OK, the headline caught your attention, so you’re here. First note that i say “Hated” in the past tense, not “Hate” in the now.

I used to hate steve jobs, because he always seemed to promise much more than he delivered. I remember back in 1984 when my house mate bought a Mac that could display a full width page of text on screen and required him to swap out floppies everytime he tried to use any sort of function. It seemed to me it was an over priced and underpowered prototype, that wasn’t ready for prime time. Jobs continued to disappoint with the Lisa, Newton (though mr Pepsi - john sculley may be to blame on that). When Jobs left apple and formed Next, he once again promised a piece of hardware that he never delivered, specifically the lack of a rewritable CD. The Next venture was a financial failure, despite the fact that the OS, called nextstep was considered by many at the time, the best graphical software development platform, ever.

Nextstep was the first time i started feeling that mr. jobs was able to deliver what was promise, at least when it was software which didn’t depend on outside manufacturers. The point where Pixar released clips of disney’s Toy Story, was the moment that my steve jobs switch went from “doesn’t deliver” to “wow”. Since then he’s returned to apple to turn the MP3 player into the brand of iPod, the iphone and of course that mac that i laughed at 25 years ago.

Well when the mac moves to Intel, then os X, i was ready to consider the switchover. Everytime i ended up ready to buy, i ended up choosing a PC for 50-60% of the price of the mac. Well in june, my windows XP machine lost it’s mind and wasn’t usable and my hp laptop was running a broken install of Vista, which i hate. So after talking to a friend about how to use a Macbook with external keyboard and monitor, i took the leap. I paid the $2300 CAD, even settled for 250gb hard drive to get one in my hands immediately.

It’s now about two months on the Mac and it’s such a stable operating system that i rarely need to deal with a crash. The software updates seem to be smoother and take seconds, not the minutes that windows often does. I never thought i’d ever say I love my Mac, but i love my mac.

Did microsoft’s crappy OS drive to the Mac? Did John Hodgman’s “PC” character in the mac ads reminding me of all the BS over the years make me switch? Beats me, but Once You Go Mac, You’ll Never Go Bac!

That’s why I hated steve jobs, but now i’m over it. :>)

So i’m building a site that will be designed to help people find the most popular tweeters in a variety of categories and help rank any tweeter relative to the twitter universe. It’s great for small users like:

Lottery Tweets

or just to check out which hollywood or sports celebrities are the top ranking Tweeters.

Here are a few examples of folks i find funny:
John Hodgman, AKA PC
NBC Latenight host Jimmy Fallon

and my favorite
The Rightest of the Right Wing - Stephen Colbert

So who’s the most followed? Jimmy Fallon. Who’s your most followed celebrity.

This man has such a way with words, facts and science generally:

I posted the following in an SEO forum that i participate in, my experiences testing Bing vs Google yesterday:

I’ve seen the tv ads, looked at the video, then go use bing and it’s the same crappy search engine as before. the links on the left, link me to new SERPs, where is the chart telling me when to fly to budapest or vegas? i’ve search for a few travel locations and never do i see their fancy graphs showing me when to buy.

When i search “NYC Chinese food manhattan’ i get normal looking SERP, with 3 ads on top, ads on right and “alternate searches” on left. The same search in google, removes the ads on top, shows a map of manhattan with list of 10 restaraunts then the same sort of results that bing did: sections from menupages.com, chowhound, etc.
Google Wins

For “chinese food central park west,
bing shows 1) site from china, 2) restaurant in seattle 3) restaurant near columbus Circle BING(correct) 4) something about tshirts in central park 5) another columbus circle restuarant BING 6) a restaurant in Regina Saskatchewan
2 of 6 correct

Google 1) shows a link to page about florida at BOTW, but shows address for a place on 79th and Central park west, bing? 2) local business group with link to local restauratn BING 3) New York site with upper west site/columbus square restaurants BING 4) yellow book page for phoenix 5) NY mag restaurant reviews, upper west side BING 6) VirtualTourist, cheap chinese central park west BING

5 of 6 right, or 4.5 if you discount BOTW because it says Florida in title, but shows a NYC restaurant in my search area.

so, to me it’s the same crap in a new wrapper. which is disappointing because i’d like to see google (or anyone’s share) stay closer to 50% than 75%. it would be nice to have 3 or 4 good/commercially successful SEs

I’ve been running advertising for Web By Fred, my consulting business since early July on WCSX 94.7 Detroit. Today i’ve received 4 emails from bicyclists angry over a comment made on by the morning show DJs on August 5th. Well the comment was about throwing things at the heads of bicyclists, ala Grand Theft Auto and in my opinion is pretty stupid and offensive. Anyone inciting violence, whether Glenn Beck on Fox or Deminksi and Doyle on WCSX shouldn’t be placed on the air by responsible broadcasters.

Having said that, remember these DJs are charged with filling about 2 hours of air time, each day,with entertaining conversation. D & D work with a single producer, 3 people to fill 2 hours a day. Letterman, Conan, Jon Stewart all do it with a dozen or more writers/producers to fill 1 hour, of which 30 minutes are interviews and not scripted. My point is that they have a lot of time to fill and a live microphone, i’m sure every day they say things they wish they hadn’t, mostly because it wasn’t funny and sometimes because it was offensive.

So before everyone starts boycotting me, the radio station and the morning show, let’s see what these guys do in the next few days. let’s give them chance to see how they deal with the backlash before we call for their heads. Are there other incidents from that past that shows a pattern of irresponsible or offensive statements? If not, let’s give them a warning, see if they do the right thing and hope that they do.