Why? Because, I enjoy helping people and figure why the hell not. I could easily diagnose the problem in 15 minutes.

Just now Erica and I were at QFC down the road. On the way out a lady in her Sebring as parked in a disabled spot with her placard. Anyway, she stopped us and started asking slowly for some cash. She said she had cerebral palsy and apparently forgot her wallet at Shell around the corner, when she went back it was gone. By this point she was bursting into tears. Apparently she had no cash and no gas, and with her wallet gone she was in a bind. Figuring that was the case I already grabbed my wallet and pulled out $5. Handing it to her she grabbed my hand and thanked me kindly.

I felt bad and all and honestly $5 isn’t much to help someone in a bind. I’m more than happy to give when I know pretty well it’s going to go do some good. I mean it’s not like she was outside a Wine and Liquor store asking for booze.

Though this reminds me, a while back at a Safeway a guy asked for money for food. I had none, I don’t normally carry cash as I prefer plastics. I said I’d be happy to grab him some food, a sandwich or something. He wanted a ham sandwich. Five minutes later I came out with a ham sandwich and a bag of chips. But the dude ditched. Seriously!? I got stood up by a homeless guy and couldn’t even get him the food. Sigh. I guess maybe he figured I wouldn’t really be helping him out.

So when I got home tonight the thought did cross my mind. How do you really know when someone needs, requires, deserves help? I mean really. I honestly don’t know if that lady really needed help. She could’ve easily been a crafty scam artist doing that to every easy mark. Hell she’d probably gather at least enough cash to buy her groceries or whatever for the night. Then again why go to all that trouble for $5?

How does one really know? When do you help, when do you not?

Anyway, this post really was just meant to show the place and show the progress as I move, build, and move, and hopefully finish up.

First are the pics of the place prior to any move and any work. then next we have construction photos of the first half of the loft space, this is the work done to create the office portion. It has already added another 120 sq. ft. of liveable space.

Click for a description:

I’ll try and add more and update everything. Crap is everywhere right now and the place is a mess. There are currently only 3 pieces of furniture in the place, a Dacke kitchen island from Ikea and two barstools. Am seriously hoping today will be the day I find all the furniture for this place, or at least some of it.

The moment I saw Natal on the 360 the first thing that popped into my head was a good porn game utilizing the technology. I figure if Vivid Entertainment got behind it then some quality entertainment could be made.

I mean combine full motion capture with a nice MMO sort of thing with XBL, maybe do some games with live action video of the big stars, maybe some POV type stuff… it could really work. And just think, there’s tons of ways to up sell add-ons, both physical and virtual, special wireless controllers, virtual toys and stuff on the XBL Marketplace, oh and various porn stars could be downloaded to offer new experiences.

Now obviously it’d be pretty amusing, I mean, could you imagine the status reporting: coreygo is playing Porn Star in a session with Sasha Grey. There would be new meaning to achievement points.

Sadly I’m pretty sure Microsoft and Xbox have standards for this stuff and these games wouldn’t pass the approval process. But seriously there’s no reason why a Adult Only category couldn’t exist. The porn industry is huge, it made VHS win, it played a part in the BD vs. HD-DVD battle. It could make bank.

Now to get in contact with the right people in the industry… Sasha, email me. ROFL.

If you’re using some LAMP type set up you could always just use mod_rewrite with .htaccess  and just do:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com/$1 [R=301,L]

IIS7 can actually import a .htaccess file and does a good job of converting them over. However if you just want to do the same thing from scratch the quickest way is to pop open the web.config for the website (you can create one if it doesn’t exist) and add the rewrite rules. Here’s my complete web.config as an example:

< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<configuration>
    <system .webServer>
        <rewrite>
            <rules>
                <rule name="Redirect www." stopProcessing="true">
                    <match url="^(.*)" ignoreCase="false" />
                    <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
                        <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^$" ignoreCase="false" />
                        <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^coreygo.com" />
                    </conditions>
                    <action type="Redirect" url="http://coreygo.com/{R:1}" redirectType="Permanent" />
                </rule>
            </rules>
        </rewrite>
    </system>
</configuration>

Just replace coreygo.com with your own domain and that’s it. I’ve got the bindings set up for this site so there’s just www. but this would also redirect blogs. if that was included as a binding. There’s a way to make exceptions and such but for that head over to IIS.net .

But here’s the kicker. First they already dropped my credit limit from $22,000 to $15,400. The cheeky fuckers raised my interest rate from their supposed lowest possible rate 11.99% in Feb to more than double that. A hot rate of 27.22% in March.

So I’ve just been charged double the interest for the past two months and will be for this month and the next. Essentially they’re just crediting me my own bloody interest back. Seriously, WTF.

The real kicker here comes from using NewCreditRules.com’s Interest and Payoff Calculator. I normally pay about $750/mo towards my current balance of $13880.

Before:
Making payments of $750 on a balance of $13880 would take you 21 months to pay off with a 12% APR.
Total interest paid is $1546.20 ($15426.20 total paid).

After:
Making payments of $750 on a balance of $13880 would take you 25 months to pay off with a 27.2% APR.
Total interest paid is $4319.48 ($18199.48 total paid).

Some loyalty, the only reason why I’m paying anything right now is because I did a balance transfer from my two other cards to consolidate payments. I’ve been a customer for 7 years and am currently a share holder, not to mention my credit score of 823. Nice doing business with you too, asses.

UPDATE: It gets better. I just called to find out why my rates were doubled. It turns out they decided to put me to the default rates after I accidentally made a payment against my WaMu checking account which was closed a day prior. I actually noticed this immediately after making the payment and called them. I tried to have that payment cancelled as I added my Fidelity account and wanted to make an immediate payment from that account. I also wanted to make sure this didn’t mess up my rates, charge me a return payment fee, and more importantly not screw up my score. I was assured that everything would be fine, and got the $38 charge reversed and was assured that my rate and score would be fine.

03/13/2009*     Credit Adjustment for Returned Payment Fee      -38.00
03/09/2009*     FEE FOR RETURNED PAYMENT FEE FOR RETURNED ELECTRONIC TRANSACTION     38.00
03/09/2009*     RETURNED CHECK/DECLINED BANK TRANSACTIONS     500.00
03/06/2009*     COMPUTER PAYMENT RECEIVED – THANK    -500.00
03/05/2009*     COMPUTER PAYMENT RECEIVED – THANK    -500.00  

This was all noted on my account and to top it off my payment wasn’t even due till the 20th of March anyway. My minimum due was less than $500 to boot.

I told the first customer service person that this was ridiculous and she said “sir, it’s actually worse to have a returned payment than a late one”. I just said… interesting, could you please escalate this. American Express will lose my business and all further interest from my account unless the rate increase is reversed.

I was transferred to a supervisor (Chris x23468 – he was nice and only doing his job but reading from a script no doubt). He basically said the same thing, it wasn’t American Express’ mistake and despite the fact I called up within 10 minutes of noticing the error and corrected it, and despite the fact that they even reversed the fees they couldn’t reverse the rate increase. I said I’d be sending this all to the CEO of American Express, Consumerist, and NewCreditRule’s.

I also have an American Express Clear card, but guess what, despite making the same payment mistake my rates are still at 8.89% on that card. Talk about complete idiocy.

It’s amazing how they’d be willing to lose a few thousand dollars in interest, an excellent and very loyal customer of over 7 years, plus some additional negative publicity over something like this. At this point I’ll be taking them up on that 5.4% credit offer, paying them off completely and never using them again if possible. I won’t close the accounts since it’ll probably do my FICO no good, but oh well. I’ll just be the customer they hate, the type that earns them no interest, the type to use Visa, it’s accepted absolutely everywhere anyway.

But what else is new, everyone already knows the credit industry is fucked up. Oh and in case you didn’t already know, American Express profits are down 56%.

UPDATE: I decided to call American Express once more this morning on my way into work. I explained the entire thing again… This time around I spoke with an Ilene out of Hillsboro, NC. She was very empathetic and realized how I’ve almost always paid double and never been late, plus the rest of the documented history of how I called to try and correct the payment snafu 10 minutes after it happened. At first she said there wasn’t really anything she could do. For some reason after a short wait this changed to her dropping me from 27.22% to 13.99%, a little closer to my original rate of 11.99%. Still I’m a bit miffed since this there’s really no reason for this. I’m still out the extra $350~ in extra interest charges for the past two months as well. Plus this tells me that:

1. The two people last night lied to me.
2. The two people last night were just being lame and just didn’t care.
3. The two people last night weren’t very well trained.
4. All of the above.

My advice to American Express, listen to Barry Schwartz’s TED talk and stop screwing your loyal customers. Kudos to Ilene for trying, I appreciate it.

UPDATE: Logged into Amex’s website to verify the rates and all that. Looks like the jerks dropped my limit on the Clear card a couple grand to within $117 of my current balance. Thanks for screwing with my credit score once again Amex.

I was browsing through my RSS feeds and noticed an Adamo video which was just horribly uncomfortably bad. I won’t even link to it. To see if it was just a fluke I went to the Adamo website. Unfortunately the same VP of design was in the video. To view it go to the Encounter bit then see how the story of lameness begins.

The odd thing was that while watching this video it totally reminded me of Apple’s MacBook design video. What really let me down about the Dell video was the tackiness. When you need lame models and stupid sets and crap to sell your laptop design, you’re on the path to failure. Apple’s video highlights the machine, the design, the engineering, pure and simple. The way Apple has done for ages.

As I watch the Apple video right now, I think it’s just dawned on me why Apple systems rock. This argument for me has nothing to do with Windows v. OSX, that’s irrelevant to me. Why my next system will be a Mac is because I get the feeling that their hardware has a tyrannical asshole genius dictating every minute detail.

When I watch the Dell video I get the feeling that attention to details wasn’t done because they’re insane about these things. It was done to play catch up to Apple, to say, see we can be cool and come out with good design if we want to.  That’s no way to convince me. Sure it’s Dell’s hottest machine ever, but the rest of it failed to deliver. Amusing to me as well is how the second best laptop Dell ever made, the X1, was actually a Samsung laptop rebranded but I digress.

Like the title suggests, I personally compared the Adamo to the 13″ MacBook. I’d get the MacBook. Now I know it’s actually being compared to the MacBook Air. This is definitely a good compare, while neither system have me wanting… if I were forced to pick one I almost think I’d still go with the Air. The Adamo’s only saving graces are the additional built in ports at the back (where ports should be imho). Otherwise the Air is cheaper, lighter, and faster. Whoa, *not* cheaper than a Mac?! WTF, ah, SSD, at this point in time – meh.

So with that, I guess I’m going to put my laptop up on Craigslist and hope I get somewhere. I think I’ll probably end up actually getting the 15″ MacBook Pro if only because I can’t be arsed to install my own 7200RPM drive into the MacBook. Plus the 15″ has a discrete nVidia GPU too. I just wish the display was 1920×1200.

I wish I were an asshole genius. Then I really would dictate the perfect system.

It’s okay Mr. Postman, I’ve got your $.41 covered. I’m sure Wells Fargo can’t spare any of that TARP money just yet.

How on Earth does my sister’s boyfriend (fiancé) afford to buy a MacBook and an iPhone barely out of jail? I’m not sure exactly how long he’s been out, guess there was work release time or something. But, seriously? I realize that getting busted for dealing nothing but weed is a pretty lame thing to go to jail for, especially since Marijuana should be legalized and taxed. But how does one come into a job that quickly making enough money to just drop 2g on Apple crap any other way than selling Weed 2 grams at a time?

Maybe I’ve become a much for froogle of a spender or maybe I’m just not being a good consumer.

The first visit was the install, he didn’t even run a speed test to confirm everything. The second visit they tried swapping the modem but apparently that replacement was bad. The third visit they sent a home service guy who didn’t even know the login for the modem. The fourth visit was the only good visit but that was because he was an office technician, not some field dude. This guy clearly knew what he was talking about and we got to the bottom of the problem quickly. It was the modem. What’s sad though is this guy had the best customer interaction of any of them yet he’s the one that the customers never get to talk to or see.

Now I’m writing this during my 5th visit. This guy has been up since 3AM. But it’s hardly an excuse. What should’ve been a very simple modem replacement has turned into a 3 hour wait. He didn’t even bring the replacement modem that was noted in the service request. Instead he’s made about a dozen calls and we’ve been waiting for some other tech to actually bring the modem. I’m pretty sure the guy that just showed up isn’t him, I think it’s his manager. But they’re still trying to figure out how to get into this modem despite it working fine through my router. Why they can’t just replace my modem and leave I don’t know. Sigh…

10 minutes later… Yep I was right “three’s a party we’ve got another guy coming”. Great… Do they have no concept that customer’s time, especially business customer’s time is valuable!?

The main problem I have with this guy is that he keeps getting things wrong. Example, first thing he did was pull up the info to look at the down and upstream channel. Everything was fine, it was locked at 64QAM like it should be. He reset some stuff, then made a few calls after he couldn’t get in, then that person said it was locked to 16QAM. They do more crap and 64QAM again like it was before, retest directly through the modem and now it’s getting 30/8, great… 5 minutes later it’s 30/1. Bad…

I’m already upstairs now just leaving them to do their thing since it’s actually rather annoying not being at work waiting for them to really just sit there. On the possitive side I think I just figured out the buzz from my receiver was being caused by interference from the power cord on the TV. Go figure…

3rd guy has arrived right now. He apparently knows what he’s doing, somewhat… Now they’re saying they need my laptop because they can only seem to get to the modem through my router… Ruh roh.

Okay so they’ve factory reset the modem and can now get into it finally. Getting the right speeds via dynamic IP so that’s good. He’s on the phone with a guy to push down a brand new created from scratch config file. Fingers crossed as it flashes and reboots. I really just want to go to work (surprising since it’s Friday and I should just say WFH at this point since it’s now 2:15).

Downstream Channel
Downstream Frequency 603.001465 MHz  597.000122 MHz
Lock Status    Locked    Locked
Modulation     256 QAM    256 QAM
Symbol Rate    5.360537Msym/sec  5.360537Msym/sec
Downstream Power   5.066157 dBmV   4.432274 dBmV
SNR      36.844 dB    37.093 dB   

Upstream Channel
Upstream Frequency   37000000 Hz
Lock Status    Locked
Modulation     64QAM
Symbol Rate    5120 KSym/sec
Upstream Power    41.1800 dBmV
Channel ID     3

Yay, good speeds with a static IP!!!

Why on Earth did this take 5 visits!? Why on Earth did I have to miss 20 hours of work? And why couldn’t they have just solved this directly from their office?

The signals all looked good from the start, they could’ve tested from my box with a test modem to confirm everything. And most importantly they could’ve just created a brand new config file from the office!

How totally lame

Within 10 seconds it became apparent why the warranty was only 1 year and not 3 or 5. The first 5 threads on the forum were all for dead SoundBridge Radio’s, total view count on these threads is about 50K. The root cause of the problem? Faulty PSU’s which were inadequately designed. What’s amazing is just how many people really truly loved this product, including me. So much so that when they all started failing people tried fixing the units themselves and tried helping others figure out the problems. Some hardcore electrical engineering geekiness too. Hell, one guy even provided a Flickr page showing the fault capacitor. What’s depressing is that this WiFi network audio alarm radio costs a full $300, and yet they couldn’t even spare an extra 20 cents of profit per unit to use higher quality components to ensure customer satisfaction and product longevity. WTF!?

As a professional engineer with many years experience I consider that the Soundbridge radio is a unit where the power supply is bound to fail on a regular basis. Because of the total lack of thermal management which is mainly due to the plastic box and tape around the box the components on the PSU, which is always on, run at an excessive temperature. Back of the envelope calculations suggest the mean time to failure will be in the order of 7 months! Even with the higher rated replacements I have only improved this figure by about a factor of three.

I really loved my Roku, in fact I used to say how it was the one piece of technology in my life that “just worked”. It did exactly what I wanted and worked perfectly, sounded great too. Then this… What a shame. I’m guessing the little Roku’s aren’t as susceptible to this kind of failure, mainly because they’re much simpler in design and don’t require the same power. But I’m sure they’re just as poorly engineered none the less.

With that, let me say, I will never recommend or buy a Roku product again. I highly suggest you don’t either. Even if that $100 Roku Player looks tempting.

FWIW, I honestly think a lot of the sales this quarter were thanks to Boxee Alpha/Beta which quite frankly rocks on the Apple TV. I wouldn’t buy an Apple TV, but would now thanks to Boxee even in its early stages.

While Apple TV may only have ~400-500K units, I’m pretty sure every one of those users is using it as intended with a TV. On the other hand, Media Center has shipped what? 20M+ units last I remember seeing from the banners… But that’s just counting SKU’s that contained Media Center correct? Microsoft shouldn’t be concerned with that number when comparing, Microsoft should be looking at the number of users actually using the app and using TV. Usage data for the number of WMC PC’s connected to TV’s? Data for the number of unique guide downloads… IIRC it’s a heck of a lot closer to 500K than 20M .

Personally, when I moved to West Seattle I completely dropped all cable services and vowed not to pay Comcast again [except for my business Internet]. OCUR was great, it really was. Despite the royal pain the setup process was, thanks to Comcast’s inexperience with the technology, afterwards it was great and ran smoothly for me. At the end of the day though it just wasn’t worth the monthly service fees. And heck, I could only do OCUR because I was internal, not because I spent another $1K+ on a brand new PC. So the fallback would then become a tuner with NTSC/ATSC/QAM… Like many OEM’s are doing, I personally skipped over the TV Pack and went right to 7 so it’s only now that I could get digital content easily. Up until now though if I wanted to use Media Center as my TV source, as a normal consumer, I’d have to be using two clunky STB’s in combo with a dual tuner and the IR blasters and all that other junk. Not very elegant…

So like the growing few, I dumped the cable and bumped up my business Internet service speeds. $65/mo for 12/2Mbps… I use Hulu, Netflix, Joost, network sites, MTV, you name it. Combine that with P2P and there’s really no need to ever go back to cable. The one thing that makes me sad, really sad, is that Media Center doesn’t fit into this new TV ecosystem. It’s only now with 7 that it’s becoming a bit more compelling for users who don’t use tuners. Internet content through MSN and such is great but where’s the MCML from Hulu, Netflix, and all those? Where’s the rich metadata for my downloaded content? Where’s the social aspects as well?

One thing Boxee has done and done really well is create an experience around the way people use downloaded and online media making it incredibly easy to dump the wire. What really got me was when I loaded up Boxee the second day. I went in to watch some of the Arrested Development that auto downloaded via RSS. It parsed the share and sorted each show, then under that each season, then under that each episode. What’s more the thumb for every episode is perfect (see screenshot). Going to more for the episode pulls up complete metadata. All it had to go on was TVArrested Development310 – Fakin’ It.avi there’s no other metadata, no XML files, no album art in the folder. It does this for my MKV movies too, MoviesWALL-EWALL-E.mkv and sure enough it has the art and metadata, no DVDID.xml, no pain.

Yes Boxee is Alpha, no, it doesn’t have any of the amazingly hard work that went into making it compatible with the multitude of tuners. It has a lot of usability and stability issues, it’s not gone through as many iterations as Media Center so it’s not as refined. But man, for an Alpha it’s bloody awesome, I highly suggest getting the Windows Alpha asap and give it a honest go, set up uTorrent with RSS, see if you could make the switch to a cableless life and live on the bleeding edge.

Honestly, I’ve loved Media Center since the days when it was only Freestyle. I supported it as a MVP for 6 years, 3 years on the eHome beta team, and will continue to support it. I’m just a bit bummed out by the fact that Media Center has failed to deliver on features that have been asked for since 2002. What is Microsoft going to do to remain competitive when Boxee goes mainstream and releases STB devices like the Apple TV? I’m happy to see the start of Internet content via MSN but where are the third party deals with the providers that people use now?

When I was sitting for 4 hours in Las Vegas International for Snowpocalypse 2008 to allow my plane to arrive; I busted out the iPhone, connected to the free WiFi, downloaded Joost and started watching The Fifth Element for free. It wasn’t a big TV and it wasn’t HD, but honestly it didn’t matter. I had the content and the experience was awesome and easy. How is Media Center going to deliver that same grin on people’s faces when the predominant source of content is the Internet and third party services?

So there you have it… My little rant about why Media Center doesn’t fit me anymore. Writing this and discussing it further later made me realize that there’s actually nothing really wrong with Media Center at all, for your every day average person it’s great. Sure it could be a little simpler to get going like TiVo but as far as the ultimate experience, Media Center is definitely it. This will continue to be true so long as TV and movies continue to be delivered the way everyone has received this content for years. However I personally believe that as more people realize that dumping the wire is easy the trend to only use the Internet will continue. Plus to make things more interesting, analog broadcasts won’t necessarily continue from all the cable providers. They could very well move them over to encrypted QAM as far as I know. If this were to happen you’d need to rent a fugly STB for each tuner you planned on using. Even less elegant.

I realized that I’m just way ahead of the curve. I was watching TV on my PC with an old BT848 Hauppauge tuner back in 1997 then tried but failed to use WinTV. Then I used Media Center before it was Media Center, then OCUR came and went. Now I’ve completely ditched TV altogether and only stream with the Internet. If the past is any indication the wave should finally catch up with me in another 3 to 5 years, what I’ll be doing at that point is anybody’s guess.

Then I actually started thinking. Why on Earth is this lady driving to work or wherever she’s driving. Why is she telling people ot pray for the doomsday? Why does anyone tell someone to pray for some supposed doomsday event that’s going to occur? I mean fuck, if I knew for certain that on 12/21/2012 the world were going to end, I’d just say screw it and have a blast. I’d quit work, travel the world, have the best 2 years of my life. Then towards the end in the last year, depending on what this apocalypse entails I’d probably just try and find an isolated corner of the planet to sit it out and be away from all the idiots who will be causing insanity. So seriously. WTF purpose is there for telling people to pray for 2012?

Of course the fact this lady printed out a sign for everyone to see and still left it saying 2000-12 must mean she’s lacking some basic mental faculties. So I suppose like praying, making this sign to let everyone else know that they should pray gives her a good feeling inside. More power to her I guess.

For me, I’ve just realized that this sort of thought process that I go through on my way in to work really does tell me there is no God and that I’ll never believe otherwise. I constantly try and put myelf in the other persons shoes and try to imagine their thought process and think like they do. But I can’t. No matter how hard I try I can’t fathom having this belief in a supreme being. Nor can I fathom having complete faith in some religion that likely didn’t even exist 200 years ago. Or a religion that’s based on interpretations of a book that’s based on beliefs and general understanding that comes from a time before the Earth wasn’t flat.

I’m not saying believing in God is a bad thing, by all means some people need that. I start becoming frustrated when people tie that belief to a religion. Why can’t people take a little more responsbility for themselves and decide religion is just taking that comfort level a step further.

Come to think of it though, this reminds me of Elizabeth Gilbert’s talk at TED on a different way to think about creative genius. Perhaps the reason why people adopt a faith in God and rely on religion is because they can’t deal with the disappointment of their own failure or the lack of their moral judgement. Or look to those beliefs as a way out of having to think about these things to which they really can never have the answer. Maybe this weight is too much to bear. I’ve certainly tried imagining the big bang and the begining of the Universe as well as a belief in God. Yet neither solution to the question really provides me with an answer I can say is fact. I guess I just have a problem with nothingness. I try and visualize this because I’m a visual person. It just doesn’t work for me. I try imagining the entire thing as a linear timeline, then non-linear. It just doesn’t work. Shit. How can there be something from nothing? What was before the bang or God? If it’s it’s non-linear than how did this even happen? If someone snapped their fingers than what started it all for them?

I fucking hate logic loops. Screw the chicken and that damn egg it came in.

Yay, more space.

UPS just delivered the 4 * 1.5TB Seagate 7200.11’s today and I’m busily using robocopy to mirror all the data onto 1 of the 1.5TB drives and 1 spare 1.5TB I had spare. The scary thing is that the music content is over 600GB and the video content is over 1.2TB.

My plan is to hold the migrated data on the two separate drives and create the new RAID5 array with 3 drives then move the IIS data and the rest of the data back. Then adding the 4th 1.5TB to expand the entire set out to 6TB total, total amount of space should be 4.5TB or about 4.08TB formatted with NTFS. The extra .91TB of space should hopefully last long enough for me to be able to add 4 more 1.5TB drives next year.

Here’s hoping for a data loss free transition and little down time tomorrow while I create the new RAID volume. And here’s hoping I don’t use up the new drives as quickly not to mention have any issues with 7200.11 firmware .

Microsoft is really playing catch-up now. How the mobile team got so stagnant is beyond me. It really seems like nothing major has changed in their product for years. Unlike the Internet Explorer stagnation though this one goes way beyond that. Why? Well Windows Mobile has sold millions upon millions of units and gained a lot of market share. But for some crazy reason they’ve just let that go to waste and have let Apple jump ahead and lead the innovation party. Heck, it’s gotten so bad HTC has had to come up with UI to hide Windows to make the phone desirable. Of course there’s also Google now with Android, but I doubt they’re too worried about it. You know, at least not until more manufacturers jump from Windows Mobile to Android then Netbooks start shipping with WiFi and 3g with Android, then thin desktop clients…

Apple really does the entire end to end solution really well. Sure they force the Apple way or the highway but usually Apple’s way is pretty damn good. Google really does cloud services amazingly well. Sure they only really make money on the advertising but they’re not stupid. They’re building each piece of the puzzle little by little. At some point soon, they’ll be set to complete the picture and deliver something amazing that could potentially deliver a massive blow to Windows, Office, and Microsoft cloud services. Google has been combining pieces that’s just amazing.

The key difference between Apple, Google, and Microsoft? Honestly, I’m not sure, culture maybe, age in the case of Microsoft and Google. A dictator in the case of Microsoft and Apple. Who knows.

The thing I notice about Apple and Google though is that while Microsoft may have better business models to make more money on more things. Apple and Google are necessarily spreading themselves thin. Apple delivers a small product line really well and concentrates on a few things it can really deliver 100% on. Google makes strategic choices on where to concentrate resources to connect things. Neither company seems concerned with delivering products and services it really has no need to.

I mean I don’t see Apple going out to make their own maps service for the iPhone or their own stock service or their own search. Instead they partner with Google and Yahoo. When searching Google you’ll get links to 6 different services when searching for “stock MSFT“, you’ll get linked to a third party flight tracking service when searching for “BA49“. Or when you search for Led Zeppelin you’ll get an album listing with ways to purchase from multiple online stores and when you go to the song listing you’ll get linked to multiple lyrics websites.

When Microsoft does the latter what happens? Well first you go to live.com and get normal search results, if you click the first link for xRank you get to see some useful information and some search volume indicator thingy. Next if you want to dig further you click on the album but now you’re no longer on Live Search (or is it Windows Live Search), you’re on MSN Music (hello Mr. Butterfly). The option is presented to buy and download from Microsoft Zune which is good and multiple options are given to buy the CD from various online stores, also good. There’s even an option to compare prices. If you go to the track listing you can even hear samples, sweet… So what’s so bad about this?

Well, immediately this tells me there’s a lack of focus and execution. There’s a total of 3 products and services involved with that entire process, Live, MSN, and Zune. They all feel different and don’t share a seamless experience. Why is MSN Music delivering content that should be delivered directly by Zune?

There are so many places where efforts are duplicated, clear vision is lacking, and the execution is 20% off target. It’s frustrating to me as someone who really honestly cares and desires elegant perfection.

Microsoft has every piece of the puzzle needed. It can do amazing things when it needs to and definitely isn’t dead. What’s needed is a bit of a reset really. Time to refocus, clear the air, and start executing and connecting everything together in the right ways. I really just hope that it’ll happen soon.

MSFT has been flat for 10 years. What the company needs is a real renaissance and to deliver 100% on its innovations. Microsoft has been ahead of the curve thanks to many products that were ahead of their time and thanks to MSR. Microsoft has many times entered new markets and gained popularity only to lose them later by the lack of follow through and evolution.

The software Microsoft makes is amazing, there’s no reason why that can’t continue.

Still wanting to beat the West Seattle Bridge to 5 north to 90 east traffic I just showed her instead how to use Google Maps on the phone. Quickly set the starting point as the current location, the end to her salon on California Ave. Swapping the directions to public transit, it showed the bus she’d normally take first thing. Then hitting the load more times showed all the times for the morning and the best time for her to catch the bus to arrive at work by 9:45.

Awesome, just awesome.

For the second time in the last 4 years I’ve gone without TV. Since June I’ve only used online services to gather my TV content. Hulu, combined with Netflix, and a little EZTV has made it an extremely easy transition. Because of this and because of frustration getting Media Center to *fit the way I* consume and want to view all this content.

Since I’m no longer using a TV tuner there’s really no need to use it at all. As I said before, despite being Alpha, Boxee shows a lot of promise and is deliverying on things I’ve been waiting for in Media Center for the past 6 years. Example, thumbnails that actually work from the TV and movie content, integration with almost every online service I use, magical absorbition of my organized content despite the lack of any real metadata in the files, and so much more…

Even in Windows 7 I’m still wishing for most of the features boxee offers. It’s really something else. For now though it’s kind of nice using Boxee with Media Center after adding Mike’s app.

Though when I brought the totes in I realized something, they weren’t heavy at all and I barely ordered anything so why was I bringing in 4 totes? Well turns out Amazon is really paranoid about hurting any of your goods. I only ordered 8 items in this shipment with a total of $33.88 yet they managed to bring it all in 4 totes. One contained a foam core with two dry ice packs inside, this tote contained my frozen fake meat and frozen veg. Then another contained an ice pack inside this keep temp bag, that contained my tikka masala sauce, cucumber, and red leaf lettuce. Then the dry containers contained a bag of chips and a 12 pack of ginger ale respectively.

Totally insane… Everything was in plastic bags, 5 in total. Oh and the chips were by themselves in a paper bag inside a tote. I don’t get it, how is this environmentally friendly and more importantly to Amazon how is this economical for them? The items I purchased were all at the normal cost I buy stuff at in a QFC, Safeway, or Metropolitan Market… so how is this profitable for Amazon?

I understand they don’t want my bag of chips getting crushed by the Canada Dry but surely they could just use some divider thing to keep things in place. 4 totes seems insane for 8 items. If I were going to metro market I would’ve fit all of these things into a single reusable bag and carried the ginger ale in another hand.

Anyway, overall I’m really impressed, they delivered the next morning without me even hearing them and they have things that normally would require multiple trips to actually find and pick up. Oh and I special ordered some matcha green tea powder which is also shipping free in a separate order, I’ve not been able to find this stuff anywhere so that was pretty sweet as well. The lettuce and cucumber seem better than any of the crappy stuff I’d find at Safeway and is on par with the produce from Whole Foods.

So for people in the right zip code, I really don’t see a reason not to use Amazon Fresh. I guess just use it while it still exists since I’m really curious how on Earth they actually make money.