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

  • 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…

  • Bitch slappin’ Bob Lutz

    Oooooh, Mama! There’s some serious fur flying in the blogosphere. You all know I am a car junkie. And you all know I am a blog junkie. I satisfy both cravings with a healthy dose of car blogs and forums, with my favorite being The Truth About Cars. This blog has it all: killer writing,…

  • When Frogs Fly

    Anyone who knows me knows that I’ve never been a Microsoft fan. I’ve considered their products derivative and their business practices despicable. Office was a response to Lotus SmartSuite and Outlook has always been stuck at Notes Release 3 in terms of user interface. Meanwhile, Microsoft to this day is still trying to kill what…

  • Perpetually catching up..but not quite

    Many pundits who review software are saying that Microsoft has "caught up" with Firefox in Internet Explorer 7 (here and here, among others). I beg to differ. Since the mid-1990s, what Microsoft has done — time after time — is deliver pale imitations of others' UI inventions. Have you ever used the View menu in…

  • A video blog you have to see

    Sometimes, the combination of a new medium (podcasting, in this case the video version of it some people call vlogging) with politics and journalism produces something very, very special. Alive in Baghdad is an impressive example. I won't go on here about what it means…or how it affected me. That's for you to discover for…