I've been reading Andrew Keen's first book, The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture, and I have to say it is one of the most negative books I have read to date. The book in its entirety is awash with cynicism and negativity with Web 2.0 squarely in its sights.

By the end of the first chapter I had a very accurate feel for how the remainder of the text was going to play out and I found myself skimming rather than reading by the time I was about 1/2 way through. Which is really a shame since the book is well conceived and well written - but I found it challenging to get past the fact that it seemed to be far too rich in examples and hyperbole about how user generated content will be the downfall of  21st century man.

Keen makes some excellent points in his writing, unfortunately they are easily lost among the pages of redundantly drawn out examples, stories and, for lack of a better word; contempt. One of his best points is about Kevin Kelly and his "desire to kill off the book entirely" by describing a "Liquid Version" of the book where "books can be unraveled into single pages or be reduced further, into snippets of a page. These snippets will be remixed into reordered books and virtual bookshelves." The thought of this just makes me laugh; and not in a humorous way - in a way that resonates just how ludicrous and idea like this is. I am not any more qualified to some random sampling of books to create a caffeine induced "Mash-up" than my 4 year old son. That being said, I don't put a lot of credence in this statement since I have read a bit of Kelly's blog, and I find him to be methodical and intelligent (at least in writing since I have never met him); but this idea of Liquid Books is ludicrous. All you have to do is look around the web a bit, especially at sites like Digg and Reddit to see what the collective effect of social news has on people.

One of his worst points, Keen starts on about music sharing and the thieves who are stealing from the artists and recording industry. Never mind the fact that by starting the war on 12 year old girls, the RIAA has fortified their opponents positions by being so relentlessly arrogant about their position. Now it would be a miracle for the Recording Industry to be able to recover. How long have people been making copies of cassette tapes? Or burning copies of CDs for their buddies? A lot longer than people have been file sharing digital music. I don't remember any lawsuits over little Billy making copies of his first AC/DC tape for all his stoner buddies back when I was in school and "Boom Boxes" were all the rage. If they had jumped on the band wagon from the start, the musical landscape would a lot less bleak. The industry as a whole could stand to pay attention to bands like Barenaked Ladies and Nine Inch Nails.

Anyway, The Cult of the Amateur is a decent book and an excellent first effort on Keen's part. Even though I don't think it would have lost any impact if it was trimmed down a bit in the few sections where it seemed to be too drawn out, I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in web technologies. There are excellent issues raised once you get used to the tone of the book. It's a pretty quick read too; so enjoy...

I've been working with Vista almost every day now for nearly 6 months and my impressions of the newest OS from Microsoft haven't deviated much from my initial impressions. I continue to be plagued by problems and anomalies which seem to have no concrete origin.

Where it works

I particularly enjoy how it handles the various sounds emanating from my machine. Having the ability to control audio levels from every device connected to it, as well as individual applications is a bonus. This keeps me from being blasted out of my chair while wearing headphones when someone logs in on Google Talk or Messenger.

I would say it is just as fast as my XP desktop too. With a 4 gb thumbdrive installed as RAM Boost, the machine sails right through large Photoshop files and plays all of my favorite games (except one, Halo 2). If the rumors about SP 1 having a performance and memory management gain, Vista will be quite fast. All of the built-in tools I have used perform well, and there seems to be genuine improvements within the operating system itself. I have run into many fewer inherent glitches within the OS; in fact I can't really think of any. All of my USB devices hook right up and are easily accessible, save one - my Western Digital 500 gb drive. Every now and again it falls off the world and I have to unplug it and turn it off to get it back; something it has never done on XP.

The majority of the applications I use work just fine under Vista as well. WS-FTP hates Vista, and will not run. I initially had trouble with the entire Adobe CS3 suite on an install of Vista Business Ultimate, as well as Flex Builder 2 not working. Those are the only ones I have had trouble with though.

Where it fails

Driver compatibility. Probably 80% or more of the trouble, headaches, and unplanned rebuilds have been due to drivers that flat-out do not work in Vista. I recently made the rookie mistake of updating my audio device drivers through Windows Update - boy that was just dumb. Even though device manager said the device was "working properly", I had no sound. So I rolled back the drivers, and then had to unplug the plugs and rearrange them to get the 5.1 surround to function again. I had to do this originally too, when I first installed it so it shouldn't have come as a surprise....

I still have no RAID support, but that's more on ASUS than Microsoft.

Then we come to Halo 2. WTF!? Microsoft sells this game under their own moniker and it hardly works right. Half the time I would get an error message that some Halo app was running and the game would need to be reinstalled; and the other half would work fine 80% of the time or just randomly quit. The I tried to use a LIVE account and hehehe... yeah right. What a joke. Halo dies every time I try and login in to any real or fictional account. After installing the latest patch, the game doesn't run at all. Way to go guys!

The biggest disappointment is how many incompatibilities in general there are, and when it comes right down to it there is enough blame to go around. It' snot completely fair to blame Microsoft because every Tom, Dick and Harry is incapable of writing solid drivers for their new OS. Especially an OS so plagued with set-backs and postponed releases; it's hard to believe that all of these other guys didn't have adequate time and resources to get their code solid before release time. What lands squarely in their lap is when their own products don't act right, and fail. Halo is one example, Office 2007 is another. I have fought with Office 2007 and Visual Studio in particular throughout my recent life as a developer. Both products are top notch unless you have trouble. My advice? Clean install. Period. Don't ever upgrade anything.

All of this garbage combined has led me down the path of deciding if I really want to switch to the Mac platform entirely. I so very seldom have problems on my laptop it's almost non-existent. The stopping point is the price, but what I guess I have to decide is Microsoft and Windows worth the trouble?

:: side note ::
Maybe your Vista woes are actually nVidia's fault?

The one thing I have come to loath about a (seemingly) good portion of folks who use the web, is the basic principal that every opinion should be taken as fact, any opposing view is a personal assault upon whomever authored or has read the original opinion, and everything is an over-reaction. Just look at any of the community driven news sites, every new product is a something killer, and just about any time [insert your favorite hated company here] releases a new product, service or changes a policy it's the end of the world and an inexcusable injustice to the world community.

The latest is an assault on Apple for adding Safari to the iTunes update application. In efforts to get more folks to try and hopefully like the new Windows version of Safari, Apple has decided to add it to the iTunes updater application, and here's the real kicker; they selected it for you by default! HOW DARE THEY! They are now acting like Microsoft, this shady underhanded manipulation of the trust of their loyal user base! How dare they make me, deselect a checkbox for a browser I do not want! Well, I never.....

I hope you're catching my sarcasm here, because I'm laying it on pretty thick. This isn't any different than Microsoft adding Live Writer, Family Safety, or Spaces to the last Messenger Update I downloaded. When I first started reading headlines about it, I thought for a minute that they were just installing by default in the background without permission - see; now that would be a bad decision. But instead what I found was that they were simply making people to commit to a positive opt out of the download. This is just one small example among hundreds - they're easy to find.

This post on John's Blog probably one of the most level-headed posts about it, and I would have to say I agree with what he finally concludes - but ultimately I don't care enough to rant or rave about it. The real biting issue for me is how every post, article, or discussion has to always degrade to how it sucks, or how someone's an idiot (or worse) with the consensus finally ending in a string of comments that you wouldn't really want your kids to read.

An intelligent argument doesn't always have to degrade into a WWE Cage Match.

After almost two years of people telling us we need to go to Primanti Brothers in Pittsburgh because they have the best sandwiches in Pittsburgh, we finally went there for dinner yesterday. The experience was an astounding let down. It's like when movie studios over-hype a movie to the point to where when you finally see it, the best parts were the previews... Well the best part of this place was the reputation; because the food was horrible. So they get the first Steaming Pile of Poo award for 2008.

We cruised over to the Southside Friday night, since I didn't have to be a guest at che-UPMC overnight, and decided to see what all the hype was about. My first impression; I was surprised the place was such a dive - but that's usually okay. Some of the best places I have eaten in Florida are serious dives. Once I got my  Pitts-burg Cheese Steak, it was like a squashed slab of processed meat sandwiched between some pseudo homemade bread. It was only sorta warm, and very bland. It wasn't large at all - nothing like what everyone said they were. Just an ordinary sandwich that was chock full of fatty goodness. Honestly, I could make a better smamich with my wife's Sheepherder's bread, some steakumms and provolone cheese.

There's not much more to say - but if that's the best Pittsburgh has to offer... then it's no wonder people left town.

A lot of ideas have been mincing around my noggin lately, and I keep coming back to the immense volume of opinions, half-truths and in some cases blatant fabrications that are floated around the Web, getting either assimilated into the collective stack as truth or is deliberately passed off as truth and equally absorbed by the mass of web travelers.

The net, to a degree, has become a soapbox for anyone who not have a voice otherwise; which teeters on the fence between good and bad. I'm not so arrogant or presumptive to make a statement as to how the web is full of trash, or that blogs are 99% bad - I'll leave that other, better known gabblers. It's like the internet has become Speakers Corner in London, if I use this list from Scott Berkun, it is almost exactly parallel.

1. It’s self-organized. Anyone can stand anywhere and start going.
2. People get interactive. There’s lots of yelling and heckling.
3. It’s mostly peaceful. No one is forced to speak or listen.
4. Some of the speakers are amazing. They own their crowds without microphones, podiums, powerpoint - just them and their voices.

Here's the problem: the expectation of truth has been severely overstated and in many cases completely misrepresented. People are constantly stating in many cases baseless opinions as fact, all the while people are swallowing it hook, line, and sinker. I've seen this in action many times before when I was hawking camera equipment in Portland. Some bloke would pop in and start on about how his buddy Jimbo said that this camera, scanner, lens, computer, monitor, or flash memory card was the best because.... the following dribble was just about always partially or entirely inaccurate, taken regardless, at more than face value because he has some casual acquaintance with this fellow. The exact same process repeats itself on the web, only it's more pronounced.

I say this in part because of the influx of Web Design and Development sites that have popped up all over God's Green Earth, all claiming to be the best provider of something, with truck-loads of experience and expertise and more than willing to wax poetic about it in their corporate blog. Just today I read an eMarketing piece (with 3 parts no less) which was all fluff. It had no meat in it at all and came to no conclusions based on the series title. Its sole purpose was to entice search spiders to crawl it and increase the ranking of their site by the not-so-clever use of keywords. Worse yet are the bloggers, developers, and whateverers that will post and spread erroneous information just because it is popular and will get them more hits. Flash is a favorite kicking target of half the web, and the other half seem to just repeat AJAX, AJAX, AJAX, like this is the magic phrase that will transport them to the land of SEO goodness. This is an excellent tactic when performed well, a one which I myself have implemented; the difference being that I try to research what I am writing about before I form or relay an opinion or post a (so-called) fact. Research is one of the most enjoyable parts of the writing process, which is in fact why I write. I enjoy learning more about the tools I use every day, and researching and sharing ideas about new ones.

How can we expect as a people that each other be honest, and perform due diligence to research information when our teachers, and paid Government officials are held to such low standards? When deception and lies have become such an integral part of society that it seems that, as a behavior, being deceitful is no longer deplorable - but admirable. We expect to be lied to.

I have no answers. None. Nope. Sorry. What I do have is simple advice to folks trying figure things out on the web. Read, read, read... then read some more. If it sounds too good or too bad to be true; flat out; it is.

Usability: the property of a website, software application, or web application that relates to ease of use. Usability is commonly defined as having three core components: effectiveness, efficiency, and satisfaction.

With the inception of the World Wide Web by Time Berners-Lee a whole new process of thinking, design, organizing and displaying information came into being. Almost instantly companies began to see the value of the web, but only after a GUI (the first was Mosaic) was created allowing a design to be applied to the information. What we know as the internet is an amazing feat; a conglomeration of individual sites tenuously linked together forming a massive network of cross-referenced information.

Computers and the applications we use every day are equally as magnificent, something that is generally taken for granted and the amount of work, design, testing and engineering that is involved is very rarely considered when one uses it every day. If the program runs and works like you want it to, then you're happy right? But what about all of the failures, glitches, bugs and functional anomalies we tolerate at the same time? Why is it that as a consumer who pays a lot of money for the technological marvels will buy it even though we expect it to fail? I've talked about this before, but I continue to get smacked in the face with it. In fact, as a general rule, I am disappointed with every single electronic device I own with the exception of my iPod.

Spending my Holiday vacation with friends in family out here on the left coast has brought to bare another issue with every device I own and the time shift. I first experienced last month with daylight savings time, and I have to say that it is simply poor programming. My cell phone (Motorola Krzr), PDA (HP Mobile Media Companion 4250), and even iCal on my MacBook Pro has conveniently not adjusted the time of a recurring appointment in the calendar even though the time zone, or time has changed. If I set a reminder to occur ever day until I die at 10am, wouldn't that hold true regardless if I am in Oregon or Pennsylvania? So my cell phone rings at 7 am for my 10 am, and my 4:30 reminds me at 1:30 in iCal. This is a bug, Now if I keep the timezone and change the time, then the times are correct? WTF? So if I change my time the wrong way, then my calendar is right, and vice-versa.

My cell phone is worse though, for this marvel of technology, and the same with my HP iPaq, I have to go in a select the date for it to automatically update. eh? So I go into the calendar on my iPaq, click the time slot and it jumps to the correct time and hit save. I don't have to actually select the time - it knows if jacked, but you still have to do it manually.

This isn't very helpful for someone who has to take medications at  6 different times every day, and if I actually traveled a lot both of these devices would have been tossed a long time ago. The Mac is the most disappointing though, everything else on this machine just works - it's too bad this little bit is all wonky. I'm not ditching it, and it's not a huge deal - but it all adds up.

As a designer I notice this sort of thing all the time, and it drives me crazy. I don't claim to be perfect and I get emails from the wonderful folks who don't like how my websites works from time to time. It just seems like the stuff I find and run across are all no-brainers, and I can't be the only one who finds it to be annoying and inconvenient. Because are computers supposed to make things faster and better?

I know how much work is involved in building computers, applications, and websites - I'm no stranger to the considerations that must be addressed in order to make these projects successful and create a pleasant interface for the user, but it's a simple fact that things could be developed better. Software companies are so tied to the 18 month release cycle that new programs and major updates are buggy and always in need of an immediate patch of some kind or another. Vista is easy to pick on, but the last version of Adobe Dreamweaver is a good example of a program that saw little advancement in the way of feature. They actually removed some, and made changes to how things are managed which make my current development process more tedious and less efficient in regards to the way I like to develop.

Microsoft did the same thing in a way with Expression Web, it doesn't interface with Visual Studio in any appreciable way, so the fact that you have an excellent GUI for layout is kind of pointless and there is no real reason for a switch to it. Visual Studio is lousy for design, and there is no dedicated Microsoft application to interface with it to allow for a tight workflow from design to development. But then it is all about Developers, developers, developers.

For what I pay, I would simply like to be able to expect more of a product then less. I would rather be pleasantly surprised at how well something works than have to be surprised at how well it fails.