rare pattern thoughts in a blog

Okay, so the Palm 700P was quite possibly the worst technology purchase I ever made. It's slow. It freezes up on me at unpredicable times. Its touchscreen goes to sleep when you need it. Its keypad buttons are made for 9-year-olds.

Now they have an update.

As part of our continuous effort to give customers the best possible experience, Palm offers an update that features performance and reliability enhancements.

Sounds great, right? However....

... you cannot update unless you have all the required extras ... like a blank expansion card (unless you're running an older version of Windows).

Is it any wonder that Palm is in a world of hurt?

See also:

Technorati: Palm sucks
Google: Palm sucks

So Jeremiah Owyang has started a media consumption diet meme, and Marianne Richmond has tagged us BlogHers, so here goes....

• Web: I used to use NetNewsWire Lite for RSS, but I tried Shrook and found it to me easier to use, with some of the features NetNewsWire makes you pay for. Shrook is easy enough, so I'll stick with it for now. Do I need to mention Firefox? For search, I use Google pretty exclusively (I find myself wondering how Yahoo! gets by, what with all the barriers they put up for people to get listed in their index) and if I'm blog-hunting, I go to Technorati. I blog using Drupal for platform and either Performancing or ecto for blogging client (though neither is optimal -- Performancing repeatedly loses my drafts and ecto keeps embedding cruft into my html, even when I define the tags myself). For online video, I find YouTube too useful to ignore. It can be a bit hard to take, though, just browsing at random.
• Music: I've started trying out Pandora, but in some stations they keep trying to push the strangest things -- sorry but how do you get Foreigner or Journey from Led Zeppelin? -- and they limit how many songs I can reject in a given time. (Am I just too persnickety?) I have several of my old CDs burned to mp3 files, which I play on my desktop iTunes, but as I've moved from my nearly-dead PowerBook to two iMacs to my current MacBook Pro, it's been a challenge carrying those 20GB of files along for the migration ride. (It doesn't help that some of the discs were defective bulk coasters.) I haven't signed up for the iTunes Store, though, because the DRM restrictions and poor audio quality make downloads there less than appealing, no matter how appealing and easy-to-use the GUI is. Stop treating me like a criminal guilty until proven innocent, Apple and RIAA, and you'll have my business. Meanwhile, as CD music continues to fade away at the big box stores, I'm finding my music horizons diminishing, and that's a terrible place to be. My whole live is defined by soundtrack.
• TV: I don't have much time to watch television, especially the commercial variety -- I think I'm more and more intolerant of commercials. I will watch the NewsHour if I'm home early enough, the Daily Show if I'm up late enough (and thank goodness for the 9pm rerun of last night's show), Frontline if I stumble across it and (of course) Battlestar Galactica. I don't do cable news -- it strikes me as an entire industry getting excited about the lint in their own navels. However, since getting HDTV on Comcast, I've found that I'm more likely to just watch anything as long as it's high-def. Well, not anything at all, but it's amazing how much more interesting Nova or Discovery (or reruns of Battlestar Galactica and Firefly) are when you can see so much detail on the screen. (Ironic that local news is in high-def, but most network shows are not; the Rose Parade was in high def, but the Macy's parade was not; sports are in high def but arts typically are not; and all HBO seems to play on their single high-def channel is Rome [though it could be worse].)
• Communication: My cell is a Palm Treo 700p, but I hardly ever use it. It comes in handy when I need to keep up on email or check something on the web, but I'm realizing the touchscreen I so wanted (and thus the reason I rejected alternatives like Blackberry or Q) is pretty over-rated. Ah well, live and learn. The phone part is actually great for clarity and reception, but I don't use it as a PDA at all, as the 320x320 screen is just too damned small. Other phonage is Vonage. I haven't had a land-line phone in quite a few years now. --Not that any of this matters, because I really really hate talking on the phone unless it's necessary. For IM, I use Jabber (via Adium), which we have set up on one of our domains, and the sadly unavoidable Skype, which as a relay is an absolute bandwidth hog even when it's just sitting there.
  I don't use Skype much for voice, since so many people seem to have so many problems configuring it to work well. We thought it'd be great for talking to clients overseas to save a few pennies a minute, but all too often it was too much like the Cone of Silence. I use Apple Mail for email, mainly because Thunderbird on Mac is too slooowwwwww (I wish it weren't).
• Movies: Once upon a time, I saw several movies a week, sometimes several in one day, but now that they blast commercials in your face before showing generally sucky movies -- not to mention the overpriced junk food, sticky floors and noisy patrons -- it's just not worth it. It's not fun any more. So I watch movies on DVD, where I'm not limited by the, excuse me, crap selection of the week, and which on an HDTV plasma is an entirely new experience. I tend to buy, not rent, because rented discs always seem to have scratches that make the flick skip or freeze.
• Magazines: I subscribe to Post, HOW, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, Macworld and occasionally Wired. I rarely buy a magazine off the rack. It amazes me how many magazines are in print. Do people actually read all these things? Somebody must. I have to say, however, that the supermarket tabloids do keep me informed. I mean, I could've gone for weeks or even months without knowing that Brittney Spears shaved her head or that Brad sent a note to Jen! Eeep!
• Books: I live for novels, but it's hard for me to find writers I like, so I'm stuck with the five or six authors who could write just about anything and I'd read it. Maybe if my life weren't so fast-paced, I'd be able to relax enough to get into a new writer's style, but usually I can't get past the first paragraph, so I do without. Meanwhile I'm reading more non-fiction than any time since I was in college. How She Does It, Blink and Designing Interactions are three of the most recent delights.
• Newspapers: I love reading off paper, but unlike magazines I don't hold the same love of newspapers. I like the print design of the New York Times, but I hate getting newsprint all over my fingers, and at a buck a pop for something I may not even have time to read that day, it becomes a dead-tree guilt and a recycling burden more than a source of news. 15 years ago that wasn't the case -- I loved getting the paper! How life changes in these times! I still read the "newspapers" online, including the NY Times, the Mercury News and the odd site that happens to have the AP wire story I want to read.

So there's my consumption in a nutshell. Now in the tradition of tagging, and because they are such an eclectic group of geeks and artists, I'd like to tag everyone on Planet Drupal.

Technorati Tags: media consumption diet

Actually, I'm surprised this is only starting now.

Get ready for the inbox on your phone to fill up faster. From fast-food chains to carmakers to consumer goods manufacturers and sports franchises, more and more companies are adopting text messaging as a way to target consumers on the move.

That's right. Once again, international corporations are looking for new ways to invade your space and push their sales pitches into your face.

No web 2.0 for these folks. No viral marketing, no sirree.

Consultant Frederick Newell says companies using text messaging should move carefully because of privacy concerns and must get customers' permission first.

Like they got your permission to show 15 minutes of advertisments for consumer products and tv shows at the beginning of theatrical films.

SmartReply, the Irvine, Calif.-based marketing firm involved in the Meijer campaign, said consumers need not fear a bombardment of unwanted messages from the burgeoning industry.

"Mobile marketing has the power of e-mail but we've learned from the mistakes of e-mail in that the mobile channel is regulated from the beginning in terms of spam," said Mike Romano, the company's executive vice president of business development.

Call me a cynic, but I'll believe it when I don't see it.

A couple of days ago, I witnessed an almost-accident: The left turn arrow changed to green and a guy going straight just started off into the intersection, almost smacking head-on into a left-turning car from the other direction.

The turning car blared its horn. He stopped eventually -- almost too late. The turning car moved on. The light turned green, and I started forward from the #2 lane....

...and saw the driver, a 20-something guy who was completely nonplussed, chatting away on his cell phone he had pressed to his ear.

This was in Longmont, Colorado, but hopefully California's new law will eventually hit this state that so-doggedly embraces individual freedoms.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who signed the measure, urged Californians not to wait until then to put down their phones while driving, citing government data showing those who held their phones while driving were involved in 15 times more accidents than those with hands-free setups.

"The simple fact is that it is really dangerous to talk on a cell phone and drive at the same time," Schwarzenegger said. "It's very important for people to know ... stop using the cell phone right now, because you are putting people at risk."

I've been using cell phones since 1994, driving with them all that time. It didn't take long to realize that every time I was talking with that then-rather-large flip-phone to my ear, I was entering my own little Twilight Zone, slowing down to way below the speed limit, not noticing the traffic around me except in some vague dream-like sense, certainly not prepared for any unexpected moves by other cars (which certainly can be expected in LA).

I had to learn how to drive with the cell phone, learn how to pay full attention to driving while someone was demanding my attention. And I had to learn to not futz with the phone itself while driving, for it was much more complicated than changing a radio station.

When I got an earpiece for the phone, it all got better. Living and working freelance in LA, where everything seems to be at least an hour's drive away on surface streets, I had to have the phone. More than once it made the difference in getting six months of work. And I had to drive. The earpiece made it possible. I still had to focus on concentrating while driving -- it has become habit now -- but it helped.

Now if only there could be a law requiring cell phone companies to use an earpiece.