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So I’m sure everyone’s heard about it through CNN or whatever. It’s definitely not a rumor and Microsoft has done an exceptional job at hiding this thing from a ton of people, including.. Microsoft itself. There’s no mention of it at all at MS and there are no internal sites for it (as far as I know). I can’t find anything about it. Engadget though, has done a pretty good job of getting inside information, but the question remains as to whether it was leaked or voluntary for the purposes of viral marketing. If the latter is the case, well, I’m just contributing to that

Some of the cool things heard so far:

1. The Zune will have WiFi, and through this you can download songs without a laptop and you can also share songs instantly with friends wirelessly.

2. There are multiple devices, one of which will be an Xbox branded portable gaming system with Live Anywhere integration.

3. In order to convert you from iTunes Music Store to Zune’s own media service, they’re going to offer to convert you for free (i.e. you can download any song you downloaded from iTMS for free, which is a crazy deal)

4. Pyxis is the codename for their Nano competitor. It will have video too. Not sure how that’s gonna work…

5. Zune’s media service will be driven by the community through recommendations and such. Much like digg.com.

6. The Zune is headed by Robbie Bach and J Allard, who heads all the design and engineering of the XBox. J Allard is pretty interesting. He is best known for sending a memo to Microsoft in the mid-90s about the rise of the Internet, which reshaped their entire direction of the company. He also legally changed his name from “James” to “J”. Seriously.

There are three things I’m concerned about:

1. DRM. Digital Rights Management. This is basically what iTunes does to force you to get an iPod when you use iTunes Music Store — all songs bought from iTMS play only on an iPod and the original computer plus or minus a few that you register. So Zune will have this in order to have full vertical end-to-end integration services (Zune player, Zune media organizer, Zune online store). What many people think is that DRM protects artists and such but in reality it doesn’t add any value for either artists or consumers. It’s just a way of enclosing various technologies together and preventing others from utilizing a part of the whole.

2. Having multiple devices that are aimed at the same market segment is not a good idea. In the end, you’re going to be creating unnecessary loss. The iPod family was successful because it was able to provide *just* enough innovation in each successive release to warrant the buying of it. What’s the difference between the iPod mini and the Ipod nano? Not much from a high-level point of view, but the timings of both releases were the keys to their successes. MS has to do a good job of hiding their successive Zune devices from the public; hiding the future guarantees a healthy consumer surplus in the present.

3. Wifi Sharing. There are two ways MS could do this. I’m sure they won’t allow you to just give a song to someone else directly. Considering their efforts to enforce DRM, this is impossible. A possibility is that they would allow you to swap songs. So you could trade a song for someone else’s. The other possibility is that instead of even sharing songs, you could send a notice to someone else’s Zune to ‘bookmark’ a song on their account on the Zune online store. This is useful for rare songs, but the popularity of this remains shaky.

I think this might be the first President ever to actually try for negative approval ratings. I cannot believe the President actually vetoed this bill with a claim of “saving human lives” (yeah right, let’s see what Iraq has to say about that) and made a press announcement after happily bringing along tons of toddlers and children (they are the result of discarded embryos, known as ’snowflakes’) in the press room to back him up. As a brother to a girl with Rett Syndrome, this news is completely saddening. There is a reason they are called stem cells. They are not human beings yet. They are cells. These are not five-month-old fetuses. These are embryonic stem cells taken from five-day-old blastocysts. This research held the most promise in solving some of the biggest problems in medicine.

There were lots of families, people with disabilities, politicians, and researchers hoping and praying that stem cell research would get enough funding to see the light of cures for some of the world’s most prevalent diseases and disabilities.

To really show you the lack of intelligence that a few Republicans (truly making fools out of themselves in Congress — i.e. Sen. Ted “the internet is not a dump truck” Stevens, Sen. Arlen “we need to wiretap everyone” Specter) have about stem cell research, here’s a good article from Wired: “Congress’ Top 10 Stem Cell Flubs”. Wired particularly reams them in this quote:

“As we all know, on Aug. 9, 2001, President Bush laid out his principles and put in place a policy, which I supported, that for the first time allowed federal funding for embryonic stem-cell research.” — Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist (R-Tennessee)

Not true. President Clinton put in place the first policy (.pdf) to allow federal funding of human embryonic stem-cell research. Bush halted this policy upon entering the White House and didn’t take up the subject again until 2001.

This bill has been passed by Congress and passed by the American public. What have you done Mr. Bush?

The Daily Show on Stem Cell Research:

Michael J. Fox speaks out on the veto. Very sad..

… I just got the job! So for 2006-2007 I’ll be the Technical Microsoft Student Ambassador (I think they changed it to Student Partner.. Microsoft isn’t really a country. Yet.) for UNC. Here are some of the things I’ll be doing:

- Launch Events. This one I’m especially excited about. Between ‘06 and ‘07 MS will be launching Windows Vista, Internet Explorer 7, Office 2007, Zune (the iPod killer with Wifi…), and other cool things.

- Tech Talks. So this would include a lot of the technical features behind .NET, Linq, ADO.NET, C#, Avalon, WCF, XAML, all kinds of awesome stuff!

- Parties. This one needs no explanation.

This is hilarious…you should watch some of Hodgman’s other videos on the Daily Show. You might know him best as the “…and I’m a PC” guy from the Mac ads:

I got the best birthday present — my parents and my sister made a surprise visit to Seattle. It was awesome.. I had no idea. They’re leaving tomorrow when my cousin takes me to work.

I found something a few days ago that I had written, along with a lot of other ramblings. I had written it on my 18th birthday. Here goes.

If we were never hungry, we would never appreciate food; if there were no war, we would never appreciate peace. If we never left friends, we would never appreciate them. If there was no such thing as death, we would never appreciate life. That is what i’ve sort of realized… recently. We only have 60 something years to live; life is like one big party, and we’ll never really know when we’re going to leave it. When I have to leave, I want to know that I partied like an animal and I did everything that I wanted to. I don’t want to hold anything back anymore.. if there is someone out there i’m dying to meet, what the hell, i’ll go meet them. If I want to say something, i’ll say it. If I have friends, i’ll go out with them. If there’s something I want to learn, i’ll learn it. I don’t want to miss out on anything.. How in holy hell can you have fun at a party if you’re always thinking about leaving it?

Have I changed in the past three years? Eh, maybe. During the past three years I experienced a major turning point in my personal life. More of a redefinition. A redefinition of what it takes to obtain happiness. It doesn’t involve being a party animal, it doesn’t involve forcing myself to do things simply for the sake of saying I did them. Happiness is more than that, I think. You could be perfectly happy sitting by yourself at a bar just as much as you are dancing on a table with the girl of your dreams. (I’ve done both).

When I’m reaching the final stretch, I really want to look back on my life and ask if I was happy — so what if I didn’t meet six billion people in the world or go skydiving or tell the world exactly what I felt. As long as I was happy.

One of the ideas I had for my Computer Science Honors project was to bring speech recognition/feedback to the iPod. The iPod is a great piece of work from an engineering point of view, but from a usability standpoint, it’s not up to par:

1. A user can barely hold the iPod with one hand while scrolling through songs (as opposed to the single-click-and-hold idea). The one thing that irritates me the most is that there are so many mobile devices out there that only seem useful to some weird species of alien with detachable thumbs. Here’s a good test: hold your iPod, your cellphone, whatever, in a position that is most comfortable in your hand — not the way in which you would normally use it. Now attempt to use it. Try and press the buttons. Navigate through the menus. With my “smartphone”, I find myself bending my thumb in ways I never thought possible, and trying to click those teeny buttons. Come on. What were you designers thinking?
2. Navigating through the menus is analogous to driving through a really complicated neighborhood, trying to find the house you want. Once you reach a dead end, you have to navigate back the way you came until you find something that seems familiar to you. Why should the end-user be the one who takes the plunge into the sea of menus, successively drilling through them until they reach their goal?
3. Driving with an iPod is a good way to wreck your car. Even walking with an Ipod can cause a head-on collision with another person. I find it hilarious that a “mobile” mp3 player was created that actually forced the user to stop everything they were doing to find a song they wanted to play.
4. Accessibility. This is an obvious one. Imagine a blind person who enjoys music. The most popular music player on the planet cannot be used by them. There are a couple million people in the US who are so paralyzed that they can only move one finger. Imagine seeing how amazing the iPod is and being unable to scroll through your favorite songs.

So there lies some design problems with the iPod. I believe that some of them can be fixed in a unique way through speech recognition and feedback. The form factor problem, well, can be fixed by getting another mp3 player The thing that really drove me the most for this project was the accessibility issue. As a brother to a disabled girl, I’ve witnessed for 21 years how hard it is for people with disabilities to use things we take for granted everyday. It angers me that in this day and age, engineers and designers turn away from people with disabilities, claiming that they’re not in their “market segment”.

Speech feedback would be useful for users with blindness, as well as those people who drive cars and listen to music. As they scrolled through the songs, they could hear exactly what song name is highlighted. They could also hear where, contextually, they are in the song: “20 Percent”, “50 Percent”, etc. to aid the fast-forwarding/rewinding problem. An interesting method would consist of being able to “tag” certain categories with snippets of music, instead of reading them out through a monotone, computer-generated voice.

Speech recognition would also be useful for blind users, and could bring in an entirely new interaction model. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you could simply state into your iPod: “Thievery Corporation, Lebanese Blonde” and it would simply look up the song and play it for you instantly? Goodbye animated menus. You wouldn’t have to do any sort of navigation.

The brute-force strategy of the speech recognition idea would simply involve doing a speech-to-text transformation and performing a search on your songs based on that text, and playing the most relevant.

So how did Apple kill my honors project? The next version of the iPod will have speech feedback. So it didn’t exactly kill it, it just implemented half of it. The speech-to-text will probably exist in a much later version, and would probably be centered around a completely guaranteed approach of performing the speech recognition. Even if they did implement half of the idea, I’m extremely happy. It’s great that companies can realize design issues and fix them in successive versions of their products, especially issues regarding accessibility. I’m still interested in the speech-to-text part of it.. but I have some other interesting ideas for my honors project..

Mount Rainier is the highest point in Washington and a “stratovolcano”, which is a fancy word for a volcano that has alternating layers of lava and ash. The trip was awesome. About 80% of our four hour hike was through 2-4-feet-deep snow. At some points it was kind of dangerous — we had to vertically climb up some snow onto a cliff, and as we hiked around it, it dropped down into a huge gorge. Some of the narrow paths were glazed with ice and snow, so we had to be extra careful; if we slipped even a little then… yeah. We had to do a bit of climbing through some more snow to actually reach our goal, Panorama Point — a towering cliff that overlooked Rainier, Mount Baker, and even Mount St. Helens in the distance.

The hike back down was pretty fun, even though it was still a little dangerous since gravity was driving us down the narrow trails. We sledded back down the snowy part of a cliff and made our way through a different trail that ran along a river. I met a couple of other interns and saw a few familiar ones along the way too.

Here are some pics taken from the cameraphone. I really wish I had brought the digital camera.

The cliff is down below.. can’t really see it.

Mount Rainier was always visible. Apparently it takes good hikers 2-3 days to get to the top.

Below us was a huge gorge, carved out from a past glacier.

The small tip on that hill is Panorama Point. It looked sort of close but it was actually about an hour and a half from this point. We had to go around the hill to get up to the trail on the Point.

I got a 2002 Acura RSX about a week ago..! Yeah, it’s gonna be tough parting ways with my 1990 Ford Escort, with its blistering top speed of 80 MILES PER HOUR. Seriously though, Japan can make a car.. and make it well. It’s probably the only American car that we’ve had that survived for so long, and it’s only because of its Mazda engine. I was really pushing for a hybrid, what with all the ridiculous gas prices and global warming craziness. They’re not so great in other areas besides mileage though — but they’re getting better. My dad found the RSX.. it’s pretty sweet. Here is a pic of the new car (okay, it’s not exactly a picture of MY car, but they took down the dealer’s site with the pics. Just imagine it’s blue instead of black):

Here’s the good part, straight from the wonderful ladder rung of middle management:

“As you can see, withholding our highest level of service from even one member is all it takes to damage the trust and credibility you have worked so hard to earn. With all of the safeguards we have in place:

• recording and monitoring of member interactions
• our Keep it Real policy, which details our standards of professionalism and ethical behavior
• and Third Party Verification, an industry-first initiative to guarantee quality in every single retention call Any attempt to circumvent our member promise is a violation of our practices, and we maintain a zero tolerance policy for non-compliance.”

Yes, that’s correct. A Keep it Real policy. Maybe that was the problem during Vinny Ferrari’s cancellation call. They should take some tips from Chappelle’s Show.

Last night, Phil, a few others, and I headed up to Gasworks Park in Seattle to watch the fireworks. Supposedly it was rated by Time Mag as the fifth best in the nation. It wasn’t too crowded when we got there, but by 10pm it was packed. Phil gave me some good reading for a few minutes while we hung out with a few other interns in the park.. I might end up buying it after I read The Inmates. After a while I spotted a few other intern-friends of mine and we wandered around and got some food. When we came back it was getting dark and very crowded. The view of the Seattle skyline was awesome though; we could see it clearly even with the mass amounts of tents. At about 10:30 the show kicked off when a Comanche helicopter flew in with an American flag during the anthem. After that, the fireworks started. They were spectacular… it’s been a long time since I’ve seen fireworks but it seems like they’ve really upped the tech factor on them. There were all kinds… 3D boxes, fireworks with parachutes, hearts, smiley faces. On the website they touted an “Italian Electrical Storm”; it kind of created a fractal in the sky. Makes me wonder how they engineered something like that.

The only downside was trying to get out of the park; there were tons of people by the time it was over, so we had to find some side-streets and inch our way towards the bridge. Eventually I got back around 1am. Here are some pics. I had to take it with the crappy camera on my phone, but it turned out alright. I have a good video with the 3D boxes.. I might upload that later.