Just for kicks. The “base” iPhone plan in Canada (by our favorite company Rogers Wireless) is advertised at $60/month. This plan manages to offer what I like to call “No Value Whatsoever” – whereas Rogers believes it offers their customers “flexibility” and “special value bundles”. I don’t know how Yoga relates to this, and unless Rogers hired a marketing person who believes that “special value bundles” is synonymous with “getting stabbed in the eye and kicked in the face” – I think that someone has a very perplexing idea as to the meaning of the word “value”.

As if it weren’t bad enough, let’s see what the actual cost is if you want your phone to be usable. By usable I mean have a half decent number of text messages, Call Display and a moderate 6GB of data (now advertised at $30/month from Rogers if you sign up before August 31st). So now what’s the cost of those 150 minutes plus a half decent amount of data?

$ 60.00 - Basic Voice Plan
$ 30.00 - 6GB of Data
$ 15.00 - iPhone "value pack" to get call display and some text messages
$  6.95 - Standard System Access Fee
$  0.50 - 911 Fee
$  5.62 - GST
—————————————
$118.07 per month.

This might be off by a few cents, because I don’t know if they charge GST on the System Access Fee and 911 Fee. But as far as I’m concerned, and for all intents and purposes, the real cost of actually having an iPhone on the basic plan with the features that actually make it usable for what it’s designed to be is almost DOUBLE the advertised price set out by Rogers.

I don’t know what you call that, but I call it lying, cheating your customers and downright scummy business.

I wanted to write to you to share my growing concern over the excessively expensive price plans provided by Rogers to their cellular customers. This is something I’ve been upset (even angry) about for a number of months, but the recent release of the iPhone plans has pushed me to the point where I have to make myself heard.

I can only hope and pray that you will listen to myself, and the literal thousands of others who have grown extremely and excessively tired of what I would call the price gouging of your faithful customers.

When it came time for me to get a new cell phone (August 2007), I specifically chose Rogers because I knew it was inevitable that you would be the exclusive provider of the iPhone in Canada. My wife and I now both have a ”$25/month” cell phone plan with Rogers, and this is where my frustration begins. Personally, I don’t know how it is legal to advertise a ”$25/month” cell phone plan, when after you add the features needed to make the phone usable (I don’t believe a cell phone is any use without voicemail, call display, call waiting and call forwarding, along with several hundred text messages) – plus add a bunch of special System Access Fees and 911 Fees and Random Other Fees – our two ”$25/month” plans total over $100/month, WITHOUT going over our minutes. How is this legitimate? How does this have any semblance of reason at all? While I lived in Singapore, I had a cell phone plan with 200 minutes, unlimited incoming text and 1000 outgoing text, voice mail, call display and call forwarding (plus the phone was free) – for SGD $18.90 / month (about $14 Canadian dollars).

The reason I am writing this now, is because in addition to being frustrated to the point of being near furious with my existing phone plans, your recent addition of the iPhone, and the voice/data plans associated to them are downright laughable.

Oh, it’s a value pack, alright

Then, the idea that you can advertise a “Value Pack” – which basically includes Call Display and a few text messages, for FIFTEEN DOLLARS A MONTH – is verging on absurd. There aren’t even words in the English language to describe how much “Value” that package does NOT deliver. Actually, if you have the time and generosity to reply, I would love to hear how you can describe this as a “Value Pack” at all. It seems to me that this package should cost about $5/month. Rogers, however, is charging 300% of that. Then there is the interesting idea that your base plans give us “Bonus Text Messages”. Oh Yay! Seventy-five “Bonus Text Messages” with my $60/month voice plan that’s going to cost me ~$70.82/month after all my special fees are added.

Would you like some ‘bonus’ text messages with that kick in the face?

I’m also quite confused and perturbed as to how you offer Visual Voicemail as standard with an iPhone (as it should be) – but don’t offer Call Display as part of the base package. How does it make sense that I can watch my phone ring, have no idea who’s calling, wait for the call to go to voicemail, NOT know who’s calling unless I subscribe to some $15/month “Value Pack”, or purchase Call Display for $7/month, but after the person leaves me a voicemail, I can see on screen who called me. Does that make any sense at all? To anybody?

I can’t even describe how much of a marketing debacle the launch of the iPhone has been for Rogers. To have a “something special is coming July 11” banner on your web site, for days, along with no plan information is one of the biggest marketing blunders I’ve ever seen. The iPhone was essentially a product of infinite value, handed to you by Apple. I believe that the iPhone could have actually been a turning point for Rogers. A turning point where your company decided that actually caring for and listening to customers was more important than corporate greed. You could have advertised that phone 38 ways from Wednesday, and had customers lined up out the doors for miles, handing you hundreds and thousands of dollars, millions of dollars, in three year contracts to get their hands on it – and you could have offered us decent prices, decent plans, and a semblance of fairness. But instead, Rogers took their monopoly, completely botched the largest marketing opportunity their company has seen in the past decade, AND decided to kick their customers in the teeth all in one foul swoop.

I am sick and tired of being gouged on my cell phone plans and random service charges. I am so sick and tired of customer support that can’t answer my questions. I’m sick and tired of trying to get my Call Forwarding to work, and finally getting through to a technical support person telling me “Oh, sorry, our $3/month call forwarding is broken right now, I have to set you up with our $2/month call forwarding.” (I wish I could say that wasn’t a true story).

Please, for the love of all things holy and good in this world, make a change. Make a difference. Do something for your customers. For once. Please. Prove to us that you actually listen, that you actually care, and that the voice of the customers can actually make a difference. Prove me wrong.

• Get rid of the crazy “System Access Fee”.
• Give us fair rates for our iPhones.
• Stop pretending that $15/month constitutes an “iPhone Value Pack”. There is no value to be found in that package at all.
• Give us fair rates for unlimited data, for all phones, not just iPhones.
• Start modeling your business after other companies who care for and listen to their customers.
• Start modeling your business after other companies who care for and listen to their customers.

That’s when I’ll sign a 3 year contract. That’s when I’ll line up at 5am, and wait 83 hours if I have to, to get my iPhone.

Please. Listen to us. Prove me wrong.

Estimating development time of software is one of my least favorite things to do. Usually, I’m pretty good at it, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s

• Time consuming
• Often grossly inaccurate
• Usually done while flying by the seat of your pants, with a marginal (at best) understanding of the functionality that you need to estimate.

I’ve always been a pessimistic estimator, and it’s something that people I’ve worked with for a long time understand and appreciate (even if they make fun of me for it, at times).

Some people might think it’s crazy to be a pessimistic estimator, because any estimate that you give to a client that’s padded by 50 or 100% is potentially going to be high. It might be a lot higher than some other shop who might totally low-ball an estimate just to land a contract.

In my opinion, in my way of doing business, the risk of a dissatisfied customer from a blown budget due to a low-ball estimate is significantly greater than the risk of losing a few contracts because of pessimistic estimates.

I would rather estimate high and exceed expectations by coming in well under budget; even if it means that I lose some work along the way because someone felt my estimates were too high.

One might define freelance or freelancer as:

a person who works as a writer, designer, performer, or the like, selling work or services by the hour, day, job, etc., rather than working on a regular salary basis for one employer.

I have a few reasons why, at least for the past few years, I’ve chosen to act as a freelancer, instead of going out and “getting a real job” – as they like to call it.

Here are my many and varied reasons for choosing to freelance, not necessarily with any in-depth discussion, but surface level reasons.

1. I haven’t found any companies (yet) that I’d like to be an employee of. I find that most companies underpay and under-appreciate their employees (especially software developers), and if I was going to work as an employee of a company, I want my work to be appreciated, and I want to be paid a fair wage.
2. A lot of companies favor people based on seniority instead of skill.
3. As a freelancer (at least when the getting is good), you can choose to work on whatever projects are most interesting, keeping the work varied, and hopefully fresh. This is rarely the case when working as an employee.
4. Tax breaks. I don’t know how the world works where you live, but in Canada – you get SCREWED for taxes if you’re an employee. If you freelance, or run your own business, you can legitimately save $1000’s of dollars a year that would otherwise go to poorly planned government projects, or 2010 Olympic Games.
5. I work best when I want to work, not 9am to 5pm. I’m often up early, starting work around 7 or 8am. I like to play video games for an hour in the afternoon around 3pm. I like to take a break when my wife gets home from work so we can have a coffee together, and then do a couple hour of work in the evening. As an employee – you can pretty much forget it (there are a few companies who don’t care when / how / where you work, but not many).
6. I like working with lots of different companies, solving different kinds of problems, and meeting different kinds of people. This is pretty much a given as a freelancer, and pretty much never-gonna-happen working as an employee of a specific company. Again, there are exceptions, but I’m speaking in general terms.

Freelancing isn’t for everyone (and it’s not always roses and candy canes), but these are a few of my many reasons for choosing it, at least at this point in my career.

When the perfect company comes around, offering me the perfect job, or when the economy goes to crap (probably related to some kinda sub-prime mortgage hoopla), maybe I’ll change my tune.

Joel Spolsky recently made some comments about TripIt, which I immediately tested, and was blown away.

This would have been infinitely useful during my past 2 years of globe-trotting.

If you travel a lot (at all?) and are tired of making up stupid itineraries in Word or Notepad or whatever, then this web app is for you.

On my way to the airport in Calgary on Sunday, I drove past a billboard for Q9 Networks that said:

Our data center client lists reads like a who’s who of Calgary businesses. Are you in it?

Marketing like this has always bothered me. It makes me want to flip the bird in their general direction, because climbing past the drivel it reads like this:

If you’re not hosting in our data center your company sucks.

Peer pressure for the enterprise. I thought we got past that in tenth grade?

Note to Q9 (this one’s free): Hire better marketing people.

One thing that I love about Seth Godin is his unceasing efforts in trying to make companies see that they need to treat their customers with respect. This is made evident again in a great little piece he wrote about Apple’s $200 iPhone price drop that the mediawenttotown on.

He talks about a bunch of things Apple could have done to make the early adopters “ok” with the fact that they were just out $200. But then he goes on to say:

The key is to not give price protection to early buyers (that’s unsustainable as a business model) but to make them feel more exclusive, not less.

I wish more corporations would take the route of doing everything in their power to make their customers feel respected. To make their customers feel like they have a choice and could take their business elsewhere (even if they can’t take their business elsewhere).

It’s been officially 16 days since arriving back in Canada. At last my cell phone works (which, incidentally, was purchased brand new and activated at a Rogers store), but not without several days of a non-usable phone, while I waited for Rogers to “look into it”, a bunch of phone calls to tech support, and snotty customer service people.

The long story short: Rogers assigned my new phone (and my wife’s new phone) telephone numbers that were specifically “reserved for internal testing purposes”. I know a good three letter acronym (Dub-Tee-Eff) that could be used somewhat appropriately in this situation.

What I continue to be amazed at is that these monstrously large corporations (all but monopolies, with not nearly enough Government control over the rights of consumers, in my opinion), still haven’t clued in to the fact that it’s no longer considered cool to gouge their customers for every last penny, nickle-and-diming for every “value added service”.

After two years of being in Singapore and paying the equivalent of CDN$12/month for my cell phone plan, which included 100 anytime minutes, 1000 text messages, call display and voicemail – I came home to the abomination that is our Canadian cell phone industry.

Now, in my opinion, I don’t consider a cell phone “usable” without voicemail and call display. Those are now considered standard features in my books. If you hand me a cell phone without these, it’d be like handing me a new car and saying I had to pay extra if I wanted it to come with an engine and a transmission.

Between Bell, Fido (AKA Rogers), Rogers and Telus – the main four up here in the GWN, your “choice” as a consumer basically amounts to who you want to get screwed by. You can do research and make “choices” all you want, but in the end, your research will be for nothing, and you might as well choose the company based on how pretty their logo is, because no matter who you pick, you’re going to get screwed.

All companies advertise their most primitive, basic plan as a plan that costs about $25/month. But none of them tell you until you look into the fine print that on top of that, you have to pay a “non-governmental System Access Fee” of $6.95/month for “maintaining the network” (or $8.95/month if you choose to be screwed by Bell).

Also, you can forget text messages, voice mail or call display. Any of these things costs extra. And I’m not talking like $2/month either. If you want to get a standalone voicemail package from Rogers (if you choose to get screwed by the company with the bad logo and terrible web site) you’re going to pay $8/month. Fortunately (if you can call it that), all of our lovely providers offer you some “Excellent Deals” if you bundle services together. So I get to save a tremendous amount of money, and feel slightly less screwed because I can get a “Special Bundle” that allows me to have voicemail, call display and 125 text messages for the low, low price of only $10/month!.

Don’t forget that extra $0.75/month for the “911 fee”. I mean, seriously? Are you fricking kidding me people? And if that wasn’t enough add some good ol’ Government style GST to chalk on another 6%.

That means, if I do the math correctly, my $25/month cell phone plan, made usable by purchasing the engine and transmission (voicemail and call display) separately, plus other random and special fees works out to

($25.00 + $10.00 + $6.95 + $0.75) * 1.06 = $45.26

WHAT IS GOING ON HERE??! Why in the name of all things pure and holy should I have to pay $45.26 per month for a $25/month cell phone plan? When are you big giant corporations going to get a clue that profit is not the be-all-end-all, and that your customers are sick and tired of being repeatedly screwed over by your greed. When will the government finally step in and do something about it? When are consumers going to start to demand better?

As cited on MacRumors and a bunch of other places:

Denny Strigl, Verizon’s chief operating officer, decided to pass on the iPhone deal and says he has no regrets: “Time will tell” if he made the right call, he says.

Also:

Given Apple’s cultlike following, however, Verizon isn’t taking any chances. Strigl says Verizon is already working with a manufacturer — he declines to say which one — on an answer to the iPhone. “We do have a very good response in the mill,” he says. “You’ll see that from us in the late summer.”

In my opinion, what Denny Strigl missed the boat on, is that there is an extremely good chance that there is no answer to the iPhone.

Just like there is no answer to Mac OS X. It either is Mac OS X, or it’s not. Just like there is no answer to the iPod. It’s an iPod or nothing – and it sure as heck isn’t a Zune. As far as my money goes, I’m going to say that the only thing time will tell for Strigl is how bad a decision they really made.

Updated: Shortened and fixed some grammar.

Seth Godin has posted (a number of days ago) an interesting piece on how even governments market themselves (in this post he is describing his experience at an Indian consulate).

I find that what Seth describes here, relates on a certain level to how a lot of businesses don’t need more technology, better web sites, or online e-commerce systems. Granted that these are all good things, and heaven knows there are a lot of businesses out there with really crappy websites. What a lot of businesses need are better ways of doing business, aside from the technology. Better workflow. Better customer experience. Knowledgeable employees. Common sense.

New company with Nick Means (from Texas y’all) is slowly starting to take shape. Between getting paperwork sorted out, coding for clients and looking for new clients – it’s keeping us pretty busy.

So for all your Ruby, Rails, Java and PHP needs…click.

And yes, there’s a difference.

I started researching AllOfMP3 about a month ago after hearing about it for the first time from a friend, while at their place for dinner. I read through all the spiel, the Russian Federation, Russian Licensing, The Russian Multimedia and Internet Society (ROMS), lawsuits, et cetera.

One of the best presented articles on the legality and ethicality of using a site like AllOfMP3 was a piece that I found here.

I’ve been looking to find new ways to purchase music (yes, I have been using the iTunes Music Store) mostly because I find that music, as a commodity, is priced way too high. Well, maybe it’s not even that the music is priced too high, but what really bothers me is knowing that the amount of cash that actually returns to the pockets of the musicians any time I happen to purchase an album is a measly pittance, compared to the amount that goes to the labels. To add insult to injury, we have this “association” (I’m looking at you, RIAA) that in its so-called pursuit of justice starts to randomly sue thousands of Americans whose names they might as well have pulled from a baseball cap. Didn’t they try to sue an 11-year-old girl? And a dead person? At any rate, the RIAA clowns think that it would make them look really smart if they seriously laid the smack down on AllOfMP3 with a $1.65 TRILLION dollar lawsuit, which in actuality (in my opinion, anyways) made them look like confounding idiots more than anything.

At any rate, now that I’ve made clear my disdain for record labels and the RIAA, I’d like to point out that I find it interesting the number of discussions floating around on the Internet about the issue of whether or not it’s “OK” to download music from a “legal” service like AllOfMP3.

What I notice is that there is a severe muddying of the water as people discuss this, because most people take the approach that if something is legal, that there is no reason whatsoever that they should feel as though it is ethically or morally questionable to purchase music from a company like AllOfMP3. To be honest, I have been seriously toying with the idea for the past few weeks, and probably can’t count the number of times I’ve visited, wanting to sign up, but ultimately deciding against it. And today I think I’ve reached my conclusion that even though I feel that the way that AllOfMP3 is operating their business in Russia is probably legal, it’s certainly not ethical. Granted, I don’t think that the RIAA or record labels in general treat people, customers or artists with any sort of decency either, generally speaking. But using the questionable ethics of the RIAA and record labels as they shaft artists and sue customers as a personal excuse to justify purchasing music from a company that is shady at best, ethically and legally, is just jumping into the mud with them.

In a way it’s frustrating. It’s frustrating that the most ethical way to purchase music puts money in the hands of the grimy RIAA and record labels much more so than in the hands of the artists whose music we love. But regardless of that fact, I’ll be continuing to give Apple my money for my music purchases for the foreseeable future.

Apparently at least a few people think that the iPhone will be a hit:

I first saw a screenshot similar to this on a Flickr photo stream belonging to Dave Shea (a fellow Vancouverite, I might add). I jumped over to Google Finance to take a peak myself, and the picture says a thousand words. It’ll be interesting to see how things progress over the next 6 months, but in the mean-time I’ll admit I’m salivating over the pretty iPhone.

Lots of questions seem to be going around, especially with regards to Java support, and I found an interesting quote from Mr. Jobs hisself, surrounding Java support for the iPhone:

Java’s not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It’s this big heavyweight ball and chain.
-Steve Jobs

I found this quote via David Pogue’s Blog which was in turn a quote from an interview that John Markoff had with His Steveness.

I’m not sure if Steve has jumped on the Rails bandwagon (yah, that was supposed to be funny), or if he just has a hate on for Java in general. It’s also worth noting that up to date Java support on Mac OS X seems to be a bit lacking as well. In order to run Java 5, Mac OS X 10.4 was required, and now it’s sounding like in order to run Java 6, a mandatory update to Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) will be required as well.

John Gruber has put up an interesting piece discussing the fact that releasing a piece of software as “Beta” is absolutely no excuse whatsoever for it to be full of bugs.

This has been addressed before by several other people much smarter than myself, including Joel Spolsky who, WAAAAYYYY back in the day (July 2001 – yes, I really have been reading his articles for that long) had this to say:

Anyway, getting good software over the course of 10 years assumes that for at least 8 of those years, you’re getting good feedback from your customers, and good innovations from your competitors that you can copy, and good ideas from all the people that come to work for you because they believe that your version 1.0 is promising. You have to release early, incomplete versions—but don’t overhype them or advertise them on the Super Bowl, because they’re just not that good, no matter how smart you are.

For the record, I’m not saying anything about Disco in particular (the particular app Gruber was commenting on), I’m talking about the broader world of software development in general. Although, I downloaded Disco to try the smoke feature, and was disappointed that it wouldn’t show smoke on my MacBook—so um, it got zapped.

At any rate, there is a fine line between releasing a quality product that still needs a bit of spit and polish, and releasing software that utterly disappoints the end user. Unfortunately, that fact can put a lot of developers / startups between what some might call, a rock and a hard place, the reason being that unreleased software that stays unreleased is essentially worthless, and released software that utterly disappoints end-users is essentially worthless. With the former, you have nothing, with the latter, you likely have a lot of frustrated end-users who have blogged about how bad your software sucks to the entire world, and even if you do get around to releasing a version that doesn’t suck – the damage is likely already done—and very difficult to recover from.

So the moral of the story is: Release early, release often – but not until it’s ready..

It looks like it’s official. Sun has officially released Java under the GPL license. Wow that surprises me. The first place I noticed the news was on Charles Oliver Nutter’s blog (AKA – one of “the JRuby guys”).

I don’t have the same optimism as many do, that there will be a minimal amount of forking of the language. I think that every Tom, Dick and Jane is going to have a different idea of what Java ought to do, and the forking will begin like mad.

I might eat my hat yet, but until then, it’s gonna be chicken curry.

At long last, after sucking most of my previous site content and blog entries from TextPattern, I’ve manage to finally deploy the new site to TextDrive now powered by SimpleLog and RoR.

I’ve previously found the documentation at TextDrive severely lacking, especially in the area of Rails application deployments, however this time around, I was pleasantly surprised by a series of articles that were a great help (along with scripts and config files) for deploying your Rails apps on Lighttpd.

Several other Rails folk I’ve spoken to have expressed concern over Lighttpd’s stability, many of whom have switched to Mongrel. I’m hoping that I don’t run into any stability issues.

Previously, I also had a nice site up for JarIndexer and XafeNotes, but alas, that is no more. I can’t bother to manage a separate site, so they’ve been included in this site for now. JarIndexer is still available for download, as it seems to be somewhat widely used, but I’ve temporarily yanked XafeNotes, as I have some intention of making it free (as in beer), and need to pull out the licensing stuff from the code base. Who knows when that will happen.

About three weeks ago, I started doing some work for Orangepath, a Texas-based company, that I’m hoping will turn into a great long-term relationship. It’s a breath of fresh air to find a company built on morally upstanding principals. I’ve actually had a ton of stuff to blog and yammer about these past weeks, but my time has been spent trying to get this site up and running, instead of writing content to bore people to death. I’ll apologize in advance if there seem to be more entries than usual in the coming days.

While in Kuala Lumpur on the weekend, wandering around some of the malls (Berjaya Times Square, Suria KLCC, Low Yatt Plaza) – I noticed there are quite a number of Sony Stores around. One of the large poster advertisements caught my attention, as the only thing that it seemed to claim was that the intelligence of a laptop is somehow directly proportional to the amount of carbon fibre it contains.

Now, I’m not exactly a hardware engineer, but I’m also fairly certain that I’m not a total maroon (I don’t think?), either. This leads me to draw one of the following conclusions:

a) Sony’s engineers know something that we don’t

b) Sony needs to fire a few people in marketing, and hire some marketing folks who have a clue

That on top of the fact that the PS3 is clocking in at somewhere around US$600, it would seem that Sony is trying to flush themselves down the toilet even faster than Sun Microsystems was with Mr. McNealy at the helm.

Jim Louderback, editor-in-chief of PC Magagine has recently posted an article entitled Boot Camp: Apple Bobs for Suckers.

He rambles on and on about how Boot Camp is a snore, and that the only reason people want an Apple Computer these days, is because they look sexy. Hello? Jim? Where have you been for the past 5 years? He says that “there are dozens of better-looking notebooks out there than those tired, industrial-looking iBooks and PowerBooks that dribble out of Infinite Loop.”

He goes on to give some examples about one of the Toshiba Portege’s and the Acer Ferrari, of which I must say I find neither at all appealing.

Following this, he bashes the Mac Mini saying that it can’t do high-end graphics. Jim, wake up for crying out loud. The Mac Mini is a budget PC for home users, not a high-end workstation for graphics professionals. When’s the last time you picked up a $500 Dell box and handed to a professional graphic designer telling them that this 512MB machine with an 80GB disk is all they’re getting.

Unfortunately, the pain doesn’t end there. He starts rambling on about how useless it is to run Windows on a Mac right now, because there aren’t any Desktop machines with expansion slots. So we’ll never know if we can use our ancient legacy SCSI adapter on the Windows install on our Mac.

One quote that I’m afraid I just can’t leave alone is this one:

The really creative computer users are the case modders who build extravagant designs to house their systems.

Jim? What are you talking about? I thought the really creative computer users were the ones who build awesomewebapps, wrote amazing webframeworks, utilized technology to improve business, and made completely unreal artwork, among other things. But then again, clearly I’m mistaken. Apparently the only really creative computer users are ones who do build “extravagant designs to house their systems”.

The remaining sections of the article are labeled “Reliability”, “Flexibility” and “Price”. But I’m afraid I’m out of time, and feeling rather nauseous at how biased and clueless Louderback seems to be. The whole point of Bootcamp is to:

a) Ultimately, to get people to switch from Windows to OS X.

b) Help you run that one windows-only app you just can’t live without.

The hypothetical situation, I’m sure, is that your PC user Joe will buy a Mac, install bootcamp, and maybe use 80% Windows and 20% OS X. Then they’re going to get a bunch of malware and viruses on the Windows install, at which point they’ll be using 60% Windows and 40% OS X. Then they’re going to go through Driver Hell to try to get their new digital camera to work on Windows, and realize that if they use OS X, they just have to plug the camera in and it works. Now we’re up to 60% OS X and 40% Windows. Can you see where this is going?

Wake up and smell the coffee, Jim.

...and it’s about time, too.

I’ve been wondering for the past two years what on earth he was still doing at the helm of Sun. Whether he intended it this way or not, it has seemed to me that for the past two or so years, his intent has been to drive Sun into the ground, not make them competitive.

“Let’s just open source every product we have, and give everything away for free. Heck, we should even give our servers away for free.”

I can’t say that “make your strategy controversial” (quote from McNealy on some of the latest paraphernalia I received at Sun Tech Days) is the best way to keep your customers and shareholders happy.

Who knows if Schwartz can do any better, we can revisit again in another 2 years and see.

...sure aren’t what they used to be.

I can’t remember exactly when it was that these photos of Bill Gates (Teen Beat magazine, circa 1983) started popping up online, I think it was early last year. They’re certainly a far cry from the latest shots of David Heinemeier Hansson in Wired magazine.

I guess in 2006, it’s chic to be geek (well, maybe it has been for the past couple years). Who’d a thunk?