iTouch TV or iTV?

I was chatting up the iTV rumors with a co-worker last night when he posed a humorous question, “Would it be a touch screen TV?” I laughed and thought of every sci-fi show I had seen as a kid playing out in my mind with the Apple logo settled nicely on the top right of the screen. As unique as it would be to have a 37” inch touch screen TV part of me screams NO WAY!

Apple has built its products into an ever growing community of life that while some aspects of one devise work on another, one product line really never replaces another. I mean look at the classic iPod, even that for some reason is still selling in stores and online. Just don’t ask me how. It is this practice of building a community of products that is a major contributor of how Apple is so successful. Each product complements the other in its own way.

But someone somewhere may still ask, why not a touch screen? Besides that the top of my current TV sits eight feet in the air above my fireplace and I have no intention of building hard core shoulders, you could kiss your Apple TV good bye if it were in fact a touch screen. It would become a bulky non portable pain in the rear. Maybe five years from now when a wall in my kitchen also serves as an interactive graphic family message board with post-its, pictures, reminders, and a zoom-able map of where I am supposed to pick up the kids after their soccer practice. It would be really great to have a touch, even 3D, or holographic iTV to swipe homework reminders from the wall to my kids iTV, or they take a screen shot of a TV show scene, swipe it to their MAC to add themselves to the scene. But right now at this moment, Apple is smarter than this. But it was still a fun thought.

Andy Rooney Passes at 92

"I hate restaurants who ask if you would like fresh ground pepper. No thanks you, I'll take your old pepper" RIP Mr. Andy Rooney

Procrastination

            I can do it tomorrow can possibly lead to a disaster. For some people the pressure involved can make them perform better while for most it will show up in the end result that no preparation was made at all. The practice of putting things off till the last moment can often affect a persons’ career, relationship, mental attitude, and can even manifest in physical attributes. Procrastination is an ailment that plagues us all from the easiest tasks we do everyday to major assignments that we know are coming weeks in advance and the effect is different for everyone.

            A career can suffer greatly from the negative effects of procrastination from missing advancement opportunities, loss of creativeness, and poor decision making. Some can even say that injuries and miss-haps increase due to procrastination while trying to hurry and catch up on lost time. A persons’ effective decision making ability tends to drop significantly when waiting for the last minute to do something. This drop can lead to a poor presentation, mundane job performance, and lost opportunities in their career. Creative thinking can often take a major blow when waiting till the last moment to get a job or task done. The valuable time prior that could have been used to come up with alternative ideas, many different approaches, and even a revolutionary idea can be lost with the fast paced movements that occur when trying to meet a deadline on time. Ideas that should have been thrown away, practices of personal and team safety  in the work place, and the immediate outcome of ones’ performance does not surface till after the end result is looked at and the procrastination is evident in all that was done.

            A persons’ relationship can also feel the strain in the act of procrastination. The feeling of tension can become high in a relationship when waiting for the last minute to pay bills, perform needed household repairs, or any other everyday common task. The result of constant nagging, blaming, and other destructive actions can sometimes only lead to further procrastination in a home and has a high possibility of a snowball effect on the outcome. The constant feeling of preoccupation in a relationship due to procrastination can even lead to isolation creating a distance between the couple and even a whole family. This feeling of isolation can also lead to an increase in the avoidance of finishing the task leading to self blame and little room for others in the relationship. Helplessness may even increase from the surrounding people of the relationship or family creating more tension, more blame, and the possible destruction of the relationship all together.

            With the increase of pressure from work and family due to procrastination a persons’ emotional and quality of life can take a significant hardship. A sense of perspective and self worth can be lost under the emotional pressure to perform well and to get the job done creating a false outlook on a positive future in ones life. Guilt, anger, depression, irritability, and even envy or jealousy can eat away at a persons’ mental and social capacity taking them further down in their emotional well being. Looking at all these symptoms individually or as a whole can often become the catalyst of divorce, suicide, hoarding, and even various types of drug and alcohol abuse.

            Combining all the effects that occur at work, in a relationship, and ones’ emotional attitude it is also evident to look realize the physical attributes that procrastination can cause. Restlessness and sleep deprivation due to constant preoccupation in the mind will often lead to a loss of appetite resulting in loss of weight, strength, and willpower. This weight loss combined with mental fatigue is often the passage for headaches, muscle aches, high blood pressure, and even further illness if left unattended. The mounting stress behind the actions of procrastination, over a period of time, while combined with the physical attributes can often lead to heart attack and even death. People are even more likely to catch the common cold when dealing with high levels of procrastination. The immune system has very touchy balance in a persons’ body and all it needs is a gentle push in a bad direction to let all levels of disease to invade, and procrastination can be a big stepping stone in the gentle push.

            Who would have thought the little act of putting something off could have such a giant impact on a persons’ career, personal and professional relationships, emotional well being, and health? Yet the constant act of putting one thing off can lead into another and another until something gives. Be it the career through a performance rating at your job and loss of advancement, a growing divide in a relationship leading to divorce and the separation of a family, or the mounting stress combined with poor health that can lead to a heart attack or even death. These are all just a small sample of the numerous things that can happen with just the small innocent act of saying “I’ll do it tomorrow”. Though procrastination is a process that we all do now and then in our lives its effects can be from the very mundane all the way to an inevitable life changing moment, it all depends on how often and to what extent you are doing it.

Google Chromebook is up in the Cloud

  Google Chromebook seems to have some interesting features like, eight second start up time, long battery life, priced point of $349 to $499, Wi-Fi and 3G, and no applications….. wait a minute. Yeah that’s right no apps, no programs, and no folders. Because according to Google everything mid June can be done on the internet. Everything?
 
Now I am sure if I search, hunt, and peck long enough I can find something somewhere to create and edit videos, create my production excel sheet, and produce any pdf or word document for my next day at work or school online. But I don’t want to search and go to a web page to do 60% of the things I on my laptop and not have to depend on an internet connection to do it. And not all of my life is comprised of Blogspot, Twitter ( #thunderup ), Facebook, and internet surfing. Just 40%.
 
  I am not completely against the whole cloud concept honestly. I could use the extra memory and think it’s a great way to back-up my stuff. But if you are in an area or on the go with little to no connectivity, how much of the cloud can you hold in your hands?
 
  On the other hand my biggest question would be why a netbook? Between the iPad, other tablets, and a descent smart phone I thought the death of the personal Desktops, Laptops, and Netbooks was imminent. It seems pointless to me to come out the gate with this product as anything but a tablet. Was there an issue with the OS in a tablet form? It seems like a near waste of money on Google’s part, unless they are just trying to hit the low price point but even that doesn’t make since because you can get an iPad2 or another tablet for another $100 ish more. So why waist the money and time? I have no answer for that, but I do think that the idea of a internet only product is just a moment or two ahead of its time.
 

Google Music takes a bite out of Apple

   So Google wants to take a bite out of the Apple iTunes with Google Music. Some are heralding it as the time of change, Droid's turbo button, and Apple and Amazon's worst nightmare. But it is really?

   The Twitter feed on it is crazy and so far it seems to be mainly cloud based and the beta test for it, good luck getting on  that list, only allows up to 20,000-ish songs for upload. 20,000 songs??? I have around 500 plus songs and only listen to about 100 repetitively, if it wasn't for shuffle I may not even listen to that many. The main part of cloud based is that you don't have it with you, it's on the internet. Now for somethings like files, spreadsheets, pictures, and the like this is an okay system for me, but to stream my own music, even just 40 songs I own that I can think of right now I could kiss most of my data plan good bye in nearly one sitting. Combine that with so-so connectivity on the go, cloud based streaming music is not so appealing to me. I know the response is Wi-Fi connections but when driving, walking, or running around it's not going to happen.

   I also watched that the Google currently does not own any music or label rights at the starting line of the beta release. Which you can find out that is not what they wanted to do but are doing it anyway. Like asking for a diet drink at the drive thru but taking the regular version at the window. Now they know how my wife feels.

   Lastly on my list is the audience. Looks like Google is making an app for their product but so far only for droid based phones. I'm not one to lug my laptop around with me to listen to my playlist while running so that idea will be out the window and so will it for any non Droid owner. Which is a huge number of consumers. Especially when thinking that 66 percent of all digital music sales were from iTunes in 2010.

   So is Google Music going to last? I am sure it will due to the support of die hard Droid fanatics and that the service is free for now like most Google products. But should Apple worry at all? With the small bite that is already missing from the Apple logo I think they will survive.

And so it begins again...

First things first. I would like to thank my friend Johnny for turning me towards this idea and to @Techranter for pushing and pushing me to continue to write, and my best for last, my love Jana ( @myjanabanana ) for whom puts up with me the most in life, she is my support, backbone, and friend. I Love You.

Warning for my readers, my grammar and spelling will be horrifying at times... most of the time. I have tried to change the names to protect the innocent, or not so innocent, and any likeness or carbon copy is purely accidental. I don't come to your work throwing rocks at you, though I may talk about it, so please don't come here telling me how I threw those rocks poorly.

Also my comma key is missing due to a strongly worded conversation with a lot of sentence enhancers while I was deployed in Iraq back in '08 and my lil fella, who is 2, decided the little rubber pad that helped generate the comma did not need to be there anymore last week.

IF you find anything I have to say/type/read/show (use your thesaurus) offense or hurtful (thesaurus again) or anything else that generates an emotion (just google thesaurus and bookmark it) in you that you don't want to feel you solely have the right to close this window that you are reading this in and never return, I will live.

Thank you though for enduring my SECOND POST HERE!!!