iPhone…Finally!

Initially I pined for the day that the iPhone might become available on Verizon. Back in 2009, when Apple’s revolutionary phone hit the market you had to be on the AT&T network to use it, legally anyway. Like many, I decided to stick it out and hope for the day when it might become available on Verizon.

While I was waiting Android phones started getting better and better. I actually passed up the first opportunity I had to get a Verizon iPhone opting instead to stick with my Motorola Droid X which I’ve kept long past its useful life. I figured I’d probably just stick with an Android phone when it came time to replace it. Some people were even saying that Samsung's new Galaxy phones are superior to the iPhone.

And then I got an iPad. The iPad with the CoStarGo product is the most powerful tool in commercial real estate. It’s not available on the Android operating system. No iPad, no CoStarGo.

This is when I learned that Apple doesn't play well with others. My Android phone and my iPad had communication issues.

What finally pushed me over the edge though, was how easily the iPhone worked with our Microsoft servers. Last week as we transitioned into our new offices I could not get my phone to sync my email but I noticed that the people in the office who had iPhones experienced no trouble.

The next morning I was at the Verizon store picking up the iPhone 5.

Can you love a phone?

Perhaps it’s just that initial passion you get at the beginning of a relationship but I have to admit that I sometimes just like to hold my new i5. As David Poque points out in this column in The New York Times, the iPhone 5 is the thinnest smartphone in the world “just under four ounces; it disappears completely in your pocket. This iPhone is so light, tall and flat, it’s well on its way to becoming a bookmark.” 

Its beauty is matched by its elegant performance. It’s rather fast too.

 "The iPhone 5 is now a 4G LTE phone, meaning that in certain lucky cities, you get wicked-fast Internet connections."

When I returned to the office I was able to sync with our servers on the first try. Smugness ensued.

And the best part, it gets along very well with my iPad.

I think I'm becoming a fanboy.

No Scanners No Problem

On more than one occasion I've encountered an empty scanner rack at Giant. I hate this. No scanners mean no Scan It for me, not on this trip anyway. I’m a big fan of the little handheld buggers so that when I find none available I get a little bummed.

They've fixed that problem, at least for people with smartphones. Earlier this week I saw this notice in the Columbia Palace Giant announcing a Scan It mobile app.

I've haven’t tried it out yet but it sure sounds like a good idea.

And…this week I bought my first iPhone. More on that later…

HoCo Losing Corporate HQ

On Tuesday shareholders of Columbia based Arbitron voted overwhelming in favor of being acquired by New York based Nielsen, combining the dominant radio rating service with the dominant television rating service. If the deal passes muster with the antitrust cops, the television guys will win and HoCo will lose a major corporate headquarters. According to this story by Gary Haber in the Baltimore Business Journal the radio ratings company “is one of the largest employers in Howard County. It employs about 860 people in the Baltimore area, out of a U.S. workforce of about 1,000.”

The ratings business is struggling to keep up with tech savvy consumers. In an article entitled “The Nielsen Family is Dead” in Wired, Tom Vanderbilt writes that “Nielsen and others have been scrambling to generate a new kind of TV rating, one that takes into account all of the activity that occurs on screens other than a television.”

“Since the 1970s, television has been ruled by the Nielsen Family—25,000 households whose TV habits collectively provide a statistical snapshot of a nation’s viewing behavior. Over the years, the Nielsen rating has been tweaked, but it still serves one fundamental purpose: to gauge how many people are watching a given show on a conventional television set. But that’s not how we watch any more. Hulu, Netflix, Apple TV, Amazon Prime, Roku, iTunes, smartphone, tablet—none of these platforms or devices are reflected in the Nielsen rating. (In February Nielsen announced that this fall it would finally begin including Internet streaming to TV sets in its ratings.)”

Arbitron has been trying to keep up as well. In 2005 they began rolling out the Portable People Meter which was meant to phase out its dependence on diaries. Four years later they encountered some unanticipated regulatory blow back.

Change may be constant but it can also be unpredictable.

How Animals Eat Their Food

Peanut told me this short clip garnered over 20 million hits in five days on YouTube.

Its classic slapstick stuff and I got a good laugh out of it. Perhaps that reveals something about my intellectual depth.

Anyway…as I've mentioned before, Peanut watches YouTube way more than what I’d call conventional television.

But what is conventional television anymore?

In the most recent issue of Wired, Willa Paskin  points out that streaming video has not only enabled us to watch our favorite shows on any computer with a WiFi connection, it has also changed the very nature of how we watch TV. We are now able to "binge watch” our favorite shows.

“Whatever our televisual drug of choice—Battle­star Galactica, The Wire, Homeland— we've all put off errands and bedtime to watch just one more, a thrilling, draining, dream-­influencing immersion experience that has become the standard way to consume certain TV programs. We've all had the hit of pleasure after an installment ends on some particularly insane cliff-hanger and we remember that we can watch the next episode right now. It’s a relatively recent addition to the pantheon of slightly illicit yet mostly harmless adult pleasures, residing next to eating ice cream for dinner, drinking a beer with lunch, and having sex with someone you probably shouldn't.”

Guilty. Just last Friday we binge watched two episodes of Homeland after we got home from dinner.

Bright Idea

I've actually met a few people who've told me they are beginning to hoard incandescent light bulbs in face the impending ban on sales.

I happen to believe that is a very stupid idea, akin to hoarding buggy whips.

I admit that I once briefly flirted with this notion, particularly considering the fact that the economics of a simple light bulb were changing, dramatically. I can buy an incandescent light bulb for fifty cents. The cheapest LED bulb runs about ten bucks, a ninety five percent increase.

That ten dollar price is actually the good news. Until recently, most LED bulbs sold in the thirty dollar range...some still do, for that and more. A 75 watt LED, for example, will run you somewhere from the mid thirties to the mid forties.

Think of it as a long term investment. In this column in The New York Times, David Pogue writes that “LEDs last about 25 times as long as incandescents and three times as long as CFLs; we’re talking maybe 25,000 hours of light. Install one today, and you may not own your house, or even live, long enough to see it burn out.”

“Yet despite all of these advantages, few people install LED lights. They never get farther than: “$30 for a light bulb? That’s nuts!” Never mind that they will save about $200 in replacement bulbs and electricity over 25 years. (More, if your electric company offers LED-lighting rebates.)”

A LED start up is even making smart light bulbs, opening a new frontier in home lighting...

Yet I imagine that some will still build stockpiles of the incandescents. In a reader’s response column to his first piece, David was asked if it was really necessary “to plug a light bulb into the Internet,” to which he responded “I understand that both incandescent light bulbs and candles are still available at many fine housewares retailers.”

Loco Blogs Out of Touch?

The Sun has launched a new mobile version of its digital content called touch. The software automatically detects the mobile device being used and presents the optimal format for that device. It’s clean and simple but the content differs slightly from their desktop version. Notably, there are no links to loco blogs, at least not so far.

I hope this is only temporary. The Sun always has been blog friendly with its daily digest of links to select posts and its annual Mobbie awards for loco bloggers. As a result the Baltimore media giant has become the top referral site for To2C, accounting for over 1,000 visits a month. I suspect this may also be true for other loco blogs they frequently highlight as well, such as HowChow, HoCo Rising and Well and Wise. I'll bet a good deal of traffic goes the other way too from loco blog posts with links to stories in The Sun.

The number of readers accessing digital content from mobile devices has been steadily increasing with the proliferation of smart phones and tablets. Out of 10,000 visits to To2C in the last 30 days, 1,100 were from mobile devices, one thousand of which were made using an iPad.

Good Parker, Bad Parker

Last night I tried out the new Streetline parking system in Ellicott City for the first time. At 5:32 PM I pulled into a space in front of the Phoenix bar and dutifully noted the number of my space. When I then entered the number in the parking kiosk I received the message above.

I must say I was pleasantly surprised by this. I had been under the impression that the new system would not allow unused time to stay on the meter after the car left the spot. It appears that this was a mistaken assumption.

That was the good news.

Around ten this morning, as I pulled into a space in front of the Little French Market, a freezing rain was falling. I thought this would be a perfect time to test out the Parker app on my smart phone allowing me to feed the meter in the comfort of my warm and dry car. I entered my space number along with my credit card but when it came time to finalize the transaction the app said I was paying for space 402 in Miami, Florida.

I wish. If I had been in Miami I wouldn't exactly need the warmth of my car. It appears that this little feature is not yet activated for Ellicott City.

I headed out in the rain to a nearby kiosk where I learned something else about the new system.

It doesn't take American Express.

I see a potential commercial here.

Koffee Kups

It’s no secret that I am a coffee lover. Some might consider it more of an addiction than a love affair. In any event, over the years I've gone through a progression of coffee grinders and coffee machines. More recently I’d relegated those machines to storage opting instead for a daily visit to a coffee shop or two. The reason for this shift was that I seldom finished a whole pot of coffee at home. Mama Wordbones does not enjoy caffeine so she would never share the pot I brewed which resulted in half the pot going down the drain.

The only problem with the coffee shop strategy was that I couldn't get my java jolt before leaving the house. On days with inclement weather it was particularly troublesome.

No longer. For Christmas Mama Wordbones gave me a K-cup coffee maker. According to this report by Rhoda Miel in Plastics News, as of last April single cup coffee makers “have gone from 4 percent of the U.S. market in 2010 to 12 percent.”

“While automatic-drip coffee makers like those sold under the Mr. Coffee brand name are still the most popular in the U.S., holding 39 percent of the market today, their share is slowly shrinking, while the one-cup format is on the way up.

“It’s just growing,” said Robert Vu, a Houston-based creator of Solofill LLC. “Everybody has to have a one-cup [system] these days,” he said.”

Good Store, Bad Store

This afternoon, while in downtown Columbia, I stopped in the Apple store to check out the iPhones. After a little over two years, my Droid X is showing signs of age; the battery doesn't hold up as long and the touch screen sometimes seems to have a mind of its own. I also think it would be nice if my phone and my iPad worked well together, something that has eluded me with the Droid.

Within five minutes of entering the store, an employee named Erica was helping me. I asked what the difference was between a buying an iPhone at the Apple Store and buying one at the Verizon store. The biggest difference she could think of was that Verizon would try to sell me their extended warranty while Apple pushed their own.

“What about my upgrade credit?” I asked. Verizon had informed that I was eligible for an upgrade credit.

“You’d have to get that from the Verizon store,” she said. Since I had to be over by the Verizon store on Snowden River Parkway later in the afternoon anyway I decided to wait and see if I could get a better deal. I thanked Erica for her time.

That was a mistake.

When I arrived the Verizon store an employee took my name and told me someone would be with me shortly. As I waited, another gentleman approached me and asked if I wanted him to do an analysis of my FiOS account while I was waiting. He said he could probably save me some money. “Sure,” I said.

After pulling up my account on his computer he told me that the plan I currently had was no longer available. He then handed me a brochure with about four new program options, all of which were more expensive than I what I currently had. The cheapest had fewer channels than my existing plan.

“I thought you said you could save me money” I reminded him.

“I can, depending on which bundle you choose and your discounts, the final rate you pay will be about what you’re paying now." 

With some prodding he admitted that this lower rate was only promotional and that it revert to the non discount rate in a couple of years.

I wondered if I really looked that stupid. I told him no thanks. By now I realized that customers who had come into the store after me were being waited on. I walked up to the guy with the tablet who originally took my name.

“It’s showing that we are already helping you,” he said checking his tablet. He seemed genuinely surprised that I wasn't being helped. Perhaps he thought the guy with the bait and switch FiOS scheme was supposedly helping me.

I told him he could just go ahead take my name off the list. I turned around and walked out the door.

I’m going back to see Erica tomorrow.

Yet Another Camera

I’m rough on cameras. My most recent one lasted all of six months. After being dropped during a wild wedding weekend in Baltimore it no longer took fully focused pictures.

Sigh.

The problem is that I take my camera everywhere because you never know when an interesting picture will present itself. I also believe that pictures make blog posts more interesting. As Rod Stewart sings, “every picture tells a story.”

That being said I really don’t consider myself a photographer. I’m just a point and shoot kind of guy that appreciates a good picture. When a photo opportunity presents itself and I find myself without my camera for some reason, I default to my phone or iPad.

I consider them to poor platforms for good photos and so when my latest camera crapped out I was bummed. I planned to procure a new camera after the holidays when everything goes on sale. Instead, my sister Kelly surprised me at Christmas with a brand new SonyDSC-TX20.

She chose well. The TX20 is a rugged beast. It is waterproof to a depth of 16 feet, shockproof to a drop of about five feet and dust proof, yet compact enough to slide into a pocket.

Hopefully this one will last awhile. 

More Apple TV Blues

Last night I finally got around to giving Apple TV a movie rental test run. Peanut and I decided to watch a Christmas movie so earlier in the day we had perused the offerings in the iTunes store on my computer. We choose a film neither of us had ever seen, Christmas in the Clouds. After dinner we settled into the couch and switched on the Apple TV.

It failed.

We were greeted with a screen that said “Setting date and time.” I figured that this would only take a minute or so.

I figured wrong.

Fifteen minutes later, with the same message still on the screen, I got on the phone to Apple tech support. We tried manually setting the time, resetting the box and finally, a system restore. Fail, fail and fail.

After the system restore fail I called Apple back. I now had a case number. You know you have trouble when they give you a case number.

“Do you have an Apple router?”

Uh oh, I thought, here we go again, another example of Apple not playing well with others.

“No, it’s a Verizon router,” I replied.

“That’s the problem. Many of those non-Apple routers have a firewall that blocks the Apple TV signal. You’ll need to change some settings on the router and call Verizon. I’m sending you an email with instructions.”

“But wait a minute,” I protested, “it was working the other day.”

“Yeah,” he responded with a note of condensation, “but that doesn't mean anything. Sometimes it will work, other times it won’t. You’ll still need to change the router settings. In the meantime we can try unplugging both the router and the Apple TV and see if that will get it working for now.”

It worked. An hour and half later we were finally able to watch our movie.

They never tell you about this stuff in the Apple store.

Parking App Gap

During this years Midnight Madness celebration in Ellicott City, I gave the new “smart” parking system a test run.

It failed.

In fairness at least part of the blame could be user error based on my lack of familiarity with the system. The main problem however, was pointed out in this story by Randall Stross in The New York Times.

“Smart-parking apps aren't as useful as might be expected for drivers seeking open spots. When a parking space is vacated, there is a short delay before a sensor’s signal moves through the wireless network, reaches the centralized system and finally arrives on a driver’s phone. But if other cars are circling, even a 30-second or one-minute wait can be too long.”

That would seem to be particularly true during a period of high demand such as Midnight Madness. After our initial failure to harness the apps power to locate an open space, we simply headed up the hill to Parking Lot F by the Court House where we found plenty of avilable spaces. Even after the new pay system becomes operational on January 1^st, the spaces in this parking lot will remain free.

Apple TV Blues

It never fails. No matter how simple a device appears to be I will inevitably encounter a problem. Such was my experience with Apple TV this weekend.

I didn't really need Apple TV. I bought it because I thought it would be a fun gift for the house this Christmas. Buying a gift for the whole family to share is a tradition I inherited from my father when he sometimes would buy a gift that everyone could enjoy, at least theoretically. After one too many movie nights sidetracked by a malfunctioning FIOS box, I figured for a hundred bucks Apple TV would give us more options.  

So I plunked down the hundred bucks at the Apple store in The Mall for Apple TV.

“Do you need an HDMI cable?” the store associate inquired.

“No thanks, I already have that.” I was thinking that I already two HDMI cables. When I originally hooked up my HDTV, I discovered the HDMI cable I bought was too short so I went back out and bought a longer one. I decided to keep the shorter one, just in case.

I should have recognized that question as a technological red flag. I didn't and consequently I began to see why I might need yet another HDMI cable.

I was an early adapter with my HDTV. Six years ago, when we moved into our new home, I bought the biggest LCD TV available at the time. It was a 40 inch Sony Bravia and it cost me four grand. This was back before the great recession hit and many thought spending four grand on a TV was a perfectly sensible thing to do.

Today of course you can buy a bigger and better TV for about a quarter of that. Sigh.

Anyway, as I went to hook up my hockey puck sized Apple TV box to my TV I realized that it only had one HDMI port and that was being used by the FIOS box.

The solution of course was to add another piece of hardware to mix. A trip to the Best Buy store in Columbia resulted in the purchase of a Rocketfish 4-port HDMI Selector, and another HDMI cable, adding another hundred bucks to the cost of my hundred dollar Apple TV. The worst part, it includes yet another remote!

It never fails.

The 20 Second Rule

How long is too long to wait for an elevator?

Twenty seconds, according to Theresa Cristy who studies “elevatoring” for the Otis Elevator Company. Christy was interviewed in this story by Kai Ryssdal on Marketplace yesterday.

"Yeah, there is a magic number, and it's 20 seconds," she says, "and that's a number that's been used for over 50 years in the industry."

But wait, its 20 seconds in office buildings but its a little bit longer in residential buildings. She didn't say how much longer.

Of course twenty seconds waiting for an elevator is nothing compared with being stuck inside one for forty one hours!

Also interesting to note is that the local offices of the International Union of Elevator Constructors are housed in a single story building in Columbia Gateway.

Surfacing at The Mall

In what may be test for a future permanent store, Microsoft will open a retail kiosk in The Mall next week. The opening will coincide with the launch of their new tablet, Surface.

Aside from video games, Microsoft has not enjoyed much success with its own hardware and once again it finds itself playing catch up to Apple. According to this story by Nick Wingfield in The New York Times, Surface will retail “for a starting price of $500, the same starting price as the current generation of Apple’s iPad.”

“Microsoft said it would sell a 32-gigabyte Surface bundled with a black Touch Cover, a keyboard that doubles as a protective shield for the tablet, for $600. A similar bundle with a 64-gigabyte Surface will cost $700. Microsoft will sell Touch Covers separately in a wider assortment of colors for $120, and a different type of keyboard cover with moving keys, called Type Cover, will sell for $130.”

Microsoft has already opened about 31 regular stores in the US and Canada. The closest ones to HoCo are in Virginia in Tysons Corner Center and the Fashion Centre at Pentagon City. Next week they will open another 35 “curated” stores for the holiday season. Besides Columbia, the only other Maryland curated store will be in the Montgomery Mall. 

Parking Wars

Not everyone in Ellicott City is excited about the new parking system that the county will soon be installing in the historic district. Monday, following the County Councils approval of the schedule of parking fees, one disgruntled loco hacked into the reader board on New Cut Road changing the message that informed motorists of the road work ahead to “Ken Ulman Hates Ellicott City.”

That’s a little hard.

Say what you will about Ken Ulman but as county exec Ken has finally addressed a parking issue that has bedeviled the historic district for years. In the eight years since a revenue authority was first established to build a parking garage in Ellicott City the only thing that it has accomplished is a study that determined the old town didn’t really need a garage.

The parking problem in Ellicott City is more of a resource management issue than anything else. There are 594 on- and off- street parking spaces in the downtown area. There are an additional 197 up the hill by the courthouse. The problem is that they are spread out along Main Street and in six separate parking lots. That can make finding an open space a little challenging in peak times.

Ken’s parking plan fixes that by putting available spaces online in real time, accessible on your smartphone or tablet. While that may not serve everyone right now, it won’t be long before it will. According to a recent study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism in collaboration with The Economist Group, “50 percent of Americans now have mobile Internet access through either a tablet or a smartphone.”

That’s double the number from a year ago.

Still, despite the obvious benefits, some Ellicott City merchants are pretty upset. In an email to Councilperson Courtney Watson, Sara Arditti, the owner of the Still Life Gallery, even went so far as to suggest that the award of the parking contract was corrupt.

“Many are calling for an investigation of the "sole bidder" procurement process in which the RFP appears to have been tailored to Streetline's exact specifications such that its competitors may have been eliminated at the outset, by design.”

Really?

She goes on to say that “I will not stop fighting by all legal means necessary.”

That should make some attorney very happy.

Not all Ellicott City merchants agree with her. In fact, all the merchants I've spoken with are actually in favor of it. They are glad to see that something is finally being done about parking rather than just being talked about or studied

Then again, change never comes easy. We saw that in Columbia and Turf Valley too.

HoCo Digital Divide

The Bright Minds Foundation has teamed up with the Howard County Public School System to help bridge the digital divide in the county. According to Paul Brown, a Bright Minds board member, approximately 2,000 students in HoCo do not access to a computer at home.

That’s a real impediment to learning, not mention parental involvement the process. The HoCo schools Aspen system allows parents to check academic progress on a daily basis, including homework assignments and test results. Without a computer in the home these families are at a distinct disadvantage.

Paul pointed out that use of the free computers in the library is limited to fifteen minutes, hardly enough time to conduct serious research. For some of these students even getting to the library is a problem.

The foundation accepts used computers but Paul pointed out that it costs, on average, three hundred bucks to refurbish a donated computer. In other words, monetary donations are preferred.

To date, Bright Minds has provided 400 computers to HoCo families. Their goal is to close the digital divide in three years.

Stand Up Cycling

Friday afternoon I spotted two cyclists by the Grist Mill Trail with very unusual bikes. I made a u-turn and went back to check them out.

Trevor and Rebecca were riding something called an Elliptogo, which is billed as more of a running device than a bicycle. They told me that they had rented them for the weekend from Leisure Fitness in Columbia. Rebecca’s was an eight speed and Trevors was a three speed.

They had just finished their workout so I was reluctant to ask them to demonstate the bikes. Fortunately I found this video on You Tube.

Census App

The Census Bureau now has its own app. It’s called America’s Economy and its bound to become a must have for politico wonks and econ wonks alike

I downloaded it this morning

According to this story by Carol Morello in The Washington Post, the app “provides updated statistics from the Census Bureau, the Bureau of Economic Analysis and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It includes 16 monthly economic indicators, such as house sales, personal income, international trade, Gross Domestic Product and the unemployment rate.”

“The app is the latest step the census has taken to use the Internet more in both collecting and disseminating statistics. Last month, the White House cited the Census Bureau as an example of a federal agency that is “making great strides towards putting a solid foundation for a 21st Century digital government in place.”

America’s Economy is free and available for iPhones, iPads, and Android devices.

Weather Geek

I readily confess to being a bit of weather geek. Last winter I even installed my own home weather station. This summer I relocated the stations monitoring devices because I wasn't satisfied with the readings I was getting. When any storm approaches, I constantly monitor multiple online weather sources in addition to my own set up.

I think that qualifies as being a weather geek.

Winter is high season for us weather geeks. Around this time of year, many us begin to consume whatever weather data we can get our hands on to try and figure what type of winter Mother Nature has in store for us.

It looks like it could be a cold one. Accordiing to this article by Scott Dance in The Sun, the “ forecast calls for cold weather and large systems of moisture to converge, dumping above-average snow totals along the East Coast. The timing is expected to be in January and February.”

The Farmers Almanac agrees, predicting that eastern states “as far south as the Gulf Coast – will see snowier than normal conditions and cooler temperatures.”

“We are “red flagging” February 12–15 and March 20–23 for major coastal storms along the Atlantic seaboard; storms bringing strong winds and heavy precipitation.”

Red flagging!

That’s music to a weather geeks ears. Perhaps we’ll even see a return of The Big Kahuna.