On the Fiscal Cliff, Republicans Got Nothin’

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Daniel Gross, writing for The Daily Beast:

The reality should be seeping in to viewers of the Sunday shows that the Republicans don’t have a game plan. They don’t have a single, specific proposal to avoid the fiscal cliff. And even if they had one, they don’t have a roadmap to get there. They keep expecting Obama to come back with something more to their liking, which they’d also reject. Many Republicans literally don’t understand what is happening. Sen. Charles Grassley tweeted over the weekend that he was frustrated that President Obama hadn’t embraced the recommendation of the Bowles-Simpson Commission. Apparently, he is one of the many people in Washington who doesn’t understand that Bowles-Simpson recommended letting the Bush tax rates on the wealthy expire, while also proposing to cap or eliminate deductions primarily enjoyed by the wealthy. Above all, the Republicans have yet to grasp that the field is tilted against them. Republicans have every reason to expect, based on their scouting of past Obama performances, that he will start moving toward them and then, essentially, bargain with himself. But now he doesn’t have to. Right now, the policy choice isn’t between an Obama proposal the Republicans abhor and a preferred Republican proposal. No, the choice is between an Obama proposal the Republicans abhor and the fiscal cliff, which Republicans would like even less and the Democrats could live with for a while. The Republicans are losing, and time is running out. But instead of putting the quarterback on the field and rolling out an aggressive two-minute drill, they seem to be preparing to punt. I really get the sense that our team is winning this fight. Perhaps the first four years of the Obama administration were him building up his list of 'been there done that' situations that he can now look back on to make the right political situations this next go-round. The next four years of the Obama administration might be like the last four of the Clinton one (in terms of the economy I hope, not the scandals).

New iMacs Go On Sale

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This morning, as promised, Apple made available the new iMacs to order. My primary home machine is a 1st generation 27" iMac that I bought in November of 2009 when they were first released. It reached 3 years old this week, and boy does it feel it. The percentage of time that I beach ball increases on a monthly basis and compared to my new (as of 8 months ago) iMac I use at work, this machine feels like a dinosaur. I've been waiting for Apple to release this machine for a while now, but ever since they announced them in October I was unsure of one thing: storage options. The allure of the new Fusion Drive appeals to me, but after giving it some thought, I had decided that I would rather have the same configuration as the iMac I have on my desk in the office at work. That machine is configured with a 256GB SSD + 1TB HD combo. It's fantastic - lots of secondary storage for archiving videos, and other large sized files, while having the performance of the SSD as the primary drive. I was hoping that the new configuration options for the iMacs would allow for the following scenarios: HD, FD, SSD, SSD + HD, SSD + FD. Ideally I wanted a 512GB SSD + a 3 TB Fusion Drive. Sadly, the configuration options are HD or FD or SSD. No two drive options are available. Given this, I think the best option for myself is the 3TB Fusion Drive or either the 768GB SSD and then for me to pickup an external 3TB Thunderbolt drive. I plan to wait a few weeks for Anandtech to get their hands on one of these Fusion Drives to benchmark it to see how it performs.

Fantasical For iPhone Released

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I fell in love with Fantastical for OS X a few years back when it was released and recommend it to anyone who will listen to me and is in need of a better Calendaring application than iCal/Calendar.app. This morning, Flexibits released Fantastical for iPhone. I've bought it already and can heartily recommend it as similarly awesome as the OS X version is. It has now become my default calendaring app for my phone. My only wish was that it was universal for the iPad as well, but knowing Flexibits, they're working on either a universal version now or a dedicated iPad-only version. Make your life better, and get this app.

Back Into The Swing Of Things

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Over the last few months I've been caught up with work, and life, and have neglected posting to this site as often as I've wanted to. I've decided to step it up and update here more often than I've been able to do in recent memory. What does this mean? Well, I'll just keep posting things that I enjoy or want more people to know about. This mainly will focus on software, hardware, cool stuff I find, or politics. I make no promises that it will be in anyway focused, but then again, I never have. Recently I've just gotten home from a long trip that I took for both business and vacation out to San Francisco. For the first 10 days of my trip, I was managing all of the technology setup for a 25,000 attendee conference at Moscone West/South/North in downtown SF as well as the live-streaming of all of our major events at the conference. I do this annually, which involves about 6 weeks of prep work prior to the conference followed by an intense 10 day period of working 12-14 hours a day during the conference. My wife flew out the day after I was done and we stuck around in San Francisco for Thanksgiving with my best friend and his partner. This allowed us to also meet a lot of our "Internet Friends" and see some of them again. I left so soon after the election (on November 8) that I haven't had a lot of time to think about the win for our team and what this means. I'm so relieved that the President was able to win re-election. Also, during my trip, the picture below happened. I can't imagine any photo such as this ever being taken in a Romney White House and it makes me all the more grateful that the election turned out the way it did.

Black Pixel Opens Up Kaleidoscope 2 Beta

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Matthew Panzarino, at The Next Web:

After almost 5 years as a development house for other people’s apps, Black Pixel is undergoing a similar shift today. The launch of its first major in-house app Kaleidoscope 2 — it’s putting its own name on a product and setting it out in front of consumers as an author — marks the beginning of what will be a portfolio of Black Pixel apps. As a big fan of Kaleidoscope, I'm very excited about this.

My List Of Hurricane Sandy Weather Resources

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I've always been fascinated by extreme weather. It wasn't until my second year of college that I decided to focus on a technology related degree rather than pursue meteorology. Because of this, whenever the area I live in is under a Tornado warning, tropical system warning, or there is an incoming winter storm I tend to get excited and track the storm closely as it comes in. Growing up, my dream job was to be a storm chaser chasing Tornados in the mid-west (in college was where I learned just how many of those jobs exist and what they paid...). As Hurricane Sandy gets closer and looks as if it will directly impact where I live, I've been spending more and more of my time over the last few days glued to the advisories being released by the National Hurricane Center, our local weather geniuses at Capital Weather Gang, and other good sources of weather info. This morning, as I kept finding more and more great resources I began having difficulty in keeping track of them all and decided that I should just build my own page with links to them to make it easier. It occurred to me that other people might appreciate being able to see this page as well. Here it is. I've yet to come up with a good name for it and I've intentionally put near zero effort in its design (other than slapping it together with bootstrap) in order to keep it as light-weight as possible for speed. Please use the contact form on the site linked in the nav to send me sites you think would be good to include on the page. Hurricane Sandy Weather Resources Note: The site is a work in progress and I'm still updating it. I could consider it incomplete at this time but will continue to update it over the next 48 hours or so with links.

The Redmond Bubble

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If you know me, or follow me on Twitter, then you know that I follow politics closely. I also enjoy the HBO series Real Time with Bill Maher for the lack of censoring you see so much on main stream news sources. For about the last year, Bill Maher has had a segment on his show each week called "Life Inside The Bubble" where he makes fun of an example of a Republican issue or talking point in which is only being covered on Republican blogs or Fox News. Usually, the Republican base is up in arms about something that everyone else is ignoring because its a non-issue or they are trying to drum up faux outrage about a topic that isn't outrageous. While idea is common in politics, this 'Bubble' I mean, I've encountered it in other places as well. Earlier tonight, Marco Arment wrote about his experience of wandering into a Microsoft Store today while he was on his way to the Apple Store to buy AppleCare+ for his wife's iPhone 5. He was curious about the Microsoft Surface, not having seen one yet, and wanted to try it out in order to compare it to the iPad. Marco's entire piece is well worth your time to read but one thing in particular really caught my attention. During the aggressive demo the salesperson gave Marco, he made a particular comment. Marco writes:

He showed me Office, which was almost unusable: it was extremely sluggish, and touch targets were tiny and difficult to hit. He said this was the only tablet that could run Office, and if you used Office at work, this was therefore the only tablet that you could use at work. I played dumb. I read the rest of Marco's article but in the back of my mind, after I read that paragraph, I couldn't get the thought out of my head. This comment by the salesperson pissed me off. I have a ton of questions I wish I could ask him. Was this his opinion? Was he instructed to say this as a part of his training? Does he really believe this? The reason this really struck a chord with me is because I work for a large environmental non-profit in Washington DC. Despite being a non-profit, the day-to-day work environment at our office is more like a corporate job than working for a non-profit. We are managed and ran like a corporation. When I started there we were heavily married to Microsoft infrastructure and software - now almost 5 years later we're starting to move away from this, but it is still largely true. In the last few years more people are being given Macs, certain management now have MacBook Airs or iPads. Our new website is powered by Drupal. We're dropping .NET in favor of open source/Drupal/php. Things are getting better. We have about 260 employees, last I checked, and most of our workforce has Lenovo notebook computers. If you take the marketing & tech departments out of the equation, most of our employees spend 90% of their time in either Outlook, a web browser, or core Office apps such as Word, Powerpoint, or Excel. Whether in meetings or at their desk, this is how they accomplish most of their jobs. I've been an iPad owner since day one. When the iPad 2 came out and now the 3rd generation iPad, I bought them all. I think I'll skip the 4th generation iPad and pick up next years model but that's beside the point. My previous bosses and current one place a lot of trust in me and have been very flexible over the years of allowing me to select whichever tools I so choose in order to do my job. Because of this, I've had the iPad in the office from the very first model on a daily basis. It has now become a replacement for my old pad & paper that I used to carry around with me wherever I go. It goes to meetings with me, it is at my desk with me and I carry it around the office wherever I go. My iPad has full Exchange integration. I can access the company's employee directory in Active Directory through the Contacts app. I have access to my full calendar, can schedule meetings with others, and have full access to Exchange email. With my iPad in hand I have access to my entire Dropbox contents (which weighs in at 80GB currently spanning tens of thousands of files & documents since 2009), all of my Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files I need (Pages, Keynote, and Numbers work spectacularly), I can annotate things (Skitch), I can do quick image edits (Photoshop for iOS), I can reboot the dev box (Linode iOS app), our website stats are at my fingertips in any meeting (Analytics HD). I can even SSH into our servers with Prompt, make quick edits with Coda 2 or...well you get the point. I could list off another dozen apps I use once a week or so to do any number of tasks. You might think it a tad ridiculous for a Microsoft Store employee's comments to Marco to piss me off, but if Microsoft's standard as to whether you can use a tablet in an office environment is if it can run Word, Excel and Powerpoint...well, that's just bullshit. I challenge Microsoft to show how the Surface, right now...today can do half of the things I listed above as well as my iPad can. And they aren't allowed to use the Google bullshit cop-out argument that you can do it in the web browser. I don't expect to pay $500+ for a machine to not be able to do my work on applications that are written in non-native code. That this employee or perhaps Microsoft trained him to pitch it this way, believes that the Surface is now going to somehow open up this huge door for people to be able to use tablets at work infuriates me. Talk about living inside a bubble. Is there any stronger way to hammer home the reason why Microsoft has been consistently behind all of their competitors for the last 10 years? Does Redmond Washington somehow block out technology related news from the rest of the world? Do they really believe that the corporate world has been holding off adopting tablets because of the lack of Microsoft Office on the iPad? Give me a break.