Writing Stuff

I love open source software. I've been using Firefox for years, love Thunderbird for email and run Adium as my multi-chat client. During my high school years I even dabbled around with Linux a bit, but now that I help administrate and troubleshoot Linux servers for a living, there's been less of an interest in using that as my home operating system. I guess technically I'm still a *NIX user, since I switched to using only Macs a year ago next month. Even though I love my Mac, I'm a bit torn with how Apple handles things. When it comes to computers I appreciate things being as open as possible. The stability and performance improvements that OS X provide over Windows make it less painful to sacrifice some control for quality. Windows is even less open source than my Mac, technically. When it comes to mobile phones, I adore my iPhone. I've had every model that Apple has released and plan to purchase this year's upcoming model, even though I don't qualify for...

I've transitioned to a new website and blog name as of today. I'm still keeping Blogger as my blogging platform since it's so incredibly easy and fun to use, but I'm now blogging on a more personal, dedicated, and hopefully interesting website. Instead of using my name as a clever (cheesy) blog name and blog address, I've decided to get something that suits me and my blog a bit better. We're now known as " Writing Stuff ." Throughout the years I've tried to find my niche for my personal blog and have always failed. There's so many things that I'm interested in, feel strongly about, and like to share my views on. I'm sure my office mates have tired of hearing my talk about the most random, technical, political, and religious topics and now I've got a space online where I feel comfortable sharing all of this. I can't restrict something so personal and fun to just one topic. Finding a blog name and domain name to suit somethi...

Google is primarily an ad and software/service company, so why bother with hardware? Google has not only been in the smartphone operating system business for a few years now, but they even joined the fray and began developing their own hardware, the Nexus One , this year. Why would a company that focuses primarily on ad sales and developing software want to get into hardware as well? I look at Google like the Borg . They want to assimilate everyone and have everybody using their services. The more people that use their services like Gmail, Search, etc... the more ads they display. Not only that but the more these people actually use the service, the better it gets at targeting ads to what is going to be most relevant to these users. As you use Gmail, Google scans your email automatically and displays ads that are relevant to the topic of the email, or things that are mentioned in it. As you search on Google they can store and analyze your searching habits to help provide you (and eve...

Today Google unveiled their plans to experimentally  offer fiber-optic internet service to "a small number of trial locations" across the US. Their initial effort will target at least 50,000 households, but strive to reach up to 500,000. This service will provide internet speeds more than 100 times faster than what most of us have access to right now, at 1 gigabyte per second through fiber-to-the-home connections (much like Verizon's FiOS ). Not only is Google going to build, operate, and provide this service directly to customers, but they will also make the network and technology open and available to other providers. This will give consumers a choice of who to use instead of requiring them to sign up through Google. I would imagine that this is along the lines of phone companies having to lease out access to their lines to smaller companies, or old regulations requiring wireless providers to lease access to cell sites which allowed providers like AllTel and T-Mobi...

Google launched Google Buzz inside of Gmail today and I was lucky enough to get access to it in the first batch of users. I've played around with it for a bit and found that, unfortunately, it's not for me and probably not for a lot of other people either. At Google's event to announce Buzz this morning, they said their goal was to create a more social experience between all of your current social networking sites like Flickr, Picasa, Twitter, Google Reader, and more. Sadly, Google Buzz just adds another social network to the mix, giving me one more network that I have to manage separately. A lack of Facebook support is what keeps Buzz from being the top destination for me to get my social fix, and I'm sure it's the same for others. Inside of Facebook, I can already get Flickr posts, Twitter updates, Picasa web albums, and shared Google Reader articles from my friends. Since Google Buzz can't pull in content from my Facebook friends (where most of them ar...

Wired ran an article yesterday on Google and the NSA partnering up to help secure Google's network against the recent cyber attack they were hit with from China. While this sounds good initially (who doesn't want Google's network to be secure?), when you consider that the NSA was the agency that "worked with" AT&T to perform warrantless wiretaps on American citizens it becomes pretty scary. This is incredibly disappointing. While Google claims that this partnership will not violate their privacy policy, I find this very hard to believe. The NSA isn't really one for caring about privacy policies and Google being willing to jump into bed with the NSA shows an initiative to work with them in the first place, which I don't like. I'm already scared enough that Google probably knows more about me than I do, but allowing what's probably the biggest techno-spy organization in the world a foot in the door at Google makes me even more worried. I ha...

The iPad is exactly  what I've been waiting for. Many people I've talked to are pretty disappointed with Apple's latest announcement , but I'm thrilled. Sure, it wasn't as revolutionary as people thought and won't replace my MacBook Pro but it does fill a void that I've been wanting to fill for a while now. Netbooks are garbage. I bought one for $300 a couple of months back and have been completely underwhelmed by it ever since I opened it up. It's slow, sucks at multitasking, runs Flash incredibly poorly, and dies after about 4 hours of usage. It's not the ideal solution for someone wanting to casually surf the web, watch videos, or send an email while relaxing on the couch. Apple realized this and came up with a solution. To fully appreciate the iPad you need to put it into perspective and see it for what it is and what Apple wants to do with it, not what you hoped it would be. What you hoped for doesn't exist and won't exist for some t...