Now, I love the work they've done with EC2 and the Mechanical Turk. These are innovative, useful endeavors. But Jeffy's gotta pay the bills somehow, right? So, NCAA Gnomes are on the front page now, and will be in yards across Nebraska and Illinois come Spring.

It's a little disconcerting that one of the greatest businesses of the beginning of this century is essentially aping the strategy of one of the greatest businesses of last century (logistics and delivery of physical goods to American consumers). I mean, hasn't anything changed in the last 100 years? Or should I get into railroad stocks now, before the bubble has time to inflate any more? ;^)

The moment a scientist patted a ferocious Great White Shark that burst out of the water alongside his boat off the coast of Australia.

Source: Telegraph.co.uk

I have to admit, I don't get it. Third party applications are the life blood of devices like the iPhone. Think about it, does Apple run the phone network? No, that's a third party service/application provided by AT&T. Does Apple pay artists to put out albums that people can listen to on their iPhones? No, that's what the record companies do. Does Apple provide mapping software to help people find their way their way to obscure clubs where super-hip bands are playing? No, Google does that. Apple provides the hardware and the OS, third party developers provide the killer apps.

To put it another way, Apple's competitors are always going to be trying to match or best the functionality and usefulness of the iPhone. If Apple finds a way to constantly add to that usefulness, it will extend the life of the device. Having hot new applications run on the same old hardware allows Apple to put off investments in new designs. This adds dollars to Apple's bottom line over a period of years and was, I think, a really canny move. But I guess the stock markets don't think the same way I do.

Two years from now the iPhone will be a freebie thrown in with any 24 month AT&T contract. At that point the only reason consumers will have to choose this old model over equivalent models from competitors will the applications that run exclusively on the iPhone. With AT&T splitting revenue from users with Apple more applications and more users means more profit even if they're no longer able to charge a premium for the hardware.

Hmmm, of course the other tech stocks I watch were also down today so perhaps market sentiment was just off, and this announcement just didn't have enough impact to keep Apple from being driven down along with everyone else.

For example, if there are detents every 5 degrees on the mouse, and scrolling 1 detent causes the screen to scroll down 20 pixels, then I would expect 3 detents to cause a scroll of 60 pixels. But, the way things are implemented in OS X by default, if those 3 detents are sensed as occurring very quickly, I may end up scrolling 80 pixels down... as the second and third clicks cause a larger scroll action to occur than the first one. Does that make any sense to anyone (by which I mean the behavior, not my poor description of said)?

*sigh* It's funny, but MS has always been good at making mice. Their first mouse was actually lauded by industrial designers as highly superior to the Apple mouse that was available at the time. And I've never had an MS mouse just crap out on me, though I've also never had one that really exceeded my expectations of performance either. I mean, it's a mouse, what could they do to really "wow" someone? Work-a-day hardware, not too complex, just about perfect for MS.

Oh wait, I just noticed that the illumination on my keyboard seems to have been broken since I installed the MS mouse drivers... hmmm, guess that it was too much to hope for an MS product that works without having any nasty side effects. I should probably just switch back to Linux since no manufacturer seems to be able to please my whiney-self lately. ;^)

Update -- Somehow, magically, the backlighting on my keys was turned down to 0. I still blame Microsoft. ;-P

Has anyone else noticed this or is it just me? Either way, I have discovered Erlang: The Movie, an introduction to the Erlang programming language that has renewed my faith in true CS masters.

Developed by exactly the type of hard-core telephony nerds that could only exist deep within the Ericsson company labs (moto "the world leading supplier in telecommunications and lutfisk"), Erlang is a general purpose, declarative, fault tolerant, highly concurrent language useful for building systems that need to run for months or years without a reboot.

The linked movie consists of the Erlang team briefly explaining some of the more pertinent aspects of their programming language with what the Internet Archive describes as "technical enlightenment and unintentional humor in roughly equal, and colossal, proportions." I can tell you that they are not exaggerating.

Watch the movie, or, view the Internet Archive hosting site for links to other 'net related goodness.

I guess I haven't been in the area long enough to understand the forces driving real estate pricing here. What I know is that I need to find a place closer to work as the hour long, 15 mile, commute is really getting tiresome. I love the views from my current house across the entire valley, but the location does leave one feeling isolated. Need something from the market? That'll be a 10 minute drive down the hill, 2 minutes at the market and then 10 minutes to drive back up. It'd be much nicer to be able to walk 10 minutes each way, you know? And going out to a club or bar? Forget it, unless I want to drive two towns over and back. At this point the move is inevitable; what's still up in the air is where, exactly, I should move to.

It looks like my choices are limited though... given what a cheapskate I am (apparently there are people willing to pay $1600 month for a 700 square foot apartment in some cities) I'll have to either move to Santa Clara or find an incredible deal to be in Mountain View or Sunnyvale. Or, buy a mobile home and park it outside different big-box stores for a week at a time. Hmmmm, could I spin that into a web2.0 "reality" web site of some type?

My first Yahoo! Oktoberfest Mug, originally uploaded by αlexander.

Have I mentioned that Yahoo! is a great place to work? Over the weekend little gnomes visited everyone's cube leaving behind branded mugs advertising next week's Oktoberfest / earnings announcement party.

Though I have no idea what the earnings announcement might include, I can pretty much guarantee the pseudo-Oktoberfest party we'll have will be more fun than the SF Oktoberfest I went to over the weekend (which consisted of - showing up to a sea of drunken frat boys, finding out that the event was sold-out, and getting out of the way of the arriving paramedics as someone inside had apparently been shanked).

Of course, the day wasn't a total waste. My friends and I went out to dinner at Flippers, and then for drinks at Zeitgeist. The conversations were fun, if completely silly, and the parking was actually super close at both locations.

In conclusion - SF Oktoberfest isn't worth attending (unless you're a drunken frat boy), good friends make changing your plans on the fly into an easy and enjoyable evening, and Yahoo! is my current all-time favorite job.

Amenities include gaming suites with PS3's and Wii's, large rear-projection televisions and weird geodesic domes on the roof. It looks like a not-quite successful marriage of Japanese design and corporate American sensibilities, but it should make a great Central Command for use during a weekend out in the city.

You can see pictures of the hotel at the Wired article: Hotel Tomo

I'd always assumed the low quality of the Picture Printing Wizard was due to neglect or under-funding from Microsoft... but now I've come across some strong evidence to suggest otherwise. In fact, if the error dialog that popped up this morning is correct, Microsoft intended for the Picture Printing Wizard to never function properly at all.

How do they think they're going to beat Adobe with crapware poor implementations like that?

DSC_1820, originally uploaded by jaeiksong.

After approximately 1 year in beta, the new Yahoo! mail launched yesterday. The event was marked by the unveiling of a giant inflatable version of the product's mascot, Liam.

Click through for more pics of the event @ flickr.