The Hold Steady

The more I listen to The Hold Steady, the more I think they’re one of the best bands to come out of this decade. Check ‘em out if you haven’t already!

The Swish from their first album Almost Killed Me (2004):

Chip’s Ahoy from their third album Boys and Girls in America (2006):

Sequestered in Memphis from their fourth album Stay Positive live on Letterman:

Boy, That’s a TON of Convenience!

The tickets are $27.50 each. The TicketMaster “Convenience Charge” is $9.95 per ticket.

That’s a 36% “convenience premium.” That seems like an awful lot of “convenience” to me.

eReaders?

I love books. I also love traveling as light as humanly possible. Given the mass of books, these two loves do not mix well.

With much interest, I’ve been watching the eReaders emerge over the years. Amazon’s Kindle seems to be leading the pack. I find the Sony PRS-505 much more compelling due to its notably smaller size. They both have the same 6″ E Ink display.  But hardware notwithstanding, it looks like the content isn’t quite there.

I went through my last six months of orders from Amazon. Those orders included twelve books. Of those twelve books, only five were available on the Kindle.

42% is a crappy hit rate in my book.

Only Funny Because It’s So Sad

You know it’s going to be a good day when…

• you head into the garage and notice you forgot to move the car into the garage the night before;
• you head to the driveway and realize you left all the windows and the sunroof wide open in the car;
• and it didn’t rain overnight!

Woo hoo!

iFondling the New Touch

I had the distinct pleasure of iFondling the new iPod touch a few days ago. What an impressive piece of engineering – truly a marvel. If the thing had the iPhone’s camera and a (real) Bluetooth stack it would be a completely killer device, IMO.

For the first time iFondling one of these beasties, I spent a ton of time really mucking about with the UI and apps. I walked away just astonished at how stellarly they executed on the software. The one-finger gestural inferface is far and away the sine qua non – though lots of people are working hard to catch up, and will. In true Apple fashion the software does what it does and it doesn’t do what it doesn’t do. As I like to tell my dear iSheep friends when they complain about something their device doesn’t do: “That’s not a problem. Steve says you don’t need to do that.” But what it does do, it does stupendously. I am so in lust for one of these things, but I run my life and define my technology needs – not Steve. I really don’t need another “tech toy” right now, which is the status an iPhone or iPod Touch would get relegated to given the devices’ limitations.

While in the Apple store, I asked one of the ‘geniuses’ at the iPhone table whether or not the iPhone 3G had gotten a real Bluetooth stack in the recent hardware or software upgrade processes. I knew the answer but was curious to hear the party line on why the stack is such a fucking joke. I was pleasantly surprised to hear him sigh and acknowledge unhappily that it is still crippleware (my word, not his). Hopefully that sort of reaction is bubbling up…

This is Not Capitalism

I guess after enough of these charades, eventually we’ll be be able to figure out just what exactly “to big too fail” means.

Sigh.

Symbian > U.S.

Gartner put out a report last week summarizing smartphone sales. Lest us Americans think we have a bead on this market, note in the table below that more Symbian phones are sold every quarter than all other operating systems combined.

Admittedly, the first derivative of Symbian’s sales curve, and presumably the second derivative as well, are not encouraging, but they’re not negative, either.

Very interesting data.

Seven Years Ago…

I didn’t have the car radio on that morning.

As I entered our office building, Rafael was coming down the stairwell. “Someone flew a plane into the world trade center!” he blurted at me as we passed. I crisply and immediately visualized some unfortunate guy’s out-of-control Cessna smacking into the side of a skyscraper.

It was just about 0850 when I walked through the front door and saw folks huddled around the television that had never previously showed anything but Crazy Taxi, Zelda, and the like.

Around 1100 or so Brian called from CA and told me we were shutting the company down for the day and I sent everybody home.

I only vaguely remember the rest of the day, sitting in front of the television, at home watching the insanity unfold.

U.S. Accounts for Half the World’s Defense Spending

I don’t have an iota of a clue as to who The Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation is. Until I stumbled upon some charts from their site this evening, I had never heard of them. Based on the headlines on the front page of their site, I think I’ve got a crisp bead on their agenda and political position though.

Even assuming a serious bias here, I have to confess that this report and chart stopped me in my tracks.

This group asserts that:

The United States spends more than the next 45 highest spending countries in the world combined.

I’m an intelligent guy, but I’m not sure I can begin to grok this sort of disparity. Is this data pure bullshit, being massaged for just the sort of dramatic effect it had on me? Lies, damn lies, statistics – and all that jazz?