Opinion Road

As many iPhone owners who have experienced cold winters know, you often have to make a very difficult choice: keep your hands warm or take off your gloves to use the iPhone to text your best friend about how cold you are. Unfortunately, the iPhone’s touch screen does not recognize gloved fingers. I discovered this [...]

I’ve been a long-time subscriber of Rhapsody’s music service (since 2005), but recently I decided to switch because of many little annoyances that finally made it almost unbearable to use. I may do a Rhapsody vs. Napster comparison at some point in the future, but today I thought I’d share my experience with trying to [...]

The new Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while. My first impression was that this was just a big fancy calculator to help people solve NP-complete problems and complex differential equations and whatnot. Not that this wouldn’t be impressive in its own right, but it’s not exactly something [...]

A couple months ago, I wrote here about my horrible experience with Delta when trying to get from Boston to San Diego. At the time, I also sent my story to Delta’s customer service. Their response (which arrived a whole 2 weeks later) did not do anything to lessen my anger. In fact, it did [...]

I keep an eye on the job market, just so I know who’s hiring, what they’re hiring for, and where I fit in with my current skills. I don’t read postings on monster.com or anything like that, I just keep up with a few choice job boards. After reading some well-written postings, it’s easy to [...]

I have recently noticed a disturbing trend start to develop in iPhone apps. It’s the “shake the phone to refresh” interaction model (a.k.a. the “Etch A Sketch” interaction model). The worst culprit is the Facebook app which requires the user to shake the phone to see their friends’ latest updates. To any iPhone developers out [...]

I woke up at 3:45 this morning so that I could catch a 7:10am flight out of Boston to San Diego. By 5:45, I was third in line to go through security. Thirty minutes later, thanks to the snail’s pace at which the TSA officers were moving and the dozens of people they let cut [...]