Amazon Kindle and webOS
I was an original owner of the Palm Pre, and have since become a fan of webOS. At the time it came out, there weren’t very many Android options on Sprint, and the iPhone was an AT&T exclusive, and I had no interest in changing carriers. The demos I had seen of the Pre looked intriguing, and I had previously used PalmOS in the past on their treo line, so I was interested in how their new OS would perform.
Over the time, I’ve grown to love it. I switched to Android a little over a year ago when my Pre died of a hardware failure, and since then there have been aspects of webOS I missed. I liked my Android, and its nearly flawless integration of Google Voice and gmail (two services I’ve become extremely reliant on) has made it an incredibly useful tool, and developers actually making apps for it was nice as well. But it feels rather non-intuitive to use compared to the Pre I was previously on. Powerful, configurable, but non-intuitive and clunky.
I’ve now used iOS, Blackberry, Android, and webOS for lengthy periods of time. I can honestly say that webOS was the one I enjoyed using the most, perhaps better stated as the one that frustrated me the least.
But this post isn’t so much about me waxing poetically about how elegant of a UI webOS has, although I could talk at length about this. I could go on and on about how intuitive the multitasking was, about how great and unique of a feature Synergy was, about how useful Just Type is, and about how my apps, data, and settings have been in a “cloud” (Palm Profile) 2.5 years before Apple’s iCloud. And, ultimately it’s something everyone will see first hand very shortly. Blackberry’s QNX is a straight out rip off of the webOS’ card multitasking metaphor. Once Palm was bought out by HP, Google hired Palm’s director of human interface and user experience, Matias Duarte, to be their director of user experience for Android, whose impact will be really felt in earnest starting with the Ice Cream Sandwich release of Android. Or you could look at iCloud and Apple (finally) joining the multitasking bandwagon as influences of Palm’s innovation.
But that’s not what this is about. This is a look into why it failed. And by failing I don’t mean why webOS the operating system failed to be good, but why webOS failed to gain traction in a highly competitive mobile landscape.
Read more
The Heat are overrated
I just want to get this out there. I don’t have the time to do a full post, and if I did it would go on LibertyBallers or DraftExpress. The Miami Heat are overrated. I’m not even saying the individual players are overrated (although I do think Chris Bosh and his anemic/apathetic defense is one of the most overrated players in the game, but I love both Wade and LeBron. It’s the big 2 and Chris Bosh), it’s their fit, and more importantly each of their ability to contribute without a high usage rate.
From a skillset standpoint, LeBron and Wade are bad fits next to each other, floor spacing will be a huge problem. None of the three are good defenders, and Chris Bosh downright terrible. And I really don’t like Chris Bosh as a third wheel. You’re taking a guy used to playing with a near 30% usage rate and decreasing that by 10%. You don’t want your third wheel to be a mediocre passing, terrible defender. He’s not going to give you “Chris Bosh value”. He’s not going to add the value to the Heat he would to virtually any other team, and because of that his deficiencies become magnified. You can overlook Bosh’s defense when he’s scoring 22-24 points per game. If he’s scoring 16 points per game? They become a much bigger issue.
Poor defense (particularly interior), poor shooting, and no depth. They’ll win 55 games just on sheer talent, but I’d be surprised to see them come out of the east this year, and don’t think they’re as destined to dominate the East as some do. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me if in 3 years this squad, starring the big 3, hasn’t won an Eastern Conference Championship.
No commentsGrunge is back!
Or, perhaps better stated, Grunge Is Not Dead.
For the record, I used that word (grunge) while grinding my teeth. I generally dislike it, and use it more to describe a time period and geographic rock movement (RE: Seattle) than I do an actual musical genre. If Alice in Chains became popular 3 years earlier before the mainstream media coined that term they would have been a metal group. If Nirvana became popular two years earlier we’d refer to them as a punk group. If Pearl Jam became popular earlier we’d be talking about their similarity with The Who and a splash of Neil Young rather than lumping them in with Nirvana. Grunge was always a media buzz-word to create hype about the Seattle movement.
(That’s not to take anything away from what grew up out of the underground Seattle scene at that time, I just don’t consider it a musical genre).
That being said, those bands comprise some of my absolute favorite, and certainly my favorite “contemporary” (can they even be called that anymore?!) music.
Read more
Pearl Jam – Backspacer
Every three or four years Pearl Jam releases an album, an event that usually triggers a fair amount of nostalgia for me. Pearl Jam was pretty much the band that got me into music when I was an impressionable ten year old (ironically) first finding out what I liked and didn’t like. I was in the 5th grade (I believe) in 1992 when I first heard Ten and was immediately hooked. This is what music was supposed to sound like to me, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I recall buying Ten, Vs., Vitalogy and Yield when they came out (for some reason skipping No Code), taking me right through high school.
Read more
Phillies begin title defense
Originally posted at baseball.realgm.com
The real season starts now.
Read more
Loyal to a fault
Originally posted at baseball.realgm.com.
Read more