casa.de.geeks

Archive for the ‘opinion’ Category

The following pictures were taken at a Walmart in Oklahoma City. The first depicts two American Indians on horseback with spears raised overlooking their land and grazing buffalo. The next picture is a large panoramic view of early American settlers wearing cowboy hats with their covered wagon stampeding onto the land. The last picture shows a more modern Caucasian woman with a cowboy hat riding a horse in the foreground and a city skyline in the background. The last picture is captioned “Oklahoma City”.

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Great history lesson, Walmart! Really. The natives were just chillin out, tending to their buffalo when a stampede of immigrants came along, pillaged their lands, and built a concrete jungle on it. I hope all those people who want to deport all illegal immigrants take a long hard look at this and think about how their own ancestors came to call this country their home.

Don’t you ever just feel like the last few weeks in technology were full of bad news and let downs? All you’re looking for is the light at the end of the tunnel. I always ask myself why the general population seems to hold people in tech related professions to a higher standard when it comes to service. I’m not saying we’re not excellent… but we’re not perfect. We make mistakes and truth be told there is not a giant magic easy button tucked away at the back of our desk drawer collecting dust waiting for the day when your priority #1, mission critical, last-minute-I-need-this-done-now, project comes along. Sometimes users request the impossible… or just the plain ridiculous, like the lady who wanted to remove the Pac Man from her Google.

Seriously though, why do other people/companies/entities get to screw up so bad and still skate on like nothing happened?

BP is still taking a big dump in the Gulf of Mexico. Progress with cleanup efforts and fixing the spewing oil leak is dragging on as if they think time itself will solve the problem.

It seems that Apple and AT&T screwed people over big time with what looks like an obvious bait and switch to me. One of Apple’s major selling points for the iPad was the ability to get an unlimited data plan through AT&T for $30 a month without a contract! Now shortly after the 3G versions are released, AT&T says they’re no longer offering unlimited data plans for the iPad or the iPhone. Even those who already signed up and will be grandfathered into an unlimited plan are forced into never skipping a payment – kind of like being on a contract, because I’m sure if you missed a month AT&T would just make you sign up for their new plans.

One final frustration of mine: T-Mobile should be ashamed of themselves! Verizon and Sprint are offering up all the awesome Android phones like they’re the ones that started this whole thing! C’Mon TMo – you offered up the first Android phone to the masses with the G1 and now your best offering is the MyTouch Slide? Where are the top-end handsets to compete with the HTC EVO 4G and the HTC Incredible or the Motorola Droid? TMo isn’t even directly selling the Nexus One but they should! They need to!

But hey, a little bird has been chirping about a big event coming soon for T-Mobile: Free phones on June 19th. If this is true, TMo could win over a lot of new customers and maybe that’s just what they need for the phone makers to consider giving TMo better handsets. I took the time to check out plans for two Android phones on Verizon’s network with unlimited data and T-Mobile still has the best priced plans. Here’s to more waiting for my dream phone.

My opinion of natural health supplements has always been that they might actually help and are natural so if they don’t they’re probably harmless. The most harm I could imagine them doing was for people to delay treatment taking useless stuff and having their condition get much worse. You know kind of like the nutters that have cancer, but instead of going to the doctor they try homeopathy, weird berries, and or praying. Then they die from something that probably could have been treated. You’re never going to get away from that kind of stupid even if they didn’t have health supplement stores people would just wonder into the woods to munch on mandrake root to cure their cancer or whatever. Read the rest of this entry »

Another example of users making me angry because they don’t bother to understand the technology they use. Apparently people are all up in arms over Google accidentally collecting data about Wi-Fi networks with their Street View cars. If you research the issue, you’ll find that payload data was only collected from unsecured networks. If you know anything at all about Wi-Fi, you know that these days securing your wireless router is so easy a caveman could do it. There’s no excuse for not doing it! In fact, if you wanted to, you could prevent your router from even broadcasting an SSID in the first place! You can’t sue somebody for invading your privacy if you are willingly broadcasting it unsecured for your whole neighborhood to see.

Do these people not see the irony? They’re suing Google for collecting data that they’re knowingly broadcasting out into open air but not a word about the fact that Google took pictures of their house! I bet these are the same kind of people that put their last names on their mail boxes for all to see.

I hope Google squashes these people. SQUASH.

Hey there T-Mobile! As a TMO customer for a few years now, I was super proud when TMO was the first carrier in the US to launch an Android handset. We were early adopters! Casadegeeks bought three of them and now all four of us have a G1. I think we’ve all reached that point now where the G1 is no longer fast enough. Time to upgrade… wait – where is the next generation of TMO’s Andoid handsets? Verizon has two awesome Android offerings now: Motorola Droid and HTC Incredible… Sprint just got the HTC Evo and even AT&T – exclusive iPhone carrier has some Android offerings. What do you have TMO? The original Android phone – G1, Motorola Cliq, HTC MyTouch – is that all? Even the upcoming HTC MyTouch2 (codename Espresso) is still lacking the new Snapdragon processor. My only real option for a next-gen Android phone on T-Mobile’s network is going to be the Nexus One. Why the complaining then, you ask. Who doesn’t want more choices?

It’s gotten so bad that people are resorting to starting rumors about T-Mobile getting the HTC Incredible – why? C’Mon T-Mobile! Bring it! You took a big step in bringing Android to the market, you should be the leading provider for the best, newest Android handsets! I want to be proud of Magenta again!

That said, unless there are more options soon on T-Mobile, I guess I’ll fork over my arm and leg to buy a Nexus One. In the meantime, go watch some of these vids about the Nexus One:

When Jenny McCarthy set out on her foolish and unholy crusade to stop people from vaccinating they’re kids most people could understand where she was coming from. After all her son was diagnosed with autism shortly after he got his vaccines. Read the rest of this entry »

Apple recently released the iPad – the most anticipated mobile device since the iPhone. However, most gadget lovers and tech heads alike will gripe about one flaw – a flaw that some believe will be fatal to the iPad. No multitasking! You can only run one application at a time on the iPad just like the iPhone and the iPod Touch. This seems to be a major part of the Apple mobile device formula and if you look at the numbers of these devices that have been sold along with other impressive stats like repeat customers and customer satisfaction, there is no denying that this is a formula that works. However, its a theory not shared by HTC which released phones such as the popular Droid and the Nexus One which run the Android OS, the product of search engine giant Google.

If you have ever used a phone with multitasking capabilities such as Windows Mobile or the Android OS, you have undoubtedly had issues with your phones system resources running out or just system lockups due to applications running in the background. Some consumers do not understand the idea of background processes and they don’t seem to be interested in learning about them or how to manage them. Can you honestly blame your average person who just wants a phone that works without the hassles of task managers and application startup options? With that said, I have to admit that my personal phone, a T-mobile G1 / HTC Dream, has had very little issues in the way of multitasking and background processes. Could it be that Google has found a way around the hurdles of multitasking and some day in the future it will be more streamlined for the average consumer? Or will Apple’s formula for mobile platform success be the victor in the end?

Does anybody remember way back in the early 90′s when Microsoft was the king on the block when it came to innovation and releasing of cool new things? Remember that feeling when you first used Windows 95 after all the promotion on TV and the radio, I must’ve heard “start me up” a hundred times in that time.After using Dos and Windows 3.1 for years Windows 95 seemed like night and day. That was back when if you saw full motion video in a game it was awesome! Then most of the cool stuff still ran better in Dos, but that quickly went away. Windows was king and its GUI was genius. That and with the birth of the internet it just got even better.

So where do we stand today. Surely they would have taken us to glorious new heights by now. Unfortunately things kind of stop there, it’s like Microsoft’s frozen in time in 1997. Yes we do have newer versions of Windows and Office and they are better in various ways, but in alot of other ways they’re the same. After all we still have the start menu and we still have Icons. Now I can understand if its not broke don’t start trying to break it, but I would have thought that after 15 years they could have thought something else up. Then again with the fact that Windows and Office are pretty much the defacto standard for business I can understand the stagnation. Read the rest of this entry »