Dog pile on the rabbit (if by "rabbit" you mean the iPhone 4 antenna)

Update: Ruben was fine.  He transmuted his contentious encounter with The Steve into a decade-long stint at Apple, then left to take a C-level role at Keyssa.  Good for him.

I woke up this morning to find a link on Drudge to a Bloomberg article entitled "Apple Engineer Told Jobs iPhone Antenna Might Cut Calls..."  As it turns out the engineer in question was Ruben Caballero, a co-worker of mine at Tropian back in the late 90's.  (Trivia: Many of the iPhone team's key engineers are ex-Tropian, for reasons beyond the scope of this post.) 

Later in the day Cult Of Mac offered up some comments on Ruben and the iPhone antenna issue from my former schoolmate and Tropian co-founder Earl (mistakenly named "Ed" in the article) McCune.  Blogs such as Huff Post, Engadget, etc have also picked up on the story.  I also note with great dismay that New York Senator "Chuckles" Schumer has decided to make Apple's business his own.  Doesn't he have better things to do, like spending more of our tax dollars and worrying about getting re-elected?  I digress...

I feel bad for Ruben that his "15 minutes of fame" will likely bring him a great deal of unwanted attention.  Ruben's a great engineer who doesn't deserve to have a double-barreled "Wrath of Jobs" pointed at his nose.  I really hope that Apple doesn't scapegoat him on this.  Ruben's the kind of guy who would spoken up if he saw a problem, and in doing so unfortunately may wind up taking a fall to cover up the idiocy of an over-zealous marketing department which placed too much faith in their industrial designers and too little in the wisdom of their RF engineers. 

I had a similar experience at Verifone in 1998 prior to joining Tropian.  We were in the process of starting to build their Omni 3000-series handheld payment terminals.  The marketing director and the lead industrial designer were having themselves a little bromance, which resulted in the marketing director taking everything the industrial designer said as the Word of God -- including his insistence that the Omni 3000 needed to not have an external antenna.  At the time, mass-production printed antennas were still laboratory experiments and about four years from being commercially viable.  The ID insisted that the device could not have any case protrusions, and my insistence that this would be impossible in production fell on deaf ears.  It's worth noting that the Omni 3750 launched in 2004 -- two years after printed antennas became commercially viable and six years after I told them they were smoking bananas. 

I wish Ruben the best and hope he comes out of this unscathed.  As for Apple: I've been saying for years that it was just a matter of time before they transmuted their success into hubris and ultimately failure.  It's sad when marketing idealism runs headlong into the brick-wall of physics.  It's tragic when good people get hurt by the shrapnel of that collision.

Some things never change

It's been years since I had cable TV, and thankfully as long since I had to deal with Comcast. But the allure of faster broadband has been tugged at me, since we're now watching more streaming TV (Netflix, etc) and my once-fast 1.4Mb Earthlink DSL now feels like a 28.8Kb modem on a noisy line. So I checked into the much-hyped Comcast Xfinity and within minutes was reminded of why I'm thankful it's been years since I had to deal with them.

Lame Encounters of the First Kind: The offers for Xfinity broadband on their website are targeted at existing Comcast customers. Prices for new customers are not shown.

Lame Encounters of the Second Kind: Calling their sales department I was forced to "Press 1 for..." repeatedly because the IVR kept trying to determine my non-existent Comcast account.

Lame Encounters of the Third Kind: After getting through to a human (Paula Perky, Sr. Manager, Comcast Chirpiness Dept.) I was informed that there are NO new customer incentives at this time, unless I want to sign up for a "bundle" of broadband plus TV and/or phone. I'm not interested in their cable TV or phone services; just broadband. And so apparently that makes me El Douchbago Numero Uno to their marketing department. No amount of cajoling was able to extract anything from Paula, who cheerfully told me that they'd love to have me as a new customer at full price.

The prospect of once again dealing with these clowns gives me a case of the hives. If they're this screwed up when trying to get me as a new customer, I can only imagine how bad will it be once I'm under contract with them. I'm sitting here asking myself: Do I really need faster broadband?
in reference to: Welcome to XFINITY | TV & Movies | Internet | Voice | Choice and Control | Subscriber Extras | Buy Online (view on Google Sidewiki)

Mobile video at Dayton Hamvention 2010

For my first visit to Dayton Hamvention 2010 I thought I would try to use mobile video and share the event with folks who couldn't attend. Being a Google OS my Droid of course offers YouTube, and there is also Qik, a social sharing app.

The value of Qik is that (like Kyte on the iPhone and Nokia platforms) videos recorded with Qik are instantly uploaded to my Qik channel. YouTube requires large videos be uploaded over the Droid's Wi-Fi connection. (I don't understand why they do this, but it's probably some sub rosa agreement between Google and Verizon to help reduce mobile network load.)

While recording at Hamvention I found Qik to be balky and unreliable. I lost a few videos because halfway through the recording Qik would stop itself without warning. For short videos it worked OK, but the longer the video the more likely it was to glitch. Furthermore; on more than one occasion Qik just died completely and I was forced to reboot the Droid.

I like the idea of immediate video posting, and hope that Qik will resolve these issues. Unfortunately until they do so I can't risk using it except for videos which I don't really care about.
in reference to: Qik | Record and share video live from your mobile phone (view on Google Sidewiki)