Author Archives: omo

The worst Giants game I’ve witnessed on TV

There is no reason to look at the 23-7 victory over the Vikings any deeper than this: It was one bad team beating a really bad team. The two worst quarterbacks to play at MetLife Stadium this season: Josh Freeman of the Bucs in the season opener against the Jets and Josh Freeman of the Vikings on Monday night. He completed an abysmal 20 of 53 passes for 190 yards in his first game with Minnesota after Tampa first benched him and then cut him.

If the Giants’ luck has really changed, the Vikings this week will cut Freeman – can Christian Ponder really be worse than this guy? – and then the Eagles, who are dealing with injuries to Michael Vick and Nick Foles, will sign Freeman and start him Sunday against the Giants in Philly.

Not sure if it was the ugliest MNF game ever in MNF history, but it sure was close.

Verizon Samsung Galaxy S4 48-hour Impression

Cause: My Gnex suffered that one unfortunate fall to the concrete floor while I was juggling it (with an extended battery hatch, which proved finally too untenable on a bigass Samsung thing to one hand) at Otakon’s exhibit hall. The cracked screen is not usable for the long run, and my upgrade date was up within the week, coincidentally. I even had an assist with a cool doctor bro that I know from the internets who tried to save it last minute. It’s okay TBN, I’ve dropped this Gnex dozens of times and it was just a matter of time that it meets its doom with the cataclysmic failure, at least in terms of the glass.

I would’ve probably picked this phone over the HTC One because of hardware requirements, but since Verizon’s version of the One isn’t shipping until end of August [update: actually it’s available 8/22 (today) at select outlets], this is not really a choice I could make. I suppose I can still handle the Gnex for a couple weeks but it was about time to flash it clean to de-gunk it as performance on the thing has generally slowed a great deal, but feh. Why wait?

TL;DR: Great hardware and execution, ruined by terrible TouchWiz UI.

I’m definitely biased because I’ve been on Nexus phones for the past 3.5 years. Changing over to TW was like having to drive a Ford Focus rental after totaling your BMW 5 series. Okay, maybe not just a Ford Focus–more like a Ford Focus with Sync. And this unfair analogy probably should go further and say that your crashed 5 series was running on a V6 Accord engine and the Ford Focus rental had more horses than the 2013 Mustang Boss 302.

But the human interface element of things were so drastically worse that I really begin to hate the user experience. Part of it has a lot to do with getting used to how things are simply different, admittedly, but it’s like I’m using some mutated version of Android that only things that are shared between the two handsets were the apps. It’s just an entirely different user experience. And it happens to be a significantly worse experience. I mean, philosophically I’m all for “easy” mode or whatever, but if you want an example that “if you even need an easy mode, the UX sucks,” here you go. This UX is terrible.

Why is it terrible? Look at this notification dropdown flip over page. It’s like they put an install of windows 8 in this notification system. Not only this a text book example of shitty feature creep resulting in a hard-to-use interface, it looks like someone just took a Blackberry menu and Holo’d it.

Of course I wouldn’t mind it at all if I can root and install my own rom, except that the bootloader is locked. It was initially exploited but they’ve OTA patched it. You can root with the latest round of VZW GS4s but that’s it. I think this might be only for Verizon though.

I think I might be able to put up with this nonSense if I can wholesale redo the notification system on this thing. Which I hope is something I can do by installing a new rom. Which is something I hope I can do at all. If not then to the Amazon return center you go. I kind of omitted the rest of the TW UI in this impressionistic review because I ran with the default launcher for maybe 10 seconds.

For the rest of you, my fellow Verizon slaves, get this instead.

So within two weeks I’ll have to either see if a bootloader unlock happens, or back to Amazon it goes! I paid $149.99+tax which was the cheapest deal I know for upgraders. VZW also charges you $30 for an activation fee so we’ll see. Most likely I think I’m just going to swap to the One if I have to do this.

Worst July Ever

My paternal Grandmother has passed away earlier last week. I’m trying very hard not to mention Google Reader in the same sentence, but let’s just say that both have major impact in my life. Of course, I will forever remember my Grandmother. That’s something I can’t say for some throwaway web 2.0 product and its shitty product managing company. Nor does it seem appropriate to really talk about both in the same breath, but that’s the point I want to make here.

The passing of my Grandmother is a milestone, a turning point for my family. For the longest time my dad’s side of the family ran a lot like a traditional Chinese household, with my grandparents in the center. When my grandfather passed away about 12 years ago (March 2011), my grandmother never really got over it fully. It caused her to have some very severe bouts of depression and that was the underlying drive to worsen her health. Basically took down a perfectly healthy woman (despite having bouts with cancer twice) over the course of 12 years. Sure, she also turned 88 this year, but there’s something to be said of long-living, old Chinese people.

The truth is that she and her husband were really like one person. She poured out her life for him and for their children. And to the best of their responsibilities in this first world country, her children did as much as they could for her over that span. It was tough to deal with a person who has lost her center, at least in this world. So that became a difficult time for a lot of my family, especially towards the end of that 12-year cycle.

But with all the children having their own homes, the “familial” center is now just a house. There are now way fewer reasons for the family to gather together again. And thus we have all become all that much more American overnight, perhaps.

Replacing Google Reader

More about timing.

Here’s the thing; while the writing was on the wall, most people didn’t expect Google to ditch Reader 5 months from “now.” Now is now 4 months and three weeks on the proverbial rearview mirror. This means two things.

First, people who already run their own RSS clients and what not–Google Reader was great, but it didn’t do some things well, such as update on time. There are the tin-foil-hat guys who run their own RSS servers (or maybe they’re just super min-maxing nerds). There are also a variety of different companies serving the existing gap that GReader didn’t reach across, which is namely anything in the mobile space. Of course, there is the guys at The Old Reader who loves GRSI, like I do, that Goog axed unceremoniously. I still resent them for it today, to be perfectly honest.

Second, people who always wanted their own RSS clients but couldn’t launch because Google Reader was the de facto market king. It probably had 50%+ market share, and in the rare event that one of these 3rd party clients had a better UX and better feature set than GR, Google’s brand power and marketing meant these small guys had no chance in hell. Most of the time tho they didn’t have a better UX and/or better features–partly because there was little market opportunity, little incentives, to improve.

So when Google decided to shut Reader, the two groups of people sprang into action. Existing services had to scale to take in the refugees, and the second group now have incentive to play the game. This also means back in March, the landscape of your GR alternatives is very different than in mid June.

For one, Feedly Cloud now exists. And that’s what I’m moving to.

The Old Reader had bee my target of choice but I never really like it that much. Part of it had to do with performance, since it was reallllyyy swamped. Now it’s much better. Difference here being that Feedly does already support devices (although I use feed readers on my mobile devices like, one out of 300 days or something), and it sports a much better user experience (including additional views like the card one that I use for the image-heavy feeds). Feedly also doesn’t support all my feeds (Mandarake … fire hose feed doesn’t even load, but I can use figinstock if I had to), while TOR supports, well, GRSI-type deal. After a quick survey on twitter, more than half of my followers who responded went the way of Feedly anyway, so it is not a huge loss.

The funny thing is like, almost every guide about “life after Google Reader” fail to take into account this gap of 4.5 months or so, the development time for new jazz. Like the Digg reader (which looks like POS) and the AOL Reader (which might be slightly closer to what I’m looking for). Or the new Feedly Cloud reader.

Anyway, it’s not really time to worry about what works. It’s time to see what I can salvage from Google Reader in its final week. Farewell, friend and companion on the web!

Unified Messaging

Just stating a few conclusions that I’ve drawn based on my own experience (…a lot of it is professional, lol) and this article. And please note there are some inaccuracies and somewhat important omissions in that Verge article. You have to take it with a grain of salt. At the same time because I am professionally tied, you can take this post with a grain of salt too, but you really have to know your messaging to get where my bias is.

If ecosystem (and maybe a better way to phrase it is “console-ification”) of personal electronics is evolving into competing walled gardens, we will need uniform/shared protocols in order for them to communicate with each other. Today, here are some of the leading standards:

Addressing: URI, email addresses, phone numbers

Transport protocols: HTTP, SMS (ie., SMPP), XMPP, email (SMTP etc)

The unfortunate thing about this is that when XMPP/IM was implemented, the federated model kind of, well, doesn’t work. It is more thinking like a local network.

So.

WhatsApp and other mobile messaging services are successful today because they address based on phone numbers, not email or URI. Price is second to convenience and ubiquity, because XMPP clients on mobile phones has been around since a long time ago and those were free too. But that enabled people to send messages only to other people using the same service–think BBM. BBM is actually a good example as to what else WhasApp (and others) are doing right, but fundamentally by allowing phone numbers as addresses, it makes everyone a part of your system.

Rich Communication Services (RCS) is a real thing that carriers have been working on since 2007 (if not earlier), but obviously doing it top-to-bottom is a lot slower than a small company trying to disrupt. But as you know with carrier-branded mobile phones that sells for nothing with a 2-yr contracts, it can be a pretty powerful competitor in this space. This is where pricing matters.

Ultimately, what people pay for their cellular service is more or less entirely up to the carrier to determine. If you think paying $5 or $10 or $20 for however many text messages you send a month is too much, well they could just bump you into a new pricing paradigm and give you unlimited texts or a bucket of texts a month, rolling up the built-in cost to the core price of the new package. AT&T has done this already. But because of the way text messaging pricing has been set by US carriers, it’s becoming a sore point that further allows platforms like WhatsApp to expand in this way. Because, it’s free OTT messaging to people not using the app, and since it confederates based by phone number, it’s just data for the rest.

Since nobody is going to give up their user DBs, phone numbers will be the reliably #1 way to identify people, and become a key property for unified messaging. And invariably that means you need a carriers’ blessing to get this to work. That might mean, at the very least, have people sell phones to run your software (iMessage is a pretty solid first step).

RCS is really just a more carrier-friendly version of this. Which only means in order to compete with WhatsApp and the like, it require the same business and marketing approach–not expecting much there. More likely that someone buys them out first.