The Board

There’s an amazing new T-Mobile store at the Bay Street Mall near my work. It’s huge and totally cushy, with couches, lot’s of open space and PSP’s for the kids to play. Probably on par with the Apple store as a mall destination :). Their computers has these jelly style, Pre-like keyboards… Pretty odd. Oh and the MyTouch3G seems pretty neat, although I can’t figure out how to manage the simultaneous apps in Android.¬†

Quincy loves the Palm Pre!

Quincy and I were enjoying Yellow Submarine being played via the quite capable Palm Pre speaker.

Burgers, fries and cookies!

Left this as a comment on the Palm blog. For posterity, in case it’s not published.
This has me really ticked off. I don’t care whether you publish this comment, I just want you to read it. I am a HUGE Pre evangelist, I lined up on June 6. I love the Pre. My friends make fun of me for my overbearing Pre salesmanship. I’ve talked them up at the Sprint store to prospective customers.
And I gave you the benefit of the doubt w/ the spying story. I already knew that the phone company tracks my location, so that didn’t bother me terribly (it did a little). But the additional data the phone sends back– including what applications I use & when– is private data and Palm has no right to it.
Now you make pains to point out how the data is allegedly “anonymized,” but no data is really anonymous. If you know where the phone is every night, it’s not really hard to figure out who has the phone! So please, don’t insult the intelligence of your customers with such nonsense.
For the GPS data, you claim we can turn this off. Yes, and then we can’t use GPS with any applications– that would cripple the phone. So your solution for people that don’t like the GPS tracking is to disable one of the best features of the Pre. There goes a giant selling point.
For the applications– well, you say we’ve “agreed” to it when we bought the Pre. Nice fine print. I didn’t see it, but I’ll take you at your word now. Just know that if I ever recommend the Pre to anyone, I will preface it by pointing out that Palm constantly tracks how you use your phone. What will you do with that data? I have no idea, but I don’t trust you not to sell it or hand it out.
So no Palm, this is not acceptable. I was withholding judgment until you had a response, and your response made me furious. I have owned a Treo 600, 700P and Centro, and a T3, III and IIIe. I am a long-term Palm shareholder. I blog about how great the Pre is, I started the biggest Flickr group for it, I listen to the Palmcast every week. And until you change that policy, I won’t even consider recommending the Pre. This makes me sad, because the Pre is a great device, the WebOS is a great platform and with Mojo I was looking forward to some great apps. But as customers– especially those most tech-savvy– flee Palm, the developers will dwindle too and you’ll be right back to where you were a year or two ago.
Don’t screw this up Palm. You’ve made the best phone on the market, and you’re trying to sabotage it. I’ll bite my tongue a few more days, but you should know that the the Palm community is pissed about this and the flood is about to be unleashed with these arrogant comments.
Until then, I’ll tell my friends to buy a Pre if they want Palm to know where they are at all times, and to keep track of their minute-by-minute usage of their phones. This is spyware at its worst, and it might kill your company if you don’t fix it.

Twitter down. Guess it’s time I finally started the tumblog.

Bachelor for an evening, so what do I do? Rent a movie, of course! Last night I watched the Director’s Cut of Watchmen, and I’m still trying to decide what I thought of it.
I read lots of comics growing up, but never read Watchmen. I was a strictly Marvel Comics guy, so Watchmen, which was a DC Comic, was for some reason not cool. Anyway, last May, on Free Comic Book Day, I picked up a free copy of the first issue of Watchmen, and thought it was pretty interesting. It was the first comic I had read in over 20 years. I wanted to know what happened next, and since the movie had just come out, I figured I’d find out someday.
One fun thing about comics is that they all occur in an alternate world not so different from our own. Watchmen’s premise takes us to a somewhat believable yet fantastic mirror-world, in the sense that if you accept just one crazy unbelievable thing, the world very well could have turned out the way it’s portrayed in the comic. In Watchmen, it’s 1985 in New York City, and the U.S., which won the Vietnam War, is still being led by Richard Nixon in his 5th term (I suppose the 22nd Amendment was repealed somewhere in there). This alternate reality came about in large part because of (here’s the required “suspension of disbelief”) a superhero, Dr Manhattan, who was a nuclear scientist who got caught in an accident that gave him near-godlike superpowers. It’s because Dr Manhattan was used as a weapon by the US government in Vietnam that Nixon is reelected, etc, etc.
The plot has three main levels: Globally, impending nuclear war due to the tensions between the US and the USSR, a situation made more worse by the continued existence of Dr Manhattan. Locally in NYC, the fear of vigilantes on the street fighting crime resulted in the passage of a law banning “masked adventurers,” meaning that Batman-like crime-fighters essentially all go into retirement, and there’s lots of public fear and resentment toward them. And on the personal level, we watch the post-crime fighting lives and relationships of former “masked adventurers” — what do they do after they’ve been forced to retire from crime fighting?
It all comes together to make a great backdrop for a story. One of the things I liked best is the way the movie pays homage to the vintage comic stories. The opening credits of the movie are really masterful at setting the stage, and the music choice is perfect (in fact, I thought the music choices and score were really exceptionally good throughout — read the first comment on the Amazon page, which echoes what I thought).
Unfortunately, I think the movie fell a little short of its promise, and for me, it was the backdrop and its execution, more than the actual story, that kept me engaged. The interpersonal relationships, I thought, were pretty poorly developed (“Why are they friends?” “What does she see in him?”). The action scenes were fun, but at 2 hours and 43 minutes (24 minutes of which was extra director’s cut footage), it was far too long.
But still, have to say it was worth the $4 rental.

Marv and I both won WebOS books in the raffle today.

The default podcast feeds in PrePod, a homebrewed podcatcher on the Pre, already has some of my favorite podcasts. It’s as if my phone can read my mind.

Taking a tour of the old building.

Just thought I’d post the usage log from our first full month of Pre ownership.
View Kelvin’s usage log
Notable points:
* As a group, we wasted 1000 anytime minutes out of our 1500 minute bucket. We would have wasted 2000 minutes under our old 2500 plan!
* I used over 1 GB of cellular data (celarly a personal best). This despite having my Pre connected to wifi at home and at work!
* Jake used nearly 600 MB, but he used 300 MB on the first day (train ride from NYC to Boston).
Usage log
* I used 963 mobile-to-mobile minutes, which is mostly a combination of calls to Serena, Jake, and oddly, Mike! For some reason, when Mike calls me over Skype, Sprint seems to believe that to be a Sprint-to-Sprint call.