Patrick's Rants

On Sunday I was driving up Hwy 89 to pick up my youngest from an sleepover birthday party. I tend to be a cautious driver so I was upset about the vehicles behind me that rode my bumper pretty closely, before I knew it we were up to 65 mph on a rode signed for 55. The wet rode and cold weather didn’t make me any less nervous. The tractor trailer (big rig, 18 wheeler) to my right completed my jitters. My passive aggressive reaction to speeders on my bumper is to slow down, which I did. The truck pulled forward on my right. Near the church with its “Jesus is at the end of your rope” sign blowing snow had refrozen across the road. I completely let up on the accelerator and my car reduced speed to about 45mph. The honking blue truck kept the hammer down. A mere 30 feet or so ahead of me the truck lost traction and slid straight across my lane headed toward the ditch on the southbound side. I lightly pumped the brakes and checked the knuckle heads on my tail. The truck started the jack knife fold that precedes a rollover. I watched the white pickup truck coming south as it moved into my lane to avoid the carnage heading its way and I steered over to the right to dodge my new lane mate as the big rig slowly recovered and headed back to its original lane.

The truck driver made his way over to the right – presumably to check his shorts. I made my way to my turn off the freeway. The car radio played “God Bless America” in that same bizarre juxtaposition as when “It’s a Wonderful World” played during the napalm scene in “Good Morning Vietnam”.

This is why the middle class feels like there’s class warfare of humongous proportions.

Nokia CEO under gun to justify Microsoft switch

BARCELONA, Spain (AP) — Investors have panned his shake-up strategy and employees are rankled. Now, Nokia Corp.’s Stephen Elop, the first non-Finn to lead the world’s largest maker of phones, is in a hurry to justify his decision to ditch the company’s smart-phone software in favor of a former employer’s, Microsoft.

He has a lot of ground to cover.

Nokia’s stock, which lost 14 percent after the Microsoft deal was announced Friday, fell by more than 5 percent Monday. Nokia employees showed their displeasure with the software switch on Friday, using flex time to head home en masse

Ok, so what do we take away from this quote from the Associated Press? First, that a former Microsoft executive has decided that Microsoft is the best development partner for his new company’s cell phone OS. Second, that the Finns don’t agree and came down with BSOD flu – they used flex time to shutter up the shop on a Friday afternoon like high schoolers getting “lost” on their way back to class from a pep rally.

Admittedly, Symbian is getting a little outdated. But it does what it’s supposed to do; hold your contacts and make phone calls. Of course, just everyone believes that “smart” phones are the wave of the future and what’s smarter than Windows? What indeed? Perhaps, the iPhone OS or Android.

Microsoft Corp. launched a new phone operating system, Windows Phone 7, late last year. Reviewers hailed it as big improvement over previous attempts, but so far it hasn’t made a dent in the dominance of Google’s Android software and Apple’s iPhone.

So the software is a big improvement over what Microsoft had before. Does that say more about how good it is now, or bad it was before?

Lastly, Microsoft is paying Nokia billions of dollars to switch to Windows Phone 7. That’s like walking onto a car lot and having the dealer ask you how much you want to take this car off his hands. Microsoft is a huge company. Their products are everywhere. Why should they have to pay a company to use their stuff? Maybe because it’s everywhere and people can see how “good” it is.

Nokia stock is back up, but it fell 14% on the initial announcement and another 5.8% on the following Monday. There’s a long road ahead, hopefully they can see clearly through the Windows.

Microsoft Phone 7. It’s supposed to save screen time. The commercials for it show people stuck texting or focused on the screen while life happens around them. So we’re to believe that a phone with more features is going to reduce the amount of time that we spend staring at the phone – maybe if Angry Birds isn’t available on the Windows Phone 7 OS. And really? From the company that brought the “Blue Screen of Death” to the masses we expect to stare at our phones less?

Well. I’ve got news for Microsoft. Those people who are addicted to phone screen time are still going to be staring at the screen. It’s a bit obsessive compulsive – it has nothing to do with the OS on the phone. If the OS were able to “save” people from their phones the nickname “crackberry” would never have caught on.

Are there really people who don’t know that lizards can save you 15% on car insurance? What? Do you live under a rock?

If you do, you don’t need car insurance and don’t give a crevasse.

There is a certain reptilian insurance salesman who is doing a call in show on insurance. A caller calls up to say that he saved a bunch of money using the web site in just over five minutes and wants to know if he set some kind of record for the amount of time it took him to “save” all that money. The host tells him that he missed the record by a few seconds. The caller replies, “but what if I just used one hand?”

Ewwwww…. what was he doing with his other hand? And an insurance web site? Really?

Infoworld is hitting hard at Microsoft in a couple of recent articles. The first seems to be a pre-mortem over Microsoft’s top officers hitting the eject switch. I mean, it really seems like people are binging out of the company.

Infoworld’s next article, takes a closer look at Redmond’s recently reported profits. Make no mistake, Microsoft’s money moving shell game is all legal. But Woody Leonhard scratches a little bit of the glitter and glimmer off the top of the numbers to arrive at a less than pretty picture of the billions that Microsoft recently reported. At this rate they are not long for this world, maybe 20, 30 years. Cause – you know – they only have so much case.

500 year old beer has been found in a shipwreck at the bottom of the ocean. Now scientists want to dissect it and maybe bring us a new version of some really old beer. I only hope we don’t have to wait 500 years to try some.