I recently was sitting in a 2011 Chevy … excuse me … Chevrolet Avalanche, and their display system was horrible. The graphic elements in it where ugly, the UI was horrible, and the navigation pretty much sucked. It was pretty much a bad experience all together.

Why do people try and re-invent the wheel? Well, they think they can do it better. And if people didn’t try we would be stuck with Windows ME all over again, competition drives innovation. So the better question is why do car makers go off and try to dapple in software development, and if it is outsourced, why not go with something people are familiar with. Imagine the iOS for your in car navigation and audio needs. The Google Android OS lends itself to this situation so much better. It’s open source and free. Car manufacturers could work with Google or work with outside companies to get the applications they need that are specific to their cars, but you would have Google Maps for your navigation system, you would have all the capabilities and audio features you have in your phone, in your car.

Are the two really that different. Do you do that anything that is that much different in your car than on your phone, not really. You listen to music, type in directions, and customize the settings of the phone. The only thing that immediately crosses my mind would be the A/C system … coming from a computer background, with the proper interfaces that is an easy addition to write.

It almost makes seems like a no-brainer .. which makes my wonder why that haven’t done it yet, or what I am missing.

Think about it, there where 1.7 Million sales within 3 days of the launch. 1.7 Million. Think about it for a minute … Yeah, that’s a lot of devices. Of course there are going to be problems with anything new, especially electronic devices, and the people you are going to hear from most are the ones that have problems. What people fail to realize are there are many many many more people, such as my wife and myself, who have Zero (0, nill, none, nada, no) problems what-so-ever with their phone. We have no new software problems, no hardware problems. And neither of us are affected by the antenna issue.

I think some , if not most of it, are bloggers trying to ‘ride the wave’. They are playing on the ‘fears’ of consumers to drive people to their blog’s and follow them on twitter. WAKE UP. Follow someone who can write something relevant and original. I’m not saying I’m that person, I’m far from it. But stop spreading the FUD.

The iPhone4, in my eyes, is revolutionary. The build quality of the phone is outstanding. It feels solid when holding it. Performance is amazing, both with software and web access. And, most importantly, it works as a phone. If you haven’t seen the display on this thing, you are doing yourself a dis-service. The ‘retina’ display is simply amazing. Apple wasn’t first to market with a 320 pixel-per-inch display. But they where the first to put it in a quality phone, with a quality os, and market the hell out of it.

Stop crying, stop complaining. The iPhone 4 wasn’t a failure, it isn’t going to cripple Apple, and it wasn’t a bundle of mistakes.

Got to love it when new software works as advertised.

I’ve done my own hosting thing since 2004. I’ve purchased and managed my own servers at CI Host, and I’ve been fairly happy with the whole set up. But As time goes on, I just don’t have the time to keep up with the hardware side of things. And I’m not really pursing the hosting thing anymore, so I’m barely breaking even year to year with my half-rack setup.

I’ve been eye-balling the services at VPS.net. Taking all the hardware off my hands, and letting me control the software. I would love to manage the hardware, but I just can’t afford to the setups that these places with RAID-10 Sans and quad cpu machines.

I’ve finally pulled the trigger and moved over the first site, my blog. The setup has been pretty cool, very simple and easy to use interface. So far I like it, we will see how it goes from there.

A bonus to all of this, it comes with a few free license to some nice hosting apps. ISPManager and HostBill. I am looking forward to moving to these and getting things setup on these services.

1. Small TV – just for some noise besides the radio. I love my texas country, but having the news on or the discovery channel would just kick ass. (Plus a nice break when I want to play some Call of Duty)
2. Microwave / Convection oven – I’m not sure I need the convection part. But being able to heat up my cold cup of coffee without having to go downstairs would be nice.
3. Sofa / Futon – A place to get away without really getting away. Plus getting one that converts to a bed is a plus when we have guest over
4. Mini Fridge – Just because i am too lazy to walk downstairs
5. Bookshelf – I didn’t realize how many books I had until I got my desk set up and had them stacked up on there … I really need a place to put these.

In a perfect world, I would already have those 5 things. Instead I have to prioritize, which means the bookshelf will be coming in first. After that I could see the TV or the Fridge, maybe the sofa. But with everything else going on in my world, I doubt I will see more then one of those by the end of the year.

I have seen the postings on Delicious Bookmarklets before, but I thought they where cheesy and not really want I wanted. Well I finally broke down and read about them while I was waiting on a call from a client. And low and behold, they are actually pretty nice. I now have two links for Delicious in my bookmark bar. One is to add a tag to delicious and the other is to view my Home, which is a feed of your links.

The only thing it is truly missing is a way to pull in your bookmarks. But I think this is a good thing. It will keep me from using Delicious as my internal bookmark tool, it will move it more towards what it is, and a socializing bookmark tool. Links that are specific to this machine I’m on, or links that aren’t important for me to remember elsewhere will go there. They will be true bookmarks, while my Delicious links are will become more of a socializing way to share links with friends and family. Things I will want to pull up elsewhere, not my payroll company or a link to the google chrome release blog

Just thought I would give my two cents on the matter and an initial endorsement on the whole Bookmarklets thing.

I don’t know if I had a favorite talk. The XDebug was pretty informative as I have never used it before, and always wanted that level of debugging. The PECL talk was also very interesting, it was a lot less formal then the others. It was part open forum , part talking about some of the lesser known extensions under PECL. I am glad I attended this one as it really pointed out some cool extensions that could really save some time developing. I also really want to check out the cario one as it looks like you could make some really nice charts and graphs with this. Also the Design Patterns talk was interesting. I knew of Design Patterns, but never really saw the use to take the time to learn about them. Well, after attending the talk, I am going to force myself to read more about them now. The speaker,  Cal Evans, suggested the book, and it sounds like the de facto standard, Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software.

The lunch was great, provided by the Dolce. Afterwards Microsoft provided an open bar with some hot hors d’œuvre. I couldn’t pass up the opportunity and had an ice cold Shiner Bock and some chicken on a stick. It was a great way to end the day.

As for now, I am playing a bit with WordPress. I’ve started to use tags, and added the (in)famous tag cloud. I’ve update the tags on the last ten posts or so. I’m also working on a few other pages, and possibly adding a few widgets.

I started a new Job at the first of the year, and it was about that time, my blog post stopped. I’ve just been to busy. Yeah I could write about random things going on, but that takes time. Some might say , oh it only takes 5, maybe 10, minutes to write a blog post. But that isn’t accurate, because I would of spent 5 minutes before, thinking about writing it, which would interfere with my current task. Then I would have to pick back up where I left off. which would be another 5 – 10 minutes. So for that 5 minute blog post, I could of potentially wasted nearly 30 minutes of my day.

This same philosophy can be applied to just about anything. Those few 5 minute task can kill hours of your day if you aren’t careful. These task are inevitable, but they need to be manage better, instead of just ignored. One of these task is time entry, sure it take 5 or 10 minutes at the end of the day to enter in your task. But there was the 10 minutes spent throughout the day jotting down notes. Then you’ve got to remember to stop what you are doing, and put them into a system. Sure you can do this at the end of the week, and it can save you a bit of time.

Grouping things together and knocking them out in a large chunk is , almost safe to say, always faster then breaking the same process into task completed at individual times. What is killer, is at work, it is easy to be in a few meetings in the morning, entering time from the day before, and then for those that try to keep a bog updated, or needs a fix from news sources on the internet. It is easy to kill an entire morning with out being productive what-so-ever.

My mornings consist of getting in and updating time, check up on latest and greats Tech related news feeds (and only tech, not even getting into regional, country, or global news) Goto a general 30 minutes office meeting, get out, get coffee, site down and go through a few e-mails, then hope into another project focused meeting, that last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. ( Even though it was scheduled as a 15 min quick update :/ see rant above ). Get out, get more coffee, get updated on e-mails again, put out one or two fires … and now strangely it is 11 o’clock and I am thinking about what I want for lunch. And I haven’t even put together a todo list for my laundry list of things to do for the day. I just have the list assigned to me from those meetings, which are just the most visible things to the powers-that-be.

I know, the problem here is not unique to just me, or hell even our company. Meetings can kill any and all productivity, and they can get out of control. Some managers feels they help because they have a sense of being on top of everything. But isn’t that was project / task management utilities are for. Isn’t that why they are use MS Project, our monthly-subscription to basecamp, and quickbase … Yes, three utilities to manage one project …. another rant for another day.

I know this is turning into a rant, I don’t want that. Just want to bring clarity to issues surrounding ’5 minute tasks’, while trying to get my blog moving again. As developers, technical resources, and the sort, we need to figure out what we can do to help our managers for this. While it isn’t our job to tell them what to do, we do, have to manage them in a sense. If not, these meetings and task get out of hand very quickly.

As many of you have noticed, I don’t have the best grammar, or even spelling, skills. They are actually not to bad if I slow down and take the time (Like for a report or some other ‘official’ documentation). But my blog post are normally spur of the moment thoughts, that I try to get out the door before they leave, and before anyone at work notices what I’ve done (like this one :/).

I am now looking for ideas that would help out with that. I know one is to just take my time and re-read what I write .. but I really hate doing that. So now I am looking for something else. Firefox does basic spell checking, but nothing in the grammar arena. Open Office as the ability to grammar check, but I don’t know if it is any good or not. And it doesn’t play nicely with b2evo, at least as far as I know.

I’ve been thinking of moving to WordPress, just so I have that export capability, and I might just use it … but then again I might not. I am defiantly holding off until v2.7 is stabilized, it is pretty damn cool looking. I always try to use apps that are against the grain, even if they don’t carry the same feature load, I use them because they work and most of the time they have one or two things the other one doesn’t. With b2evo, that is about to past, with v2.7 of WordPress the admin interface is cleaned up a lot, and I just might have to start using it, as it now provides other features that I am starting to require.

If anybody is out there reading this, do you have any ideas on how to better Spell / Grammar check my blog postings.