I’ve deleted, or deactivated, my FaceBook account. I know there has been a lot of Internet buzz recently about changes that FaceBook has made to its privacy agreement, but that really has no bearing on my reasons for deactivating. It just no longer interests me.

I believe that FaceBook has become the AOL or MySpace of the Internet. There is a lot of uninteresting junk, too much traffic, and I’m not interested spending mental bandwidth keeping up with it.

I have this BLOG space for sharing opinions, a personal web site, my board gaming BLOG for other hobbies, my Squeak Enhancements site for sharing specific technical stuff, and I still use Flickr for photos.

My preferred way of communicating daily status and thoughts is to utilize the micro-blogging tool Twitter. With Twitter I feel more connected with what I need to know and easily share with others.

I haven’t written a board game review in quite a while. Getting back into the saddle, I have posted a review for the excellent board game “Ad Astra” on my games BLOG:

A World Without String

I currently own and use an iPhone with AT&T. And I love this iPhone. It offers an ease of use and seemless elegance that’s unmatched. The user interface really is intuitive. Some people dont get how important that is.

My only real complaint has been that, at least where I live, the AT&T wireless network is not as robust as the Verison wireless network.

Yes, I used to be a Verizon customer. And when the iPhone was announced I couldn’t wait for the day that it became available so I could drop my Verizon contract and open up a brand new AT&T contract. I wasn’t just a “switcher”, I was eager and delighted to leave. I knew the wireless service would not be as strong yet I gladly switched.

I tried a number of high-end mobile phones when I was with Verizon. With the new Droid phone it looks like Verizon finally has a phone that competes with Apple’s iPhone. But I’m never going back. I can sum it up in one word.

Fees.

Verizon was certain to find some way to make my daily use of my phone expensive. If I wanted to transfer a picture from my phone, they had the BluTooth wireless interface crippled on my Motorola V710 phone. The only way to transfer a picture either to or from the phone without cables was to use their network. And there was a fee for that.

How about music files like ring tones? There was a fee for that too.

Synchronize my contacts with my computer? Could it have been any more difficult?

Heaven help you if you accidently used too many minutes. There was a fee for that too. And it just felt like they weren’t trying to make it easy to not make that mistake.

Unused minutes? Too bad you lost them. Money in someone else’s pocket, but not mine.

It honestly felt that their profit model was to make money off customer mistakes and even everyday power-user activities.

Now I read that they have announced that they are doubling contract termination fees for smart phone customers. Is that to stop more users from switching to the iPhone? From what I can tell, the iPhone has been a huge success in the smart phone market. Is Verizon worried that new Droid owners may still get frustrated and switch anyway?

It’s a free market and I think it’s fair that Verizon can do whatever the market will bear. I think they do have a better network. But for this customer, the iPhone just made switching away easy. I didn’t care at all whatever it took to get out from under their tent.

Do I think AT&T is flawless? No. I get dropped calls. And I would prefer even cheaper monthly wireless costs. But I have never once felt like they treated me like a revenue opportunity, ensuring to profit on everything I do. And the iPhone really is an awesome mobile device.

There is a subtle message in Verizon’s latest commercials. They actually are very clever and make me laugh. The Land of Lost Toys commercial is great. Especially because I think they hit on the only weakness that exists. The little blue 3G coverage map the iPhone shows has to make an existing iPhone user laugh. It’s a pretty good observation.

But here’s the subtle thing. I think that commercial doesn’t pick on the iPhone. Instead it’s saying the iPhone is crippled by the wireless network it lives on. I suspect that Verizon wants an iPhone in their stable, and we may see one in the future. I believe Verizon made a huge mistake on the iPhone and they know it.

That will be interesting to see if it happens. What if one day in the future the consumer can decide which iPhone wireless carrier they want? Wouldn’t that be interesting? I’d love to see AT&T compete with Verizon by being a better wireless provider.

Leave the iPhone out of the equation and see what happens. The customer wins.

“The older generation needs to understand that my generation does not respond well to anger, hate, and personal attacks. We are a generation of communicators, and to us, actions speak louder than loud words.”
– Meghan McCain (http://twitter.com/McCainBlogette)

I read those words in her recent column and they jumped off the page at me. She’s on target.

It’s not just the older generation either. The polarization of American politics has gotten out of hand. When we hear a politician speaking on a news program it seems like we want to know right away which party they belong to before we actually listen to what they are saying. As if the parties are really different enough that the solution lies with just one.

I’m with Dan Carlin on this one. I’d rather see a little badge that shows the names of the politicians biggest financial contributors. Who do we really hear speaking anymore? Do we hear the constituents?

Like he says, “If you’re not angry, you’re not paying attention”.

We had quite an interesting weekend.  Friday morning Nicholas complained that he had pain in his abdomen.  Melissa got on the Internet and looked up his symptoms and it looked as if Nicholas might be having a problem with his appendix.

We discussed the situation briefly, decided he wasn’t going to school that morning, and she called the doctor’s office.  I went to work.

While I was at work, Melissa heard back from the doctor’s office and after hearing his symptoms they recommended that Nicholas be immediately taken to Children’s Hospital ER.  At the hospital they determined that he did indeed have an inflamed appendix and that they would be performing surgery to remove it.  Melissa informed me right away and I left the office to be with her at the hospital.

Because of the H1N1 flu problems, everyone at the hospital was wearing masks.  Here’s the two of us while we were waiting to hear how the surgery went.  

The appendix is that curly looking thing in the top picture. I’d never seen one before.

It took a while before they released him from post-op.  I think it took a while for him to come out of the effects of the general anesthetic.

Finally, they brought him up to his hospital room for him to recover and be observed by the hospital. Here’s a picture from right when he was rolled into his room.

Melissa spent the night with Nicholas in the hotel room.  She slept on a very hard uncomfortable looking “padded slab”.  I went home, thinking I would be getting up in the morning to go into work (on Saturday) just to see what I may have missed from Friday.

I got home around 8:30 PM that evening.

Later that night I exchanged several e-mails with folks from work and decided that I didn’t need to go in on Saturday.

The next morning I went back to the hospital and waited there with Nicholas and Melissa for him to recover enough for them to release him.  The good news is that he was eating, but still in some pain.

We were able to leave around 1:30 PM Saturday.  It was quite an interesting weekend.  Nicholas is doing better and will have probably 2 half-days beginning the school week, and at the advice of the surgeon, no Gym class activity for about 2 weeks.

I was thinking about how you can tell if someone is really interested in something. Sometimes you will hear it described as being passionate. “He is passionate about musicianship”, for example.

Dictionary time. Passionate: having, compelled by, or ruled by intense emotion or strong feeling.

It has been my observation that being talented is not what it takes to be exceptional about something. It’s passion. The lexicon of those individuals who have created products, companies, or content, seem to always include that those individuals were passionate about it.

To follow the musicianship idea, the outstanding examples of musicians you can think of are probably all individuals who are passionate about their craft. Somewhere in the equation we probably assume that genius or innate natural talent is also required. I believe that passion in a subject also drives someone to a high level of focus and detail. A passionate guitar player will never have to be reminded to practice their craft to become better musicians. Passion can also make up for genius. Although I think talent, is required.

If someone is passionate about something they think about it a lot. Morning, noon and night. Perhaps the passionate amongst us are even seen as “unbalanced”.

If you are interested in creating an excellent orchestra you would think a lot about having passionate musicians included. Your First Viloin is probably going to be someone with a lot of passion about playing the violin. You don’t have to remind them to practice.

I’ll bet your First Violinist is not a “9 to 5″ musician. Doing only what it takes to complete the work. They are probably not in it just for the money either. We’ve all met those folks.

To carry the orchestra metaphor along, a successful orchestra has the full range of musicians. People will demonstrate different levels of passion about their craft. It doesn’t work if all your Violinists are First Violin. Everyone should be passionate, but they also need to play well together. In an orchestra a skilled musician is listening to what the others are doing while playing their own instrument. They both know and can hear where they fit in.

Obviously I’m also writing about software development teams. The metaphor works.

I think it works when you interview someone to join your little software development orchestra. I pay attention to the level of passion the individual demonstrates. Do they practice their craft after hours? Do they read, write, and talk about their craft all the time?

I added pictures of my wife, Melissa, and a few photos from Mother’s Day 2009.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/91786944@N00/

I continue to receive emails from students new to learning programing, object oriented development, Smalltalk and Squeak, as they go through my tutorial LaserGame.

Recently I was reminded again that I misunderstood my target audience when I wrote that tutorial.  My original goal was that this would be a process showing development through-to-completion of a delivered application all written in Squeak using Test Drive Development and generally sound everyday development practices.  And I thought the tutorial would be utilized by students having already learned the basics.  That turned out to be way off base.  I get letters all the time from complete newbies telling me thank you.

And earlier this week I was asked by one of these less experienced students about how I did what I thought was a very basic step in the process.  But of course, someone new wouldn’t know that.  My mistake.  So I just published another update with a clarification in that section.  I’m so grateful for the positive feedback that I get.

Here’s the updated page: http://squeak.preeminent.org/tut2007/html/038.html

I’ve made a lot of noise about doing a complete rewrite of the tutorial, in the past.  Yes, I have not completed that work.  First there were health concerns interrupting my work, then some health issues within the family.  Lately it’s just been too many other projects.  It’s amazing that I was able to carve out a clean free-time space and create that tutorial in 2007 like I did.  I think the whole thing was written and published over 4 weekends during that summer.

When I get back to the project I have several new goals in mind.  First off the tutorial will account for the inexperienced motivated student.  I’ll have more detailed notes and examples.  I’ve already started rewriting much of those parts.  I’m also uncomfortable that I gloss over some design considerations in a few places and want to amplify upon that work.  I’m also intending to make the tutorial available in book form, probably through LuLu.com.  Two other goals are worth mentioning.  I intend to have a version of the tutorial support the new dialect of Squeak called Pharo.  That actually complicates things considerably since the tutorial relies heavily on screenshots and the two dialect look so different.  I’m guessing I’ll have to create some of the Morphic objects that LaserGame uses but do not exist in Pharo too.  Lastly, I think the tutorial could easily be extended to take the student as far as making Laser Game an iPhone app.  That would increase the audience for Smalltalk development too.

At the office they have these large ice machines and chilled water dispensers. There’s 2 on every floor.

The Ice Machine

It seems that these machines need frequent servicing. Well the other day I noticed that I never see the service guy take a sample of water and drink it after working on the machine.

So these scientists have published a white paper describing how they think the problems with the Large Hadron Collider might be because of sabotage from the future.

It does sound like material for an episode of Fringe, a TV show I enjoy watching.

But this got me to thinking. Hey, if these guys are right that might explain all the problems with Windows. Maybe scientists from the future have learned that a well working Windows system could doom the world. So they go back and insert bugs and other…

Nah. Occam’s Razor gives us the right answer. It’s probably just bugs.