Did Apple Just Take Control of My Home Theater?

Everybody knows that I’m a big fan of the up until this moment woefully ignored Apple TV. Everybody also knows that I am itching for an opportunity to ditch DirecTV, cable and all the other old media and over-priced methods of obtaining my television programming.

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It looks like Apple may have just given me that opportunity. Maybe.

I really like the (tiny) look and details of the new Apple TV, announced by Steve Jobs himself at today’s Apple Fall Event. I’m totally cool with the rent-only, no local storage thing. I’m very cool with the 99 cent HD TV show rentals. I love the way Netflix has been incorporated (as an aside, Netflix seems like the big winner here, and Redbox the big loser).

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Some details I need to see include:

1. The other networks need to join ABC and Fox in capitulating to the inevitable dominance of Apple in the TV content provider space.

2. The cost of movie rentals needs to come down a little. $4.99 for a 48 hour rental doesn’t seem like much of an improvement. I’ll pay a little extra for first day access, but I’m thinking $3.00 would be the sweet spot. Maybe Apple will charge less for movies that have been on DVD for a while.

3. I need to know that I can get cable TV shows on the same basis. I’m not asking for True Blood for 99 cents, but I should get regular cable programming at the same price.

4. I need shows to be available sooner. The same day would be awesome. Days later is not awesome.

My initial reaction is that for the massive amount of money I currently pay DirecTV, I could probably rent all of the shows I really care about.

I just need an acceptable combination of content, speed and price. It’s too early to tell if we’re there yet.

But we’re definitely closer.

Update: Roberto Bonini asks some good questions about the new device.

Calling All Web Design Gurus: Colors Behaving Badly

I have beat my brain silly trying to figure out why the header on this blog looks normal in Chrome and Explorer.

And messed up in Firefox (note the different colors of red).

I’d be forever grateful if someone could point me to a solution.

Is iTunes an Unreliable Alternative TV Show Provider?

It looks like my plan to dump satellite and cable TV and give Apple all of my money has hit a snag. For that to happen, iTunes would have to be very reliable in getting TV shows up and into the iTunes Store.

Based on my experience so far, that ain’t the case. I bought a season pass to Big Brother 12. The double elimination episode (Episode #22) aired on Thursday night. It’s Sunday afternoon, and it’s nowhere to be found on iTunes.

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There’s another episode on tonight.

I’m not the only person who’s noticed this.

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My thoughts exactly.

Case Studies in Good and Bad Tech Support

As I’ve said before, the best way a company, any company, can take advantage of so-called social media is not to ask people over and over to “Like” their fan page on Facebook, but to increase accessibility for customers when they have a problem. Unfortunately, I think so many companies are dedicating so much of their resources to increasing their fan count on the various networks that no one is left to mind the support store.

I’ve reached out to three companies recently for tech support. Two of them I pay money to. One of them I don’t, but I would if they’d release and support a premium product that works better.

Let’s take a look at three levels of tech support. Great, trying, and horrible.

Great: Casper

I have bought and used Future System’s Casper for copying hard drives for years. It is a great program, and I have recommended it many times. After my recent experience, these recommendations will keep flowing.

I’ve known for some time that the C: drive in my primary desktop was failing. I keep most of my data files on another disk, so this wasn’t a huge problem. I just needed to get a new hard drive, copy my current one, and switch it out. When I tried doing that, using Casper, I had some problems. The hard drive wouldn’t copy all the way (and I ruled out a physical disk problem as the cause). So I emailed Casper support.

Within a day, I had a personal, very detailed response from Jim, with Future Systems’ technical support. I’m sure there are knowledge bases and templates for troubleshooting inquiries, but the email was detailed and told me several, specific things to do. In other words it didn’t feel like a canned response. I tried again, and it worked like a charm.

In the meantime, I had figured out that if I wanted to get rid of the recovery partition that HP had placed on my C: hard drive (which had a separate drive letter), I’d need to do a fresh install of Windows 7 (Casper will copy a letter drive, but if you want the disk to be bootable, you need to copy the entire hard drive, which in this case included the recovery partition I wanted to get rid of). So I copied my C: drive with Casper to protect my data and then installed a fresh version of Windows 7 on a new C: drive.

Great support. And now I’m talking about it.

Trying: Disqus

Everyone knows I like the Disqus commenting system. It is beautifully designed, and feature-rich. The problem, of course, is that the Reactions feature (which compiles the mentions of the blog post at Twitter, etc.) just doesn’t work. At all. And having all blog posts say “no Reactions” is much worse than not even trying to compile the Reactions. I’ve been emailing with Disqus for months and months about this.

I get responses. The emails are nice, but not terribly helpful. Sometimes a few Reactions will show up. Then, nothing. So I email again, and we repeat the process. Disqus badly needs to create a premium account system so they can make some money and use that money to make the Reactions feature work. I’d pay for it. If it worked.

After my most recent email campaign, which I began when I noticed the link to force Disqus to manually rescan for Reactions had disappeared, I got an email assuring me that they were working on it. Then nothing. When I followed up, I learned the manual rescan link was back.

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So while Disqus is still not automatically compiling Reactions correctly (or at all), the rescan link seems to work, if you’re willing to do manual scans for your posts.

In other words, at least they are trying to provide support. And now I’m talking about it.

Horrible: SugarSync

For a long time, I was on the fence about which remote back up and access service I was going to use for my primary off-site backup. I looked at all sorts of services, and tried many of them. While I am a committed Dropbox user for general web storage (you and I get a little free storage if you sign up for a free account via that link), I ultimately decided to use SugarSync for my automatic backup and access services.

I have a lot of music (both that I create and that I buy to listen to), videos and photos, so I need a lot of space. In fact, I quickly blew right through SugarSync’s $250/year plan and into a larger, more expensive plan. I’m happy to pay, for the peace of mind and the ability to access my files via my iPhone and iPad. However, as a premium customer I expect at least pretty good tech support, on the rare occasions when I need it.

When I replaced my C: drive, I decided to go ahead and replace my storage drive with a bigger one. Once I did this, I made some minor changes to my file storage names and locations. When I installed SugarSync it showed my reconfigured computer as a new computer (because I renamed it, to preserve my Windows Home Server backups of my prior configuration). I sent a support request to SugarSync asking how I could make sure that my already uploaded files would be associated with my newly reconfigured computer, without having to re-upload massive amounts of stuff that is already on SugarSync’s servers.

The form promised a response within one business day. I got some canned link to a page showing me how to download and restore my files to a new computer. Not my problem, fellers. My data is here, and there. Just under different computer names (because my reconfigured computer shows up as a new computer on SugarSync). I’m trying to avoid having to re-upload hundreds of GBs of data. It’s been a full business week.

Data is important. C-notes paid for a service are important. Add all that up, and I should already know exactly how to address this issue.

Horrible support. And now I’m talking about it.

Maybe SugarSync should hire Jim.

Ghosts, Friends, Home and the Writing of Songs

I’ve been writing songs for literally as long as I can remember. The earliest one I can recall didn’t really have a name, but it was about a llama, and mostly went something like “Mama llama, brother llama, sister llama too.” I sang it in the bathtub when I was maybe 6 or 7. I probably heard something on the radio and subconsciously stole it. A year or so later I thought for a while that I’d written I’m a Girl Watcher, because my sister thought it was a hoot to have me sing it for her friends.

Later, the songs got at least a little better and more original. Some of my friends got really into music, and actually formed bands that were good. A few of them got really good. I hung out with them. Played the drums really, really badly for a brief spell. Continued to mostly write songs. Only much later did I learn to beat out enough chords on a guitar to recreate the music that I had in my head.

So for a while, I fancied myself the John Perry Barlow (Cassidy was named after one of his songs, and he has emailed her a time or two to say hi) of my friends’ bands. I’d write with them. Then they’d go on the road and do all the hard work, while I sat around dreaming up my next song. Or sleeping.

One afternoon when I was in high school, I was hanging out at the public tennis courts in my hometown. Someone came running over to me and said “you’ve got to come over here, right now!” I walked over to a car, and there, playing on the radio, was a song I’d co-written with my friend Joe Middleton (yes, the same Joe mentioned in my factually accurate song The Kansas Reflector Incident).

That song is called “Princess.” I’d written the lyrics, sort of as a tribute to a friend who had been in a car accident and sort of as an aid in girl chasing (“you know I really wrote that song about you”). You have to remember that at that moment, I was really into Dan Fogelberg and Hugh Prather (thankfully, I later got back to my country roots), so the lyrics probably read like watered down Bread (the annoying soft-pop band, not the food, or the money). But Joe took those words and turned them into a darn good song. He and his band recorded it, played it live and ultimately got it on the radio. I don’t even have a copy of the song any more.

But it was on the radio, so it must have been good, right?

Anyway, I kept writing and playing songs. Back in 1987, I had a mental reboot and threw all my unfinished songs in a dumpster off of Chimney Rock (a day or two later I made an unsuccessful dumpster dive trying to get them back). Other than that, I have hundreds, and maybe thousands, of songs and song parts lying around. A lot of the finished or mostly finished ones are available and can be streamed at Err Bear Music.

I’ve remained friends with Joe. Like the rest of the world, we have communicated more in the Facebook era. A few months ago, Joe and his band, Idlewilde South, got back together. A few weeks ago, Joe asked if I wanted to write some songs together. The rest is history. Or the future. Or maybe both.

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The first new song we did is called “Ghosts.” Idlewilde South will premiere it publicly at a concert in our hometown, Cheraw, SC, tonight. They talked about it, and played it, on WCRE, the local radio station, earlier this week. Here’s the relevant part.

There’s also a homemade, but well done, video of the song on Youtube.

It was fortuitous that Joe wrote me when he did. I have not been writing or playing much the past few years. I need to get back into it, because it’s fun and it is a great outlet for whatever’s bouncing around in my head.

Since we finished Ghosts, I’ve written the words and an idea for the music to another song, that I think could turn out really, really well. I’m going to co-write that one, because it requires musical chops better than mine.

I’ve also just about finished up an old, previously half-written, song about another Cheraw childhood friend.

All in all, things seems to be looking up, musically speaking.

Dogs I Have Screamed at and Other Tails of Woe

I try to be a mellow, zen cat. I really do. I fail miserably, but I try. It’s always the dogs that get me.

When I think back about the times I have completely lost my mind, at least as an adult, 4 of the 5 times have been over a dog. Not a woman. Not money. A dog. The other time was when some dude threw a beer bottle at me in a roadside honky tonk between Vancouver and Kamloops. Even then, I was on my way to Jasper to look for wolves, so it was somewhat dog-related.

The first time was when I lived in Nashville, back in the eighties. Some lady two houses down left her dog in the backyard. Every weekday. This dog would bark from the minute she left until the minute she let him back in that night. I was at home a lot, either studying or writing songs or goofing off or trying to sleep. I tried for weeks to mentally filter that dog out. I thought about killing it for a while, but poison is for sissies and I didn’t have my shotgun with me at the time. I thought about killing her, but she was a girl. Eventually I waited until a Saturday when I knew she was home and knocked on her door, planning to have a calm, neighborly conversation. She gave me attitude, I started screaming, she concluded I was both a psycho and a danger to her pet, and the dog problem was solved.

About 10 years ago, in my old neighborhood, the guy two houses down (yes, this is a pattern that will continue) took his family on vacation for two weeks. He didn’t take his dog. No, the dog got left in the backyard. Presumably someone fed the dog, because he was nourished enough to bark, non-stop, from dusk till dawn. Every. Single. Night. This time I had my shotgun, but he was a black lab. If it had been one of those little yappy dogs…

So for 14 nights I sat in bed listening to that dog bark. Our bedroom was upstairs in the back of the house, so it sounded like that dog was right outside our window. On the 14th day, when I stumbled home from work, read-eyed and bleary from lack of sleep, I saw that he was back. I stomped over there, with absolutely no intention of having a calm, neighborly conversation. He gave me attitude, and things quickly degenerated into me telling him, in no uncertain terms, what I would do to his dog and then to him, if I didn’t get peace and quiet. We stared each other down a few times after that, but I never heard the dog again. Problem solved.

Fast forward to my current neighborhood. A couple of years ago, some young guys moved into the rent house, two doors down. By all accounts, they seem like good kids. Certainly much better behaved, in general, than I was at their age. But, they have a dog. I’ve never actually seen the dog, but for months I heard him. Again, our bedroom is upstairs, at the back of the house. That dog may be two yards over, but when he barks it sounds like he’s in bed with me. For months, I was woken several nights a week by barking.

I tried to persevere. But I was worn out and down. During a particularly active week, barking-wise, I found myself sitting in bed at 3:00 a.m. listening to that dog bark. Loud and incessantly.

Since I had never (and still haven’t) actually seen the dog, I wasn’t positive which house it lived in. I marched outside, and walked up and down the street trying to figure out where that dog lived. It’s harder than it seems, because the lots are big and everyone has high, solid fences. I narrowed it down to two houses, either two or three doors down. Unsure where to knock (and wanting to avoid scaring an innocent, possibly armed, party), I just started yelling “Will someone shut that f#*king dog up!” Two neighbors stuck their heads out the door, told me they were also sleep-deprived thanks to that dog and, by process of elimination, helped me identify the right house.

And lo and behold, at that very moment, at around 3:30 a.m., one of the guys walks out his front door. I assumed he had heard me raving, but it turns out he was just getting something out of his car. When I stormed up and started bitching at him, it startled the crap out of him. I think he jumped 3 feet when I started yelling from the middle of his yard. At that point, things became more funny than rage-inducing. So I told him his dog was killing me, and the other neighbors. He said he’d take care of it, and he did. I hear that dog every now and then, but not a lot. Problem solved.

Then comes last night. My next door neighbors, who unlike the other dog-owners I actually know (and like), have a dog. Now I like this dog a lot. He comes over to visit whenever he can. Hell, he’s been in my house, which is more than most of my human friends can say. But he will bark.

For some reason, he ended up in the backyard at 2:00 a.m. He started barking wildly. The dog two doors down sounds like he’s in our room. This one sounds like he’s in our room with a megaphone. To make matters worse, Delaney had a triathlon training session at 7:00 a.m. this morning (yes, she is a Jedi). I waited 20 minutes or so, thinking that someone would let him in and he’d shut the hell up. No such luck.

Once again I wasn’t 100% sure which barking dog was the culprit, so I went out back and started yelling wildly. You know, mediation, hillbilly style. It worked, and my neighbor and I spoke. Him apologizing for his dog, and me apologizing for being a raving maniac. Intermittent sleep deprivation over an extended period makes it really hard to be mellow and zen.

Interestingly, I was once on the other side of this equation. When I was a kid, I had a German shepherd who was a barker. His pen was down the hill, past some trees and away from the house, so I don’t remember him keeping me awake. But the neighbor on that side complained one day. This was before dogs rode the coattails of kids to the no-punishment, new age, “he’s my baby” place. So I borrowed a bark collar for a week. Problem solved.

They still make them.

Why Are Google Apps Users Always at the Back of the Line?

appsline Here’s the way it goes when Google announces some new feature, like today’s announcement that Gmail users can make phone calls right from Gmail. First, I read a little about it to see if it’s something I’m interested in. Often, it is. I get excited about it, and when I get home, I eagerly sit down at my computer to try it out.

Only to find out that the nifty new feature is not available to Google Apps users. You know, those who use the platform Google wants us to use instead of those expensive Microsoft Office apps. The same apps that Google would like for us to pay for.

The Gmail blog post announcing this new feature has this all-too-familiar nugget:

If you’re using Google Apps for your school or business, then you won’t see it quite yet. We’re working on making this available more broadly – so stay tuned!

I can’t imagine how pissed off I’d be if I was paying for Google Apps. It’s sort of like if Microsoft rolled out feature after feature to its Docs users and promised to get back with paying Microsoft Office customers “soon.” That probably won’t happen.

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But it keeps happening with Google Apps. It’s messed up. It’s backwards. And it irks the dickens out of me.

Audio Updates are a Cinch, with Cinch

I’m generally not all that excited about video blogging, or listening to podcasts that I’m not on, simply because I can read faster than you can talk and I like to consume information at my pace, not yours. However, after looking at Cinch for a few days, I became intrigued enough to give it a try.

Cinch, for those of you who remain unlearned in the ways of audio updates, is:

A free and easy way to create and share audio, text and photo updates using your phone or computer. Cinch enables you to capture and report on your experiences in a way that simple text just can’t do. Using a simple interface, you can make and broadcast your content creations through Facebook, Twitter, CinchCast.com and more.

Sign-up is simple. It’s pretty much a two-click process if you sign up via Facebook, which I did. You can choose a Cinch page URL and add links to your other social media locations. There is a nifty iPhone app, that lets you record Cinches, add a photo and upload them. I did an initial Cinch, reviewing Cinch, added a photo and tried to publish (e.g., upload) it via 3G. The bad news was that the process timed out, leaving me with a “Pending” Cinch on my Cinch page.

The good news is that the next time I opened the Cinch iPhone app, it prompted me to recover the audio recording. The photo was lost forever, but between the two, save the recording. A photo retake is faster and easier. I retook the photo, and tried again. Bingo.

That’s good, because for Cinch to be useful, reliable 3G uploading is a must.

It also publishes your Cinches to your Facebook profile. And to Twitter if you want. At the moment, I’m adding my Cinches to Facebook, but not to Twitter. As a non-Cinch-related aside, there badly needs to be a way to filter out certain of your Tweets before your Tweets get published to your Facebook profile, to avoid duplicate Facebook posts.

Happily, you can embed your Cinches. This will greatly increase the likelihood that I use Cinch, since anyone who has read Newsome.Org knows that I have long believed in consolidating most of my content on my page, and only pushing some of it to the various third-party networks.

My initial impression is that Cinch is well put-together, though it is still in public beta. I wish it had video capability, and perhaps that will be added in the future. In sum, I like it. The as yet unanswered question is, do I need it?

I’m not sure how much need I have for a micro-audio-blogging service, but if I do have a need, Cinch certainly fits the bill.

Post-Apocalyptic Novel Reading Club

Part 1 (August 2010)

Casaubon’s Book over at the Science Blogs is starting a post-apocalyptic novel reading club.

This is about as targeted to my interest as humanly possible. Science fiction is my genre and post-apocalyptic is my favorite sub-genre. So let’s get it on. I’m going to update this page from time to time, and I hope you’ll add your recommendations in the comments.

Any discussion of book, and certainly any discussion of post-apocalyptic books HAS to begin with Andre Norton’s Daybreak 2250 – AD, also known as Star Man’s Son.

This was the first science fiction book I ever read, and it remains one of my all-time favorite books. Some people claim that this book, published in 1952, was the first book set in a post-nuclear world. I love, love, love this book, and highly recommend it.

Another book- or actually 7-book series- that I really like is The Pelbar Cycle by Paul O. Williams. The Amazon description sums it up well:

One thousand years after a devastating and chaotic series of nuclear exchanges, all that is left of the United States of America are scattered, warring tribes and small city-states. One of the latter is Pelbar-proud, civilized, and intolerant of change and new ideas. Rebels and troublemakers are sentenced to a year of exile at the massive midwestern fortress of Northwall, defending Pelbar against the fierce Shumai and Sentani tribes. Restless and brilliant Jestak is a visionary who has seen and learned too much in his distant travels to be content with life in Pelbarigan. During his exile at Northwall, he makes contact with Pelbar’s age-old enemies and risks all to rescue his beloved Tia from nomads armed with long-lost weapons from before the atomic holocaust. Jestak’s daring quest for love brings profound changes to his world.

I really enjoyed all of these books.

One of the best forms of post-apocalyptic story is the journey, in search of a better place. I can give you four of these to start with. Obviously, Stephen King’s The Stand and Cormac McCarthy’s The Road are both excellent books. Lesser known but still very good are James Van Pelt’s Summer of the Apoclypse and J.G Ballard’s The Burning World, published in 1964.

Another of my favorites is David Brin’s The Postman.

I am a huge fan of vintage science fiction, and buy used paperbacks in bulk on eBay. You can get a lot of books cheap, and discover a lot of good, out of print books.

Other vintage post-apocalyptic books I’ll recommend in this initial installment are On the Beach, Robert Heinlein’s Farnham’s Freehold, Earth Abides by George R. Stewart, and We Who Survived the Fifth Ice Age by Sterling Noel.

Finally, though perhaps not a traditional post-apocalyptic book, let me give a nod to a good book I just finished- Ursula K. LeGuin’s City of Illusions. I really liked it. It has a similar feel to Daybreak 2250 – AD, and that’s high praise.

That’s it for part 1. Do you have some recommendations to add?

GoodSongs: The Dark Horses

I’ve said about nineteen times that A Truer Sound is the best music blog on the planet. Once again Matt shows why by uncovering some excellent music that had somehow escaped my attention.

I wonder about a lot of things. I wonder if I’m right that Lane is secretly Brittany’s fiance (if so he is a lucky dude, because she is smoking and hilarious). I wonder if Spotify is just some big inside joke being played on U.S. music fans. I wonder about all the (supposedly) grownups who seem to spend all day and night trying to convince us that internet science projects are actually billion dollar companies. I wonder how a web site in 2010 can be as ugly as Myspace.

But more than that, I wonder how it took me eight years to hear about the excellent alternative country band The Dark Horses (see what I mean about Myspace). I wonder why in the world a band that good split up, back in 2007.

I’m thankful that I read A Truer Sound, so I didn’t completely miss this excellent band. Here’s the song that caused me to immediately search for, find and buy the only two records I can find by The Dark Horses.

The Dark Horses – (I Pity) The Poor Bastard.

From the excellent 2005 self-titled record (Purchase @ Amazon). Awesome, excellent sound.

This record is consistently great. No fillers, and no weak songs. It reminds me a little of one of my favorite records of all time, Drag the River’s Live at the Starlight. I bet The Dark Horses rocked live. Hopefully one of the band members will find this post and hook me up with some live stuff (hint, hint).

While I like the other record a little better, Come Along is also a great record.

The Dark Horses – The Fine Line.

From the excellent above mentioned 2002 record (Purchase @ Amazon).

According to their visually horrifying but musically wonderful Myspace page, The Dark Horses consisted of J.D Hughes (vocals, drums), Sam Park (vocals, guitar), Erik Kristiansen (guitar) and Kevin Keller (bass).

There’s not much information out there about The Dark Horses. Here’s a short interview with Sam Park. Looks like they came out of New York City, just like another of my favorite alt. country bands.

If you like good music, and particularly if you dig great alt. country, go buy these records. I did, and I’ve been playing them non-stop.