TechMaven

Easy Like Sunday Mornin'

I'm in London.  I'm flying home in about 11 hours.  It is late and I'm syncing my iPhone so I'll have new crap to listen to on the flight.  I'm thinking - I really want to hear "easy like sunday morning." 

Some typing, a few clicks, and the song is mine.  For $0.99.  Sorry brits, here its 79p (about $1.60 in USD). 

That's easy like sunday morning. 

I, Robot FOREVER!

I'm in London on business and staying in the St. George's Hotel near Oxford Circus.  A nice place, quite accommodating, and not overly pricey by London standards. 

The TV here is generally not that good.  It isn't like the states where we have a channel for every interest and fetish and the programming is as varied as it is colorful.  Given, there are entire channels here devoted to the big-brother like surveillance of a random house where a group of beautiful young people seemingly chat endlessly in their pajamas (yes this is real) but I'm actually fascinated by one particular channel - the ALL THE TIME ALWAYS ON "I, Robot" channel.  No joke.

There's a channel in this hotel (I'm assuming it isn't nationwide) that has played I, Robot on repeat the entire time I've been here.  IMDB tells me that the movie is 115 minutes long, and I've been here for roughly 108 hours, so that means that I've had the chance to view I, Robot over 56 times.  I haven't been in my room the entire time, and I haven't been awake the entire time, but I have seen it enough to now identify each scene by background noises alone and to recite each line easily.  Talk about skills.

I am not going to change the channel before I leave so that I can achieve the maximum viewing count of over 87 times through the movie.  That will come CLOSE to the number I've watched Aliens or Braveheart. 

P.S. I always laugh when Sonny says "but I must apply the nanites."  I don't even know why.

Loan Sharks Online

I've never heard of something this blatant, but here it is.  Cashcall.com will loan you money, unsecured, at nearly 100% interest.  Look at these rate tables:

The smaller the loan the higher the interest rate.  This is INSANE.  If you're in a place where this is the ONLY way to get money, borrow from a local loan shark.  You're going to have better luck. 

 

Flickr knows what camera you want

Flickr is one of the best services available for sharing photos. There are others, and some even more popular like photobucket, but Flickr is superior. Why? Feel. Experience. Fun. Something. Hard to explain. Feature wise they’re all similar, but Flickr just has a better way of doing it. They also have something I haven’t seen with other services – the ability to look up photos by type of camera AND to see statistics on each, based on the frequency of user of each camera and photos taken by that camera. The photos can be broken down into types as well letting you see if a particular camera is good for portraits or landscapes or close ups. I love it.

I recently upgraded from a Canon SD500 to a Canon SD850 IS. I’m a huge Canon supporter (with TONS invested in Canon pro digital bodies and lenses) and love their point and shoot cameras for my casual shooting. I think their design is fantastic, size of the camera is great, and the image quality is best. When I went to Flickr and clicked through to the canon SD500 area I found that usage has declinied significantly in the past few months. You can chart the rise and fall of a camera which as a data nerd I find super interesting. The 850IS however is on the rise, being newly released, and the comparison shots showed me what I wanted to see – that the images do look a little better.

Next time you’re looking for a camera check out the reviews on a place like CNET or retailer like CompUSA or Best Buy, then head over to Flickr and see what other images from the same camera look like. Can’t beat that.

British Airways vs. American Airlines

The company I work for, Bazaarvoice, affords me the opportunity to travel internationally. Its exciting because its different. I’ve had the chance to fly American Airlines and British Airways, each on a Boeing 777 and each from DFW to London’s Gatwick airport, which of course means I have an opinion about which is better. And technology comes into play as always. Read on.

On the BA flight the plane is configured with first class “pods” that look like little walled mini-cubes, but they’re not cubes at all. They’re circular, provide for some privacy, and are offset and facing each other allowing for people traveling together to enjoy some conversation. They’re well appointed, serviced like royalty, and fantastic. That is, from the vantage of the other classes of seats – i never flew first. Business is similar, just smaller a bit, but still outstanding. Upgraded coach is roomier with fewer seats total, then there’s coach. Its what you’d expect, fine seats and decent legroom, but nothing special. The seats each have video systems with multiple channels of audio and video allowing for some selection as to which movie you watch. There’s a corded controller that is capable of multi-button input for gaming or otherwise, but the software they have for the entertainment system hasn’t taken advantage of it.

On the AA flight the 777 is packed with more seats. First and business are just seats, but really nice seats. No pods. The coach sections are both the same, none are upgraded in any way, and provide for a similar amount of legroom. The video system is different – a touch screen enables all of the controls without having to touch the controller, corded again, in the seat arm. The controller allows for duplicate channel and volume changes and has the buttons for a gaming setup as well, but isn’t used. Flight maps are available, just like in the BA flight, and the programming is similarly varied. Other than the glitch at the beginning of the flight that disabled the entertainment for 30 minutes, it was similar.

Overall the technology in coach is parity between the two. I preferred the AA flight’s touch screen because it allowed for visual selections of entertainment but they’re really the same. Overall I’d rather fly British Airways because of the general service. Free alcohol on the flight doesn’t hurt either. Oh, and the accents make you feel like you’re international before you leave US soil. Fun.

AT&T Hangs Up on Customers

Literally. I travel frequently for business, and now I’m traveling to London at least once every six weeks. This means that my overused BlackBerry 8800 and its unlimited data plan need to come with me so I stay connected. No problem right? Just call in and make sure that everything can be ported over, enabled, provisioned, configured, synchronized, whatever words the usually friendly tech wants to use to describe the process. 

 So I am on hold. Its 8:45pm CST. I’m on hold for a while. One thing that’s interesting, is that the first person I spoke with and figured out I needed their “international provisioning group” actually waited on hold with me until it took more than ten minutes, then she announced she’d be ducking off the call as well. Seems like a waste of human power to have her wait with me, but that’s not the point of this post.

At 9pm their regular hours are over at AT&T service, because technical issues stick to a strict schedule of business hours only. Always. But I’m already waiting, have been for at least 15 minutes. At 9:01pm CST a polite but terse recorded announcement tells me they’re closed, their regular hours are blah blah blah, and then hangs up on me. 

 Just a simple post to AT&T if they’re reading (they should be, google makes it super easy to find this stuff and technorati makes it even easier) – try not to hang up on your customers. Its rude, counter productive (I was actually trying to give you MORE money by going international with my data plan), and creates bad word of mouth.

 UPDATED: Want to know the best part? It didn’t work. I arrived, and the phone still didn’t work. After 10 minutes (and like $20 US worth of credit card calling to AT&T) it was working, just like last time. Argh. Figure it out.

iPhone posts abound...

Read about it here too:  Bazaarblog.

iLove the iPhone

I got one.  I stood in a line for about two hours and still got one.  I enjoyed the conversations and the fact that Apple came out and said "we have enough for everyone."  I was shocked - someone finally figured out how to launch a huge new product.

I immediately ran home and activated it.  I had to deal with adding a new line and changing my phone plan a bit, being a customer of AT&T and a blackberry user that didn't want to simply swap out phones, but there were really no problems getting things turned on.  Then I fell in love with it.

The iPhone is exactly what we've been reading about for months.  EXACTLY.  It looks and feels solid, it acts just as the commercials show, and it does everything Apple has been telling us it will.  Is that not amazing?  I'm blown away by the fact that expectations were SO huge and the potential for disappointment SO great but they actually nailed it.  Well done Apple.

On to some specifics.  What I really love about the iPhone:

• It feels solid.  Rock solid. 
• The screen is gorgeous.  320x480 is the new HD for handhelds.
• The unit is responsive, very responsive.  No hiccups like previous PDA type devices and no slowdowns when the network chugs.
• Wi-Fi in phones is genius.  More need this.
• The iPod part of it is the best iPod yet.  Awesome display and fantastic interface.  I really enjoy the touch navigation for everything.  It is intuitive and easy.
• Visual voicemail is another genius change to how we use phones.  New standard, absolutely.

What could be improved:

• Exchange integration - but only maybe.  I haven't tried it yet myself, this is just from what I've read elsewhere.
• Download pictures via the browser.  Safari on the iPhone doesn't let you save to the phone.  Odd.
• Buy things from iTunes store on the phone!  This seems like a no brainer, but maybe they worried about the bandwidth. 

I'm not going to use it for email yet.  Well, at least not corporate email.  I have a blackberry 8800 and that's going to be the workhorse for a while.  Forwarding calls to the iPhone works fine and means I can break away from the tether a bit and not check email every thirty seconds.  Truth is I think I'll be paying more attention to the iPhone anyway, it is just too cool.