Et Tu, iCloud

iCloud still has some critical bugs to work out.

In my mind, I considered Apple's iCloud akin to Amazon S3 for the consumer. S3 allows users to upload files which are stored on Amazon's servers in three different places, for redundancy. While Amazon Web Services have had occasional down time, they've never lost S3 files that I'm aware of.

Last Tuesday, my iPhone started running hot and the battery was running down very quickly. After troubleshooting the problem, over two days, by switching between WiFi and 3G, without any luck, I decided to reset my iPhone to original factory settings and restore it from iCloud.

iCloud Benefits

Launched this past October, iCloud stores a backup of your media and data on Apple's servers instead of iTunes. The beauty is multifold – at least in theory.

First is that you don't lose your iPhone backup if your computer's hard drive dies.

Second, is that it's very efficient in that iCloud doesn't actually store your apps or music, in your backup, since Apple already has a copy of these files on their servers. In other words, they don't count music and app backup storage against your allotment of 5, 20, or 50 GB.

Third is the fact that iCloud allows you to share and sync media and files across all of your devices – which happens automatically, in the background. Change a playlist on your desktop and, within seconds, you'll see the updated playlist on your Apple TV or iPad. Buy a song on your iPad, and it's immediately downloaded to iTunes on your desktop or iPhone.

My favorite iCloud feature is Photo Stream. Snap a photo on your iPhone and it's copied to your iPad or iPhoto automatically.

Backup Regrets

Unfortunately, I didn't take all the necessary precautions before resetting my iPhone to factory defaults, resulting in the loss of my iPhone's camera roll containing more than 12,000 photos that I've take, over the years, on my iPhones.

I forgot the 3-2-1 rule of backups: Three backups, on two different media, with one stored off site. In my case, I only had one current backup stored off site, in iCloud, but I failed to make two other backups.

Don't Give Up The Ship

Of course, I didn't go down without a fight. Over the course of several days, I tried every combination of restoring my iPhone that I could think of.

Some of my iPhone restorations required 30 hour sessions of updating and redownloading content in vain, followed by three trips to the local Genius Bar at Apple.

Two days in a row, I left my iPhone at home when I went to work so it could continue downloading, without interruption, on my speedy 50+ Mbps Internet connection since I thought that the 30 hour wait was due to my 19 GB camera roll download.

But, in the end, the final option was to replace my iPhone with a new one, in case it was defective. But, still no luck.

Postmortem

I have 25 GBs of iCloud storage. My backups where a little shy of 25 GB, but there were multiple iPhone backups in iCloud. Surely I would have expected at least one of my iCloud backups to succeed. But, alas, no.

Restore Incomplete

iCloud thought that my 12,000 photos were on its servers, but it just couldn't seem to download them to my iPhone.

After completing each restoration attempt, iTunes also thought that my 19 GB worth of photos where on my iPhone. But, were they really? It seems not.

Needless to say, it was very disconcerting to see the Restore Incomplete alert: Some items could not be restored from the iCloud backup.

Cupertino, We Have a Problem

It appears that there's a bug with the iCloud restore process which causes internal, repeated crashes. As my iPhone tried to restore apps, a process would crash, before the app finished installing, resulting in a repeated download and installation attempt. I suspect that a big chunk of the thirty hours spent restoring my iPhone was due to it redownloading the same apps over and over again. The internal iPhone diagnostics and usage data shows scores of crash logs, each about minute or two apart.

Saving Grace

So, did I really lose my 12,000 photos? Not exactly. While I'm highly disappointed that I can no longer have them on my iPhone's camera roll, nearly all of them are in iPhoto, which backs up to my Time Capsule. My most recent photos that weren't in iPhoto were, luckily, on my Photo Stream, so I copied them into iPhoto.

As a side note, my Photo Stream doesn't seem to go all the way back to when I first started using it. There only seem to be a few hundred photos in my Photo Stream – it's suppose to keep the last 1,000. Hmm.

Still, it's highly disappointing that I couldn't simply recover everything from my iCloud backup. The Apple iCloud team has some work to do.

Life in a Day

It takes a lifetime to experience life.

But, what if you wanted to experience most everything that life has to offer in a single day?

Life in a Day, released a year ago, covers life around the world on July 24, 2010 in an amazing way.

This crowd sourced documentary, produced by Ridley Scott, opens during the pre-dawn hours where we see what some people experience before most of us wake up in the morning. It then takes you through that Saturday's seemingly mundane, yet, intimate and raw events from the point of view of anyone, rich and poor, young and old, sick and healthy, in developed and developing nations.

On this single day, one question is answered, "What was it like to be alive on July 24, 2010?", and three questions are asked:

1. What do you love?

2. What do you fear?

3. What's in your pocket?

The final moments of July 24, 2010

It's nearly midnight now and I'm running out of time…

The sad part is I spend all day long hoping for something amazing to happen, something great, something to appreciate this day and to be part of it and to show the world that there's something great that can happen every day of your life, in everyone's life.

But, the truth is that it doesn't always happen.

All day long nothing really happened.

I want people to know that I'm here. I don't want to cease to exist.

And today, even though nothing great really happened, tonight I feel as if something great happened.

YouTube

You can can watch the entire 95 minute production of Life in a Day embedded below or on Netflix streaming (turn on Closed Captioning to read the English translations).

Update: I was wondering what I did, myself, on July 24, 2010. Thanks to Facebook's new timeline feature, I figured out, in two clicks, that I had dinner at my father-in-law's.

PS - If you don't have time to watch the entire movie, but still want to experience life - and a great love story - then just watch the first four minutes of Up.

Job Satisfaction With Room Key

Nothing says job satisfaction like having the press cover your work.

Today, I was surprised to see a number of news outlets cover the launch of a heretofore secret project that I've been working on: roomkey.com. While I only had a tiny part in this project, as the product manager, it was a big part of my life since I began working at Wyndham.

I was also a little surprised to see that TechCruch covered the news too, Six Hotel Giants Team Up To Launch Hotel Search Engine Roomkey.com, Buy Hotelicopter. TechCrunch specializes in covering high tech news and I don't exactly consider hotel industry news high-tech, but when you get the largest companies in the industry together, it's well worth covering.

In a nutshell, Room Key is a joint venture of the world's six largest hotel chains who've created a search engine amongst themselves. After customers visit one of the six partner sites, they may be presented with an opportunity to see comparable hotel rooms from one of the other partners.

Poor Man's Performance Monitoring

Amazon has been great at rolling out high end (enterprise class) web services which don't require expensive or long term contracts. Instead of signing a contract, Amazon Web Services are "pay by the drink" which literally means that a monthly bill can be less than a dime. You simply pay for storage and bandwidth used.

But, I've noticed one, key, service that Amazon has yet to roll out: website performance monitoring.

CDN

Five years ago, if your website had to deliver large media files, such as audio or video, then your best option was (and still is) a content delivery network (CDN). A CDN distributes copies of files all over the world so that they're as close as possible to the users which means faster download times. The problem with CDNs of the past, like Akamai, is that it's a service for the big boys requiring long term, expensive, contracts. Of course, when you spend thousands of dollars each month you do get enterprise class support and dashboards, but, many smart, lean, companies can develop their own dashboard specific to their needs.

A couple years ago Amazon began selling their own CDN service, called CloudFront, with no contract. CloudFront, like all Amazon Web Services, is "pay by the drink," so that any startup could deliver video and music just as fast as Netflix streaming movies or the Apple iTunes Store. Just like Amazon now offers a CDN web service, I can see them offering a performance monitor web service in the future.

Performance Monitoring

Performance monitoring is a way to monitor the status and performance of a website. Is the website up or down? How long does it take for your website to load for users in New York, L.A., and Paris? Are there any bottle necks causing delays?

There are two basic ways to monitor performance: internally and externally.

External Performance Monitoring

External performance monitoring would be at home as an Amazon Web Service. There are no shortages of companies providing external website performance monitor services and dashboards for hundreds or thousands of dollars per month. The services these companies provide are very complex and many times they offer more than any one company requires. Also, a company paying for these services will require a team of employees to gather and process the performance reports.

External performance monitors usually run automated scripts which follow a critical path, such as logging into an e-commerce website and making a purchase. These scripts can either run on simulated web browsers, in a data center, or on actual web browsers in homes or offices so that they can simulate the "last mile" performance. The latter can be very helpful when companies try to troubleshoot seemingly "strange" problems such as why a website has problems loading only for some customers and not others. Is the problem due to a misconfigured router, a misconfigured DNS server, etc?

Since Amazon already has points-of-presense all over the world, they would have little problem setting up an external performance monitoring service API.

Internal Performance Monitor

Even if a small company doesn't have the financial means to afford an external performance monitoring service, they should still implement simple internal performance measures on their servers. Off the top of my head, I can think of two simple measures which should be implemented from the get-go: web server segregation and code timers.

Web Server Segregation

Static web server resources should be segregated from web servers that serve up dynamic web pages. If this can't be physically done by using separate hardware, then use different host names and web server logs for dynamic versus static resources. If you only have one web server, then simply move all of your static web resources to Amazon's S3 web service.

Monitoring your dynamic web server logs is one way to determine what your customer's UX is like. I use Apache with the following log format:

%h %l %u %t "%r" %>s %b "%{Referer}i" %T

The most import part of this log format, for performance monitoring, is the last part, %T. This shows how long it took for the dynamic page to be requested, generated, and served to the client's web browser. Here's an example from an Apache log:

ool-182e94c5.dyn.optonline.net - - [08/Jan/2012:16:45:59 -0800] "GET / HTTP/1.1" 200 66321 "-" 2

The last number, 2, tells me that it took two seconds for this dynamic web page, which is 66,321 bytes long, to be generated and downloaded to the client's web browser. Historically, that number is less than one second in my logs, so seeing two seconds warrants further investigation which is where code timers come into play.

Code Timers

Code that is executed which could take longer than a second or requires "heavy lifting", such as generating reports, should be timed. All API calls to third parties, i.e. Twitter or Facebook, should also be timed and logged.

Here's the source code for a simple Timer.java utility class based on Apple's WebObjects app server.

The following Java method, which verifies a Twitter user's credentials, is used in actual production code. It demonstrates the timer's simplicity. The key to using the timer is that it's started at the beginning of the method and then the timer's results are logged just before returning from the method. The next step would be to log the high, low, and average response times and report them.

public static String twitterUsernameForUser(User user)

{

Timer timer = Timer.startNewTimer();

String twitterUsernameForUser = null;

Twitter twitter = new Twitter();

twitter.setOAuthConsumer(System.getProperty("twitter4j.oauth.consumerKey"),

System.getProperty("twitter4j.oauth.consumerSecret"));

AccessToken accessToken = new AccessToken(user.twitterOAuthToken(),

user.twitterOAuthTokenSecret());

twitter.setOAuthAccessToken(accessToken);

try

{

twitter.verifyCredentials();

twitterUsernameForUser = twitter.verifyCredentials().getScreenName();

} catch (TwitterException e)

{

e.printStackTrace();

NSLog.debug.appendln("Caught exception. Invalid twitter credentials.");

}

timer.stop();

NSLog.debug.appendln

("OAuthTwitterUtilities.twitterUsernameForUser() elapsed time: "

+ timer.elapsedTime());

return twitterUsernameForUser;

}

But, even if Amazon offers a web performance monitoring service, you should still segregate your web server and time your network API calls.

Two Ships Crashing in the Night

Video chat is the future of social media.

Social media allows companionship without being present. Generally, media is fixed, meaning that it's recorded on paper, hard disks, etc. But, if we focus more on the social aspect, and less on the media part, then it can also be a live stream without necessarily being recorded such as a telephone call. While there are many aspects of social media that are entirely new, one, in particular, is very interesting to me: random video chat.

I've had several technological epiphanies in my life as I suddenly recognized that a new technology was going to be transformational and innovative.

Epiphanies

My earliest technological epiphany was when I got my first computer - it was a Radio Shack TRS-80 Model I, first introduced in 1977, and I loved it. I was amazed by it's processing capability. Today, we take for granted the power of the personal computer. But, back then, we marveled at what it could do. I used to use my Model I to help my father bubble sort product serial numbers for his job when I was in junior high school.

My second epiphany was in the early 1980s when I hooked up my TRS-80 Model I to a modem for the first time. I spent the entire night logging onto bulletin board system (BBS) after BBS and I ended up pulling my first all-nighter well before high school.

My third technological epiphany was the first time that I logged on to the World Wide Web. I had been using Internet e-mail since the late 1980s, but I was late to the WWW, in the mid 1990s, since I was on active duty in the Marines and deployed to the Middle East. However, I still remember the first website that visited - it was a triathlon news site.

All of the world's information was instantaneously at my finger tips.

Random Video Chat
This leads to my latest innovative epiphany: Random video chat.

While video chat sites, such as Chatroulette, Stickam, and Tinychat, that first gained attention a couple years ago, have a bad rap on the surface, there's something about them that's amazing on a deeper level.

To paraphrase the French poet Jean Cocteau, fashion produces beautiful things that become ugly over time, whereas art produces ugly things that become more beautiful with time.

Sites like ChatRoulette truly fall into the art category.

On video chat websites, there is no shortage of men exposing themselves. I'm guessing that 90% of the visitors to these types of sites are male and it seems like a big chunk of them broadcast their crotch, as if there's much of a chance of any woman stopping to watch and partake in the show.

While these sites do have an ugly side, there's an interesting, hidden, aspect that can be very engaging and entertaining.

If you give it a try, you can make a connection with someone – a connection that's on par with a chat at the bar or cafe. The fascinating part is that the conversation can take place with people from all over the world in virtually any setting such as the living room, bedroom, classroom, or car to name a few that I've participated in.

In literally less than a second, someone has popped up on your computer screen as the both of you make a decision to stay or "next" each other. No account needs to be created, it's anonymous, and instantaneous – no need to follow, friend, or subscribe - it's just you and a random partner, mano a mano.

Most connections last less than a second, but it's not unheard of for a conversation to last many, many hours.

I'm guessing that the average age on these sites is late teens to early twenties. From time to time, I've received some unpleasant reactions when these young adults see me: the old man.

Virgin Experiences
After nexting dozens and dozens of men's crotches and being nexted, myself, I discovered that I could do better if I didn't have my camera on, after all, I'm no spring chicken. At this point, I could engage people in a conversation before turing on my camera.

One of my first chat experiences was explicitly shocking with a college senior at large midwestern university. I could see her, but she couldn't see me, so it was a one way video chat without voice as I told her about my former girlfriend who attended the same university. After I figured out how to turn on my microphone, I could talk to her and she'd type back, but she couldn't speak since her roommate was sleeping.

She was a very conservative and bright religious Muslim who grew up in the U.S. and never drank alcohol. But, she suffered from a pseudo preacher's kid syndrome due to her ultraconservative lifestyle. I was shocked when she asked me, a faceless stranger, to tell her what to do. She was, by no means, teasing me, with - she was 100% serious, trust me on that. (Suffice to say that we didn't go there and nothing happen.)

I was thinking that her story wasn't real - this was all too fast and easy - but her info all checked out via Facebook, LinkedIn, Google+, etc. Where were websites like this when I was a young, single guy???

Innovation
Social video chat is the very definition of innovation, which is anything that reduces the cost of a transaction in terms of time or money – live and in person. No longer is it necessary to visit single's bars or dating sites that lead to so many dead end first dates. Now, you can experience personal connections in any safe and personal environment of your choosing.

The one night stand, perfected in the 20th Century, has now evolved into the one hour stand with video chat, "Don't worry, Baby, I'll still respect you in 60 minutes."

Memorable Experiences
Without a doubt, my first experience was unique, but I couldn't help but be intrigued.

My next stop was a classroom in Scotland as several students were huddled around a laptop during a class. We chatted for about 30 minutes until class ended.

I chatted with a high school student who was poolee in the Marine Corps Delayed Entry Program. We spent some time talking about the Marines as I related my experiences to him.

I briefly talked to a student in Singapore who had his name, Darren, tattooed on his wrist. He complained to me that, after "nexting" hundreds of people, he'd only seen two women, but I don't think he was giving up.

I actually found some people my own age who were sitting in their kitchen in Iowa drinking beer… rather, they had already drunk a lot of beer.

Watching my wife and her former college roommate try it out for the first time was priceless as guys would shower them with complements so they could talk to two women. For some reason, the guys from Turkey were the most polite.

Random Tech Support
By far, my most rewarding experience was with a 32 year old women in the Netherlands who was a school teacher. She was a little unhappy since she had recently switched from her Windows PC to an iMac and, when she synced up her iPod to the new iMac, it had erased her iPod music library.

We chatted for a bit as she imported her CDs into iTunes. She was a little frustrated poking around her new computer since she couldn't find the backspace key. When I told her that the trick to backspace on the Mac was to hold down the FN key when pressing the delete key, she promised to name her first kid after me, Joe "Backspace."

Cheating?
So, is it cheating if you're in a relationship and seeking social interaction in a video chat? That all depends on the rules with your significant other. Is it cheating to go to a bar and talk to another patron? Probably not, as long as it's platonic. As a matter of fact, video chat is definitely safer, cheaper, and faster than physically visiting a bar or cafe. The only downside (or maybe it's an upside) is that it's random and anonymous. But, things probably won't work out if you live in China and find your soulmate in Timbuktu.

Video Chat's Dark Side
Random video chat doesn't come without a chilling dark side that goes far beyond the plethora of penises. While consenting adults are free to do as they please, it seems that people, especially the ladies, either forget or don't care that their video chat partner can easily record their interaction for nefarious purposes.

Even more chilling is that any child can log on to these video chat websites simply by attesting that they are over 18 with a simple check of a box. While the interaction is random and probably too distant for the possibility of a physical interaction, it's still frightening to think about how impressionable children can be.

The Future
Video chat offers a lot of possibilities. I've met many foreigners who were simply interested in practicing their English. It's also a great way for socially awkward people to learn how to speak to others. But, here's a newsflash for the guys: You'll increase your chances by being respectful, rather than rude, to to the ladies. Instead of clicking next a couple thousand times and greeting women with, "Show me your boobs!", try treating them with dignity and you'll be surprised at the results.

I think Patti Stanger should use these random video chat sites to screen her guys before appearing on Millionaire Matchmaker. She'd get a quick indication of how her client candidates treat the ladies.

Why?
Why do they come? What do they want? Well… why do we sit at the hotel bar, when on a business trip, instead of taking our drink back up to the room? We want to be social... we want to be a part of something bigger than ourselves.

It's rather amazing to drop right into someone's personal life for a private conversation only to never hear from them again. But, if you want to try it out for yourself, you can't be shy or thin skinned. After all, it is the Internet and anything goes.

It should only be a matter of time until Facebook rolls out video chatrooms amongst friends.

Partial Panel Failure in IMC

One of the obvious differences between flying a plane and driving a car is that you can't simply stop when you have a problem. Running out of gas or having an instrument failure is serious.

I recently flew down to Annapolis, from northern New Jersey, for a couple days of board meetings. It was raining and I was in the clouds at 4,000' with a 30+ knot headwind slowing me down for more than 90 minutes. About 20 minutes outside of Lee Airport in Annapolis, my glass cockpit panel ("digital dashboard") had a partial failure, at night, in IMC (the clouds). Since the panel is digital with diagnostics, as the attitude and heading indicator tumbled, it recognized the failure and displayed a warning message followed by two big red "X"s.

Mayday?

As much as I love high tech, avionics failures like this aren't completely unexpected so I have traditional backup instruments. It took me a few minutes to confirm that the digital airspeed and altitude indicators were working fine since they displayed the same readings as my analog dials. As unnerving as this failure was, it didn't represent an inflight emergency.

Rather than rely on my autopilot, I "hand flew" the plane as air traffic control vectored me for the approach into Annapolis. The clouds were lower than I'd liked, but when I broke through them and saw the airport, I set myself up for landing. It took me longer than usual to get down to the runway, in the dark, so I decided to "go-around" since it's a shorter runway than I'm used to using. On my second attempt, I landed, albeit, I used up almost the entire runway since stopping in the rain took longer than normal. Unfortunately, during most of my time in Annapolis, it was pouring.

Cleared for Takeoff

When I departed Annapolis, two days later, I was hoping that, somehow, the panel problem would have resolved itself. Unfortunately, that wasn't the case. But, since all of the backup equipment was working fine, I could fly home under instrument flight rules. Even better was that there wasn't a cloud in the sky as air traffic control vectored me over downtown Annapolis.

Going Solo

I called the glass cockpit manufacture who pointed me to several authorized resellers in northern New Jersey and I chose a reseller based at Sussex Airport. Yesterday's flight from Morristown to Sussex only took about 20 minutes.

Since Sussex Airport doesn't have a manned control town, pilots have to announce where they are. When I was about 12 miles away, I could hear steady chatter as pilots were announcing their positions. But, one voice stood out since it sounded like a young girl. She was obviously taking off and landing, repeatedly. Just as I was about to enter the traffic pattern, she announced her position and I saw her about a mile in front of me. This was helpful – I had never flow into this airport so I didn't know where the landmarks were to make my turns.

A typical landing pattern is entered at 45° to the runway and flown parallel to the runway, but in the opposite direction of landing, followed by a left turn perpendicular to the runway, and then, finally, another left turn, to line up with the runway. Trailing another plane, into an unfamiliar airport, makes things easier – just like following another car's taillights, in the dark, on an unfamiliar road.

As I followed the young pilot in front of me, I heard someone from the ground give her some words of encouragement. It turned out that she was a student pilot on her first solo flight. No matter how old your are, your first solo flight is both exciting and stressful since it's the first time you're flying an airplane without anyone else aboard. It's just you and your new skills, all alone in the plane. Actually, your "first solo" isn't just one take off and landing, but rather it's three in a row and it's something you'll never forget.

Repairs

Ironically, I had to go to an "old school" airport for my high tech repairs. Even though Sussex Airport is only about 90 minutes from Manhattan, I definitely felt like I was at an airport deep in the country.

Of course, high tech, being what it is, meant that we couldn't reproduce the problem with the glass cockpit panel at the avionics shop. Now I'll have to wait until the problem happens again. But, I did have an opportunity to have the repair tech troubleshoot an intermittent VOR. Turns out that repairing the VOR was a simple fix which involved simply re-soldering a ground wire.

While the repair tech worked on my avionics, I had a lengthy conversation with an older pilot who turned out to be the grandfather of the 17 year old high school girl who I had followed into the airport. Her family had come to the airport to watch her solo. She initially planned to attend the Air Force Academy, but when she found out that she had to wait another year to qualify for a Congressional nomination she visited Embry-Riddle, in Florida. Embry-Riddle, also know as "The Harvard of the Sky" specializes in aviation and aerospace engineering. Her grandfather told me it was a no-brainer for her. It looks like her future holds a career in aviation.

iTunes Match: The Curve Jumping Cloud For Consumers

Apple launched iTunes Match, today. They were shooting for an October release, but they missed it by two weeks. I didn't really think about iTunes Match features until just now, when I tried it out.

I downloaded the iTunes 10.5.1 update and let iTunes Match run while I cooked dinner. It took about 45 minutes – I wasn't really paying attention. During that time, it scanned my iTunes library to determine which of the 2,400 songs it had on its servers. Then, iTunes Match took the songs that it didn't have on its servers and uploaded them. Fortunately, I have a blazing fast ISP, so uploading about 400 songs took less time than the entire iTunes music library scan.

I Get It

Once iTunes Match was done processing my library, I "tuned it in" on my Apple TV. I didn't really know what to expect, but there on my Apple TV were all my songs nicely arranged into my playlists.

I created a new iTunes playlist on my computer and copied some songs into it. In the time it took me to move my hands from my computer keyboard to the Apple TV remote, I noticed that the TV screen flickered and the new playlist that I just created showed up on my Apple TV. Ok, now I get it.

Prior to iTunes Match, it was a bit inconvenient to push my music from my iPhone or iPad to my Apple TV; and it was also a minor hassle to keep iTunes open on my laptop so that the Apple TV could "see" my music and playlists.

Missing In Action

Some songs, though, seem to be missing and I'm not sure why. I have some voice memos that I've recored which obviously shouldn't be uploaded, aka, "This item is not eligible for iCloud."

But, I also have some songs, such as a store bought Tchaikovsky CD that I imported into iTunes 10 years ago, that weren't uploaded. The song titles show up on the Apple TV, but they're grayed out. In iTunes, next to the track name, it displays an iCloud icon with an exclamation point indicating, "This item was not added to iCloud because an error occurred." The songs are on my computer, but it's not in iCloud. I'll have to investigate some more.

Update: A former coworker from Apple just read this blog post and tweeted me the solution to my problem: "Set view options to show iCloud status column. Sort by status. Select all 'Error'. Right click to reupload." Sure enough, that did it. I now see my missing songs in iCloud and on my Apple TV.

Piracy Big Brother?

So, does Apple and the RIAA now know which of their users have pirated songs? No, it's not that simple. Nearly all of my iTunes library is either composed of songs that I bought from the iTunes store or imported from my CD collection. In the case of CD imports, iTunes Match has no way to know if the CD import was from music that I owned or "borrowed" from a friend. Of course, Apple could listen to songs that are uploaded, which aren't recognized, and determine that, perhaps, they're a concert bootleg; but that would surprise me. It would be the equivalent of Gmail reading the e-mail on their servers to gather business intelligence.

Cloud Computing

"Cloud" has become the hot buzzword in tech since 2006 when Amazon launched their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) which allowed users to turn on a computer with the click of a mouse (ok, technically, they're not turning on a physical computer, rather, they're launching a virtual machine but it does the exact same thing as a computer and it's indistinguishable).

Amazon's EC2, along with a handful of competitors, are true cloud computing systems. Other systems, like iCloud or Amazon's Simple Storage Service (S3) are actually cloud storage systems - there's no real computing going on. But, that doesn't mean that they're not useful. On the contrary, they're tremendously useful.

So, what is the cloud? Simple: cloud, quite literally, means Internet, as in you're reaching out over the Internet for computing power or storage or fundamental web services such as DNS. And, you're reaching out via an API, which means that other computers can talk to and access these services without human intervention.

Abstraction: The Cloud For Consumers

Since modern computing first began during WW II, with the Mark I, layers of abstraction have been added, one on top of the other, in order to manage and reduce complexity. Each layer allows more "everyday" users to access computing power without requiring a detailed technical understanding.

Many times, when a new layer of abstraction is added, there's some resistance from hard core programmers since each layer removes some control that they once had.

Rear Admiral Grace Hopper was one of the first programmers to encounter this resistance when she took her library of software routines and bundled them into the first compiler. The compiler ran slower and it was less efficient than writing pure machine code. Claims of code execution inefficiencies were a somewhat valid claim since computing power was not cheap 60 years ago. However, the true expense, since then, hasn't been CPU power, but, rather brain cycles. It's much better for a computer to step through some inefficient code than to have a human take a chance at creating bugs. As my former boss at Apple used to say, "Code you don't write is code you don't have to debug."

Rather then just create another cloud storage solution, Apple has completely removed the ambiguity of the file system just as it did with iTunes and iPhoto. When you import media into Apple's "iApps", you don't need to concern yourself with where, on the file system, the file actually resides. There's no need to know if your files are located under ~/ghopper/Music/iTunes... or c:\Program Files\... With iCloud, you don't have to know which folder your content is located in, iCloud handles that for you.

Hockey Stick Curve Jumping

There are incremental improvements and then there are revolutionary improvements. The latter are improvements that's aren't just twice as good, rather they're ten times better which usually involves a paradigm shift.

The ice trade is a perfect example of revolutionary technological improvements. In the late 1700s, only the rich had ice since it had to be harvested in the winter and then shipped and stored like granite or marble with a short shelf life. Frederic Tudor was Boston's "Ice King" and he made his fortune by harvesting and shipping ice to places that would not have otherwise had it such as the Caribbean and India.

Innovation during Ice 1.0 revolved around making sharper saws to cut the ice and inventing insulation, other than hay, to keep the ice from melting. But, if you worked in the ice business in the late 1800s, you needed to pay attention when refrigeration technology came along.

With the advent of electricity, ice harvesting was no longer necessary. In Ice 2.0, warehouses could make ice during the summer and send it out for local delivery. This is, in it's truest sense, a curve jumping disruptive technology. If you were still sharpening your saw while ice was being made using refrigeration, then you would have missed the boat.

Looking back, it isn't hard to realize that Ice 3.0 was the invention of the personal ice maker, aka, our home refrigerator. If warehouse refrigeration companies didn't start making home refrigerators in the first half of the 20th Century, then they were probably left behind.

Technology & Innovation

So, how in the world does the ice trade tie in with Apple? Both involved clear, revolutionary, jumps in technologies, i.e. a 10x improvement over the previous way of doing business. Instead of harvesting ice, we make it at home. Instead of entering cryptic commands into a text editor, we use a mouse to drag and drop icons.

After all, what is technology? The answer is relative. Do we think of the wheel as technology? You could say that technology is anything that was invented after you were born. You can think of it as a synonym for magic and, nowadays, when it breaks, you have to throw it away and get a new one because it can't be fixed. (I'm paraphrasing Strong Bad.) As Grace Hopper once said, "Life was simple before World War II. After that, we had systems."

Think Apple

At Apple, we philosophically thought of innovation as the intersection of imagination and reality. But, more pragmatically, we believed that innovation was anything new that reduced the cost of a transaction, either in terms of time or money.

Brady's Life With Duchenne Muscular Dystorphy

Brady Sherman's one of Jerry's Kids, he was born with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. He's an exceptionally bright kid who loves all things mechanical and military, especially aviation.

I've known Brady since before he was born. His mother is my wife's best friend and college roommate.

Brady was diagnosed with DMD when he was a toddler so we all had an inkling for his life ahead which averages late teens to early 20s.

Personal Memories

One Christmas, when Brady was about five or six, he got his first two-wheeler bicycle. We worried that he might hurt himself. When Brady was ridding his new bike he, like all kids learning to ride, fell over. As the bicycle rested on top him, he made it very clear that he was uninjured. With his arms outstretched, lying face down, he professed, "I'm O-K!" We got a good laugh out of the fact that he issued this decleration with the force and effect of MacArthur's, "I shall return."

We took Brady for a flight in my plane this past summer. Since he's been in a wheelchair for the past few years, it took two attempts to get him into my Cessna. The first attempt was with his mother and I trying to lift him into the front copilot seat. Brady was a little anxious about the thought of being lifted into the plane so we tried again, about a week later, with his father and me.

When you have no use of your legs and suffer from muscle degeneration, falling is a big deal. A very big deal.

Fortunately, his dad and I were able to lift him into the plane and we went up for a flight. He got a thrill out of flying the plane when I let him take the controls. But, he only flew the plane for a few minutes. Like most people who take the controls for the first time, including me, we don't really know what to do and a short time is more than enough.

Joking Around

Brady loved a good joke, even when the joke was on him. Several years ago, my wife, Laura, and I were over the Sherman's house for a Christmas Eve party. The party was still going strong well past 11 p.m. Brady was getting very upset as he kept trying to end the party and throw everyone out. As we all know, Santa Claus will skip your house unless everyone's asleep. Years later, I still teased him about that and he always smiled and chuckled.

I taught Brady how to stick one finger in your nose while licking the other finger and then touch the licked finger to someone's face. "Watch how wigged out they'll get," I told him. We all got a big kick out of it when it tried it on his dad a few minutes later. (Well, maybe all of us except dad.)

Wishes Granted
Brady's wish was granted a couple years ago by the Make-A-Wish Foundation when he and his parents were flown to Normandy, France for a battle field tour. That's a memory to last a lifetime.

My first paid journalism article was about Brady and the training he and his family went through when they got their yellow lab companion dog. I was amazed at how well trained that dog was and how much assistance he gave to Brady.

This Morning
Yesterday, Brady fell as he was being lifted out of his wheelchair and broke his leg. He was treated and he went home with his parents. His dad slept next to him last night. This morning, Brady's breathing was very shallow and his parents couldn't wake him. Laura called me at work and told me that Brady was dying as he was being rushed to the hospital while CPR was being performed in the ambulance.

The doctors were unable to to resuscitate him.

Brady passed away this morning aged 14 and a freshman in high school.

We all thought that this moment was still years away. None of us can process this. It just doesn't seem real. He was just a kid.

While I, like most everyone, worked hard to get where I am; I too often forget that I did nothing to be born. I didn't earn being born – it quite literally befell me.

I need to be reminded that I won the birth lottery on many different levels... where and when I was born, my good health, and so on. Steve aptly described it: Life is fragile.

Last Shots
I clearly remember the last time I saw Brady. It was Saturday, September 3, when I snapped this photo of him watching Black Hawk Down. Brady loved the military and he knew more about it than any other kid I know.

Raw Emotions
Tragedies like this leave emotions very raw as waves of grief come and go, followed by anger and then laughter at fond memories.

Brady's mother best expressed one of these extremes, tonight, on Facebook, "Fuck you Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy."

Brady's final life experience was in his own bed, in his own home, under the same roof with two parents that loved him with every fiber of their existence.

But, as comforting as that sounds, at this point, I can't cry hard enough.

SMS is Dying, Viva SMS!

My love affair with text messaging started when I arrived in Nairobi, Kenya in May 2005. I was amazed that the wireless carriers in East Africa were so much more advanced than in the U.S. What I found particularly useful was that they could text money to each other using SMS - no apps required. As soon as I returned to the U.S., I created a proof of concept, using a GSM modem, and partnered with an angel investor as we tried to raise funding from Tech Coast Angels for the now defunct Acasero.

This morning, I was very pleased to see that Amazon announced a new web service which allows anyone to send text messages from a short code. Sending an SMS from a short code, which is a five or six digit phone number, is not an inexpensive proposition. It will cost a company at least $1,000/month not including the metered costs of sending each text message. I've covered the details in this white paper that I wrote a few years ago. But, with today’s announcement from Amazon, that cost is literally reduced to pennies.

SMS is Dying
The wireless carriers' approach to marketing SMS is what I call "bad." RIM has gotten around it, for years, by allowing direct messaging from Blackberry to Blackberry. Now, Apple's iOS 5 has done something similar by allowing text messages to be sent over the data portion of device's payment plan vice the SMS portion. The wireless carriers have priced themselves out of the market when you consider that it would cost about $6,000 to download a 4 MB song if wireless data cost as much as SMS.

Viva SMS
Yet, even though SMS is dying, it's still very useful in both developed and developing countries. It will continue to serve a niche for many years to come. The key strength of SMS is that it's a push (event driven) messaging system compared to e-mail which generally has to poll a server (even with "push" e-mail utilizing the IDLE command, it's still not a responsive as SMS).

So, now that SMS is available to the masses via a short code, what are some of the possibilities? I can think of a few, very marketable, ideas.

I'm Dreamin' of a White Halloween

It's been just over a month since I moved from Carlsbad, California to Rockaway, New Jersey. My first week here was hot, with highs around 90°. By the end of the second week, it had rained 13 days in a row. Of course I complained about the rain – until today.

The leaves are just beginning to change colors and many remain green, after all, it's still October. So, I really poopooed yesterday's weather reports of snow. Okay, maybe snow flurries, but when I heard forecasts of possible snow accumulations of several inches, I just brushed it off, "Ain't gonna to happen." Obviously, I couldn't have been more wrong.

This morning, it started snowing. It was in the mid-30s, so the flakes clumped up into postage stamp sized clusters. As the day wore on, I figured that it would warm up and turn to rain. I'd seen this movie before, especially as a kid growing up on Long Island, hoping for a snow day. At most, I expected a light dusting – it'll all be melted by late afternoon, I thought.

I moved my car out of the driveway and parked it on the street and then ran an errand in my wife's VW Bug. I was at CVS for about 10 minutes when they lost power. The store was now running on battery backup and the employees started ushering the patrons off the premises. We could make an immediate purchase while the cash registers and credit card machines still had battery power. I quickly bought two ice scraper brushes for the cars. By the time I got back to the Bug, it had an inch of snow on it.

No sooner did I brush off the windows and head out of the parking lot than I could no longer see out of the side and rear windows. Every time I accelerated, the traction control kicked in for five to ten seconds. Even more unnerving was the fact that, as the car would slide and skid sideways - ever so slowly - I'd hit the breaks and hear the antilock system clicking away for what seemed like an eternity, "Please stop, please stop, please stop."

When I got home, I parked the Bug in the driveway. As I started shoveling snow, I could hear the cracking of tree limbs, every five to ten minutes, as they came crashing down all around the neighborhood. I couldn't figure out why this seemed so strange – but something was very "different" which was causing all these limbs to fall.

It wasn't until a few hours later when I realized why so many trees were collapsing. Normally, in the winter, when it snows, trees don't have any leaves. Not only are the leaves still on the trees, but most trees still have live, green, leaves. It wasn't just the combined weight of the snow and leaves that caused the tree limbs to snap. It was also the fact that the healthy, green leaves, significantly increased the surface area of the limbs. More surface means more snow sticking to the trees, which, in turn, means the trees now need to support a heavier load.

Although there are no trees on our property, our backyard now has more than its share of limbs, courtesy of our neighbors. On top of that was the fact that the snow was very wet and clumpy and it seems like more limbs came down than would have fallen during a hurricane. (Speaking of hurricanes, it's still hurricane season here.)

Operation Driveway

After shoveling the driveway – which is a task I can't recall doing in over 25 years – it was time to move my Honda Accord from the street to the driveway. I was leery about leaving it parked on the street because of the passing snowplows plus the fact that the street in front of the house is a very steep hill. I watched several cars slide, skid, twist, and turn down the hill. They were getting way too close to my car. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before one of them would slam into my car if I left it parked on the street.

I was sure that the SUV, in the following video clip, would skid into the back of my silver Accord after watching it make several failed attempts to enter their own drive way. Fortunately, they finally gave up and parked on the street.

However, after multiple attempts, I, too, failed to get my car back in the driveway. I drove around the block three times. Each time, as I came down the hill, I simply could not turn into my driveway – the car just kept skidding straight. It certainly didn't help that the driveway is extremely narrow and it's surrounded by retaining walls on both side.

All that I could do was leave my car parked in front of the house. About once an hour, a snow plow made a pass. With each run up and down the road, they've built up a protective wall of snow around my car. It'll be a pain to shovel out tomorrow, but, for now, I welcome it. I'm guessing that about six or seven inches of snow has fallen, so far.

Next Step

My next step is to meet my neighbors and become friends with them. Two neighbors fired up their snow blowers and each plowed about half a dozen driveways; and then they plowed the sidewalks. I need to get on their to-be-plowed list.