//Delete this later

So since the election, I’ve been hearing the same pseudo-racist whine from a lot of people that usually goes along with the tune “it ain’t easy being white”.  Or some variation on that.  People who say that make me want to slap the shit out of them.  “Ain’t easy”?  Just because a black guy is president?  Oh, wait, because there hasn’t been a white boxing champion since…whenever?  Come on.  If you seriously believe that’s all there is to it, go rent a place in the ghetto.  Go live there for awhile and talk to some people.  When the only job your great grandpa had was working to barely put enough food on the table for his kids to live, so they could get stuck in the same cycle…and on and on, you’ll think differently about things.  Especially when your college educated grandfather, who came out and got a great job working for bosses who really thought that job was a white man’s job and lived in an beautiful house that was worth something when your pappy or you inherited it.   Even now, you’re still inheriting the product of racism.  Just because you feel “shitty” that not every single president was the same color you are, or that stars in sports you casually watch aren’t white people doesn’t mean that you’re not still benefiting from centuries of prejudice.

Even if your white family was poor going back generations, they still had an advantage that black people didn’t have.  If they would have taken a bath and saved up for a suit, they would have had more of an advantage in most parts of this country and in most situations when they applied for a job than a black candidate.  Especially if it were one of the “good jobs”.  We still have the lingering remnants of a caste system even today.  There are still old white assholes in charge who don’t think black people make “good doctors” or “good lawyers”, even if the president happens to be one.  Or “good programmers”, for that matter.  So, it actually isn’t “tough to be a white guy”.  It’s just not as easy as it was when a big chunk of the population was being denied the same rights as you or your ancestors had.

Anyway, it’s that passive aggressive racism that really pisses me off.  With normal racists, I know they’re nuts, but with the passive aggressive kind, I know they’re just petty, ignorant, and self-centered.  I have pity for people who have mental problems like most of the aggressive racists, and think they should be getting some help for what obviously is to me a symptom of a worse mental condition…but the passive aggressive ones need a slap upside the head because they should know better but don’t.

…despite what you think right now about it.  Pick your situation, then jump to the blurb that’s about your reason.

1.  You are employed full time with (what you feel like) is great employer-paid insurance.

2.  You are a senior citizen on medicare or social security.

3.  You are an independent contractor or small business owner.

4.  You are a student or unemployed.

5.  You run a major corporation (not a health insurance corporation).

1.  You are employed and have insurance.  Good for you.  You have coverage, you can go into the doctor when you want, and aside from a pesky co-pay, you can walk out of that hospital having been taken care of.  So why would you ever care if someone else wasn’t covered?  Simple.  Your bank account is why.  How much do you make?  How big have your raises been over the past 10 years?  Not quite what you were hoping for, most likely…that’s the case for most people today.  Companies cite “rising costs are causing us to cut back our holiday bonuses this year” or “cut back on raises” or “pay freeze” or “hiring freezes”…whatever.  Those things generally either cause you to work more for less pay, or prevent your salary from keeping up with average living increases.  What are those mysterious “rising costs” they talk about?  Well, a really huge one is that health insurance you’re so happy with.  See, the health insurance industry has raised premiums for everyone, consistently, even though more people every year pay into that same pot.  The guys running the health care industry feel like they’re doing such a good job providing you with such winning insurance that they feel like THEY should have yearly raises that are roughly 200% higher than the average increase for standard of living.  In fact, the head of United Healthcare, one of the largest players out there, felt like he did such a good job that he raised rates for their massive base of customers, then he gave himself a BILLION DOLLAR BONUS.  And we thought those Wall Street bank CEOs were draining the pot.  Nope, that one billion came out of money you paid into the pot for coverage.  The larger that pot gets, the lower the premiums should be.  There’s more in there to cover everyone…right?  Unless the guy managing the pot decides to drain ONE BILLION DOLLARS out of it.  And that’s not counting all the other board members “getting theirs while the getting’s good”.  AKA, robbing your health dollars and tricking you into thinking that it’s the “economy’s fault”.  If your HEALTH CARE company was buying up mortgage backed derivatives, then it’s their own damn fault and there is government money (that you also paid for) that should be there to take care of that.

But why do you care?  You have health coverage…it’s all good, right?  Well, your employer may not feel that way, and to offset those rising costs, they’re taking it out of your future.  Your bonuses, your perks, your salary.  You’re feeling the crunch as much as anyone else, and you don’t even know it.  No properly regulated (outside of the military, which isn’t properly regulated) government agency could run insurance as poorly as the insurance industry has.   If they did, the politicians who let that happen would get voted out in favor of reformers willing to make it work.  That’s how Medicare has survived for so long and is a far more efficient system.  A system designed to care for people who are expensive to cover.  Seems like it shouldn’t do as well has it has, huh?

2.  I’m a senior citizen on medicare or social security.  You’ve done your part to society, paid your dues.  You don’t owe anything to these kids!  They can fend for themselves, right?  Well…maybe not.  See, it turns out, that if health costs continue to rise across the board, the next generation might consider trying to deregulate those social programs that are helping you buy heart medication, helping you out when you get sick, and all the other things you rely on to try and enjoy those latter years as much as you can.  If health costs continue to blow up, money’s got to be saved somewhere…and Medicare is a program that is expensive.  It’s insurance only for those who are expensive to insure.  The next generations, just to get by, might get turned on by the notion of tax cuts just like your generation did.  And if you’re still around at that point, it’s going to get hard to stick around.  On the other side, if the door were opened and people began to see the value in a public option, maybe Medicare could be extended towards everyone.  The end result?   With all the money focused into one pot, with conceivably less bureaucracy and overhead than an entire health insurance industry all pulling out of that pot, the coverage that Medicare could extend might actually improve.  Since the taxes would most likely be tacked on to income tax, and since you’re most likely retired, you’d still have the same setup where the next generation pays in for the most part, but you wouldn’t have to worry about your kids getting sick and having no coverage, then being forced to make you live with them in an extra room instead of in your own place in the retirement community.  Or worse, cut you off entirely.

3.  You are an independent contractor or small business owner.  Either you make a LOT of money (which, considering the economy, is unlikely, but you never know), or you’ve noticed that health care has gotten REALLY expensive.  As in, as much as the rent on an apartment.  For something that you might use once in a year, you tend to self-medicate, you gamble and hope things “work out”…not a good idea.  Your back could go out tomorrow, you could end up being stuck going into the hospital, and what might that cost you?  10 grand?  For most people running their own business or consulting, that’s enough to hurt pretty bad.  Or maybe you get jobs from time to time, but in-between jobs, you’re not covered.  Or you might just be plain sick of paying for health care, only to have your contract end 3 months later and be unable to pay the monthly.  The public option was MADE for people like you.  It’s so you have an affordable option that doesn’t necessarily require that you be employed, or even in a union, so long as you’re a citizen.  The nice thing about that, too, is that by having a fully regulated public insurer that isn’t skimming way more than it should off the top, when you DO get employee based health care in the future, it might actually be cheaper and you may be able to negotiate your wage up a little more effectively.  I know from a lot of personal experience that if I ask for what I want for a wage, either a company will take it down by 15% or more, or they’ll just bring me on as a contractor with no health benefits.  It’s really those health benefits that are the sticking point.

4.  You are a student or unemployed.  Again, the public option was made for you.  You’re looking for work, but what happens if you get sick?  Or in a car accident on the way to the interview?  Or you’re a student who gets sick, slips and falls on the way to class, or heck, you see something that well could be a cancerous mole…but you were just dropped from your parent’s health care plan and you’re barely able to pay for your education with your financial aid LET ALONE try and get health coverage.   You’re being bankrupted before you even have a chance to contribute to society.  What are you going to do?  Turn to crime?  The bottom line is, none of it ends up well for anyone involved.  Having a good public option might open the door to insurance that will cover the unemployed and students without charging them their premium.  If you have that many people paying into the pot, and you are keeping the overhead down, you can do that quite easily.  After all, these insurance companies seem to be making a fortune with all of this stuff.  And you don’t have to become a prostitute, rob a bank, or carjack someone in order to stay alive.  If you’ve got kids, then you can take some comfort in knowing that they’ll be taken care of if something goes wrong.  That means, they won’t come back to you and force you to make the decision to pay for a 15 thousand dollar operation, or cut them loose and pray for a miracle.

5.  You run a major corporation (not a health insurance corporation).  Congratulations.  You’ve reached the pinnacle of success in this society, and truth be told, you didn’t do it all yourself like the people you pay to tell you that say.  You did get a hand from a government that provided roads and transportation to your headquarters, provided a free public education to your employees, provided police and protection so someone else didn’t just come along and knock your sand castle over.  But you notice something that’s really annoying…you need to keep your workers healthy, because they’re the ones with the tools that bring in the big bucks.  When they get sick and can’t be replaced, it hurts the business.  Or your competitor is offering a full health plan in order to lure your employees with all their company secrets away from you, and your non-compete clause is only causing a lot of lawsuits against YOU.   So you offer the health care package as a part of your employee benefits.  Unfortunately, you’re getting reports from HR that those benefits keep costing your bottom line more and more every year…and all the while Fred, the CEO of the health insurance company that promised you that wouldn’t happen, just went out and bought himself another mansion, complete with a yacht and a Picasso.  You’re being taken to the cleaners over this, and you know it, but there’s nothing you can do…or is there?

Maybe this is one of those times when capitalism isn’t so great…you know, those times when you’re on the receiving end of the shaft.  If the government creates a public option where the overhead is regulated and premiums go DOWN like they should when more people pay into the program, Fred’s going to have to know that he can’t keep snowballing his customers like that and expect them to continue paying into that private plan.  On top of that, to win his customer’s faith back, he’s going to have to beef his plan up a little.  Add the vision coverage back in, for example…so you can turn around and send a big company-wide email that you worked with your insurer, and got your employees their vision coverage back.  You get to be a hero for a day or two and your employees don’t start trying to unionize out of desperation.  Nice.

Of course, it’s highly doubtful that anyone like that is reading this, but I did the CEO part for fun.

Given a couple days of thought after that last job, it became kind of apparent to me (and I knew this all along, but didn’t quite put two and two together about it), the previous place I worked, while I really liked the team and management, were still trying to figure out the Agile process.  They knew that it would help them with estimates, but if all your focus on is estimates, you’re just adding bureaucracy without adding the teamwork element that makes Agile a better development philosophy for many teams.

A coach can tell you “I see you’re doing some of the basic pieces, and that’s great” and you can take that as a compliment, but Agile development’s entire purpose isn’t just for better estimating tasks, it’s about getting those tasks done more efficiently and making your team look better in the eyes of the company, provide better value.  It’s not for every team or every philosophy, to do it justice, you kind of have to embrace some things that you might think aren’t totally intuitive if you come from a waterfall background.

One thing that really puzzled the hell out of me when I was driving out with my little box full of the odds and ends and books I pulled out of my desk was “why would you even try doing Agile if you want your team to work off in little islands on things anyway?”  I got this massively schizophrenic reason that my contract hadn’t been extended, and all I can think is that this is a team that knows what it wants to be, but is still holding onto a philosophy that it was very used to.  I was alternatively told that what they wanted for the team was for all the developers to go off on their own and “take ownership” of pieces, but was also told that what they wanted was someone to work “across the system on a little bit of everything”.   To do both isn’t exactly easy, but I felt like I had managed to do that simultaneously.  The thing is, the latter one fits better with a real agile philosophy, the former fits with waterfall method style development.

I like teamwork.  I don’t seem like I would, but I really enjoy working off people.  Sometimes I ask them questions I already have an answer to, because it’s possible that they might have a better answer or know something I don’t.   The teams that I’ve worked in that worked like that got stuff done on time, sometimes even ahead of time.  What was hinted at me was that they didn’t like that, they didn’t want me to talk to other people about things, they just wanted me to own something and not communicate with others.  From working across their entire system, I learned in detail exactly how that turned out.  From watching the team “fire” emails sent out on a regular basis, from listening to people, I figured out that the result of that has been that they have a hell of a lot of stuff in production that invariably ends up not working the way it should.  I used to see several of the same stored procedure throughout the system, mainly because the person who wrote it didn’t ask the guy who was working on security how they were supposed to write it.  The end result is when a third programmer got into it, they picked the one that either looked the easiest to figure out, or what seemed to look like the “most official” or “most commonly used”.  The end result is that you would either have a security backdoor into the system, or you had a procedure that was far more inefficient than what was really needed in that spot.  Or one that didn’t work as expected at all.

There was also little consistency in the overall architecture.  One person would do things one way, one would do it another, and you could tell the lack of collaboration was probably at fault. And when someone else had to make both pieces play nicely together, it became a struggle that wasted time.  If they had made sure things were in sync to begin with (usually one piece is made before the other…if not, then it can be developed in tandem if they communicate), it would have saved time for more than one person…it would have saved the QA person time as well.  On one hand, when I originally interviewed there, I got the feeling that the team was a bit apologetic about it, on the other hand, I felt like they almost took pride in that because whether or not someone was comfortable with that was apparently a criterion as to whether or not to hire a person.

In a lot of ways, that’s like telling someone who walks in the door “Hey, we have a lot of spaghetti code that is the result of working on conflicting deadlines and team turnover rate.  Are you comfortable with working within that and not trying to make things better for everyone?”  If it were posed to me like that, my answer would have been “Hell no.  I take my job seriously, and if I feel that I can add value by making things work better, then of course I’m going to do what I must to refactor things.”

Anyway, what I really feel was the real reason was that I have a wide range of skills, some sort of niche, and they couldn’t figure out how to use those tools effectively within the system.  I got the feeling that they were trying, but the work they did was fairly purposed.  They had a lot of work that didn’t seem to fit in with the focal work that they did, and that seemed to be the type of work that I was a better fit for.

The point of the title of this is that you can scrum away all the tasks and stories you want, you can put whatever numbers on it you want and you can get as great at estimating as you want, but if you want to improve velocity, you’ve got to encourage people to do things like trade tasks when working towards a release (working on tasks you have no familiarity with is fine when you have plenty of slack time planned in an iteration, but when you’re trying to increase velocity, it’s a really bad idea).  You need to encourage the meetings, and even once in awhile, you’ve got to pair on a task.

When I saw them fighting fires, they were fighting fires because people who had taken ownership of their section of code had become so insulated from the rest of the team that they were breaking other people’s work.  There’s no architecture document in XP.  There’s no set of specs.  You make up for that with communication.  You have to.  Scrum doesn’t solve that entirely, owners and scrummasters don’t always define tasks properly upfront because most of the time they don’t have their heads in the code.  When the team was really putting out fires and making things work well, they pulled together and had the online conferences and communicated with each other.  They bounced ideas off each other.  It’s sad that they couldn’t extend that approach to the rest of their process, but they seemed bound and determined to hold onto those last fragments of waterfall…even though those are the absolutely worst things to hold onto when you switch to Agile.

This is going to be a little bit of self-therapy, so bare with it…if you like.

It’s kind of always been the same…the places I love to work, rarely, if ever, love me back enough to really give me a chance to belong and stay, be a part of something.   On the other hand, the places that I generally hate working at never want to let me go.  There definitely is a reason behind it, maybe it IS just because the places I like working at, are places other people like working at, and they know that and have the upper hand.  Places I hate, other people hate, and they know that they have to bend over backwards to keep me there.

That said, I don’t buy it.   I can tell when the rest of my team is less happy than I am, and when they’re more happy than I am, and it doesn’t always match up to the workplace.

Anyhow, with all that out of the way…I can say with 100% certainty that happiness, for me, is having something I love that loves me back.  My dog makes me happy.  My bird makes me happy.  My work made me happy until today, when I discovered it didn’t love me back as much as I loved it.   The time I spent on my own time learning and trying to do things that I thought would be really beneficial for my team, well, kind of wasted time now that I could have been using to develop my own products.  But I do that when I enjoy my work, and I just don’t really care much otherwise.  When I hate my job, I tend to pour more of that time into my own projects.

I saw a lot of potential in this job, and a lot of potential in the type of work I would be doing.  I knew that given a little budget and investment, I could make it all pay off…or at the very least, help them keep their bases fully covered.  I’m disappointed that it wasn’t feasible for them, that we couldn’t make it work out.

Then again, I always notice that when I’m happy, I get relaxed and I tend to be myself.  I tend to become more passionate about things than people around me can handle.  I try harder to fit in and I want to contribute more.  Sometimes when I hate something, I only do enough to be done with things, and people seem to accept that a whole lot better because when people get what they expect, they’re fine with that.

I forgot how hard it is to break into a team where they’ve all been situated for years, and you’re the new guy trying to figure everything out…and the reason they brought you in was because you could do something that they weren’t even sure they wanted to do.  That’s happened to me before a couple times, and it always ends up bad.  You start measuring yourself against people who have far more experience with the things that are there…but more importantly, they start measuring you against those people when you’re still just trying to figure those things out and take ownership of those things.

Those people almost always have long forgotten how it felt to have to learn everything from scratch, and they simply cannot judge you fairly.  That’s not their fault, that’s just how the human mind works.  We live in the now, and we don’t relive our first month or two on the job all the time.

Anyway, I forgot that my contract was really a quarterly evaluated deal, and the things I brought to the table, they just weren’t ready to have me deliver on.  When you like doing what you’re doing and you like the people you’re working with, you want to forget those details.  Anyway, I’m off for awhile, and I really do hope that when they’re ready, I’ll be available…but with the goals I’ve laid out to buy this house, I’ve got to find real work, quick.  And I’m sure as hell not going to drop another job just for another 3 month contract or part-time deal.  It has to be full time, or I’m not interested.  As for right now, I can safely say that I’d be thrilled to get a full time job offer, from my (now) previous employer or anyone else, provided I’m not taking a huge step back in salary and quality of work.

Going to be taking some trips to the dog park, looking for work, and maybe, just maybe, I’ll do those 3 Palm Pre apps that I’ve been putting off for a month now.  I don’t have anyone else to make happy besides myself and my pets, so what the hell.  I might not be able to buy my house, but there are more important things in life than that.

Geoff Kleinman’s recent <a href=”http://www.onpdx.com/music/94-7fm-krnk-give-us-feedback-then-youfail/” target=Resource Window>post</a> on his twitter battle with 94.7 KNRK really got me to thinking…I haven’t listened intentionally to FM radio in a really, really long time.

See, I can listen to good local bands on Pandora that get no play at all on KNRK, drowned out by, effectively, big label bands (that aren’t putting out top 40 pop hits) and essentially classic rock which clutters up the station.  Mind you, there’s a place for that…there are a lot of classic rock stations that only play the same stuff they’ve been playing for 20 years now…and the stuff that was new when that station started up wasn’t exactly classic rock then…but it is now.  And KNRK plays it.

The thing Pandora lacks, however, is the personal touch.  There’s no spontaneity, no real randomness, no interaction with the audience.  It just merrily plays a bunch of music that its algorithm thinks is related to each other, and a lot of times, that’s very cool.  But there are times where you want something more entertaining than relaxing, and that’s where radio could still have a niche…if it weren’t inundated by idiots with microphones and no creativity.  Bad jokes.  They don’t practice any of that stuff, they don’t have psych degrees most of the time, they’re just guys who know music.  The problem there is that just knowing music doesn’t hit that niche, you’ve got to work an audience.  You need to have a good voice for radio, you need to mix it up, you need to bring something that no one else does and practice it.  It’s more than knowing obscure music, knowing how the equipment works.  If that’s all you know, you bring nothing to the table that Pandora and internet radio doesn’t already do much better.

It’s the one thing that Sirius/XM and AM radio have figured out.  They hire people who know how to interact with a crowd.  That’s what the talk radio folks do and it works.  It makes income and it gets listeners.  It’s no surprise to me that KNRK is losing income and laying off talent…they don’t have any talent to begin with.  Every time I’ve tuned in accidentally in the past, I’ve tuned out because the dj was ANNOYING.  Self-indulgent, juvenile, emo, too-cool-for-you douchebags don’t make for good dj’s.  FM is rife with them.  At least with Pandora, I don’t have to listen to these idiots’ verbal masturbation.  They might think it’s funny to themselves, and their hangers-on clique might force themselves to laugh, but unless you think you can stand up in front of a hostile audience and deliver that line without getting a bottle thrown at your head, don’t say it.

This is probably the umpteenth million Palm Pre blog/review, but I’ve had it burning in me for awhile.

I really can’t figure out why people still defend the iPhone.  Or Blackberries. I’ve developed for both.  I would use Symbian devices over both.  The Symbian architecture is much more powerful and was built purely for mobile devices, even if programming for it feels like having a root canal done.  iPhone is powerful, but reminiscent of early Windows CE…feels too much like a clumsily shrunk down desktop OS.  Unlike WinCE, Apple tried to go too far, and discovered that some things were really hard to figure out how to do well on a small screen, so they just omitted those fairly common features and pretended like that was intentional.  (Why did it take so long to support video?  The Treo 600′s could do video in ol’ PalmOS!)  Not only that, but Objective C is not that impressive of a language, and developing on the platform of your choice pretty much means your choice has to be a Mac.

I guess it could be because iPhone is pretty easy to use, and it’s like having a bike with training wheels…it’s probably your first bike, or maybe its just a lot nicer than the total piece of shit you used to use to get around, and you’re excited that you can do shit that most mobile device users have been doing for several years now.  It really is cool and you grow sentimental about things that blow your mind for the first time.  I know I have a much higher opinion of Phillips music players because my first boom box with a cd-player was a Phillips.  It rocked the hell out of every radio I’d ever had before, and I thought “Phillips is an amazing company to make something so rad.”  Then I discovered that Sonys were better.  A lot better.  Then I discovered mp3 players.  But I still kept giving Phillips a lot of credit that it didn’t probably still deserve.  I thought they were the real innovator, but in reality, they were just another player.  I thought this way about PalmOS, too.  First PDA OS I ever used.  I told myself “I’ll never need a laptop, because I’ve got this thing figured out, the Graffiti, the hacks, I can McGuyver it with a modem and get it on the web, and I can freaking program it to do all kinds of things, too.”  I got sentimental.  Then Palm fired the guy who invented the thing, sold PalmOS to the Japanese, and began putting Windows Mobile on their handhelds.  It happens.  If a company doesn’t think they’re making the big bucks, or that platform isn’t bringing enough people into the fold, they fold it and you got to learn to live without it.  It happens a lot more with big companies that undergo restructurings every 10 years.

Blackberry OS does what a phone can do, but aside from being proprietary, it has a butt ugly interface, is not horribly extensible, and is at the whims of MIDP, which as far as Java goes, is a 80 pound weakling.  BBOS just has limiters all over the place AND it’s tied to a sinking ship called MIDP.  I have never been able to do everything I wanted to do while working within the constraints of BlackBerryOS/MIDP and their API.  I always need to do something that I just cannot do, and it’s infuriating.  Not only that, the developer signing bit is weak.  It adds no security to anything, it just allows RIM to have a catalog of all the software apps out there for their phones so they can keep tabs on things.  Palm used to use an ID for apps…but that was mostly to keep apps with the same name from clashing with each other’s databases.  That’s an actual functional use for that.  Digital signing of apps doesn’t really mean a whole lot anymore except that you jumped through some hoops.

I can understand Windows Mobile.  I agree, it’s user interface seems to have crawled out of a mule’s backside, but as a developer, I’ve never used a more powerful toolchain to create solutions before.  Now, it was pretty much suck prior to .NET, but .NET made WinMob awesome.  Making a clean, easy to learn and well supported toolchain is how you make friends with me, even if you are butt ugly. WinMob 7 is supposed to change all that, but I’m still skeptical of that.  Every time Microsoft says they’ve improved the UI, it seems to be less easy to use.

And even though I’ve long been a big Palm fanboy and I fully admit it, I didn’t think they had much of a shot after they mothballed Cobalt (which was a really cool and powerful OS that…well, didn’t support multi-touch and all the things that would have made it obsolete a year after release).   Then I saw a demo of a Palm device running Linux, and thought “what kind of pipe dream is this?”  I had my doubts, big time.  I know linux, and I like linux.  But no matter how much I try, I never can persuade my family to use linux.  They’ll do it for a few months, then quietly get rid of it and not tell me.  Or they just won’t use it and hate me for installing it in the first place and gobbling up hard disk space from their precious Windows.

This isn’t like that.  The only way you can tell you’re using Linux is if you’re using the developer tools.  Palm figured out a way to make linux not look at all like linux…and also be super easy to program for, to boot.

The user interface is a browser.  WebKit, to be exact.  Now, I’m not exactly fond of WebKit, but it is fast and pretty powerful…and there really isn’t a better web browser out there that I could consider would be acceptable for a user interface.  Google wants to do that with Chrome and make GoogleOS, but Google is also a company that has to make money on these products, and I know they will find a way to do so that will creep me right the hell out.  They don’t use software to sell the hardware like Palm does.  They make money on software and web services and advertising, and I’m sure that its only a matter of time before Android and GoogleOS, provided they make enough of an inroad into the mobile user base, begin to work their money making bloatware in there so their shareholders don’t get anxious.

Developing for the Pre is as easy as it gets.  If you know how to make a webpage, if you know a little CSS and javascript, you’re most of the way there.  They have an API that lets you hook into the stuff you need, and everything else, you do in xhtml and css.  You can do it in any editor you like, as these are fully open standards, and there are tutorials all over the place.  All you have to really learn is how to call out the api (which is not too different from other Javascript APIs, like JQuery and Dojo), and you can make full featured apps.

So you’re sitting there thinking “well, how do you make games?”.  Aside from the fact that Flash will most likely come to the Palm Pre’s platform (webOS), which means any old flash game on the web is fully portable…there’s a guy who took and made the classic 3D ID game, Wolfenstein 3D, for the Pre.  There’s a whole lot you can do with HTML5 that you’ve never been able to do with HTML before.  Ajax is a powerful way to program, and most sites are just scratching the surface of what this methodology/scripting language can do.

But that’s not all.  This thing is running on Linux.  Linux has been around now for almost 20 years.  There’s a whole lot you can do on Linux that you can do on Windows and MacOS.  That said, this will make porting apps between Android and Pre probably pretty simple.  Not only that, there’s an emulator that will run a whole lot of the old Palm OS apps fairly well.

So you say “but where’s the apps?”  Well, this thing was just released last month.  It takes some time.  However, there were hundreds of thousands for the old PalmOS platform, and already in the last month, after the first round of code camps, there are well over a hundred up on the “unofficial app store” known as precentral.net (which has a very useful app you can download to hook into their site and download the other apps just like you would with an app store).  But that’s certainly not all…Palm just opened up the floodgates on their own official app store, and I’ll say this…if you can get it there, do it.  It’s worth it.  The updater for webOS is very slick…it won’t just update your OS like windows update will, it updates your apps you downloaded from the app store as well!  And it’s FAST.  Your apps are basically complex scripts that pull their content from the net, so downloading new apps usually takes just a couple seconds.

Of course, this also means you should really get an unlimited data plan.  However, their initial carrier, Sprint, provides a very affordable unlimited plan.  You can use the built in wifi, though, if you want…it’s probably the most efficient wifi implementation I’ve ever used (although the one thing that makes me crazy is that I can’t save my stupid password for enterprise wireless networks like I have at work…though my solution is to then turn on Pandora and listen to music, use that to keep me logged in, I’d rather not abuse Pandora so much).

The music and media works pretty much like an iPod does.  Not surprising, since the daddy of the iPod is the CEO of Palm, and he’s the guy who laid down the law on how webOS was supposed to work.

One thing I regret, though…that they didn’t release the Foleo.  Or moreso, that they didn’t release the Foleo with the same specifications as other modern netbooks.  This phone made me want to go out and buy a little black netbook (MSI Wind U-100) to use for programming my phone.  webOS, being an open platform, can be made to be “tetherable”, meaning you can open it up and use it as a portable wireless access point when you’re in a pinch.  Therefore, you’re connected through your data plan, so you can do something like write a blog with your netbook, or download something to your netbook wirelessly.  It’s very nice when there isn’t a handy coffee shop with wifi around and you get that urge to write something on the net.  Even so, I’d have loved to have had a Palm branded and made laptop that had some extra functionality to control and tether the phone, or work with the media better over the cable.

When a Pre gets plugged into a computer, it works one of three ways…you can sync it with your media player like an iPod, you can use it like a flash drive and just drop files into its file system, or you can just let it charge up through USB.  Those options are really flexible and make this thing much more usable than you’d think it could.

You can’t really know how awesome it is to multitask on a phone until you find one that does it right.  Windows Mobile did it, but it always felt clunky and unintuitive.  This feels even better than switching tabs in Firefox or IE.  It’s seriously the most intuitive method to multitask I’ve ever seen.  It just makes a whole lot of sense, especially if you’ve got a screen that supports those kinds of gestures.  The analogy to flipping cards and a deck is a very good one, though I’ve never played a card game where I drag my finger one way, and all the cards rotate in that direction.    But it works and works well.

Another thing about the Pre…it’s the sort of platform where you discover some incredibly useful new trick every so often when you really sit down and use it.  It’s like the developers kind of said “well, they might use it like this, or they might use it like that, so let’s figure out a way to do it both ways”.  It’s hard to explain without having someone really sit down and use it.

I really wish, though, that the voice control were a little further along.  From what I’ve seen, the voice control really isn’t fully integrated as I’d like it to be.  I’d like to see voice control be really easy to add to any application, so I could easily open that app, like Pandora, for example, tell it to log in, tell it the station I want, and have it start working without having to touch the device.  Or have it open a twitter client, log in, and voice dictate a tweet and post it.  It’s a nice thing to be able to do if you’ve got it on the inductive charging touchstone (worth the cash you plunk down in straight up usability and coolness factor), you’re working on your desktop and your headphones are on and you don’t want to go touch the screen.

The build quality of the initial devices had some problems, which made a lot of really stupid iPhone and BB fanboys declare that Palm was already dead in the water.  You see, these are people who enjoy seeing the underdogs fold, crash, and die.  You’d think these are the same kinds of people who also enjoy watching animals get hit by cars, by the way they talk, but I digress.  With all new appliances, build quality issues are very common.  If it’s not one thing, it’s another…and the more risks you take with the design, the more problems you’re likely to have.  It just so happens that Palm took a lot of risks to make a fairly revolutionary design…a bottom sliding keyboard, the magic “pearl” embedded into the bottom of the screen, the gesture area beneath the screen, etc…risks that Apple didn’t even come close to taking (and since BlackBerries feel like they were made for blind 3 year old boys with pudgy, fat fingers, no, they didn’t take many risks either).  But they had problems early on, too.  And they fixed a lot of them, just as Palm is fixing their problems with the Pre right now.  Expect much better units to begin being rolling off the line in the next couple months.

Another knock that the iPhone and BlackBerry fanboys haven’t really been as loud about is the sales knock by the stock analysts.  They know full well that new devices go through three or four phases:  1.  Early adopters who line up at the store to buy the first devices that roll off the lines, 2. The lull as the early adopters figure out if they like their phones or not, while build quality issues are resolved, while services are rolled out, etc., 3. Power users and people whose contracts have run out, or people who know early adopters, Christmas shoppers, whatever…start coming out and buying the device, and 4.  The late adopters, IE, the people who switch because they just get sick of their old phone, start looking into the models.  Well, we’re in the second stage right now.  The early adopters have bought their phones, now things are getting fixed and everyone is waiting to see how things go.  But for some unknown reason, stock analysts don’t seem to understand this very simple process, and if the sales go down for a month, they just jump all over that product.  Especially if they have their egos staked to it and called that product dead in the water to begin with.  And even more especially if they have a phone made by a rival company and might be fanboys themselves…and that unconsciously leaks into their work and causes them to make predictions that end up hurting anyone who dares to invest using their advice.

One last knock is that this “webOS” thing is not a platform, according to Gartner.  It’s just an Appliance, although it’s no longer a “Concierge”.  Well, if the web isn’t a platform for business, then no, it’s not a platform.  If following open web standards isn’t a platform for business, then shucks, I guess it’s not a platform.  Guess the Internet is not something that you can recommend doing “business” on.  I can understand platforms that aren’t extensible, proprietary APIs and third party developer interfaces that are ultimately weighed on the source provider’s internal work to add features and functionality…but then again, .NET is just that, and Windows Mobile is ruled a full on “platform”.  Well, you have to consider that these are business people making this call, and not engineers.  open standards mean nothing to some guy who has no idea how the technology to send email through a server works, but just wants certain features that are ultimately tied into a platform methodology and user philosophy that is set by one company (in this case, Microsoft…which probably explains why their mobile OS, despite being foul to use, is considered a “platform” and thus recommended for business use).  Even though I’ve written a lot of Windows Mobile apps, and every time, my users have a “work phone” and a “me phone”, and that “me phone” isn’t the Windows Mobile phone.  There’s a reason why I have a little love/hate thing with Windows Mobile…every developer wants to make apps that people enjoy to use, but if the platform isn’t a joy to use, you feel like your work is handicapped.

But my golden rule is this:  companies that solely focus on one platform, one device will always make the best device in the shortest amount of time.  A company that makes a device or platform as a side division rarely can do a better job or innovate in the field because the people on top make the calls, and the best people in the company trickle into the projects that make the company the most money.  Mobile devices are, for a lot of companies, a loss leader.  They do a lot of work on a platform and a device, sell it cheap, get a contract going with a carrier to ensure stable income to make up some of that loss, and use that platform to get people to adopt their bread and butter platforms.  Don’t think for a minute that I didn’t think about buying a Mac when I was trying to learn how to develop for the iPhone…but ultimately, I looked at my bank account, took a long look at all the hoops I’d have to deal with, and thought about whether or not the platform would really stick around that long…and went out and bought an Alienware laptop with Windows on it instead.  That may not have been the smartest move, but damnit if I don’t love this laptop. 

Palm’s future rests on this device and their platform.  You can bet that you can get a bit more responsiveness and service when a project is that important to a company.

So I’m walking the dog today, and decide to head on up to the old neighborhood…Park Blocks, by PSU.  Totally forgot about the Farmer’s Market, but I figured, what the hell, I’ll walk around it.  It’ll be fine.  Then I notice all the construction going on and the outlets to the street that are blocked off, so I figured I’d walk through so I could get past it and start wandering home.

First, I hear one snotty couple point and say “No dogs.”  I ignore them, because I just figure they’re kinda assholes.  I’d always been allowed to walk my dog through the market.  He’s only 30 pounds, and he already went to the can a few blocks away.  Besides, I always carry bags and always clean up after him.  So I start cutting through so I can get around the mess, and someone else points and whispers “No dogs.”  The person standing next to her had some kind of yorkie on a leash, so I figured she was just being an ass to me.

I start walking behind this asshole who is smoking while walking through the crowd.  I try to get around him because my fucking eyes are burning from the low quality tobacco that he’s spewing out his nostrils.  Then this little jackass prances up to me and says “We don’t allow pets down at the market anymore”.  What the hell?  I’m just trying to get through that mess.  I never asked for them to have their fucking market all over the park!  They literally block off 2 or 3 apartment buildings and most of the park with that market, and they don’t give you anywhere to get around it without having to walk a block either way to circumvent the damn thing.

This is kind of an example of the kind of shit I’ve been noticing more and more over the past couple years.  It’s the kind of snobbishness I’ve come to expect in California or Seattle, the kind of stuff that you know you’re going to encounter there so you go out of your way to avoid it.  A huge part of the charm of Portland, at least for me, has always been that you can do things and people won’t really pass judgment on you for it.   For the most part, people would understand and know that the roles could be switched, so they just stayed cool about it.

Another point I’m making is that Portland seems more than happy to sacrifice its dog-friendliness for stupid snobbery.  What, you don’t think people walk their dogs through that park before and after that market?  They do.  Those dogs poop right there, right where that food cart is standing.  I know from firsthand knowledge.  I used to live right there.  I know all about it.  I’ve stepped in it…right there.  Some people are assholes and they don’t pick up their poop.  I saw an example of that just yesterday with some guy who walked down to the green area across the street from me and let his dog crap right by the restaurant parking lot, and didn’t have the decency to pick it up.  It happens.  But punishing the good dog owners with the bad is the idiots answer.

And all the while, a guy can walk right through a crowded farmers market smoking low-grade cancer sticks, and no one bats an eye.  What is a dog going to do that dogs haven’t done already if you put your farmers market right where people walk their dogs very regularly?  The people who run the PSU farmers market really are the worst types of assholes…they’re the types that don’t think for themselves.  Is it because dogs aren’t allowed in stores?  What defines a store?  Must a store be indoors, or outside?  Does a coffee shop that sells stuff count as a store, and if so, does that mean that dog friendly establishments such as Iron Mutt Coffee and the Lucky Lab are operating illegally?

If the Farmers Markets aren’t operating on top of a giant hobo bathroom like Skidmore, they’re operating on top of a dog park.  If you want to keep the dogs out, renovate an old supermarket or office building, and put the market in there.  Put a sign on front that says “Not Dog Friendly, Sorry”.  Don’t treat dog walkers like they bear the mark of Cain.  That’s the kind of attitude that Portland needs to get back to differentiate itself again.  Now, it’s just full of self-serving, obnoxious, hypochondriac, narcissistic idiots who want Portland to become a suburb of San Fran or Seattle.  The people who really run this town are the types of people who were laughed at when they first started coming here.  They’re the people who wanted the “snobby green elitist” part of the Portland persona, but wanted nothing to do with the “quirky, laid back, weird” part of the persona, so they have taken their generally strong financial clout and effectively lobotomized the parts of the Portland persona that they didn’t care for…generally the parts that didn’t make them feel like they “fit in” and didn’t make them feel superior to other people.

Anyway, a whole lot of what I loved about this town is pretty much on life support, if it’s still alive.  I really don’t know where it is located so I can check and see.  It’s certainly going downhill in dog-friendliness, that’s for sure.  It’s unfortunate how many people didn’t clean up after their animals, but it’s just as unfortunate that idiots had to take a sledgehammer to everyone, including the responsible people as well.  They cut funding to dog parks, they stopped supplying bags to the parks, they pass these poorly defined laws that ultimately prevent people walking their dogs from going pretty much anywhere where people sell anything…even if that dog walker really could use a glass of lemonade or a coffee or tea or something while out walking.  Can’t get it.  The law says that I’ve got to be thirsty.  No one would be kind enough to get that for someone, either.  That’s just how these people are.  They leave their dogs at home.  Always.  These people reward treating animals like possessions, and not like friends, not taking them out to walk, to get some air, to socialize, to help them be healthy.

Anyway, sorry about the rant for a first post.  I’ve been blogging since the 90′s, so I don’t consider this a first one.  I’ve just been doing it so intermittently on so many sites, and finally they just made it easy enough to get my stuff working on my own domain.  So, here we go.  But this is just something that really bugs me, because I made this town my home and it’s just turning into assholeville, and it’s really turning out to have been a big mistake.

I could have made a whole lot better living in Cali or Seattle.  I “got by” up here, and stayed for reasons that seem to be disappearing every year.  The best people keep leaving town and they keep getting replaced by assholes.  I wished those assholes would just stay whereever it is they come from, but they keep reproducing, and that’s pretty goddamn alarming.

Quick follow up:  Yes, as I stated earlier, I understand why people would ban dog walkers from some places.  But there are other places where it just doesn’t make a lot of sense, and I also know that punishing everyone for the sake of a few shows a fundamental lack of understanding of human psychology.  A better solution would be to really enforce and fine the people who don’t clean up after their dogs.  Punishing the people who DO clean up after their dogs and generally are responsible, in time, makes them care less and less about being responsible.  But that’s not the point of this whole thing.  The point is that there are an alarming number of people in this town who gleefully enjoy the loss of freedom for others who aren’t doing anything wrong (at least as far as they know) and gladly pick up a pitchfork and dig in.  I find people like that creepy, like the people in Orwell’s 1984 who liked Big Brother and did what was expected of them, or the brainwashed citizens from Fahrenheit 451.  It’s also really sad to see people so willing to trade in their freedoms just because they can’t figure out a more fair solution to a problem.  Even more sad when they’re so willing to trade in someone else’s freedoms because it doesn’t effect them.  And even if you do ban something/someone from an area, the least you can do is provide some means to get around it, you know?  Like a path or something.  I’d pitch in to help set it up.