Mike Cohen

Getting out the vote

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Today was the second time I went out canvassing for Obama. Two weeks ago I went out with another volunteer. Last weekend I didn’t feel too well, so I stayed in the office and made calls. Today I was out on my own. The office gives us a list of addresses of Democrats who are infrequent voters. The objective is to make sure they vote.

More than half of the people on my list today had moved or weren’t home. A lot of the houses looked like they were abandoned, most likely foreclosures. We just skip any houses with McCain signs, like this one.

Hostile territory

LowePro FastPack 250

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For most of my recent trips, I only took a small point & shoot camera instead of my D40x, so I would need only one carry on bag. I really want to take my D90 to Macworld Expo, so I started shopping around for a case that can hold both a laptop and a full sized DSLR camera. I decided on LowePro’s FastPack 250. It has a camera compartment accessible from the side that will hold the D90 with the 18-105mm lens attached, plus several other compartments for additional lenses and accessories. A compartment in the rear will hold a 15″ laptop, and there are several other pockets for accessories.

DSC_1255 Laptop & Camera compartment\
Camera Compartment LowePro FastPack 250

MacBook RAM and hard drive upgrades

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I upgraded my new MacBook to 4GB of RAM and a 320G 7200 RPM drive, which I purchased from Other World Computing. The speedup is dramatic, since it was constantly thrashing with only 2G of RAM when I had 2 large applications open (like Aperture + Photoshop, or anything else with Parallels).

Replacing the hard drive in the MacBook is very easy – you just have to open the battery compartment and remove a single screw. The most difficult part is dealing with the 4 mounting screws on the side of the drive which hold it in place. They’re nearly impossible to remove from the old drive. Luckily I was able to find 4 screws that were exactly the right size. Unfortunately the screws still attached to the old drive prevented it from being mounted properly in the external case.

Drive Removed

Replacing RAM is a bit more involved, since you have to remove 8 screws and the entire bottom of the case. It isn’t too difficult to open, and the RAM is easily accessible and very easy to replace once you get it open.

Bottom of case removed

I highly recommend doing upgrades like this in two phases. First, I replaced the RAM, put everything back together, started up, and verified that the RAM was good. For the second phase, I replaced the hard drive. I then connected the old drive in an external case and used Carbon Copy Cloner to restore the contents to the new internal drive.

I’ve posted a full photo gallery of the upgrade here.

Should Apple pull the plug on the iPhone?

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Last year, John Dvorak said:

These phones go in and out of style so fast that unless Apple has half a dozen variants in the pipeline, its phone, even if immediately successful, will be passé within 3 months.
There is no likelihood that Apple can be successful in a business this competitive. Even in the business where it is a clear pioneer, the personal computer, it had to compete with Microsoft and can only sustain a 5% market share.
And its survival in the computer business relies on good margins. Those margins cannot exist in the mobile handset business for more than 15 minutes.

According to Steve Ballmer:

Now we’ll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It’s a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I’d prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.

Who’s having the last laugh now?

Is Richard Sprague going to eat his words?

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A year ago Richard Sprague wrote:

I can’t believe the hype being given to iPhone. Even some of my blindly-loyal pro-Microsoft friends and colleagues talk like it’s a real innovation and will “redefine the market” or “usher in a new age”.

What!?!? Without even mentioning that the same functionality has been available on PocketPC, Palm, Nokia, and Blackberry for years, I just have to wonder who will want one of these things (other than the religious faithful). People need this to be a phone, first and foremost. But with 5 hours of battery life? No keypad? (you try typing a phone number on that screen, no matter how wonderful it is — you will want a keypad). And for all that whiz-bang Internet access, you absolutely need the phone to work, immediately, every single time. Will it do that?

So please mark this post and come back in two years to see the results of my prediction: I predict they will not sell anywhere near the 10M Jobs predicts for 2008. Okay, it’s possible there are enough Apple religious people to buy a lot of them at first, but even the most diehard Mac fans who buy one of these will secretly carry two phones. One to prove how loyal and “cool” they are, and the other to actually make and receive calls.

I remember the lessons I learned working with the Newton team many years ago. I was in Apple’s marketing department at the time and we did this big fancy user study which basically proved that nobody would buy the thing at the price and functionality we were building. So what did we do? We shoved it into the market anyway because it was “cool”. Cool is great, but you still need to make phone calls.

Now how did that work out?

links for 2008-10-21

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  • Arrest made in GOP voter registration scandal
    The charges against Jacoby and YPM, if true, are far more serious than any of the allegations against ACORN. The ACORN canvassers were registering fictional characters who couldn't possibly show up to vote–especially not with the new federal photo ID requirements. ACORN itself was the victim of their deception. Whereas, YPM canvassers allegedly lied to real-life voters in order to register them against their will and this deception might have a real outcome on the election if it infered with GOTV efforts by the Obama camp or future Democratic campaigns.
    (tags: republicans voting fraud)

Obama leaving campaign trail to visit grandmother

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We all need to keep Barack Obama’s grandmother in our thoughts & prayers. Madelyn Payne Dunham, who helped raise him, was released from the hospital late last week, but her health had deteriorated “to the point where her situation is very serious.” Barack Obama is canceling nearly all his campaign events Thursday and Friday to fly to Hawaii to visit her.

Colin Powell endorses Obama

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Powell said exactly what needed to be said:

It troubled me. You know, we have two wars. We have economic problems. We have health problems. We have education problems. We have infrastructure problems. We have problems around the world with our allies. And so those are the problems the American people wanted to hear about, not about Mr. Ayers, not about who is a Muslim and who’s not a Muslim. Those kinds of images going out on al Jazeera are killing us around the world. And we have got to say to the world it doesn’t make any difference who you are or what you are. If you’re an American you’re an American.

Un-American

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Like Scoble, I’m not an American.

  • I grew up in New York an lived in California, places that Sarah Palin considers unpatriotic and anti-American.
  • My family background is Jewish and I’m an agnostic. As a non-Christian, I can’t be an American.
  • I have friends who are Muslims.
  • I believe in science & evolution, not creationism.
  • I work for a Canadian company.
  • I drive a Toyota Prius rather than a gas-guzzling American car.
  • I support Barack Obama.
  • I’m registered as a Democrat and I’m a card-carrying member of the ACLU.

I’ve always felt that patriotism is a stupid concept. It’s nothing more than a weapon to use against those we disagree with. No nation is any better or worse than any other. Patriotism can’t be forced. Kids shouldn’t be forced to recite words they don’t understand. We should earn their respect as a free society that values all people equally.

Any flag is nothing more than a meaningless symbol. Instead of worshiping the flag, we should hold up our constitution as our most precious symbol that sets us apart.

A political campaign that strives to deepen our divisions and says that some of us are less worthy and less “American” than others deserves to lose.

New MacBook

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As I wrote a few days ago, I got a new 2.4 GHz MacBook today. I think it offers the best combination of size & performance. It isn’t much bigger than a MacBook Air, yet it feels a bit snappier than my old MacBook Pro. The only drawback is the lack of FireWire, but all of my external drives are either USB 2.0 or dual interface.

I’ll post a more in depth review at MacMegasite.

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