On Intuit’s acquisition of Mint

Jason Fried’s closing thoughts on the Mint acquisition:

Thomas Jefferson said “Periodic revolution, ‘at least once every 20 years,’ was ‘a medicine necessary for the sound health of government.’” That may be even truer for business. We need new blood, new companies, new methods, new ideas, new applications, and new leaders to regenerate stale industries. The old must be plowed under by the new.

But today it seems like the old is doing the plowing. Let’s stop that. Let’s build great companies that are here to fight, here to win, and here to stay until the next generation after us comes along and kicks all our asses. And again and again and again. That’s how better happens.

DAMN RIGHT! We must take the fight to them. This is how we advance the state of the art and foster innovation.

Peter Gabriel – Mercy Street – Live in Milan 2003

I must see Peter Gabriel in concert someday. One of the greatest musicians of our time.

SanDisk, where are the G3 SSDs?!

http://www.sandisk.com/business-solutions/ssd.aspx

I’ve been waiting for these puppies since their announcement at CES in January. Availability was slated for mid-summer. Well… it’s August, so where are they?!

Many people don’t realize that the biggest bottleneck in a computer is not the processor, or the speed of the memory, but the hard disk itself. Below, you can see the difference between a hard disk and SSD.

Once they come out, they will immediately start pushing down SSD prices

After 9 years, Pismo G3 still going strong

It’s amazing how well this thing has held up since getting it for college in 2000.

Under the hood is a 500Mhz G3, 768MB RAM, a 60GB hard drive, running OS X Tiger 10.4.11 with Safari recently updated to 4.0.

It can still do your Gmail, Google Maps, and load complex sites as ESPN and the NY Times.

Not fast enough for playing YouTube videos without being choppy, but that’s ok.

A fine machine, and still a first-class citizen on the Interwebs.

Verizon FiOS, MacBook Pros, and Self-Assigned IP Addresses

If you’ve had difficulties connecting your MacBook Pro to a Verizon FiOS wireless router, read on.

When connecting to the FiOS wireless router, I can see the access point, enter the password, and it appears to connect to the network.

Except the router doesn’t assign the MacBook Pro an IP address and self-assigns itself one. Even manually entering the address in the 192.168.1.x/24 block, subnet mask, and default gateway address doesn’t work.

Through trial and hour for the past few hours, the key is that the password is case-sensitive. I had initially entered the password in lowercase letters. Without much luck, I deleted the password stored in the keychain, and tried again. But this time, I entered the same key in UPPERCASE.

It was beautiful.

iPhone OS 3.0 Acid3 Test 97%

Almost there. Just playing with the new iPhone 3G S before heading to dinner and was curious as to Mobile Safari’s standards compliance.

This thing kicks ass!

Ready for iPhone 3GS

Apple’s servers were overloaded as usual today from all the WWDC announcements, so it took me a few tries to reserve a new iPhone. But I finally got through, so I’ll be picking one up 19 June at the SoHo store probably around lunchtime. The confirmation e-mail said that it would be available anytime during store hours, and that I should be on the lookout for concierge staff wearing orange t-shirts to help me checkout. Maybe I should take a half day or something.

This was really good timing for me since I partially shorted out my 1st gen iPhone from the rain in the Five Boro Bike Ride last month and have only been using it as an iPod.

Also, my predictions came true for the Snow Leopard upgrade priced at $29. I was betting that it was going to be made free, excluding S+H, but this is close to it.

Break of Reality

Rick came to visit on Saturday, and we went to see Break of Reality at Baruch College. Wikipedia describes them as a rock cello quartet, but to be precise consists of 3 cellists and a drummer.

My mind was on FIRE that night. It took me to places I’ve never been to.

Check them out, and if you like, pick them up on iTunes.

On the lack of Firewire on unibody MacBooks

After some quick research, I’ve concluded that the lack of Firewire on the unibody MacBook is totally inconsistent with other Macs that are available for less.

A potential reason for omitting Firewire is cost. If this is the case, then I have only one question: why is it that Firewire is still a standard feature on the new Mac Minis starting at $599, AND even the updated white MacBook with the 9400M GPU that sells for $999? Ouch.

That and Firewire has nice benefits such as target disk mode for easily mounting the disk for recovery, being able to carry more power for self-powered devices, TCP/IP networking, and smoking USB 2.0 because it’s still CPU dependent, while Firewire is handled by a dedicated controller.

This is not good.

Update – 8 June 2009: Firewire once again STANDARD on all Apple portables except the MacBook Air. YES!

Not sure if Target Disk Mode (TDM) will be offered though. It would be madness not to.

Bald by choice

I’ve decided to go bald since the new year and am really liking the change. Though initially thinking it was a good way to save money from getting a haircut, the cost of razors and shaving cream, however, negates any of the cost benefits.

But still, I think this is a good direction, and I’ll keep it going this year.

Some people don’t like it though, my mother included, as well as a girl from work. In fact, she had asked me if I was ever going to grow it back. I told her it was unlikely.

Now, I’ve had my hair in a bunch of different styles growing up, so there was never any one I stuck with. That, and I’ve never had a clean, well-defined hairline. So the conclusion was, why bother with hair at all?

If I suddenly lost the ability to grow hair, and never had to shave it down every morning, that would be quite a blessing.

But some people get this preconceived idea that being bald gives people the look of having been in the slammer, and/or involved with crime. Most likely it’s manufactured by the media.

A good example is the Mirror Universe episode of Star Trek TOS, where the crew meets their evil counterparts, who all have beards and look evil, Spock in particular.