Recent articles have highlighted Verizon Wireless’ statements that they plan to open their network to any cell phone or software program. This sounds like a bold move, but it’s actually not all that exciting. While “unlocked” phones (phones not restricted to a specific carrier) are relatively uncommon in the US, they are frequently seen worldwide and are available through many importers, including mainstream sites like Amazon. These phones typically use GSM cellular technology, the standard used by T-Mobile and AT&T in the US. Your phone’s “identity” is defined by a SIM card, a small, removable card that can be transferred from one phone to another. To change your phone, you just pop your card into the new phone and you’re all set: no need to get prior approval from your phone company.

Verizon and Sprint use CDMA, which lack this SIM card technology. To use a new phone on these networks, you need to contact the company to have them assign your phone’s identification number to your cell number, so that calls are routed appropriately. Verizon now claims they will soon lift restrictions on this process, allowing a wider range of devices on their network.

Sounds great, but here’s a few problems. First of all, as I previously mentioned, you can already do this with T-Mobile and AT&T, so it’s not exactly a bold new step. Secondly, you’ll need to have an unlocked CDMA phone; these are relatively rare (though admittedly may become more common). When you read the fine print, it turns out they will restrict use to “approved” devices. While this is a step in the right direction, the actual impact at this time will be relatively minimal unless Verizon and Sprint start adopting a technology similar to SIM cards.

When Apple announced that they were partnering with Starbucks, many people scratched their heads. I’ve now changed my tune. In fact, I think the plan should be expanded to more types of stores.

Here’s the basic idea…you walk into a Starbucks. While you’re waiting for your double peppermint soy latte, you notice that you happen to like the song that’s playing. You take out your iPhone or WiFi-capable iPod Touch and it tells you what song is currently playing, as well as what songs were playing previously (in case you didn’t realize you liked the song until after it stopped playing). You can then buy the song right from your iPhone and sync it back up to your computer when you get home. The program is now active in Seattle, San Francisco, and New York, and will expand to more cities next year.

It’s not something I can see myself using frequently unless I start spending more time in Starbucks, but the idea is sound. This morning, I went to get a bagel from Bruegger’s and heard a song playing that caught my attention. It was a female singer who sounded somewhat like Kate Bush and sounded like it belonged to the late 80s-era alternative scene from England. The sound system wasn’t very good, but I thought I made out the lyrics “We could be dancing” as part of the chorus.

I hate not being able to figure out what song I’ve heard, so I hopped onto Google when I returned home and searched for ‘”We could be dancing” lyrics’ in Google, but came up with songs that sounded nothing like what I heard. Thinking I may have miss heard part of the lyrics, I modified the search to “could be dancing”, “you could be dancing”, “I could be dancing”, even “be dancing”. None of the songs were even close.

I then resorted to a different strategy. I knew Kate Bush had recently released a new album, so I checked out the most popular songs from it using iTunes – didn’t sound anything like what I had heard. I then thought further: who sounds like Kate Bush, may even sound like she has a British accent, but is more recent? Tori Amos. I tried searching for ‘”We could be dancing” “Tori Amos”‘ in Google but again came up short. I tried several purported lyrics search site as well as Melodyhound, a site that lets you enter a tune to search with using a virtual piano keyboard. Nothing.

In one last attempt, I went to iTunes and looked up Tori’s newest album and picked the most popular song, Bouncing Off Clouds. To my surprise, that was the song. It turns out the would “dancing” was actually “bouncing”. Who knew? If Bruegger’s had a system like Starbucks, it would have saved me a great deal of wasted time and frustration.

I’m generally a sucker for the latest gadget, but one I won’t be rushing to buy is Amazon‘s first entry into the market, the Kindle. The Kindle is an attempt to create what Amazon calls “the iPod of books.” This slim, compact device is innovative in several ways. Instead of using a traditional LCD screen like most laptops and cell phones, it uses a technology called “ePaper”. This technology, though not yet available in color, looks more like a traditional paper page than a screen – it’s not backlit, and can be read more easily in a wide range of lighting conditions. Users have said it is comfortable to read this screen for long periods of time, though I personally don’t have much trouble reading a traditional LCD screen. As a result of this technology, the Kindle has an decent battery life (Amazon estimates you’ll need to recharge every other day).

The second innovation is the inclusion of EVDO wireless data support for “free”. EVDO is the high-speed data network technology used by Sprint and Verizon (it’s not clear who Amazon has teamed up with), so you’ll have internet connectivity at most locations. Of course, Amazon is giving this to you for free so you can buy eBooks instantly from anywhere

This sounds fabulous, doesn’t it? Free high-speed internet? You can browse the web from anywhere? As always, there’s a catch. While there is no monthly fee, you do pay for usage of this network (outside of buying books and using Wikipedia). Want to browse the web? Sorry, you can’t…only read customized newspaper feeds and blogs optimized for the Kindle. Well, at least those are free, right? Nope, you’ll pay for a newspaper subscription or a blog subscription, even though these are freely available online. And remember, the Kindle is black and white only. Want to use the Kindle to send a few quick emails? That will be 10 cents per message. What happened to “free”?

One feature that jumpstarted the iPod revolution was the ability to take material you already owned (i.e. CD’s) and copy the music onto your iPod. There’s nothing analogous for the Kindle. Amazon will convert some files to Kindle’s format, but you’ll have to go through them each time you want to, say, add a PDF to your Kindle (amazingly, the Kindle does not natively support PDF).

Lastly, there’s the price. $399 for the device alone, then you’ll have to pay more for each book. All this to have yet another device you’ll need to carry, one that isn’t really practical for anything other than reading Amazon’s eBooks. Don’t get me wrong, I think that electronic formats are the future of reading (if not the present), but the Kindle does too many things wrong for it to be worthwhile in its current format.

And, it’s really ugly…

A few months ago, I cancelled cable. At the time, I justified it because cable was costing me around $80 a month and, with a young child, I just didn’t have time to watch it. What has been surprising to me is how little I’ve missed it. Many people can’t conceive of life without television, but I have found it is easily substituted with two technologies: 1) the web and 2) podcasts.

In the days before the web was as robust as it is today, the amount of information, news, and entertainment was limited. In the early 90s, I remember going to Yahoo! (at that time a website based at Stanford) to see what was new each day. Most of my internet use was centered around USENET newsgroups, discussion forums that were focused on particular interests (in my case, alt.coffee was the one I frequented most). On slow days during the summer, I’d occasionally have read everything – all the USENET posts, all the web pages of interest. There was nothing left on the internet.

That’s not a problem today. I generally have a running list of questions in the back of my mind that I have intended to look up but haven’t had a chance to yet.

Sometimes I need a source of news or entertainment and web-browsing is inadequate or inconvenient. That’s where podcasting comes in. Some of the television shows I used to watch are available as podcasts (NBC’s Meet the Press and CBS’s 60 Minutes). I use audio-only versions of these programs and listen to them during downtime (e.g. in the gym, in the car, on the subway), so they don’t really eat into my free time. Part of the experience is lost without the video, but not much, and video podcasts are also available for many programs.

For entertainment, there’s my list of tech shows (This Week In Tech, MacBreak Weekly, Diggnation), brief educational shows (Legal Lad, Grammar Girl, 60 Second Science), and other entertainment from NPR (Car Talk, Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me), all of which are free (and can be found easily via iTunes).

My opinion may be a bit biased by the lack of time I now have for sitting down in front of the TV uninterrupted, but give it a try. You might save yourself $80/month.

Apple introduced their Intel based Mac line in early 2006, and basically ever major software manufacturer has updated their software to run on the new platform. Older software, though compatible, runs at a fraction of the speed. The last remaining offender is Microsoft, with their atrociously sluggish Office 2004. Not only is this software a generation behind its Windows counterpart, it’s terrible performance makes using it incredibly frustrating, even on otherwise speedy machines. Microsoft has issued a slew of minor updates over the past several months, but their are but minor patchwork on a crumbling foundation.

Office 2008, optimized for Intel-based Macs and brining the software suite back into parity with its Windows counterpart, is due in January. Some irreversible damage may already be done. Frustrated by the inadequacies of Office (particularly given that most users depend only on basic functionality), some (like myself) have turned to Apple’s iWork or other considerably less-expensive competitors. Sure, they’re not as feature-complete as Office, but they’re good enough. The Keynote presentation software allows me to generate presentations considerably faster than I could with PowerPoint.

One no-brainer move that would help Microsoft earn back some credibility would be a public beta program. This would help free users from the pain of using Office ’04 now, provide useful feedback to the company, and allow users to see benefits (presuming there are some) of Office ’08 prior to buying. I only hope that the lack of such a program doesn’t bode ill for the software suite.

As much as it pains me to do so, occasionally I have to run Windows software on my Mac. In my case, the main uses are to run Internet Explorer to check on web compatibility and to run SAS for statistical analysis. Fortunately, there are two software packages that make this brief diversion into the Windows world tolerable: Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion. Both are good products and a nice complement to Apple’s own Boot Camp. While Boot Camp requires you to reboot your computer into Windows, Parallels and VMWare let you run Windows programs alongside your Mac program, a great convenience that makes them easily worth the small premium.

I used Parallels exclusively since it was released, but it became erratic after upgrading to Leopard. A recently released beta seemed to help with networking problems, but I developed some graphics problems that made me take a look at the competition. Parallels, with their latest version, has a clear goal in mind. Their goal is to integrate Windows apps completely into the Mac, so that you don’t think of them as being part of a different operating system. Sure, they will look different (the windows are clearly Windows-esque, the menus are stuck in the windows), but they get their own dock icons and can access your Mac files (if you so choose). You can set your Mac Documents folder to by your “My Documents” folder in Windows and you can set files to open with Windows applications by default. If you have Word 2007 for Windows, you can make this default application for opening Microsoft Word documents from your Mac.

The problem is that Parallels is a bit sluggish, and this sluggishness can quickly become annoying if you try to integrate Windows into your life. It’s especially a problem if you don’t leave Parallels running all the time, because sometimes a file type will somehow get associated with a Windows app. I’ll double click it, expecting a Mac app to open, and will be instead tortured while I wait for Parallels to launch then then load a Windows program. No matter how much I try to disable this, it always seems to return at a most inconvenient time. Furthermore, I don’t want Windows, with all its inherent security flaws, to open up all my Mac files to the potential hazards of WIndows viruses and malware. I want to run Windows in a an isolated environment for specific tasks only (granted, this may not be everyone’s goal).

Therefore, I’ve made the leap to VMWare, and so far am quite happy. VMWare is considerably faster, and is bereft of the annoying integration “features” of Parallels. The only Parallels’ niceties I’ve missed so far are the mappings of Mac shortcuts for copy, paste, and save (command-c, command-v, and command-s) to their Windows equivalents (control-c, control-v, control-s). This results in some occasional errant characters as I switch between the two systems, but at least it is fast and reliable.

Macworld has a set of instructions for converting a Parallels virtual machine for use in VMWare. I used these instructions with great success.

There are many new features in Mac OS, but one that has really made a difference in my day to day use has been Spaces. Spaces basically creates multiple virtual monitors even if you only have one physical screen. This is extremely useful if you have a small screen (e.g. on a laptop) and want to run mutliple programs simultaneously without having to deal with minimizing windows or constantly reorganizing your workspace.

Once you turn on Spaces (in System Preferences), you can get started. I recommend starting with 4 spaces (the default) because its easy to manage. It’s also a good idea to assign a commonly used applications to a specific space. I have Mail go to space 2, Parallels go to space 3, and Keynote go to space 4. You can do whatever you want, but giving each space a specific “role” makes it easier to remember what is in each space.

Getting around in Spaces is fairly striaghtforward. Make sure you check the preference in System Preferences to have Spaces displayed in the menu bar. This menu can be used to switch from one space to another, but more importantly tells you which space you are in. By default, the F8 key will present you with a bird’s eye view of all your spaces.

This view allows you to move a window from one space to another or to switch to a different space just by clicking on it. You can also move all the windows in a space to another space by dragging the blue background. You can also trigger this view if you include the Spaces icon on your dock.

A few more tips:

• Drag a window to the edge of the screen bordering two spaces and wait – in a few seconds, you’ll have moved the window to the neighboring space.
• To move to a specific space, hold down control and press the number of the space (control-3 goes to space 3). If you do this while dragging a window, the window comes with you.
• While in the birds-eye view, hit c to collect all your windows into a single space.

Once you’ve mastered these shortcuts, you’ll appreciate how much more efficiently a small screen can be used.

I got frustrated with using the character palate to find commonly used scientific characters. I knew there had to be an easier way to enter betas, alphas, and other symbols. I searched and found this wonderful page of Mac keyboard shortcuts for special characters.

The most useful for me were:

• © – option-g
• ™ – option-2
• plus/minus – option-shift-=
• mu – option-m
• beta – option-s
• delta – option-j
• greater than or equal – option-.
• less than or equal – option-,