Yachats Oregon - Goodnight

One more shot - almost dark by this point. Long exposure and tripod mounted. The rocks and the tidal pools here are a great place to spend the day. See my Flickr for a few more. Had a great weekend in Yachats Oregon. Goodnight.

Yachats Oregon - Coastline

The rocks off of the Yachats coastline a little after sunset. A great place to play.

Yachats Oregon

We spent the weekend playing on the beautiful Oregon coast near Yachats. Great weather, good food, and great friends. Had an opportunity to take some interesting long exposure shots as well.

Tim Berry and iPhone Drama

Tim Berry: iPhone as Classic Drama - Business on The Huffington Post

Tim Berry, founder and President of the company I work for, has an excellent post up on the Huffington Post about the launch of the iPhone and drama surrounding it. Tim's perspective on the iPhone launch is especially interesting because of his history with Apple in the 80s and his involvement in their business planning.

I'm eagerly awaiting the iPhone introduction, but not just because I want one. I'm looking forward to the drama of Jobs, Apple, and cool gadgets vs. the stock market and financial analysis. I'm hoping that Apple and Steve Jobs can establish coolness as a wild-card measure of long-term health in a stock market world ruled by short-term metrics like gross margins and last quarter's earnings. It's a classic drama, complete with a hero, a fatal flaw, and, I hope, final redemption.

Name Our Baby

We have kids and we're fortunate to have another one on the way. I don't talk about my family here on palmit.commentary and I intend to keep it that way - no, you can't name our baby. I go a kick out of this Blaugh comic though - not too far from reality for some blogging parents. Don't let your community name your baby and don't optimize your baby name for Google search ranking.

Motorola Q vs iPhone

 

I ordered a Motorola Q on Tuesday from my cellphone provider - Verizon. The Q is coming my way via FedEx, I should have it by tomorrow. The Q is replacing my Motorola RAZR, which I'm quite fond of, but needs at the office necessitate the upgrade. The upgrade also means I won't be getting an iPhone any time soon. Some of you might find this surprising considering my recent iPhone posting frenzy.

Why did I opt for the Q over an iPhone?

1. Cost. The Q, $179 - the iPhone, $499, or $599. 2. Proven track record. The Q is a great phone and a reasonably good PDA - it has the track record to prove it. The iPhone might suck. Even if it doesn't V 2.0 will be better. I'm going to give Apple some time to make it better and cost less. 3. Windows Ecosystem. I live in the Windows world and so does the Q - it remains to be seen how well the iPhone will do in a Windows world. 4. Verizon. Verizon provides the best all-around service of any carrier I've ever used. The phones work, I get great coverage, they don't drop calls, and their customer service is excellent. Switching from Verizion to AT&T (which I've had bad experiences with) for an iPhone isn't worth it. 5. Zimbra. We're switching to a Zimbra mail setup at the office - I know the Q supports Zimbra Mobile - the iPhone may not. 6. Microsoft Outlook. I spend a lot of time in Microsoft Outlook. The Q has great support for Outlook - the iPhone may not.

I'm still a big fan of Apple's products. I have an iPod and I use it almost everyday. I still really like the iPhone and I hope it's great. I'm just waiting for a V 2.0 that's better (more storage, better carrier options, a replaceable/extendable battery) and less expensive. The 1st iPod shipped in 2001 with 5g of storage - today, for the same money, you get 80g of storage and a much better product. I'm going to wait - at least a year. More to come on my Moto Q experience.

Update 06/21/07

See Apple already working on cheaper variants of iPhone 

iPhone Optically Excellent and Energized - Now in Hybrid ; )

iPhone Delivers Up to Eight Hours of Talk Time // Apple upgraded the official battery time estimates for the iPhone this morning and confirmed that it will ship with a glass front panel - the glass front panel makes me feel better about just how durable this thing is going to be.

CUPERTINO, California - June 18, 2007 - Apple today announced that iPhone will deliver significantly longer battery life when it ships on June 29 than was originally estimated when iPhone was unveiled in January. iPhone will feature up to 8 hours of talk time, 6 hours of Internet use, 7 hours of video playback or 24 hours of audio playback. In addition, iPhone will feature up to 250 hours - more than 10 days - of standby time. Apple also announced that the entire top surface of iPhone, including its stunning 3.5-inch display, has been upgraded from plastic to optical-quality glass to achieve a superior level of scratch resistance and optical clarity.

Father's Day Picaboo Photo Book

It's Father's Day here in the United States today and my most excellent family surprised me with a beautiful photo book from Picaboo.com. The photo book is hard-bound and the photo pages are excellent quality. My wife was able to insert her own custom captions and text to give the book a very personal touch. This is the 1st time we've used an on-line service for something like this and we're both impressed with the quality of the book and Picaboo's service as well. A friend passed a promotion code over to my wife last month so she gave it a shot - we got a $29.99 photo book for $8.99 including shipping - great deal. We're also planning on giving competing sevices like Scrapblog and Blurb a shot. I'd really like to get more of our pictures off of the computer and back into the real-world where people can enjoy it. Happy Father's Day Dads!

ZOHO Creator Rocks

ZOHO Creator - how did I miss this? I watched a ZOHO Creator DEMO today (above) and was totally impressed. I'm frankly surprised this isn't getting more attention and that this is the 1st I've heard of the product. ZOHO Creator makes it easy to create a simple, or fairly complex, database (complete with a UI) in minutes. They've made it really easy to share the UI for data-entry - you can even post a code snippet to your website or blog to make the data-entry UI available anywhere you want. It's free, it's slick, and I'm completely surprised more people aren't talking about this. ZOHO Creator even features a powerful scripting language - watch this demo. Very cool.

Jason Calacanis - The Crisis We're Facing on the Internet

Slimebuckets, pollution and web conservation Calacanis-style

Wil Harris posted a nice interview-style article for the INQUIRER yesterday - he interviews Jason Calacanis, founder and CEO of the new search engine Mahalo. Jason talks about why he thinks the Internet is broken and what has to happen to fix it.

Well, I think the wisdom of the crowds is beneficial, for sure. But I think that there is a limitation to everybody having a voice in something. If everybody has a voice, then you end up with something average. If everybody participated in the making of a movie, it wouldn't be so good. But if you give Scorcese total control, it can end up brilliant - so there's really a limit to how far you can push the wisdom of crowds. -- Jason Calacanis

iPhone Available 6 p.m. June 29th Your Time Zone

Happy hour with the iPhone | Tech news blog - CNET News.com The American public will get its first chance to buy the iPhone at 6 p.m. in each local time zone, Apple confirmed Wednesday. [Source - CNET]

Mac Rumors Featuring iPhone Details from AT&T Traing Manual

 

On Friday Mac Rumors published a series of, what appear to be, scanned copies of an AT&T iPhone training manual. They do a good job of summarizing the scans (so you won't have to wreck your eyes trying to read them) and the scanned copies are available as well. Apparently, someone that goes by cindynjgirl79 sent them the scans. The Google search on cindynjgirl79 produces some interesting results - maybe this is cindynjgirl79's MySpace page - it's 3rd in the results. There aren't going to be a lot of surprises left when the iPhone ships on June 29th.

Apple Jesus Phone

The iPhone hype just keeps coming and TechCrunch is all over it - everything at TechCrunch tagged iPhone. June 29th all will be forgiven. The Jesus phone from Apple. Watch the embeded video below - looks like Duncan Riley put this together as a promotional piece for TechCrunch.

Canoing on Sparks Lake in Oregon

We left Saturday morning for an overnight camping trip on Spark Lake in Eastern Oregon. Unfortunately, we ended up driving back late Saturday night - constant rain Saturday afternoon and into the evening soaked us and spending the night in wet tents (with a bunch of little kids) wasn't what he had in mind. It was a short trip but worth the effort. Canoing on Sparks is always a treat and the views of Mt. Bachelor (pictured above in the background) are always spectacular. Highly recommended. - best paddled in a BELL canoe.

Google Calendar Directory Released

Google released a Public Calendar Directory today. Public calendars have always been searchable but the Calendar Directory is organized and easy to browse.

Speed Demon Photography

Surf over to Crestock.com and check out the amazing action shots submitted for thier photo contest. Sprinting greyhound by EcoShow is my favorite.

Indie iPhone Ad Spacetacular

Check out this Indie iPhone Ad. The concept and production values are great. Really impressive what people can do these days with a decent computer and a digital video camera. 69,979 views in about 3 days and Apple didn't pay a dime for the Ad - nice.

Techmeme vs. Scoble's Link Blog

Techmeme is great but Robert Scoble's Google Reader powered Link Blog, Scobleizer.com's Shared Items, is better. My Google Reader "For Morning Coffee" folder includes both the Techmeme feed and Scobleizer.com's Shared items feed so I have a lot of caffeinated experience with both feeds. 9 times out of 10 I prefer the content in Scoble's Link Blog. Why? I think it's the human element. Why scan through the Techmeme feed and others for the highlights when Robert can do it for me ; ) I call it the ScobleMeme. ScobleMeme, like TechMeme, isn't for everyone. Thanks Robert!
Related:
Scobleizer - My favorite 35 feeds for the past month

Jeff Han Unveils High-Resolution Multi-Touch Computer

Watch Jeff Han demo his high-resolution multi-touch computer screen at TED. I'm sold on his vision of how we should be interacting with user interfaces - make it happen Jeff! We've lived in a flat world for far too long.