Johnny Evans, writing for Computerworld about Apple's all-male (and, it should be noted, white, middle-aged) executive team:
The image I like to carry of the company is that it's some form of meritocracy. That the people at the most senior positions are the people capable of the best performance.
That may be true short term, but over 10-15 years, no women have proven to be "capable of the best performance"? I find that hard to believe.
There are too few women and too many prejudices in technology.
44 years later, "I've Seen The Promised Land" is still one of the most powerful pieces of oratory ever uttered, and this line by a "white girl" in the ninth grade chokes me up every time.
Audio here and here. Video of the title quote here.
OK, final Teller links for the night. He's been interested in the psychology behind magic for a long time. He co-authored "Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research" for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2008, and Wired Magazine profiled him in 2009:
"Go take a look," Teller says. I amble down the hall and—just before reaching the end—smack into something hard, leaving a wet mouth-print on polished glass. The "window" is merely a reflection; the hallway ends in a precisely angled, mirrored door. "You didn't see the illusion because you weren't expecting one," Teller says. "You assumed I wasn't fucking with your head and that this hallway is actually a normal hallway. Those assumptions work great until you walk into a wall."
Teller, from a February interview with The Smithsonian Magazine:
unwilling
On his and his mentor, David G. Rosenbaum's, thoughts about magic and theatre:
A romantic novel can make you cry. A horror movie can make you shiver. A symphony can carry you away on an emotional storm; it can go straight to the heart or the feet. But magic goes straight to the brain; its essence is intellectual.
The piece is chock-full of with these amazing nuggets.
Documentary filmmaker Debbie Lum, on the subject of her SXSW entry.
Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy:
If you’re not Asian, what Lum is referring to is the targeted attraction that some non-Asian men have toward Asian women — an obsession, in some cases, that takes the creepy plunge into sexual fetish: “Living in the Bay Area, if I had a dollar for every time a guy with yellow fever tried to hit on me in Chinese, I could have funded ‘Seeking Asian Female’ on my own,” she says.
Not a whole lot of insight here by Forbes, but this bit rings true:
[J]ust shaving off the credit card companies' fees on Apple retail stores could save Apple $3 billion in revenues.
One year ago Apple announced 200 million iTunes accounts. Just about everyone I know has one. You can already "gift" someone with iTunes credit. All you need is a cleaner interface to send it and a linked account to get money out.
Their tag line is "how to design cool stuff". I own dozens of their printed editions from the mid-'90s. It's great for both "how to" instruction and design inspiration.
We recently began testing Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts on iOS and Android devices to make it easier for brands to reach consumers anytime, even when they are on the go. As with the launch of Promoted Tweets in user timelines on Twitter.com, we started by showing them in the timeline only for those users already following the advertiser. Since we began testing three weeks ago, reactions have been positive. Starting today, we are expanding this test, enabling brands to target Promoted Tweets to mobile users that share similar interests with their existing followers.
Translation: Prepare for unsolicited tweets from advertisers.
A prediction: This "test" will either fail, or will result in an option to pay to remove these "Promoted Tweets". There's your business model right there.
On Friday, March 16, AT&T set a new single-day record for its iPad sales and activations, demonstrating robust demand for the new iPad on the nation's largest 4G network, covering nearly 250 million people.
Subject to declaration by the Board of Directors, the Company plans to initiate a quarterly dividend of $2.65 per share sometime in the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2012, which begins on July 1, 2012.
There's also a $10 billion share repurchase program.
“We have used some of our cash to make great investments in our business through increased research and development, acquisitions, new retail store openings, strategic prepayments and capital expenditures in our supply chain, and building out our infrastructure. You'll see more of all of these in the future,†said Tim Cook, Apple's CEO. “Even with these investments, we can maintain a war chest for strategic opportunities and have plenty of cash to run our business. So we are going to initiate a dividend and share repurchase program.â€
Translation: Our money printing press is oiled up and ready to go.
One interesting note from the conference call: Apple will pay dividends on unvested Restrcted Stock Units, but Tim Cook specifically requested he not receive this benefit on his 1,000,000+ million RSUs. That's a lot of money he's giving up.
A conference call before the market opens? If this isn't an announcement of a dividend, I'll eat my hat. I don't think they do this to say "we're doing nothing". $100 billion in the bank is hard to ignore.
Question is, how big, and is it a one-time special divided?
The China correspondent for the public radio show Marketplace tracked down the interpreter that Daisey hired when he visited Shenzhen China. The interpreter disputed much of what Daisey has been saying on stage and on our show. On this week's episode of This American Life, we will devote the entire hour to detailing the errors in "Mr. Daisey Goes to the Apple Factory."
Daisey lied to me and to This American Life producer Brian Reed during the fact checking we did on the story, before it was broadcast. That doesn't excuse the fact that we never should've put this on the air. In the end, this was our mistake.
The original program1 was riveting. Daisey is a talented and engaging storyteller. Too bad it was in part a fabrication for the purpose of telling a good story.
Kudos to Ira Glass and This American Life for a full-throated, zero equivocation retraction2.
What I do is not journalism. The tools of the theater are not the same as the tools of journalism.
Rob Schmitz, the reporter who tracked down the interpreter, is American Public Media's Marketplace China correspondent, and filed his own report:
But it wasn't.
Daisey says "it's not journalism. It's theater." That's certainly true, but the "story" was put out there as truth, not fiction.
The Public Theater, where the show finally ends its run on March 18, also put out a statement:
[…]
Mike is an artist, not a journalist. Nevertheless, we wish he had been more precise with us and our audiences about what was and wasn't his personal experience in the piece.
Even in defending him, they acknowledge the deceit.
No longer available in audio form, alas. The transcript remains "only for reference". ↩
Speaking of kids and programming, the KidsRuby app (for Mac and Windows) lets kids write and run real, working code in the Ruby language and draw graphics using "Turtle graphics". When I first learned to program, one environment used Turtle graphics. It's a great way to introduce kids to the idea of structured commands and rules.
Speaking of getting more engineers, if you have any interest in learning to program, check out Codecademy, where you can learn the basics at your own pace. Encourage a kid to try it, and she may build the next iPhone, Facebook or Angry Birds.
"Mystery Meat" refers to on-screen elements and features that are hidden until you click, tap or hover on them, or actions you have to perform without the help of on-screen guidance. Think right-clicking or tap-and-holding on an link in Safari to open it in a new tab 1, or the pinch-and-zoom in iOS: until you learn about it, you don't know it exists.
The new iPhoto app for iOS, released with the new iPad, as beautiful as it is, is filled with mystery meat UI. Lukas Mathias at Ignore the Code summarizes his iPhoto experience:
Touching and gesturing in different ways would make seemingly random things happen. I regularly unintentionally activated features, changed views, opened or closed pictures, and got iPhoto into states I wasn't sure how to get out of again.
He gives several examples where the UI is simply inscrutable to new users, including my favorite:
There's some on-screen help, but it's mostly useless. For example, Apple's help tells you to «touch and hold with two fingers to use the magnifying loupe.» But once you do that, there's no further help or information! The loupe seems to support different zoom levels. How do you access them? I don't know. Are there other features the loupe supports? I don't know. Can you access the help system again, to get additional information? Nope, trying to do that just closes the loupe.
After experimenting and figuring it out (two fingers on the edge and rotate, like focusing a camera lens), it was a cool feature, but how was anyone supposed to know this ahead of time? As Lukas concludes:
Unfortunately, iPhoto's hidden gestures aren't particularly fun, and they only work in iPhoto.
If you just learned about those options, you're welcome, and point proven. ↩
Asked whether Obama is Christian or Muslim, some 45 percent of Alabama Republican respondents picked Muslim; 14 percent correctly identified him as Christian. Another 41 percent said they were unsure. In Mississippi, a majority of Republicans, 52 percent, identified Obama as Muslim; 12 percent said he was Christian and 36 percent were undecided.
What a great idea: deconstruct the recipes of well-known beers so you can make similar ones at home. I definitely need to get started with home-brewing.
I had a similar idea for a case, but I'm thinking it's an example of being stuck in the "make it a netbook" mindset. But, if you do a lot of traveling and typing, and don't want a separate keyboard, this looks nice (should it ever ship).
I wasn't able to buy any iPhone 4 online when it went on sale, so I was left to pre-order it and pick it up in a store. Fortunately I didn't have to wait in line long. It took less than 30 minutes from arrival to departure.
This is a far cry from folks who stood in line for several hours to get their iPhone (and in many cases, to not get their iPhone because they hadn't pre-ordered one).
I drove by my local Apple Store this morning to see how long the line was; I'd guess about 300 people deep, at about 8 am. Some folks were there at 6 am and didn't get their iPhone for nearly five hours.
And yes, it's a great device. The text is crisp, the screen bright, and it feels very, very fast. It also is more comfortable in my hand than I thought it would be.
Case received and installed. Here are my thoughts after about 24 hours of having it:
It looks good (I can see the iPad without obstruction).
it feels good (though I'd prefer a powder-satin finish; it's a little smooth).
The edges are a little rough (could use a sanding).
It's less durable than I'd like. In just a day, it already has swirls on it from putting it down on various surfaces. Not sure if the aluminum iPad would fare any better; I suppose the argument is it's cheaper to replace the plastic cover than buy a new iPad.
I'm keeping an eye out for a power-satin finish cases, though.
A thin (1mm) case to protect your iPad from dings and scratches, plus fold-out stands, screen protector, microfiber wipe and headphone and 30-pin connector protectors. Whew. That's a lot of stuff for $33 (including shipping).
As a fan of the classic Moleskine notebooks, and of hand-crafted works, I just had to order this case. It's made of bamboo and faux leather using traditional book binding techniques. Reading my iPad with it feels like reading a real book, and is very comfortable in the hand.
With all the high-prices iPad holders out there, it's nice that there's a $2 version available.
OK, it's a business card holder from OfficeMax, but it works great for holding the iPad horizontally, and two of them inverted against each other holds the iPad vertically too.
If you order through the OfficeMax.com site, it's Buy 1, Get 1 at 50% off, so you can buy two for $3. I have half-a-dozen scattered around my office and home. (I prefer the silver, if you can find it.)
Speaking of Matias, they have one of the best keyboards I've ever used, the TactilePro. If you like the old-style clackity-clack, like the Apple Extended Keyboard from  years back. It's so good, it's currently sold out, even at $150.
Call me when I can drive to Disneyland from San Francisco with nothing more than 10 minutes to top off. Current and planned pure electric cars get maybe 200-250 miles on a charge, and take upwards of three hours to fully charge. Even super-powered chargers you might find at a filling station are planning 30 minute charges.
Hybrids or range extended vehicles which use a gas tank solve this problem, but for many of them (e.g. the Chevy Volt), you're going to get 40 miles on the battery and 300 miles on the gas tank, which kind of defeats the point.
They're great for the commuter who drives 15 or 20 miles round trip a day, and can plug in on either end of that commute, and I wouldn't mind having a Tesla roadster (only $101,500!), but I don't see the current crop of cars competing for my cash just yet.
Malbec is a newly discovered grape, for me. It's only in the last year or so that I've learned about it, and it's rapidly becoming one of my favorites. It's become a popular wine in Argentina, and is growing in popularity in California. In the 2008 Zolo, it's a medium-bodied taste, which I think it would lay down well, as it has some some solid structure behind it, though the tannins are not at all overwhelming.
Like many Malbecs, this wine has an inky darkness to it, a deep, deep purple on the edges, almost black as it pools, with a strong plummy or jammy taste. It is the perfect companion to many meals, including tonight's, my first use of my new Big Green Egg.
I haven't spoken of my Big Green Egg yet, as it's only a couple of weeks old, and, other than a test-firing to make sure it "works", I hadn't used it before tonight. What is the Big Green Egg? In few words, it's a ceramic outdoor griller and smoker, shaped, yes, like a big, green egg. I bought it for an absurd amount of money after a few friends swore how good it was. I'd been wanting to buy a new grill to replace my crappy $40 metal bowl, and I'm not a big fan of gas cooking.
(The Egg has a "following" that seems as "cultish" as that of Mac users. No surprise, then, that I'm drawn to it. I'll have unboxing and set-up pix shortly.)
Tonight, as I pondered dinner, and despite the fact that I went to Forbes Grill Steakhouse on Saturday and I'm going to 5A5 next Saturday, I felt the need to fire up The Egg and sizzle some steak on it.
The economy has done some bad things to a lot of people, but one of the good things its done is made good steak cheap. How cheap? How about Prime grade New York and Ribeye steak for under $10 a pound? Thanks to Costco, I was able to stock up on three or four pounds of each, for less than the cost of one 12 oz. cut of each at a high-end steakhouse.
Tonight I fired up The Egg, and in 20 minutes it was at a roaring 600 degrees. Whew! I sprinkled a New York steak with some kosher salt and fresh ground pepper on both sides, and let it sit while The Egg came up to temperature. Then three minutes on each side with the flames caressing it, and then a couple of minutes "baking" with the fire dialed down, and it came out slightly north of "medium" on the edges.
The uncut steak shown here isn't slathered with sauce; that color comes from The BGE, which produced a fantastic crust, while remaining moist and juicy. The steak was chewy without being leathery, and despite my initial fear that it had been overcooked and ruined, it was only slightly above temperature.
(Next time, I'll limit it to two minutes on each side, and two minutes "baking", so it's pinker. I know, for a steak lover, I still don't like it to far below medium. Better than a decade ago when I wasted a good cut at "well done". Shudder.)
The 2008 Zolo Malbec was in fact the perfect companion to the New York steak. It neither overwhelmed it, as a Zinfandel might, nor succumbed to it, like a wonderfully subtle Pinot Noir might do.
In all, it was a enjoyable meal, and I'm looking forward to more pairings of Big Green Egg and my wine collection.
I'm not a big fan of Chardonnay, finding them generally bland and soft (aka "buttery"). This 2007 Mietz CellarsChardonnay, however, is a more acidic style, which I find much more interesting, yet it remains an easy drink, making it perfect for an evening sitting on the couch with a loved one after a home-cooked meal of Spice Hound-infused turkey tacos.
Mietz is part of the Family Winery cooperative, and this bottle is part of the cooperative's wine club I joined in January.
A couple of days ago I dreamt I was sentenced to six months in jail, for an unknown offense.
Beyond the strangeness of dreaming I'd been sent to jail, what was particularly strange was the amount of freedom the inmates seemed to have.
Several times, I left the jail to go home so I could find books, magazines, and other forms of entertainment that would prevent me from being bored during my incarceration.
It seemed I could leave during the day, as long as I was back in the evening, and I could do as I wanted in the cell.
I recall selecting books I had always wanted to read, along with books which were in tatters from decades of use.
One book that stood out was a handbook for amateur magicians, which I've owned since I was a teenager. I learned dozens of slight-of-hand and other tricks from that book. And after choosing that book and returning to jail, the next day when I walked out again, it was to bring back a deck of cards.
I have no idea what the dream means. I thought perhaps it represented my desire to live a life of leisure, free to read and learn.
I thought perhaps it represented freedom during the day and inflexibility at night.
No matter how I ponder this, I can't come up with a good explanation.
A beer tour, hosted by Sam Adams Brewery, in Germany, the birthplace of beer? How badly do I want to do this? Pretty damn badly. At $2979 per person though, it's not happening. At least not this year.
