johnwilker.com

I bet on the wrong horse, can the government help me out?

This nonsense with the big three and the banks, really has me thinking our government is made up of suckers. I’m thinking of writing a letter, or maybe flying (southwest) to Washington to beg in person. I mean, I went to the track, I pick the horse I thought would win, even though he had three legs and wasn’t expected to survive the race. He died, and so did the Jockey even. I lost my shirt, my wife is mad, and I’m not sure I can pay for my new Audi RS6.

I’m thinking the government can help me out, I mean, I don’t need 25bil, so a few thousand should be easy, right?

Mitt Romney has an op-ed piece in the NYT, and man, that guy gets it.

But don’t ask Washington to give shareholders and bondholders a free pass — they bet on management and they lost.

Emphasis mine. They bet, they lost. That’s it, that’s how markets work.

To top it off, the three paupers, came to washington in private jets. Not in the same private jet, but three different private jets. Thankfully the Committee called them out on it.

“There is a delicious irony in seeing private luxury jets flying into Washington, D.C., and people coming off of them with tin cups in their hand, saying that they’re going to be trimming down and streamlining their businesses,” Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-New York, told the chief executive officers of Ford, Chrysler and General Motors at a hearing of the House Financial Services Committee.

“It’s almost like seeing a guy show up at the soup kitchen in high hat and tuxedo. It kind of makes you a little bit suspicious.”

He added, “couldn’t you all have downgraded to first class or jet-pooled or something to get here? It would have at least sent a message that you do get it.”

Clearly, they don’t get it. They haven’t gotten it for a long time. Executive dining rooms, private jets, etc. I mean really? Is the corporate tower a castle or a place of business? The entire auto industry is so out of touch with business in the 20th, let alone the 21st century, that simply propping them and their “Standard policy” up is not going to do anyone any good. Not them, and more importantly, not us. This out of touch-ness is exemplified by Tom Wilkinson,

“Making a big to-do about this when issues vital to the jobs of millions of Americans are being discussed in Washington is diverting attention away from a critical debate that will determine the future health of the auto industry and the American economy,” GM spokesman Tom Wilkinson said in a statement.”

Uh, vital jobs like the CEO’s? Like his? Sure a great many auto workers will likely be out of work, I feel for them, but like everyone else, they bet on management, and lost. They also bet on their union, and it failed them. It fought with management so that a guy who turns a wrench makes $50/hour, maybe the union shoulda been making that guy learn to program computers? Or learn to maintain robots? Rather than simply raising his dues, fighting for more pay, to raise his dues some more.

What’s truly sad and amazing to me, is that not just management and the unions are out of touch, the mouthpieces (like Tom) and the PR tards are too. I mean out of hundreds if not thousands of PR turds between the three paupers, did not a single one stop to say, “Hey listen everyone, we’re sending our three leaders to Washington to beg for money. They’re going to say the jobs and the very US itself depend on us continuing to exist. We should show them that we get it. We should have all three CEOs, drive (in American cars) to Washington. They should make a tour of it, showing that they’re willing to do what it takes to make the companies work in the 21st century. I know they’re going to say they’ll make a buck in salary, but since they should have done that a year ago, to try to keep us out of this mess, it’ll really impress the American people and the politicians, that they (the CEOs) understand the situation, and aren’t simply looking to have their corrupt antiquated system propped up on the taxpayers backs.”

No one thought that? None one?

Tags: Business

MAX 2008 Day 2!

Day to of MAX, is well, kinda like Empire Strikes Back, without the Luke screaming like a girl part. I’d say the General Session today however was very Revenge of the Jedi (yeah I’m old skool, look it up).

General Session

Adobe’s guys advertised day 2 as a must attend general session, which frankly, it usually ain’t. Not the case this time ’round. They really brought their A game, showing off the (finally) cool designer developer work flow that CS4 brings to the table. I was impressed, and had less of a vaporware feeling.

They also gave us a bunch of eye candy to drool over in our sleep for the next year; Alchemy, Bolt, Flash Catalyst, etc.. Very cool stuff!

I was especially keen to see Adobe finally giving the CF crowd an IDE. CFEclipse is great and all but, not fully tied in. Seeing what Bolt is capable of, WOW.

Alchemy, mmmm I dunno. Am I the only one who thinks that “Alchemy” is the old days term for the science of turning lead into gold? I mean really, is that the mental image we really want for a product? We’ll see. I’m not a gamer, and not a C head, so it didn’t do much for me.

Ryan will be able to try is ‘flexmagically’ contest again, I think it might be a bit more successful.

For the first time I was actually pretty jazzed about searchable SWF, that’s pretty cool, and might finally solve the niggling problem of SEO and Flash RIAs.

The last few minutes of the general session, were given to Ted Patrick to pimp the new groups.adobe.com, I’m not sold yet on the idea, since the previous incarnations weren’t that great, and I’m not sure how this effort will go, but we’ll see :)

The Day

When Tom and I do an event, day 3 tends to be box lunch, and only so so, since so many people fly home at various times through the day, usually starting just before lunch. The box lunch affords people to grab a meal and go. It’s weird that the Tuesday lunch, was box lunch. That certainly doesn’t bode well for the Wednesday lunch. Fingers crossed.

360|MAX had a great day! The crowds were way better, as word spread. Jun’s prank app is absoultely, positively hilarious.

MAX ‘08 Day 1 Recap

Looooooooong day.

I’m about to pass out, but wanted to get my thoughts on MAX ‘08 day one down on paper.

For Tom and I, MAX San Francisco, started on Sunday. We ran some errands, put stickers on our fliers for 360|Flex Indy, and then headed over to Moscone for some socializing. We hit up the community leader mixer thing, which was awesome. Congrats to the team that organized it.

Monday morning we hit up MAX bright and early, setting up our 360|MAX Unconference area, which is a cool area.

Enter the Keynote. So, oddly enough the keynote didn’t start until 9:30 am, yet the doors opened at 7am. I found it a bit weird since breakfast was just sandwiches.

The keynote was good, I gotta admit, The pre show dude was AWESOME! (video above). Shantanu and Kevin are both great presenters I have to say. Kevin more so, he’s very casual, and seems to be pretty unflappable, even when things don’t go the right way.

The information in general was pretty much what you’d expect, “State of Flash” type stuff, blah blah. One cool thing was some future tech they demo’ed as strictly early labs internal, but really sweet! Screens that know what’s going on around them, even where they’re pointed. I’d post a video, but then it occured to me, it might not be fully “open to the public” I can’t imagine why, but ya never know. It was cool though!

OK, the rest of the day.

Tom and I were pretty much tethered to our unconference area, which went really well. Slow start, but I think we’ll start seeing more people as the word gets out more.

Our sessions were all kick ass, especially Mate and Degrafa, which really pulled folks in. Tuesday has a bunch more killer sessions!

The bummer is not being able to wander around as much as I’d like. MAX for me is walking around the halls, finding people to chat with. This time around, I gotta chat with those who come to us.

The general session for TUesday is supposed to be Gumbo, Thermo, and future goodness. We’ll see. I’ve got my Thermo and gumbo installed to play with.

360|Flex Indianapolis MAX discount!

Also for MAX attendees, make sure to swing by and see Tom or I. We’ve got 100 tickets to 360|Flex Indy, for only $100 each. That’s $150 or so off our lowest possible price. Available only during MAX, so there’s only two days left to get this price!

Tags: Adobe Flex, Adobe MAX, Conferences

iPhone app - get your music on! Ocarina

I probably played a total of 6 hours of any Legend of Zelda game, evar. But Ocarina for the iPhone is damn fun! Fun isn’t really the right word, since Ocarina isn’t a game, it’s a social music…. experiment? App? Experience?

You’ll just have to try it out.

The app has two modes. musical instrument mode (play the Ocarina) and listen mode, (listen to others play their Ocarina).

Both modes are absolutely incredible. In make music mode, you blow into the mic of your iPhone, you hear the music out the speaker. The UI is 4 buttuns, pressing any combination of them, is the same as covering the holes on a flute.

The music is rather eerie, to me at least, almost like a durge, but also kinda mesmorizing, I could probably just sit it on my desk an listen while I work.

The visual representation of listening to the music is simply awesome. Rather than just a stic indicator of where the person you’re listening to is, you actually ’see’ their music. These cool green rings, and blue spirals, leave the location of the person playing, and shoot off past you into space.

Don’t like what the person is playing, jump to another person.

What amazes me, is that this is one of those apps that you think, “How many people will be using it, when i want to listen?” thinking there’ll be one dot at

any given time. That couldn’t be farther from the reality, I fired it up right before writing this post to screen shot it, and just look at how many people were playing their Ocarina on a Sunday around noon MST.  Each dot is an Ocarina being played, truly a world symphony.

Apps like Ocarina really reveal the social power of the iPhone. Sure we can calculate our split of the bill at a dinner party, we can tweet, we can manage our netflix queue, etc, but how cool is it that we can make AND share music with no infrastructure requirements beyond the internet. Hearing the music someone on the opposite side of the planet is making, while sitting at their desk or on their couch.

I don’t know who Pacman186 is, but their music was nice, and I enjoyed being able to listen.

Tags: Apple, iPhone

Earthscape for iPhone, Boulder Denver New Tech Meetup

Tuesday (election day) was a busy one; it was the last day of Defrag ‘08, was election day, and was also a denver meeting of the Boulder Denver new tech meetup.

After Defrag Rob, Adam, Fraser and I spent some time in the bar in the lobby of the Hyatt, talking about twitter, glue, communities, etc. One of the best conversations I’ve had in a while.

After a few drinks, we caught the last two presentations at the meetup. One was a phone thing, that I didn’t quite understand, since we missed probably the first 2 minutes of the 5 alotted per company. We did see all of Earthscape(iTunes Link).

Think google earth, with community photo sharing. it’s pretty cool, and easy to use, photo’s appear as you pan through the map.

There’s two view modes; pan mode (looking straight down on the map), and 3D mode (right there to the right).  Both modes are very fluid and easy on the eyes. Initially I was worried that the graphics would kinda suck, but I had to admit Earthscape (and google earth, since it looks like Earthscape uses google earth) has very good graphics. Looking down on my house, it’s funny to see how old some of Google’s images are. I think I can see straight into the 2nd story of the town home, since there’s no roof.

users can, of course comment on photos, you can see all photo’s from a specific user, etc. You can even see Wikipedia entries, which is really cool! It’s cool to see the pictures people are taking of the places they are. Sure it’s a touch voyeuristic, but that’s human nature, and one of the under pinnings of social media :)

The blue circle thing, that’s my house in the middle, I was watching “The Happening” on Amazon unbox. Good flick.

You can see in this pic that some of the map doesn’t always un-blur. At first I thought I had glaucoma, but realized that some times the maps just don’t fully rez.

It’s a free app, I DL’ed it right there in the meetup, and took my first pic of it’s creator talking about it.

iPhone app aside, I’m definitely hooked on the new tech meetup. I don’t know if it is always Boulder, and the “Denver” part is name only, though I suspect that’s the case. Definitely worth the 20 minute drive into Boulder.

Tags: Apple, iPhone, Mac

A conversation on the state of music

I mentioned earlier my cool lunch conversation with Jonathan Yarmis, at Defrag on Tuesday. We got to talking about Music and movies, and how the RIAA has (as we all know) completely missed the boat.

Jonathan pointed out that he subscribes to Rhapsody, spending about $200 a month year on music, he doesn’t get to own, and when he wants to own it he buys it outright. above and beyond his Rhapsody spend. I admitted that I hadn’t pirated a single song since getting my first iPod. Spending hundreds, probably over a thousand, on music, and devices to play it on. I calculate I’ve spent more on music in the last 3-4 years than in the previous 27 of my life.

Yet as far as the RIAA is concerned, we’re the enemy. We can’t use the music we pay for how we’d like, we can’t have it on too many devices, can’t put it on CDs, we can use it in only the prescribed way, or else face prosecution.

We likened it to the RIAA being more concerned with the $1 they could get today over the $2 they could get tomorrow. By restricting use, suing customers, in general treating us like crap, the industry forces us to find alternatives; indie musicians, streaming services (while they exist), outright piracy of music, etc.

Ford once said people had their choice of colors of Model T, black, black or black. That worked really well when there was only one choice, not just of color, but of car. You either wanted a black Model T, or you walked or rode a horse. Unfortunately, the music industry doesn’t realize, that they’re Model T ISN’T the only choice, it hasn’t been for a long time.

Just look at the music sales figures on the iTunes store, the proof is in the pudding, people are buying music, so why make it a painful process for us?

Tags: Defrag, Music

Defrag Conference ‘08 Day Two

Charlene Li’s preso, AWESOME. Slides here. Among the best guotes, and there’s a lot of them, “Open will be the new norm”. Charlene did a great job of describing what the next few years in web 2.0/social media are likely to entail. Talking about trusting Google was big for me. I put everything up there in the google cloud, for lack of a better option really. Google is ubiquitous now, sure I could roll my own, use Yahoo, etc, but no one else does. I really do worry that not only could google decide that doing evil is easier and more profitable than not doing evil. A few months ago we all saw what a gSlap would look like when gmail was down for what? 4, 6 hours? People, including me, were freaking out! We’ll see.

Neeraj Mathur from Sun, not so awesome. I think only Sun, could turn Social Media into a rather boring, over equationed, enterprise-ified concept. Not “friends” but contacts. Equity built by some formula, and displayed like a progress meter. Kudo’s to Sun for trying, but I think they’ve taken it too far and made it “too Much”.

Eric did the sponsor bingo card raffle, great prizes. I’ve never been a sponsor bingo’er, but the idea does appeal to me, especially if you have each sponsor pony up a prize valued at $250 or more, awesome idea Eric!

Eventvue was in the house, literally and metaphorically. Defrag used Eventvue’s cool community building site to let all of us defraggers connect, and talk. It was cool to follow the defrag08 twitter stream, and interact with people I’d never metn and never heard of, but who are clearly thought leaders! I do wish Eric had set up a twitter wall, I’ve found that those are hella fun to watch. People invariably end up standing there staring at the screen for a few minutes, seeing the tweets fly by.

So overall, Defrag = good times, great conversations! Thumbs up. Eric did a bang up job, keeping things moving along. An extra special hard task since there weren’t any breaks between sessions.

As is usual for conferences, the best part was the conversations in the hallway. I had a great conversation Jonathan Yarmis about the music industry and the future or lack there of for them. It was cool to sit and throw ideas back and forth, talking about all the ways the RIAA has completely screwed the pooch, by fighting tooth and nail for $1 now rather than work towards the $2 they’d get if they embraced the current technological environment.

I also had a great conversation with Rob, and Adam from Eventvue, and Fraser from Adaptive blue; talking about twitter, Facebook, and Glue over beers. That kind of conversation is just so great and can’t be replaced. I can’t imagine attending a conference and not having these types of conversations with people that I’ve just met.

Tags: Conferences, Defrag, Technology

Defrag Conference ‘08 day one thoughts.

I wrote this after lunch on Monday.

Another freakishly awesome day in Denver! I’m sitting in the main hang out area (long foyer along the two break out rooms) with the sun beating on my back, reflecting on my MB Air’s glossy screen right into my face. It’s like those metal tanning things from the 60’s and 70’s

So far Defrag has been an awesome event, as advertised for sure. A few of the sessions have been a bit too lofty for me, but some have really rocked. I’m looking forward to more! What I find interesting so far is I haven’t taken a single note, like I would at a tech conference. It seems for me it’s more about just absorbing information in more general terms, than scribbling notes frantically as a speaker rambles on. It’s quite refreshing. The short form factor (30 Minute sessions) makes it almost like an Ignite, minus the auto advancing slides. It’s weird to have no “passing” period between sessions, so it’s kinda like a race to get your crap together and get to the next room if you’re changing rooms.

Typical conference problems, are typically happening. Wifi is sketchy, though remarkably not crappy. Kudo’s to Eric. I believe it’s impossible to have 100% fail free wireless internet, though at it’s worst, I’ve only lost my connection a few times, for a very short period, and only had laggy-ness (technical term) a few times too.

The topics around social media are very interesting, it’s good to see so much attention being given to SM topics, especially in the enterprise. Those guys definitely need it for the most part. I’m very interested in reducing the barriers between people (community) and things (companies), so seeing Enterprise take more of an interest in social media, is very promising.

Tags: Conferences, Defrag, Social Media

I’m at Defrag ‘08 Today and Tomorrow

I’m at the Defrag conference, here in Denver. I missed last year’s event, so wanted to make sure I didn’t miss this years event.

I can’t wait to see what the hype (Yeah, there’s some hype) is all about, Eric seems like a great guy, and my pal Rob from eventvue gave high praise to last year’s Defrag.

I’ll be live blogging from the conference too so stay tuned.

Tags: Conferences, Defrag

The Story of the Macbook pro with bad wireless

My Macbook Pro is first generation. Core Duo, no 2.

It’s a great machine, still a work horse, but the wireless card doesn’t work. Never has. When I got the machine, we didn’t have wireless in the house, so I never used it, there were network drops in every room, and hub in the living room. I first noticed the wiress trouble at a conference; I’d connect but the connection would drop, or I’d never see the network my friend in the next seat could see, and connect to. I then bought a sprint card, so wireless was un necessary, EVDO to the rescue.

Early on I swapped out the Super Drive for a second hard drive, from MCE. 160GB drive, trumps a rarely used DVD drive.

Jump forward two years, i’m at EUI, my work laptop on one side, my MBP on the other, one on the network, going strong, the other (guess which) getting not more than a blip of connectivity.

I decide that since I’ve got the Macbook Air, I can be with out my MBP for a few days, so off to the Cherry Creek Apple Store for my Genius appointment.

Mac Genius FTL

Right away he can see that there’s something odd with the machine, identifying the second drive right away, impressive. He can see that the airport isn’t working, that’s good. He goes back and talks to his boss, and returns to tell me, that since the Optibay had changed the electronic signature of the machine, he could never guarantee it was 100% back to working when giving it back.  LAME. He suggests I return to the Mac Outlet, where I had the Optibay installed. They’re Apple Authorized so it’d still be under warranty (I have an AppleCare contract).

Since it took longer than promised to install the drive, I wasn’t looking forward to going back to Mac Outlet. I fired off an email, letting them know what the deal was and got a reply letting me know they could do the work, and that they were looking at a 3 day turn around.

I drop it off on a Wednesday around 1pm, confirming with the guy at the counter, 3 days.

I Call on Saturday, it’s still about 15 machines back in line, Ok, no problem, depending on your count Saturday might not be day three. I call back on Tuesday, it’s about 4 machines back. GRRR ok lame.

I call back Wednesday around the middle of the day, “It’s on the tech’s bench right now” so I leave him a voicemail, letting him know if it ain’t gonna be fixed, I’ll need to take it unfixed. The MB Air is great, but it’s not the machine for compiling (is that the right term) iMovie projects. Plus the single USB port makes doing stuff at home a PITA when I need my iTunes portable drive, etc, etc.

He calls back Wednesday night about an hour before they close to tell me it was the Airport card and that it’s ready for pick up. I go in Thursday morning to pick it up, right when they open.

No payment needed, it’s a warranty repair so I grab my trusty MBP and head to the office.

I get there, fire it up, connect to the wireless network, Nada. same bad connection, as a week ago. LAME.

Not only did my expectations as a consumer not get managed, but my problem wasn’t solved. Now I’ve got to have a friend at the office, pull the second drive out, replace the old Super drive, just so I can go back to the Apple Store, and have them fix it, or send it to the Depot. Joy.

Apple store Service for the loss :(

Tags: Apple, Macbook