Zeigen

I wrote earlier that we were on the fence about cutting the land line. Not any more.

After monitoring, the only calls we received were useless calls from surveys or businesses. We didn’t make any significant number of outgoing calls.

I never got a replacement answering machine, so if friends did call, it just rang and rang (confusing to them).

Now when they call, they get a referral to my cell phone, and after 30 days, that’ll go away too.

The last four digits of our land line used to be 8486, which spells out TiVo, and I enjoyed that it was an easy mnemonic. I do miss that part.

Everything else, I don’t miss.

We do still have a couple of phones connected that don’t require power, so in an emergency we can call 911. (I haven’t tested, but we may be able to call 800 numbers as well even without service.)

Ditched your land line lately? Plans to do so? If not, why are you keeping it? As far as I can tell, the main reasons to keep a land line now are:

• You have a whole bunch of talkative people in your house who chat on the phone a lot and require unmetered local calls.
• You don’t have any options for decent cell reception
• You really need a working modem for some reason (Series1 TiVo?)

I’m happy to save $30+ a month.

“Diplomacy is the art of saying ‘nice doggie’ until you can find a rock.” — Wynn Catlin

By publishing that quote (it’s frequently misattributed to Will Rogers, but I have no idea who Wynn Catlin was), I’ve just eliminated any chance that I could ever become a genuine diplomat. During the vetting process, the hiring committee would doubtless read my blog, find this quote, and thus find my character incompatible with proper diplomatic bearing.

Any post to a blog, to twitter, to a forum or newsgroup, and any photo posted to flickr or facebook or myspace can come back to haunt you. (Quite a few people have written me over the years to say that their name came up in a web search with the first result pointing to someplace on my old personal web site where I quoted them about some Tori Amos thing or random kibology thing, and could I please remove their name because they were applying for such-and-such a job and they did not wish to appear as the type of person who approved of Tori Amos or kibology or whatever.)

A few days ago, I published an essay about the dilemma between public and private personas when participating in web 2.0 sites. One point I didn’t mention, however, was that ultimately many people prefer to be private to the extent of not sharing anything about themselves at all, which by definition means not participating in public forums. While many sites allow anonymity, many do not (because anonymous users tend to contribute less positively).

Probably this is the genuinely biggest barrier to adoption.

So, as a social media site, how do you overcome this barrier?

1. Well-constructed trials. Allow users to participate and share anonymously in a walled garden or with a subset of the features so they can get a sense of the site and how it’s fun or valuable, and dangle features in front of them that require registration. Make sure existing users have a way to easily hide the anonymous folks.
2. Privacy guarantees. Allow users real control over who gets to see their content, be explicit about how long the content will be archived, and describe exactly which search engines will index that content.
3. Make sure there’s a way for new users to get their questions answered. The very first, most prominent content on the home page must be a concise description of what the site is about, who it’s for, and a link to the FAQ. Follow that with either a new users forum (that allows anonymous posting), or live chat session with either vetted guides or mentors who are advanced users of the site.

Engaging with prospective users is a diplomatic balancing act. Treating privacy concerns as nice doggies only to crush those concerns with rocks isn’t the right approach; the only answer is open and complete disclosure.

The truth is, since having kids I’ve not been exercising regularly.

The real truth is, I stopped exercising regularly even a year before Sammy was conceived.

The sad, genuine, unvarnished truth is, my weight is not where I want it to be.

Technology perhaps to the rescue? After reading reviews and testimonials about Wii Fit, and seeing the Wii in action at my brother Phil’s place, I managed to find a Wii and Wii Fit (thanks to Zoolert), ordered online, and all three boxes arrived today.

Setting up the Wii involved surprisingly large amounts of waste packaging and cardboard recycling, but the process was easy. My wife was quite skeptical at first, but a quick game of bowling won her over. (”This is fun, isn’t it!” Sure is, especially when she beat me 126 to 95.) Then it was time to get going with Wii Fit.

Much has been written elsewhere about Wii Fit itself. There are some curious UI decisions, an odd mix of a cartoon aesthetic on some screens and 1970s fitness brochure aesthetic on other sections.  I agree that there’s a bit too much time spent loading and explaining when I’m standing there tapping my foot and just want to get going with exercising. I’m also extremely skeptical of the “Wii Fit Age” (took the body test twice today, before and after exercising, and was first put at 49, +8 from my actual age, and then put at 52. Kimi was put at +11 years. If repeating a test generates results that vary wildly, how accurate can that test be?

But the activities seem (after day 1 at least) to have some variety, and the format is perfectly suited to appeal to my desire to unlock things and complete things.

Some may feel the constant unlocking of hidden exercises and activities combined with the corny motivational screens and dubious emphasis on balance is just so much rat-maze navigation, but to me it’s like a game, and anything encouraging me to view exercise as a fun activity can’t be too bad.

Microsoft has reportedly claimed that 60% of Wii Fit users try it exactly once. Seems like sour grapes to me.

So, my poor long-suffering reader, I’m about to embark on the most banal of all blogging activities, and keep track publicly of my progress against my Wii fit goals.

My BMI is at 26.06, which is overweight. My goal is to reach a BMI of 22 (normal) in two months, losing twelve pounds in the process.

Day 1: After setting things up, I tried a couple of exercises in each of the four areas, starting with Aerobics. The step exercises impressed me immediately. Running seemed less well implemented but the scenery made it interesting — my problem was that I kept trying to game the system by trying to shake the remote in order to figure out how it calculated my pace. In the Strength category, the first activity, leg raises, made me feel very uncoordinated. For Yoga, I tried just the breathing and half moon poses; it seemed fine but I’m unlikely to put a lot of emphasis on this section. I did notice that just doing the half moon made me sweat. Finally, for balance, I was terrible at soccer ball headers, but not too bad with the ski slalom. And then I rounded things out with some hula hooping. I have to say I enjoyed myself.

Day 1 stats: 30 minutes of banked exercise, Wii Fit age 49, BMI 26.06.

“Web 2.0,” if it means anything at all, is a term usually used to reflect the modern trend of interactive web sites that encourage users to create and share content. Blogs, wikis such as Wikipedia, forums, social networks, podcasts, comment streams, RSS feeds — all these approaches and technologies form the backbone of the web 2.0 universe. (The term also reflects the second decade of the web’s existence, and the transition of web users from dialup speeds to broadband speeds.)

Web 2.0 today is in a state similar to the state of the web in 1998. Back then, four years into its rapid growth period, the “World Wide Web” (as we still called it then) had proven itself to be much more than a passing fad, and the vast majority of major organizations had created a presence. URLs had become a common sight on billboards. While mainstream and popular, there were still many people who had not really used the web extensively.

Today, almost everyone has heard of blogs, and most have used one or more of the vanguard web 2.0 sites such as Flickr, Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter, etc. But even the most popular of these sites sign up only a small fraction of their visitors as users.

The central dilemma I see as a barrier to future growth is an adoption paradox: Coming up with incentives for users to create accounts and to start generating the content that in turn attracts more users to sign up. Peer pressure is an effective motivator, but many potential users don’t sign up because they don’t get what their role is, what the site is about, or how it would benefit them. In the meantime, they either avoid the site or lurk there.

(The lurker phenomenon is prevalent: A popular Flickr photo will have tens of thousands of views, but very few comments or links. A popular Twitter user’s page might be read by 100 times more people than actually sign up to follow that person. YouTube has hundreds of millions of viewers, millions of registered users, but less than a million users who have uploaded a video. For zeigen.com, according to my server logs, more than 5,000 unique visitors came to this site last month, and an unknown number more viewed the content via an RSS reader — but only 20 unique users left a comment.)

A user’s role at a web 2.0 site falls along a continuum between what I’ll call “public” versus “personal” personas.

Let’s take Flickr as an example. When you sign up for Flickr and begin publishing photographs, you’ll be doing one of these things:

• Publishing artful or beautiful or technically proficient photographs intended to be appreciated by a general audience
• Publishing photographs of a particular subject matter (such as, say, model airplanes) intended to be appreciated by fans of that subject matter (such as model airplane enthusiasts)
• Publishing photos of your friends and family, intended to be appreciated by people who know you
• Some combination of the above

YouTube follows the same pattern: Many users are uploading family videos, others are uploading things they find generally amusing or interesting, or a series of videos on a particular topics, or anywhere in between.

Similarly, blogs can be personal and intended for friends/family (journal sites), or public but general (such as a celebrity’s blog), or public and focused on a particular topic.

With some sites, such as Digg, the expectation is that there is no “personal” content — everything is for public consumption. You’d never promote stories about your family, only stories of interest to just about everyone.

Other sites, such as Facebook, are the opposite: Other than corporate or celebrity profiles, everything a user puts there is personal, about you, so almost no Facebook profiles are for artistic purposes. It’s all about your personal life.

Some Twitter users highlight the personal even to point of banality (”Ate lunch at sandwich place again. Had Turkey. Was good.”) while others spread breaking news, one-liners, observations, or punditry in an effort to attract more followers and support their public persona as a blogger or artist.

I’ve written about FriendFeed previously. and it continues to be the web 2.0 site I’m most interested in. The dilemma for me (and therefore I presume for most users) is where to draw the line.

For example: A friend posts a picture of their new haircut or has a status of “sad.” Because it’s a friend of mine, I want to compliment the haircut or ask them why they’re sad. Sometimes I just want to post what I had for lunch.

BUT — I have a few different types of followers on FriendFeed (co-workers, friends, business acquaintances, online contacts, random strangers). The people who subscribe to me who don’t know the person involved won’t want to follow that conversation. Sure, it’s fairly easy for them to skip it, but if my goal is to acquire more followers, I need to do so by keeping my persona public. So part of me becomes reluctant to post “personal” comments or links on FriendFeed, because the role I’ve so far taken on there is more public than personal. (I’m usually interested in starting conversations with a wide variety of interesting people about topics that I care about, and the items I share there are generally not about me.)

One prolific FriendFeed user, the notorious Robet Scoble, discussed creating a second account that’s more private, just for personal items — but that’s far from an ideal solution. Fragmenting yourself into different accounts is difficult to manage (especially when you start getting into the weeds of managing duplicate feeds, remembering to unsubscribe or subscribe to different people and join certain rooms on both of your accounts), and the UI of the site presumes that you only have a single account.

Yesterday FriendFeed launched a beta test of their new interface, and it’s a great improvement. In addition to improved aesthetics, there are a plethora of new features. The most important is the ability to categorize the people you follow into whatever labels you assign (Personal, Coworkers, Interesting, Noisy — whatever). Two of the default labels are “Personal” and “Professional,” which supports the observation I’m trying to make here.

However, I think FriendFeed has it almost backwards: It’s not so much that I want to categorize my friends based on how I know them (although I do want that) — much more, I want to categorize what I publish. Let me label the things I share as “Personal” or “Public” (and use even more tags if I want to assign them). That way the people who subscribe to me can decide if they want the full feed (complete with my lunch plans and haircut comments) or to automatically excise those parts they won’t care about.

For all web 2.0 sites, the first job is to clearly explain what the site is about, show how it benefits the prospective user, and ease new users up the learning curve. Once that’s done, helping users understand and manage their role along the public/personal continuum is essential to making the site sticky and successful. Tagging and categorization is the answer for that. Smart tools and good design will be needed to make this task intuitive and easy.

With Flickr, you can subscribe to a user’s entire photostream, or just to an individual series (as tagged by the user). The next step for many other web 2.0 sites, including Twitter, Facebook, and most of all FriendFeed, is to catch up to that concept.

BOOM.

Saturday afternoon, there’s an explosion up the street (although we didn’t hear it), and the power goes out. A transformer has blown out a block away from us.

No harm done, or so I thought (other than interrupting the Olympics I was watching; now I’ll never see that handball match between Sweden and Denmark). I took the kids up to the tot lot to play in the sand, and later Kimi picked us up to go out for sushi boats. A power cut is certainly one way to get me out of the house.

But Sunday, when I called home, the phone just kept on ringing. Turned out our home phone system (a Uniden three-handset system I had picked up several years ago at Costco) got fried when the power came back on Saturday evening, and was stuck in a permanent reboot loop.

This morning when I called Uniden for support, they walked me through a hard reset, but no luck. They had no alternatives for me — they don’t even have a repair facility at all. It was out of warranty, so toss it and buy a new one. What a waste.

Time to go back to Costco and buy a new one, right?

Well, hold on a second. The nationwide trend is towards ditching home phone service. The National Center for Health Statistics has a very interesting article and graph showing the wireless-only trend (totally random federal agency research for the win): Wireless-only households went up from 12.6% during the first six months of 2007 to 14.5% in the last six months. So, about one out of seven U.S. homes no longer have a landline.

Meanwhile, AT&T lost a million landline subscribers in their last quarter (per gigaom).

I was all set to cancel my home phone number today (despite my geeky attachment to the phone number, which ends in 8486 — spelling out TIVO as a mnemonic).

There are certainly some advantages to a home phone:

• Unlimited local minutes. Unless you’re paying a huge amount for an unlimited cell phone plan, chances are you’re paying attention to how many minutes you spend on your cell. Families with gabby teenagers need the cost convenience of a home phone with unlimited usage.
• 911 ease of mind. Despite improvements, 911 calls from a cell are not as reliable: You’re usually calling a very remote emergency center, which has more limited ability to learn your location. Additionally, cell phones can more easily run out of battery or otherwise be unavailable for use.
• Disaster/power loss ease of mind. Assuming you have a handset that doesn’t require being plugged in, when there’s a local disaster such as an earthquake, the landline is more likely to work than the cell phone.
• Archaic requirements. Some companies that you do business with really want you to have a home phone, and don’t know how to deal with you if you don’t have one. I’ve heard that one contributor to your credit score is how long you’ve had the same landline phone number.
• Inconvenience of updating all your friends and database entries: What a pain to tell everyone you know that you no longer have a home phone.
• “Home” sense: My cell phone number is only for me, and it’s usually in my pocket. My wife’s cell phone number is hers, and it’s usually in her purse. But my kids don’t have cells (too young), and what if someone wants to reach any of us but only if we happen to be at home? (Not that my kids are old enough to answer the phone yet.) But that’s what a home phone number “means”: Anyone who’s home. A cell phone doesn’t mean the same thing — it’s for a specific person, and even today a cell phone call seems more “urgent” than a call to a home phone number.

The downside of a home phone is primarily the cost (and the cost of ownership of those power-spike-vulnerable handsets): I was paying over $30 a month for unlimited local and a certain amount of included long distance.

We certainly didn’t miss having a home phone during the four months of the remodel where we weren’t home anyway. So, like I said, I was all set to ditch the home phone number. But when I can called to cancel, not surprisingly, AT&T was very willing to make me a deal to keep me as a customer. So, sucker that I am, as an experiment, before ditching our home phone service completely, I have decided to give the home phone number an extension (hah!). I’ve reduced the cost to $6 a month (plus tax) by removing call waiting, switched to a measured rate, and removed long distance.

We can still receive unlimited calls, and we pay $0.02 per outgoing call. My estimate is we make very few outgoing calls, so that it’s not worth paying $4 a month more for unlimited local calling. If I’m wrong, I can switch back to unlimited, and still save $20 a month from what we were paying.

After several months, I’ll evaluate the bills and the usage. If we no longer need the home number, I’ll join those one out of seven households that have cut the cord.

In the meantime, I have three perfectly functioning Uniden handsets, but no base station and no answering machine. If I can find a cheap replacement for the busted base station, I may replace it. If not, well, now you know why our home phone number just rings and rings when we’re not home.

Jonathan Feinberg’s Wordle is a very polished online tool that takes a bunch of words and turns them into clouds, where the most-frequently-used words are displayed proportionally larger. Paste in your favorite song lyrics to get a result like this.

Here’s what I get from the words in recent posts on this page. (Click to enlarge.)

At work, my co-workers are used to seeing me attached to my laptop, leading to such classic lines as, “Woah, are you married to that thing?”
Well, not today.

On Friday, after arriving home, my laptop slid out of its case (because I hadn’t zipped it all the way) and crashed about four feet to the pavement. It made a sickening thud. I was furious with myself for being so clumsy. While no pieces broke off, in the aftermath, the hard drive was making distressed noises and the screen no longer worked.

So, for the first time in a long time, I didn’t do any work over the weekend, and checked no work e-mail. When I got into the office this morning, I dropped it with our IT folks, and Peter spent most of the day recovering what he could. (Almost all of my work is saved on the network drive, but there were a few things saved locally that I didn’t want to lose.) He couldn’t fix the screen, so he spent the rest of the day building me a new laptop.

The upside is a nice new shiny laptop, faster, with a bigger screen. The downside is I’ve now spent the entire evening downloading and installing and configuring programs, and I’m still a long way from being done.

Isn’t it time that Microsoft offers a service that lets you save your configuration online and restore it for just such an occasion?

It was jarring to not be able to check e-mail throughout the day. But instead, I did manage to clean up my cubicle, sort and file a huge stack of papers and files, set up a second DVR, and generally cross off a few dozen items that had been languishing on my (paper) to-do list. But now I’m facing a few thousand unread e-mails.

A few months ago, a friend of mine left his position at Google and went to join a startup called FriendFeed. He invited me to join while it was still in beta, and now that it’s open to the public, it’s quickly moved up to become my favorite web site.

So what is it? My submission for FriendFeed’s “describe FriendFeed in 2-8 words” discussion was, “Your friends make the news.” When you sign up for FriendFeed (which is free, and is currently without any advertising), you can choose which online services you use (such as Flickr, Netflix, Twitter, Amazon wishlists, shared blog posts on Google Reader, and much more). Once set up, FriendFeed automatically creates a news feed of your activity on those services. This feed can be public (i.e., anyone can see it), or private (only you approve who can read your feed). You can also submit items for your feed, by sharing URLs using FriendFeed, or just creating general comments, perhaps about what you’re doing or thinking.

Then, you choose which people on FriendFeed you want to follow (your friends, relatives, and/or people you find interesting). If your friends aren’t yet using FriendFeed, you can invite them to do so, or you can create an “imaginary friend” for them as if they had actually signed up.

FriendFeed turns out to be a great way to see in one consolidated place what’s going on with your friends, whenever they add an Amazon wishlist item, submit a photo, write a blog post, or whatever else.

The interesting part comes with the social aspect: your friends can “like” and comment on the different feed items. Discussions begin. And in your feed of news from your friends, you can also see the items that your friends have liked and commented on, even if that item didn’t come directly from your friend — so you start seeing interesting updates from your friends of your friends.

What’s striking about the site is both how simple it is to use as well as how much it changes the game. Before, to find out about different things your friends were doing, you may have visited dozens of different sites. Being able to instead view all of that news in one place means you feel more up-to-date and closer to different people, and learn more about what they’re interested in.

While the site works in different ways for different people, I find that it’s most effective when you’re following people you are actually friends with in real life. Interesting people share interesting things, but the level of meaning and the degree to which you care is enhanced a great deal when you care about the person. For example, if an interesting stranger shares an item about, say, cat grooming, you may or may not find that engaging. Probably you’d just skip past that item in your feed. But when your co-worker shares an item about cat grooming, even if you don’t care about the topic, now you know that they either have a cat or want to get a cat, and the next time you see that co-worker you now have something to talk about.

New features are being added at a rapid pace. It’s easy to hide items you don’t care about and control the experience to make it what you want. The web page is responsive and the service is reliable.

I say that last because, in contrast, I’ve also started using Twitter.

Long-time twitterers please forgive me as I explain the basics, since Twitter is very old news to many blog readers, having launched in late 2006. Twitter is a remarkably popular service in terms of its growth and its number of users (well over a million at this point). However, in real life, very few of my co-workers, none of my family, and a tiny fraction of my friends are using it and many have not even heard of it. And this is despite being in the heart of the Silicon Valley, working for a high-tech company full of early adopters, surrounded by tech friendlies. Part of that gap is because it’s a generational thing: Twitter seems to immediately appeal to college students, while those older seem to take longer to “get it.”

So, what is Twitter? Brief (140 characters or less) updates about whatever you want. These updates, or tweets, constitute micro-blogging. Instead of long-winded posts like this one, brevity is the soul of Twitter. Dashing off to a coffee house? Twit it, and now your friends know, and if they’re in the area, perhaps they’ll drop on by. Thought of a great one-liner? Share it on Twitter. Mad as hell about dropping your laptop and breaking it (like I did earlier this evening)? Just had the greatest ice cream cone ever? Can’t believe what McCain just said? Twitter, twitter, twitter.

The 140 character limit, instead of being a barrier, becomes liberating, since you’re freed from having to cite your source, defend your premise, or define your terms. You can write about the most trivial of things since it’s stream of consciousness, and the basic idea is to share with your friends what’s going on at the moment, as uninteresting as that may be.

Where Twitter excels is in the number of ways you can interact with it: You can submit updates from your cell phone via SMS, from an instant messenger application such as AIM, via a browser at twitter.com, or via other social networking sites. Conversely, you can set up the level of notification for updates from your friends. Biff in accounting might be your Twitter friend but you can set it up so that you only see what he’s up to if you go to twitter.com. Your spouse, on the other hand, can have updates sent directly to your IM or cell phone.

While Twitter really feels like a subset of FriendFeed, the bigger issue lately seems to be its lack of reliability, with numerous outages — growing pains for a site that’s exceeding user adoption expectations.

Neither site yet displays any hint of a business model. They’re free to join, with no ads. All those developers and servers are expensive, so somewhere along the line one or both of those things must change or else the service implodes. But in the meantime, they’re both interesting sites.

In contrast, Facebook is a well-known social networking site, and it’s full of ads — they clearly know what a business model is. Originally for college students only, Facebook is now open to everyone, and it’s a social networking site. Despite having a friend or two working there, I have to say that after I’ve been using it for a while, I don’t find any value offered that’s not better handled elsewhere. The semi-public communication in “Walls” is not a good way to converse (with most walls showing half of a conversation). The private messages are better handled with traditional e-mail. The countless applications are generally time-wasting (hunting zombies, answering easy trivia questions) without being deep, and many seem to actively trick you into adding them. (One promoted itself with the tagline saying that a co-worker called it “the best application on Facebook” when he’d really never said any such thing. Most require you to add the application in order to view whatever doodad or message your friend is trying to send you.) Is it better than Friendster and Orkut, the social networks that I tried out previously? Demonstrably so. It’s certainly more attractively presented than MySpace, which I’ve not used. But the main drawback is that there’s nothing compelling there, and the Facebook interface actively interferes with productivity, while Twitter is more streamlined and FriendFeed adds value and interest.

I’ve been using the web now for 14 years. So much has changed in that time (and not always for the better). These days, very little makes me excited about the web the way I felt in the early years, but FriendFeed certainly comes closest.

Follow me as zeigen on Twitter and zeigen on FriendFeed. Befriend me on Facebook if you like.

If you’re long-time users of these sites, I’m interested in what got you started using them, which you like best (or which other one you think blows these away), and what you like/dislike.

If you’ve never heard of these sites before, what’s your reaction? Is it, “Why? What’s the point?” as I suspect most people feel? (Especially if you’re over 40…) Well, people felt that about the web and blogging too. Both are here to stay.

Quick, if you use Microsoft Word, follow these instructions to reduce your paper usage by 5%.

I’ve always hated the default 1.25″ margins Word uses. Who came up with that, anyway? WordPerfect and most other word processors I’ve used over the years always had one inch margins. I like half an inch, but that’s just me I guess.

Lately I’ve been plagued by IM spam — random messages from randomadj-randomname-random# with a greeting of “Hi ___,” followed by a URL broken up with spaces.

I use Trillian as my IM client. Can anyone recommend any plugins or settings to block this? I’m up to about a dozen a day. Very annoying.

Update: Back online after about 1pm. Glad to see 1.1.3 supports map auto-locate, multiple SMS delivery, customized home screen layout, web shortcut buttons, chapters in video playback, video rental, IMAP for GMail, and probably more.

…but the adjustment of clocks continues:

• My alarm clock
• Microwave clock
• Sammy’s alarm clock
• Wall clock in computer room
• Wall clock in living room
• Microwave clock
• Answering machine clock
• Thermostat clock
• Sprinkler system clock
• Video camera clock
• Still camera clock
• Stephen’s car clock
• Kimi’s car clock

On the other hand, a number of devices adjusted themselves — and correctly, too, despite all the mucking about with when DST is starting and stopping: All of our TiVo DVRs, the cable box, Kimi’s alarm clock, my iPhone, Kimi’s cell phone, my car’s GPS device that’s in top secret beta, various PCs and laptops.

I like when we fall back because of the extra sleep. But I hate how dark it gets in the evening; it’s much harder to go on walks to the park with Sammy on a weekday now.

I’m so upset right now. I just found out that an e-mail I sent using my iPhone on Sunday night in our hospital room to my closest friends and family was never delivered.

I used the “Email Photo” feature to send a photo (the first one I included in the blog entry below, the one with Kimi and Sophie taken minutes after Sophie was born). I heard the “whoosh” sound to say the e-mail was sent. But it didn’t get delivered, didn’t get put into my Yahoo mail Sent folder, no error messages no nothing. I don’t even have a record of who I need to apologize to.

I don’t know if it’s the iPhone’s fault or AT&T’s fault or Yahoo’s fault, but in testing right now it’s totally random whether the photos I mail get delivered or not.

I at least called my immediate relatives to tell them the news, but some of my cousins — Mark, Tracy — and closest friends — Howard, Ken, Bob, John and many others — never got the news or photo.

In testing earlier, only 2 of my 10 test picture mails arrived (all going to the same address). But just now 2 out of 2 were delivered fine. In perhaps related news, different apps (photo, iPod) seem to be crashing a lot. My iPhone is unmodified if that makes a difference.
There’s a lesson about reliance on new technology in there somewhere. But I’m too furious to see it right now.

This is day four of using my new iPhone. I’m still getting used to it (and my typing on it is slow as of yet), but I think of it in terms of what other devices it replaces for me. The iPhone is a hybrid — and normally hybrid devices are inferior to the dedicated devices that they try to replace, so that you end up with a compromise.

With a combination fax/printer, for example, you have to ask yourself if the combo does a good enough job at both printing and faxing, or if in the process of making it a single device has introduced so many shortcomings that it’s worse than just buying a separate printer and a separate fax machine that can actually handle what you need.

But in the iPhone’s case, it’s not a compromise. I can legitimately head to a meeting or go on a trip with fewer devices and gadgets than I previously would have taken along.

• Phone: A-. Very capable cell phone. More thoughts (and quirks) below. Overall I’m happy to replace my previous phone and use the iPhone instead.
• Pager: B+. I used to carry a separate pager (remember those?). If I hadn’t dumped it previously, I could dump it now. Some issues though: When I get new page that’s long, I always have to scroll up to the top — for some reason it always shows me just the bottom by default. Also, a long page becomes even longer because the right fifth of the screen is taken up with a GUI widget that’s only shown haflway down the page. Most annoying of all (and probably not Apple’s fault), AT&T is assigning random numbers that the page is “from,” which seem to totally confuse the iPhone’s chat model. Deleting pages is one tap too many — tap Edit, tap the minus, tap Delete.
• Laptop: B+. Web browsing and e-mail are both very effective. You can’t edit spreadsheets or project PowerPoint presentations, so for some jobs I still need my laptop. But the web browsing is wonderful and intuitive. On the e-mail side, the default gmail settings totally blow (although I know a solution is coming soon, and you can always just browse to gmail.com), but the Yahoo mail settings work very well — the only things I’ve wanted to do that I couldn’t were to create a new folder, and to make some mail as spam. I can’t yet access my corporate e-mail, but that’s not the iPhone’s fault (although I suppose the native VPN support could be better).
• iPod: A-. Eight gigs isn’t close to enough to hold my music collection, so I’d need to bring my 80gig video iPod if I want access to all my songs (and Apple’d need to create a 300 gig classic model for all my videos). On the iPhone’s iPod player, I find it weird that I can’t see full info on a track (like its year, composer, or any notes I’ve added). But there’s enough space that right now I have loaded 1,161 of my favorite songs, and the interface is smooth enough that I have to agree that this is the best iPod I’ve ever owned.
• Boom box: C-. The speakers are not terrible, but also not loud enough to replace a boom box. I do think it takes too many clicks to pause a song (assuming you don’t have headphones on).
• Calculator: D. Only the basics (addition, multiplication, subtraction, division). Even my old cell phone’s lame calculator handled more than that. C’mon, Apple, couldn’t you have fit in a few more operations?
• Stock ticker: B. Some people carry a dedicated stock ticker device. The iPhone’s quotes are 15 minutes delayed, but you could always use the web browser and log into whatever service you use to get real-time quotes. And most day traders switched to laptops or pagers with custom alerts anyway.
• Flashlight: C. In a pinch, any cell phone can double as a flashlight (and sometimes the results are life-saving). The iPhone offers decent illumination; obviously not what it was designed for, but it can help you find your dropped keys on a dark night.
• Watch / Alarm clock / Stop watch: A. The time of day is shown on every screen. I don’t wear a watch anyway, but on a business trip I wouldn’t need a watch, or an alarm clock, or a stop watch — just the iPhone. I love the timer UI with its weird circular tumblers and an iPod sleep option. The alarm clock should let you wake to a favorite track, but I can deal.
• Camera: D+. It’s a 2 megapixel camera, but without a flash, pretty bad low-light performance, a pokey shutter speed, and no options for controlling camera settings whatsoever. You can take pictures, delete ‘em, set them as wallpaper, associate them with a contact, or mail them off — and that’s literally it. For loading pictures taken on a real camera and showing those snaps to friends, the resolution is great and the slideshow transitions are beautiful — however, all the photo management (selection, orientation, cropping, etc.) has to be done on your PC ahead of time. On the iPhone itself you can’t even delete a photo that you sync’d onto it.
• GPS / map case: B+. Does this replace my TomTom or Dash GPS navigator? Not quite. There’s no GPS in the iPhone, so it can’t tell you when to turn, nor automatically show you on a map where you are, nor does it read out the directions. But you can type in a simple reference to a location (”Mountain View sushi”) and get a list — and show overhead satellite or street views with pins, plus get directions to or from. The map is a delight to browse; a slick implementation of Google maps at the palm of your hand. For a long road trip I’d want my on-dash navigator. For short trips, the iPhone is good enough to get you there and prevent you from getting lost. I love how it walks you through each step of the trip with an animation on the map.
• Datebook: C. Syncing with Outlook is giving me a few fits, and it takes way too long. Any updates throughout the day are not reflected unless I sync again. You can’t sync wirelessly, only via the supplied USB cable and dock. The meeting attendees aren’t included, just the meeting title, time, location, and notes.
• Address book: A. No need to carry your little black book. Once you get your contacts imported, the address function is quite handy and capable. Some of the fields I’d like to use (like a category filter) aren’t really exposed, but the address book is really quite good.
• PDA: B-. When I first starting using a Palm Pilot in 1997, the main functions I used were calendar reminders, address book, notes, the “to do” list, and games. Later came mail and expenses. I stopped using my Palm once wireless became common, and started carrying my laptop everywhere instead. But there are times I miss carrying a Palm. I’ve already covered how the iPhone can handle my calendar and contacts. The notepad on the iPhone is nothing special; you can’t import notes, and the only way to get your typed notes off the iPhone is via mail. I’d also like the notepad better if I could password-protect individual notes. There’s no “to do” list function on the iPhone at all. And there are no built-in games, although more and more web sites with free games are popping up. (Plus you could hack your iPhone and load on the various custom apps and games that are starting to spring up, but I’m not going to do that just yet.)
• Blender: F. There are a lot of references to the iPhone blending, but I don’t see anywhere I can put in the fruit and juice. I still need to carry my dedicated blender if I want a smoothie.

Extra thoughts on iPhone as a cell phone: As a cell phone, the iPhone is very good. The UI is clear and functional, much better than the UI of my Motorola SLVR L7 that it replaces. I can hear people clearly and I’m told they can hear me clearly, and the dialing performance is quick (almost too quick).

Holding a flat soap bar to my head is a little weird (and the screen gets dirty quickly), but it works much better than I expected. However, there are a few quirks and areas for improvement:

1. Importing contacts needs to be more flexible. You can’t take them off the SIM of your old cell phone; iPhone doesn’t seem to use the SIM for saving or retrieving contacts at all. You can’t beam them over from your old cell phone via SMS or MMS or bluetooth or IR. For a Windows user like me, your only options are to enter them manually on the iPhone, get them from Yahoo (if you happen to put your contacts there), or sync them with Outlook Express or Outlook 2003/2007. I can’t stand Outlook and don’t use it beyond what I’m required to at work (where we use it for our calendaring). It took me two days to format my Palm Desktop contact list properly, export it as a CVS file, manually add headers, manually map the fields for importing into Outlook, and then sync with the iPhone. (Wonderful now that it’s done, but it was a lot of tedious work.)
2. The recent call list doesn’t support separation by outgoing and incoming calls — it only shows all calls or missed calls. The iPhone’s a little too smart for its own good about collapsing calls into a single entry. If I call my brother Rob’s cell, then he calls me from his home number, then I call his work, then he calls me from his cell, that all becomes “Robert (4)” and then if I tap for the details, it only shows the times and that the most recent call was from his cell, not a list of who called whom and the duration.

There’s some more I have to say, including the need for a separate RSS reader, some concerns about battery life and recharge time, and some weird UI design inconsistencies (sometimes you confirm in the keyboard widget, sometimes in the upper right, sometimes the upper left). But this is already long enough for now.

Let me sum it up: The sum is greater than the parts. Overall, I love my iPhone.

Busy morning — Kimi’s exhausted and in pain (honestly, I think the baby’s going to arrive any day now), so I took Sammy out with me. Dry cleaning, bagel shop, Costco, Children’s Museum & Zoo, Stanford shopping center for lunch, and then the UMF bit. Shiny new 8g iPhone, at $200 less than what I’d thought about paying for it.

Only now to activate it:

38 hours? 38 HOURS OF MAINTENANCE? Nothing going until Monday at 5:30am? I first called the Apple Store at the Stanford mall to see if this was accurate, and someone named Joe there said this was news to him but activation was an AT&T issue. He could give me the AT&T phone number. Sure, I said. The number he gave me was for DIRECTV. Joe, Joe, Joe. Sorry Joe. You’re fired. In a few seconds online I found the AT&T phone number from their iPhone FAQs page — it’s 1-800-331-0500. I called and eventually the woman admitted that yeah it’s probably down until Monday morning. 38 hours? 38 HOURS? AT&T, you’re fired. This is gross incompetence of the most preposterous proportions. 38 hours?

The main reason I needed a phone is because my old one, a SLVR L7, has started to have a bad speaker — I can hardly hear. So don’t call me until Monday, because I can’t hear you.

I hate you, AT&T. So much hate. You’re fired.

At work they installed a new paper towel dispenser in the bathroom. Wave your hand under it, and the paper towel automatically rolls out. Great! Fewer germs and bits of wasted paper.

Except, it didn’t work. I waved my hands and nothing happened. No manual release mechanisms so no paper. So I just waved my hands in the air as if I didn’t much care.

In this case, my preference is for the regular paper towel dispenser. Fewer moving parts, less chance to break. Despite being a technologist and gadget enthusiast, there are two other areas off the top of my head where I prefer the low-tech approach.

• Voting. The ongoing revelations about software and security flaws in the touch voting booths deployed across the country are supremely demoralizing to me. My preferred technology for voting remains paper, and probably will remain so for eternity.
• Poker. While I love the game, I don’t care for online poker. I prefer real cards, real human players sitting near me (so I can study their expressions), and real chips on real felt. Online poker is plagued with being illegal, the possibility of bots, the ever-present danger of collusion, but most of all, I find it boring.

At work today, many are sporting their shiny new iPhones.

For now, I’ve held off. A good friend of mine works at Apple and I was able to see it in action last week. I want one really badly, but I don’t NEED one. And $600 for a phone isn’t really smart for me to spend right now, what with… oh wait, I haven’t announced that yet. Stand by for that.

Anyway, it’s beautiful and elegant and I don’t mind any of the shortcomings people have written about (with the possible exception of the battery being built-in, that does irk me). I want want want. But for now I shall not indulge the Unseen Mystical Force floating all around me.

A lot of hullabaloo and outcry last week over the new Google Street Maps feature. Since we live in Googletown (otherwise known as Mountain View), our street’s right there. I’m not necessarily too happy that you can clearly read my car’s license plate in the driveway, but I’m not freaking out. Too much.

It didn’t take my brother Rob long to spot one of our cats, Stormy, wandering down the street a few houses away.

Kimi’s reaction:

Aah! Big brother is spying on my cats! I can imagine the log…

11:01 Cat is sleeping on porch.
12:33 Cat is still sleeping on porch.
12:47 Cat is now sleeping on driveway.
13:20 Cat is licking self.
14:07 Cat is sleeping again.

Big fun!

I can’t believe I just went to all the trouble of typing all that.

-Kimi

I got my start after college as a trainer, teaching folks then-current programs like WordPerfect and Lotus 1-2-3. Even as recently as a few years ago I was teaching classes at the San Jose State University Professional Development Program.

I still like to teach occasionally. By popular demand, I held a one-hour course at TiVo on Windows keyboard shortcuts last week. Why that topic? I rarely use the mouse if I can help it — instead, I use the keyboard as much as possible. The keyboard is much faster, saves your wrists, and is more precise. A few of my co-workers, when they see my fingers fly across the keyboard, asked me to teach them how to do what I do.

The best way to learn to use the keyboard is to practice. Rather than try to memorize a big long list of shortcuts, it’s helpful to focus on just mastering one a day. So, to help people learn keyboard shortcuts, I’ve created a new blog at zeigen.com/shortcuts. Every weekday there will be a new keyboard shortcut. Please check it out!

I wrote about watching the first nine episodes of “Heroes” previously. The other week, I went to watch the second half of the season but realized I had failed to set the Season Pass priority high enough, and one of Kimi’s shows had been recorded instead. Fortunately, NBC offers Heroes free from their site, so I was interested in trying out their experience.

First off, thanks NBC for offering full-length shows free from your site, but the experience was pretty bad. I expected ads that couldn’t be fast-forwarded, but I didn’t expect the same ad multiple times. Six times viewing the exact same ad is irksome and off-putting. If I were an advertiser, I wouldn’t be caught dead trying that — the frustration factor is too intense. I’m actually less likely to purchase the particular product being advertised now because of how annoying the ad was. In addition, the UI needs work. After each break (and each commercial), I had to re-maximize the video to full screen. I had to disable my screen saver.

And worst of all, the video was grainy, too dark, and had too much macroblocking. The streaming was faster than real time, though. And the price was right.

On a more individual level, I really didn’t like watching a full hour of TV on my computer. Wrong light, wrong chair, wrong ergonomics. I much prefer watching TV on my couch in the living room.