Adam-Jackson

It’s very rare that I talk about audio and music. I’m not an expert or an audiophile. I don’t have formal training but I’m a HUGE fan of music overall. I have nearly 20,000 songs in iTunes and each one of them is in perfect quality or at least up to my standards. I can tell you what kind of file and what the kbps is just by listening to it. By the way, “kbps” stands for “kilobits per second” (not kilobytes).

Pre-Blog Post Note: I’m not a professional and most of this is “assumptions” based on my 10+ year love of music. I don’t speak for anyone, including BT. This is just my opinion -Adam

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A History Lesson

When iTunes was introduced to the world on April 28th, 2003, the highest kbps for purchased music was only 128 and this was acceptable to most but audiophiles complained that 256kbps music was needed as 160kbps generally translates to “CD-Quality” and ripping at 128 would result in loss of that quality. Then again, Apple touted that 128kbps AAC (the codec used by the iTunes Music Store instead of the more popular MP3) was more efficient at compression and thus CD-Quality MP3s were 160kbps but in AAC, 128 was acceptable. Confused? It’s not important, just a little bit of history.

Anyway, on May 30th, 2007, Apple introduced iTunes Plus. This was a response to two things. One, the consumers that wouldn’t use iTunes due to DRM restrictions set by Apple’s store and that 128kbps was too low quality. iTunes plus tracks generally cost $1.29 (30 cents over the standard price) and came without DRM and were double the quality of Apple’s 99 cent tracks. The users were happy! In 2009, Apple announced that he entire store would become iTunes Plus enabled by the middle of the year and all tracks would be 256 and without DRM and variable pricing would be put in place. Basically, this was a response to labels demanding some tracks be sold for $1.29 and Apple didn’t want to budge.

Today, when you browse the iTunes Music Store, every track is encoded at 256kbps (above CD-quality) and DRM-free and tracks range from 79 cents to $1.29. Consumers are happy, labels are happy. Oh, one other technical side note; If you rip a CD at 256 KBPS, you won’t always get that much quality out of it. You’re ripping more than you need to. I’m going to share with you why iTunes isn’t the place to buy music that you truly appreciate or music that you want longevity out of.

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Why iTunes Isn’t The Best Place to Purchase Music

Today, Brian Transeau’s (aka BT’s) latest album, “These Hopeful Machines” has landed on Amazon, iTunes and your local record store. Brian’s music is fantastic, wonderful, celebrated and timeless. I listen to tracks he created over 12 years ago and the songs might as well be a couple of weeks old. Every track he has created is delivered in a way that you can experience each album back to back without the feeling of boredom and, honestly, his music inspires me. My ex-girlfriend, Laura claims that I have a “man crush” on Brian for his art of music and I admit it. The crush is real. His music has helped me write over 50% of my blog posts for the past 10 years. He’s helped me get through good times and bad and helped me through a 16 hour car ride across state lines. His music has lifted my appreciation and awareness to new levels and it has brought me down to the level of realization that we’re so tiny in this huge universe. Brian makes electronic-audible art.

His music never should be consumed at 128kbps AAC, MP3 or WMV. Even at 256kbps, I think you’re doing yourself a disservice. Go ahead and enjoy your Smash Mouth album at 256k but music from artists like BT, U2, The Beatles and Moby (and many more) should be played in a different way outside of the iTunes Store restrictive quality model.

For a while, audiophiles have begged Apple to provide variable pricing for different qualities. 96kbps can be purchased for 49 cents and AIFF / Apple Lossless should cost $1.50-$1.99. Audiophiles will pay $19.99 for an album in Apple Lossless because they know the advantages to paying more for that file format. However, Apple keeps things simple and only provides 256K music.

Before I continue, let me stop and say that if you use Apple’s included earphones, then just stop reading and purchase Brian’s new CD on iTunes for a few bucks and listen away. You’re not going to get anything out of this if your earphones cost less than $99 (Apple’s earphones cost $29 and even then, they’re a ripoff).

My earphone of choice is the Shure SE530. I currently own a pair of Bose QuietComfort 2 cans (which totally blow at $299 they’re a ripoff), Etymotic ER-4, Shure SE420 and the Shure SE530 earphones. The Shure SE530s retailed for $599 when I bought them. Those died outside of the 2 year warranty and guess what, I bought a new pair for $449 (their current price). Why? They’re totally worth it.  Earphones, headphones, cans and monitors are all different kind of devices to help you listen to music. Each have their own advantages and pricing does matter. I just saw that Ultimate Ears, a subsidiary of Logitech, released a 6 driver pair of earphones for $1350 and if I had the cash, I’d buy them. I don’t understand by people pay $300 for an iPod and buy thousands of CDs for $12.99 each and then plug in a pair of $29 earbuds. It’s stupid and you’re not enjoying music the way you should.

Long story short, if you’re not in a pair of earphones that cost at least $99, then just stop reading. For young and newbie audiophiles, the SE115 (link) are a great starter pair of earphones. They’re only $115. My first pair of “good” earphones were the SE110 and I never looked back and every year I upgrade because it’s worth it!

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Ok….Back on topic

Brian’s new album comes out today. Do not buy on iTunes (unless you want to). I’m sure he would love you to purchase a digital and analog copy of his music but hear me out. I’m lazy so I went to Wikipedia and searched for AAC, MP3 and Apple Lossless. Below are the descriptions.

MP3:

MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, more commonly referred to as MP3, is a patented digital audio encoding format using a form of lossy data compression. It is a common audio format for consumer audio storage, as well as a de facto standard of digital audio compression for the transfer and playback of music on digital audio players.

The use in MP3 of a lossy compression algorithm is designed to greatly reduce the amount of data required to represent the audio recording and still sound like a faithful reproduction of the original uncompressed audio for most listeners. An MP3 file that is created using the setting of 128 kbit/s will result in a file that is about 1/11th^{[note 1]} the size of the CD file created from the original audio source. An MP3 file can also be constructed at higher or lower bit rates, with higher or lower resulting quality.

The compression works by reducing accuracy of certain parts of sound that are deemed beyond the auditory resolution ability of most people. This method is commonly referred to as perceptual coding.^[5] It internally provides a representation of sound within a short-term time/frequency analysis window, by using psychoacoustic models to discard or reduce precision of components less audible to human hearing, and recording the remaining information in an efficient manner.

AAC:

Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) is a standardized, lossy compression and encoding scheme for digital audio. Designed to be the successor of the MP3 format, AAC generally achieves better sound quality than MP3 at similar bit rates.^[1]

AAC has been standardized by ISO and IEC, as part of the MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 specifications.^[2][3] The MPEG-2 standard contains several audio coding methods, including the MP3 coding scheme. AAC is able to include 48 full-bandwidth (up to 96 kHz) audio channels in one stream plus 16 low frequency effects (LFE, limited to 120 Hz) channels, up to 16 “coupling” or dialog channels, and up to 16 data streams. The quality for stereo is satisfactory to modest requirements at 96 kbit/s in joint stereo mode; however, hi-fi transparency demands data rates of at least 128kbit/s (VBR). The MPEG-2 audio tests showed that AAC meets the requirements referred to as “transparent” for the ITU at 128 kbit/s for stereo, and 320kbit/s for 5.1 audio.

AAC’s improvements over MP3

Advanced Audio Coding is designed to be the successor of the MPEG-1 Audio Layer 3, known as MP3 format, which was specified by ISO/IEC in 11172-3 (MPEG-1 Audio) and 13818-3 (MPEG-2 Audio).

Blind tests show that AAC demonstrates greater sound quality and transparency than MP3 for files coded at the same bit rate.^[1]

Improvements include:

• More sample frequencies (from 8 to 96 kHz) than MP3 (16 to 48 kHz)
• Up to 48 channels (MP3 supports up to two channels in MPEG-1 mode and up to 5.1 channels in MPEG-2 mode)
• Arbitrary bit-rates and variable frame length. Standardized constant bit rate with bit reservoir.
• Higher efficiency and simpler filterbank (rather than MP3’s hybrid coding, AAC uses a pure MDCT)
• Higher coding efficiency for stationary signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 1024 or 960 samples, allowing more efficient coding than MP3’s 576 sample blocks)
• Higher coding accuracy for transient signals (AAC uses a blocksize of 128 or 120 samples, allowing more accurate coding than MP3’s 192 sample blocks)
• Can use Kaiser-Bessel derived window function to eliminate spectral leakage at the expense of widening the main lobe
• Much better handling of audio frequencies above 16 kHz
• More flexible joint stereo (different methods can be used in different frequency ranges)

Apple Lossless:

Apple Lossless (also known as Apple Lossless Encoder, ALE, or Apple Lossless Audio Codec, ALAC) is an audio codec developed by Apple Inc. for lossless data compression of digital music.

Apple Lossless data is stored within an MP4 container with the filename extension .m4a. It is not a variant of AAC, but uses linear prediction similar to other lossless codecs such as FLAC and Shorten.^[1] All current iPod players can play Apple Lossless-encoded files. It does not utilize any digital rights management (DRM) scheme, but by the nature of the container, it is thought that DRM could be applied to ALAC much the same way it can with other files in QuickTime containers.

Apple claims that audio files compressed with its lossless codec will use up “about half the storage space” that the uncompressed data would require. Testers using a selection of music have found that compressed files are about 40% to 60% the size of the originals depending on the kind of music, similar to other lossless formats. Furthermore, the speed at which it can be decoded makes it useful for a limited-power device such as the iPod.^[2]

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Summarizing The Content I Pasted Above:

Yeah, I know that was pretty “techie” but here’s the gist. AAC is leaps and bounds above MP3 in so many ways! AAC is a great codec to use in the iTunes Music Store. Small file sizes, increased quality and flexibility. However, Apple Lossless is true lossless audio. Meaning, you don’t lose the quality. Apple Lossless is just like AIFF or WAV but where those two file formats turn a 3 minute song into 30 megabytes, Apple Lossless has the same quality as those file formats but brings it down to only 10 megabytes. Less space = more songs stored on your iPhone / iPod but without losing the quality like you would with with MP3 or AAC.

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Why All of This is Important:

Apple only gives you AAC 256kbps music when you purchase from them. Brian Transeau will spend weeks, months and years on an album perfecting each chord, bit, byte and second. He plays back these songs over and over in the original quality and he plays it back on monitors (both large speakers and in-ear monitors) and then he sends that music to the record company to distribute.

AAC 256kbps is “adequate” for most music. I think it’s offensive to your ears and to Brian’s passion and creativity to buy music from Amazon or iTunes in that lousy file format and lousy compression.

My suggestion. Buy BT’s album at your record store. In iTunes, choose “Apple Lossless” as the default Import method and enjoy Brian’s the music the way its meant to be heard.

I had purchased every BT album on iTunes, then when I bought my $600 earphones, I went to Amazon and bought the physical CDs. I reimported all of them in Apple Lossless and the benefits were incomparable! Every song, note, sound was detailed and real. The music came to life and so I began doing this for all of the music that I truly loved at 128 / 256 kbps. Now, 25% of my music is encoded in Apple Lossless. The file sizes are larger than AAC (10 megabytes compared to 4 megabytes) but it’s very much worth it.

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My Advice:

Buy Brian’s physical album (Amazon Link), purchase the SE115 from Shure and enjoy music the way it was meant to be heard. Don’t shoot yourself in the foot by buying Apple’s crappy quality. This isn’t Smash Mouth (no offense), this is Brian Transeau. He’s been working since 2006 on this album and it’ss meant to be heard the best way possible.

Further Reading: Macrumors.com Forums “AAC versus Apple Lossless” LINK

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Finally, here are some videos and Photos I shot of Brian’s last three performances in the bay area (San Francisco Area). He performed at iPhoneDevCamp and RubySkye.

It sucks being an Apple consumer right now. It really does. Apple clearly hates Adobe Flash, publicly and privately acknowledges that Flash was the leading cause of OSX Leopard Application and system crashes and they even modified Safari to not crash when Flash decided to fail which is a sign that they are having to do workarounds because Adobe Flash simply sucks on OSX. It’s clear that Apple has abandoned Flash entirely because many of us thought it was performance and battery issues that kept Flash from appearing on the iPhone OS devices. Now, with the release of iPad, it’s obvious that Apple won’t be adopting the standard on mobile devices.

Prior to the iPad announcement I was angry at Apple for their lack of support for Flash and I wasn’t alone. Hell, YouTube was forced in 2007 to create a mobile site for smartphones that played video in H.264 because many handsets didn’t support flash. Apple even worked with YouTube to deliver a custom application for iPhone prior to its June 2007 launch and, once again, the videos play in h.264, not flash. There are still times when browsing the YouTube app for iPhone that I get errors about a video not being available for my mobile device because there’s no h.264 version available.

However, last month (before the iPad came out), YouTube flipped the switch on HTML5 video. Prior to this new video standard, we were stuck with Flash. It was the default technology behind slideshows, games, video and even banner ads. Much of what we enjoyed about today’s web was powered by a system that was closed, non open-source and owned by one company (sound familiar to Apple but let me continue). Apple’s closed systems continue to improve but Flash on the Mac has been broken for years and Adobe won’t push the technology forward. On a PC, flash requires very little system resources which equals battery savings for mobile devices. On the Mac, playing Hulu video on my MacBook cuts the battery life in half, maxes out my CPU and forces the internal fan to come on to combat the heat needed to play a simple standard def video.

Silverlight came to popularity in 2008 and it may be a better way to get video, it’s not native on the Mac and aside from partners such as CBS, Silverlight never really broke through. The reason.. Google & Apple didn’t go with it. Apple didn’t start preinstalling Silverlight on its computers and Google didn’t support it on their video properties. Flash remained king.

For the next two years, the consumer will suffer but I have hope because it’s for the best. See, Google’s switch to HTML5 video on YouTube and Apple’s unwillingness to support Flash on its iPhone OS devices will force web developers to reconsider what system they use to deliver multimedia to users. In a few months, the amount of web devices that don’t have Flash and will never have Flash will surpass 100 million (that’s just Apple devices) and that’s a huge number of 3G & Wi-Fi connected users that will be unable to enjoy content.

In 6 months, it will be clear that there are 100 million potential users who aren’t getting your content and most of the top 5 video sites on the web will be using HTML5 instead of Flash (crossing my fingers that Hulu jumps on board as well).What does this mean?

It means three things.

1. Content creators will be forced to adopt HTML5 for content (video, interactive media)

2. Adobe will have to improve their product or Flash is dead

3. Internet Explorer 6 will finally die.

Right now, YouTube will display HTML5 video only to users of modern browsers (Safari, Firefox & Chrome). IE users are left in the dust but YouTube kindly shows Flash video to those users because it’s a pretty big chunk of people that still visit YouTube with the archaic browser. Soon, more sites will start ditching Flash and going strictly HTML5 and for once, our iPhones and iPads will show us videos and content across the web while Internet Explorer users will see a glaring “missing plugin” icon that we have grown so accustomed to. They will feel our pain.

This process will be slow. It will be painful to us early adopters. Eventually, our notebooks will have longer battery lives, our phones and mobile devices will crash less and have lower CPU utilization and Microsoft + Adobe will have to improve or die. I know Adobe and Microsoft have other revenue streams but I look forward to the day that Google & Apple lead the pack and we, the consumer will benefit.

The only problem, this won’t be a quick transition and for now, you’ll have this to look forward to when you are browsing the web with your iPad or iPhone. (photo credit)

Tonight, a friend told me that my online life is huge in a way that I share every single moment. Not only is the level of data simply enormous but my sharing causes confusion and leads to negative attention. In a blog post from last month titled, “Embracing The Hate” I wrote about the situation If find myself in much too often. I wrote:

This value greatly exceeds the loss of giving people more crap to throw at me. Sharing selectively has been my goal ever since AdamsBlock happened. Share less, more often which results for a lot of unusable information like linking to a news story or a funny video. This info isn’t leveraged for hate and only serves as filler for the really important stuff.

That’s how it’s been lately. I do share a lot but most of it is useless bullshit that no one should really care about like links, photos and tweets about nothing. I try to imagine if members of my family tweeted like me and how that would paint them. What I realize is we as humans all have regrets, faults and “aspects” of us that would be considered unacceptable in modern society.When is the last time a married man looked at a beautiful woman or a married woman thought about her life with that other guy that she knew in college or how often does a guy think about quitting his shitty job and simply tells a friend later over beers. Everyone has these moments that aren’t shared or spoken to anyone other than our own self-conscious and that’s where they’re supposed to remain.

I disagree because I believe honesty and being translucent is an enabler to great things. Most of you that have started following me in the past year have really seen the Adam who is censored. That’s pretty hard to believe but it’s true. The last 12 months have been full of censorship and I’ve had many people who I knew 3 years ago upon joining Twitter who told me things have changed and asking me if I’ve changed or just my tweets. The answer is both but I consciously leave tons of things out and I’d rather not.

Twitter has been a tool that did a lot for me. Twitter is responsible for 80% of my blog’s traffic, 45% of my Flickr photo views. My friend Scott Beale posted a tweet linking to my resume for my move to San Francisco and helped me land a great job. Another fellow san franciscan sent me a link to an awesome apartment that I live in now. A friend helped me get free tickets to shows in Vegas, another give me a place to crash for the night in a Los Angeles Hotel and another random Twitter friend bought me a beer in Seattle. Nearly 75% of my income is based on Twitter related work and, until just 3 months ago, all of my relationships were based on people who I met through social networks. I did realize the problem with that and fixed it.

Lately, everything I do doesn’t start with Twitter and it has lead to some great projects and relationships but I admit that there are so many opportunities that never would have happened had I not joined Twitter back in 2006.

If Twitter makes life so awesome, why am I contemplating walking away? The main reason is relationships and people. I have realized a few things. Going back to my first point about humans and how flawed we are, I realize that the micro-celebrity concept is applying to me. The more I share, the more people have things to hate me about. Think of it like dating. The first date is attraction based on their looks or “replication value” that you assume they have (money, personality, beauty). As you go out a 2nd and 3rd time, you learn more about them and soon realize how incompatible or different you are from that person. There comes a time when you deal with it which would make you shallow and fake or you are honest and tell them that things aren’t really working out.

Twitter is the same way. You see my follower count and tweet count or you like a photo that I post and you follow me. Soon, you learn I love coffee, my family and that I don’t like crowds or partying. I don’t like certain kind of music and I tweet about my dates and how they went. You learn everything that I am willing to share and soon you follow me for different reasons. Either it makes you feel good or bad and sometimes you’ll just unfollow me.

This relationship I’ve had with Twitter and the people that follow me is very interesting and it’s something I’ve never been able to wrap my mind around but what I do realize is that more people don’t like me or rally against me and what I do based simply on what I tweet. This is terrible and it’s something that I can’t really help. I have no way of taking each follower out to lunch and sharing with them truly what’s going on. I can’t say hi in person and get to know them. This is the fatal flaw of online social networking.

One big life change that happened recently really opened my eyes to this. I realized that so many people assumed a lot and said a lot and spoke of me a lot in conversations simply based on what I said on Twitter & my blog. It’s human nature to talk about other people but too often do people talk about others with an ignorant mind. I’m ignorant to so many things and I try my best to not talk about things I don’t know anything about. This is an effort I fail at way too often.

So I could curse those who don’t understand me and don’t understand what I’m really doing but I can’t because I gave them no reason or tools to know the real me.

So why would I leave Twitter? To put a stop, once and for all to the confusions, doubts, gossip and failures to understand the real me and what I really have to say. There is so much that you and I could learn from each other but we can’t do it in 140 characters and we can’t do it over email. It has to be in person with a handshake and a hug and until that happens, we’re just assuming we know what’s up and only getting 5% of the story.

I might still be on Twitter by sharing interesting links and photos and blog posts but the concept of sharing “what I’m doing” may soon come to an end. I hope this post cleared some things up. Thank you, as always, for reading.

I read this story today in the Washington Post. As you all know, I love bringing a bit of reality to my friends via writings and posts about humans and our interaction with the universe as well as the disconnect that’s growing each day.

Please click through and read the entire post HERE by author, Adrian Higgins.. I’ve copied it below because it’s simply amazing.

I wrote about this exact same subject last month in the post titled, Our Future: Connected & Dumb in Real-Time [UPDATED].

You know you have crossed the river into Cyberland when the guy coming your way has his head buried in the hand-held screen. He will knock into you unless you get out of his way, and don’t expect an apology. It’s as if you aren’t there.

Maybe you’re not.

Technology has drawn us into our interconnected webs, in the office, on the street, on the park bench, to the point that we exist virtually everywhere except in the physical world. Robert Harrison, a professor of Italian literature at Stanford University, laments that when students pass through the school’s visually stimulating campus, iPhones, BlackBerrys and all the evolving devices and apps draw them into their blinkered personal realms. “Most of the groves, courtyards, gardens, fountains, artworks, open spaces and architectural complexes have disappeared behind a cloaking device, it would seem,” he writes in his book “Gardens: An Essay on the Human Condition.”

This retreat from the natural world is most evident in the young, but it is not a generational phenomenon, he argues. Instead, the ubiquity of the computer is changing the very essence of the human animal. We are in the midst of a historical change in “our mode of vision,” he says, “which is bound up with our mode of being.”

According to a recent landmark study of viewing habits, adults spend an average of nearly three hours a day interacting with computer screens. Add TV viewing and you get a screen time of about 8 1/2 hours. “People are spending more time in media and especially screen media than anything else they’re doing in life,” says Bill Moult of Sequent Partners, one of two organizations that provided the study.

But you don’t need numbers to know how absorbed we have become by screens and their mesmerizing qualities. In October, two Northwest Airlines pilots who flew their jet 150 miles past their destination told investigators they were distracted by their laptop computers. Walk the streets of downtown Washington and you will see many people, a majority perhaps, plugged in to a two-dimensional world. Peer into the vehicles, and tally a scary number of drivers on hand-held cellphones, even texting. This may be illegal in the District, but the temptation is too great. We have become digital zombies.

Actually, we have become symbionts, says Katherine Hayles, author of “How We Became Posthuman.” Just as a lichen is the marriage of a fungus and an algae, we now live in full partnership with digital technology, which we rely on for the infrastructure of our lives. “If every computer were to crash tomorrow, it would be catastrophic,” she says. “Millions or billions of people would die. That’s the condition of being a symbiont.”

Hayles is among a number of intellectuals who see this dependence as not necessarily bad, but as advancing civilization and, above all, just inevitable. “From Thoreau on, we have had this dream we can withdraw from our technologies and live closer to the natural world, and yet that’s not the cultural trajectory that we have followed,” says Hayles, a professor of literature at Duke University. “You could say when humans started to walk upright, we lost touch with the natural world. We lost an olfactory sense of the world, but obviously bipedalism paid big dividends.”

In the Computer Age, “we are making our environments more responsive to humans’ needs and desires than ever before.”

Adriana de Souza e Silva, assistant professor of communication at North Carolina State University, says the widespread acceptance of public phoning, texting, surfing and tweeting on mobile devices has changed our lives so that we exist in a duality of the physical and electronic worlds.

“What we are witnessing now is a different kind of public space composed of people who are physically there [but talking to] people who are remote,” she says.

She argues that this has actually made us more aware of our surroundings because so many devices are driven by their location and the user’s awareness of place. “The BlackBerry might be looking for a local restaurant and a person two blocks away, not overseas. If you’re walking downtown and you can access information that’s been tagged there, that information suddenly becomes part of that location.”

The difficulty, Harrison argues, is that we are losing something profoundly human, the capacity to connect deeply to our environments.

Landscape designers talk about bestowing on a garden its genius loci, or spirit of the place, that bubbles up into your consciousness if its presence is strong enough and the visitor meditative enough to receive it.

Harrison says a garden truly reveals itself only when its own depths and those of the beholder flow together. But that takes time. “For the gardens to become fully visible in space, they require a temporal horizon that the age makes less and less room for.”

He is captivated by the Czech writer Karel Capek, who gave the world the robot in his play “R.U.R.” and in it warned that technology would be our ruination. But Capek was also a passionate gardener who wrote “The Gardener’s Year,” published in 1929. “No one knew better than Capek that the cultivation of the soil and cultivation of the spirit are connatural,” Harrison writes. He believes gardens hold the key in leading us back into the visible world, because they are three-dimensional and made of living plants that speak to our “biophilia.”

“Gardens are the best place to begin this reeducation,” he says. Without it, he fears that the prophecy of the German poet Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Duino Elegies, will become so. “Earth, isn’t this what you want; invisibly to arise in us? Is it not your dream to be someday invisible? Earth! Invisible!”

As many of you know, I’ve decided to sell my MacBook Pro [BLOG LINK], [EBAY LINK]. There have been quite a few inquiries as to why I’m selling my nearly new MacBook Pro. Great question!

The MacBook Pro 17″ w/ 3.06Ghz Processor was released the 2nd week of June at WWDC. I bought it on the 25th so it is only 4.5 months old. Apple will, most likely, be updating the MacBook Pro once the christmas shopping season is over and after Macworld Expo in February (which Apple won’t be attending) which puts me around March. Now, at the 5 month mark, the resale value goes from a slow down-tick to a fast plummet and when new models come out, it’s even worse.

I’ve experienced heartache with the wait and see approach before like my last 15″ MacBook Pro at 2.93Ghz got about 20% less than I thought it would because Apple added SD slot and a built-in battery about 2 months after I purchased it and bumped the clock speed up a bit. This change greatly affected the resale value.

Given that the next MacBook Pro is nearly certain to have Core i5 mobile chips (like the iMac does today), this means the resale value will be even lower because not only will they be updated but they’ll have a brand new processor generation (like the jump from CoreDuo to Core2Duo) and after 18 months with the same graphics subsystem, this will see a bump as well.

The iMacs, as you all know already have the Core i7 with a faster front-side bus and glorious beautiful 27″ monitor. The new iMacs will retain their current value at a 2-3% resale value drop each month until around May of 2010. At that point, Apple would have already released a brand new MacBook Pro w/ new processors and yours truly can sell the iMac and switch back to MacBook Pro.

It sounds to you like Adam is wasting a ton of money. No I’m not actually because with extras like AppleCare, a case, some vintage Apple Stickers and some other goodies that will boost the resale price. Without giving away actual numbers, after eBay collects its seller fees and after shipping I always come out even on what I paid for the machine. That’s right. EVEN. Every 6 months I get a new machine and I never invest any money into it except for the rare times when I went from MacBook to MacBook Pro or MacBook Pro 15 to 17 and so on.

Is it worth the trouble? It is for me but in the past 5 years I’ve owned about 13 Apple computers by doing this so yeah it takes work to follow trends but it’s nice having the latest machine especially when I’m not losing a lot of money in the resale transactions.

I posted this heavily clicked review yesterday of retweets and I admitted that it was still pretty incomplete. At the time of writing, I was convinced that retweeting was for the better but, as Twitter notes, it’s still in beta.

Today, I found a flaw in people that are being retweeted. I noticed this in the stream.

The photo in question was this where my friends Drew and Robert Scoble retweeted two accounts that I don’t really care for and don’t want them to show up in my Twitter stream. Here’ a screen grab.

So Dave Winer and the Aflac Duck both show up and were retweeted by friends. At this time, you can only disable disable retweets from a person you’re following. So, I can go to Robert Scoble’s page and disable seeing ALL of the retweets he does of other users. This would be cool if it was someone I follow who retweets CONSTANTLY but this isn’t the killer feature and I think it’s more important that I am able to go to any user’s page and configure that person from never showing up in my stream. I send out this tweet:

But no, if I go to the Aflac Duck’s twitter page, there’s no option that says I never see his tweets in my stream no matter what person retweets him. This is a pretty major flaw as the top 25 celebrities on Twitter has no business showing up on my main stream but with this new feature they will day after day because each of them have millions of followers.

Then, I try this and all is right in the world but it’s simply a band-aid for a larger problem.

Blocking a person on Twitter will prevent their tweets from showing up in my stream no matter who retweets them. Yes, this works but it’s not a good solution because Twitter doesn’t have an active “list” of people you’ve blocked. Instead, you just have to keep a mental note of this and go to their pages specifically to unblock them. All social networks and IM clients have an easy list that you can access of people you’ve blocked but Twitter doesn’t.

I think this is something that will come later and since the product is in beta, there’s no need to stomp my feet and whine. If you see a lot of tweets from Britney Spears in your stream, just remember that you have to block her specifically or she’ll show up every day as friends retweet her.

Once every 3-4 months, I’ll change all of my passwords. You won’t believe how passionate I am about security and since working in IT for a few years, I learned the value of a secure password.

I keep an Adobe PDF that’s password protected with a master password. This PDF is updated every 4 months as I cycle through and change all passwords. At this time, it’s 4 pages long and contains over 50 password credentials to websites, devices, operating systems and other objects that require credentials to gain access.

If you’re on a PC, Please please please try RoboForm. It has a master password, auto-fill of forms and it even manages multiple identities for each website like I have 15 Twitter logins. Finally, it’s completely portable and the encryption is 128-bit. It’s an excellent piece of software and just talking about it makes me want to go back to Windows. Mac users will 1Password is the same but it’s not because I’ve used both.

I just changed all of mine this week and it took about 1 hour total to do it. Seriously, it’s not very hard to do and if you use SugarSync or Box.net, you can access that PDF from your iPhone if on the go and away from your PC. Don’t memorize your passwords because if, for some reason, you’re captured and held for ransom and the guys want access to your PayPal account, you have deniability that you really and honestly don’t know the password.

Ok, that last scenario was mostly a joke. What do I use for all of my passwords?

I use the PCTools Random Password Generator. The default settings are fine but on financial websites, I up that to 12 characters. These randomly generated passwords are hard to remember but fine if you store them in that PDF.

So get serious about security and change your passwords often!

Just a few minutes ago, I logged into Twitter.com to verify something and saw this glorious goodness:

That’s actually not my screengrab, I stole it from this guy but I do now regret not screen-grabbing the feature for later use. I’ve long expressed my “distaste” of the new feature but, as usual, Adam should have kept his mouth shut until actually trying it because now I can see exactly the kind of power RT has now that it’s an official feature. It was well thought out and takes retweeting to the next level in a very logical way.

The Basics:
First of all, I had to go back a page or two to find a tweet that was retweeted by someone else. It turns out Evan Williams retweeted someone named Rael who I’ve seen mentioned by friends here and there. As I scrolled over that tweet, it looks like Twitter has added a “tip” that says, “Wondering who this is?” with some info as to why you’re seeing that person in your stream. This is an excellent way to avoid any “freak-outs” that we’ve seen in the past from a few celebrities that got the feature early on.

I’m writing this assuming you’re a Twitter power user and understand what retweeting is. If you’re not, this blog post should get you started. The retweeting feature of Twitter.com allows you to retweet any interesting tweet you see with 2 clicks. Click “retweet” and confirm that’s what you want to do as Twitter lets you know this will be tweeted to all of your followers. You won’t see the retweet in your main /home page on Twitter. Why? Well, we’ll get to that later. People that are following you that have the new feature enabled will see someone’s  face in their stream that they’re not following and it will say that they were retweeted by you. They can also retweet that person as well but to their followers, it won’t show your name and will just say retweeted by “3 others” up to infinity I’m guessing.

If the person following you does not have the feature yet, they’ll simply see your face like usual with RT and then the tweet and it will look just like it did before the new feature so there’s no weirdness for people following you that don’t have it yet.

Discovery:
I’ve written a lot of lessons about discovery and mindshare and, personally, I found myself taking additional time when scanning the stream of data just to look at tweets that started with RT. The RT means it was retweeted and is something important. My fear was having a new face in my stream would throw me off (thinking I accidentally followed someone) but instead, on Twitter.com they made the UI understandable enough that if you saw the RT logo (a little square stamp) you could, over time, start ignoring them or paying more attention to them just like you did when you saw RT before a tweet before. The image is more recognizable and thus easier to filter as our brain interprets data and catalogs it.

So my first gripe was out and I’m happy about that. The RT will be missed but until Twitter rolls it out site-wide, we’ll be seeing it for a while. Plus, any 3rd party Twitter applications that don’t support Twitter’s ReTweet API, will still do the old fashioned way and since it’s text, Twitter won’t be able to block it. For those of you that prefer the old method, no one is stopping you from simply copying someone’s tweet and putting RT in front of it. Over time, more apps will support the new method.

Discovery is key. RT wasn’t just a way to share someone else’s tweet with your followers; it was a way to give kudos, thanks or a thumbs up to someone. Sharing, re-blogging or quoting is a way to show your appreciation and spread the word to people you follow. Twitter users love being retweeted. The thing about RTs is that I never gained any significant amount of followers from it. I’m sure many followers of people that retweeted me, saw my post or my link but not many clicked through to follow me. That might be changing. I saw this reply today just after using the RT feature and talking about it:

So, Hans-Jörn actually discovered me through a retweet of someone else. This makes complete sense because humans are visual creatures so my face appearing in his timeline (since he has the new retweet feature) triggered an awareness to my content and despite what my message was that was retweeted, he may have a trust with the person who retweeted me so w/ my face, content and “recommendation” from a friend, Hans felt confident enough to click “follow” next to my name. This was never possible prior to the new feature being enabled.

The Finer Details:

I wanted to note a couple of things that were interesting. Another one of my fears was that guys like Ashton Kutcher or websites like TechCrunch that have millions of followers and thus get retweeted hundreds of times would fill my stream. Everytime a new TechCrunch post is tweeted out, dozens of my friends tweet out the link that it’s hard to concentrate. The new retweet feature only enables you to see that status one time. Let me drill down into this a bit more.

I follow @Ev on Twitter. He posts something 10 minutes ago and 10 of my friends retweet it. I’ll never see those retweets because I already saw his tweet (since I’m following him). Sure, there’s a likelihood that I wasn’t looking at Twitter when he posted the update, but Twitter would rather not fill your stream with duplicate tweets. To back up just a bit, it’s important to remember that anyone simply putting, “RT @Ev….” as a text retweet, I’ll still see those because it’s text. This is an example of retweet content that will continue to live on for some time:

The same rule applied to people I’m following. I retweeted a post from @Ev. I refreshed my Twitter.com/home page and saw that my RT wasn’t showing up! The reason is that since I’m following him, it won’t show in the stream but if I navigate to /AdamJackson on Twitter (which is my public profile view), the Retweet does show up. This minor experience decision from Twitter will mean the stream is less spammy and thus solves one of my major gripes about the RT feature.

When a retweeted post says, “retweeted by 21 people” you can’t actually see who those people are. Earlier designs showed a view of Twitter avatars from people who retweeted it but it seems that was scrapped or just temporarily disabled. That’s totally fine because it’s distracting. I’d like to be able to click the number and see a list of people who retweeted. Further expansion on this since Twitter is now organizing the data differently would be to show leader boards by the amount of retweets but I guess I’ll have to stick to TweetMeme for now. Here is what the old retweet method looked like in earlier mockups.

Here’s how it looks now:

You can also now “undo” a retweet. Instead of the option to “delete” a retweet which might serve as confusing since it looks like you’re deleting the original person’s tweet (not technically possible but could be confusing to some), this undo button makes more sense that you’re undoing your retweet.

A final granular feature that I think is extremely important is the time stamp of the person’s original tweet is accurate since Scoble tweeted this out “9 hours ago” that’s the time stamp that is maintained when my followers see his face on my stream. Remember, people that follow him won’t see it. When I hover over the “you” area which is you or whoever retweeted it, I see a timestamp for when I actually retweeted it which was 31 minutes ago.

In Conclusion:
I wanted to mention that this was only after 5-10 minutes of using the new retweet feature. This was a feature I was pretty against when the screen shots first appeared last month but now that it’s being rolled out, I’m very impressed. Let’s keep in mind that this is still in beta and rumors say that it’s only being rolled out to 5% of users but the new feature will work with 3rd party clients via the API and I can expect even more good things from this new implementation as Twitter continues to improve the way it functions. Overall, I’m pleased with it and look forward to seeing where it goes next.

Today, my friend Andrew Mager linked to this video on CNN.com:

I found the video intriguing but I think most people enjoyed it simply because the kid was in the 5th grade and was so well versed on our 1st amendment rights with enough knowledge of our constitutional rights to also answer questions about them on national television. My thoughts on this matter are different because he only is taking the stand for one thing and yes it’s a big thing so I’m not saying he’s on the wrong path. The right to marry shouldn’t be a debate in my eyes but the argument that allowing same-sex couples to marry will harm the sanctity of marriage is pretty in-valid as I’ve written about here before with a few extra thoughts [link].

Despite the kid’s awesome thought process and that he’s taking a stand at such a young age which, in turn, results in him being called a “gay wad” he’s still missing the big picture here. The fact that liberty and justice for all is pretty much flawed simply because we as humans are flawed. When is the last time justice was actually served for anything? The justice system is royally broken and humans in the form of judges and juries and law makers continue to throw in their own life experiences and thoughts into the process which makes everything up for interpretation so you end up with a system that doesn’t really work.

I’m not even going to talk about Liberty. Honestly, the Wikipedia page on liberty is pretty long and yeah I skimmed the whole thing with the intention of reading in depth later. The short end of this is that liberty is non-existent for many of the reasons that the justice system is broken. Humans have opinions based on experiences and learned behavior. There are billions of humans and we all have our own opinion so giving everyone liberty will simply never happen no matter what people try.

I am proud of the kid for taking a stand but our pledge of allegiance is simply flawed in so many ways that I’m surprised it’s still recited in schools. Removing the, “under God.” line back when I was in school was an interesting choice that most schools in America didn’t adhere to anyway because they saw the change as denouncing God and allowing the atheists to win the argument which is completely false. The whole thing just stinks but there’s something a friend said to me on Friday that rang true.

As she, a native of Holland, sat with me in an Italian restaurant said to me, “I love America because the food diversity is so amazing. Letting everyone move here was a smart move!” I thought to myself, yes but it also meant religions, policies, teachings and ideals were brought here as well. I applaud America’s stance in the last 200 years of allowing people from all over to come here as it was the land of opportunity but our constitution wasn’t really designed to support hundreds of religions and to this day, hate crimes are still common in every state and people are judged by their skin color in every way. There is no liberty and justice for all.

To bring my point home, it shouldn’t have been a big deal and so highly publicized that a black man became president and a Latino women was made elected to the supreme court. It was a big deal because it’s so abnormal. People of color and women becoming leaders in any form is still “newsworthy” when it should be normal. It shouldn’t be abnormal at all but it was and this proves why liberty and justice have and always will be flawed. Until we as humans evolve to rid ourselves of hatred for anyone that’s different, this boy will never be able to say the pledge of allegiance.

My Mom who is techie enough to do real estate online, send emails and video chat with me has decided to use Twitter. She’s already on, actually but we can pick any computer user who is proficient enough to use Gmail and put them in front of Twitter.

The sign up process is simple but I’ve only told them, they can follow family & friends and update those people with what they’re doing. It’s a way to easily connect with others and share things. Mom is excited but the front page is pretty confusing. “popular topics by the minute, day and week” is on the main page. She reads through all of the topics and this is what she sees.

She’s aware of Veterans Day and Fort Hood but “#blamediddy” and “#donttrytoholla” look weird. What’s “Google Wave” and why are people talking about “MW2″? This is a bit confusing and she immediately assumes that this site is a place to talk about current events but she heard from me that this is a way to keep up with friends and see what they’re doing. Twitter’s tag line says, “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.”

At this point, her interest has passed and she’s merely following my recommendation. Joining is easy but with 82 million current users (11/12/09), she has a problem picking a username. Once she’s in, there are hundreds of “suggested” people that are recommended to her to follow. Al Gore is there and model, Brooke Burke and some guy name TechCrunch is recommended. She follows a few celebrities and moves on. Skipping the “find friends” area she now has a main page full of tweets from celebrities and there’s a box that asks, “what are you doing?”

After a while of scrolling around and seeing a lot of tweets she has no idea what to do from here. The sidebar has her name and tweet count and there’s a search box and then trends that show all kinds of topics and most mean nothing to her at all. She’s not really interested in pop culture and why are people talking about “3 words after sex”? She sees an option for lists and finally there’s a button that says, “Find People” at the top of the page.

From here, she can enter a friend’s email address, login to her Yahoo Mail account or search by first and last name for family members. This process couldn’t be easier but since her friends don’t tweet very much, her Twitter stream is now full of deals from Dell Outlet and some VC in Silicon Valley that’s live blogging a conference. “This isn’t very valuable” she says. She makes a great point.

I’m watching closely as she explores the screen. I told her she can reply to someone’s tweet to start a conversation. “How?” she says. She makes a great point. The reply and favorite buttons aren’t visible until you hover over a tweet. This simple user interface decision turns into a user experience nightmare. I don’t answer and let her try to find out for herself. 52 seconds later she finds the reply button and clicks it. The process of sending a reply is very easy.

She clicks on TechCrunch’s avatar and sees their page full of auto-posts. This is pretty boring and she wants to unfollow them. Where?

I have to show her the drop down to unfollow them. What are lists, she asks. Well, lists are a way to organize people you want to categorize into different sections like friends and family and maybe one for Florida friends and another for California. That makes sense but she has no idea how to create one so it’s very quick that she gives up.

Back on the main page, she’s following 10 people and suddenly Ashton Kutcher shows up on her stream w/  “retweeted by brooke burke” text below it. “Why is Ashton showing up? I can’t stand that guy!” I explain to her that people can retweet other people’s tweets and you can choose to not see those on a person to person basis. She understands and wishes that she could just disable retweets all together, “what if someone retweets something pornographic?” she asks and I have no response and just tell her that let’s hope they tag it with “not safe for work” so she doesn’t click it.

This was all Mom needed for her first Twitter lesson. She goes off exploring and here are some follow up questions I get over email.

• Who is “britneyfuckedvids” and why is she following me so many times?
• I clicked on some post under trending and now I see a ton of RTs about google wave. How do I get out of that?
• Someone followed me and keeps sending me all of these replies about hotel deals and travel. Did they hack into my twitter?
• I signed up for a get more followers thing but now all of these people are showing up in my page?
• How do I tweet from my phone like you do? Where do I go to get something like that?

Then, fast forward one week and she’s stopped using the service. She goes to my page to see what I’m up to but she’s simply stopped. The spammers, features and retweets just made it one big mess and even though she’s a modern woman in her forties, Twitter was simply too much to fuss with.

If she had joined Twitter 3 years ago like I did, the progression of complexity would be slow and manageable but it’s kind of like you’ve never used a word processor and all of the sudden, here’s Office 2007, Go have fun! It’s too much and sometimes we just want notepad or textedit instead of MS Word. Twitter is on the road to complexity and when it really matters and we really are trying to do something, along comes the failwhale and Twitter is over capacity.