Deleted. Deleted. Deleted.
Suddenly, I’d gone from having 60 third-party apps on my phone to having a mere 20. That’s enough to fit on two screens (if you stuff the Stock Apps you can’t delete and don’t use into a folder). It’s been about 15 minutes since I finished, and already I can’t remember half the apps I deleted. I think that’s a great sign that I did the right thing.
Category: General Tech
Stay Classy, Tumblr
Tumblr co-founder David Karp seems like a fun guy. This is from an article about an email he sent to a Tumblr user who was complaining about the service’s recent issues with uptime:
Karp responded abruptly, saying that “…we have no interest in customers that will go out of their way to discourage our entire team” continuing to say that this is a “…team that regularly spends their nights and weekends working feverishly to provide the best service we can against extraordinary challenges”. He signed off saying that “Plenty of services will import Tumblr blogs. Please go away.”
CNN’s 1986 Coverage of Challenger
That video is still so shocking, even after 25 years.
‘Trauma to the Nation’s Psyche’
Senator Bill Nelson, in the same NPR story:
It was a huge shock to the American people because the space shuttle had come to represent our entire technological prowess. And when people suddenly saw on their television screens, that was played over and over, the close-up shot of those solid rocket boosters going off in different directions about 10 miles high in the Florida sky — this was a trauma to the nation’s psyche.
‘Catastrophic Events’
Jon Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan, to NPR on the space shuttle Challenger:
It was such a shock, because most people thought it would never ever happen. But once you get the idea that spacecraft sometimes have catastrophic events, then it becomes less of a shock.
On Adding Features
Marco Arment, talking about Instapaper development with Rands:
Generally, I know I’m done because as I’m testing the migration from the current in-store version to the new version, I cringe at how bad the in-store version is relative to my shiny new development copy. I think, “I can’t believe *that* is what customers are using right now, when they could be using *this*.”
That’s when I freeze new features, fix any known bugs, polish any rough edges, begin final testing, and prepare to issue the release.
A ‘Rocky’ Time
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson seems confident AT&T won’t suffer too badly at the hands of the Verizon iPhone:
[The coming months] may be rocky, volatile and hard to predict, but as the market stabilizes, we will work through it.
Good luck, dude.
What Dave Caolo Took to Macworld
I’m super jealous of that 11.6" Air, but not of those headphones.
Yahoo Shedding More Jobs
Yahoo disclosed plans on Tuesday to layoff around 140 employees in the latest in a series of job cuts.
The reduction comes a month after the Web portal let around 600 workers go as part of a strategy by Carol A. Bartz, the chief executive, to pare costs and reinvigorate a stagnant business. Previous rounds of layoffs took place in 2009 and 2008.
Tuesday’s cuts were focused on Yahoo’s marketing team, according to a person briefed on the matter who was not authorized to speak on the record.
Verizon iPhone: $30 Unlimited Data
It’s official: Verizon is going to offer iPhone buyers a $30 unlimited data plan. The carrier’s heir apparent and chief operating officer, Lowell McAdam, told us the news ahead of the company’s meeting with investors.
[…]
But you’d better act fast. Speaking later Tuesday morning, Mr. McAdam said the iPhone unlimited plan will be a temporary offer and that the carrier will follow AT&T’s move to tiered pricing in the not too distant future.
Hoarding
That’s the fundamental point I really want to get across in this post, how applications like Evernote have encouraged us to become information hoarders.
Since it’s so easy to clip and save information throughout the day off the glutton of information that is the Internet, we almost feel compelled to store away facts and blog posts, photos and wikipedia articles because we can.
I mean damn, I can take a photo of a business card and send it to Evernote just in case I want to contact the annoying sales guy at the conference that gave me his business card 11 times, but do I actually NEED to?
Seven Years In
NASA:
Opportunity and its twin, Spirit, which passed its seventh anniversary on Mars this week, both have made important discoveries about wet environments on ancient Mars that may have been favorable for supporting microbial life.
Its amazing that those things were built for a 90-day mission. While Spirit is out of commission right now, Opportunity continues to make amazing discoveries on Mars.
These two little rovers may be the most impressive engineering NASA’s ever completed.