moebius recursive

Trying to keep these forays into politics to a minimum but this is one that really struck me last night watching McCain and Obama debate:

Someone needs to sit John McCain down and explain to him that no matter what he does, he can’t ‘win’ the Vietnam War by fighting in Iraq/Iran. It just isn’t going to happen.

Technorati Tags:
dubious, mccain, opinion, politics

My recent sniglet creations:

Solutionating: Combination of solution and hallucinating. What vendors and software designers do when they convince themselves that their product (solution) does something that it absolutely does not.

Annausysis: Combination of analysis and nausea. That feeling you get during your analysis that tells you just how screwed up something is. Frequently accompanies solutionating.

Technorati Tags:
fun, humor, ideas, language, sniglet

Finally had a chance to try out the Genius function in iTunes. In a word: unimpressed.

Here is Apple’s breathless description of Genius Sidebar:

While you reacquaint yourself with the music you already own, let Genius introduce you to new music you’ll love. As you select songs in your library, the Genius sidebar displays songs from the iTunes Store that go great with it. The Genius sidebar won’t recommend songs already in your library, and you can preview and buy recommended songs directly from the sidebar.

In my experience, not quite. Granted my rather eclectic set of music in iTunes gives a wide berth to what passes for American pop music, it is not like it is all way-out exotic stuff. Genius seems to think so. For I would say better than half of the music tracks that I clicked on, Genius came back with ‘I got nothin’, but here is the tired old crap that everyone else is listening to…‘ displaying the top selling tracks and albums in the iTunes store. Great, not interested in being homogenized like the rest of the herd.

It also frequently falls into the trap that Amazon recommendations does, that of assuming that you are a moron. For example, if you buy a CD by, say, David Bowie, Amazon proceeds to recommend every single CD that David Bowie has ever made, whether the style of it is even close to the original CD. It’s as if Amazon (and Apple) are saying: ‘You found that first CD, but your probably not smart enough to find all the other stuff by the same artist by using our search function, so here they are for you, nitwit‘. Not helpful at all.

The Genius Playlist function does a slightly better job than the sidebar, but I still get plenty of “Genius is unavailable for the song “.

I suppose it can only get better as more and more info gets fed into Apple’s hungry servers over time. We shall see…

Technorati Tags:
apple, genius, itunes, music

Over two years ago, I posted about the idea of marrying an accelerometer and the iPod to be able to shuffle iPod tunes and otherwise control it. I guess Apple thought it was such a good idea that they stole it and implemented it in the new iPods announced today.

So where is my money, Apple?

Technorati Tags:
apple, ideas, ingenuity, innovation, ipod

Haven’t been posting much lately because things have been crazy-busy on all fronts. Plus, I have been trying to resist the temptation to blog about all of the political insanity and the ridiculous press coverage (or lack thereof). Leave it to Jon Stewart to knock this out of the park once again. It ’tis a thing of beauty to expose the Republican perfidy and hypocrisy in their own words and actions. Behold:

Technorati Tags:
blogging, fun, humor, politics

I has been an interesting week for some much needed innovation in the web browsing space. First up was the introduction of Ubiquity from Mozilla Labs. This is a very interesting idea and surprisingly functional considering it is a .1 release. Sort of reminds me of QuickSliver on OSX, except targeted for Firefox.

Today comes word of Google’s Chrome browser that among other things, gives each tab its own process so that an errant tab can’t take the entire browser down (I’m looking at you gratuitous, Flash-encrusted sites).

I hold out more hope for these that the Titanicly overhyped and ultimately underwhelming Flock collection of plugins browser from a few years ago.

Technorati Tags:
browser, chrome, firefox, flock, google, innovation, mozilla, ubiquity