along the lines of those that know what RSS is and those who do not. Seems like a simple acid test.

About a week ago my family was gathered in the kitchen – all of us – a rare thing these days what with the kids growing up and all. We were talking about the coming new year and suddenly it dawned on me that when I was their age I thought that by now I’d be living in outer space. I explained that I thought I’d be shuttling back and forth between the Earth, Moon, and Mars, repairing computer systems, visiting friends and family, and generally cavorting in zero G. At first they all looked at me like I had suddenly sprouted another head. That was before they burst out into raucous laughter. I was puzzled by their reaction. They thought it was the most ridiculous thing they had ever heard. I didn’t probe as to where they thought they’d be in 10 or 20 years but I think their dreams are much more down to earth.
That makes me sad. Then again when I was a kid human space exploration was a big deal. The Apollo program, Skylab, Voyager, Viking were all big milestones for mankind. Today space exploration so mundane it hardly gets a mention on the news. It’s all but disappeared from the public consciousness, so much so that kids don’t dream of being astronauts. So today when we sit down to our New Year’s dinner I plan on asking the kids what they think their future holds. I’m curious what they will say. They are my time machine. They are going to see how this life, this movie, is going to turn out – at least the one I’m living in. I wonder how they think it’s going to end.

I highly recommend those of you interested in the whole WikiLeaks kerfuffle to read Bruce Sterling’s article The Blast Shack. I think he’s hit on some strange socio-political conservation law where the Internet and the New World Order are variables in an equation that is trying to balance out. The problem is there are other terms in the equation that will be irrevocably cancelled and lost. A fairly down-beat assesment but very thought provoking.

A lot of people have been asking me if I will switch when the iPhone is available on the Verizon Wireless network. The short answer: Probably not. Here is my thinking. First, I’m assuming there is a huge pent-up demand for the iPhone on Verizon. That will consist of existing Verizon customer and a slew of disgruntled AT&T customers who have been itching to switch because of AT&T’s less than stellar network. This is going to mean a ton of new subscribers hitting the Verizon network with data hungry iPhones. I have a feeling Verizon’s cellular network will bend and probably break under the strain. So the Verizon network might get worse for the first few quarters while it’s under rapid expansion of subscribers and the load on the network increases. There hasn’t been a CDMA version of the iPhone so we are not sure how it will behave on that network. The result may be a poor network experience for all those new switchers. Second, I have to buy a new phone. My existing iPhone won’t work on the Verizon network so I’ll have to buy a new phone and new plan with Verizon. Which means I’ll have to cover two plans at once. Just to switch to Verizon. Not terrible but not ideal. Finally, I remember all the issues that AT&T had with activations when they first launched the iPhone a few years ago. We don’t know the details but there were a lot of processes between Apple and AT&T that weren’t fully baked and tested. The first few months were a bit rough for users with activation problems. Apple can certainly bring a ton of experience to bear but Verizon is new to the iPhone. I anticipate glitches in the Apple/Verizon backend system integration that might cause issues for new switchers. So I’m going to uncharacteristically sit on the sidelines for this launch. I have been happier with AT&T service over the past 6 months. It seems to be getting better, although I haven’t traveled to Mountain View lately. It’s been working very well in the NYC Metro area. Who knows. Maybe all those folks fleeing AT&T just might give us some more bandwidth and improve quality of service for those of us left behind on AT&T.