Year: 2013

My Jerry Maguire Moment

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I’m writing this while sitting at the bar waiting for takeout from my fav pizza place dive in my old/new city of Columbia.

This time it feels more permanent. That’s most because I’vd started both my new business and my new life here. This is my Jerry Maguire moment in time and place.

Everyone here that I tell I picked this patch of famously hot dirt over Asheville looks at me a little curious and a lot of envious. However, this dirt is my home (well closer).

I called my grandmother today from my new offices downtown and wished her happy birthday. She was so excited to have me back in South Carolina just because it’s closer to home and my girls will have SC roots.

That made me realize some deep things about myself and my family.

It’s good to be home.

To quote Jerry Maguire, “I was 35. I had started my life.”

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4D Star Collapse Lead to Our Universe?

Here’s your Monday afternoon mind-bender…

It could be time to bid the Big Bang bye-bye. Cosmologists have speculated that the Universe formed from the debris ejected when a four-dimensional star collapsed into a black hole — a scenario that would help to explain why the cosmos seems to be so uniform in all directions.

via Did a hyper-black hole spawn the Universe? : Nature News & Comment.

How Google Solved Android’s Fragmentation Problem

With an app, of course.

Fascinating to ponder that Google is trying to basically blow up the PC industry with Chrome (the Win 8 Chrome app runs exactly like my Chromebook and I’m betting they take that over to OSX as well) and is doing a similar thing with this decentralized Android strategy to iOS.

Rather than having the big updates come to a device via an operating system update (“yay iOS 7 is coming out with all of these great new features!” etc), with Google Play Services the table has been turned and allows for Android to stay up to date despite the actual version number that a manufacturer might ship with the hardware.

Oh my this is interesting…

This is how you beat software fragmentation. When you can update just about anything without having to push out a new Android version, you have fewer and fewer reasons to bother calling up Samsung and begging them to work on a new update. When the new version of Android brings nothing other than low-level future-proofing, users stop caring about the update.This gets even more interesting when you consider the implications for future versions of Android. What will the next version of Android have? Well, what is left for it to have? Android is now on more of a steady, continual improvement track than an all-at-once opening of the floodgates like we last saw with Android 4.1. It seems like Google has been slowly moving down this path for some time; the last three releases have all kept the name “Jelly Bean.” Huge, monolithic Android OS updates are probably over—”extinct” may be a more appropriate term.

via Balky carriers and slow OEMs step aside: Google is defragging Android | Ars Technica.

(Fe)Male Identity(ies)

My amazing friend (and a rare Baptist MDiv/MAR/PhD) Thomas writes this fantastic post:

Admittedly, the overall message of the post seems to be one of trying to teach children good social media practices, but it does much more than that. For starters, there is what appeared to many commenters as blatant hypocrisy: the mother decried certain photos of teenage girls while peppering her post with photos of her attractive and fit sons, bare-chested on the beach the author has since replaced these pictures. But this only scratches at the surface.

via Conservative Christian Slut-Shaming, Boys Will Be Boys, and Identity Formation.

Nexus 5 with LTE?

My Nexus 4 is the best phone I’ve ever owned (having owned every previous iPhone up to the 5 and a couple of other Android phones like the Galaxy S3). Being a relatively recent convert to the Android world, the ecosystem is such a better fit for me than iOS (though I still respect that platform, of course). And if the next Nexus phone is anything like the new Nexus 7 tablet, I’ll love it even more. Seriously, the new Nexus 7 tablet is just phenomenal.

That said, I’m excited about the potential Nexus 5. I’ve been pondering the Moto X since I do have an upgrade available on Verizon, but I’m going to hold out for an upgrade to my beloved Nexus 4 on its $30 a month T-Mobile plan with no commitments or contracts…

As is often the case with smartphone leaks, the first one opens the floodgates to a wave of others. It looks like Googles next Nexus device, which most are calling the Nexus 5, will be no different. As discovered by S4gru, a smartphone manufactured by LG has appeared on the FCCs site with enough detail to associate it with the device that Google itself leaked in a KitKat promo video earlier in the week.

via The LG Nexus 5 with LTE may have appeared at the FCC | The Verge.

Twitter Hashtags and Crisis Management

One thing that’s frequently seen in 2013 is some form of crisis that begins on and manifests itself across social media platforms. The folks at Social Media Today have some great tips for using hashtags effectively during times of crisis (even though they have a typo in their post title, evidently):

Use a Twitter Hashtags in a Crisis | Social Media Today: “One given in an incident: if you use social media, people will use your hashtag and @username as a source of getting the info they need. A hashtag in a crisis will become a sort of customer service channel. Be sure you have dedicated staff monitoring your social media channels and responding to  legitimate requests for information.”

Microsoft Acquires Nokia

Android and Motorola vs Apple and iOS vs Microsoft … and … Nokia:

REDMOND, Washington and ESPOO, Finland – Sept. 2, 2013 – Microsoft Corporation and Nokia Corporation today announced that the Boards of Directors for both companies have decided to enter into a transaction whereby Microsoft will purchase substantially all of Nokia’s Devices & Services business, license Nokia’s patents, and license and use Nokia’s mapping services.

via Microsoft to acquire Nokia’s devices & services business, license Nokia’s patents and mapping services.

Let’s see if this changes anything.

New Mac Pro Alternative

Fun read of an insanely expensive yet pretty awesome setup…

So it was decided. New Mac Pro. Will buy.Or so I thought. A couple of months ago a change in circumstances meant my girlfriend’s need for my 11” Air went from “After you buy a new Mac Pro” to “Yesterday”. Since the Mac Pro was still months away I had to make a decision.

via I couldnt wait for the new Mac Pro – Hopefully Useful.</p

How to Expire Contest or Coupon Related Tweets

If you use Twitter for anything marketing related, you’ll occasionally bump into the need to delete or expire a tweet (or series of tweets depending on the campaign).

Here’s a nifty tool that helps solve that problem:

A former Twitter engineer has released an app that lets you schedule your tweets to be deleted. Enable Spirit for Twitter and append a hashtag like #1m, #2h, or #3d, and your tweet will disappear after the specified timeframe. It’s introducing even more ephemerality to a service that’s already heavily focused on the moment.

via Add an expiration date to your tweets using a simple hashtag | The Verge.