Thinking aloud: Azure, AWS, DevOps, cars and opinion from Alex Neihaus

  • ‘Cause Google’s the taxman

    Mid-April! So metaphor rich: the Boston Marathon…tax season in the US…EMI and Apple Corps have settled their disputes. What’s a blogger to do with all this? Easy: cram it all into a rant about Google. You will advertise your product or service on Google. You will allow your competitors to bid against you for the…

  • Brevity, baby.

    To the surprising large number of people who’ve emailed, called, IM’ed and otherwise let me know that you’re wondering why I haven’t posted lately, I offer as a short interlude this post with its “a picture tells a 1000 words” explanation.” This is like the overly-long intermissions in 1960’s film musicals like My Fair Lady…

  • C’mon and gimme that ole time subculture

    First, I hope this racy image won’t have the MPAA giving my blog an R rating…but it was such a cool graphic I couldn’t help myself. Well…ahem…back to the post at hand. I’ve been taking some…uh…commentary from both friends and business associates about my apparent infatuation with all things blog and podcast, but especially about…

  • iPod audio gettin’ better all the time

    I’ve been Turkmen-bashing Apple here a lot (just read the most hilarious obit for Saparmurat Niyazov) for not yet having released a Vista-compatible iTunes. I can’t decide if it’s out of what I suspect is pique at Microsoft having shipped an OS that’s so Mac-like or, more probably, if it’s being a big, slow and…

  • Apple: I’m in freakin’ agony, OK? You’ve made your point.

    Hello, Apple? Could you please please pretty please ship the freakin’ update of iTunes for Windows Vista? I know — I just know — you have the thing finished. After all, if nearly everybody else could have their products somewhat ready for Vista, couldn’t you? I mean you own the whole MP3 marketplace, right? Surely someone…

  • After being a yuppie…I got a BMW and an HDTV

    Just when you think you’ve outgrown all sense of fashion, peer pressure and have resigned yourself to your own middle-aged individuality, along comes a jolting reminder than your cohort’s tastes may change, but the pressure to conform doesn’t. I was scanning a newsletter for a client and ran across this amazing story: BMW owners love…

  • Major league antitussive

    A cold that I brought back from Europe resulted this week in a cough nasty enough to remind me of the incessant hacking, phlegm-ing and general mucous-ness of a smoker I once had the misfortune to sit across from. Yech. But in the “better living through chemistry” department: my doctor gave me a prescription to…

  • Apple + DRM = doubleplusgood

    I know that in the torrent of comment, wailing and teeth-gnashing the blogosphere, podosphere and ipodo-universe will generate about Steve Job’s comments on digital-rights management, my little post here will live in obscurity. Still, I can’t help myself: I’m blue in the face with envy…Envy of Apple’s marketing brilliance. And the power they have to…

  • How to be bush league

    Every now and then, even the best of us does really stupid stuff. Thursday, February 1 was my day. I was headed home from Paris after a good set of meetings…all I had to do was get to the airport on time. We were booked on Air France 332, leaving CDG at 1:15pm. The instructions…

  • The love affair continues

    If you even lightly press the “talk technology” button on Alex, you are more than likely going to get a lot of gushing from me about WordPress. Since I first found WordPress 2.0 in the early summer, I’ve been amazed at what I, last a developer 15 years ago, could do with this industrial-strength, multi-user…

  • Microsoft gets whacked up side the head, and I can’t help myself

    Wow! Is this Internet thing powerful or what? Over the Xmas holiday, a well-known security expert and professor in New Zealand named Peter Gutman wrote and posted on the ‘net a scathing critique of Windows Vista’s new DRM technology. Now, it’s nearly impossible for you to go anywhere on the ‘Net without seeing people podcast…

  • An Alito for the Wall Street Journal

    I am seriously bent out of shape by an editorial entitled “Franchise Freedom” that I read in the January 2, 2007 edition of the Wall Street Journal. I can’t link to the editorial here, because even the Journal’s red-meat-Republican opinions are locked behind a subscription site. (How very web-centric…how very authentic it makes me think…