"Murdered-Out." Engadget Podcast 131

Engadget podcast numero 131 was a pretty light-hearted affair.  paul miller was out sick; in his stead, chris ziegler provided some cell phone insight.  also in this episode, sweet sweet vindication for josh and nilay.

first of all, I'm going to get a whole bunch of blackberry stuff off my chest. I know that cell phone reviews are in no way created for me, so it doesn't really matter, but I still want to say that I have a hard time paying attention to bberry reviews. I had two of them, and no matter how easy they may have made it for me to get work done, I didn't develop loving relationships with either one. my hatred of their browsers made it nearly impossible for me to like either of them, and the fact that they failed so badly at browsing is what makes it so hard for me to take any review seriously. furthermore, a lot of what nilay and josh say about the similarity of specs between models and the mind-boggling proliferation of bberry form factors hit home with me.


josh loves this photo. normal day at chris ziegler's house (self-described cat-lady of cell phones).
courtesy of engadget.com


when I entered the ranks of management in my previous corpworld, I was given a bberry. as I anxiously awaited its arrival, I went online to see if I could figure out which one I would end up receiving. I wanted one with a camera and a decent browser. I thought that guessing which model I'd be assigned would be as simple as estimating how up-to-date my IT department might be, but that optimistic idea evaporated with my first search. I was shocked to see how many versions there were. there was no way for me to figure out which one I'd be getting, so I closed my desk-top browser and patiently waited for the box to come to my cube.  imagine my sadness at how crappy the curve's browser was (I had the one pictured right underneath the 8900 in the photo, above). at the time, my personal phone was a little nokia brick, and while I loved it, I sort of envied my husband his iphone. I figured that this work bberry would fulfill my smart phone lust. how wrong I was. I'm pretty sure that my curve's browser was just as bad as the one on my nokia. actually, I ended up loathing my bberry to such a degree that when I moved into my current role (different corpworld), I asked that I not be issued a bberry at all. my curve ended up representing the shackles of my job, and nothing more than that. I was resentful of it, even when it wasn't mysteriously crapping out on me (take the battery out and put it back in, power back on). the tactic of not carrying a bberry at my new job worked for a while, and then I was told I was receiving one. sigh. this time, I didn't even look around at coworkers to see which one I'd end up with. I just didn't care.


photo grabbed from tinh te review, posted to youtube.


I ended up with the bold on the left, in the photo, above. a friend received that one on the right from the same company on the same day. I don't know if her supervisor cheaped out on her, or if I just drew the newer straw, but despite having the latest bold, I still didn't care all that much. the first thing I did was to check the browser and it still sucked. what? why? how???? if I was in the stock market and had rim shares, I'd drop them as soon as I heard the CEO state that "buggy cell phone launches are the norm." how disgustingly apathetic. am I being too harsh?

but the pleather back? I liked it!  my curve had a plastic back, so the upgrade to pleather was great. denim? really? nilay, I am so right there with you when you asked, "denim? like stonewashed?" I shudder to think of all those who may have been walking around in denim shirts, denim jeans, and denim bberries. now I am being too harsh.

I know the iphone isn't perfect, but once my current company went the way of apple, and I was able to replace my bberry with the iphone 4, I cancelled my personal cell phone contract and stopped thinking about blackberries at all (that is, until I began this blog project). yes, at&t's network sucks and sometimes I wait in vain for my phone to sync or receive emails, but you know what? I can always get where I want to with my browser, and for me, that's what matters when it comes to my cell phone device of choice. yes, perhaps I am a sad, little, limited person, but there you have it. that's my bias. like paul, I prefer a digital keyboard, and no bumper. for the record, I've been keeping auto-correct on, just to try it out, since everyone besides me swears by it. I still find it frustrating, but now also I find it fascinatingly awesome by equal measures. and I keep thinking of things I wonder if suri could do for me, but I don't have ai technology...

first gen kindle, image via widipedia


I can't help but wonder if this is the kindle that josh is trying to buy as this pod is casting.  I was picturing the second gen version in my head, but that's because I had no idea that the first gen even existed. it's way cooler than the second release, and I can see why josh might become totally enamored after getting over his initial aversion. 

chinese crested (dog) via rate my k-9.com

a long time ago, I thought that I only liked big dogs. which is really kind of funny, since I never even had a dog in my home. like josh and the kindle, once I let go of my disgust, I found that I really wanted a little dog. various breeds come and go from my short list, but the chinese crested always rates in the top five wants. what I'm saying is that the first amazon kindle is ugly in the way that certain breeds of dog are ugly. they're so ugly that they're completely charismatic and ultimately, super cute. chris ziegler "flipped" two kindles on ebay, for which josh calls him a jerk. it's ok, josh apologizes for that.

in the beginning of the episode, nilay talks about why it's unlikely that apple will sue palm over the technology used for the pre's touch capabilities. josh just wants to be reassured that nothing will hold up the pre's release (nor the watchman's). nilay is happy that he has the opportunity to talk patents with his best friend and to set the record straight both on air, and in (digital) print. josh uses this passage to segue into the sectera edge / blackberry confusion issue. he crows over the fact that obama is shown with a blackberry in a photograph. not that he cares. no. but just in case I didn't make it clear in my last entry, the blackberry whatever and sectera edge are two, separate entities.

oh and last but not least, "murdered out." I don't know how to properly commiserate over how sad I feel about myself that I'm picking up "cool" slang terminology from a geek podcast that's over two years old. sigh. have I ever mentioned that I used to live in manhattan and hang with the cool kids (for example, I used to regularly see acts like borbetomagus and the boredoms at the cooler, & etc.)? now I'm in a suburb of a lesser city and so uncool that almost every day I don't care that I don't live in manhattan, or in one of its hip boroughs. anyway, "murdered out" is an awesome phrase and I am so happy that I learned it. thank you, engadget podcast (now vergecast).

"Mrs. Peacock with the Lead Pipe in the Ballroom" Engadget Podcast 130

so many things in this podcast. nilay spent his weekend evaluating set-top devices that stream netflix. I kept wondering what the big deal is with set top boxes, and why people can't just be satisfied hooking up their laptops to their tvs. can't that work for everyone? I stopped wondering this on thursday morning, when I worked from home and decided to watch the last half of the last season of weeds, as I did some editing.

andy botwin is awesome. just sayin'.

we have a projector rather than a tv, so maybe that complicates things? I'm not sure, but I had to call my husband to ask him to explain the set-up. In order to view the computer screen on my wall, I didn't just need to know which setting to use on the remote. I had to know where to position two separate switches (I didn't bother to ask what they were doing). due to my lemon of an hp, I also had to fiddle with the screen settings until the sound came through our speakers. yes, I wrote that correctly - screen settings to adjust speaker output - that sums up the character of my crappy hp pavilion. so I get it, viewing online content on one's television should be as simple as popping a dvd into the computer. we do have a blu ray that streams from netflix, hulu+, and a few other sites, but even now, in 2011, the interfaces are not great. hulu+ didn't even work, so we ended up canceling the subscription that we purchased just for the sake of our new set top box. in 2009, josh predicts that content will be the make or break aspect that determines netflix's success.  it's 2011...I'm pretty sure the streaming content is still fairly dismal when it comes to movies. best part of the netflix segment? nilay reveals the fact that he uses top gun and jurassic park as sound benchmarks for judging audio delivery. he catches some heat, but not nearly enough. even still, transformers?

this podcast is dubbed the "angry rant" edition. I like a good angry rant as much as the next guy (especially when it's not directed at me), but what I find interesting about this episode are the absences of certain rants. it's like interesting negative space. for example, listen to paul's rant over the frame channel concept. sorry to those readers who encountered a broken audio file. I've fixed it! click to hear about 30seconds of paul miller ranting.



it's a gentle rage. also absent is the rant that should accompany the recounting of the frame channel rep that used paul's personal account information to contact him to suggest a meeting in his home town. talk about disgusting. josh used the phrase, "creep salad." that was funny.  paul and josh are both angry about best buy's selling practices, but paul lets josh rant for him. I'm guessing because he knows that josh does a much better rant. needless to say, paul needs to work on his rant skills.

josh does a pretty good job getting lathered up over the issue of obama's blackberry, the sectera edge.

sectera edge security description. via pcworld.

just kidding! of course, a blackberry and a sectera edge are two, separate products. how many times can josh use the word, conflate, in one verbal paragraph? the best part was when he said that cspan or cnn or some journalistic entity "conflated the blackberry out of the picture." he corrected himself immediately, but really, it was a cute ranty sentence. very heat of the moment.

tim cook goes on about how apple will go after anyone who rips off their intellectual property. it's like a rant-threat.

"we are going to get so professional on you" Engadget Podcast 128

so, I was totally wrong. I had not seen the back of ces 2009. podcast 128 is another wrap-up episode, this time guest-starring thomas richer, an (ex) engadget senior editor, or lone wolf and self-acclaimed "old man," from the netherlands. he was apparently responsible for this bit of photoshopped handiwork:

image via switched.com

I agree, it's slightly disturbing to see mac guy's face on the little girl body, but the imagery is pretty far from reaching the "block it out" end of my horror-meter. I'm continually editing my impressions of each host persona, as I listen to the podcasts (my impressions of josh and nilay are still somewhat plastic), but I'm becoming fairly sure that my general idea of paul isn't going to change. the man is an innocent. he's sensitive. that isn't to say that he's fragile, or anything like that (I wouldn't know from the podcast, thank goodness), but he's definitely easily disconcerted. he's someone that I would probably have the urge to be extra profane around if I knew him personally. in a fun way, of course!

the very cute feature of this podcast is that everyone is super loving each other. it's like post-show haze love. and you know what? I was right about the snort-level giggling. there is slap-happy commenting going on in this podcast. first to come is thomas richer love: paul describes himself as glowing in the mornings after he gets up and reads thomas' posts. later on comes the group love: thomas richer initiates a conversation about how much everyone loves the opportunity ces gives the engadget staff to hang out with each other.


maybe when they hang out with each other at ces, the engadget staff are like tech-loving care bears.


before the conversation devolves into wackiness, there is some deadly serious discourse about the status of net books, consumer behavior (are there really people who don't know what to do once their desktops are full of icons?), the palm pre, and palm-the-company, and "the childlike joshua topolsky."

I like how the childlike version of josh topolsky is still ready to slam right into curmudgeon mode at the drop of a hat. for example, as everyone chides him, and he agrees that he's beaming (somewhat prematurely) over the promise that the pre holds, he says, "what, I don't deserve to be happy? is that what you're telling me?" or something like that. that quote was actually an approximation.

I was ready to write a whole thing about the [personalization of] and [identification with] one's computer and william gibson and jean baudrillard (I had a crush on some of his books when I was an undergrad), but I'm going to replace that sure-to-be-pedantic paragraph with this:  During a weekend visit, my mother-in-law asked my husband if he would help her with her computer. my jaw nearly hit the floor when she said that she wanted him to help her delete some files. uh, what does that even MEAN????? this is a smart and independent woman. she was a vp of hr when she retired, and she still practices hr on a volunteer basis for her church and the penn foundation. she uses her computer for various work-related tasks, and I assumed she was at least on intimate terms with basic comupter functions. as she was answering my husband's pointed questions (what kind of files do you need help deleting? has your computer's performance slowed recently? & etc.), all I could think was, "hey, if you have too many icons on your desktop, it might be time to get a new computer!" in the end, my husband told my mother-in-law that she needed to figure out how to delete items by herself and to let him know when she was having real issues with her laptop. harsh, right? will I completely forget how to interact with technology when I'm old? is that an automatic response to aging?

everyone tried, but no one succeeded in getting thomas to say the word, "kiosk."

"MAIL MERGE!!!!!?????/? + CES" Engadget Podcasts 124-127

124 = macworld and ces day 1
125 = microsoft and day 2
126 = palm pre and day 3 (pre)
127 = last day wrap up, hungover

macworld must have been boring because I can't even muster the energy it would take to look up the correct spelling of phil shiller. honestly, the most interesting thing about apple is steve jobs. sure, there was an entire company behind the man, but so what? it's steve jobs who was credited with awesome comments such as,

"Bill Gates'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." - The New York Times January1997

"We don't get a chance to do that many things, and every one should be really excellent. Because this is our life. Life is brief, and then you die, you know? And we've all chosen to do this with our lives. So it better be damn good. It better be worth it." -Fortune March 2008

AND he had something to do with the creation of Breakout, one of the best atari games ever. anyway, there is banter that makes the rehashing of macworld much more interesting than it would have otherwise been. can you imagine sitting through the boredom of listening to people retell tales of looking at 17" macbook pros? I don't care how unremovable a battery is. to me, that's just not news. josh had one great quote where he was talking about the lack of buttons on the macbook pro's trackpad, "I don't find the lack of buttons to be more useful. Do you know what I find to be a really useful tool for getting work done on a computer - and it has lot's of buttons? The keyboard, that's what."

I think that it was during 124 that nilay mentioned the gizmondo ceo who "chose" to crash his ferrari. I looked that up, and it was ugly. but the funny thing is that the car crash probably wasn't the worst disaster in this guy's life.

enzo into a tree? where's the tree?

the gizmondo itself is the punchline. it was apparently a bonafide clunker. here's an excerpt from the wikipedia article about the gadget:

"With fewer than 25,000 units sold, the Gizmondo was named by GamePro as the worst selling handheld console in history. By February 2006, the company discontinued the device and was forced into bankruptcy. In 2008, founder and CEO Carl Freer announced that he had reached an agreement with the liquidators, and planned to re-launch Gizmondo as Gizmondo 2." 

the gizmondo, via gizmodo

at the end of the podcast, josh gets all loopy and predicts that the microsoft ceo, steve ballmer, will execute a karate kick onstage, pump his fist in the air, and introduce a zune phone by having someone call him on it while he's on stage so that he can pull it out of his pocket while saying, "woa, I can't even answer the phone because I'm jamming to so much music."

oh one more thing - it was during this macworld that apple announced it would use a tiered pricing scheme for its itunes store. 69cents for "bargain basement" songs, 99cents for a "regular" song, and $1.29 for a "premium" song. I'm sorry, I know that I'm particularly scrimpy when it comes to media purchases (I've never paid for anything in itunes, nor have I ever purchased an application for my iphone), but I would NOT pay $1.29 for a song! I looked, though, and most of what I'd want from the itunes store is 99cents. I had to search around for $1.29 songs, and luckily, I'm not into the bieber. paul miller thinks that yacht rock is a prime example of bargain basement. maybe some of it, but I don't know, I'd say bargain basement is more like ratt or deo.

I think paul got one thing right though; he predicted that subscription services would become the big thing for music. spotify is seriously ruling my world (the free one, of course - thank you again, dj reef!). I mean, it has changed my life. I can't imagine buying another record or cd again. well, I take that back. of course I can, because a lot of what I'd like to listen to isn't on spotify (drag city), but then, so much is there that I really don't care about what I can't hear on it. right now I'm digging some john phillips.

125 is the microsoft day of ces. there is no zune phone. there is no fist pumping (in the air). there is no karate kick. but despite all those unrealized predictions, the retelling of the keynote is pretty hilarious. microsoft had some "ladies" demonstrate a few things, and one was named, janet galore. they also had a child demo a software called, kodu. josh and paul thought that maybe the kid's name was willow, "or one of those names." it was actually sparrow. microsoft billed sparrow as an "actual 12 year old girl."

sparrow demonstrated a really cool software called, kodu. kodu is a programming environment that allows a user to code by going through menus of icons, rather than typing in a language. paul said that had he known about this in his youth, he'd likely not be able to put a sentence together, but he would probably have made some pretty kickass games. for the record, paul accused willow/sparrow of doing some autistic-like mumbling chatter while flying through the kodu menus. someone said that steve ballmer made phil shiller (sp?) "look like a baby." most likely it was josh.

the guys make fun of thin tvs, which apparently, are all over the place. nilay sneaks around on the floor of the show, while paul and josh are on the press junket. there's a lot of security around an lg phone watch, which gets much airtime on the podcast due to the fact that they're making fun of it, except for paul, who thinks that it's pretty cool. when pressed for a reason by josh, he says, "because it's a phone that you wear on your wrist. that's cool."

feel like talking to your wrist? not quite spy-worthy. via cnet.com

episode 126? funny you should ask. it's about day three at ces. while they do mention the sony vaio p (nilay really really really wants one), they (ok, mostly josh, a little nilay) absolutely gush over the palm pre. I can feel josh smiling giddily through the speakers as he's talking to me from over two years ago. scroll forward, however, and what do we find? this is what we find, and it's sad. I wonder if josh ever got a turbografix 16 emulator for his pre.

it's interesting to find out that the pre is named for precognition. nilay mentions that the phone is said by palm to "know what the user wants before the user itself knows." josh responds, "like precognition," but no one is having it. nilay wants it to be like preview, and paul doesn't have an opinion. I'm surprised that there's no mention of phillip k. dick. in dick's books, precogs are humans that can tell the future.

if you haven't read this book, do so immediately. 

it's apparently during this ces that wireless charging (inductive?) is introduced as a truly viable alternative to plugging devices in to charge. nilay mentions that there is a wireless charging alliance. this is the second alliance I've learned of while listening to the podcast. the first was the open handset alliance. at work, we have signs up that discuss hand-washing. the signs have been designed by the soap and detergent association, which is a part of the clean hands coalition. I guess there's a group for everybody.

in 127, everyone sounds hungover. nilay sounds like he's been yelling and smoking all night long. ryan block is in on the action, and for some reason, I'm not remembering all that much about the podcast itself. I was wiped out after listening to so much CES talk. I can't even imagine what it's like to cover the event. I think that there was talk of Dell and its Adamo, but mainly what I remember from that was that they rented out a bunch of rooms for their announcement and that it sounded like a weird scene. oh wait, you know what? there was a bit of talk about some chips. maybe I can't remember the podcast that well because the pre talk blurs the episodes, and who cares about chips? I mean, sure we all do, but really, most of us don't.

aww, but he's so cute! 

"sounds Awesome" Engadget Podcast 123

123 is the last Endgadget podcast of 2008. everyone's excited about CES, macworld¹, clutch form-factors², x-mas, new year fantasies³, and the reader meet-up recap.

ok, listen up. enough technical banter already. I'm skipping straight to x-mas.

the GE OLED "holiday" tree mentioned in the podcast. this is the link to the original engadget post.

the discussion begins with the "holiday" tree versus "christmas" tree argument that took place in the comment section of the post that accompanies the above photograph. I read through some of those reader comments, and people really did "go nuts and lose their minds" over the title of that sculpture. the controversy may have blindsided the podcasters, but I wasn't surprised. if there's anything that people get silly over, it's dogma. while nilay was interested in assuring the readers/listeners that there is no engadget editorial rule on using christmas vs. holiday in their posts, josh made the following statement, "I would like to say that I have a personal policy of using x-mas⁴ as much as possible, but only because I'm a big futurama fan." that would be a great epigraph for a book chapter on the topic.

my favorite thing about this part of the podcast is learning about the editors' personal chirstmas/x-mas/christ-mas experiences. paul revealed that he hung about all vacation and watched netflix streaming through his x-box. I say, he was most likely in jammies, drinking hot chocolate, and watching john hughes movies. he didn't have a tree in his apartment, but his roommate did receive a "house⁵ from his gramma." nilay glommed on to his sister's tree, and got a zojirushi rice cooker. I'm no techy nerd, but oh boy, am I ever jealous about his rice cooker! I have an old tatung. it's pretty much one switch and a heating element. there are no computers in my rice cooker. it's so old that I can't find a photo of the model online (the one pictured below is similar, but more modern-looking than mine). I love it, but still, the allure of fuzzy logic cooking my soupy rice (congee) to perfection is so seductive.

rice cooker envy - how about an umami setting on your rice cooker? zojirushi has it.

josh did not exchange gifts with his wife for x-mas in 2008 (he "went crazy in 2007" at x-mastime), but he did have a nice tree, with no religious iconography. it was decorated only with star trek ornaments, plus one obama decoration. he mentioned that the tree was "really nice," and that he was "into it."

maybe he had a spock topper, since he didn't have an angel up there.

I knew that josh was nerdy, but having only star trek ornaments on the x-mas tree is other-level nerdiness. I'm not totally surprised, but I am mildly surprised.

everyone in the know knows that the best winter holiday to celebrate is circleness⁶!

as of this podcast, there were 12 days until the start of CES. after reading about the rivalry between tech blogs, I can't even imagine what CES is like for these guys. josh mentions being nervous, and it's obvious that everyone is keyed up about the event. these guys weren't trying to suppress the fact that they were salivating in anticipation of it. the slightly frenzied air of the talk makes me think that the event itself must be crazy for these journalists. I imagine geek machismo, one-up-manship style blogging, sleep deprived feats of nerd-pranking, and a lot of giddy, snorting laughter. I don't care how wrong this fantasy⁷ is, it's mine and I'm not changing it.

footnotes

1. so, no one is really excited about macworld. they're excited to talk about apple's cancellation of their appearance and the fact that steve jobs wasn't giving the keynote address. some guy named phil something or other was handed the keynote responsibility instead.

2. form-factor is hands-down the nerdiest piece of lingo I've acquired from this hobby.

3. paul wants the laptop of his dreams, which is basically an apple air that has adequate processing power and a replaceable battery. nilay wants streaming content to provide him with what he actually wants to watch in an HD format. I don't remember what josh wanted (his perfect smart phone).

I'm surprised that paul didn't fantasize about qrio. 

4. pronounced ex-mas.

5. the house was gingerbread style in its construction, and it lit up, and played a song.

6. go check circleness out. you owe it to yourself. the tree-topper shown is the circleness symbol of an infinity sign inside a circle. also shown is a lego death star ornament.

7. I know that there is live-blogging at many tech sites during these spectaculars, but I've never been a reader of the blogs, so I don't quite know the reality of how continuous the posts are. I'm not ready to become a reader yet.

"I plot all of their deaths constantly" Engadget Podcast 122

podcast #122 is really the Q&A session of the 2008 NYC reader meet-up. it's short and sort of sweet. josh, nilay, and paul seem to be as articulate and sassy in person as in their podcasts. at first I thought that maybe paul was d-r-u-n-k, but then I noticed he sounded quite sober later on in the session. maybe he was able to rally? there were fewer questions than I'd anticipated, but I guess that's because everyone was eager for the raffle to occur. I wonder if I would have chimed in with a question, had I been there. sometimes I imagine having the opportunity to interview the trio and I mentally compile a list of questions.

Ryan Block (left, former engadget editor-in-chief) and Brian Lam (right, former gizmodo editor-in-chief)

the first question of the evening was, "how do you feel about the staff at gizmodo.com?" to which josh provides a very diplomatic answer that nilay chimes in on, "I plot all of their deaths constantly. Let's be honest." but then he maturely adds, "read both sites, but read ours more often." I didn't even consider a rivalry between blogs before the moment I heard that question. I suppose it's natural, especially given the fact that engadget was started by someone who left gizmodo, apparently to begin a war between tech blogs.

did Engadget kill the Palm Foleo? image from Wikipedia

the cutest question was either, "what's the gender ratio of Engadget readers?" made cuter by the fact that it was lisped by a man, or, "how do you feel about mentoring and giving out advice?"

want to write for a tech blog? answer a call for writers! that's how josh, paul, and nilay got their jobs.

during the q&a, nilay proved to me that he really does like to yell at people. he yelled at people for booing free stuff (turns out they were booing the bberry storm), and he yelled at a girl who was heckling some guy. he told her to stop being mean, and that she was already scaring [the men] around her just by being a girl. it was cute.

there was one q&a-er I found to be completely annoying, Dingo (commenter name). he got up and PROJECTED a mini speech into the mic. his demeanor made it clear that he was shamelessly begging for attention. finally, after all the other crap he let out of his mouth, he got to his question, "but really, the question that's on everyone's mind," I'm telling you, he was obnoxious, "or at least the one that's on my mind," I suppose he did reign himself in, "is, 'What Is the Meaning of Life?'" Josh didn't skip a beat. "The Meaning of Life? Oh, of course, it's 42. Everyone knows that." so true. I'm not even a nerd and I knew that (but I'm sure I wouldn't have busted it out in a nanosecond).

The Ultimate Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, The Universe, and Everything. image from Wikipedia.

awethumb - prepost

I wish I'd known what these were when I was listening to #121

it only took me forever (ok, a few searches, but these days that feels like forever) to figure out what the spelling was for this to find it, but I did that work for the benefit of my readers (who probably already know what an awethumb is). I say, "wow." I wish that I could have known what these were when I was listening to the podcast, because had I been able to picture Nilay wearing these when he first mentioned them, it would have made me cackle out loud (maybe I would have even snorted again).  now if I could find the definition of, kerf? kurf? curf? what? I will be all set.