Ideapad

Blogging since 1998. By David Wertheimer

Page 21 of 128

On mobile phone usage

March 7, 2011 /

From my post on aiaio:

The majority of respondents, 58%, don’t use the mobile Internet at all. And two-fifths of that group doesn’t even have a web-enabled mobile device.

In my everyday life, for each instance I have of “aha! let me look that up on my phone,” I get half as many eye rolls about the fact that my phone came out of my pocket. My ability to access information in an instant can be trumped by an inclination toward, well, not taking out the phone.

Mobile etiquette is a funny thing; I personally err on the side of polite more than progressive, apologizing if my phone comes out mid-conversation. I wonder how much of that is going to drive mobile adoption the next few years, and when or whether it will move from accepted to expected across all social and age classes, as text messaging has.

On overstating

March 4, 2011 /

Steve Jobs’ reality distortion takes its toll on truth, on Fortune Tech.
I hate when hyperbole overshadows fact. (It’s one of the reasons I have never gotten deeply into following politics.) This article posits to fact-check Steve Jobs’ iPad 2 keynote, but Seth Weintraub’s corrections are surrounded in so much arm-waving frustration that they undermine the root arguments behind them. They also overstate the corrections.
To wit: Jobs included a bullet point that said the iPad has greater than 90% market share. Weintraub wrote in response, “‘>90% market share’. OMG Math,” then asserted, “Apple would have needed to sell 3.2 million more to reach 90% of 2010’s tablet market share.” Which, in itself, isn’t accurate either. If the market is essentially the 14.8 million-sold-in iPad and the 2 million-sold-in Galaxy Tab, then Apple’s sales in 2010 weren’t 90% of the market, they were actually (wait for it) 88.1%. OMG Math.
Then, in trying to compare apples to apples on component pricing, Weintraub starts with, “The XOOM’s are simply better.” He then chooses to pick at various items on the iPad’s spec sheet which don’t match up to the Xoom’s, and says Apple doesn’t measure up. But in doing so, he’s playing the same game in reverse: focusing on factors where his preferred device is stronger (RAM, storage, speakers) and ignoring the ones where his is not (processor, size, cameras). It’s a winless argument.
Thinly veiled disdain is good for speaking to a base of like-minded individuals. But it won’t win any broader discussions.

Slap bass, dawg

February 25, 2011 /

How many people remember that Randy Jackson, now famous for his role as an “American Idol” judge, was a bass player with a long history in the industry as a session musician? I remember him well as Journey’s bassist on “Raised on Radio.” Check out the still-great video for “Girl Can’t Help It” for Randy Jackson circa 1986, complete with ’80s flattop and neon leather jacket.

Separated at birth

February 6, 2011 /


Separated at birth, originally uploaded by netwert.

I knew Fergie’s Super Bowl halftime show costume looked familiar.

Assessing the importance of North American cities by their major league sports presence

January 31, 2011 /

I have contemplated on and off for years the way certain cities have a more of a major-league sports concentration than others. The factors that lead to each specific case are numerous and complicated. On a more base level, though, a quick glance at a city’s sports footprint says much about that city: its size, its presence in multiple markets, its interests.

Herewith, a tally by city of the major sports markets in America (covering MLB, NFL, NBA and NHL), in descending order of size, organized by my own arbitrary but numerically derived categories.

The majors
New York, Chicago, Atlanta, Boston, Dallas, Denver, Detroit, Miami, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Washington, DC. These 11 cities are the hosts with the most: a team from every sports league. Of them, New York is the most major of all, as it has two teams in every league except basketball–that is, if you include Long Island and exclude New Jersey, although come 2012 the NBA Nets move to Brooklyn, making the Big Apple that much bigger, and of course ignoring the fact that the NFL Giants and Jets don’t actually play in New York, but we’ll get to that. Chicago gets bragging rights for its two baseball teams, while Dallas gets a partial bye, since its baseball and football teams technically play over the border in Arlington.

The anomaly that the National Football League would rather you ignore
Los Angeles. Not only is this the only major broadcast market without a football team, but LA boasts six pro teams across the other three majors (if you include Anaheim in the tally, which MLB does, so we’ll let them claim the Angels and the NHL Ducks too). From this angle it’s crazy that there’s still no football team here.

The mid-majors
Cleveland, Houston, Pittsburgh, St. Louis, San Francisco, Tampa Bay, Toronto. These cities have 3/4 coverage, not a bad haul, especially for cities you wouldn’t otherwise think are major or important on other scales, like Tampa. Surprising, actually, that there are only seven cities with this kind of sports presence. I almost demoted San Francisco because the NBA Warriors still refer to their location as “Golden State,” which makes no sense to me, even with the Golden Gate Bridge in their logo. Also, bonus points to Toronto for being so American that it boasts several of our pro sports teams.

The players
Charlotte, Milwaukee, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Kansas City, New Orleans, Oakland, San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Nashville. Each of these cities has two pro teams. Interestingly, all of them count a pro football team as one of the two (with the exception of Milwaukee, which has Green Bay up the road). Indianapolis and Nashville get less credit here than the others, because they have teams that cite a hometown state rather than the city.

States that matter, because their cities don’t
Minnesota and New Jersey each have two teams that don’t bother to name-check any town in particular. New Jersey’s sports footprint is so schizophrenic that the two football teams who play in the state actually have “NY” in their logos and pretend their port of call is across the Hudson River. And Utah has a lone sports team, which migrated there from New Orleans but retained its name, so we get to enjoy the dissonance of a team in straightlaced Salt Lake City called the Jazz.

Legacies
I love cities that have a sports team much larger than they would otherwise deserve. Green Bay, for one, with its legendary football club. And San Antonio with a leftover from the NBA-ABA merger in the 1970s–which, by the way, also explains the New Jersey Nets.

Canadian cities that make the list thanks to the NHL
Calgary, Edmonton, Montreal, Ottawa, Vancouver. I bet the CFL has a team in each of these cities. (Montreal had an MLB team until a few years ago, and Vancouver briefly sported an NBA franchise.)

One-sport oddities
Columbus has a hockey team. I don’t know why. Jacksonville has a football team, and not even the NFL is sure why. They play basketball in Memphis and Oklahoma City, mainly because wealthy men chose to buy teams and plunk them across town from their estates. Orlando, on the other hand, has a fairly strong basketball presence but no other teams.

Portland has a lone and legendarily popular basketball team; Sacramento also has an NBA presence. A few miles south, San Jose has a hockey team, which I’ve also never understood, although they always had a pretty terrific logo.

And speaking of hockey, the NHL has a team in Raleigh, N.C., which is probably why they call themselves the Carolina Hurricanes. Got all that?

David Wertheimers I don’t know

January 17, 2011 /

I am not any of these people, but over the years I have been mistaken for the following:
Group manager of display pricing at Microsoft. Twice received job leads from recruiters. I get a lot of personal email meant for him, too.
CEO of the ET Center at USC. This David Wertheimer and I have swapped some emails over the years, and for awhile our companies were in the same New York office building. (He’s also the smartest of this list, as he grabbed wertheimer.com.)
Law partner at Hogan Lovell. My favorite: I grew up in the same town as this David, 9 or 10 years his junior, and have been hearing about him my entire life. From 2003-2007 we lived 11 blocks apart. We’ve gotten each other’s mail and once the Harrison restaurant booked his Thanksgiving table under my name. Someday we’ll have coffee, but we haven’t yet.
Senior program officer of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. This mistake hasn’t been made, but I wanted to call out my namesake. Cool career.

One space, please

January 14, 2011 /

Space Invaders: Why you should never, ever use two spaces after a period, in Slate.
“Every modern typographer agrees on the one-space rule,” says the column. “Every major style guide–including the Modern Language Association Style Manual and the Chicago Manual of Style–prescribes a single space after a period.”
I’ve taken Farhad to task before, but I’m behind him here (even though I dislike how he positions his argument). I forcefully converted my own two-space habits sometime in 2004. It’s ungainly, and it doesn’t even render in HTML, where I spend much of my days. I’ve taken to performing a find-and-replace on any documents I have to proofread.
In fact, I can trace my period shifting to my first full-time position that required I use Outlook on Windows for email. Faced with seas of Arial, I could suddenly see how disjointed my text looked, after 15 years of Mishawaka in Eudora.
Habits are nice and conventions are nice. But clean, efficient typing is even nicer.

The year in cities 2010

December 22, 2010 /

For the sixth consecutive year, I’m chronicling in this space the places I visited over the past 12 months. To quote 2009, per Jason Kottke’s rules only overnights are listed; repeat visits are denoted with an asterisk, and places visited prior to this year get a dagger. (N.B. It seems I beat Jason to it this year.)

New York, NY *† (home base)
Orlando, FL †
Austin, TX
Livingston, NJ *†
New City, NY *†
Rendezvous Bay, Anguilla, British West Indies
Madison, WI †
Mooresville, NC *
Chicago, IL †
Sydney, Australia
Gloucester, MA †
West Tisbury (Martha’s Vineyard), MA †
West Warwick, RI
Dallas, TX
Palm Beach Gardens, FL †
I expect to get around somewhat less in 2011, although I already have trips planned or pending to Orlando, Boston, Charlotte and San Diego, so who knows.

Follow-up: Duane Reade Flex Rewards

December 16, 2010 /

So I was right about one thing when I wrote about Duane Reade’s new flex rewards program in January:

Ten bucks a year is below my worth-the-trouble threshold, so I’m
basically done with the rewards card. I wonder how much less I’ll look
to DR as my default convenience store as a result.

Sure enough, I never did activate a new loyalty card. And now, between the changing system and DR’s buyout by Walgreens, I find myself without loyalty to the store in general. Instead, I find myself stopping in the new CVS that opened a block away (closer to my apartment!) instead… and I’ve never enjoyed CVS.

Duane Reade may be making a few more bucks–or, rather, saving them–but I wonder how many of their customers have done the same thing as me.

« Older posts Newer posts »

Ideapad © 1998–2024 David Wertheimer. All rights reserved.