Category: Commentary

I asked for it. Seems I got it.

Of course it’s going to be 9 months before they launch in the UK.

Bollocks.

Bill Gates says (when asked about Apple’s ability to get into the living room for home entertainment systems):

They have a huge disadvantage in the kind of variety–design points, price points, distribution approaches. They just don’t get that. They do get to do this tightly coupled monolithic design. What we have to make sure is that we are working with the partners so we get that creativity of the close coupling while the variety of partners is such that we get something they really don’t have.

Yes, Bill.

That’s obviously why Apple had a huge disadvantage into getting into the pockets of a third of the western world with the iPod.

That’s obviously why when your own “Plays For Sure” brand died, you decided to kick your partners in the gut with the new Zune way of doing things and attempt to clone Apple’s success.

That’s the thing about being the richest man in the world. You can just say anything, any old shit and not care about the repercussions. Because, end of the day, you’re the richest man in the world. Ya boo sux.

According to this article on the New York Post, lawyers are walking away from their highly paid jobs in an attempt to escape the so-called Blackberry Lifestyle – “being tethered to the job 24/7 and having to rush back to the office at a moment’s notice when e-mail orders pop up on the ubiquitous PDA.

I wonder about this. If I’m on your buddy list, you probably see me online more than most (human operated) avatars. I usually have my laptop with me, wherever I am. I have a mobile that is on 99% of the time.

I’m interested in 3G/4G all-you-can-eat deals though since the death of the Newton I’m not convinced that anyone has invented the device which will allow me to extend my presence the way I want it.

Mash together a PDA, phone, GPS, make it Mac compatible and add in some highly scriptable software so that we can have cool web apps extended from it.

I’ll call it my Ghost.

Rather than a PDA that “can do” instant messenger applications, how about a PDA that is an instant messenger application.

My Ghost has communication to the core. It reflects my status and copies that to all of my applications. When I’m busy, I set it to BUSY and it handles all of my email, voicemail and instant messages. When I am available it allows them to come through. When talking on the phone, it changes my status to “on the phone” and when I’m busy playing “Jet Set Willy for GHOST”, it rightfully changes my status to “In a meeting”. When I’m available, I want it to retrieve my GPS co-ordinates and use them as a tag so that my buddies and colleagues can see where I am. For when I’m somewhere I shouldn’t be, I want to be able to switch that off too 🙂

I’m realistic. I don’t want this for free.

Last night I was at a party where the conversation between strangers turned the conversation to where it always goes when strangers collect in groups. We talked about movies and music.

I extolled the virtues of some of my favourite films (Tron, The Sound of Music, Strange Days, NightBreed, The Great Escape, High Fidelity). I gave my critiques of their favourite movies (a lot of time spent deconstructing Natural Born Killers). We listened to Juliet Lewis’ new band and noted they were playing in Belfast in May (she linked Strange Days and Natural Born Killers). We discussed who was the better actor: Robert De Niro or Brad Pitt. Music brought us back round to Elvis, whose rendition of “I did it my way” I compared to the vocals by the late, great Peter Boyle (linked here). I caught a lot of dirty looks for that one.

I’ve been enjoying the time off this Christmas by burying myself into films and books. A most recent conquest is Persuasion, by Jane Austen. One of the films I found myself loving last year, despite the gaping holes in the plot, was The Lake House. The book made an interesting cameo. A good read.

I upset a friend earlier today. It wasn’t intentional but the more I tried to make amends, the worse things got when it was finally at the point I was ready to throw my hand in the air and just give up. At last I said I was sorry.

[Edit. Same thing happened today and I didn’t just capitulate and say sorry. Hence, continuing bad mood on their part. Bound to happen.]

Violent Acres has a wee sermon on how to fight.

It’s fun reading. I’ve always found that responding to imminent violence with confidence works wonders.

I used to fight a lot in school. Always hauled up for it. In primary school there were two guys, Martin and Colin, who I fought with a lot. Just stupid kids stuff. I remember feeling horriby guilty when standing over one of them after bloodying his nose and stuttering “Well, you shouldn’t have pushed me….” In later years in primary school we played “Bulldog” which was just organised brutality. We played fighting like a sport.

In grammar school, things were different. I fought a lot with a guy (Philip) over a girl (Bronagh). And neither of us got the girl anyway. He found out that I was, frankly, besotted and spent 4 years teasing and generally being an obnoxious ****. And it was all because he liked her too. And I lost a lot of fights. A lot. It was never too bad because I don’t bruise easily but it was damaging to the ego. The fights stopped in Lower VIth because he lost once and spent the day with a bruise on his cheek. And mostly because I stopped fighting like a 4 year old and actually made a fist.

I immediately enrolled in my first martial arts class and since then I have never needed to fight. Fighting just never finds me. I’m not that good at fighting because, well, my heart was never in tournaments (fighting for the sake of fighting) but there is an impression others have that I’m a big guy who can do “high kicks to the head”.

Confidence in the face of greater numbers also saved my brother from a beating when, growing up, he was chased home by a dozen kids from the local council estate. We, being Catholics, were the odd ones out in that town in the late 80s and it was Northern Ireland with all that implies. One of his friends had reached the house before him and told me about the impending mob and I went calmly downstairs and out into the street with my nunchaku and every single one of the thugs turned round and walked away. The confidence and implied threat of violence from an older brother was much greater than their intended beating of a small, thin boy.

My attitude to fighting is summed up by a quote at the end of The Mexican. Jerry is captured by Margolese and extolls about how if they take him down “someone is going to lose an eye or not be able to fuck or something”.

It’s that confidence and philosophy which has kept me (physically) fight free for 15 years….

Moments with a secret smile in my years at Apple is written by someone with 20 years experience at Apple in the sales departments. In this post he waxes about selling to resellers, selling to education, selling to companies who have no money and selling to the government.

Yes, another Apple thing. But a good read nonetheless.

I’ve had heaps of moments like this. The moments when I know I’ve clinched the deal and I’ve looked at my partner and she’s seen it in my eyes. That’s a good moment. Thankfully it’s been a good year and I’ve got lots of those currently.

Reading this:
Resumes are tailored for a particular job, and let’s face it, often “cosmetically enhanced”. If you’ve been blogging for years, you certainly did not do it with a particular job in mind; your blog is likely to be a true reflection of who you really are, what you are an expert in, your communication skills, your priorities … YOU as a whole person, not as a candidate for a specific job.

I’ve heard of people not getting jobs because they put their antics up on their MySpace account (photos and details of extreme sports performed while under the influence of illegal substances, for example.) I’ve heard of people’s blogs causing them to lose their jobs. You can see a heap more about that here.

I’ve also heard of people getting jobs because of their blogs (you may also count people being hired because of their relationships with other folk on IRC channels). This is obviously a precursor to adding semantics (meaning) to the Internet. Changing it from being data….going beyond information…and into meaning.

Years ago I was told that the Curriculum Vitae was very different to the Resumé. The latter, an American expression, didn’t care about your hobbies, your personality or what badges you earned in the scouts. These days however, things are different. Your off-air life can greatly affect your potential employability in the future. Rober Scoble intoned a few weeks ago that reducing your chances to be hired by even 10% by putting something on your blog was foolish. Food for thought certainly.

Recruitment consultants ring me every week. Sometimes they try to hire me away based on some outdated resume from….what…5 years ago? I mean – they must be scraping the bottom of the barrel if they’re still holding my CV and considering me for a post. Other times they’re trying to get me to hire someone. Or consider hiring someone.

Recruitment, as a business, is highly profitable though being a consultant can be stressful – not because of the job itself (which by all accounts is not difficult) but because it can be a job that involves trusting people. You’re trusting people to turn up to jobs. And in some sectors you’re the one they call at 6:30 am on a Sunday because the fill-in cook or porter hasn’t turned in. How utterly soul-destroying this must be. Recruitment consultants don’t get badly paid, but I’m told they suffer from burnout quickly. And where do you go from there? From talking to a few I reckon they don’t get paid as much as they should and in my opinion you should never spend more than 5 years of your life making someone else rich. (and may be of the opinion that you should never spend more than 5 years doing one thing anyway).

I don’t know the process these days. Do headhunters take the time to Google for prospective hires? Do they search on MySpace and Bebo for these people? In Northern Ireland I’d reckon not. I’d love to be pleasantly surprised but based on that recent call from a headhunter, I don’t think that they even have web access. It’s not as if I hide…

Not convinced? Well, read Now It’s Easier than Ever to Build the “Brand Called You”.

Will Recruitments companies in Northern Ireland start to hire BlogHeadHunters?

The speaker is David Heinermeier Hansson. He created Ruby on Rails. The full quote is:

• Apple will continue to trounce everyone else for the preferred geek platform. The stigma of being a Web programmer still using Windows will increase.

To be honest, the stigma of being on Windows no matter your occupation will increase. Now more than ever, Mac OS X is seen as a premium computing device as much as the iPod is a premium music player.

The quote above comes from the annual SYS-CON predictions from top industry players.

It’s interesting to compare some of the predictions. Gary Cornell, founder of Apress (a company that is to Windows as O’Reilly is to Open Source technology) says:

• IE 7 will have a fast adoption curve and so Firefox will cease gaining market share.
  Sales of high powered desktop will slow.
  Apple will no longer gain market share for its desktops and will stabilize at its current meaningless level.

Interesting take, Mr Cornell. More wishful thinking rather than prediction I reckon.

Mark Hinkle of Enterprise Open Source Magazine reckons:

• Microsoft’s launch of Vista will start to prompt hardware refreshes which can be nothing but good for Apple. Apple already has momentum, Intel hardware, dropping prices and all the tumblers are becoming aligned for it to creep above its measly 5% market share. Linux desktop vendors will likely see a few defectors from the Redmond camp…

John Evdemon of Microsoft says:

• IT finally admits that there is no silver bullet. Every year I hope to see this happen and every year my hopes are crushed by buzzword-of-the-minute hype machines.

Uh John? It’s your employer who was been promising the Silver Bullet all these years. You’re an Architect at Microsoft, John, you write the software that powers the hype machine.

Bill Dudley of the Eclipse Development Journal says:

• Macs will continue their ‘thought leader’ adoption curve. This is not the year they start to penetrate the corporate IT department.

Brandon Harper of Acxiom Corp says:

• People who normally wouldn’t use Linux start to explore it and even replace Windows with it permanently.

This will be dwarfed by the number of people upgrading from Windows 98 to Windows Vista with the purchase of a new machine.

I’ve just cherry-picked the Mac-relevant its but there’s heaps more in the article. A lot on AJAX, web services, Software as a Service – it’s worth a read if you have any interest in emerging technology. All of the writers have something to contribute, apart from David Cornell.

I like Paul Murphy, the nom-de-guerre of Rudy de Haas. His book, The Unix Guide to Defenestration was a very good read from the point of view of someone wanting to set up a service-based IT organisation and a lot of the hints and tips in there are worth their weight in something much more valuable than gold.

He also writes one of the blogs at ZDNet which I guess is a good place to go if you want to be paid for this sort of writing.

But Fridays MacTel: “the real story” is a load of tosh. And Thursdays Cringley, MacTel, and nutty theories is just raving lunacy. Slow news day?

But it’s more explained that Paul is a SUN/SPARC/Solaris bigot the way that I am an Apple/Mac/Mac OS X bigot. That is to say neither of us are blind in our decisions – I blieve we both make educated decisions about our technology and we know what we like. I used to really like Slowlaris but then I found myself with no hardware to run on it (and I have had passions for HP-UX, Ultrix and even the odd Linux distro in the past). I’ve not heard of anyone running Solaris on the new x86-based Macs…which might prompt me to have a fourth HD in my Mac Pro (adding to the existing Tiger, Leopard, Windows).

I don’t know all the facts obviously but I do know what Apple will do and both Paul and Cringely are way off base here.

No growth without assistance.
No action without reaction.
No passion without restraint.

The things we touch have no permanence.
There is nothing we can hold onto in this world.
Only by letting go can we truly possess what is real.

A faithful heart makes wishes come true.
Make a wish.

– Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

Related posts:

1. Jonathan Gems on the abolition of the UKFC
2. Murderdrome BANNED by Apple
3. Today
4. AppStore Wars starting to heat up…