If I were a consumer (I am) only (I'm not) I'd be pretty jazzed about the Kindle Fire. New. Shiny. Lots of stuff through Amazon's formidable online store. 

Then I looked at Apple's iPhone 4S TV ad, which I first saw last night before "House," and which I thought was frankly pretty boring, again. The ad tells you, as though you've had zero contact with the shiny stuff those wizes in Cupertino make, that Apple's products are linked. 

Buy music on your new, shiny iPhone 4S... it shows up in your new, shiny MacBook Air. Bookmark a page in the book you're reading on your iPad... and that bookmark shows up in your iPhone 4S. It's magical. 

http://bit.ly/ut8pTo

Sunday and Monday we spent most of both days moving a customer's web site and all their email (30+ accounts) to one of my hosting biz's cloud servers. As part of the move we switched all the email accounts from POP3 to IMAP. 

Suddenly messages and folders on PCs (they're allowed) and Macs (they're preferred) were appearing on staff iPhones. Create a folder on the PC, and it showed up on the iPhone. File a message in a folder on the iPhone, and it filed again by itself on the Mac. The syncing was magical. The reactions to having email messages, all emails messages, on smart phones and computers, filed in exactly the same way were magical too. 

I mention this because Kindle Fire's specs tell you its got access to cloud storage (Amazon's been selling cloud storage for quite some time, and we've used it for customer projects, but we've had to program interfaces with its APIs) (sorry, lots of geek there), but it doesn't mention how the books, movies and music you buy through the shiny, new Kindle Fire will link to your PC or Mac or smart phone. 

Linking email across phones and computers was a big win-win for my customer. We knew it would be. Click the link above, and watch the boring iPhone 4S ad again. See how Apple is linking all your stuff. Apple's doing what we did with email with all your books, movies and music. 

How does Kindle Fire compete with that? 

The most recent issue of the New Yorker has Malcolm Gladwell's piece about Steve Jobs and his tenacity and at times childishly rude behavior in getting what he wanted just right. 

http://nyr.kr/uPvSQQ

Gates is right when he said that Jobs stole from Xerox before he had a chance to, partly, if stealing is what The Beatles did to Buddy Holly. That's a tiny bit of a stretch, but not really so much as it might seem. And it's kind of the point of "The Tweaker" article. 

I'll write more on why it's perfectly valid later. 

In the meantime, if you're interested in how Jobs' impact just might not have been narrowed in scope to tech or industrial design, check out the New Yorker. It's on shelves now, as they say. 

Who is PopTech for? It's not a rhetorical question, because as per their web site (https://poptech.org) it costs $3,000.00 to attend.

I should take a step back: PopTech, the eclectic conference of "though-leaders" and visionaries is coming to Camden, Maine October 19-22. Conferences are cool. PopTech, like TED, looks cool, and unlike TED it looks a lot less cliquish. I'd like to attend. I probably should attend.

I've got bunches of character flaws, but ignorance about things I'm really interested in isn't one of them. Put another way: I do know what I know, and (even more importantly) I know what I don't know. Without inflating my ego to Macy's Thanksgiving Day float proportions, which really isn't my style -- I'll settle for just enough air to make for a comfy bike ride home this evening, I'm probably someone who should attend PopTech.

But not for $3,000.00, thanks.

American Public Media's Marketplace, often a very good show, often gets it wrong. Many of the statements made on this story about Apple are wrong. 

http://bit.ly/ndvMhd

Britt Beemer's assertion that Apple's products "quickly become incompatible with themselves" is flat out false.

The Portland Press-Herald ran a story on Steve Job's failures. The tackiness of doing this on the day after he'd died aside, the idea the NeXT failed is interested, and more nuanced. 

http://bit.ly/qltnUI

NeXT was purchased by Apple when Steve Jobs returned to the company. Mac OS X, the iPhone and the iPad are all running software based on NeXT's.

If you use Apple's products as a consume,r and you're not building things as I do with Steve Jobs' company has give all of us, then I suppose you wouldn't begin to understand this. But then why be allowed to write an inaccurate article about it. 

More to come. Stay tuned. 

A friend in Chicago and the Macintosh, the first one Apple made, are the reasons why I do the work I do, and not because computers are cool, or because some computers can be hip. 

I got into this business in the late eighties and early nineties when Steve Jobs' company really did appear to be going away, and when aligning oneself with it and its products and its fine attention to detail to build things yourself seemed like a bad career choice. 

The Macintosh was delightful. It was better, it was complete, and it didn't forget the details. That's what my friend, who was also a Macintosh user and who understood this, and that's what the Macintosh, made by Steve Jobs and his company and which I still have, meant to me. 

I'm thinking of the handle on the top of the case on the Macintosh, and I'm smiling about it. Really great. 

http://bit.ly/ofmtBE

So, I made light of now melancholy technology consumers pretending to be something more than technology consumers, and the Portland Press-Herald has run a story on a $35 Android-based tablet made in India. 

And, wearing my consumer hat now, I have to say that I want one to play with. 

http://bit.ly/nMKqo0

Or: Tell me again why the iPhone 4S is so bad

Facebook was flooded with disappointing status messages. Twitter, if you've not given up on Twitter by now, was no doubt inundated with hair pulling Tweets. 

Apple didn't announce the iPhone 5. Cue that End of the World... REM song everyone was playing to death last week after REM called it quits. 

The many, many, many consumers of the good technology Apple is producing shared their overwhelming disappointment, repeating (mostly repeating) the profound disappointment Facebooked and Tweeted by other consumers. Reminds you what's god awful about social media: People without anything meaningful to contribute can contribute nothing, a lot. Oh well.

Really, best look at what Apple is offering this time around (jump to Siri and Dictation, search for "processor" and "camera") instead of focusing too much on what they aren't: 

Technology Review's story: 

http://bit.ly/q0eOwU

Ars Technica's story: 

http://bit.ly/r3eniT

And to put things in some perspective: Apple didn't cancel Christmas this year. :-) 

Another good Portland Press-Herald editorial on Maine's governor's drive to ferret out widespread fraud wherever it exists, and even where it doesn't. 

I know about the voting fraud the Maine GOP presumed to be rampant when it presented its findings to the Maine Secretary of State... who found one case of voter fraud.

Now Maine's governor is going after unemployment fraud. He's motivated in part by the Federal government telling all states to limit fraudulent unemployment claims. That's fine. Without a doubt there are going to be some of these. But he seems really energized by the belief the Maine GOP seems to have generally that, like UFOs, ghosts, the Loch Ness Monster, if there isn't the evidence of a thing existing, then it must exist. 

The Press-Herald correctly calls him on it. This editorial says the focus should be not on investigating the unemployed, but it should be on creating jobs. The priorities should be on job creation. That is in part why this governor was elected. 

http://bit.ly/nRzykp

The Portland Press-Herald had a good op-ed Sunday on filling the skills gap projected for Maine by recruiting people from outside the state to come here, to live here, and to work here. That's great. The projected need of workers, like those in IT, versus the pool of skilled workers in the field, is wide, and it's going to increase. Not just in IT. 

http://bit.ly/mQifq6

But, the thing is, there needs to be the work in Maine to attract people to come and live here. In the past 4-5 years we know of numerous people who relocated to Maine in late 1990s and early 2000s who left because the work wasn't here. "Quality of place" doesn't make an economy by itself. It's a contributor to a thriving economy. But, literally, bluntly, by itself there's no money in it.

NY Times has an article about shops letting their employees pick the computer hardware they're most comfortable using and most productive on. 

This is good news! The computer is a tool and whether it's a Mac laptop or a Droid tablet or a Linux workstation is completely irrelevant. Or it's about as meaningful as requiring that all employees write using blue Papermate felt tip pens, with red Papermate felt tips used for corrections and edits. 

http://nyti.ms/qRAp4h