Naturalized and adopted citizens and Medicare/Social Security - the SSN class trap and a likely SSA software process failure

TLDR;

1. If you are a US citizen by naturalization or adoption you should check (call SSA and wait on phone for 1-2 hours) that your SSN is classified as US Citizen. The reclassification of an existing SSN has been an issue for over 40 years. If it is not correctly classified you will run into problems when you start Medicare or Social Security coverage (which can be at different times).
2. I think the rats nest of issues I ran into getting Medicare coverage arose because SSA software automates routine processes but it doesn't cover this problem. AND there isn't an effective process to manage exceptions to the automation rules.

Story

One of the joys of Oldness includes obligatory encounters with overwhelmed government services, not least the Social Security Administration. Recently I fought my way past the usual array of minor bugs and UI issues and browser incompatibilities to register for Medicare 8 weeks before my 65th birthday around May 30 2024.. I believe it was on the first day that I was eligible to start the process online.

That's where it went bad. After completing the application the screen briefly showed a confusing message about needing to submit some sort of additional documents -- but not which documents. I also got an email dated 6/3/24 saying to expect instructions. I waited ... and nothing happened. My online application status indicator stayed at the start of step II.

I checked the online status many times over the following weeks but nothing turned up. I finally phoned SSA and after about 1-2hours of waiting I got someone who started to work the problem. Somewhere during this process my line was disconnected. SSA staff don't have a way to call back or reach anyone who is disconnected.

After a week or two I were getting closer to my birthday and I forced myself to phone again. This time after 1-2 hours I was told to bring my naturalization certificate and state ID to our local SSA office.  I was later told this advice was wrong for my situation -- in fact they needed my passport and state ID. (I suspect two government approved IDs and my naturalization papers and birth certificate might have worked if I didn't have a passport.)

In the aftermath of the CrowdStrike fiasco I waited 3.5 hours in the local SSA office until I finally reached a very pleasant expert who looked at my passport and state ID, explained that my SSN classification was wrong, and passed on the correction to the one person who could process it. Somehow that happened the same day -- so I think she made an extra effort.

The SSN conversion thing is a problem -- two our children were born in Korea and both got caught out by this. SSA being overwhelmed is a problem too -- not everyone can spend hours and hours waiting on the phone or at the SSA office.

But the interesting problem to me is that I only received one of two emails that I was told were supposed to have been sent to me and neither of the two paper letters that were supposed to have been sent. In addition the description of the problem I saw in the original online submission form was incomplete and only showed there. 

I'm sure SSA believes I missed the 2nd email and that I threw out both SSA letters. The latter is especially unlikely; we have two special needs children and Emily does NOT miss SSA letters. It's a life, death, and taxes class thing.

That's what SSA would believe, but I think the letters were never mailed and the 2nd email was never generated. That what's would happen if the business logic in SSA automation didn't have a specific response to the SSN classification problem AND didn't have a good process for "problems not elsewhere classified". That would also explain the incomplete or misleading instructions my second phone rep passed on to me. It might even explain why the first phone rep might have dropped my call (lest she fall infinitely far behind).

I wasted a lot of hours dealing with this, and so did SSA staff. I worked for years with government software so I'm not optimistic this will get fixed; I suspect "edge cases" will be falling off the SSA process for decades to come. But I did write our state representative's office, so maybe the summer student will find a way to pass on the speculative bug report.

Why we can't have good personal finance software any more

This Nov 2023 blog post from the CEO of a budget/financial management software firm (Monarch) tells us a lot about why we don't have alternatives to Intuit ...

... personal finance apps, which typically rely on data aggregators (Plaid, Finicity, etc) to connect to tens of thousands of financial institutions to aggregate the necessary financial data. These data fees are quite expensive, which means a personal finance app is losing money on each free user and must make it up in some other manner...

... Personal finance apps are only as useful as their underlying data. As mentioned above, keeping this data up-to-date is a massive and expensive challenge that everyone underestimates. Subscription-based services are incentivized to constantly invest in this data architecture; otherwise, customers churn...

... Unfortunately, no single data aggregator provides complete coverage of all financial institutions. So we have integrated with all of them at Monarch. What’s more, we’ve spent years (and millions of dollars) building an intelligent data infrastructure that can route users to the best aggregator for a given financial institution. We’ve also invested heavily in AI-based transaction cleansing and classification. I believe we have the best financial data infrastructure that has ever been built for this use case. In full transparency, this is an ever-shifting landscape and there are still a few large institutions that don’t want to share their data, so our coverage is not yet 100%. We plan to get there eventually...

Intuit got the relationships early and has some leverage over banks (which seem to be normally greedy but extraordinarily incompetent). Everyone else is at the mercy of the aggregators. An evil (or just profitable) dominant vendor might spend quite a bit of money to keep this moat as deep and merciless as possible.

Quicken for DOS cannot be recreated: Why we can't have good personal finance software any more.

Almost 40 years ago we used Quicken version 2 or 3 for DOS 3.1 on a Panasonic 8086 with 640K of memory and a CPU too feeble for a modern toaster. 

Every month a 3.5" (not 5.25") diskette came in the mail with our bank and credit card transactions. We loaded that into Quicken. We entered cash transactions manually. It worked pretty well, though Quicken was plagued with database corruption bugs until the 90s. When Microsoft Money appeared one could migrate transactions and history from one to the other.

There's no modern equivalent. Today's vendors sell our data to third parties and then market products to us. Vendors have a hard lock-in. This kind of service decay is now known as "enshittification". Today in a mastodon thread I listed what drove that enshittification*:

1. The banks feared disintermediation and commodification so they stopped cooperating and/or raised transaction costs. 
2. Selling services to customers and selling customer data were both seemingly painless ways to increase margins for a publicly traded company
3. Costs and user experience both favor user data in the cloud — which aligns with selling user data and services.
4. Customer data lock strategies became irresistible and with cloud migration they were easy to implement.

Of these the first is the big one. If customers could get their data then small vendors could produce niche subscription products. But the banks aren't going to cooperate. They know better now.

I don't know if we'll ever see good products again. Perhaps if Apple or Microsoft went into banking they'd provide an API for developers to use. Of course we'd all have to use Apple's Bank for everything but, speaking for my family, they already own us.

*With two 't's per Doctorow.

Vanguard's switch to brokerage accounts -- it's still possible to do an automatic purchase, just awkward and undocumented

The original of this post is below. It turns out Vanguard's (algorithmically generated?) response is incorrect.

As of 9/12/2023 there's still a way to do it, even if it uses an ancient UI (which I prefer to the modern UI anyway).

The trick is to

1. Have cash in settlement fund. You no longer transfer directly from one fund to another. For example, in an IRA Rollover account, you first put cash into the Settlement fund then you setup an automatic purchase.
2. You have to ignore this misleading 9/2023 verbiage from Automatic transactions: "Automatic investments allow you to move money from an authorized bank on file into an existing Vanguard account. If you'd like to move money to your bank or between your non-retirement and Vanguard Brokerage IRA, please use our automatic withdrawal feature." It omits that you can also move money between funds within a brokerage account. I suspect it's not been updated to reflect the changes Vanguard made with the brokerage account change.

To get to this screen

1. Start with balances
2. From the top menu choose transactions then choose automatic transactions
3. Click add automatic transaction

If there's no fund to exchange into you need to create that with the "new" UI then you can do the above.

-- ORIGINAL VERSION OF THIS POST

Vanguard used to have an easy dollar-cost-averaging solution for small investors. You could specify an regular exchange from a cash fund to an index fund. Set and forget. No fees.

Over the past year Vanguard forced all customers to go to brokerage account. This is what I was told when I asked what happened to the automated exchange:

Automatic exchanges are not available in a Vanguard Brokerage Account. I am

sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.

...

If you have additional questions, we can be reached at:

https://support.vanguard.com/

Sincerely,

xxxxxxxxx

Registered Representative

Vanguard Personal Investor

Of course Vanguard did not mention this when we asked about the consequences of switching to a brokerage account. In fact the representative I spoke with thought our prior exchange would continue to work.

The brokerage transition has also necessitated a redo of the Vanguard web site. It's now a mix of incomplete new functionality and old-looking but effective legacy functionality. They are obviously years behind schedule.

In the longer term I suspect Vanguard wants to reduce self-management of investments and earn a percentage on managing customer funds.

We had been planning to consolidate our investments with Vanguard. That's on hold now. The days of John Bogle are long past. 

PS. It's also possible that Vanguard outsourced responses to an AI and the answer I got is actually wrong. It appears if one has cash in a settlement fund it's possible to setup an automated purchase. The web site text for automated purchases uses misleading language.

Sorrow for the Long Tail - the memory machine I will never see

There are several software products I want nobody will build.

For example, I want a “screen saver” that will randomly select from a collection of video and still images and display them across multiple screens.

Pretty much like Apple’s annoying [1] screen saver, but for video it would randomly select a xx second file segment and play that without sound.

I don’t think anyone will ever build this. It’s too hard to do [2] and there’s no money in it. Only a small number of people would pay, say, $20 for this. Maybe 1 in a 1000. After expenses and marketing it would be hard to earn even a few thousand dollars.

Which reminds us of the false promise of The Long Tail. Those were the days that Netflix had a huge catalogue of barely viewed movies [3] that were often very fine. We thought there would be business for the interests of the 0.1%. That didn’t happen.

This is why I’ve given up on trying to predict the future ...

--

[1] Whenever macOS cannot connect to the folder hosted on my NAS it reverts to the default collection. I need to restore my share and I’ve never been able to find an automated way to do that. On iOS things are much worse. Speaking of products I want, I’d pay $20 for a macOS utility that that simply reset my screen saver to my preferred share.

[2] We never thought software development would keep getting harder. We used to think there would be a set of composable tools we could all use (OpenDoc, AppleScript, etc). We expected a much more advanced version of what we had on DOS or Unix in the 80s or the early 90s web. Instead we got AngularJS.

[3] In the mailer days our kids movies were unplayable due to disc damage about half the time. Finally gave up on that.

How to build a safe and sane social network

This is how to build a safe, sane, and sustainable social network.

1. Build it to be viable on $1/user year.
2. Sell memberships for $25/year. Each buyer gets one user license and contributes 24 to the free pool.
3. Donors can buy an unlimited number of free-pool memberships at $1/year apiece.
4. Donors who give over $1000 a year get an optional sustainer badge.
5. Anyone can join for free if there are free memberships available.

That’s about it. Essentially it’s the public radio model.

Tech regressions: MORE, Quicken, PalmOS, iOS, Podcasts, Aperture, Music, iPad photo slide shows, and toasters.

One of the odder experiences of aging is living through technology regressions. I’ve seen a few — solutions that go away and are never replaced.

Symantec’s classicMac MORE 3.1 was a great outliner/editing tool with the best style sheet implementation I’ve seen. It died around 1991. The closest thing today would be Omni Outliner — 16 years later. There’s still no comparable Style Sheet support.

Quicken for DOS with 3.5” monthly diskette records of credit card transactions was the most reliable and useable personal accounting tool I’ve experienced — though even it had problems with database corruption. I think that was the 1980s. Today I use Quicken for Mac, a niche product with unreliable transfer of financial information, questionable data security, and limited investment tools.

PalmOS Datebk 5 was an excellent calendaring tool with good desktop sync (for a while the Mac had the best ‘personal information management’ companion). That was in the 1990s. When PalmOS died we went years without an alternative. I briefly returned to using a Franklin Planner. Somewhere around year 3 of iOS we had equivalent functionality again — and a very painful transition.

iOS and macOS have seen particularly painful combinations of progressions and regressions. OS X / macOS photo management was at its best somewhere around the end of Snow Leopard and Aperture 3.1 (memory fuzzy, not sure they overlapped). OS X photo solutions had finally reached a good state after years of iPhoto screw-ups — the professional and home products more or less interoperated. All Apple needed to do was polish Aperture’s rough edges and fix bugs. Instead they sunset Aperture and gave us Photos.app — a big functional regression. Apple did something similar with iMovie; it’s much harder to make home “movies” than it once was.

iOS was at its most reliable around version 6. So Apple blew it up. Since that time Podcasts.app has gone from great to bad to not-so-bad to abysmal. The iPad used to have a great digital picture frame capability tied to screen lock — Apple took that away. For a while there was a 3rd party app that worked with iCloud photo streams, I could remotely add images to my father’s iPad slideshow digital picture frame. There’s nothing that works as well now; as I write this I’m working through a web of bugs and incompetence (I suspect a desperate timeout stuck into iTunes/iOS sync) to sneak some photos from Aperture to an iPad.

Apple Music is following the path of Podcasts.app as Apple moves to ending the sale of music (probably 2019). At the same time iTunes is being divided into dumbed down subunits (iBooks regression). The last 2-3 revisions of iTunes have been so bad that this feels almost like a mercy killing.

We don’t have a  way to avoid these regressions. Once we could have gotten off the train, now the train stations are dangerous neighborhoods of lethal malware. We need to keep upgrading, and so much is bundled with macOS and iOS that we can’t find 3rd party alternatives. Data lock is ubiquitous now.

I think regressions are less common outside digital world. It’s true toasters aren’t what they were, but since 2006 Chinese products have become better made and more reliable. Perhaps the closest thing to tech regressions in the material world is the chaos of pharma prices.

This takes a toll. There are so many better ways to spend my life, and too few minutes to waste. I wonder what these regressions do to non-geeks; I don’t think it goes well for them.

Quicken for Mac 2017 -- $45 upgrade for nothing.

Quicken for Mac 2017 new features …

Compare your income and spending year over year with custom reports
Customize your budgeting goals month-by-month (12-month budget)
Pay your bills in Quicken with Quicken Bill Pay (fees apply)
Get more power on-the-go with the improved mobile app
Enjoy a new look that’s easier to use and navigate

On the other hand …

Quicken 2017 for Mac does not have certain investment reports/views, such as Performance (IRR), or Allocation by Investment.

We’ve been using 2015 and somehow I thought the 2017 update was worth paying for. Wrong. The only change I notice is new UI to learn.

That was a real waste of money. 

Intuit sold Quicken for Mac to a private equity company. The corporate headquarters are “3760 Haven Avenue, Menlo Park, CA 94025”. This is the current street view (7/2016).

We can live with Quicken 2015 - or 2017. We can do our investment allocation reports by hand. So I don’t think it’s a bad buy — once.

No upgrades though. Quicken 2017 is a classic, stinky, private equity move — fire everybody, put in a little bit of work, squeeze the market.

Stick with the version you have.

Beyond Simplenote: I still want a graph layer (concept map) overlay for my memory augmentation notes collection

I still want a graph layer atop my notes.

Yes, I want my personal locally stored data unlocked memex. Since the passing fad of the web is now, you know, passing, maybe I’ll get one.

Maybe someone will play with this now that there’s not much point in doing another searchable memory augmentation app. Apple and Google each have their “good enough” solutions. Those solutions have scary data lock issues, but for their vendors that’s a feature, not a defect. (For the record, I’m still on Simplenote/nvAlt, despite the extremely very insanely annoying search bug in the Simplenote Mac client. [1])

The idea is as old as time. Each open data format note has a title, a body, tags, and a unique identifier. The app maintains a separate data store of noteID pairs (relationships, no directionality or additional relationship attributes necessary).  When viewing a note one sees titles of related notes. There’s a UI for viewing the graph that also treats tags as nodes [3], and a UI for editing relationships.

The key is that the individual notes remain separate files and the note-note store is plaintext/rich text as well. [2]

One day…

PS. I think this was kind of what Gopher did. 

- fn -

[1] My own extended memory collection has moved through DOS text files, FileMaker Pro text base, PalmOS Notes, DateBk Memo, AvantGo files, Outlook Notes, Evernote, Google Notes (killed!), Toodledo Notes/Appigo Notebook,  and Simplenote/ResophNotes/NotationalVelocity/nvAlt. No wonder I’m a nut on data lock issues and distrust Cloud solutions for extended memory even as I use them. Also: Before Simplenote, Palm Notes, iOS Notes, Keep, EverNote and OneNote there was Tornado for DOS. 

[2] Remember when Mac Classic gave every file its own unique ID? Those were the days. How to get the unique ID for the notes is the trick for a plaintext implementation especially across platforms. With rich text one can bury the unique ID in the metadata. Unique ID could be an IP6 URI.

[3] Remember when graph data visualization was a thing? That was the early 90s I think, around the time of VRML and MCF/RDF.

See also: 

(This is started out as a tiny post but I kept finding more old material I wanted to think about …)

• All I want for Christmas is a graph (mind-map) … on App.net 11/2012 discussion of this on ADN.
• XMind: Impressions and comments on the mind mapping market 11/2012. I buried the lede in this post, the discussion of the graph layer for a Notes collection is buried within. I gave up on XMind because client-side Java died.
• Tinderbox, Simplenote, MindNode and data freedom 10/2011. Earlier version of this plea. Lists some Personal Information Managers I’ve known. My plaintext/rich text standards love is born of much painful experience.
• Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity 7/2010
• Cloud data: Should I trust (Simplenote) Simperium? 8/2010. Only while nvAlt works.
• Before Simplenote, Palm Notes, iOS Notes, Keep, EverNote and OneNote there was Tornado for DOS. 
• Taking note: Tornado Notes Lives—Sort of (an entire blog on note taking. I just subscribed!)
• Escape from Outlook Notes - ResophNotes, SimpleNote for iPhone and Notational Velocity 7/2010
• Palm/Palm Pilot: Personal Experiences and Tips: my old Palm Pilot web page. For nostalgia.
• Jon Udell’s Interviews with Innovators: Evernote as Memex 7/2008. (Evernote is still in business!)
• Gordon’s Notes: xanadu and Gordon's Notes: memory management
• Full text search and digital prostheses: new email, new mind 7/2008 - A few years after full text really went mainstream. This doesn’t seem to show up on in our productivity stats, which is more than a bit curious. It is almost as if digital tech is simultaneously increasing and decreasing economic productivity, so we see only the delta.
• The Mundaneum 2008
• Mac NoteTaker for PalmOS with TextMate 1/2006 (oh, the pain)
• Palm to iPhone - the summary 8/2008
• Farewell Palm I didn’t get rid of all my old PalmOS gear until 2010
• The rise of software rental (aka software as service) 2/2010
• Moving Palm notes to Toodledo via CSV file - what worked. (Hard!) 9/2008
• Google’s IQ boost is only beginning 12/2009. Even as I wrote that Google was making a hard turn into evilplusness. Now it’s the AI assistant moment.
• Project Memfail: Tackling my search space problem 9/2013. I rely on my Notes as pointers to other stores but I still need Google’s increasingly shaking custom search engines.
• Thinking tools 2014 - holding steady but future unclear 5/2014. Two years later it’s basically the same toolset, but I created kateva.org/sh as a backup given ADN’s expected lifespan.
• Why we need to retire at sixty 3/2010. Memory augmentation is not an option.

My project management tools - April 2016

Early in my post-corporate days I wrote a detailed post on how I expected to do project management going forwards. Since then I’ve experimented with various tools and services.  

Today I updated a Simplenote/nvAlt [1] summary of my project management tools including how I archive completed (or abandoned) projects. All of these tools have multiple substitutes on iOS, Android, Windows and MacOS so I’m hopeful this toolset approach should work for years to come. Sometime I’ll write an update on my methodology, it basically shifts between Agile-Kanban and Agile-Scrum. Lately more Kanban than Scrum, but I go back and forth.

Principles
- minimize proprietary data formats and data lock (or at least tool lock) - always have an exit strategy
- archived indexable by Spotlight
- easy backup and restoration [Trello fails here, it’s the tool I’m most likely to replace.]
- integrated with Google Calendar
- scales to single person or team projects
- formal project archiving process

MacOS
- create a folder in Project hierarchy
- in some cases also have a shared Google Drive folder
- I don’t make much use of Tags in MacOS at this time.
- Mac file folder has aliases to nvAlt Simplenote, Trello (URL), MindNode (in iCloud Drive), may contain Scrivener files if a writing project, presentation files, etc.

Simplenote/nvAlt (iOS, Web, MacOS)
- Create a simplenote entry for the project, tag it with project.
- Simplenote title has prefix “Project: “
- Describe the project and where things are
- Define project tags: use tags in OS X file system
- project tags have prefix p_
- save as text file in project folder when completed

Trello - Agile Project Management (iOS and Web) (review)
- create Board for Project
- 2 lists: Queue, Active
- when Task/Card Done archive it
- Milestone Cards have dates
- Cards can have checklists
- Subscribe to Calendar on gCal
- Print as PDF when completed and export JSON

MindNode (MacOS and iOS)
- release planning, hierarchy, overview of project (alt OmniOutliner)
- store in iCloud drive but create shortcut
- export to PDF when completed

Scrivener (MacOS)
- for writing projects

Google Calendar (Trello project calendar, iOS, MacOS)
- scheduling and time/capacity management
- project calendar to PDF when completed

Google Drive (iOS, MacOS)
- for collaborative file sharing projects

Email (iOS, MacOS)
- Gmail with web interface and MacOS Mail.app IMAP client.
- Drag and drop selected emails from Mail.app to desktop (creates standard file) to a folder in MacOS project (“Mail Archive”) 
- Careful use of Subject lines to optimize search, typically I don’t file emails or use tags with emails. 

- fn - 

[1] nvAlt is post-maintenance but it still works on El Capitan. Simplenote still has active development, but search has been broken on the Mac app for over a year. I’m not worried because I keep all my notes in plaintext; I have multiple exit strategies. (Not including Apple Notes.app, it needs an exit strategy, a backup strategy, and significant updates. None of which I expect from Apple in its current state).

See also:

• Trello - an orientation review 11/2013, updated 4/2016
• Tools: emulating (Rally) Agile work using Appigo ToDo.app and ToDo Cloud: 7/2015, includes extensive links to productivity posts, Getting Things Done and so on.

Red Cross Basic Life Support training: avoid the Flash based simulation option

The American Red Cross runs classes in basic life support (CPR/AED). I’m doing the professional course. 

Historically these courses have been quite good, but these days they are sometimes (always?) offered as a combined online training module and a class-based skills portion.

Which would be a good idea — if the module weren’t buggy. It’s a Flash based program, and on my new MacBook Air Flash/Chrome misses trackpad clicks. Not something one would normally notice, but the simulation requires one tap 30 times at a rate of 100-120 taps/minute. When the tap frequency exceeds about 105 clicks get dropped. One can hear the pad click, but the simulation doesn’t respond.

Two counting errors means repeating the simulation. With this bug counting errors are common.

I’ve done one module, the last one left, at least 4 times. Once my wife, watching me, saw it miss 6 of 30 clicks.

Software is hard. Server side software is very hard. It’s expensive to develop, but it’s even more expensive to maintain and revise. We compare software development to building bridges, but really it’s more like building a fancy English garden. Hard to plan, hard to create, but it’s the maintenance that really hurts.

The Red Cross shouldn’t be running this simulation. They can’t afford it. They’re not alone though. The American Board of Family Medicine recently deprecated a very ambitious patient simulation software project. They really needed to do that, but it must have been a hard call. They’d invested a lot of work and money. The reality was, they couldn’t afford the maintenance.

There’s nothing easy about software. We need less of it, done better.

Tip: If you do have to do this, try a mouse instead of the trackpad. I found the glitches distracting and stopped watching the animated hands, but that was a mistake. Click the mouse but count on the hand movement. 

PS. When it comes to abdominal trust vs. back blows for chocking adult/child the downloadable text is internally inconsistent and also inconsistent with the abdominal thrust only simulation…

Update 2/12/2016: Our in-person class had 6 participants. One didn’t realize there was an online portion — I can see missing it, communications and the web site are both confusing. At least one other person had to call support to find the online portion. Everyone had click-count problem; one young person described the simulation as the worst experience of her life (she is young).

As is typical once one person spoke of having problems everyone joined in. It seems I got off lightly.

The logic and consistency errors around foreign body/choking management are well known. The course is scheduled to be rebooted in a month; i hope the simulations will be redone or eliminated. I’d suggest the American Heart Association course instead.

Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome are all very different.

If you’ve ever wondered why healthcare institutions can’t easily share data between computer systems, just take a look at Calendaring in iOS, OS X, Outlook 2010 and Google Android/Chrome.

Google went down the road of calendar overlays. You can have as many calendars as you like and you can share them across a Google Apps domain or between Google users. Public calendars are available for subscription. My current Google Calendar calendar list holds twenty distinct calendars of which 8 belong to my family. (One for each family member, one for entire family, a couple of parent-only calendars that the kids don’t see.) In Google’s world, which is consistent across Chrome and Android, shared calendars can be read-only or read-write. Google supports invitations by messaging.

I love how Google does this, but I’m a geek.

I’ve not used any modern versions of Outlook, but Outlook 2010 also supported Calendar subscription. They didn’t do overlays though, every Calendar stood alone. I never found this very useful.

Apple did things differently. Not only differently from everyone else, but also differently between iOS, OS X, and iCloud.  OS X supports calendar overlays and subscriptions, but the support of Google Calendar subscriptions is  weird (there are two ways to view them and both are poorly documented). iOS has a very obscure calendar subscription feature that I suspect nobody has ever used, but it does support “family sharing” for up to 6 people/calendars (also barely documented). There’s an even more obscure way to see multiple overlay Google calendars on iOS, but really you should just buy Calendars 5.app.

iCloud’s web calendar view doesn’t have any UI support for Calendar sharing, I’ve not tested what it actually does. Apple is proof that a dysfunctional corporation can be insanely profitable.

All three corporations (four if you treat Apple as a split personality) more-or-less implement the (inevitably) quirky CalDAV standard and can share invitations. Of course Microsoft’s definition of “all-day” doesn’t match Apple or Google’s definition, and each implements unique calendar “fields” (attributes) that can’t be shared.

Google comes out of this looking pretty good — until you try to find documentation for your Android phone and its apps. Some kind of reference, like Google’s Android and Nexus user guides. As of Dec 2015 that link eventually leads to a lonely PDF published almost five years ago. That’s about it.

I don’t think modern IT’s productivity failure is a great mystery. 

Tools: emulating (Rally) Agile work using Appigo ToDo.app and ToDo Cloud

My circumstances have changed. I may have more to say on that later; even in the sort term it is probably a change for the better. But of course life must be lived forward and understood backwards and all that.

One of the benefits of my new position is an opportunity to revisit my Tools. At one time (less so now) I’d read that tools didn’t matter, it was all about … something. Process maybe, or magic. This was sometimes used to justify a lack of investment in tools to support getting work done. I won’t bother refuting this idea, it’s self-evidently wrong.

Tool choices shape everything. I like Tools that last years to decades; switching costs are often high [10]. In practice, since modern software has very short lifespans, this means choosing adaptable tools and, when data lifespan is longer than tool life expectancy, portable data. For a serious Tool complexity and learning curve don’t bother me, but complexity shortens already too short software lifespans and and usually binds a Tool to a single platform (web typically). So I reluctantly favor simplicity - just enough functionality to do what I need. (I despise the current fashion for early delivery of barely working products, but that’s another story.)

These past few days I’ve been choosing my go-forward task and project management tool. Over the past few years I’ve used a mixture of Google/Outlook Calendars (don't underestimate the power of the Calendar), Appigo ToDo.app for iOS with sync to Toodledo for web access and data freedom, and RallyDev’s “Rally” Agile project/task management software.

I could write a book on the RallyAgile (which is Agile shaped by Rally) and the twisted evolution of that tortured product. It is hard to watch software adolescence — the drinking, the reckless driving, the law breakin … then, if one is lucky, the emergence of a somewhat broken product that may do some good in the world.

Suffice to say there are things I liked about the way I adapted RallyAgile, such as Features that are completed in 3-10 weeks of work, Feature-Stories that map to 1-10 days of work, and Feature-Story-Tasks that map to 1-6 hours of work. I sized “Stories” [1] by “Points” where a “Point” is 5 hours of work [2], and where a Story could be any one of 1, 3, 5, 8, 13, 20 Points [3]. I liked two week iterations [4] as a practical planning unit - a period where each task was (tentatively) assigned Calendar blocks and where one could focus on getting Stories complete rather than constantly replanning. I liked having protected time for planning a “Release” (set of Features basically) and for planning an “Iteration” (2-3 week collection of Stories), time to review and improve process, and time to look ahead and reassess “Features” and “Release”.

Today I’ve made my first pass at a set of Tools (and, yes, practices) that will give me the functionality I want within the constraints [5] of time, budget, familiarity, platform (Mac/web) and the requirements of longevity. In bullet form, here’s my list:

• Google Calendar: Well, I’m certainly not going to use anything Apple owns [6], and Outlook is owned by ZombieSoft. So pretty much narrows that down.
• Appigo ToDo and ToDo Cloud: I never seriously considered Rally. Omni products are too platform specific and I fear lifespan. My use of Toodledo was a path-dependency accident of history, and now that Appigo has fixed task-creation-by-email I can switch fully. Primary downside is data lock [7]. My next option would have been Trello, but there’s no native Mac client, I don’t need distributed team support, it’s complex, the nomenclature is odd, etc. [8]

Here’s how I map “Agile” style of “getting things done” [9] to Appigo ToDo

• Tasks -> Tasks. (Tasks are are tied to projects may get Stars, not sure if I need to do that)
• Stories -> Projects
• Features -> List Name (Contexts and Tags will take on some of the things I use List Names for).

I think I’ll put “hours” and “points” into the Titles of Tasks and Stories.

 

The relation of “Features” to bigger Goals/Initiatives/etc I plan to map out in MindNode.app, but that’s another post.

Tasks associated with “Stories” get slots on the Calendar. I will still use Appigo ToDo for tasks unrelated to “Features”/“Projects”, those have the usual ABC priority (simplified from old Franklin/GTD priorities) which work like this:

• A/High: Get Due Date and time on calendar
• B/Medium: May get a due date, may have calendar time
• C/Low: No due date, no calendar

I’ll update this post in future as I fill in the rough spots.

- fn -

[1] Without going into details on my own twisted adaptation of Agile, I dislike the word “Story” and all of it’s subject-action baggage. I use “Story” to mean a testable unit of work that is composed of tasks, is measured in “points” where a “point” is 5 hours of real work, and may be part of a “Feature” (which is, etc).

[2] Ok, one more detail. The mysticism about the meaning of a “Story” "Point” also annoys.

[3] Fibonacci more or less, where as Points go up so does uncertainty. I was the best Estimator I know of — I’d do my initial Story estimates, decompose to Tasks and assign hours to tasks, sum the hours and divide by 5, then round up to next Fibonacci number (so 11 hours is 3 points). When I did Task estimates I assumed an average rather than ideal path, and adjusted for dependencies — esp. on unreliable corporate infrastructure.

[4] In practice this was too much planning overhead with distributed teams; 3 weeks is better in that case. I like 2 weeks for local teams. I could write another book on doing corporate software development with distributed teams.

[5] Ahh, Constraints. So important to choice, thus project planning. Could write a book about those too :-). Constraints are my friend, a relative of Requirements I suppose.

[6] Has any company ever killed more data, data formats, products and platforms? Apple is a charming TV sociopath serial-killer of a company.

[7] App.net.@clarkgoble tells me there’s a SQLite database and Todo Cloud data is CalDAV and theoretically extractable, though I suspect much would be lost. There’s also the back door of switching back to Toodledo and their export features, but that’s a cheat. I wish Toodledo had implemented full-text search, but I understand my task volume and complexity is not their market.

[8] I’m keeping on eye on Trello. Familiarity and time were constraints too.

[9] Yeah, GTD and all kinds of old Franklin stuff on goals, etc all fit in here, but that’s yet another book.

[10] In writing this post I reviewed past blog posts. It wasn’t too hard to switch from Franklin Planner paper to the PalmOS in the 90s, but the 00s switch from PalmOS productivity Tools to early iOS was brutal. Awful. Horrible. MobileMe… argggggghhh. It went on for years, no thanks to Apple [6] but sincere thanks to pre-Evil Google. The pain of that switch is one reason I’m reluctant to commit to anything novel - like Trello.

See also

• Gordon's Tech: Trello - an orientation review 11/2013
• Gordon's Tech: Getting Things Done and Managing Email with Lookout for Outlook 12/2004: I still do email this way but I do a lot more Calendar scheduling within an “iteration”.
• Gordon's Tech: The Fallows Summary of Getting Things Done (GTD) 10/2004
• Gordon's Tech: Toodledo gets it 8/2008: I’ve used them for 7 years! Not a bad run. They do a good job and nobody beats them for data freedoms.
• Gordon's Tech: Using Outlook Tasks: a mini-tutorial 8/2008: Outlook may be dead but there’s a lot of power there.
• Gordon's Tech: Getting Things Done: integrating the Outlook add-in with Palm synchronization across multiple machines 9/2004: PTSD. Ugh.
• Gordon's Notes: Google - please give me tasks that appear on my calendar 8/2009. Despite the title is really about how I did tasks then - which is quite similar to now. I’d forgotten I started doing Agile in 2009. By the time Google introduced their half-hearted task/calendar integration I’d changed directions.
• Gordon's Notes: What the iPhone needs is Gorilla Haven’s DateBk6 1/2009: Amazing how little progress has been made with task/calendar integration. I can only assume the Gods are interfering lest we storm the gates of Heaven. Seriously, why don’t we have smarter task/calendar software? i could write another book about this, or at least another book-length blog post. Pimlico actually has an Android app as of 2015.
• Gordon's Notes: Task management: a feature request 9/2008; Pre Evil-Google, when we used to ask for boons. Still waiting for this one.
• Gordon's Tech: Toodledo iPhone vs. Appigo Todo.app 10/2008: How I ended up with both.
• Gordon's Notes: Beating email - it's doable. Here's how. 7/2008. Early version, I got better.
• Gordon's Notes: Inbox zero - mastering corporate email 1/2010. Traffic management is key. I just discovered I still have a presentation online about this. In the corporate setting I went to “Sentbox zero” — something so advanced I fear to describe it.
• Gordon's Tech: Creating Google events from email and SMS 11/2010: Alas, the SMS creation feature is gone. Google’s email/event create support is a bit flaky.
• Gordon's Tech: Palm: 2003-2013. Mostly pain of transition.
• Gordon's Tech: pda and Gordon's Tech: PIM: way more like this. Someday I should clean up those two tags.

A data lock free local file format for a concept map or mind map application

It occurred to me, probably not for the first time, that there’s a natural local file store data lock free ‘file format’ for a concept map or mind map application.

Treat each node as a file system directory (folder) and make the node name the name of the folder. Treat hierarchical relationships between nodes as container relationships in the file system. Represent other arcs as hard links (unix) or soft links/shortcuts/alias contained with a folder. (Would be good to be able to distinguish Aliases that represent relationships between nodes from Aliases to system files that are properties of the node, such as an nvAlt/Simplenote text file.)

Treat other contents of a folder as properties of the node, such as notes (plain text, RTF, etc). 

And so on.

That’s the file “format”, the UI can be any variant of current Mindmap/concept map. User interactions turn into file system calls.

I’m sure someone has done this somewhere. Anyone know of a reference?

Google and the Net 2015: The Quick, the Sick and the Dead - 7th edition

I first published a Google Quick, Sick and Dead list in January 2009, at the dawn of Dapocalypse. This was six months after the Battle of Latitude; we were well into the post-Android Google-Apple War I. By then the iPhone was big, but not as dominant as it would get.

Less than two years later, in July of 2011, Google Plus launched. Five months later Google Reader Shares vanished and Google 1.0 was declared dead. Looking back, a lot of software became ill in 2011.

Again with the damned interesting times! Since then many cloud services have been killed or abandoned. We’re growing accustomed to major regressions in software functionality with associated data loss (most recently with Apple’s Aperture). I am sure businesses struggle with the rate of change.

Looking back the 2009+ software turmoil probably arose from 2 factors, one technological and one external. The technological factor was, in a word, the iPhone. Mobile blew up the world we knew. The external factor was the Great Recession (which, in Europe, continues today as the Lesser Depression). 

Of course if you believe the Great Recession has its roots in globalization and IT (including IT enabled fraud and IT enabled globalization) [1] then it’s really all a post-WW II thing. I suppose that’s how it will look to the AIs.

Which brings me back to my Google Quick Sick and Dead series. It’s been more than four years since the 6th edition. I haven’t had the heart to update the list the way I once did — too many old friends have become ill. I’m doing an update today because I started a post on the Google Calendar iPad experience and it got out of control.

As with prior editions this is a review of the Google Services I use personally — so neither Android nor Chromebooks are on the list. It’s also written entirely from my personal perspective; I don’t care how the rest of the world sees Google Search, for me it’s dying.

With those caveats, here’s the list. Items that have effectively died since my last update are show with a strike-through but left in their 2011 categorization, old items have their 2011 category in parentheses. Items in italics are particularly noteworthy.

The Quick (Q) 

• Google Scholar (Q)
• Chrome browser (Q)
• Maps and Earth (Q)
• News (Q)
• Google Drive and core productivity apps - Docs, Sheets, Present (Q)
• YouTube (Q)
• Google Profile (Q)
• Google Translate (S)

The Sick (S)

• Google Parental Controls (D)
• Gmail (Q)
• Google Checkout (S)
• iGoogle (S)

The Walking Dead (D)

• Google Search (S)
• Google Custom Search (D)
• Google Contacts (Q)
• Google Hangout (S): on iOS
• Google Voice (D)
• Google Mobile Sync (S)
• Google’s Data Liberation Front (S)
• Google Calendar (Q)
• Google Tasks (Q)
• Picasa Web Albums (Q)
• Blogger (D)
• Google Books (S)
• Google Plus (Q)
• Buzz (D)
• Google Groups (D)
• Google Sites (D)
• Knol (D)
• Firefox/IE toolbars (D)
• Google Talk (D)
• Google Reader (S)
• Orkut (S)
• Google Video Chat (S) - replaced by G+ Hangout

A lot has happened in four years. I was surprised to see I’d rated Google Search as “sick” in 2011 — but that was the right call. In my personal experience Search has moved into the Dead zone since; I am often unable to locate items that I know exist. I have to find them by other means.

 

I haven’t adopted any new Google Services since 2011. On the other hand hand many services I thought would die have simply remained “Walking Dead”. Google Scholar’s persistence is quixotic; I figure Larry Page is personally fond of it.

 

Google Calendar is the Canary case. Four years ago Calendar was due for some updates, but it looked healthy. My immediate family members each have 1 Google Calendar; with various other family and school calendars and event feeds our total number of subscribed calendars is probably in the mid 20s. We use Google Calendar with Calendars 5.app on iOS and Safari or Chrome elsewhere. We’re Calendar power users.

 

Since 2011 though Calendars has stagnated. Google’s only “improvement” has been a partially reversed 2011 usability reduction. Today, thanks to our school district’s iPad program, I got to experience Google Calendar on the iPad without the benefit of Calendars 5 

[2]. It’s an awful experience; the “mobile” view is particularly abysmal. Suddenly four years of stagnation leapt into focus. Google Calendar is now an Android/Chrome only product.

 

Looking across the list there’s a pattern. Google is abandoning its standards based and internet services, focusing instead on Android and an increasingly closed Chrome-based ecosystem. Presumably those two will merge and Google and Apple will become mirror images. It’s unclear if anything will inherit the non-video streaming internet, or if it will simply pass into history. Maybe our best hope is that smaller standards-friendly ventures like Fastmail, Pinboard, WordPress, and Feedbin may prosper in an ecosystem Google has abandoned.

  

Damn, but it’s been one hell of a ride. The take away for me is that I need to get away from Google, but that’s easy to say and hard to do. Replacing my family’s grandfathered Google Apps services with the Fastmail equivalent would cost over $600 a year and the migration would take a non-trivial chunk of my lifespan. History is better to read than to experience, and we’re still early into the AI age.

 

- fn -

 

[1] It’s a different blog post, but widespread hacking (governments included) and ubiquitous identity theft may yet kill Internet 1.0. As of as Jon Robb predicted in 2007 the Internet itself is ailing.

[2] I haven’t been able to get my own iPad purchase past Gordon’s Laws of Acquisition. Those same laws have stopped my iPhone 6 purchase. Maybe I can justify the iPad by keeping my 5s.

See also:

• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #1 (1/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #2 (11/09)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #3 (6/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #4 (10/10)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #5 (5/11)
• Google Quick, Sick and Dead #6 (9/11)
• AvantGo RIP - memories of the roaring 90s 6/2009
• Software died three years ago. Why? 12/2014.
• Apple kills yet another photo sharing service - and generally screws up iOS photo management 9/2014
• How quickly can businesses adapt? 7/2014
• Apple and the 2013 tech world - in the doldrums 8/2012
• Project Ducky - why I’ve stopped using new Cloud services 3/2013
• Fraud and Globalization: Toy Story III 6/2007

Software died three years ago. Why?

This is a weird time in software. Lots of things are going away, but few new things are appearing.

As best I can tell Windows software died around 2005. Based on what I’ve seen over the past year, particularly in the Mac App Store, OS X software died around 2011. The Chrome and Safari extensions I’ve looked for, like Pinboard extensions today, were often last updated in 2011 — around the time Google Reader died.

The iOS app store is such a well known mess that my fellow app.net (adn) geeks can’t find anything new to say, except that iTunes 12 is probably worse. Aperture died 6 months ago and yet is still being sold. Yosemite is still months away from release ready. My Google Custom Search Engines return fewer good results. Google Plus is moribund. Windows 8 might be fine but no-one I know uses it. 

I can’t speak to Android, except for second hand reports of increasing malware problems. If I strain to find a bright spot I’d say Google Maps is improving in some ways, but regressing in others. Ok, there’s the malware industry. It’s flourishing.

I seem to remember something like this in the 90s, both before and after Mosaic. Long time ago though, I may be confounding eras.

My best guess is that our software development is a lagging casualty of the Great Recession. Good software takes years to create, so the crash of 2009 probably played out in software around 2011. The effects were somewhat offset by involuntary entrepreneurs creating small but excellent products. The Great Recession’s effects started to fade in 2014, but that meant many Creatives were sucked back into profitable employment. The projects they’re working on now won’t bear fruit until 2015 and 2016.

The Great Recession is probably the main driver, but there are synergistic contributors. Apple was probably coming apart at the seams when Jobs fell ill, and it now behaves like a corporation riven by civil war. The stress of the mobile transition, and the related transformation of the software market from geek to mass user, hit everyone. I’ve little insight into how well ad-funded software development is working, but Google’s disastrous Plus effort suggests it’s not all that healthy.

The good news is that there’s hope. Google may turn away from Plus. Facebook is going to have to find new revenue streams. There’s a storm building among Apple’s customers that Cook can’t possibly ignore. Most of all, the Great Recession is fading.

Here’s to 2015. Hang in there.

Apple kills Aperture. Observations.

In an alternate universe….

Today in a terse but clear posting on the Aperture web site Tim Cook apologized for the difficult decision to end Apple’s competition in the professional and prosumer photography market. He promised to fully cooperate with Adobe on a migration path to Lightroom that would convert Aperture non-destructive edit metadata to Lightroom format. All image metadata would be preserved. Group, Album and Smart Album functionality would suffer, but Adobe promised to improve their tools to ease the transition. Aperture sales were immediately discontinued. Support through Yosemite and ongoing RAW image updates for new cameras was promised through 2016. Users were saddened but appreciated Apple’s professional approach….

That would be a pleasant universe.

Meanwhile, in the real world, the announcement that Aperture was dead, and that Apple was effectively abandoning professional photography, appeared via Jim Dalrymple’s blog. Aperture remained on sale in the App Store while muddled Apple clarifications showed up in various blogs. Some said saying there would be support through Yosemite, others hinted at helping Adobe with migration to Lightroom. As end-of-life announcements go it was a complete screw-up.

Oh - but users of Logic Pro and Final Cut Pro “should not worry about their apps—they will continue as normal”.

Right.

The impact on heavy users of Aperture is heard to overstate. That’s why Gruber’s “that’s the way the cookie crumbles” earned his feed a Gordon-death-click. Maybe I’ll return someday, but The Loop covers the same ground and is a bit less irritating - albeit equally uncritical of Apple. I’m sure Gruber is devastated.

I won’t dwell on the migration path ahead, though it makes my excruciating transition from iPhoto look like a walk in the park. As of today none of my 20,000 or so non-destructive image edits will convert to Lightroom, much less album/image relationships, image/project, folder/image/project, folder/project comments, geo-tags and more. I won’t even mention Videos (which were never well supported in Aperture or iPhoto).

I’m not doing anything for a while, but one immediate impact is that I won’t be buying any camera that Aperture doesn’t currently support. If Aperture will indeed work on Yosemite then I’ve got years to convert — and I won’t be upgrading to Yosemite if there’s any doubt about Aperture support. (Which means no major Apple hardware purchases next year.)

Beyond Apple’s announcement fiasco, I was struck by the generally dismissive commentary — as though it were a trivial move to go to Lightroom. Happily, now that I’ve killed Daring Fireball, I can say the blogs I follow are relatively realistic about the impact of Aperture’s demise.

It’s not just Aperture users who have grounds to worry. Given Apple’s software record over the past 5 years (iBooks, iMovie, Podcast, Aperture 1, etc) what’s the chance Photos will be safe for serious iPhoto users before 2018? iPhoto users are back in Apple photo management limbo.

On a larger front I’ve written before of Data Lock, and of how the “Cloud” is making data lock even stronger. I knew the risk I took with iPhoto 2 11 years ago [1]; a path that has led to the dead end of Photos.app.

The way Apple executed Aperture’s termination is a rich lesson in the consequences of data lock (a risk I understood when I signed up with iPhoto long years ago). Does anyone think it will be possible to move from Apple’s next generation Photo app to Lightroom? That’s a far harder problem than moving from Aperture to Lightroom — and that’s nearly inconceivable at the moment.

I can’t do much about the way Apple handled this transition — other than spare myself the temptation of a camera purchase. I can, however, reduce my purchases of Apple products — especially Apple software. I have no faith in Apple at all.

[1] From my ancient web page on digital photography: 

Problems: iPhoto 2 through 5

iPhoto has longstanding problems. I knew of them when I started with iPhoto 2, but I took the gamble that the large user community, and the prominence of Apple's multimedia iLife suite, would pressure Apple to improve the product. That hasn't worked. If you're a PC user you should not switch to a Mac for digital photo management, instead I'd recommend Picasa (free from Google). If you're a Mac user, take a close look at iView MediaPro -- though that's a risky choice too (small market, hard for vendor to compete against iLife).

If you proceed with iPhoto, know the risks …

Data Lock - You can check in, but you can't check out.
You can export images -- though it's tricky to export both originals and modifications. You can't, however, migrate your albums, smart albums, comments, keywords, captions, etc. etc. I thought iView MediaPro would take advantage of this and sell and import utility, but they haven't. So when you use iPhoto, you marry iPhoto…

Update 6/28/2014: Clark Goble responds with more eloquence …

as Apple pushes more and more the lock-in of iCloud, of iBooks, and of iTunes video, why should we trust Apple if they don’t have a way to get the data out? This is the thing that some activists have preached for years and most of us have discounted.5 But now I think it’s a real question Apple has unintentionally made very significant. Why should I trust Apple not to lose interest in iBooks if sales drop? (Which apparently they have) iTunes Music isn’t a big deal because there’s no DRM. But the rest? Why should I store files in iWork?

Can we trust Apple? The cavalier way Apple is responding is telling us, no we can’t. And that’s a shame because they could easily have made this announcement in a way that said we could

I particularly appreciated his footnotes…

… I remember Apple fans ridiculing people trusting Microsoft with Plays For Sure DRM when that product collapsed and people lost their data. Many of those same people are pretty flippant about locked data today. ↩

I doubt rumors of Apple adding a Lightroom export will include being able to port both your raw data files and the adjustments you made to the files. You’ll either have to export as TIFFs or lose your adjustments simply because the math won’t be exactly the same. Heck, I’m skeptical they’ll export anything beyond metadata and files… 

Lessons from Photo Stream Unlimited - Typhoon Mobile and is Apple going to make a prosumer camera?

For an old school technology geek, reared on local file stores and data cables and file formats and backups and (ugh) synchronization, these are challenging times. Our life is getting harder as the tech landscape shifts to fit billions of connected devices paired with humans who don't know a .docx from the proverbial hole in the ground.

Remember Cnut and the tides? He knew you can't fight City Hall. The best we can do is figure out which way the wind blows. (Ok, I'll stop now.)

So what does Google's mangling of old school email [1] and weakening of CalDAV support, Apple's ending of iTunes USB sync of calendar and contacts [2], Apple's Podcast.app disregard for iTunes metadata [3], Apple's mobile/Cloud retcon of iWorks [4] and, especially, Apple's very quiet Everpixing [5] of Photo Stream tell us about the wind?

It tells us that mobile has at last eaten the world. We knew this was coming, but we didn't know when. Hello Typhoon Mobile, good-bye the world we elder geeks evolved in.

The new world is transitory -- people don't keep photos any more. They walk away from Facebook accounts with barely a backwards look. It's Los Angeles all over.

The new world doesn't have cables. It doesn't really have local file stores or local backup. It rarely does power or complexity -- pro power is going to get expensive. Do you love your iTunes Smart Lists? Play 'em Taps while you can.

We can't fight this -- heck, even Apple can't fight this. At best Apple may support a rear guard action for its old school paying customers. Google, Amazon and Samsung ain't gonna be so merciful or so motivated. [6]

Maybe we'll meet at a bar sometime and raise a glass to the days that were.

Oh, and that camera? 

Well, if Photo Stream is as big as I think it will be -- just enough memory in the age of transience -- there's a nice little business for a Photo Stream compatible prosumer device that is to Camera.app as the MacBook is to the iPad. It's a natural Apple software/manufacturing disruption move. An iCamera they make that works with Nikon, Canon or Leica glass -- whoever makes the right deal. I'll buy one.

- fn -

[1] I just modified the wikipedia entry to say Gmail is an "email-like" service rather than an "email service". I doubt that will stick, but eventually it will. 

[2] So far on Mavericks. It's effectively ending for Podcasts and iBooks as well. After Apple stops selling iPods all cable sync is going to go.

[3] You can change Podcast titles in iTunes, but if the Podcast is available online those edits are ignored.

[4] Retcon is how comic books dealt with middle-aged superheroes that were born 60 realtime years ago; it's a recapitulation of how Greeks did mythology -- every town had its version of the stories, and they got frequent reboots. In software we once had "updates" that added features and capabilities or managed platform changes, now we have retcons that inherit branding. They come with new capabilities, but also substantial regressions. Apple has kinda-sorta apologized for calling iThing 13 iWorks, but they didn't have much of  a choice.

[5] Everpix was a photo service that claimed to store all images forever for all devices. They were so obviously high risk I avoided them, but it may not be coincidental that they died around the same week that Apple ended its Photo Stream image limit.

[6] Who is it that makes Office 365? Can't remember.

Update: A corollary of all of this is that we're never going to come up with a DRM standard for either eBooks or movies. We'll go instead to a pure rental model.

Wanted: A blog feed that consists of a random sample of all past posts

I've been idly looking for a solution to the blog backlog problem. Lately I've seen others looking for the same thing, so I'm expecting a fix within the next few months.

What's the backlog problem?

The backlog problem is discovering a great blog, but reading only the most recent posts. That is, after all, how blogs were designed to work. Problem is, there's a lot of great stuff in the backlog. I'd like to read that too - the same way I read my other blogs.

What I want is a special feed for every blog I read that's the 'random post feed'. It could be generated by a WordPress extension for example -- it just has to be integrated with the blog's database and publish 1-2 posts a day. [1]

Any day now ....

[1] Google Reader could have done this because Google kept old posts around, but nobody else is going to keep billions of blog posts in an archive. The RSS feed for backlog posts has to come from a random selection of all past posts -- say 1 random selection a day. I've seen mention of using Yahoo Pipes to do something like this, but Pipes can only randomize the urls exposed by a feed -- not all past posts.

Will we get a $5000 custom app development business?

There are a lot of apps I want that that I can't find, apps like a personal-corporate search tool, or a corrosion-resistant wiki, or adding a graph navigation (link) layer to a plain text repository.

I know enough about building software that I can, fairly quickly, make up an initial set of requirements that I'm reasonably sure are a good match to readily available toolkits and technologies. I can quickly revise them to match timelines and resources. It's a bit of an odd knack but it's one I have.

There are architects I know who can, in an hour, lay out how to build to those requirements -- including specifying platform options and toolkit alternatives.

The first step is free for me. For $1K-$2K for 1-2 hours work I can find good people to do the second step.

Things get tricky when we try to turn this into code. Anyone who has done outsourcing knows that there's a gap between the theory of Ugandan MOOC grads wanting to work for $20/hour and the reality of high school quality coders who work for a year before moving into management. Not to mention little details like testing.

Open source only works if the app is something the developers themselves want to use ... and that's a special case.

So for $2K I can only get to the pre-coding step given today's methods for organizing paid work ...