Scott Stevenson on Cappuccino.

Dan Benjamin explains both why he needs a new laptop bag, his criteria for picking a bag, and the bags he considered.

Perhaps just over-obsessive geekery, but I love reading well-thought out explanations of why someone chose their equipment, especially when I can benefit. Usually means I find a few new things to consider.

Dan had one thought that I particularly liked, however:

I’ve probably thought about that phrase every time I’ve made a purchase. Generally speaking, when you buy something impulsively, you’re probably going to make a bad decision. Worse, when you purchase something inexpensive (or maybe cheap is the better word), it usually doesn’t last as long as the expensive version would have. Everything breaks eventually, but cheap things tend to break sooner.

I’ve realized the same, and recently have begun considering the nominally more expensive, but higher quality, item to have a greater value than the cheaper and lower quality item. Paying for a higher quality product tends to also mean researching and taking more value in the item and company as well, which is an ultimately more rewarding experience than buying “affordable” products that are merely consumables, expected to break soon and be replaced.

A Zogby poll shows that after Obama’s convention speech and McCain’s announcement of Palin as his running mate, the two candidates are virtually tied.

But what I found most interesting were the numbers when Barr and Nader are factored in, specifically among independents. Barr is currently polling at 5%, with 4% of Republicans and 11% of Independents supporting him. His Independent support is quite large, and favorably for McCain, someone willing to support Barr is more likely to support McCain than Obama on economic issues.

Moreover, 12% of Independents remain undecided. In other words, Democrats and Republicans have now almost entirely fallen in line with their party’s ticket, but a large percentage of Independents — 37% including Nader’s supporters — are either undecided or supporting a third-party candidate.

This means the race will be heavily dependent on the Independent vote. Obama should pick up 3% of Independents supporting Nader, increasing his support among Independents to 42%, but McCain could conceivably pick up as much of 8% of Barr’s Independent supporters, bringing his support from Independents to 41%. At that point, undecided Independents become key. McCain needs them to split evenly, which may be enough to give him the lead (however slim) in overall vote because of his greater appeal with Democrats (8% of Democrats in this poll supported McCain, while 4% of Republicans supported Obama).

Palin, though, is an unknown. In this poll, 7% of Democrats and 5% of Republicans are undecided. Palin’s social conservative positions should help shore up McCain’s Republican support, peeling off 1-2% from undecided Republicans, which would further strengthen McCain’s position. If Palin appeals to just a small percentage of Democratic women, that could weaken Obama’s support and give McCain an edge.

Ultimately, this simply means it is a close election, and barring any October surprises, I think it is going to come down to election day. Whichever party is more motivated to get out the vote will win.

Fareed Zakaria argues that Russia’s invasion of Georgia is more akin to Russia’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 than their invasion of Hungary in 1956, a strategic blunder rather than a sign of Russia’s assertiveness and future.

He makes a decent point: Russia’s invasion of Georgia has driven the Ukraine and Poland into the open arms of the West, and isolated Russia from their traditional supporters against the West — former Soviet central asian states, and China.

But I think he misreads Russia’s invasion of Georgia. Zakaria states that Russia invaded Georgia and all it has to show for it is a lousy t-shirt, err, south Ossetia.

During the invasion, Russia attempted to bomb a central oil pipeline running through Georgia and into Turkey. This was not a mistake. Russia targeted the pipeline to show the West, and Europe particularly, who controls their oil. Europe depends on Russian natural gas running through the Ukraine, and has shut it off before.

Zakaria reads the invasion as a re-assertive Russia attempting to re-take a former sphere of influence and state while it is rich with oil wealth, and failing because the globalized world does not look favorably upon Russia’s ambitions. Not completely inaccurate, but it misses the big picture.

Putin, still firmly in control of Russia in his Prime Minister position, has re-created Russian autocracy, and is now showing Russia’s power in all senses — military, with Georgia; economic, with Georgia and Russian oil flowing to Europe through the Ukraine oil pipeline; diplomatic, through their alliance with Iran, Venezuela, et al.; and espionage through their assassinations and attempted assassinations in the Ukraine and Europe.

Ubiquity for Firefox

Mozilla Labs has released a video of something they are working on called Ubiquity, and the best way to describe it is it’s Quicksilver for the web.

Ubiquity is a great idea in the general sense. The idea is that we have all of these great services already — Google Maps, Craigslist, Twitter, GMail, et cetera, and most of them have APIs which allow developers to connect them and make them even more valuable; but why should we rely on developers to create these connections?

That’s where Ubiquity comes in. It is a browser-based, command-controlled and extensible tool which allows you to connect different services and do some really cool things, like highlight a list of apartments on Craigslist, invoke Ubiquity, type in “map it” (or whatever the command is), and it does it — it takes the location data of the apartments and maps it in Google Maps.

It is also extensible, so others can write plugins for Ubiquity and connect even more services together or create new functionality.

This is all great (and I don’t mean that sarcastically — it really is. I love that Mozilla Labs is pushing forward the idea of a web browser), but this makes me wonder a bit, should this all be within a web browser, or should web APIs be better extended to support al kinds of desktop and web applications?

Rather than Ubiquity, I think we need an all-encompassing framework which allows web service developers, and application developers, to easily connect with each other. For example, the framework should build in micro-formats so they are easy to build in to your service, and it is easy for, say, a desktop collaboration app to, using standard calls in this framework, easily find whatever kind of data the user is looking for.

Basically, we need an end-to-end web framework for services and apps to build in, so all sorts of applications can develop, rather than just develop plugins for a web browser.

Many feared that the iPhone factory worker who had her picture taken with an iPhone while on the job would be fired, but apparently Foxconn has no intention of firing her.

Foxconn has described it as a “beautiful mistake,” and that is accurate in more ways than one.

While Chinese factories have been maligned as inhumane, the photos show a clean, modern work area and a worker having fun. It is perfect publicity for Foxconn — an attractive female worker’s photos end up on an iPhone, and the photos are spread online virally. The brilliant part is that the positive work environment aspect of the photos is not the focus of them. It is a background thing that is being mentioned as an aside, which means free good publicity without any debate over working conditions in Foxconn factories — just the background message to people that Foxconn factories are quite nice.

This is publicity that companies cannot generate on their own, and it would be ludicrous for Foxconn to punish the girl, because that would turn public goodwill into condemnation.

Panic’s Coda

Panic just released Coda 1.5, and it is a big update. Besides speed improvement, 1.5 brings:

Coda 1.5 adds a number of major new features, including fully integrated source control with Subversion, find and replace across multiple local files, easier-than-ever text clips with groups, a user-customizable bookshelf, improved AppleScript, and much more. The editor itself has also been overhauled, with greater support for mixed mode syntax coloring (such as Javascript embedded in HTML) and significant performance increases when using Leopard.

(From Panic’s announcement email)

Coda’s new Subversion integration looks excellent — I connected it to my Beanstalk account in ten seconds, and began committing and updating and all of that good stuff.

They also added site-wide find-and-replace, which was Coda’s biggest problem before.

It makes my favorite HTML/CSS/Javascript/FTP/you-name-it app even better, and it’s a free update. Awesome.

School is once again approaching, and I am entering my third year in college. I am anticipating this to be my most difficult year because I am taking Mandarin for the first time, and I am terrible with learning new languages — I barely managed to survive Spanish in high school. This is as about as far as I can get from being comfortable.

During this semester, I do not want to be buried in papers, caught unaware of something that needs done, or unable to find a file I need on my computer. Whereas in other years I could afford to be somewhat disorganized, I have very little room for error this year.

There are four different areas of disorganization that a student (and any professional) deals with — paper handouts (syllabi, project descriptions, information sheets, et cetera), email, events and tasks, and actual school work. In preparation for this year, I have created a system of sorts for each area. This will be a two-part article, and I warn you now, will probably bore most of you. These articles are as much for me to think through how I am going to do this as it is for you to read.

Paper Handouts

I receive much too many handouts from my classes, and it is quite easy to overflow with them. In my first year of college, my organizational method was to stick them all in a desk drawer and go fishing for the right one when I needed it. Not only did I lose many important sheets, but my desk was a mess, and this disorganization creates a feeling that I do not have control of my work, which creates unnecessary stress. My second year I bought a simple, 3-area desk inbox. This helped, until I realized I had no system for how to use it. As it filled with more and more papers, a mess once contained in desk drawers moved itself to my desk top.

While thinking about how I was going to be more organized this semester, I realized handouts break down into two types — syllabi, and class-specific papers, such as project descriptions, paper descriptions, and information sheets. These are the important ones, and the rest are mostly junk.

Strategy

There are only two physical elements to how I am going to organize my handouts. First is the desk inbox I have, and second is a hanging file frame to put in a desk drawer.

1. Circular It is difficult for me to delete or throw something away, because I have an anxiety that I may end up needing that paper for some reason, so I end up keeping most papers, which take up space rather than provide value. This needs to change. As soon as I receive handouts, I will decide whether I need to keep it or not. If I do not, it immediately goes in the trash. If I do, I put it in my desk inbox.
2. Review This is the most important step. Every few days I will empty my inbox and decide again whether I need each handout or not. If I do, it moves to step three; if not, it enters the circular. This step is important because it forces me to review my handouts and thus what work I need to do. I cannot file it away and forget about it — it will enter into my mind at least twice before being filed.
3. Filed Using the hanging file frame in my desk drawer, I will use a simple file system. The first folder is a syllabi folder, which will hold each class’s syllabus. The reason the syllabi get their own special file is because more than any other handout, students reference this one the most so they should be immediately available without any searching. Then each class will have its own folder, and will hold its handouts. Simple to understand, simple to file, and simple to maintain.

That is it. No complex system to grasp. Just an easy way to review each handout, stay organized, and have easy access whenever I need a handout.

Email

I receive most spam from my school. During the regular school year, I sometimes receive something like twenty to thirty of these emails a day, and they fill up my inbox. Worse, these emails obscure the ones I need to pay attention to — emails from my professors and fellow students.

My goal is to remove these useless messages from my inbox and highlight emails from professors and students.

Strategy

1. Filter Luckily, my school sends these mass-emails to a list (the email address in the To: field looks something like STUDENTS@LISTS.WHITTIER.EDU), so I can filter these out of my inbox quite easily. To do so, I created a local “Whittier Junk Email” folder, and a Mail.app rule which moves any emails sent to that email address into it. This keeps them out of my inbox, so only important (or relatively important) emails are in it. Out of sight, out of mind.
2. Professors I could create a folder for each professor, but that would be a mess — Mail.app’s source list would be too complex. Rather, I have created a single smart mailbox which lists every email I receive from each of my professors. This keeps their emails in one place so I can quickly find the email I need, or only look at new emails from my professors rather than everything in my inbox if I need to.
3. Projects Projects tend to accumulate a large number of emails between group members. To make managing these emails easier, whenever I am assigned a new group project I create a new smart mailbox which lists any emails from my group members. Simple.

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There is nothing revolutionary, complex or stunning about these strategies — but that is exactly the point. They are simple ways of organizing things I need to manage, and filtering out the junk. The next article in this series will deal with organizing events and tasks and school work.

TUAW published a rumor that Apple may announce an unlimited iTunes subscription, where for $129.99 a year, subscribers can listen to as much music as they want.

This rumor is not exactly new, and TUAW’s “source” is merely an anonymous tipster who does not work for Apple. Despite Erica Sadun’s calling it “brilliant,” a music subscription is not new, either — there are a number of similar services already available.

Yesterday, Michael Mistretta posted a unique take on an iTunes subscription service. Michael points out that the flaw with paying for each song or album is that it discourages music experimentation. I am much less likely to buy music from a band I have never heard if I must pay a full $10 first, and I may not even end up liking them. He then argues that an iTunes subscription would solve this by allowing you to listen to as much music as you want — subscribe for a year, and listen to as many new bands or artists as you please, and buy any CDs that you particularly enjoy.

Michael’s point is right, but a music subscription is the nuclear option in this case. It is a solution, sure, but it ignores that music is fundamentally different than other media in the process of solving a rather small problem.

Unsurprisingly, Jobs explains it well:

People don’t want to buy their music as a subscription. They bought 45’s; then they bought LP’s; then they bought cassettes; then they bought 8-tracks; then they bought CD’s. They’re going to want to buy downloads. People want to own their music. You don’t want to rent your music — and then, one day, if you stop paying, all your music goes away.

And, you know, at 10 bucks a month, that’s $120 a year. That’s $1,200 a decade. That’s a lot of money for me to listen to the songs I love.

I just bought Beck’s new album, Modern Guilt, a few days ago, and I like it a lot. Between my car and home, I have listened to it ten times now, and I bet in a few years, I will still throw it on every once in a while. Good music is timeless that way — it does not get stale. The Ramones’ first album is as good today as it was the first time I heard it. Music is something special, because it can be consumed over and over again and be just as satisfying as the first time. Music is personal, and stays with you.

A music subscription ignores this. If I downloaded Modern Guilt through a subscription service, just to have the option to listen to it in the future, I must also continue paying the subscription. I have every intention of listening to this album in 2015, and to do that, I would have paid almost $1100. Insane.

And worse, I would not really own the music. I would be tied to a service, completely dependent on it, to listen to my music. If it fails (as several subscription services have), my music, and investment, disappears. I could not switch services if I wanted to.

I could just buy the album outright if I decide I like it enough, but if I am just going to buy albums that I like anyway, then the service is not very valuable. At that point, this music subscription service is more of a sampler service — “Pay $130 a year, listen to whatever you want, and buy what you like” — and I do not think that is worth $130 a year. I would end up buying all of the same albums as usual, and pay an additional $130 each year. No thanks.

Easy Solution

So I do not think a subscription service is the answer, but Michael’s point still stands: it is difficult to find new music on iTunes.

There is a simple answer here. Rather than create an entirely new payment model for iTunes, Apple could, if negotiations with labels permit (which is an admittedly big if), extend its song preview from 30 seconds to 2 minutes or even the full length of the song. You could listen to as many songs as you want, and know whether you like it enough to buy. Easy.

Video is Different

Movies and TV shows, except for the very best, are watched only once, and sometimes two or three times. Video is boring after watching it a few times.

Which makes it perfect for a subscription service. We already consume most of our movies and TV shows through a subscription — cable TV and Netflix, with movie rentals and an occasional visit to the theater thrown in. And here is where Michael nails it:

iTunes has an incredible amount of media—what if for one set monthly fee, I could download all the music, TV shows, and movie rentals I want (with one rental at a time)? All this in combination with audio and video podcasts that are already free.

All of a sudden, iTunes becomes your one-stop place for any type of content. iTunes becomes your media center. Goodbye Rogers cable TV. Goodbye Blockbuster. Hello iTunes.

If Apple offered an affordable monthly subscription which makes all of iTunes’s movies and TV shows available, I would drop Netflix and cable and subscribe in a second.

So a music subscription cannot stand on its own, but an all-inclusive subscription certainly could. It would be an incredibly powerful subscription. Watch whatever TV show or movie you want, and listen to whatever music you want, too, from your home theatre, computer, iPod or iPhone, for a reasonable monthly fee. That is hard to resist.

I am not sure if Apple would go in this direction, but it makes a hell of a lot more sense than a music-only subscription, as TUAW hopes for.