no, really

I’m not one to grovel and beg, so I won’t do it now. But here’s what I’ve got to say, Nokia: get over yourself. Once upon a time, you were the belle of the ball. You had pretty gowns and a rockin… set of features. You did it snappily and cutely without looking like an anime-loving Japanese schoolgirl with her STD clinic on speed dial. You had grace and efficiency that is trademark of your get-the-job-done-with-few-words Scandinavian heritage.

But then you got a little narcissistic. You were lauded for wonderful ideas and innovative interface designs, and while you were bowing, the world kept going. RIM is eating your lunch with one of those giant silver serving sporks and a pair of wooden salad tongs. Motorola has the worst interface on the planet, but they slap a shiny skinny cover around it and blammo, you’ve got a household name. So, Nokia, where’d you go?

I know you’ve still got your foot in the game, but you’ve gotta keep going. The E61 was a great start… it’s just too bad that Cingular forces you to your knees until you come out with the E-series’ idiot cousin the E62. Yes, yes, I hear you… if you want to play ball in the US, you’ve gotta play by their rules. Isn’t it about time that changed?

Terminate your contracts with the providers and open a store next to every Starbucks in North America. See how they like it when people sign a contract to get the “free phone” and pop their SIM into one of your hot new toys.

Better yet, get people who actually use your phones to beta test them in the US. There is so much diversity of users in terms of habits and signal strength and travel, etc. in the US, that it’s a great edge-case market for testing. Anyone can prove that their phone works perfectly at 72F at sea level at 10:30am standing 100 feet from a tower that’s serving up all the network you could want. But what about those people in mountainous regions? And those of us whose municipalities would rather we stick to smoke signals than put up obscene towers just so we can find out what color socks Tawni is wearing to her soccer game while we drive down the road in our Escalade doing 90 mph.

Better yet, ask me! I’m a great tester. I use my phone daily for all sorts of tasks, and I never bang it on the desk to make it go faster. I travel from the suburbs to Manhattan routinely, by car or by train. I work with computers and the Internet ALL DAY, and have friends with all sorts of other devices and networks that I exchange txts, emails, mms, etc with. Besides, I’m sick of shelling out hundreds of bucks and signing contracts that describe the term in Epochs just to play with a piece of plastic that just makes a phone call.

You’ve (hopefully) already read my wishlist of features in a phone. How about you get to drawing, and give me a call when you come up with something. I’ll let you know if it’ll win hearts like Jennifer Garner, or just please loyal fans like Anne Hathaway. They both look good in a dress, but which do you want on your arm?

so we’re most of the way through a slew of work on the house. A wall came down, and there is all new paint, and new moldings n stuff, and it looks fantastic. We also got a bunch of new high hats in, which brings me to the point.

I love my dimmers. Like, really love my dimmers. They’re not super geeked-out like x10 or anything, but they have two things that are kind of exciting to me: little green lights that move, and cool extra little fade in/out features. I look forward to going in and out of the rooms that have said dimmers just so I can play with them. I even got another one for the bedroom lights that has a remote control!

That makes me a geek. A very very happy geek.

I’ve had the same phone now since July of 2003. ‘How’ you ask? How can I - someone who is pretty demanding of their devices - possibly have had the same phone for two and a half years??

Well, first of all, it was *exactly* the device I wanted. Something that I didn’t have to sign a contract for (thank you, eBay), something that had Bluetooth (which was rare back then), a camera (and it took video: ooooo), mp3 player, email stuff… scads of features. The best part? It’s a candybar.

I like candybars. The chocolate kind with peanuts and caramel, and the digital kind that you put up to your ear and say “hello.”

It does all kinds of stuff, and it fits in my pocket.

Fastforward to the present. All kinds of high-speed data networks are growing like mold on rocks, new devices come out every couple weeks that routinely beat the competition. Heck, it’s probably possible to sit with your kr-ak-jakz-eo thingamabob on the top of a mountain in the andes and send your cousin in Sheboygan an e-mail about seeing him your sister’s bar mitzvah the next day.

With all this wonderment, why can’t I find one that I like? Reason: they all suck. It’s a multiple choice quiz:

Which one of these faults would you like in device ‘x’?
a) suck-ass battery life
b) little-to-no camera
c) qwerty keypad requires surgeon and micron etched needle
d) requires restart at random and totally inconvenient intervals
e) 2-year commitment to service of unknown quality

Here’s what I would like:
* Pocketable form factor
* usefuly sized keypad, preferably querty
* display of reasonable size
* camera that takes recognizable pictures
* reliable high-speed network
* crashes less than once a week
* bluetooth with a2dp
* at least somewhat attractive. gets a date to the prom, but doesn’t need to be crowned queen.

Here’s what I can live without:
* wifi (if I’m in range of a wifi network, chances are I’m near a computer that would be waaay better at doing anything requiring a wifi connection)
* streaming music videos with ultra bing-blingy polymorphic ring-picture-vid messages
* anything remotely related to windows

So, please, Mr. R&D, make me that damned phone. Or at least ask me for some opinion on what to make. Trust me, if you follow my suggestions, you will have that better mouse trap that most of the population is yearning for.

For the time being, I’m torn between the Treo 680 with Cingular and the BB 8703e over at Verizon. I’m sure everyone has an opinion on both, which doesn’t help me much. Maybe I’ll just flip a coin…

For as many different kinds of people there are out there, there seem to be different ways of approaching development. These different ways could probably be placed on a “control spectrum” where at one end (for the sake of argument, let’s call it the _Left_) you have the willy-nilly, cowboy-coding, answer-to-no-one kind of development that usually involves one programmer who’s never worked with others before.

This is identified by:
* lack of source control
* no distinguishing marks between ‘feature requests’ and ‘bugs’
* orders being rattled off verbally by the ‘boss’
* development done *on* production
* raw FTP
* programmed in notepad
* sub-par quality
* *fatal* crashes

The quality of the work is so low, that there isn’t even mention of QA, just “why doesn’t this #$*(& thing work??”

On the other end of the spectrum (again, let’s call this the _Right_), you have uber-control. A programmer has the authority to change only the lines of code he has been assigned, must do it in the style and number of characters dictated, as assigned by a black-box ticketing system, at the assigned time, for the assigned duration, at the desk to which he has been assigned on this day by the little lcd control thingy on his keychain (which needs to be authorized once a week), following the 372-page printed code manual given during the week-long orientation in Tampa or Memphis or someplace equally temperate and desolate.

This is usually identified by:
* disinterested programmers
* Everestine code libraries
* rigid feature sets
* long development cycles
* above-par reliable software
* documentation that fills several warehouses in Jersey City
* copious backups

Underneath all of this control is a direct relationship of overhead. The more control, the more overhead:

On the Left, there is no documentation, no tracking of development, no checking in to source control, no release procedures, etc.. At the same time, work is turned around quickly (with the exception of the “x=0″ Left), and is very adaptable.

On the Right, there are additional days, weeks, and months of generating documentation and diagrams, minutes added to development daily for checking in and out, releases are done in a scheduled and controlled fashion, accountability for every line of code, and even more time for testing and QA.

Since I started doing development, I’ve experienced all different kinds, and have a pretty good idea of where I fall in the spectrum. I started out as the sole developer, knowing nothing of good development practices. After a few years, I developed my own procedures to make sure things were a bit more controlled. Once I started working with a team, I learned how my old ways were insufficient, and worked with people to come up with procedures for doing development. I’ve even worked in such a highly regulated environment that my looking up code examples online was identified by the IT department’s proxy as me visiting “online gambling” websites, which warranted a “talking to” (which lead to me leaving that job). It wasn’t until a while later that I started exploring actual development methodologies, and learned not only the error of my ways, but how much I was doing right _naturally_.

As in most things, I tend to be a little to the left of moderate. I’ve picked up the bits of control that are eminently helpful to development and help produce quality code, while leaving behind all of the extra documenty-bits that don’t do anyone any good, save the company that makes printer paper. The question I ask myself is “after this is launched, will I be glad I’ve done _x_?” If the answer is yes, I do it. If the answer is no, I don’t. If the answer is maybe, I need to work out a rough cost/benefit ratio to determine if it’s worth the added overhead.

There are some things that I know I can do better, that involve more control, and thus more overhead e.g. Test Driven Development, and Feature Specs for QA. It feels a little bit like jump-rope… I’m waiting for the right moment to hop into it, but I’m sure once I get in there, it’s just a simple matter of jumping up and down.

I was poking through digg, and saw a post on a Myers-Briggs MBTI test that’s supposed to be for programmers. I took the 10-minute test and while it’s hard to get an unpleasant summation of your personality, here was mine: (glad to know I’m doing something that agrees with my personality)

E=4 Extraversion
I=7 Introversion
S=8 Sensing
N=12 iNtuition
T=11 Thinking
F=8 Feeling
J=16 Judging
P=3 Perceiving

INTJ - Scientists, engineers, professors, teachers, medical doctors, dentists, corporate strategists, organization founders, business administrators, managers, military, lawyers, judges, computer programmers, system analysts, computer specialists, psychologists, photographers, research department managers, researchers, university instructors, chess players. They have a particular skill at grasping difficult, complex concepts and building strategies.

I’ve been back and forth lately on sticking with this blog engine. It’s good… it does the job… but I also set up wordpress for something else, and it’s really that much nicer. I’m going to have to see if I can migrate the stuff from here to there.

I also started messing with Joomla to set up a silly site, and it’s really good. I like the simplicity of the template/css editing (with some usability caveats), and the configurability of display stuff at all kinds of levels. The install went nice and quickly, and from what I’ve seen of the code, it’s nice and lean.

The last tool isn’t something I’m new to, but it’s something I’ve done a lot of exploring with lately. JQuery takes nearly all the pain out of JavaScript for me, whittling it down to just what’s needed to get some interesting and fancy stuff running. I’ve had some trouble with the quality of the plugins, though. If anyone has any good scripts for edit-in-place + select lists, let me know. Doing multi-forms on one page is getting to be a bit cumbersome with the scripts I’ve found.

Cockiness and overconfidence have never been a part of my regimen. I think I’ve been a pretty humble person in my career - partly because I know how much I don’t know, and partly some childhood insecurity, I’m sure.

At the same time, I’m very conscious of what I _do_ know.

That’s what makes me good at what I do. I know how to build applications, I know how to solve problems, I can figure out how to do it in a way that makes sense for today and will work well into the future.

So, I’ve never built a threading application in C. The definitions in my glossary are pretty crappy, because they’re built on experience and not on textbooks. I have all the respect in the world for people who have a strong foundation in the fundamentals - I was raised by educators, so I get the value of it.

Every so often, however, I get put in a situation that unexpectedly asks me to question my qualifications. I have to take a long hard look at my training-to-experience ratio and say “is it enough?”

Then I look back at what I’ve *actually* done. What I’ve produced. Who I’ve helped, and where they are today, and I’ve got right there the proof. Ask anyone I’ve worked with - they’ll tell you I’m qualified.