Yahoo Mail's Redesign

Yahoo (NASDAQ:YHOO) has updated its e-mail interface:



It has a cleaner, less cluttered look; and fewer ads. Yahoo has also decided to add a new application window containing many of its applications just a click away. All in all, I really like it.

Video On-Demand Cures Boredom

Was perusing TVGuide.com to see if there was anything worth watching tonight, but found absolutely nothing that interested me.

I need to watch something! Reading at night is not an option for me (I prefer to read in the morning), and I have no hobbies to speak of. And listening to music for the sake of listening to music is not my bag. I need visual stimulation, and television is the only effective delivery system.

Then I realized I have video-on-demand through my cable company. So I’ve decided to watch a couple episodes of No Reservations I somehow managed to miss. So the night is not a total loss at all. Thank you, Anthony Bourdain and video on-demand

I'm Getting The Pantech Matrix

My next phone:



I'm always two generations behind far as cell phone technology is concerned. I'm just not willing to pay for instant gratification many people are so compelled to pay for because of some fetish they have (think iPhone), or trying to keep up with the Joneses.

The Pantech Matrix seems like nice compromise wise both in terms of it's price point and functionality.

3G iPhone Out Today: Will It Be A Success

Starting today you can buy the new 3G iPhone from AT&T (T); and Apple (APPL) has also launched an apps store, where you can download third-party applications for your iPhone. Personally, I find the whole experience underwhelming and a bit overrated. Regardless, I found this ad on Apple's site to a bit amusing:



The phone may be half-price, but your cell phone will almost double because you will have to subscribe to a data plan and pay extra for SMS and other features. Is it worth it? Not to me. But this won't stop the crazies from buying one.

Why not just get a Wi-Fi equipped phone - like a Blackberry? Want e-mail? There are plenty of free e-mail services that provide POP access, like GMail. Why pay extra when you don't have to?

Will the 3G iPhone succeed? Initially, yes; but the cost of ownership is still prohibitive for many people, including myself. Plus, it's a closed, proprietary system. I much prefer open source applications written in Java.

A View From Mars #1

Earth and the moon as seen from Mars:



A jarring perspective I never really thought about: how the Earth looks from other planets?

The 3G iPhone: Not As Cheap As You Think

The new 8 GB 3G iPhone is going to sell for $199. Sweet! I was going to buy one for my wife - who never had a decent phone in her life - when our contract with AT&T expires in November...until I read the fine print that is:

Everywhere you look, a new iPhone price hike turns up. At $199, the phones themselves may be cheaper — but Apple and AT&T, the phone's exclusive carrier in the U.S., are charging users by other means. The iPhone data plan by itself is going up $10 to $30/mo. In a GigaOm interview, AT&T wireless chief Ralph de la Vega reveals that the 200 text messages previously included will cost iPhone users an extra $5/mo. ($20/mo. for unlimited messages, which seem practically obligatory.) And then there's Apple's MobileMe subscription, without which the iPhone's new synching features won't work, at $99 a year, or just over $8 a month. Add it up, and iPhone users will be paying about $43 a month, or $1,038 over the two-year course of the AT&T contract they signed up for — all to get an iPhone at $199.

So to fully maximize the iPhone you have to pay $1,038 for the data plan, text messaging, and synching software; plus $199 for the phone itself. This doesn't include voice, taxes and other assorted fees. That's a pretty hefty phone bill to pay each month.

Apple Releases 3G iPhone..Like, Whatever

Wow. Apple announces the 3G iPhone. Arguably one of the worst kept secrets in history.

The Circuit: Very Funny

Deepak Ananthapadmanabha-- yes that's his name-- hosts this funny and irreverent web-only series about technology.

Addicted To Twitter?

I use the following Twitter services:

• TwitPic
• Twhirl
• TweeterFeed

And I publish to Twitter via txt, im, web, and e-mail. I guess you can call me a Twitter maniac.

Twitter Is Back. Thank God!!!

Twitter has been facing some growing pains this weekend with an outage of some kind. Thankfully, it's back up and running, and all lost posts returned to their rightful place. It's strange. A technology I once dismissed as trivial and overly simplistic is now a critical part of my life. I love Twitter.

An Analyst On Crack: Apple To Sell 45 Million iPhones?

An analyst is predicting that Apple (APPL) will sell 45 million iPhones in 2009. He gives the following reasons:

• By introducing a 3G iPhone within the next 3 to 6 months
• By offering a family of 2 to 3 iPhones — including lower-priced models selling for $200 to $300 — by Jan 2009 at the latest
• By entering new countries, effectively doubling the addressable market every year for the next two years
• By adding new features, such as games (Tiger Woods Golf, played by swinging the iPhone?) and remote purchases (Starbucks lattes without the wait?) starting in June

I think this analyst’s predictions are a bit on the optimistic side, in my opinion, and I will hit on two reasons why: first, in the U.S. market, the iPhone is only available through AT&T (though an unlocked iPhone will work within any GSM network, say, T-Mobile, but not Verizon), which seriously limits its appeal; and second, the barriers of entry are so low, there are scores of competitors who are bringing out clones of the iPhone, and at much lower prices. And then there’s Google…

Amazon Kindle: Sold Out After Heavy Demand

I thought Amazon's Kindle was one in a long line of electronic book-- or eBook-- products that have failed to catch on; and, at $399, a bit on the pricey side. But, it seems, Amazon cannot make enough of them. No sales figures are available, but this article in Popular Mechanics is simply fawning.

Laptops In The Classroom: A Distraction?

Laptops have become so ubitiquous in classrooms these days that I'm probably the last of my generation to take notes with pen and paper-- and I'm only 35!

I'm not a Luddite. After all, I'm part of the PC generation, but I do believe there's a time and place for everything. Sitting behind a screen, anonymously pecking away at a keyboard, doing God only knows what is not a good way to learn, in my opinion. Laptops also get in the way of the teacher-student relationship, fragile as it is, distracting students from giving their professors their undivided attention, the only thing they demand.

So put away that laptop, if only for a moment. Is that too much to ask?

Is There Viagra In My Drinking Water?

A good reason why sales of bottled water will continue to be strong:

A vast array of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose. Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

Comedian Lewis Black has a funny rant about bottled water:



In light of this new revelation, however, how did pharmaceuticals get into our water supply? I believe it's a conspiracy: that bottled water companies are intentionally spiking our water supply with drugs in order to boost sales. Paranoid? Maybe. It's a scene straight out of Dr. Strangelove, where General Jack D. Ripper believes there's a communist conspiracy afoot to "sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids."

Bloggers Are Writers Too

JK has written a great post about the writing process, something I'm keenly interested in as well. JK says that we bloggers can benefit from a more disciplined approach to writing as practiced by professional writers like Orhan Pamuk, Suketu Mehta and Kathy Sierra, all of whom JK profiles. An important quote:

Pay attention to the structure of the post, spend time editing it and finally make it interesting to read.

Lessons I have repeatedly learned and forgotten (often within seconds of each other). It's hard enough to write something interesting on a daily basis that the blogosphere demands, but writing and then editing is a never-ending struggle for me. This is why I write so infrequently, and when I do, the most I can manage is a few paragraphs, often only a couple of sentences (that is why I like twitter and tumblr so much). Writing is not easy. I can take comfort in the fact that writing is not suppose to be easy-- even for professional writers!

There are two things in my mind that can make a blogger better: reading and writing Obvious, I know, but hear me out. It's no coincidence that good writers are often good readers. Good readers in that they not only read widely, but pick good books to read. Quality is important here. After all, reading John Grisham, Tom Clancy, cereal boxes, and People magazine will only take you so far. Not surprisingly, most writers read the classics. Classics are classics for a good reason, they are a fount of good writing. Bloggers should read more of them.

But reading takes time. Time is a precious commodity in our fast-paced culture, where bite-sized blog posts is all we have time to digest. We value doing many things as possible in the shortest span of time, hence the mantra: volume is more important than quality. I suffer from this problem acutely. I'm always obsessed with reading as many books as I can before I die, only realize that there was no way I was going to read all the books I wanted to read, even if I did nothing but read and live to 200. It's just not possible. So I have become more pickier in what I read. And instead of trying to read a book as fast as I can. I read slowly. Letting the author's word sink-in. To meditate on the books meaning. In my opinion, a good book cannot be read once, but twice, even thrice. Each time something new, absent in previous readings, comes to the surface.

The second part, of course, is writing. Reading provides a foundation, in that you learn what good writing is. Nevertheless, reading and writing are two different functions. I've read Charles Dickens or Jane Austen and wonder why I can't write like them. My writings are consistently filled with choppy sentences (or run-on sentences), grammar mistakes, misspellings, incoherence, or is downright banal. The only way to improve my writing, I find, is practice, practice, and more practice.

Yahoo! Mail And Spam

I don't know what the deal with Yahoo! Mail is lately but the increasing levels of spam is troubling. Ever since the switch to an AJAX-powered model, spam has been simply out of control. Much of the spam are porn-related and dealings with prescription pharmaceuticals (the usual suspects).

I would gladly switch to another e-mail provider, but switching e-mail addresses these days is akin to switching phone numbers-- a royal pain in the ass; something to be avoided at all costs. Yahoo! Mail is my lifeline in this electronic world, so I'm willing to to tolerate a certain level of spam. Nevertheless, I have my limits, and unless Yahoo! rectifies the situation quickly, I will be forced to go elsewhere, like GMail, whose spam filter works much better than Yahoo's.

Microsoft Goes For Online Gold

Microsoft has just announced a bid to purchase Yahoo. No surprise given the latter’s poor performance lately, making it a good takeover target—plus Microsoft has the cash. I think it’s a good fit. By purchasing Yahoo, Microsoft gets a bevy of online companies with great brand recognition. Honestly, hard as Microsoft has tried, it’s MSN properties lag behind both Google and Yahoo. I hope the deal goes through.

India: No One Writes Letters Anymore

Excellent article in The New York Times about the dying industry of professional letter writing in India. The article profiles one G.P. Sawant, who claims he hasn’t written a letter in three years! The culprit? Globalization, internet, and high mobile phone penetration.

I remember when my mother use to write letters to Bangladesh and India on those familiar blue air mail paper slips, and receive them in turn. Those days are long gone, of course: now calling costs pennies a minute, IM and e-mail are equally intimate—as a result, no one writes letters anymore. Hence there is no need for professional letter writers like Mr. Sawant, who, long retired, idyllically passes his time away at his stand, just in case that one person might need a letter written.

[via kottke]

What's More Dangerous: Iran Or A Dirty Bomb

What’s more scarier: a nuclear-armed Iran, or this?

An underreported attack on a South African nuclear facility last month demonstrates the high risk of theft of nuclear materials by terrorists or criminals. Such a crime could have grave national security implications for the United States or any of the dozens of countries where nuclear materials are held in various states of security.

Shortly after midnight on Nov. 8, four armed men broke into the Pelindaba nuclear facility 18 miles west of Pretoria, a site where hundreds of kilograms of weapons-grade uranium are stored. According to the South African Nuclear Energy Corp., the state-owned entity that runs the Pelindaba facility, these four "technically sophisticated criminals" deactivated several layers of security, including a 10,000-volt electrical fence, suggesting insider knowledge of the system. Though their images were captured on closed-circuit television, they were not detected by security officers because nobody was monitoring the cameras at the time.

I think the world community should focus its attention and energies on these kinds of incidents rather than attack Iran. I’m not defending Iran or its odious regime, of course, but the right of a sovereign nation to defend itself by any means necessary, including nuclear weapons. I have a hard time accepting the argument proffered by the United States and its allies that Iran has no right to possess nuclear weapons while the P-5 (China, France, Great Britain, Russia, and the United States) are allowed by virtue of the fact they had it before everyone else.

The world should be more concerned about low-yield nuclear weapons like “dirty bombs”. As the attempted theft has proven, a “dirty bomb’ going off is a more viable possibility than, say, Iran blowing Israel off the map. Iran will never do such a thing because they realize Israel—and the United States—would retaliate ten-fold, it’s mutually assured destruction for the new millennium.

I believe Iran getting nuclear weapons is a fait accompli. Pakistan not only has nuclear weapons, but sold the technology to whoever wanted it, including, ironically, Iran! In my opinion, Pakistan is more dangerous than Iran, yet there are no plans to defang Pakistan of its nuclear weapons (and the subsequent punishment were laughable); in fact, the United States is giving Pakistan billions in aid. Iran knows it’s just a waiting game.

Knowing this, isn’t it better to enlist the Iranians in securing existing supplies and hunt down and arrest would-be thieves? After all, Iran could just as easily be a target of a “dirty bomb” as the United States.

[via connecting the dots]

Verizon Wireless Opening Up Its Network

Some good news on the technical front: Verizon Wireless has decided to open up its network to non-Verizon devices and applications, granted they meet Verizon’s technical standards, whatever they may be. Yahoo! Tech has a good overview that is worth checking out.

Will other networks do the same? For example, I use AT&T, which uses a GSM-based network, unlike Verizon’s CDMA. And GSM offers more flexibility in what mobile phone I can use since it’s a simple matter of swapping out a SIMM card (which makes it easier to use the phone overseas, unlike CDMA). CDMA software, on the other hand, is embedded in the phone. As a result, there is a paucity of unlocked CDMA phones in the marketplace. Hopefully, with this announcement, we’ll see more CDMA phones in the marketplace. So AT&T might not jump on board right away by opening up its network, but it must be thinking about it at least.

On of the benefits we might see with Verizon Wireless opening up its network is the expansion—even explosion—of third-party mobile phone applications. Instead of buying an expensive data package through Verizon, a user can build a custom package specifically designed to his or hers specifications, whether it’s ad-supported (like Google) or fee-based.

Whatever happens, it’s a watershed moment for the mobile phone industry, which has been a slow growth industry for a while now.