Wednesday was a very big day for me.  Even though I worked late into the morning Tuesday night on a project for work, my wife kindly came in at 9:58 am and woke me so that we could watch the web as Apple announced the long awaited tablet.  For over a year I’ve “known” approximately what this tablet would be and have impatiently awaited it’s arrival.  After all the news was out I can’t say that I was blown away, but on the other hand I wasn’t extremely disappointed either.  It is mostly what I expected it to be.  I was bummed about several things, but also pleasantly surprised at the price.  And after a few days of reflection I have a couple of things I want to say about the soon-to-be-in-my-hands iPad.  So read on for my thoughts about the missing flash, missing camera, weird aspect ratio, the product category and a prediction for release day.

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Since my devistating review of the Camangi WebStation I’ve had some time to think about what my vision is for the soon to be announced Apple tablet.  This isn’t a prediction of what I think it will be, but rather a look at what I hope it will be.  Of course I originally wrote this about two or three weeks ago and since then there have been many rumors and speculations about what the tablet will be.  And by now we have a lot of clues as to what it will be.  And of course it’s very likely that in two days we’ll know exactly what it is, at least it’s initial itteration.  But hit the link and read on to what iWant it to be.

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While the world waits for Apple to release official news about their new tablet computer, a few smaller (and lesser known) companies are releasing their own touch screen tablets.  Archos has a few models out, there’s the viliv, and then there’s the whole CrunchPad thing which is now called the JooJoo.  And I’ve never played with any of them.  I have however been (for some reason) drooling for an iSlate for the past year or so.  And in my impatience I prematurely ordered a Camangi WebStation and am ready to report the bad news…

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It’s no secret that I have a movie theatre for a television and that we enjoy watching movies at home. But I’m also the parent of a small child and we have a fairly strict policy of what we allow our child to view. Still, we enjoy getting cozy on the couch for a good family movie. So the issue becomes WHAT to watch. The challenge is to find movies that are clean and appropriate for her while at the same time are able to hold my interest.

As I said, we’re careful about what television shows she sees. I’ve even vetoed some Blue’s Clues episodes because of the way they often handle conflict, encourage entitlement, and promote drama and whininess. And don’t even get me started on The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse and how they routinely teach ’scientific’ principles that defy the laws of physics.

Everything she watches is played off TiVo, giving us the ability to skip over commercials. Although I must admit that it is mostly so we can avoid her falling for kids advertising and wanting every cheap toy that is pushed in her face. So we simply remove the pushing. We also don’t watch any non-kids shows when she is around, which basically amounts to ‘when she is awake.’ And if the TV is playing live-tv, it’s always on the food channel – which has proven to be a completely kid-safe channel.

For movies, as a general rule I believe in the MPAA rating system. G-rated movies are probably fine for her.  PG, or Parental Guidance, means that it might or might not be appropriate – and we need to pre-view the movie to know if it’s cool before she sees it. And I figure she can probably watch PG-13 movies when she’s 13 – but we’ll see when we get there. With only G movies to choose from, the short list gets stale fast. The problem with the PG rating is that it’s too wide a range – movies can be fine for 6 year olds or barely appropriate for 12 year olds. Overall I think there is a serious shortage of good family movies. And it’s a genre that is not target by indie film makers, which is why I have a passion to try to eventually fill that gap.  But I digress…

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High Tech Monorails is a documentary I edited for my friend Rob Kelly.  It’s airing on Travel Channel and Travel HD several times this month starting Sunday at 7pm PST.  Set your TiVo and be sure watch it!

The show covers several of the world’s best monorails including the Schwebebahn in Wuppertal Germany, which was built over 100 years ago.  It also takes you to China aboard the 1.2 billion dollar mag lev that reaches 270 mph, and to Las Vegas where a monorail was built to connect the back side of the strip’s casinos.  And the film talks about how Los Angeles was offered a free monorail in the 60’s but turned it down due to pressure from the oil companies.  And it asks the question “why aren’t we using these technologies more today.”  All egos aside, it’s a delightful way to spend an hour.  I hope everyone gets a chance to check it out.

Hit the link to see a clip from the show… Read… »

What’s better to help me forget about that stolen iPhone other than a new big budget prime time sci fi show to watch. Gosh V, that’s a big TV…

I watched, hoping for a BSG-style re-imagined remake of the 80’s original and I got the feeling that’s what they were going after. For some reason I can’t quite tell yet if they succeeded. I didn’t watch much of the original miniseries (or any iterations thereafter) but remember enough know a few spoilers. So I was glad that the pilot covered a lot of ground and I think it got us far enough along the story to hopefully be able to kick into full swing next week.  In comparison I felt both BSG and Sarah Conner Chronicles had excellent pilots and got things rolling right away. I think it might take a few more episodes to see how well I’m going to like this. But at least they got me willing to give it a try for a few more weeks. For now we’ve got a season pass. What did you think?

LOS ANGELES

OCTOBER, 2009

Imagine you’re on vacation enjoying a day at Disneyland with your family.  You get your iPhone out of your pocket and it’s in your hand.  You set it down on the seat next to you for a second to help your 4 year old, then a few seconds later you suddenly realize that it’s gone.  You think “Wait a minute… where’s my iphone?”  Then you question yourself “where did I set it down and why would I set it down?” and then you re-step your path, ask around if anyone saw it, check all your pockets like 10 times, look in the stroller and all around.  It’s gone!  Now what?

What would you do?  “I have mobile me” you say?  Well, so do I – but there are some harsh realities to that.  If you’re an iPhone owner I suggest that you read on, find out what is and isn’t possible, and think about what you would do, because it could happen to you. Read… »

Just an update on the wordpress virus.  After several hours of research followed by 3 or 4 hours of fixing, I’ve wiped out the virus and cleaned up the database.  I also implemented guvnr’s 10 tips to make wordpress hackproof.  (Ok if that’s not offering a challenge to all the hackers out there…)

The main advice everyone gives is obviously to update to the latest version of wordpress and all your plugins, but once infected it’s too late for that plan to help.  Other tips are to of course use a strong password and to disable the default admin user account.  But first I had to remove the ‘back door’ admin user – which was giving the virus access to my site. Then I went through the 10 tips closing up vulnerabilities where possible.

One place where I almost hosed myself was that somewhere in the process I accidentally reduced my admin account’s privileges to that of a normal author, without first creating a new admin user.  After that blunder, logging back in as admin was impossible – so there was no way to create a new admin user.  Ultimately I had to hack back in to my own site (via the mysql database) and create a new user with admin capabilities.  Ahhhh, technology!

Yes!  I just determined that tomorrowland.com has been infected. You can read about the attack here.  So the site might be up and down for a few days until I clean it up.  And then I’ll be on vacation for a week after that.

It’s a cleaver hack that somehow installed a hidden administrator account.  I noticed it when I wrote that last entry and when I clicked to set the author, an unknown author appeared.  Then further investigation showed that I have 2 administrators although the 2nd one shows for a split second and then disappears.

This is probably the reason dreamhost saw some odd activity on my site, however a simple google search could have told them what was going on.  I’m still glad I’m off their servers and moved on to my own.

Let’s just say that I won’t be doing any more business with dreamhost.  And I can’t recommend that anyone else do business with them either.  Without getting into the details they are responsible for tomorrowland.com being down for almost two weeks, and never showed any concern about it, or a real reason why it was shut down, which has lead me to finally move away from them and shared hosting to a dedicated server at another company.  Of course this brings new technical challenges, like maintaining a whole server, but it should be fun and educational and I expect that now we’ll be good for a while.

October 20, 2008 – now

Five days shy of a year ago I reinvented my blog, decided to extend myself some grace, just try to have fun with it, and focused the site on all the technology that’s in my life and makes our lives more fun.  Back then I made a commitment to myself to update my blog every day.  Except for weekends, holidays, and the occasional day here and there I did a good job keeping it up for quite a long while.

But for the most part blog posts were written very late at night.  And daily blogging wears on a person, especially when you see various levels of success (and failure) in terms of traffic, and basically no revenue from ads.  So over time my updates slowed and eventually came to a stop.

And let’s talk about ad revenue for a moment.  Because in my opinion Google AdSense is a scam for honest site owners.  (By honest I mean following the contract and not clicking on your own ads and not trading daily clicks with fellow bloggers.)  In the past year, from October 22, 2008 through October 15, 2009, Google AdSense shows that I gave them 103,994 page impressions.  Not too shabby.  In that year I had 225 clicks and earned $83.28.  However, because Google won’t cut a check unless you reach $100, I’ve not seen any of that green.

I also have other ads on my site.  I have an amazon ad that I made myself which links to Amazon using my associates code.  That ad has probably been there fore about 6 months, was clicked on about 5 times, and never resulted in a purchase, meaning no revenue.  I also had an ad for dreamhost, which also never resulted in any revenue.

This has led me to the idea that I might as well remove all the ads and just do it for the love.  The fact is that I’ve only ever had the goal of using the ads to cover the cost of the site.  And of course the cost just shot up 5 fold because of the server change.

Traffic

I won’t be shy with the rest of the numbers… On an average day (before the takedown of ‘09) I got about 400 unique visitors (as reported by Google Analytics), which I feel is a decent following.  In terms of web traffic and server usage this is a very small site.  To put it in bandwidth terms, last moth I used about 75 GB of bandwidth.  Again, a very modest number.  I now have a whole server mostly dedicated to serving this site.

Grace, Success and Failure

Grace came from the fact that I had been getting hung up on the possibility of making mistakes and it was causing a serious block.  So I decided to give myself the freedom to make mistakes, misspell words, have bad grammar, etc.  And luckily when I started no one was reading anyway, so who cared if I made mistakes.  The freedom is why I can write this entry off the cuff.  Because if I had to plan it out and write it properly it would never get done.  Grace to move forward and not care what people think.

Success and Failure is often self-judged by page views.  And once a random post gets a ton of hits overnight, that becomes the new standard by which all other posts are judged. What is weird is that the posts that I expected to get picked up by engadget or gizmodo and do well usually didn’t.  It wasn’t something that I could control.  And some of the posts that I put the most effort and love into also didn’t get a lot of hits.

The biggest hit is my review of the Sony Webbie HD camera, which as of today has been hit over 42,000 times.  And of course my dell mini 9 leopard install was also a hit at over 12,000 views (plus about 20,000 on youtube).  Oh and my favorite is a post where all I did was ASK if anyone has opinions on Plex vs Boxee vs XBMC.  That post has hit over 4,000 times and has high results in google.  And actually that one has made me want to focus more on the discussion of home media players, which I still plan to do.

Some of my ‘failures’ (ok, let’s call them disappointments) would be the Cat Genie review, which I worked hard on, and the paint on screen stuff – wow I worked REALLY hard on those posts.  But another disappointment was the first Podcast.  Without the 42,000 hits on the webbie camera post, these other numbers would have seemed respectable to me. But in comparison they’re poor and disappointing.  Perspective?  This post will get read about 10 or 20 times, and most people wont read this far.  So blogging has to be done for yourself and if people read it fine, and if they don’t fine.

The Podcast

The most recent change came in June when I posted what was supposed to be the first of many video podcasts.  I worked extremely hard on the video, had to put myself out there by being on screen, and then worked on customizing my own video player module.  I still have many plans for video and hope that they’ll be the future of this site.  But it will take me accepting the mentality that I had a year ago with writing and apply it to the videos.  I can be a perfectionist when it comes to video because it’s my field.  So we’ll see where that leads me over the next year.