soapbox

So, it’s about time that I start posting again, I might as well mention what I’ve been up to…

Being sick.

Whee!

It’s been a long drawn-out process involving huge amounts of coughing, two rounds of increasing nastiness antibiotics for a prolonged sinus infection, Kirsten taking two rounds of antibiotics for some sort of strep throatish infection, and now Sarah working on her second round of antibiotics for her first ear infection. Frankly, it’s just all uncool since I’m pretty sure that I spread the nastiness to my the rest of the family.

It’s raised a big question though since antibiotics are normal enough drugs these days that the insurance companies will only pay for you to get generics. ALL of the drugs that we’ve been taking lately have been made in India. All of them. It makes me wonder how much manufacturing capacity for drugs we actually have in the US anymore. What happens if some natural disaster or unnatural disaster cuts off trade for a couple of weeks? Ear infections don’t get cured for a while because everything is based on just-in-time supply chains?

It actually makes me think that the wacko survivalists might not be too far off track. I’m really thinking about talking to my doctor (well, Sarah’s doctor, I’m not so worried for myself) about getting a little supply of common stuff just in case.

I’d get a gun too, but Kirsten wouldn’t go for that.

With all of the fuss about Vista and Windows 7 – and there’s no denying that MSFT could have done a better job over the past few years – there are a couple features that are actually pretty cool.

Of particular note is something called readyboost, which allows you to use a USB flash drive as an instant RAM boost. The thumbdrive serves as an additional memory cache that can be accessed much more quickly than data on a hard drive. I don’t know how much of a long-term solution this is, but it’s pretty slick, given that it would take me a LONG long time to do the same thing with a linux box.

Speaking of flash drives, and this is specifically for Ryan Johnson, it’s time to eat your corn flakes:

a hi-tech band embedded with a 1 Gigabyte USB flash drive pre-loaded with exclusive Star Trek content

… you just need 8 UPC codes from specially marked Kellog cereal boxes.

Given the popularity of W7 RC, there has been a lot of concern that all current Windows Vista users will be orphaned, abandoned by the Redmond giant.

A “Save Vista” campaign has been organised by InfoWorld. “We detected a deep anxiety over Vista among technologists and consumers alike,” said editor Galen Gruman. “We decided to do something about it, launching a petition drive to ask Microsoft to keep selling Vista after the planned October 23 end-of-sales date.” The petition has already gathered over ten signatures. “‘Seven’ is just sucking up to latté sippers. Like Hummer, like Chrysler, like Edsel, Vista is a great American name that shows the might of full-sized American industrial production. It’s a monument to everything that makes us the country we are.”

Several industry leaders have added their voices to the effort:

“I fully support this initiative. My computer business employs 200 people; the best possible thing for it is to make sure Vista continues and goes forward.” – M. Shuttleworth, London

“I can’t tell you how much Vista has done for my business. So many people depend on it.” – S. Jobs, Cupertino

“Vista is the one thing that will keep people seeking out and using systems that are at the forefront of technology. It’s been the best thing for all of us.” – L. Torvalds, Portland.

Some deep thoughts from our old buddy Joe:

Think about those words: “Wildest dreams.” Most of us, I suspect, have some pretty wild dreams. I don’t expect any of my wildest dreams to come true but if I win a billion dollars tomorrow or get asked to play second base for the Cleveland Indians or win the Pulitzer Prize or have Jenna Fischer just call … to say … she loves me or have Morgan Freeman call to say he’s turning Soul of Baseball into a movie, well, I won’t be able to lie and say I never dreamed them.

So, what would be beyond my wildest dreams? I don’t know. If I could come up with something, by definition, it would not be beyond my wildest dreams.

But I have to say this … I suspect what has happened to the Snuggie is beyond these people’s wildest dreams. I mean …

And, unrelatedly except for “huh?”, check this out. Has anybody actually seen this commercial on TV? It’s allegedly a real product, at tiddybearcomfortstrap.com.

The drive-up coffee shack. Maybe they exist places other than the Seattle area, but I haven’t seen them. It’s a pretty simple construction, a small building maybe 4′ by 8′, a sliding window at the right height for a F350 truck, a small door for the barista to get in and out, and not much else. Typically, they’re in the parking lot of a gas station so if nature calls the barista can always close things down and just run into the station’s bathroom. There are fancier ones made of cinderblock or with little indoor areas for customers, but the basic recipe is the same and they are EVERYWHERE!

Due to the small footprint, the location has got to cost very little and a barista makes ~$10/hr so you really don’t need to sell very many lattes an hour to make these things a going concern, maybe only five.

So, why is this dubious?

Well… you get the sense that there’s a marketing arms race going on. You can’t lower prices, how how do you differentiate your hut from the one a quarter of a mile down the road? The answer, like everything in marketing, is sex appeal. I have to assume that when the huts started, one advertised “hottest barista around” and hired some UW student. Then came the bikini coffee huts. It’s a slippery slope though limited only by public decency regulations. Up the street now there are three huts that have “lingerie baristas”. And pasties on MWF. What’s next? Peep baristas?

I’m actually very curious about the whole thing. Who is the target demographic? Is the coffee noticeably better or worse than say, a Starbucks? Does having a hot girl increase sales more than a slightly fancier hut would?

So this is a little late in the posting, but things have been busy (though not as busy as GMoney-busy) recently… but anyway, a couple weeks ago there was a big firestorm on slashdot and elsewhere sparked by the announcement that Windows 7 Starter Edition would allow only three applications (excluding antivirus apps) to run simultaneously.

To review, three is not a large number. At last year’s Professional Developers Conference, MSFT said that that “70% of Windows users have between eight and 15 windows open at any one time”… but that’s a pretty useless empty stat given the vagueness of “windows”. This year, the MSFT monkey asserts that

most users wouldn’t be affected by the three-app limit. “We ran a study which suggested that the average consumer has open just over two applications [at any time],” Painell claims. “We would expect the limit of three applications wouldn’t affect very many people.”

This is all stupid, and may not even happen due to the EU’s legal team.

But… a clever post buried in the slashdot thread got me thinking – this is actually a good thing for linux and Mac users! This way we get a cheap(er) version of Win7 to run via Parallels/VM/etc, and the app limit constraint is meaningless.

Finally, some humor:

A Microsoft study has shown that users seldom use all 26 letters during a session, and so the economy-priced Windows 7 Functional Illiterate Edition will only support A through W and the numerals 0 through 7. However, the software will be endorsed by Sesame Street and today is brought to you by the letter “/”.

My friend Brianne is up to #4 in the voting and made the first cut, check it out:

Really, pretty remarkable on several fronts, and a very clever bit of advermarketing by Solo.