Where am I going to buy $500 pens now? I’m devastated.

I hope they open a cupcake shop in the spot, we need more of those.

Great show last night, I feel very fortunate to have seen Prince in a small venue. A rocking show – just his current small backing band of 3 women on drums, bass, and guitar. Opened with a few classics, including a nice variant on “I Could Never Take The Place of Your Man”. A lot of his new material. A nice cover of the Cars’ “Let’s Go” with a shout out to Boston. A really nice cover of “Crimson and Clover”. Along the way Prince was in great lead guitar form, and also picked up the bass at one point for a great solo.

He is a captivating performer. I’ve seen Jack White in a small venue and Buddy Guy, they both pour a lot of emotion into their guitar work, Prince is up there as well.

Everyone has written about forcing the stupid touchscreen down our throats, that annoys the heck out of me too. But maybe I can get used to it.

But moving beyond that, I just want to use a damn printer. There is nothing about printers on the home screen. When you type in “printers” it says it can’t find anything. Awesome. So I bring up the stupid f&*king charms (because menus and ribbons and taskbars weren’t good enough ways to start programs, let’s invent a whole new system, yay), choose Settings, choose “Change PC Settings”. Oh there is nothing called “printers” in this list either. OK click on devices and you can add a device, and then it tries and tries to search for devices. Meanwhile it is showing me a crappy list of devices I do have – great I have a “HL_DT_ST BD-RE WH08LS20” installed, that is good to know. Oh and I have devices called “Microsoft XPS Document Writer” and “Send To OneNote 2013”. Where are those on my desk? Those are so much more important to me than my damn printer.

I know it isn’t cool and strategic to print anymore. But people still need to f&*king print. I eventually found a way to add a printer but don’t ask me where the hell I found it.

Oh and the arduino software won’t install on it, apparently the arduino board is not trusted. To install it, you have to boot into the secret system setup mode which you get to deep in the control panel, and choose to turn off driver signing enforcement. Except this super secret startup mode hangs on my brand new machine and I have to power cycle. That is great, you certainly don’t want the most active community of tinkerers using your operating system.

Oh and I am using with dual monitors – one plain old monitor and one touchscreen. DON’T DO THIS. It sounded like a great idea, keep the new interface off in one screen in its little ghetto, and run all my real apps on the other screen. Except the touch interface is horribly confused now – a touch on my touch screen moves the pointer on my non-touch screen.

Yes I am doing perhaps somewhat niche-y things but Windows used to be good at that, damn it. It would run on anything and let you do anything. Now it is just an OSX/iOS wannabe and not very good at that.

Not in a good mood.

• Ghostman by Roger Hobbs. Excellent thriller about a world-class thief trying to thread the needle between rival criminal organizations and law enforcement. Great character. I’d read more featuring.
• Business Model Generation by Alexander Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur. I don’t read many popular business books, they are all so repetitive and derivative. This book wasn’t terrible – the authors aren’t trying to sell you on their thesis, but are giving you a compendium of tools for thinking about business models
• The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng. Excellent story about a young ethnic Chinese woman in Malaya during and after WWII. The intertwining of many cultures, the horrific treatment of groups by the rulers of the moment, and how everyone coped and survived. A window into a part of the world and its history of which I have been largely ignorant.
• The Fault in Our Stars by John Green. Two teenage cancer sufferers find love amidst their tragedy. Not an easy read but will grab you. Apparently under production as a movie.
• Extinction Machine by Jonathan Maberry. Eh. Super tough government agent violently unravels a conspiracy involving aliens. Not very original.
• The Dragon’s Path by Daniel Abraham. High quality fantasy. Not quite as bold as Game of Thrones but pretty darn good with compelling characters and a bit lighter tone than Game of Thrones.
• The Double Game by Dan Fespeman. Held my attention but the motivations of main character seemed like nonsense.

• CircuitLab – worth watching. Today it is kind of a toy, but if this could grow, say, into a tool that would let me design and emulate SOC-based systems, and then outsource the parts supply, circuit board mfr, and even assembly of them, well that could be cool.
• PaintCode – if I was doing iOS/osx app development, this seems like a must have. Laying out visuals and then creating all the boilerplate framework is tedious and boring.
• Pressgram – Love this idea. Never understand why people gift content to other branded services, this lets people own and control their own content.
• Some Ecards Store – I’d like to buy a bunch of the coffee mugs and stock our office with them.
• Tabular – I don’t have enough time (or, to be honest, enough skill) to engage in my secret desire to compose music, but if I did…
• 2 factor Apple ID auth – purportedly you can turn this on but it has been a failure for me, apple claims i set some security question answers that i have never seen before, and now I am locked out of my account after too many tries. Awesome.
• WindowsRT jailbreak tool – something to do with my stupid surface machine

[caption id=”attachment_6498” align=”alignright” width=”200”] What We See[/caption]

[caption id=”attachment_6499” align=”alignleft” width=”200”] What Minnesota Sees[/caption]

So Minnesota fired Tubby. @MedcalfByESPN is pretty clear that the real problem lies within the Minnesota athletic program and community – failure to build facilities, failure to support program, etc:

That’s the truth. Gophers need to invest a lot of money to right the ship. I’m gone. Feel free to disagree.

You can get lost in Minneapolis. When the Gophers are good, everyone cares. When they’re not, they go away. That’s just how it is.

The Gophers need so many additional resources to compete with the best teams in the Big Ten and the country. Limited investment.

Pretty classic mediocre team problem. The institution thinks it is a premier program, and thinks it deserves premier people and premier results. The truth is different.

I have a need to collaborate on some complex documents and I am trying out Sphinx as the document build system. Plays nice with github, promises to play well with code (tho I haven’t really tried that out yet), uses reStructuredText for markup. I would have preferred that it used markdown (well, multimarkdown, I kind of need tables), but rST seems fine. Sphinx builds HTML, text, PDF, and a bunch of other output formats.

I also need some simple flowchart imagery and GraphViz seems like the way to go – auto generation of flowcharts, etc from simple text descriptions. Again plays nice with github, with my favorite text editor, etc.

For text editing I have moved to Sublime Text. I love bbedit but I do have the occasion to use a Windows machine and Sublime has versions for both OSX and Windows.

Oh and finally I occasionally need a more complex drawing. The Wacom Bamboo Stylus + Lekh Diagrams on the iPad seems to be a great combo. My drawing skills blow, I really like how Lekh Diagrams autocorrects my rectangles, triangles, circles, etc.

• Alys, Always by Harriet Lane. A young woman witnesses a tragic accident and is then drawn into the family of the victim. Or insinuates herself into the family. I thought the tale was a little underdeveloped as either a suspense novel or as a character study, so just ok.
• Dhalgren by Samuel Delany. I read this years ago on my first sweep through the SF canon. I was probably too young and didn’t understand it. Now I am older and I still am at sea, it is just weird shit. I am just too linear I think. Or too linear at this moment in my life.
• Snow White Must Die by Nele Neuhaus. Purportedly one of Germany’s most popular mystery writers – but I suspect Germans have better taste than this. Stilted dialogue, choppy language – a product of bad translation? Whatever, I gave up 40% of the way in. Blech.
• The Teleportation Accident by Ned Beauman. Strong reviews, but just seems kind of pointless. The lives of wastrels in the mid1900s, as they bounce around but never quite engage with the events of the day. If the message is “most of us will live pointless lives and leave no footprint on the world”, well, ok. But who needs to read this?
• Fade to Black by Francis Knight. Blade runner-inspired fantasy set in a noirish city, with of course plots and corruption mixed in. Solid.

I liked Google Reader. It was a great way for me to keep up with content across a variety of interests – I had groups for college football, for tech, for books, for economics. I knew that I could always go to Reader and get caught up on a topic. As others have noted, it was probably the single Google product that I used more than anything.

Judging by Twitter reaction, a lot of other people liked Reader too, and in particular, use of Reader seemed to be biased towards the influentials in each of the disparate communities I followed. The leading college football writers were all saddened to see reader go. Leading tech writers. etc. “Marcelo”:http://blog.calbucci.com/2013/03/google-is-about-to-learn-tough-lesson.html says it well, Google just walked away from a product used disproportionately by influentials, and this seems like an ill-considered move. Most startups would kill for the audience that Google Reader had.

Of course Google isn’t really a startup any more, as this move demonstrates. Google is willing to walk away from customers to achieve some strategic goal. Google is willing to dump a product with users, to try to force people to more “strategic” products like Google+. Google prioritizes their competition with Facebook over user satisfaction. Google prioritizes the needs of advertisers, who probably never loved Reader, over the needs of users. It all seems a little arrogant and self-centered.

But no time for whining. Google owned Reader and they get to decide what to do with it. Twitter is fun but is no replacement for Reader – I didn’t have to wade thru a stream of gunk to get to content on Reader, and Reader never had the snark of Twitter – I like a certain amount of snark, but not all the time. I’ve moved initially on to Feedly which slurped up all my Reader groups and feed info nicely, seems relatively fast, is a lot more expressive that Google Reader. I’m not unhappy. Reader had been static so long, Google had really given up on it years ago, it was time to move on. As “others have noted”:http://corte.si/posts/socialmedia/rip-google-reader.html, Reader was probably hurting the market more than helping it, people can now move on to better solutions that are more user focused.

I worked for part of my career in the Personal Systems group at Microsoft. The Personal Systems group was full of great people, was a very successful business (MSDOS and Windows 3.x/95), and there was just a great vibe in the organization. I think I had a decent reputation as a manager and peer, but as they say “a rising tide lifts all boats”, and it was easy to seem smart and effective when I was part of a great team and business.

In early ‘98 (I think), I moved over to the MSN group, Microsoft’s first major foray into online services. The joke inside Microsoft was that “moving into the MSN group caused 20 points of IQ to evaporate”, and I fared no better than anyone else. The group was dysfunctional, there were too many people without great product shipping experience, the strategy was unclear, the whole thing was just a cesspool. Ultimately I left Microsoft in large part due to my experience in this group – there was no coherent view of what the strategy should be (at every level of the company), and I was going to have spend years moving people out of the organization, which was not a challenge I wanted to take on.

I’ve been reading all the negative press around the “NCAA and Emmert”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/28/sports/ncaafootball/calls-for-reform-grow-louder-for-ncaa-and-mark-emmert.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1& this week. The mishandling of the Miami case, Pete’s broadside against the NCAA, stupid amateurism decisions, etc. A lot of finger pointing at Emmert and calls for a change in leadership.

I have no idea if Emmert is a great guy or not, but he is in a broken system. The entire premise of the NCAA is wrong. Billions of dollars sloshing around in the system, flowing to the institutions and media companies and adults, and just a dribble flowing to the athletes. The system is doomed to failure, there is going to be leakage everywhere. As long as Emmert tries to maintain the system, he is going to look like an incompetent. If he really cares about the student athletes, he’d be wise to step outside the system and attack it.

On the heels of “B&N’s rumored step back from the Nook”:http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/25/business/media/barnes-noble-weighs-its-nook-losses.html, I bet he is “more forlorn than ever”:http://theludwigs.com/2010/04/the-nook-dude-at-the-barnesnobles-looked-forlorn-today/.

This was an easy one to predict. Competing in consumer hardware against Apple (and Samsung), and with an undifferentiated product relative to the Kindle? The Nook was born with 2.5 strikes against it. Maybe there were ways that B&N could have succeeded – a device that made the retail experience better? That authors or publishers liked better than alternatives? – but competing head-to-head on hardware specs was doomed from the get-go. A lot of shareholder money wasted in direct spend on the Nook, and in opportunity cost as B&N chased this pipe dream and failed to innovate in their core business.

It will still be interesting to watch AMZN in this market. They will not be able to compete with Apple, Samsung on mainstream tablets. But they don’t necessarily need to, they can still be the best online retailer without making their own devices.

“15 of the stupidest items Jesse Jackson Jr, bought with embezzled funds”:http://www.ijreview.com/2013/02/37631-jesse-jackson-jr-pleads-guilty-to-living-off-of-campaign-money/ – Well I’ve never embezzled money, but I have certainly bought WAY stupider items than these. $9K on kid’s furniture? Seems downright sensible. A bunch of money on memorabilia? As someone who buys OSU tickets every year and has a closet full of OSU-themed clothing, what’s the problem?

For stupid, here is my personal list:

* A boat. Any boat. A moment’s purchase, and a lifetime of maintenance hassles. * That whole life insurance policy I got fooled into buying at one point. Dumb. Combining financial instruments into one complicated hairball just confuses you, which is probably the seller’s intention. * Every kitchen small appliance ever. The juicer, the bread machine, the rice cooker, the popcorn popper, etc. Used <6 times and then they clutter up some cabinet somewhere. I’ll make an exception for the toaster. * That cool-sounding weekend trip at a charity auction. Which you never end up using. At least the money went to charity though. * Antivirus software. Just don’t download sketchy crap. * Any meal at “claim jumper”:http://www.claimjumper.com. Terrible food, and lots of it. * The infamous “$100,000 couch”. Every MSFT employee in the 90s sold options to buy some household goods, and then lived to regret it 3-4 stock splits later when they realized that couch cost them $100K. * Golf club membership. Seemed like a fine idea, but no one else in the family was excited, which I could have figured out earlier…

Thankfully I have ducked some stupid things:

* any vacation time share. whew. * car lease. the last time i bought a car, they pushed me hard on this, telling me it was a huge win for me. so exactly why were they pushing it so hard? * UPDATE: hot tub. Suggested by a friend, we’ve never bought one of these, and in fact filled one in at a house we bought. Never knew why we needed a really big Petri dish.

* “A Memory Of Light”:amazon by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson. This series finally comes to end, about 6 books too late. Good to get to closure on the tale but I can’t recommend starting the series. The first 3-4 books were excellent but then the series meandered far too long. * “Storm Prey”:amazon by John Sandford. A fine detective tale – a team commits a robbery at a hospital pharmacy and then have a falling out, with deaths resulting everywhere. No new ground broken here but a fun ride. An aside – I only picked this book up because it was on the “2 for $8” hardback table at the local B&N. The only B&N purchase I’ve made in like 6 months, and I am their core market. There is no path to recovery for B&N. * “Explosive Eighteen”:amazon by Janet Evanovich. My other $4 hardback. It is probably a mistake to pick up the 18th book in a series – my guess is that the high point of the series was probably back somewhere around book 4 or 5. Still, a lot of people must like these books since there are now 18. I thought it was trite, formulaic. Felt like the author spent a single afternoon writing it. I’m glad I spent only $4. * “O Jerusalem”:amazon by Laurie R. King. I’ve only read a few of King’s Mary Russell series, they have all been very very good, as is this one. Wish I’d read another of these instead of the Evanovich. * “A Manuscript of Ashes”:amazon by Antonio Munoz Molina. Tried to go highbrow but, well, boring.

So the new “Chromebook Pixel”:http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2013/02/chromebook-pixel/ is out, and it is an interesting move. Nice hardware, but expensive, and of course limited to whatever software runs on Chrome.

Being the “proud” owner of a Surface RT – another nice piece of hardware limited by its software – I’m not betting that this is going to be a big seller.

If I was Google, I would have built a Windows machine with great Google service integration and a Google/Chrome alternative to the new Win8 interface

* PC OEMs are not doing an amazing job on building machines, the field seems wide open * One less thing to explain to users – it is a Windows machine, it runs all Windows software if you want to, no need to explain Chrome * Probably easier to get wide distribution – it is just a great Windows machine * Users have to deal with a new interface on Win8 anyway – the time is ripe to offer something that is different than Metro (and maybe supports the classic Windows look better) * It would befuddle Microsoft. They can’t hate or attack a Windows machine.

I’ll never buy a Chromebook. I’d think about a great Windows PC with great Google integration.

I’m playing around with nano copters, the first I picked up was the “Syma S107c”:http://www.amazon.com/Syma-Channel-Control-Helicopter-Recording/dp/B0081VOEZM. Cheap and has a camera.

So super simple to set up, it comes assembled, you just need to connect the camera up, charge the copter, load batteries in the controller, and go. First run was indoors, and the copter was pretty uncontrollable due to body rotation. In theory you can use bias wheels on the controller to fix this but didn’t seem to work that well.

The camera was easy to use in theory but all my movies were blank, and then the camera USB connection wouldn’t work.

So then an outside flight. Still uncontrollable and then I had a hard landing from 8 feet onto pavement and boom, parts everywhere. I may be able to get it back together.

If this thing had a sensor/fb mechanism to control rotation, and a height sensor to prevent damaging drops, it would be infinitely more fun…

UPDATE: Ok reassembly successful. The camera payload is super fragile and pops apart easily. And when that happens, the copter decides not to fly. But reassembled, and i got a little better at using the bias wheel to control the rotation. Successfully took my first movies.