The Apogee ONE

I will occasionally write reviews here of products that I’m particularly enthusiastic about, or which I find myself using frequently. The Apogee ONE is just such a product: it’s a very high quality digital audio interface (I just made my high-school English teacher cringe by stringing five adjectives before a noun).

But first: what the heck is a digital audio interface anyway?

Simply put, it’s a device that translates an audio signal (for example, the sound of my voice captured by a microphone) and converts it into a digital signal that can be processed by a computer. Specifically, this little device has an input (actually multiple inputs, though you can only use one at a time) and a USB output that plugs into your computer (specifically, your Macintosh—I don’t believe that Apogee supports Windows PCs). Let’s say you want to record a podcast; you’d plug in the digital audio interface into your computer via its USB port, then plug a microphone into the audio interface, then start your recording program (Garageband or Logic Pro for me) and record something.

Sure, you could use your computer’s built-in microphone, but an external mic is almost always a higher quality. For example, you can use a directional mic that will only pick up your voice, and not all the rest of the noise in the room. The reason you use a digital audio interface, and the reason that some people will pay large amounts of money for one, is because you want to have a very high quality recording. Specifically, you want to have fidelity, a fancy word derived from the Latin word for “faithful.” You want the recording to sound as much like the original as possible.

That’s what the Apogee ONE does; it maintains a very high quality digital signal that’s faithful to whatever you plug into it. More importantly, it does so in a very simple manner.

Here's how I set up the Apogee ONE for podcasting.

Let’s talk about inputs: first, you don’t really need one. The Apogee ONE has a built-in microphone, which is a rarity in the world of digital audio interfaces. Specifically, it has an “internal reference condenser microphone that has been fine-tuned by professional recording engineers.” Whatever. The fact is, it’s a very good microphone by itself. Most of the voiceovers you hear on my podcast are captured using only the Apogee ONE.

Second, it has a “break-out cable” into which you can plug either a standard 1/4″ plug (such as a guitar cable) or any XLR device (most professional microphones use an XLR input). If you’re using a condenser microphone, it can optionally supply the standard +48V phantom power required to drive them.

There are two other plugs on the device: one is for the USB cable that connects to your Mac, and the other is for a headphone or speakers. The latter is important; many applications (for example, Logic Pro) assume that any audio interface you’re using will be handling the output as well as the inputs (Garageband is a bit smarter, in that it lets you set them independently).

Finally, on the front of the device, there’s a single large knob. Depending on the context, it either lets you select the input device (internal mic, external mic, external instrument, or external mic with phantom power) or set the gain level for the selected microphone. There are also a pair of LEDs (invisible during normal operation) that show amber when you’ve reached peak level, and red when you’ve exceeded it.

When you’re not using it, the device and all the associated cables pack up into a little stretchy carrying case. It’s given me trouble-free operation (with very high quality) for almost a year now, and at least 15 episodes of my podcast. It’s available at Amazon (and other retailers) for about $249.00.

It’s happened to every engineer at least once. You’ve finished the release build, you run a final performance check, and the numbers show that the site won’t stay up. Or there’s a particularly nasty bug that makes the device useless, and your team has already spent nights and weekends without finding a solution. In any case, you’re the manager or the team leader, and you need to let your superior(s) know that it’s not working out: it won’t ship on time, or it will be broken if it does ship. (You should be able to extrapolate from this to your particular industry or situation.)

How do you let your manager (or perhaps the Senior Vice President of your division) know?

In most cases, if you’ve given frequent, regular status reports, there should be no surprise. But we all know that we can’t expect every contingency, and something totally unexpected pops up from time to time. The first rule of status reporting is “no surprises,” but—whoops!—here comes a big one.

Frankly, there’s no easy or perfect way to deal with a situation like this. Often, in business, a lot of time and money will be lost. The band that is supposed to play at the announcement, for example, will still have to get paid for their time. But here are some suggestions for retaining your professionalism and your dignity during the process.

DO let them know as soon as possible. “Boss, we’ve found an issue that may affect the launch,” is much easier to hear  a week before the launch than a day before the launch.

DON’T try to assign blame, or let your boss do that—at least, not yet. Inevitably, the first questions your manager will ask are, “How did this happen?” and “What are you going to do to fix it?” Your response should usually be, “We’re trying to make sure we fully understand the extent of the problem. Unfortunately, it’s going to take some time to resolve.” You will only compound the error if you tell him or her your first theory and it turns out to be wrong. You need to communicate that there is a problem and that you’re working on it.

DO let them know that you appreciate the urgency, but don’t sugar coat it. “We think that the code for the phlebargle is iterating too much, and it should be a simple fix,” sets the expectations too high. Be realistic: “The code is inefficient, and we need to test our fix before we can commit to it,” lets your manager know that you are working the problem and that it’s still urgent.

DO give your manager the bad news in person if possible. A face-to-face meeting or a phone call will not only give him or her the opportunity to ask questions and get answers, but also to make eye contact and let him or her hear the tone of your voice. A terse email sent at 3:00AM is liable to have your manager stewing in impotent rage and worry for hours.

DON’T kill your team. It’s tempting to say, “We’ve been working on this for 48 hours, and we’re not gonna stop until it’s fixed!” But the only thing your macho act will get you is disgruntled, inefficient engineers. No one can work so many hours and still maintain a high level of output. Professionally and firmly, tell your boss, “We’ve spent 36 hours straight working on this, and people are a bit dazed. I sent them home to get some sleep and, as soon as they come in tomorrow, we’ll put together a plan on how we’re going to solve this.” Your team will respect you for it, and your boss will hopefully understand.

DO accept responsibility and the consequences. If it’s a bad enough screw-up, you might lose your job. I’m sorry to have to say that, but the reality is that there are certain expectations put on people in leadership positions and, if they can’t meet them, those leaders may need to be replaced. However, in my experience, tough times like this are excellent for helping to reveal the true leadership qualities of an individual. By acting professionally throughout the crisis, you can often increase your stature within the organization, especially if the problem was truly novel. On the other hand, if the problem was foreseeable, then you or your team should have foreseen it and had a plan to mitigate the potential problem.

Which problems can be foreseen and anticipated and which cannot? Unfortunately, that’s pretty industry-specific; since I’m a software engineer, I’ll probably write another essay on that topic in the future.

Tascam Digital Pocketstudio DP-008

I’ve used Logic Studio, GarageBand, and a host of other multi-track recording systems before and, in all honesty, Logic and Garageband are probably much more suited for professional use. But the simplicity of the Pocketstudio makes it wonderful for experimentation and composing, and basically just “messing around” with music. It’s not going to replace the high-end, computer-controlled systems, but its ease of use gives it a special niche.

For example, if I want to record a guitar track, all I really need to do is to turn it on. It has two built-in microphones on the front of the unit, and they do a perfectly adequate job. For better quality, however, I can plug the guitar into the 1/4″ input socket in the back, and this eliminates extraneous noise.

With Logic, for example, there’s a ton of overhead for even a simple recording. From ensuring that the audio interface is connected to setting up tracks in the software, there’s a ton of complexity. With the Pocketstudio, it’s just plug-in and go. Frankly, a (small) number of knobs and buttons is a much simpler interface than trying to use a mouse to navigate through multiple levels of menus on the computer screen.

The DP-008 lets you record two tracks at once (i.e., you can’t record a full band all at the same time). It records to a standard SDHC card (I’m using a 16GB model, which lets me record hours upon hours of music). The back has 2x XLR mic inputs (phantom-powered if desired), 2x 1/4″ guitar/bass/mic inputs, a 1/4″ plug for a foot switch, a 1/8″ headphone jack and volume control. Side ports include the SDHC card slot, USB port, and a socket for an optional power adapter.

Tascam also has a four-track model that’s significantly cheaper (and is actually almost pocket-sized), but is missing the XLR inputs and balanced outputs of the 8-track version.

Here’s a sample track that I put together in under 30 minutes yesterday (this would have taken hours in Logic). It includes 2x ukulele tracks, 2x vocals, plus a rhythm track.

The prom queen

This individual (and it’s just as likely to be a “prom king” as the queen) is a true social butterfly. Online media—Facebook, FriendFeed, Twitter, MySpace—is just another one of many tools she uses to keep her social circle intact. While she may not have been her high school’s actual prom queen, she almost certainly still keeps in touch with her.

She’s a planner—she organizes gatherings, soccer games, poker games for her spouse, and feels involved whenever she has direct control over an activity. Whether it’s running the annual candy sale for her children’s junior high school orchestra, or putting together the annual reunion for her college graduating class, she’s an integral part.

She drives a minivan.

She is frustrated by limits imposed on her: why, for example, does Facebook limit her to 5,000 friends? She went to high school with 3,000 people, and to college with 12,000 more, and she knows at least half of them by name.

She has a blog and writes regularly on women’s issues.

She dropped out of the work force when she had her first child, but has since returned, now that her kids are in elementary school. Her job title will be “Event Planner” or  maybe”Marketing Manager.”

She ran her first marathon the year after her youngest child turned 7.

If you’re building a social media experience for her, then get out of her way. She needs tools and she knows how to use them. Your job as a developer is to make sure that those tools always work, even in ways that you didn’t foresee. Give her ways to bring people together (“groups,” “events,” or “interests”) and ways to communicate with large numbers of people, and she’ll be happy. Whatever you do, don’t force her to work in a way that fits your expectations: that’s a sure way to drive her away. Expect creativity—if she finds a way to embed a Google Map into her comment, then embrace that and leverage it, don’t quash it. She is quite possibly the best way to see your social media site expand because of all the new members she keeps bringing in.

The marketer

He is only interested in social media as a way to expand his market. He talks about “reach” and “distribution” as if people were meat channels for the delivery of advertising. He dreams of viral videos about his product. Often, he’s a consultant and uses words like “leverage” and “synergy.”

On Facebook, he has 4,992 “friends” that he met at conferences. He considers them his “vital business connections.” He values his Porsche more highly than either his wife or his girlfriend. Both his wife and his girlfriend, in fact, are less “relationships” and more “strategic alliances” that he will discard once they’ve outlived their usefulness.

His Twitter page uses a full-screen image of himself, wearing sunglasses and standing next to his car, and a trite slogan like “improve your throughput.”

He sometimes thinks about his upbringing in the Roman Catholic church and thinks that they have a really well-connected graph.

He is great to go out with, since he will always pick up the tab, trying to impress you. On the other hand, you then have to listen to him.

Given a free reign on your socially-enabled website, he will kill whatever community that you have painstakingly built over the years, often with a few well-directed comments.

He sells Amway to his relatives on the weekends.

To be continued…

Waterlogged school buses in New Orleans, August 2005 (photo by Allan Campbell)

Approximately five years ago, one of the most devastating natural(?) disasters in US history occurred. Early on the morning of August 28, 2005, Hurricane Katrina plowed into the Mississippi river delta and up towards New Orleans.

The first reports seemed to indicate that the city had survived relatively unscathed. But an hour or so later, the world began to receive reports that the levees, long viewed as the weakest part of New Orlean’s hurricane defensive shield, had begun to fail, and the city was filling with water.

The story is fairly well known, but I had a small part in the midst of it. At the time, I was an engineer for Yahoo! News, and Katrina rapidly became the top story. We watched as our traffic doubled, then tripled, then quintupled our normal daily rate. And it stayed at that level, with little variance, for the next week or more.

My nephew was a flight mechanic and rescue winch operator for the US Coast Guard at the time; he took the top photo you see here on one of his (many) flights over New Orleans and the Mississippi coast. He had, in fact, transferred out of the New Orleans Coast Guard station several months before Katrina but was recalled (along with hundreds of fellow Coast Guard men and women) in the aftermath of the storm.

They flew inland, landed in the parking lot of a Home Depot store, and purchased every chainsaw available. They flew back to New Orleans, distributed the chainsaws among the Coast Guard rescue crews, who used them to speed their entry into the attics where residents had retreated from the encroaching floods.

The Houston Astrodome after Katrina

One of the problems in the immediate aftermath was how to reunite the evacuees from New Orleans with their friends and relatives who were looking for them. Yahoo! put together a team of volunteers, including me, who flew to Houston to set up a computer center to help the evacuees search for and contact their relatives.

Yahoo! employees worked with a local computer networking charity and Verizon to set up a telecommunications center and a computer facility.

At the end of the first day, we reviewed the situation. One of the problems was that there were too many people trying to help. There were at least sixteen websites, many of them small, local sites, that carried lists of people trying to make contacts with their friends and relatives.

David Filo, one of the founders of Yahoo!, was on the call and realized that this was an area where Yahoo! could help. He had Yahoo! build a special search index that integrated data from all of the sites, and thus gave us a single site (by the next morning!) that linked out to all the necessary information.

A volunteer helps a Katrina evacuee find her family

The tragedy was great and is still ongoing, but it was an awe-inspiring site to watch a company like Yahoo! use its huge resources in such an open and rapid manner; this is one of the reasons why many of us are still here.

In keeping with my homage to William James, I suppose that this blog post should be subtitled, “A Study in Human Nature.” However, my goals are not quite so lofty as James’s; I am merely an observer, and not a philosopher, of online social activities. Perhaps a better title would be, “A Field Guide to the Social Media Participants of the Online Realm,” but even that is a bit pretentious, don’t you think?

Those of us who live in the rarefied air of Silicon Valley tend to assume, almost always incorrectly, that the “rest of the world” experiences social media the way we do. It therefore comes as quite a shock, at times, to discover that there are enormous hordes of online users who do not experience the Internet the way we do. Here are some facts about the “other half” of the online world:

• Many of them do not know what a URL is, nor what a search engine is. There’s a reason that the most common search query at Yahoo! is “Google,” and the most common search query at Google is “Yahoo.”
• The term hyperlink has no meaning and is probably confused with something in science fiction.
• They have never heard of Techmeme, ReadWriteWeb, Mashable, TechCrunch, or any of the other dozens of sites that we tend to rely on for our daily news.
• They believe that the Internet is a scary and dangerous place, and will rarely, if ever, divulge any personal information, much less their credit card numbers, online.
• They have no sense at all of the relatively safety or security of one website versus another. “https://” vs. “http://” is meaningless.
• They tend to perceive Internet sites as TV channels: different content, to be sure, but fundamentally the same technology.
• If they notice the URL, they get concerned if the site does not use “www.” before the domain name, thinking that it somehow controls the behavior of the web.

It’s not surprising, then, that these people tend to have different experiences of social media. This is an attempt to catalog, based solely on my personal experience, the various types of social media behaviors that occur.

The grandma

She has an account on Facebook after frequently seeing her grandchildren using it. She has had a computer since the 1990′s, and it’s mostly used by her grandkids when they come over to visit. She’s good at a few tasks using the computer: she can print out maps and directions, she can retrieve her email, and she can upload pictures from the tiny little Canon point-and-shoot camera that she carries everywhere.

Unfortunately, she has no fear and little understanding that there are Very Bad People on the Internet who would like to take over her computer and use it to send thousands of spam messages per hour for the next few years.

Her social graph consists of a) her immediate family members, b) some people she knows from church or the local community, and c) scammers who would like to inherit her modest fortune.

She loves seeing the pictures of her children and grand children, and she’s a big fan of casual games online. She has a farm on Farmville.

She reads every word of text on a web page before taking any action at all; because of this, she does not distinguish between actual content, navigation, and advertising.

Because of her innocence, she needs to be protected. Default privacy settings that reveal her name and location to the world could put her in very real physical danger. She will never be a mobile device user, and strategies that encourage her to become one will only confuse and frustrate her. She gets far more value out of “real life” social interaction than she does online, and she will drop the online interaction in a heartbeat if she has an opportunity to do something that involves real people.

The student

He is in high school or college, and has never known a world without the Internet. He does not wear a watch and probably never will. The concept of a “landline” is a novelty, since he’s never known a phone that would not go everywhere. He will not use email personally because it’s too slow, instead relying on SMS (text messaging) for most of his interaction with his peers.

His attention span is under two seconds: if he looks at a web page and cannot figure out how to use it in that time (or if it takes longer than that to load in the browser), he will drop it and move on to something more interesting. He is incredibly frustrated with his college’s website, and will scream out loud at how difficult it is to use.

He is completely and totally paranoid. He was raised hearing horror stories about online dangers and will go to great lengths to avoid giving any personal information online. He has no way of determining the difference between real and imagined risks. He will grudgingly order things from Amazon, but he will not allow them to save his credit card information for later, preferring to enter it each time.

He uses Facebook almost exclusively on his smartphone. He updates his status several times today, often with totally introverted comments about his state of mind.

Because of his paranoia (some of it justified), the student needs to be enticed to expand his social media horizons. For people his age, the best way to do this is with sex. The ability to share with people of the opposite gender is a strong attractor, overcoming many fears. Seriously, however, the student needs to be introduced to things gradually; he needs to be assured that he has control over who can see his personal information, and what it will be used for.

To be continued…

All the stuff that I usually have with me

Clockwise (from top left): wallet, iPhone 3Gs, guitar pick, Citizen Nighthawk watch, fountain pen, external microphone (enhanced video/audio recording with the iPhone), a Yahoo!-branded Jawbone Bluetooth headset, keys, eyeglass cloth, Buck knife, change, small Leatherman flashlight, another key, and my trusty Levenger pocket briefcase.

With great fanfare, Facebook announced Places yesterday, their version of the somewhat popular geo-location services that haven’t really swept the nation. Like their competitors/partners Foursquare, Gowalla, Whrrl, Yelp!, and a few others, the idea is that you can, from your mobile device, “check in” to a location and let your friends/stalkers know where you are.

Facebook Places; no check ins allowed

There’s just one problem: they left out the “Check in” button. Either that, or I’m too stupid to use their application. When I run it, I get a screen that shows me where some of my friends are, so it’s obviously working for them, but it sure isn’t working for me.

According to their FAQ, the application is “available to users in the United States.” I suppose it’s possible that I’ve been transported outside the US, or that California seceded from the Union in the last 12 hours, but I think I would have heard about that.

So this is the review that I would have written had the product I would have written about actually worked.

In all honesty, however, I’m sure it’s a really, really great feature. I have no idea why the “Check In” button is not available; presumably some technical issues with Facebook.

It’s not creepy at all. If it is, then the San Francisco Chronicle has instructions on how to opt-out of having your location shared.

(My favorite part is the final ukulele solo as it fades out.)

It’s very creative, and it’s an insightful look into the process required to produce something of this quality. If you’ve ever been involved in professional music production, you’ll understand that much goes on “behind the scenes,” and this video gives you some insight into that.

The new version (2.1.1) makes no mention of the power issue in the release notes, but it does mention these new features:

• You can now disable IM alerts
• The dialpad is now more responsive (ed: I wonder what that means?)
• The behavior of the volume, when Skype interacts with other apps, is better
• When your status is set to Do Not Disturb, notifications are not shown when the app is running in the background.

I suppose its possible that these may have addressed the power consumption issue, and a brief (30 minute) test this morning did not show any unusual power drop while running Skype in the background, so it’s possible this may have been fixed as a bug.

I plan on running Skype in the background today, so I can give you a full update later.

I think it’s worth pointing out that Skype is not really focusing on its iPhone app. If you visit the main Skype site (link above) and click the “Go mobile” link, you’re treated to a page discussing Verizon, Blackberry, and Android 3G. There’s a small button at the bottom of the page for “Other mobile solutions” that takes you to a page where you can choose Skype for either iPhone or Symbian. In addition, Skype has been extremely slow (compared to other app developers) in responding to iOS updates and hardware changes such as the new iPhone 4.

Little bacon cheeseburger (top), regular (two patty) bacon cheeseburger with grilled mushrooms (bottom). Fries in the middle.

If you’ve been in California for more than a few minutes, someone has probably told you about In-N-Out. This venerable chain of restaurants has more rabid fanbois than Apple, and for a good reason. They sell excellent hamburgers and french fries; and that’s really all they do. They have drinks and shakes on the menu, but the In-N-Out menu was probably the inspiration for  Steve Jobs’s dictum to keep things simple. There are very few options, but the quality of what they sell is exceptional.

However, an upstart chain called Five Guys Burgers and Fries, started in Virginia, has moved into California in the last few years, mostly around the Los Angeles area. And, in the last few months, they’ve moved north into Silicon Valley. They are often touted as an “In-N-Out Killer” (sound familiar?), and yesterday was my first chance to sample their stuff.

The Five Guys menu is much more feature-rich than that of In-N-Out. In addition to hamburgers (they have a “little burger” with one patty, and a regular “burger” with two), they also sell hot dogs. Moreover, and much to my delight, they also have bacon cheeseburgers, which is the height of burger gastronomy in my humble opinion (In-N-Out does not sell bacon at all, even on their famous secret menu). Five Guys is awash with options: you can have mayo, ketchup, hot sauce, BBQ sauce, A-1 sauce, or any combination. You can top your burger with grilled onions, green peppers, jalapeños, or grilled mushrooms.

Both chains offer fresh (never frozen) beef, and they are roughly comparable on that front. In-N-Out offers small, crispy fries, while the Five Guys fries are much larger and correspondingly less crisp. Five Guys does, however, offer a Cajun variant of their fries.

Unfortunately, Five Guys’s burgers cost about double what In-N-Out’s cost. My verdict: if you’re looking for a good burger, you can’t go wrong either place. If you want to save some money, however, go to In-N-Out. On the other hand, if you’re looking for a flexible, ultimate burger experience, Five Guys can’t be beat.

Kodak DC20

In August, 1996, I purchased my first digital camera, a Kodak DC20. This was, in fact, one of the very first (if not the first) “consumer” digital cameras. It was well within my price range at the time, which was indeed rather limited.

Unlike today’s digital cameras, this little gem did not have a built-in LCD display, high-speed USB transfer (USB had not been invented yet), a flash, or any of the other features we consider normal. Its resolution was measured in kilopixels, not megapixels, with a maximum photo size of 320×240 pixels. It connected with the computer via a serial cable terminated with what appeared to be a 1/8″ headphone plug. There was not an electronically-generated shutter sound; instead, there was a reassuring but mysteriously mechanical “thunk” when you pressed the shutter button. It would hold approximately 20 images, even at that low resolution.

Nonetheless, that camera captured some of the most important moments in my life. We had moved to England earlier in 1996, and so the Kodak’s digital images record much of our wanderings and explorations in and around the area where we were living. It also captured my son, age 5, on his first day of school.

Some of the best images from that camera are included below, in their full original size and glory.

It’s actually a fairly straightforward way of enhancing and customizing an existing theme; it’s better than hacking at the original theme’s code because, should that theme get updated, your changes would be lost.

I have a website called the Daily Funnies where I’ve used this technique. In this case, the parent theme is called Genesis, a theme framework. If you follow that link, you’ll see that the basic Genesis theme is black and white. It offers very flexible page layouts, however, and is easy to customize.

I created a new theme called “Funnies.” This theme consists of a single file, style.css, that includes the parent Genesis stylesheet and then overrides some of the specific style rules. For example, I changed the navigation bar from black to a dark green, and then used green for links and other components of the site. The result is as you see it here:

the Daily Funnies

(Note that, by the time you look at it, it might have changed a bit, as I am continuing to play with it.)

In addition to replacing or extending the stylesheet, you can use child themes to add new PHP functions (in the file functions.php) or even to replace the existing templates (for example, you might replace the home page with a new layout).

"Dante's Gates of Hell" by Flickr user Trey Ratcliff

I’ve used WordPress for my personal blog for a several years (I’ve also played with TypePad and various other blogging systems, but that’s beside the point). In my job at Yahoo!, our bloggers got along with various home-brew systems for a several years, so we decided to move most of our professional bloggers to WordPress.

Many people have called WordPress a serious, enterprise-class blogging application (I’m not going to cite any sources here, mainly because I don’t fully agree with it). Yahoo!, of course, has a somewhat different opinion about what is a truly world-class solution for performance, security, and integrity.

WordPress is a best-of-breed blogging platform, which is why we chose it to use at Yahoo! It does, however, have serious architectural and structural problems that had to be overcome before it could be fully accepted as part of Yahoo’s Media infrastructure.

The story of how we created a highly scalable, fully redundant, extremely secure installation of WordPress at Yahoo! is the subject of a presentation that I have proposed for the South By Southwest Interactive festival in March, 2011.

Before that presentation makes it to the conference, however, it has to be voted on by the conference attendees. If you’d like to hear about this, go to the South By Southwest PanelPicker and vote! The presentation is called ”WordPress and Yahoo!: a marriage made in hell.”

I am not a hugely political beast. I am a registered Republican, and there are times when I regret that. I find that my personal opinions tend toward the middle of the road, and both Democrats and Republicans are often too extreme for me. And, I’m sure I don’t fully agree with Dan on everything, but I respect him as a person, as a business person, and as a thoughtful politician who earnestly desires to do good. He’s running a “come from behind” campaign against a well known, well-financed, and thoroughly experienced incumbent, Zoe Lofgren, and he has a lot of work to do to win this election.

A political campaign, especially for one as high-profile as a run for Congress, is essentially a non-profit business. It’s a business, however, that’s only operating for a very short time; in this case, the work of the campaign will be over by November 3rd.

Like all businesses, it needs a certain amount of infrastructure and technology to keep things running. In addition to setting up and managing Dan’s website (running WordPress 3.0.1, by the way), I’ve set up Google Apps on his domain, so that we now all have unified email, calendaring, and document sharing. I’ve set up a virtual phone system using My1Voice, and I’m running his Facebook page and his Twitter account, both of which get automatically generated posts via TwitterFeed.

I’ve still got a to-do list a mile long, and very little time to get things done. However, I have to admit that there’s a ton of free or low-cost applications out there on the web that can handle the vast amount of things we need to do. We’ve already hit some headaches—for example, we discovered a bug in Google Docs where, instead of creating a new document for you, it redirects you to a help page if you happen to be signed in to more than one Google account at the moment. My personal goal, however, is to be unnoticed; if I do my job well, then things should just work, and Dan can focus on the important issues of running his campaign.

Crater Lake, looking north, July 2010

Hollywood has used this technique with great success; look at the recent reboot of the Star Trek movie franchise. A wormhole, some time travel, and the whole scenario starts over from scratch.

I’ve maintained a blog, off and on (mostly off), since 2003. It’s been a random collection of, well, crap. Some of it very, very good crap (if I may say so myself), but most of it crap, plain and simple.

So consider this a reboot of my blog. My old blog content still exists, though it’s moved to a permanent archive site. It’s searchable, and there is still stuff of value there, but I’m going to focus my efforts here.

“Focus” is a very important word: one of the problems with a blog like mine is that it was very unfocused: mostly a random collection of stuff I found here and there, and things I wanted to rant about. Here, I’m going to try to be more focused: I really am interested in the intersection of technology and our society, and I want to keep things focused on that.

I also want to be more consistent in my updates. I cannot guarantee a new post per day, nor a new post a week, even, but I do hope to do better than I did before. And I invite your participation and feedback as, together, we explore new worlds, search out new civilizations, and boldly go where no one has gone before.

Urbanears Plattan headphones, army green

I’ve now been using these headphones for more than a week and, quite frankly, it’s pretty upsetting. A few years ago, I paid more than $300.00 for a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 3 noise canceling headphones, and I’m seriously thinking of throwing them away.

Don’t get me wrong: the Bose headphones aren’t terrible. But the bass is so amplified, so overwhelming, that the impression I get from them after hearing the Urbanears is that everything sounds muddy. The Bose have the advantage of noise cancellation, which actually works very well if there are repetitive, droning sounds (like a window fan, and air conditioner, or airplane engines). And the Bose are extraordinarily comfortable; I could wear those for hours and never get tired of the feel. The Urbanears have a tendency to pinch my ears after an hour or so, and the material of the cushioning is more like vinyl than leather so that my ears get sticky and sweaty after a bit.

I also had the opportunity to compare the Urbanears with a pair of Sony headphones in roughly the same price range; very similar in sound, though I think the Urbanears are a bit brighter and have more clarity (and my friend who loaned me the Sonys agrees).

My summary of the Urbanears:

• Pros: Absolutely superb sound clarity and reproduction, approaching the quality of the best studio headphones and monitors I’ve used; elegant design; foldable; spare plug on the side lets a friend connect and share the music with you; microphone and button to let you use them with the iPhone (adapters for Nokia phones or simple stereo plugs are also provided).
• Cons: tends to pinch and get sweaty after a while; no active noise cancellation; makes me hate my $349 Bose headphones.

All in all, a very good value for $60.00.

Urbanears Plattan headphones in Yellow

This afternoon, I came home to find a package from Sweden waiting for me. It was a pair of Urbanears “Plattan” headphones that I had ordered a few weeks ago.

Urbanears is an upstart headphone company; they say that

Urbanears is a collective out of Scandinavia, motivated by a common interest in global relationships and shared involvement in the relevance of the living brand. Urbanears promotes a deeper connection to color, form and people while providing the freedom to transcend individuality and unify the sound experience.

High ideals, certainly, and they’re certainly eye-catching, but how do they sound?

I’ll have to admit that my very first impression wasn’t good. I had been listening to my $349 Bose QuietComfort 3 headphones at work, and my initial impression was that the sound was very flat with the Urbanears. After flipping between several songs on my favorite playlist, I soon decided that these weren’t flat; the Bose headphones were indeed very muddy, with artificially-enhanced bass and poor quality high tones.

Having spent some time in a recording studio, the best analogy I can make is that these sound like a set of highly-balanced studio monitors, with an extremely flat response. I can hear high notes better with these than I ever had with the Bose. The clarity is amazing, at least to my aging ears.

I don’t think these are for everyone. If you live for the thump of the artificially-enhanced bass lines in some music, you probably won’t like these. If you like classical, jazz, or more complex music, you’ll probably appreciate the clarity.

This is just my initial impression, so I hope to report back in a few weeks to see how they stand up to repeated use.

Note: some minor corrections based on comments.

Robert Scoble hits the nail on the head when he says that, “On my phone I only use voice about 5% of the time I use my iPhone.” He was responding to Louis Gray’s post on how he switched from iPhone to Android.

It amuses me to hear the ongoing debates about call quality on AT&T vs. Verizon vs. Sprint, etc. My personal experience is, of course, nearly irrelevant (since my personal experience may have little to do with how you or someone else experiences it), but I’ve been with AT&T for 10 years now and cannot yet find a reason to change.

I live in a house in the hills east of the Santa Clara Valley. The nearest cell towers (of any variety) are over 3 miles away. I get one bar of signal strength no matter which carrier I use. When I had an Amazon Kindle (which uses SprintVerizon for its “Whispernet” service), I often had difficulties downloading books to it. Recently, I’ve installed an AT&T 3G Microcell in my home, and I now get 5 barsstars. Likewise, at work, there is an AT&T repeater. In addition, since AT&T is a partner of Yahoo!, we get a substantial employee discount on service. So, you see, I have a huge number of incentives to stick with AT&T. In addition to that, however, is the fact that I’ve almost never had connectivity problems; I suppose that, if I lived in downtown San Francisco where I competed with tens of thousands of other users, I might have problems, but I don’t.

But, to return to the original discussion—I use my iPhone so rarely as a phone, the carrier is nearly irrelevant. I use Skype on my MacBook Pro more often for voice communication than I use my iPhone. Unlike Robert Scoble and Louis Gray, I don’t have companies tossing various models of Android at me to let me try them for a few weeks, so I can’t compare. But the essence of my argument is that, for many “mobile professionals,” the telephone carrier is almost irrelevant. Both AT&T and Verizon are “good enough,” and we should be making our purchase decisions on other factors, such as the battery life (which seems to stink on every so-called “smart phone”).

Louis Gray agrees when he points out that the call quality isn’t what moved him from iPhone:

Yes, AT&T has been dramatically underdelivering in terms of quality and functionality, but this did not drive me away from Apple as much as the lack of choice did.

If you are a person who spends most of his or her time on the phone, then call quality should be a determining factor in which phone you purchase. For the rest of us, the user experience, battery life, underlying platform, and so-called “ecosystem” of applications and support are vastly more important than which carrier we choose.