Comments

A quick post to say I've adjusted comment settings to hopefully stop the comment spammers.. who are not "good enough" by a long shot.

Further cell phone calendar stuff...

In a previous post I mentioned using my cell phone to carry calendar information. I just did this for a conference I was attending. It was, in fact "good enough" for carrying the schedule I intended to follow, and when I did follow it, it worked pretty well other than trying to read a smallish screen. However, when things changed such as a breakout session being cancelled, the UI of the phone wasn't the best for making updates. Possibly a Treo-like device with more of a keyboard-like interface would work better, if anyone reading this has experience in that vein, let me know in the comments.

Cell phone as organizer, again

Well, I was wrong. In a previous post, I said that you couldn't load calendar items to my phone.

Turns out, you can, but it's a convoluted process.

First, you have to have the items in Outlook - no other calendar program will do. Second, you have to, as with contact information, export the calendar items you want to a comma-separated values file. Third, when you export, you have to tell it to use the defaults so that all the default fields, whatever they are, are exported - if you try to use only the fields that the phone software can contain, you won't be able to import, because it will tell you it's not a valid Outlook file. Then fourth, with the phone connected to your PC and while running the desktop software from the phone manufacturer, import the calendar file.

And in a spectacularly brain-dead design, the calendar in the phone is replaced by the items you imported! There's no merging, the calendar is wiped out and re-written with what you just imported, so be sure to select all the items you want in the phone.

So, now I have to decide whether or not to start using Outlook for organization, just so I can get stuff to my phone.. more later.

Further television thoughts...

So, Congress is debating giving networks until 2008 to completely cut over to digital from analog television. While I like the display of high-def television, I think by 2008 no one will care whether it's "broadcast" digitally. IPTV, or television sent over Internet Protocols, will be a major competitor to broadcast and cable by then.

Here's my thought on how it will go:

First, more and more people jump on the broadband wagon, mostly via cable modem as opposed to DSL but the method doesn't really matter.

Second, Tivo and media PCs are set up to receive content via an Ethernet connection Tivo-to-Go pretty much enables this already. So does BitTorrent, and there are others.

Third, the inexpensive "TV-out" cards you can get have s-video, DVI, etcetera as output . Bypassing the tuner provides a picture on an analog set that's "good enough" (you knew I had to get it in there!) for most people. HDTV output is already appearing, too. Possibly instead of adding a card to your computer there'll be a "converter" - wireless or cabled, but you plug it into the component/s-video input of your TV, the other receives output from your computer.

Put it all together, and you have time-shifted and space-shifted television where people can watch what they want on the schedule they want, much like Tivo (or EXACTLY like Tivo if Tivo jumps on this method) but the middleman of the cable company or broadcaster is eliminated.

The method of paying the content creators is yet to be determined: will we have ads and product placements embedded in shows, or will we subscribe to shows we want for a per-show price? Will we get Yahoo!TV Unlimited for $10 per month?

I don't know for sure how fast this will happen, of course, but I do know it is already happening, it's just a matter of which media companies will survive it.

Thoughts on television

When will television producers begin to get it?

A new show comes along, that people like to watch (pick your own example, because I don't want to single one out) and they start watching that instead of other stuff that's on. The year after, there are 10 shows like it! The main reason we watch the new show, however, is because it's different from everything else. If they'd just grasp that simple fact, perhaps we'd have a broad spectrum of innovative programming to watch rather than having to choose from among several clones of the same concept.

Update on the cell phone / organizer issue

In this post I hypothesized that the cell phone would be better than the organizer. It is, in fact, better.

The desktop software enable me to export some contacts from Palm Desktop - of course in the lingua franca of data exchange the comma-delimited file, rather than some contact standard - and import them into the Desktop program for the phone, then sync them to the phone. A cumbersome process, but it works. Maybe there's a better way but I haven't found it yet.

It's got one nagging problem - you can't download schedule items from the PC software, only contacts. If I want a schedule item on the phone, I have to enter it by hand, which is not only a pain but violates one of my cardinal rules: if data is in a computer, one should never have to re-enter it to move it to another computer (and your cell phone is a computer, nake no mistake about that). So, I'll have to see what can be done about that, but otherwise the cell phone is "good enough".

A cell phone may be good enough to solve two problems

In relation to this article, and this article -

The cheap organizer works, but synchronizing data to it is a pain as the cheap software that comes with it isn't designed to grab data from the Palm Desktop software I already own, or in fact from any PIM software. You get to pay money for that upgrade, and if you don't you can either manually enter your contact information or try to figure out their file format - and I haven't had time for either.

I bought a pre-paid cellular phone, a Kyocera K9 from Virgin Mobile. The I paid $14.99 for software and a cable to synchronize it with my PC, turns out that it can contain 100 contacts and a schedule - so we'll see how that works. I'm not holding my breath, though, because what little I've learned of the software says it plays nicely with Outlook and Outlook Expres, and I don't use those.

My suspicions are that the cell phone will be better than the organizer - after all, I can actually make a call to the person in the directory; whether it becomes "good enough" only time will tell.

Sounds Good Enough to me...

I've copied my LPs and some of my tapes to .wav files, split them into tracks, and put them on my hard drive. Now I'm about to convert them to MP3 or Ogg format. I see a lot of posts that purport to tell me how many bits per second I should go for - but you know what? I'm not sure it matters. For an old dinosaur like me, who probably ruined his hearing at Who / Allman Brothers concerts by standing too close to those stacks of Marshalls, the music quality doesn't matter so much. I hear what I hear and that's it. So, I'll probably go with 96Kbps or 128Kbps because I see a lot of people doing that, but I could probably get by with 56Kbps, because with the type of music I'd carry with me and the state of my ears, anything that sounds more-or-less like the LP is going to be "good enough" for me.

Good Enough and The Long Tail

"The Long Tail" is a very interesting concept, partly about how companies can profit by selling to the many thousands of people who want marginal things, rather than just the millions who want the most popular things (as I understand it, but I may be less clear on it than I think).

This fits in with the "Good Enough" philosophy because a lot of things which are "good enough" for me (or you) aren't going to be big hits, necessarily. Think cheap pickup truck versus SUV, or seeing "The Spanish Prisoner" instead of "Spider Man". There's still money to be made with the items that aren't "hits", because they're good enough for a lot of people, or because there are enough people in that niche market to make some money.

One niche market that I'm looking to be served is in video or television content. For two examples: I'd like to be able to legally buy all the epsiodesof Max Headroom, and I'd like to be able to legally buy copies of several different commercials from over the years. I've not yet found any legal way to purchase these that's affordable. Those are niche markets, because Max Headroom wasn't a commercial success and because most people don't want to watch commercials anyway. Yet, if the people that owned that content made it possible to buy, I'd wager there are lots of other people that might purchase some of it.

PS: Here's a LazyWeb request: if you know of legal sources for the above, let me know by posting a comment here.

Give Me That Old Time News

Long ago, on a cable system far away, there was a channel that wasn't used for anything. So, they chose to broadcast what looked like the output from a Commodore 64 or Apple II (remember I said this was 'long ago'), with the contents of a basic newswire feed. Just the facts, Jack. Something like what the AP or Reuters transmits to your local paper; what they read before they sit down, crank up their typewriter replacement units, and spit out however many column inches the editor demands.

I want that newsfeed back, with a little more text added to flesh out the details. I want it on my TV, for my local and national news, and I want it in an Atom-based format so it can be picked up by a program (browser, aggregator, news search engine, whatever). It does the job and little else... say it with me now - it's "good enough".

I am so tired of the local network news that spends half its time trying to give me a tease before the commercial in the hopes I stay through the commercial. Just give me the news, the weather, the sports in a simple factual style and I'll take it from there.

Are Pre-Paid Cell Phones Good Enough?

After a few months without one, it's time to get a cell phone again. At the risk of being called a "Luddite" or worse (see some of the posts of Russell Beattie) I'm going to say we just need a phone right now, not a mobile computer. With limited usage and no use for a camera phone or text messaging, our criteria will be a screen that's easy to read day or night, buttons that are easy to use, and easy to listen with. After those are met, the phone that will be "good enough" will have the lowest cost for us with the least lock-in, and currently that seems to be a pre-paid cell phone.

Please don't infer from this post that I'm against cell phones with George Jetson era features. If I needed them, I'd buy them, believe me. And I agree with Russell that the platform is incredibly important - if I ever decide to do more software development, the cell phone is what I'd aim for, despite having a mainframe background, because a lot more people use cell phones than use personal computers. I just don't need the features right now, and so I'm not going to pay for them right now either.

'Twas the Season

Another Holiday Season™ has come and gone. Mine was, as usual "good enough" - I had fun, I got a couple of nice presents, and I enjoyed visits from relatives. One present I'll talk about in the context of this journal.

We bought ourselves a digital camera, which we'll enjoy as we travel. We didn't buy the best-of-breed, but rather picked a price point more-or-less and then picked a good camera in that range. I'm no camera expert, so we didn't have a long laundry list of featuers we wanted, just a few: made by a camera company (i.e. Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Kodak, etcetera), optical zoom, relative ease of use, and a memory card that was fairly popular. You, of course, would have your own criteria. But as I've probably said too many times already - if you get what you want, at a price you consider affordable, that's "good enough".

That brings up another holiday issue, too. If you read all of the hype before and during the holiday buying season, there are any number of expensive new things you might feel that you should have bought. Well, it's not true. Ads and newspaper write-ups are the public relations game for the people that want you to buy their stuff, they're not interested in the stuff you want to buy. If you bought gifts you thought were "good enough" then good for you! You probably managed to have a holiday buying season that you figured you could afford, whether you paid in cash or you bought it on credit; and the recipients of the gifts will enjoy them just the same.

As this new year begins, I hope your new one will be "good enough" - for you and yours.