Thanks to a wonderful Xmas gift last year, I have been catching up on a decade and a half of missed comic books without the frustration of the actual books. Marvel's Digital Comics have thousands of digitized comics, all laid out for enjoyment. And Marvel has introduced version 3.0 of their reader, which has made the experience far more seamless and rich.

I still dislike the gaps in the issues, and the difficulty in reading the crossover events (would it kill you to index the Civil War and Secret Invasion series, folks?), but this reader is a definite improvement. Now, Marvel, make me an iPhone version, and we are seriously talking. Hey, you already offer issues for sale for reading through Comics X on the iPhone; can you just extend my subscription to those?

Yes, it finally has happened. My favorite IM client has made it to the iPhone, and it was worth the wait. For $5, Trillian users instantly get their full buddy list, across all IM services, complete with renamed buddies and, best of all, push notification for new messages!

There are features a plenty, but the biggest advantage Trillian brings to the iPhone is stability and seamless sync with PC clients. I've been using it for a couple of weeks, and I'm pleased to see it works so well. The push notification mostly works perfectly, except for the occasional odd time it doesn't alert you, but it's made life a lot easier so far.

Of course, not all is golden; there is room for improvement. I'd very much like to see a few changes:

• Allow buddies to be displayed in tiles, as Trillian does on the PC. With the small screen of the iPhone, this is almost a must.
• A one click to set status messages from presets.
• Better control of the sounds to choose different ones for the notifications.
• The ability to stay online with the iPhone while also on the PC, or at the very least the ability to automatically log on to the iPhone version when quitting the PC version, and vice versa.
• No Twitter or Facebook on the iPhone version? C'mon...I could dump Tweetie in a second!
• I realize the Skype integration in Trillian is a bit wonky, but not even an effort here. Hey, I'm on Skype more than most everything else.

Gentle readers, you know of my quasi obsession with all things steampunk. Unlike many who share in this quirky alternate history reimagining, I posses extremely little actual talent in the use of tools or the artistic skills to put them to good use. Luckily, Bruce Rosenbaum of Sharon, MA, has not only the skills, but has transformed his home into his canvas of expressions. My friends, I give you the Steampunk Home.

There are so many jaw dropping elements to this abode, I can barely believe it. The door to his file storage room in his home office pictured here is just the beginning. Not only does it simply stand on its own, but:

The lock wheel is functional and the signal light over the door illuminates along with the interior lights when the door is opened.

For those of you who follow my feed in Google Reader, you may have seen a few of these latest posts. This USB-enabled replacement for the humble wall outlet is one of my recent smack-on-the-forehead "Why didn't I think of that?" Moments.

For a measly $10, you can replace your wall outlet with a source for your vampiric gadgets, especially the Dracula of the power hungry, the iPhone 3GS. I've had sporadic luck with these USB slots at airports and planes with Apple's tether, but with a whole house of power available, I'm fairly sure it can force the ravenous appetite to be sated.

Some of you know my ongoing quest to get my TripIt calendar into my iPhone. I've blogged about workarounds with Outlook 2007 and Exchange, but they all involve some degree of manual work. No more. TripIt helpfully sent me an e-mail last week, giving me a tip on how to add my TripIt iCal feed into my iPhone.

The process couldn't be simpler: simply copy the iCal feed from TripIt and send it to yourself n an e-mail you can access on the iPhone. Open the e-mail on the iPhone, and click on the iCal link. The iPhone recognizes it, and allows you to subscribe to the link, adding another calendar to your iPhone. That's it. From then on, your TripIt trip details will automatically update and appear in the subscribed calendar; view all of your Calendars, and you will see your TripIt items overlaid on your other calendars. Simple, and brilliant.

Look, I love the iPhone's TripIt application, and use it constantly. I even love the new USA Today Autopilot app that integrates with TripIt. But to have the itinerary items on your calendar at a glance? Perfect.

Online bike clothing retailer HuckNRoll sent me this e-mail this week, and it's a brilliant example of irreverence and attention grabbing that fits well with their brand. To deconstruct:

• The headline: hilarious, attention getting, and clever.
• The featured sections: note how the features escalate from "Cool Gear" to "Cold Gear" to the piece de resistance, "Holy #$!T It's Freezing Gear"
• Note the subheads for each of the featured sections, each increasing in irreverence with the purported temperature drop. "Grow a pair" LOL
• Finally, the piece that really caught my hilarity: the subject line. I had to Google this one. Note: Google's habit of delivering suggested Image search results right away makes this a somewhat NSFW search term. However, unlike my previous annoyance with juvenile e-mail marketing subject lines, this one fits the brand perfectly, it makes great sense and is definitely a grabber...so to speak.
  
  

I have another confession: as much as I love my iPhone, I have yet to truly appreciate it as a gaming platform. When the games started to hit in a big way for this new platform, I was excited: I abandoned console games (except for the occasional Wii party game), as I simply don't have enough time to devote to the beautiful but expensive investments console games offer. For the last couple of years, my gaming fix has been occasionally found on a Sony PSP, allowing me the portability to enjoy a good cigar with my skills at driving the Cowboys to yet another Superbowl on Madden.

This week is San Francisco's curious tradition of Fleet Week, curious as the traditionally aggressively pacificistic city celebrates the military. In the past, with the busy seaport and two military bases, it was easier to understand, but the days of dominant naval power have gone by, so it becomes an anachronism that Bay Areans guiltily take pleasure in. This year, with the down economy, it became even harder to raise the funds, forcing fundraiser cruises and private donations to help fill the gap.

It was a stunning show of quiet power, precision, and grace that I had not seen, and if you'd like to see it for yourself, enjoy below the sight of the Navy's elite flyers making their 2009 arrival at one of the nation's busiest airports.

Penn Jillette is one of my personal gurus. What he says so often makes so much sense to me, I am often frustrated that he is not running the world. He frequently does short vlog entries on Sony's Crackle site; today's is about In-N-Out Burger. If you are not familiar with this practically legendary West Coast chain, they make a hell of a burger and fries, cheap, and fresh.

Watch for yourself and see.

From Crackle: In-N-Out Cup Quotes

I have yet another confession to make: as much as I love the English language, it sometimes baffles me. Worse, it confuses me the same way every time in certain situations. For instance, if I am standing in the middle of a block, and some one tells me to go to the "3rd house down on the left," I am paralyzed. Do I count the house I am standing in front of? I don't blame the speaker; I blame the imprecision of the language that allows such vagueness to be communicated. After all, the 3rd house may have a winning lottery ticket, but the 4th house might be a compulsory 24 hours of Michael Jackson homicide coverage.

So, it is with the same disdain I look at this e-mail I received. See the call out? A set of 4 lights, only $19.95 each. Nice deal, right? I click through, and, after not being delivered to the product I clicked on (yep, the old bait and switch), I end up finally finding my lights:
Wow! Now down to $14.95! Cool! I click through, and get this:
Ok, now wait a minute. First, the "bait and switch" that the $14.95 price was for a 4 pack of AA batteries. I used to run a major retailer's e-commerce site, over a decade ago; even back then, this was unacceptable! Now, let's turn to the "Set of 4; $19.95 each" that originally lured me in. The way it was phrased was that a set of 4 was $19.95. Do you see that here? Uh, no. Ok, assume I am English impaired this way, and the intention was to express that each lamp in the set of four was now $19.95. Ok, that would be $79.80; where is that? I see $78.99, a bit less than $79, for a set of 4, or $22.99 each?

All this has just one effect on the consumer: close the web browser and unenroll from the e-mail list. Now, I am not mentioning the etailer who is responsible here, but they are a major online brand, who clearly should know better. It's 2009, not 1997; there's only one way a mistake like this gets rewarded: with $0.

Pricing errors are a fascinating social experiment. It starts with a website or store mistakenly pricing an item at an outrageous price. Thanks to the power of those old InterTubes, it spreads like wildfire. Before you know it, Twitter is down under the load of people tweeting their good fortune, Facebook changes their terms of service to reflect some other way they think they need to protect themselves, and sites like Woot write wry salutes.

What happens next is interesting. First, the retailer pulls the offending item, causing a hue and cry from those who missed it, and a series of gloating posts from those who got in on the deal...or did they? The retailer has a choice at that moment: honor the error, or issue an apology but cancel the orders. Consumers seem to think there is some sort of legal requirement for this, but the laws are based state by state, and most do not have such protection. PR consultants debate what gets more press: reneging and getting TV coverage of the outcry (any PR is good PR, remember), or "doing the right thing." Debates are spawned, local TV news pieces do their bit, and so it goes.

Case in point, as a study in contrasts:

- Best Buy prices an $1800 TV at $9.99. The cycle kicks off as described. Best Buy cancels the errored orders. The pundits debate, the internet wails.
- ThinkGeek's server went a little schizo, and accidentally priced items as free. The cycle erupts as expected. ThinkGeek says "Whoops! Our bad. Shouldn't punish the customer; keep what you got." The web quietly rejoices and Consumerist celebrates.

The obvious argument is that BestBuy is far larger than ThinkGeek, so they couldn't absorb such an error. But Best Buy's CMO, Barry Judge, has been quite vocal and transparent about their errors before, so why not use this as an opportunity? The obvious answer is the results: ThinkGeek did the right thing, and barely was recognized. Best Buy does the wrong thing, gets tons of PR, has an opportunity to make amends, and all of the web will be talking about Best Buy.

This formula repeats, as well, as Apple, eBay, Amazon and more have shown. Until we as consumers reward companies with PR for doing the right thing as loudly as we condemn them for doing the wrong thing, the cycle will repeat.

A couple of weeks ago, Forbes published a story that swept the interwebs: the iPhone had a security flaw that would allow a hacker to own it with a single text message. As you can imagine, the hue and cry went off loudly: the iPhone was insecure; the iPhone was a cheap piece of crap; the iPhone would never be a serious enterprise device.

Yeah, Amazon's getting in on the video game trade-ins. They excitedly emailed me to suggest I trade in my 2009 copy of Madden for the new 2010 version. Curious, I clicked through to see the whopping trade in value of...$1.50. Yes, that's right: $1.50. Towards a $40 game.

Save the e-mail costs, Amazon: it just cost you a customer. Next time, offer me the trade in if it gets me at least 25% of the way there!

A couple of weeks ago, the wonderful folks over at Woot had a nice deal on an Acer AspireOne netbook. If you aren't familiar with netbooks, they are ultrasmall, ultralight, and ultracheap laptops. The trade off is in performance and usability: the hard drives are usually miniscule; the processor is bare minimum, and the keyboard is usually tiny. The result is a small, fast and light laptop that's good for general net surfing, with maybe a little left over for some music.

• Performance will be a problem. These netbooks barely start up. Watching streaming video? Good luck.
• Only get the solid state hard drives (16 GB or so). Regular hard drives are dog slow on these.
• Whatever you do, get the Linux version. Windows XP on these things is a complete choker. If you have to have Windows, use Windows 7 Beta.

So, forewarned, I held off, until this tempting Woot. You can see the specs on what I picked up. In essence, everything everyone said not to get. And what did I find? So far, everyone was wrong. My Acer AspireOne has Windows XP, a 160GB hard drive, and a powerful 6 hour battery. As you can see, it's pretty tiny, but the keyboard is 89% the size of a regular one, so you can actually type on it. Screen resolution is low, but for what I am using it for, it is not an issue.

The performance is great: I have not seen it choke yet, even when streaming HD video from Hulu. Skype videoconferencing is crisp and fast. And I watch my Slingbox over wifi with zero hiccups.I use LogMeIn to work remotely at times; I was able to use it for hours with no issues. I threw some video on a 4GB SD card, and plugged it in: played perfectly with no performance problems. Starting up and shutting down are fast and efficient, and this sucker goes forever without charging. The only thing I dislike about it is the sound card: it comes with a "virtual surround" driver that I can't get rid of from Realtek. The result is, when plugging in headphones, you can't hear the vocals unless you turn the balance all the way to the left or right. Works fine with speakers, but not headphones.

Overall, I'm very pleased with the AspireOne. For under $300, I get a Windows XP machine that has enough horsepower and memory to do what I need, while being able to go for 3x my laptop. It's small and light enough for me to even throw it in my pack on the bike, and it means no need to haul the laptop on trips. If you are considering a netbook, I recommend the experience, and don't necessarily listen to the detractors.

I don't like baseball; most folks who know me find that out. But today, I read this story on ESPN about the Boston Red Sox's David Ortiz allegedly testing positive for performance enhancing drugs, and how it might taint his legacy as a star. I won't go into the whole reason I think this is crap, but I was struck by his statement:

"Today I was informed by a reporter that I was on the 2003 list of MLB players to test positive for performance-enhancing substances. This happened right before our game, and the news blindsided me.

"I want to talk about this situation and I will as soon as I have more answers. In the meantime I want to let you know how I am approaching this situation. One, I have already contacted the Players Association to confirm if this report is true. I have just been told that the report is true. Based on the way I have lived my life, I am surprised to learn I tested positive.

"Two, I will find out what I tested positive for. And, three, based on whatever I learn, I will share this information with my club and the public. You know me -- I will not hide and I will not make excuses.""

Well done, sir. Well done.

A cautionary tale today about the near addictive and ubiquitous presence of Twitter. See, many folks use Twitter almost exclusively on their phone. For instance, some folks only interact with Twitter via text (SMS) messages, rather than dedicated clients or the like. As a result, many people blur the line between using Twitter as most folks do (as a one-to-many communications tool) and using it as just another form of text messaging. Normally, this is perplexing at worst, but sometimes, it can be downright problematical.

Case in point: today, Anthony Sullivan, the "pitchman" of the Discovery Channel show of the same name (with recently departed Billy Mays), was twittering away. Obviously, without thinking, he accidentally published his cell phone number on Twitter (see right). OUCH. Now, I've blacked out the actual number, but in looking at the Twitterverse, people are already calling and texting him. Imagine you are an inventor, looking to get a hold of a legendary pitchman to help you, and you see you can now have Anthony Sullivan's cell phone; what would you do? And pity poor King Sully: he is now getting bombarded with Twitter replies ranging from sympathy to scorn for the error, and he will most likely have to replace his cell number to avoid being overwhelmed.

It's hard to draw the line on what communications mechanisms do what, but it becomes more important than ever to maintain those controls. Personally, I prefer using Google Voice, as I can automatically determine certain people who can call/message me, and treat the rest like the spam they are. Would have saved Sully!

Every day, I ride the ferry from Marin to San Francisco. Frequently accompanying me is my friend and coworker, Charles. We often take inspiration in the Bay air and beautiful scenery and come up with what we call "The Million Dollar Idea of the Day." I've been coming up with these since I was a kid, and I vow to someday make good on one, but for now, I am content to share them with the world...and you, gentle reader. :-)

Plus:

Plus:

Equals:

Now, what do these images mean? Why can't there be sheet music that knows where you are in the piece, and listens to you, and continually automatically turns the page for you? We live in the 21st century: computers are all around us, and barely used to their full potential: surely there must be a way? And I think, with a little ingenuity, there is.

Follow my thinking. First, you need something that can "hear" the music played. Digital Ear Real-Time software allows you to plug in a microphone, and it can turn what it hears into MIDI files, readable and playable by a computer. Second, you need to convert MIDI files to sheet music; there are lots of options for that, including this software. You also need a way to display that music on a large, high contrast screen: Amazon's new Kindle DX is perfect for this, and is already being used to display sheet music. Add in a small CPU, with a dedicated purpose, and you have sheet music that "hears" where you are in the piece, and can display the music, all without page flipping and losing your place.

There are a couple of foibles here. First, even the DX does not automatically flip pages, but that's more of a UI limitation; there is no programmatic reason an e-ink display can't automatically turn the page, or you could use a monitor instead. Second, the "hearing" software undoubtably has some lag to it, but as a first version you could have the computer simply follow the timing of the music: sheet music is inherently mathematical, and has the definitions of timing built into it (those symbols indicate how long to hold a note, and the piece is defined at the outset with a certain timing). In any case, the results would be no drop off in any music of the piece, and no losing your place.

There are hundreds of orchestras in the country, not even counting all of the schools. There are thousands of live music performances a day, all using sheet music. The market for this is, frankly, enormous. Computers are getting cheaper every day, and the e-book market is very hot right now, with the ability to download new content as a new business model. Combine all of these factors with the right hardware and software, and you have today's million dollar idea: Autoscrolling E-Music.

To the enterpreneur who takes this idea and makes it a reality, I give it to you freely. I only ask you credit me with an advisory board position...and free tickets to the first performance. :-)

The latest example of the poor quality of the media is on display today from the state I was born in, Massachusetts. In this article, we get the headline:

"Mass. man scrambles to repay Tom Brady"

In 1963, the USPS changed all states to have 2 letter designations; Massachusetts went from "Mass." to "MA". Nearly 50 years later, we still see this ancient designation used. Why? If the headline said "MA" instead of "Mass." would there be any less understanding or interest? Do you see North Dakotoans bandying about "N. Dak." instead of "ND?"

C'mon, reporters...you probably weren't even alive when this change was made. Show your maturity, not your laziness.

GameTap, an online videogame service, recently emailed me with the subject line you see to the left, "Wow! Some Serious Guns!" Open up the email, and what do you see? Lara Croft, in all her tightly clad, barely contained glory. That's it. Yes, get the crude reference here.

I am anything but a prude, but I expect tactics like this from spammers sending fake Viagra ads or Nigerian bankers. A real company people pay real money to? Please. Grow up, kiddies; I have to think that anyone with such childish sensibilities should probably not have access to my credit card account. Thanks; no business coming your way from me!

Like many others who acquired the latest Apple iPhone bauble, I experienced a very un-Apple like experience. First, in true Apple fashion, the 3Gs arrived without any directions, just a "quick start" guide. It seemed odd that such a product launch would not at least include instructions on how to upgrade from a previous iPhone; instead, I was forced to rely on some outdated instructions on Apple's site...which turned out to be inaccurate. So, for a day, I had the world's most expensive iPod Touch, instead of an iPhone 3GS.