On hiatus

Rather than write something marginally-melodramatic, I’m just going to say – there are other things more important than this right now. Not that this hasn’t been clear for a while now, but I think that I should just admit it and move on with life.

I sort of hate going out this way – it really looks like I pulled out after getting my dubious 15 minutes of web fame by baiting Robert Young (not intentional but I should’ve known better, though I still stand by what I wrote). I have cool things I want to say piling up in my little “to blog about this” file, but they will likely find different outlets. If you enjoyed reading this, I’d love to hear from you – feel free to comment – and maybe whenever a reincarnation of something like this ends up happening, you’ll hear about it as well.

– Mike.

Robert Young, please stop telling people what to do

I was about to write a short piece about the difference in blogs between commentary/news on the one hand and speculation on the other. I was going to bring some fine examples of commentary on current events, some examples of “so and so company will do such and such a thing,” and finally the most cheeky of all, “so and so should do such and such a thing.” And then I noticed that the latter category all involved posts from GigaOM, in particular written by a certain Robert Young. Now, Young is a wee bit of a big wig in some tech circles, and he did do some clever stuff, so I’m going to do my best to tread lightly. But I’m a mite disappointed by things like Maybe Google Should Buy a Movie Studio? or Why Steve Jobs Should Buy Youtube, or the most recent tour-de-force, Facebook & Six Apart Should Merge.

Inquisitor 3: now in Beta, Free

Just a quick update, hopefully one of a few tonight — the beta of Inquisitor 3 is out for Safari, and is free. For those not in the know, Inquisitor is sort of like autocomplete for your Safari searches, on crack. Or like spotlight for the web. A friend’s been using it for a while, but I couldn’t personally justify spending the money on it as a poor poor student. Now I’ll give it a shot, and so should you.

Vox and other funny words

First of all, just a quick word – I haven’t posted for almost two months, so I thought I should mount a minor defense of myself. Here it goes: I’m in school. That’s pretty much it. The beginning of the semester was a frenzy of getting my act together (still continuing) and now is midterm/paper season. With that said, I’m going to see about juggling things around and making this work.

Now, onto some useful stuff. First of all, I’ve decided that I’m going to stick with WordPress. The speed increase over Blogger isn’t a huge deal because I do most of my post writing offline (using MarsEdit or, more recently, Ecto), but even with that aside, I like the WordPress themes better, and I decided I don’t have time to mess around with Blogger’s somewhat arcane XHTML/CSS themes (think CSSZengarden – lots of unnecessary stuff just so you can customize everything).

Also, I recently got an invite to Vox, which is a new social blogging service from SixApart that Anil Dash blogged about a while back. I’ve kept a more “personal” type of a blog on LiveJournal for a couple of years now, and I’ve always been slightly bothered by your stereotypical angsty teenage LJ user. Not that I wasn’t one at some point, and not that there more sensible people on it, but that’s the general vibe that the global LiveJournal community gives off. Vox is a little bit more early-adotper-ey, and a little more adult and modern, and oh so very 2.0. I’m going to play with it for a bit more, and post some more specific impressions. In the interest of keeping my “personal” life and my bloggy life at least a little bit separate, I’m not going to post my Vox address on here, but if you know me personally you should have more than sufficient means at your disposal to get it.

Bigfoot’s Killer Network Interface Card reviewed

Bigfoot’s Killer Network Interface Card reviewed: it’s a NIC. For $280. With a heatsink shaped like an evil evil sharp-edged K. Better have a clear case for that bad boy.

(Via Engadget.)

Brain scan of nuns finds no single “God spot” in the brain

CogNews mentions a study at the University of Montreal looking at what in the brain “lights up” when nuns think of God: “A new study at the Université de Montréal has concluded that there is no single God spot in the brain. In other words, mystical experiences are mediated by several brain regions and systems normally implicated in a variety of functions (self-consciousness, emotion, body representation).”

Seriously, can we stop giving grants to these people? Sometimes in the late ’90’s, someone decided that seeing what “lights up” in the brain when stuff happens is “hawt.” Now, I’m all for real neuroscience studies that use imaging data to infer brain function. In fact, that’s my own interest, basically. But looking at what in the brain “lights up” when nuns try to “relive a religious experience” or when “kids think of their mother” or whatever else and call it the “God spot” or the “Mom spot” is stupid. A great majority of these studies are a waste of $600 per scan or whatever it is for fMRI (more for PET and MEG).

Puzzler — maybe solved?

I’ve been thinking a little bit more about this MacUpdate Promo deal that came up a few days ago, and I realize that there’s something I should’ve considered that I haven’t thought of before: macZOT has been sucking recently. I loved the woot.com-style “one day-one deal” thing, and when the mysteries had hints that were guessable but tricky, they were acceptable. But they’ve been doing these 5-day long things, and sneaking repeats in mysteryZOTs and all this other stuff that is sort of cute when it’s rare but gets really old really fast. So if MacUpdate does what macZOT used to do and now fails to, I’m in.

A puzzler from Macupdate

Today MacUpdate launched a new thing called MacUpdate Promo, which does 24-hour steep discount sales on popular mac software. Um — how is this different from macZOT!, and if it’s not different why are they bothering? I suspect that most people who care about the sort of thing macZOT! does already know about it, so I doubt that the additional audience of MacUpdate will do them any good here (and who reads the MacUpdate charts regularly, anyway?). It’s not that I don’t think that they’ll make any money from it, but I do think that there are better things they could spend their effort on, given that something like this has been going on (rather successfully) for some time. This one’s a puzzler.

Apple Buying YouTube? Why bother?

For a couple days now, people have been speculating on the notion of Apple purchasing YouTube. There have been arguments from both sides – you can see a pro argument from Robert Young over at GigaOM and a short response from John Gruber over on Daring Fireball. The pro side basically says that YouTube to the video iPod will be the same as the iTMS was to the regular iPod. The con is that YouTube is basically a big repository for copyrighted videos viewable by everyone – and the RIAA and buddies would blow a seal if Apple took part in that.

On Shareware

Some of you probably heard about mac enthusiast/blogger/wunderkind Phill Ryu recently launching a contest called “My Dream App.” The basic idea? Everyone can submit ideas for cool shareware apps that they wish existed, a panel of judges (including some shareware developers and Mac notables) cuts the list down to 24 cool and feasible ideas. Website users then vote to eliminate candidates every week, until 3 remain. These candidates get their apps written by some of the aforementioned shareware developers, fame and royalties ensue. The “American Idol” of Mac software design.

I’m curious to see how well this is going to work, and what it says for the shareware market as a whole. By definition, it’s sort of a niche market – the apps are usually simple (though sometimes surprisingly useful) one-shots that are used by a subset of the already-niche mac geek userbase. People within that group usually register your app because they often are developers themselves, they respect your work and so on.

But when you try to get out into the more mainstream market (even just to slightly less geeky mac users), you need to start guilting people into registering, because the internet often makes your serial numbers just about as as easy to distribute as your software. This is really where the problem arises, I think – people will steal your app, and they’ll do it a lot, and you either have to compensate for the people who crack your software by charging more for the people who actually register (a $20 desktop worldmap or a $25 blog updater come to mind), or you charge peanuts and hope that you’ve dropped the cost to the point where people would rather pay than waste their time looking for codes or cracks. Of course, if you choose the latter option, then some people might feel less guilty stealing it because “oh, it’s only worth 5 bucks anyway”.

Ryu and his buddies have money to burn on something like My Dream App, so there’s no question that people buy their shareware – but I’m wondering whether it’ll ever grow out of this mac-geek/blogger-developer thing and to more mainstream.