Steve Jobs (Short Take)

It's not hard to figure out what the obvious topic for today is. It's been interesting and occasionally encouraging to read the various news accounts about Steve Jobs stepping down as CEO of Apple. One I just read claims he worked a full day yesterday at Apple. That would be great if true because it would at the very least argue that he's not on deaths door as most people seem to be assuming after yesterdays announcement.

Still, most signs point to the fact that he is in fact human and that his health is not improving. I've admired his company and his effectiveness as a business leader for many years now. He's not perfect but he's done more than pretty much anyone else and he's managed to accomplish all that while doing less harm than most people who have amassed large sums of money have managed.

He hasn't always had the Midas touch though, at least over the short term. The NeXT computer was a brilliant product that never actually gained the kind of market share it needed for long term viability. The original units were shipped with a very cool but slow R/W optical drive only, no hard drive. This combination was revolutionary given the time but did not make a good impression from a performance or reliability perspective and that didn't help the viability of NeXT. Other than the original AppleTV it's hard for me to think of any other even partial failures since then though. Of course NeXT was eventually absorbed into Apple and a lot of that technical DNA survives today. The MacOS X OS was at its start a port of Next's operating system.

A lot of people have been writing eulogies to Jobs. I'm going to choose to believe that his story isn't done yet. He's apparently still heavily involved with Apple and he's still on the board at the Disney company. He may just surprise everyone and stick around long enough to add substantially to his legacy.

Image by Phil Bradley via Flickr

HP Tablet Hunting And Garrison Keillor

My quest for a cheap HP tablet may yet bear fruit as HP may have more available later this week. I have my fingers crossed. I'm a total junkie when it comes to tech toys and even spectacular failures have a bit of appeal if the price is right. I'm periodically hitting refresh on the HP page hoping to get lucky.

As I write this my wife and I are on our way to see Garrison Keillor of Lake Wobegone fame. I've been a casual fan of Keillor's for many years now so I've been looking forward to this for awhile. We almost missed the show though as it was originally on our calendar for tomorrow night. Thankfully through an unlikely series of coincidences we found out around lunch time that it's tonight. It's nice when stuff like that works out in your favor as tickets for a show that has already occurred are even less useful than expired milk as there is always a chance the milk might turn into cottage cheese or something else marginally useful.

I've decided I need to put a lot more effort into my blog entry titles. Apparently "foo/bar/whatever" isn't a very enticing labeling based on the number of page impressions I get on those kinds of posts versus ones where I use something that looks like a question or statement. If any aspiring bloggers are reading this, please learn from my mistake. It only took me a year and a half to figure out.

Of course following this advice is easier said than done. It's not like I don't want to come up with pithy titles. If I were good at that I'd probably be in marketing or advertising or maybe comedy rather than technology.

My favorite new social networking site is FourSquare. Any company that can get me to tell them where I'm at voluntarily has to be doing something right. Apparently I'm a sucker for virtual badges and points. Particularly when I get to compete against my friends.

It's after the show now. Keillor was by turns hilarious, thoughtful, serious and always entertaining. The Mountain Winery, the venue for the show was excellent as well. It's high up on a mountain side in Saratoga California which is southwest of San Jose and overlooks the silicon valley.

My plan for the morning of the 24th is going to be to work on the programming portion of my business idea. I should be able to finish up the initial data gathering portion of my coding with a bit of luck. At that point I'll be able to start working on other aspects of the project.

A minor rant before I go. The Google+ mobile client for iOS has a lot to recommend it. Two things I don't like though are the lack of an HD/iPad version and the fact that it only works in portrait mode. It's the second decade of the 21st century. There is no excuse for a mobile application not to work properly when the device is rotated.

Image by gelund via Flickr

HP/Cisco/Good Morning

I'm still kind of regretting not getting one of those $99 HP clearance tablets. When I did a brief survey on EBay they were selling for twice that yesterday. I like my iPad well enough but having a very inexpensive alternative to compare it to would have been nice.

If HP had gone this route earlier they might not have failed in the tablet space. Of course they are losing a ton of money on each unit sold but it might have been worth it if they could have established WebOS as a viable alternative to Android and iOS. There has already been a port of Android announced for the platform; no surprise there given the capabilities of the hardware and the closeout price.

HP's fire sale can't be making other vendors happy though as they are no doubt cannibalizing at least some of the tablet market. Apple probably won't see much of a blip but the Android tablets are going to see a short term reduction in sales and given how poorly most of them have been doing to date that isn't a good thing.

It will be interesting to see how much of an impact, if any this has on people's price expectations, particularly for Android. Apple might just make out like bandits on this one as they have high margins and a differentiated product. The Android tablets are much more commoditized and don't have a lot of room for price cuts if they want to stay profitable.

On a different note, my halfhearted aspirations to be a Cisco CCNP are continuing to lead where most halfhearted aspirations do. I managed to fail the switch exam again. Oddly I know I was much better prepared than the first time and my score was actually lower.

One of my early jobs was working as a programmer in a department that created both computerized and paper and pencil tests. I’ll never claim to be a trained in the art of psychometrics but I do have a pretty good layman’s grasp of the concepts and this kind of variance in the face on increased knowledge doesn’t bode well for the testing methodology in use by Cisco.

I’m done for now on the Cisco front. I just don’t have the motivation I need right now to be successful and I’d rather be spending the time learning technologies and skills that are directly applicable to my current hobbies and side projects.

Image via Wikipedia

Related articles

• Race is On to Port HP TouchPad to Android from webOS (linearfix.wordpress.com)
• Hey Amazon: Now You Know How To Beat Apple In The Tablet Space (AMZN, HPQ, AAPL, GOOG) (businessinsider.com)

It's All About... (Short Take)

Image via WikipediaMe this time. I'll get back to my prognosticating in a few days. Right now I'm a little obsessed/distracted with other things.

The weekend is about done and results are mixed. For my nascent business idea I made good progress. I'm not done with the initial project I'd scoped out in my head but I'm not far off and I've worked my way through a number of problems so the remaining sections should go faster.  Two hundred and fifty lines of working code plus an initial database schema isn't bad given how rusty I am.

I had two other projects I needed to make progress on. One I'll talk about in my other BLOG. The third was studying for my Cisco CCNP switch exam. I think I'm going to be OK there. I just need to get an early start tomorrow and go over my notes one more time before heading to the testing center. This will be my second attempt. I barely missed passing the first time so in theory I should be OK this time but I've been letting myself get a bit too fragmented recently. I'll know soon enough I guess.

I'm going to keep this short so I can get to sleep and get an early start.

Happy Monday everyone.

Another Pleasant Valley Sunday

It's been a long time since I've been plugged into any sort of developer community. Epochs essentially in Internet time. I made some tentative steps yesterday morning and evening to get back into the swing of things as part of the side project I talked about in my previous post. The first hour or two was fairly frustrating. $15 wasted on a book that though only a couple of years old is largely out of date and a dozen web sites perused and discarded because they didn't contain timely information either. This is a pretty good example of why search is rapidly becoming obsolete and curation and discovery are gaining popularity. Locating all the worlds information is great, but if it's mostly obsolete and difficult to sort through the utility in that is limited.

Another thing I discovered is that a lot of sample code is short on error detection. I'm not complaining since I paid zero for the code in question but it was a good reminder to me that it's not enough to just call a function and assume everything is going to go well. Better I be reminded of that early in the process rather than later.

It may not seem that way at the time but I tend to think that the worst case scenario is really when everything goes right early. When the wheels finally start to come off you're just not prepared. I think I prefer that mildly paranoid feeling I get when everything is finally going well.

I did manage to generate about a hundred lines of code yesterday. It connects and downloads some data. I've started work on a database schema and should have a first version of the initial portion of my project by the end of the day. I also have my Cisco CCNP switch exam tomorrow which I've been putting off for awhile. I'm not going to do that again, so I may get squeezed for time due to the need to do a bit more studying.

When I wrote the bulk of the above I was sitting in the passenger seat of our trusty Honda Fit. The iPad is great for some things but coding isn't one of them. This is particularly true when said code lives on a VM that isn't remotely accessible. I'm going to need to do something about that. Since I couldn't code I figured it was a good time to work on the BLOG. I hate to waste time.

The good thing about the book I bought is it is the Kindle edition so at least I found out it wasn't going to be very useful sooner rather than later. E-Books are one of many reasons that product development times have become much shorter in the Internet age.

One bummer for yesterday was that I missed out on the $99 clearance HP tablets. I figure there is a good chance that somebody will port Android to them and for $99 it seemed worth it to grab a potentially useful historic foot note.

Time to get back to work.

Image via Wikipedia

Setting Goals

I've been a hobby acoustic guitar builder for a few years now. Recently I've taken to giving myself public dares on my other BLOG as a means of setting some goals and motivating myself to spend more time on projects related to my aspiration to someday build great sounding and looking guitars. Those challenges have helped me focus and make more progress over the past three weeks than I have over the previous several months.

Another one of my goals has been to be a founder in a new business. It's important to note the use of the letter "a" in that previous sentence rather than the word "the". I'm really more of a team guy and have never viewed myself as CEO material, at least in my initial venture. I've had this plan in my head for awhile now where I'd be a principal in a new company, work hard at it for a few years, reach a graceful exit point that included a modestly large sum of money and then take that experience and create a situation where I was the prime mover and shaker. It's a nice dream, but it isn't going anywhere and I'm tired of waiting.

This doesn't mean I'm quitting my day job and starting a new company right now. What it does mean is I'm daring myself to do some serious work on my latest business idea to get a better idea of where it might lead. I generally have about three semi serious ideas a year. I get excited about them for awhile and then move on to something else for a variety of reasons.

An idea might require programming skills that I don't possess. I'm not a bad programmer but I'm not a great one either and I've done most of my work in Perl and SQL over the years. I have a love/hate relationship with Perl but it's the tool I know and learning a new one would take a lot of time that I'd honestly rather be spending on things like writing and learning to build guitars. My wife and I also like to hang out occasionally so that's an important consideration as well.

I've joined and followed a number of professional organizations focused on entrepreneurship since finishing my MBA but really haven't gotten that engaged in any of them. That's been bugging me recently given my stated desire to be part of a new business. I've finally come to the conclusion that at least part of the problem is I don't feel like I'm bringing anything to the table when it comes to potential interactions in those kinds forums. Sure, I have an MBA from a school with an excellent reputation in the area of entrepreneurship but what have I don't with those skills since I finished that MBA? Brainstorming ideas, primarily with myself and interviewing a handful of people as part of my research was a good start but I need to do better than that.

My latest idea requires programming skills that I actually have, at least for the initial stages. My dare to myself is to write some code and develop the potential business model to the point where I can make an informed decision on whether this idea is worth further exploration. I have some other dares in mind if things look good at that point but I don't want to layer to make this overly complicated right now.

I'm giving myself one month to do this. I've scheduled a weekly event on my Google calendar to remind me to update this BLOG on my progress.

If it's a lousy idea, I'll determine that along the way and report more fully on what it is I was planning and why I don't think it will work. Otherwise I'm going to be somewhat vague. We were taught in business school that teams and execution are much more important than ideas but right now all I have is my idea and I'm not willing to share it with the entire world yet.

So in summary, I'm not quitting my day job any time soon but I am going to put a lot more emphasis and focus on figuring out if my latest idea has any merit over the coming month. That will include writing some code to test my idea and putting together a preliminary plan for how the business might work from a monetary perspective. Once that work is done I'll have to figure out the next portion, if any. Wish me luck.

Image by orkboi via Flickr  

Why The iPad Needs A Keyboard (M.I.C. Keyboard Buddy Case)

I've had a combo Bluetooth keyboard/case for my iPad for about a month now and it's amazing how many times I've been approached by total strangers who want to know more about it. There are others but I use the M.I.C Aluminum Keyboard Buddy Case for the iPad 2.

From an aesthetic perspective it's a perfect match for the iPad. I've included some pictures here of my iPad in the case to give you a better idea of what it looks like.

From a functional perspective the keyboard works reasonably well. It occasionally needs to be power cycled because it either starts repeating the last key pressed or stops sending to the iPad but that happens maybe once or twice an hour tops. I'm not sure if that is a problem with the keyboard or bugs in iOS. I did briefly use a Microsoft keyboard with the iPad but that was awhile ago. I don't think I had these same problems but I could just be forgetting or the victim of small sample size in that case. It automatically puts the iPad 2 into low power mode just like Apple's smart covers.

The keyboard/case isn't a tight fit which is why I use an additional case from Timbuk2. That works great and is reasonably sized though a fair amount bigger than the iPad 2 by itself. It's an excellent combo to keep in my car so long as I avoid direct sunlight.

Most of the interactions I've had have been with wait staff at restaurants who are curious about the combo. Sometimes this has included staff who weren't even responsible for the table I was at. I'm generally very focused on whatever I'm doing so these encounters aren't being initiated by me. Yesterday I even had somebody follow me to the door of the restaurant I had eaten lunch at to ask me about my iPad/M.I.C keyboard combo.

When complete strangers are approaching me this frequently I start to suspect that the subject of their curiosity just might be a winning combination.

The iPad 2 by itself is still a conversation starter even several months after it's release but the level of interest has gone up ten fold easily since I've started using the M.I.C. Keyboard Buddy Case.

I would love to see Apple offer a keyboard like this for the iPad. It's pleasing to the eye and very useful if you want to turn the iPad into something a little closer to a real laptop. It's still not as flexible as a full on computer but I can do casual to intermediate content creation tasks now which has greatly increased the utility of my iPad 2 for me.

If I were Apple I'd move the charging/data port to the side of the iPad and create a docking station to interface with the iPad in some future version. This is essentially what ASUS has already done with the Transformer tablet though and Apple seldom imitates others.

The keyboard buddy is a visually outstanding product but somewhat flawed from a functional perspective. On balance I'm happy with the purchase and would recommend it for anyone looking to improve the functionality of their iPad. There are other options out there that might be better but I have no first hand knowledge of them.

The M.I.C. keyboard buddy is worth the $50 I paid for it. You're mileage may vary though.

Related Articles:

• Keyboard Cases for the iPad 2 (online.wsj.com)