Tuesday, November 6, 2007

oPtion$

I pre-ordered oPtion$ at Amazon long before it became commercially available (which it actually did is in the last few days). I forgot all about it until this morning when I got the familiar Amazon carton wrapped goodies. As many of you might already know, oPtion$ is a parody book written by FSJ (I guess by now you know who this guy is -- I've been talking about him a lot lately). He composed the book inspired by a number of his best postings about the recent Jobs option backdating 'scandal' on his FSJ Diaries blog. The picture here right is a scan from the back-cover of that book.

I took the liberty to copy the prologue here:

"Your average frigtard probably figures I've got it pretty sweet. I'm one of the richest people in the world, and I'm hailed everywhere as the most brilliant businessman of all time. I'm lean and handsome, with close-trimmed hair and a Sean Connery-esque salt and pepper beard. And I'm famous. Like People magazine famous. Like everywhere I go people recognize me, and they get all weird around me, and you know what? I love it. I never get tired of it. If there's one thing I can't stand it's retards like Britney Spears who say they wish they weren't famous. Come on. If you really feel that way, then give away all your money, turn your wigger spawn over to Child Protective Services -- which, let's face it, is where they ought to be anyway-- and move your cottage cheesy ass to a hut in Tibet. What's that? Yeah. That's what I thought. So shut up.

What's even cooler is that I'm not famous for being some steroid-taking action movie star or illiterate dick-grabbing rapper or moronic freak-of-nature basketball player. I'm famous for being a genius, and for running the coolest consumer electronics company in the world, which I totally started in my garage, by myself, or actually with this other guy but he's out of the picture now, so who cares. I'm famous because the devices I create are works of art, machines so elegantly crafted and industrially designed that they belong in a museum. My iMac computers and iLife software restore a sense of childlike wonder to people's lives, and bestow upon their owners a sense that they are more intelligent and even, well, better than other people. I also invented the friggin iPod. Have you heard of it?

People ask me all the time what motivates me. It's not the money. There's already way too much money, so much that I can't even remember how much there is. I never really cared about money anyway. I could wipe my butt with hundred dollar bills, that's how little I care about money. I actually did that once.

To recap: I'm a handsome, famous, spiritually gifted genius; and I wipe my ass with money. No wonder people are jealous of me. I understand. I'd be jealous of me, too. Yet what most people don't realize is that in many ways the life of El Jobso is not always so fantastic. I travel too much. I work too much. I sleep too little. I rarely take a day off. I'll be honest; it's a hard life. It's like Bono always says when we're hanging out. People think being a rock star is just nothing but sex and drugs and having fun, but it's a grind, man, it really is.

But the really tough thing about being super brilliant and successful is that people get jealous, and they try to knock you down a peg. In my case the top-seeded jealous frigtard I've ever encountered was a United States Attorney named Francis X. Doyle, a big sweaty blockhead who one day decided that he wanted to run for governor of California and who figured that the best way to launch his career would be to prosecute a high-profile celebrity CEO. Why not, right? Eliot Spitzer worked this same scam, bringing charges against dudes on Wall Street, and now he's governor of New York.

So Doyle and his tiny sidekick, a young lawyer named William Poon (I swear I am not making this up), decided to take down El Jobso. They sat up there in their ugly office in San Francisco, pecking away at their Windows laptops, plotting and scheming, making phone calls to the SEC and leaking information to the press. Fatman and Robin, we used to call them. Or Inspector Clouseau and Kato. I wasn't their only target. These idiots went after dozens of companies in Silicon Valley. They concocted a fairy tale about greedy executives lining their pockets and cheating investors, and of course the nitwits in the press bought the whole story and ran with it, because let me tell you something, if there's any group of people in the world who are suckers for a story about evil rich people, it's the filthy hacks in the media. These spiteful, hateful, small-dicked losers spend their entire lives in a constant state of jealousy and resentment. Here's their job description: Interview people who are richer, more successful, and more interesting than you are, then take cheap shots at them in print. They're parasites. They're leeches. To overcome the shame of what they do, these conniving bastards convince themselves that they're saving the world by exposing all those rich, successful, interesting people as phonies. Which is ridiculous. But whatever.

No doubt you've heard, what happened to me. You've read the stories about the big scandal at Apple. The fact is, you've heard only their side. You've heard a distorted tale based on leaks and lies, fabrications and falsehoods created by prosecutors, government flunkies, and media hacks. Now it is my turn. And believe me, my lies and fabrications and falsehoods are way more convincing than theirs. "

Go get this folks... it will really cheer-up your otherwise dull lives...

The Google Phone Alliance

When we first heard the news about an upcoming mobile phone from Google we all thought it was about a real hardware thing... not a contract, or 'platform', or 'alliance' of some sort. Turns out we were all wrong, particularly those nitwits who spent good hours of their lives designing concept phones like what they thought Google designers would come out with (see photo left). It was about an alliance, just like Microsoft had attempted in the past with its Mobile Windows disaster to only see it falling apart like a house of cards. In the last few days, the best article I read about the Google Phone adventure was at the FSJ blog (click on my favorite links at the left column to get there). If you really feel blue and hate you even woke up this morning, read FSJ's account of the Google-Phone. Man, oh man... keep some clean underwear by your side while reading it...

Off this posting, here's a taste of FSJ's (Daniel Lyons) take on initiatives based on Consortia and Alliances... how right on the money he's again!

"...Consortia don't work because nobody can ever agree on anything and everyone always wants to push the group in ways that advantage themselves and disadvantage everyone else. Reason #2 -- the only companies that join consortia are the ones who are too stupid or shitty to make a great product on their own. It's like, Hey, we've got forty spazzo companies that can't fuck their way out of a paper bag; let's put them all together and maybe they'll magically become some kind of big bad powerhouse. More likely it'll just be some scary ass Frankenstein monster, walking around drooling and tripping over its own tongue..."

Monday, November 5, 2007

Twitter, Take Two!

Obviously I was again kinda late to 'discover' Twitter. It seems there are about half a million Twits active today. New members are being added at the rate of about 2000 a day! An interesting site to learn about all this is Twitter Facts that has done some interesting analyses of the Twitter phenomenon.

One analysis explores the 'long tail' behavior of the stats relating to Twitter. Let's call a person with a Twitter account a Twit. Three interesting concepts are being analyzed: the followers (number of Twits following the postings of one particular Twit), the following (total number of Twits that one particular Twit regularly follows) and updates being the total number of postings a Twit has published. Twits with many followers are called "whales". Twitter Facts discovered a long tail behavior in almost all types of statistical graphs (followers, following and updates) which in itself is quite interesting and probably relates to the ways humans socialize.

One of the most popular whales, Brian Shaler published a short article about Dunbar's number. See here an excerpt:

Thanks to popular social networking services like Twitter, Facebook, etc., users can communicate with others much more efficiently. Before this technology, an avid socialite would have a limit to the number of people he or she could communicate with. Now, there is no limit. On Twitter, the “whales” (people with large numbers of contacts) have thousands of followers. On Facebook, they are hitting the maximum limit of 4,999 friends. With high efficiency communication platforms, there is practically no limit to the number of people a “popular” individual can communicate with.

What happens to someone when they talk to thousands of people at a time? If you wait in line to talk to this person or if you are a small voice in a large crowd of people clamoring for the attention of this person, are you going to be able to have a meaningful interaction? With all the noise, will you have a strong enough signal to hold a conversation of much significance?

Makes you think what the point is for someone to be following more than 150 people, Internet facilitated or not. If Dunbar was right then something is wrong with some Twits following hundreds of other Twits. And if they are stupid enough to get notified with SMS about new postings then I'd like to be their mobile operator...

One interesting site is TwitTown.com that publishes ranks of twits based on their number of followers. Visit them and take a look at the top ranking list. See how many celebs appear there of whom I guess there are plenty of wannabe fakes. For instance, Bill Clinton must be one like this...

On the other side, Barack Obama and John Edwards seem legitimate. I am not so sure about Steven Colbert though. He seems pretty crazy to be citing his own one-liners for kicks. Like "Hey, America, are you thinking what I'm thinking? You soon will be." Posted last April... quite prophetic if you think that he recently made public his intent to run for President... If Ronald Reagan and Arnold Schwarzenegger could make it, why not Colbert. Or Jon Stewart for that matter?

A great Twit favorite is iJustine, of course. In her early twenties, she's been quite a web celeb with her blogs and YouTube clips. IMHO her most hilarious clip is the one where she sobs and pleads to the world to leave Steve Jobs and Britney Spears alone...

Another Net celeb is Dave Winer, the legendary inventor of 'Blogging' and 'RSS'. And of course, another FSJ. And the Asian character who carries a camera mounted to his ear and keeps filming his life 24x7... and finally, a fake Borat...

If you decided to become a Twit, try TwitterWhere, that will help you discover other nitwits like yourself in your neighborhood. It's not terribly accurate but it works.

Sunday, November 4, 2007

Türkiye

Now tell me... can you be more Turkish than the guy on the shot? Great shot BTW, with his head and ears at the golden corner (the thirds rule).

Recently, we Greeks started to like them Turks... for as long as we beat them in soccer games... We also support their entrance to the EU against all odds and against Sarkozy's and Angela's desires. We also trade with them and do cool business... you see, they are used to be taken advantage of by sly Greek and Jewish traders for centuries, that is... I had an uncle, retail trader, like this who they deported to Greece in 1963 after they found out he was stealing anything that moved for years, under their nose. What Turks are good at are winning battles and wars... but traders? No way!

Here's to you suckers! Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, Libanese, the whole lot of you... you are all born brothers among yourselves but still keep on lusting each other's blood... deep red as in the flag above...

Are you a twit?

TWIT used to mean "This Week In Tech" and it was (maybe still is) a Podcast about the tech news and gossip of the week, examined by a series of usual suspect reporter celebs in Silicon Valley, led by the legendary, and useless if you ask me, Leo Laporte. The only guy I liked on that panel was John C. Dvorak, who at least has always something meaningful to say.

This TWIT is quite different though. It's you and me and everybody else who's geeky and crazy enough to subscribe to the Twitter, the one line blogging social networking facility that can be fed by Instant Messaging clients and SMSs from cellphones.

Imagine you are killing time at an airport waiting for your flight to depart and you are... playing with your Nokia, or iPhone for that matter. You see something happening around you, funny, serious, whatever, and you suddenly feel an immense "desire" to send a message to the world and talk about it. An one-line message, so to say. Like, "a guy just walked in front of me with a monkey and the monkey smiled at me...". How exhilarating experience that was. You gotta tell people about it... What'd you do? You join Twitter!

Twitter members are sending messages to the Twitter Public space for everyone else to read via their PC and/or cellphone text message reception facility (a.k.a. SMS). As a Twitter member, you answer to the question "What do you do?"; the idea is then to enter a short text message of, say 100/200 characters maximum, telling something about what you are doing and experiencing at the moment. Anything your heart desires... as an example, check the kinda BS I am posting to Twitter in an attempt to "try" the system and discover the "deeper meaning" of such an emerging social networking phenomenon.

The idea is to invite friends who care about what you are busy doing in any given moment of the day, and even get "alarmed" on their cellphone that you've just posted something new... I wonder, unless you are called something like "Bill Gates" or "Sarkozy" or "Al Gore" for that matter, why should more than just a handful people (your wife, close friends and maybe children) should give a didlii squat what you are busy doing, anyways...

Nevertheless, you'd be surprised how many people, with nothing more useful to do, have put in their favorite lists scores of insignificant Jon Doe's who keep discussing their miserable lives in single line blogs on Twitter. It's so bad that Twitter came up with the Twitter Poster, a display of avatar photographs of the most active Twits, with the most popular among those shown by larger size avatar icons. The larger your avatar is displayed, the more followers you got. There are Twits who are being followed by thousands of brain-dead morons in a sort of newly bread one-line textual voyeurism.

There maybe one single occasion where Twitter might be somewhat useful. (Trust me, I consumed a great deal of gray matter inside my scull in order to come-up with this one...) Suppose something critical is happening to you and you just can't reach people you need to reach; you know they follow what you do, because they told you so, but you just can't find their coordinates to message them something urgent (too far fetched, I know...). Ok, then, you twit the message and you know they'll probably read it in the next five minutes it will hit their antennas... It could be a matter of LIFE AND DEATH, that is... noooot??? Gimme a break!

Anyways, that's Twitter. Invented by a big shot someone (I forget who) who became a multi-millionaire first time by inventing another popular social networking initiative (I also forgot which one) that he then sold to either Yahoo, Microsoft or Google... Apparently he's thinking of selling again...