I have deep, mixed emotions tonight. The torah tells us that we should not rejoice at the death of our enemies, but I cannot help being happy that this man who brought death and misery to so many, is finally dead.
It won’t bring back Kath or any of the others that Al Qaeda has killed over the years. It won’t bring the World Trade Center back. And it won’t stop terrorism.
But still, I wish so badly that I were in NYC tonight so that I could celebrate.
Shot on my HTC phone.
In the next few weeks I’ll be speaking at two different conferences, one on each coast.
On March 21, I’ll be talking about how to navigate the waters when two developer communities are working together at the Evans Data Developer Relations conference in San Jose. I had a great time speaking there last year with my colleague Craig Goodman, and am looking forward to returning.
And then on April 5 I’ll be at Social Media & Community 2.0 Strategies in Boston, on the topic of what NOT to do in community management. Looking at the rest of the speaker roster, I’m really excited to hear what they all have to say, and honored I’m on the list.
If you’re going to be at either event, or looking for a couple of good events in the near future, I hope to see you there!
(cross-posted to the Community Kitchen)
TL; DR: There’s no such thing as the perfect tablet. My MacBook Pro rules.
I spent a good chunk of the weekend giving the Xoom a workout. I truly wanted to like it but I have to say I’m less than enthused.
There’s things I like about it, to be sure. Being able to turn the device on, log in, and poof! Google starts synching all my stuff. That is great. Or it would be if it actually downloaded all my apps and bookmarks. Most of them got re-synched but not all.
The Xoom is fast and app switching is really smooth and easy. Want to jump from a link in Tweetdeck (which runs beautifully) or even email to a web browser? Click, you’re there. The web page loads fast, and then getting back into Tweetdeck is one tap of the Back button. It’s nice and I find it an intuitive workflow. On the iPad I have never liked having to hit the Home button and re-launch an app to jump back and forth.
Oh, and the battery life is excellent. After 8 hours of near continuous use with the wifi turned on, I still had 15% battery left. More than enough time for a cross-country flight, and that’s a key use-case for me.
Then there are the things that are annoying. The keyboard, despite being on a bigger screen, isn’t easy to type on, because some of the elements from the layout have been switched from where they are in Froyo devices. This is annoying and slows down my typing speed. Some apps and widgets are great, others, not so much. Scaled-up Android apps generally don’t look as bad as scaled-up iPhone-to-iPad apps do, mostly because they’re nowhere near as badly pixelated. It’s true that few apps are designed to take advantage of the expanded real estate of available on a tablet but my apps worked well
I have issues with the iPad as well, though. I hate the browser, and not just because it doesn’t run Flash. I can’t import bookmarks from Chrome into it, for one thing. It’s also slow, even when on wifi. I miss my Android widgets. I wish I could customize the screen more. And several of my favorite tools look like crap on the iPad – notably Tripit, Foursquare, Facebook. And sadly my much-loved Tweetdeck is buggy as hell on the iPad.
On the other hand, the iPad wins for email hands-down. I find the keyboard easy to use and the unified inbox is very nice.
Either the iPad or the Xoom will do just fine for the two main things I’ll be using them for – airplanes and some lightweight email management in the bedroom. They’re both decent devices but neither has my heart. That still belongs to my trusty MacBook Pro.
18 months from now who knows? Maybe I’ll be typing my blog post on a tablet instead of my laptop and laughing at how I ever thought a laptop was better. So far, color me unconvinced.
We had a few weeks of really nice weather and the cherry blossoms decided to pay us a visit.
Unfortunately another winter storm blew through a day or so after I shot these, and they’re not looking so pretty now.
Not entirely unexpected given my recent blog post, but Johannes Somary did not overcome the stroke that felled him in late December, and I juggled my travel plans to be at his funeral this past weekend.
As a final gift to the many people who loved him, Johannes carefully planned out his funeral, and left detailed instructions for the event. A central point was the musical program, of course.
The music was a mix of plainchant, a couple of his own compositions, and selections from the Fauré Requiem, all ably sung by members of his Amor Artis Chorus. More than ably. I am not sure I’ll ever be able to listen to “In Paradisum” again without crying after hearing the amazing power of it sung live, with such love.
Amidst the great sadness there was laughter too. Anyone who’s ever sung with Johannes will remember Tye’s “Laudate Nomen Domini“. Although it wasn’t on the funeral program, right after the communion section, it rang out through the church, an unauthorized addition to the day. I had to bite my lips to keep from laughing and then to keep from signing along. 🙂 Call it the choir’s last gift to Johannes. I’m sure he would have approved.
I should write more about Johannes, but so many other people have said so much about him over on his CaringBridge site I feel like there’s nothing new left to say. I’ll hold him in my heart always though.