AT&T Crank

Didn't we already break up AT&T? Guess that is like asking "Didn't we already invade Iran?" Can this administration keep ignoring history? I guess they will. After the AT&T monopoly breakup we saw an explosion of telecommunication innovations and options that was good for the markets, good for the consumer and good for business. Now AT&T is huge again with less competitors. And it is getting bigger with the proposed purchase of their competitor: Cellular One. Enough is enough even if the iPhone is now available to more rural customers. And if you haven't notice, cell phone contracts are getting longer and bills are getting bigger. Business consolidation may not give us a pure monopoly but it sure raises the barriers to entry and prices.

And while I'm at it, what about that AT&T name? Cingular changed their name to AT&T. Marketing research probably shows that more people know how to spell AT&T than Cingular so the merged company took over the old name. Simple. Three letters and a squiggle. But I suggest they change the name just slightly to AT$T. It is only money out of your pocket.

iphone Crank

Since this is iphone day ( 1 i.p.), I thought I'd move some attitude to my blog and be cranky like Dave Winer and John Dvorak. I've long been accused of being cranky by friends and co-workers. So on to the wonder of iphone and the religous apple.

So you pay about $1,000 so Jobs can smirk some more? This certainly isn't capitalism where the marketplaces is logical. There is no logic to sitting on your butt for 36 hours waiting for some nerdy AT&T employees to take your credit card while they've been playing with the phone since noon! This is mania and running with the herd and not wanting to get to the high school chess club meeting late.

Wonder how many AT&T staff hand in their resignations today and walk out with their iphone. Talk about cutting in line!

RSS Reader Video

If you need to watch a video to learn about RSS Readers, here it is:

Click To Play

There are two types of Internet users, those that use RSS and those that don't. This video is for the people who could save time using RSS, but don't know where to start.

Slimmer Blogging Code of Conduct

Tim O’Reilly has posted a draft code of conduct for bloggers. My take is that the code is too long. Instead, I like the idea of having your comment policy upfront as suggested by Tony Hung. Being more specific, for one, I don't think "We won't say anything online that we wouldn't say in person" is even possible. As a simple example, how do you say the same thing in person that you would in a photoblog? Or even a standard blog entry like this one that has links to other blogs. Blogs are blogs precisely because you can express things you can not say any other way. And on most other points in the draft I agree with Michael Arrington's summary.

Positioning the British Invastion

How did Spirit stand a chance? The Beatles, The Rolling Stone, Led Zeppelin and Traffic. What mindshare could Spirit hope to gain. Finally San Francisco brands created a new niche with Airplane and The Dead. But the Brits got the mindshare that had a long lifespan with classic rock. I still enjoy Traffic. But don't own a Spirit CD, only vinyl. (Won't own an iPod.) Guess I need to pay up. :)

Prime Time Media

An advantage of age is a history of media. Each media (or extension of man) has a time, no matter how short, where it is the cutting edge. This is often called the golden age. Creativity is king. Three examples: the late 50's are well recognized as the golden age of television. Look at a Marx Brothers movie for a previous golden age. More recent, "web 2.0" gained credence as a new age for internet. I now believe we are in another new age of video as the leader. McLuhan aside: it is easier to recognized what was the dominate media when it is dethroned. "Does a fish know there is water?" In the past decade or three, video games have replaced music. Google "lemmings" to see how many blog about spending time in their youth playing that video (computer) game. I sit hear listening to the first Traffic album produced in an age when the "album" was in its prime. On the screen is "A Day At the Races" with the Marx Brothers at their prime. RIAA knows that their "prime" as passed. My prediction for the next golden age: Ajax (web browser as operating system) games. We've already seen "old media as content for new media" with Lemming converted to Ajax. The golden age is starting - don't lament, enjoy.

Hobo on Rails

If you do Rails, then have a look at Hobo at HoboCentral.net. Great screencasts that show you how this framework makes it easy to get a Rails app up very quicky. Particularly impressive is the three screencast where they import a theme and it is all working within a few minutes. Very DRY and very design driven.

Quick and Clean - Well Factored Ruby by Chad Fowler

Chad Fowler gave a very good talk at the NovaRug Users' Group (2/21/07) about well factored Ruby on Rails code that he called Quick and Clean. These are some notes and links to references.

The talks was inspired by Joel Spolsky's article on The Law of Leaky Abstraction. Chad argues that you have to know what is going on "under rails" to write great code. So learn more Ruby! Chad was also inspired by Martin Fowler's keynote at 2006 Rail Conf. In the keynote he states that Rails continues the tradition of smalltalk where quick can be clean and it does not have to be dirty.

Chad organized his presentation into some opinionated suggestions and presented sample code to make his point:

• Controller only does CRUD methods
• No SQL in Controllers
• Limit Controllers to four lines
• Avoid duplication
• No code in your Views - make helpers to clean up
• Master Ruby

Discussion was promoted by his conjecture that we may have be reaching the limit of MVC (Model-View-Controller). He referenced the Amrita as software worth exploring.

So a good meeting with links to even more.

Case against Landis may be in jeopardy

I'm not a lab tech, but I found the initial news coverage of Floyd Landis alleged doping poor. Now the LA Times is reporting the serious errors may have been made and the case may be dismissed. And where did I hear it? Near the end of a sports show, almost as an afterthought. I hope if this case really is dismissed that the news editors give it as much time as they did the charge.

Kids Are Not The Same

I'm constantly reminded that kids are not the same. Well, maybe on sitcoms all the kids are the same. And maybe we assume that all kids in a classroom are the same. But they are not and we should expect them not to be the same. Nor can we make policy as if they are the same. In the real world kids are different. Karen Olsson writes in NYT about Her Autistic Brothers. The difficulty in raising kids is fully exposed and wonderfully detailed. What a challenge these brothers pose for not just the parents but also for the siblings. And the article just brushes what a challenge our society faces finding how to find productive lives for these young adults. Almost a year ago Gretchen Cook wrote about Siblings of Disabled Have Their Own Problems. This story uses an estimate from Arc of the United States that there are 7 million siblings of children with disablilities. If you ask around I'm certain that you'll find someone else who knows about this problem first hand. Read these two articles and you'll have a better understanding.