Putting aside enough time to honor your New Year’s resolutions?  A good extra New Year’s resolution might be to avoid everything on this list from ReadWriteWeb:

10 Mobile Social Networks to Check Out – ReadWriteWeb 

The prevailing wisdom (Folklore?) is that the value of a network is proportional to the square of the nodes: See Metcalfe’s law and the less-familiar, more optimistic Reed’s law.  That might be true of the potential of the entire network, but what about the value to a particular node, i.e., individual?  Mobile networks being geocentric will have much-smaller pockets of useful nodes due to population density and market popularity–think Orkut in Brazil.

They’re all competing for the same thing–my time–with often-redundant features.  Cross-posts helps: This blog goes to Linkedin and Twitter; Twitter, Facebook, and Brightkite cross-post to each other.  However, I often ignore cool features to cater to the least common denominator among my network of networks. There’s also the occasional SNAFU like when a blog bulk edit pushes dozens of bad posts to each.  Diminishing returns rapidly give way to value lost with too many active networks, cross-posting or not.

Right now we’re in the Cambrian Explosion of social networking; such booms rarely end well for the participants.  How many of ReadWriteWeb’s 10 will only be remembered in the fossil record of such articles?

I have some long-time draft Documentum posts that should see daylight soon as well, and the new smart container feature in D6.5 has me pondering the fate of virtual documents and EMC’s folder fetish. Thanks to Brilliant Leap for sending me the link and distracting me from iPhone adoration for a few minutes.

Finally, kudos to the makers of WordPress 2.7.  Constant interface changes make me a little crazy (glares at Lotus Notes), but this truly was a big step forward for the project.  I’m looking forward to what they do in 2009.

Have you ever retired a Mac by mistake? No.

I bought a unibody MacBook Pro. Aside from being a thing of beauty, the improved GPU means all my games run well under Boot Camp; the Dell XPS 600 may get an early retirement (in the Blade Runner sense).  I love the trackpad and found myself forgoing a mouse while traveling–except under Windows where it’s squirrelly and inconsistent.  I hope Apple starts squeezing out Boot Camp updates as fast as iPhone updates to fix the track pad problem and take full advantage of the dual GPU.  Please cross all appropriate appendages.

I ended my contract in Rockville, MD.  The commute got to me and I ended my contract with F. after a one month extension to see one of my projects through its first deployment to prod. I’m making a pattern of very long separations to help with transition, and that’s both good and bad: Good this time because I think it really made a difference in the deployment; bad because I missed out on the before-end-of-year hiring cycle.  I hope it reboots as usual in the beginning of the new year despite the grim economic situation.

I got the flu.  My last day in Rockville was when the fever kicked in.  The following three weeks were pretty miserable, and I still have a bit of a cough after another two.  Next year I’m definitely getting a flu shot, and I’m wondering if I should still get one this year since they typically treat a handful of the most common strains.  Any medical professionals care to comment?

I drank the Kool Aid and bought an iPhone.  Expect a subsequent post with some of my favorite apps.  I’m testing how long it can last in stand-by mode with power consumption optimization (WiFi and 3G only when needed, no push, hourly pull) and it looks like the answer’s 72 hours.  I may have to bump my SMS messages up to 1500 from 200 which irks me to no end, but that’s one of a handful of gripes that are more about AT&T than the device itself.  Otherwise, it’s a Good Thing ™.

I attended MJD‘s talk at Philadelphia Linux Users Group (PLUG) about strong typing.  The slides for Atypical Types are on MJD’s site.  We agree that Java 1.5 is the first usable version of the 1970s-style programming language but for different reasons:  He asserted at the talk that Java typing got better because a Haskell guy rewrote the 1.5 compiler and force fed Java some good medicine like generics. Is Haskell the new programming language incubator?  Given things like type inference, how a smart compiler removes all strong-type clutter that stupid compilers require, could be.

I corrected a long-standing mistake about Documentum Composer in my I’d Rather Be in Philadelphia blog post.  Despite being a newer Documentum customer, F. had enough invested in its 5.3 architecture and how it integrated into their corp-wide build process to make Composer a non-starter.  I’m looking forward to a contract in the future where I get to use all the new 6.5 stuff without the drag of a 5.x (or even 6.0) install base.

My Worst Nightmare — from royal.pingdom.com via WebbAlert

I hate cables. The overgrown yellow “mesh network” above would hospitalize me if encountered in person. Cables offend my minimalist sensibilities while triggering my obsessive-compulsive need to always have the perfect cable on hand. I hide most of my dirty little secrets in big Rubbermaid tubs in the closet–all those combinations of type, length, color–but guests bear witness to the public shame that my workstation has become:

I’m not a huge fan of wireless technologies either; they’re slower, less secure, less robust, and often require batteries. Being saturated by a hundred low-power radio transmitters just doesn’t seem like a good idea. Bluetooth and the alphabet soup of 802.11 can be handy, but they always betray me when I need them most. That’s why I still have a land line with at least one regular, corded phone attached at all times. That’s also why I laid gigabit Ethernet and fiber all around the apartment after the walls came down.

Along comes the Macbook Air. I drooled like a teen-aged fanboy at first, but it’s really starting to annoy me. Others find fault with the lack of an optical drive and no removable battery; understandable concerns for road warriors and jet setters. The average laptop battery barely makes it to cruising altitude, and now there’s all this nonsense about not carrying on extra batteries. As if I needed another reason to never fly again. How much worse of an experience can flying become?

What personally ticks me off is another Apple laptop without anything resembling a docking station or unified connector. I attach my computers via a KVM to a big monitor and a full-sized natural keyboard; the laptop’s poor ergonomics would reduce me to a cramped, gnarly mess of digits and vertebrae in days. So the trade-off is physical health for mental, having to look at a cramped, gnarly mess of cables all day long.

Another trade-off is treating the laptop like a desktop. I end up lugging around my old Powerbook15 instead of my smaller, lighter, more powerful Macbook because I dread having to cold connect/disconnect the eight cables that integrate the Macbook into my workstation. I’ll go through that hassle if I’m doing a weekly commute, but it’s too much work to throw into the backpack in case I have a few spare cycles while wandering the city.

Even Leopard’s getting on my bad side lately: Stability as a whole took a hit in this release, but I’ve had much more trouble with my KVM. The Macbook stops recognizing the keyboard; even fiddling with the USB cables won’t fix it. Reboot time. Imagine how much worse those issues are going to be when crowding everything into the Macbook Air’s one USB port instead of the two USBs and one firewire on a Macbook.

Maybe I’m being a bit paleolithic here. A lighter laptop with faster 802.11 appeals to people who lug their laptops everywhere. I’ve wanted to do that since I first held a TRS-80 Model 100, but it’s just not practical for a computer professional who needs tons of screen real estate and will be grafted to his tech for hours at a time. I would really rather have seen Apple release a jumbo iPod Touch or uber-Newton. A 5×7 multi-touch glass slab that wirelessly melds with my computer when in range would be perfect. It would also close the casket on eBook readers like the Kindle, another recent annoyance. There are two things that nobody in the eBook community seems to get:

First, this is the age of convergence. A device that does one and only one thing is a step backwards for a generation with phones that also take pictures, play music, and make coffee. Books are just another form of media, so give us a media player with enough real estate to make print (and video) as convenient as audio. Podcast pundits with Kindles have even been saying that they prefer reading books on their iPhones, devices they’d always have with them anyway. A 5×7 high-res multi-touch display in landscape mode could show two swipeable, pinchable side-by-side pages as well as playing movies in a space bigger than a postage stamp. The Touch is at the lower end of tolerable as far as video real estate goes.

Second, the average fiction junkie doesn’t need to carry around a hundred harlequin romances. The real market for a stand-alone reader with lots of capacity is somebody like me, a freelancer that travels for work and a techie who lugs around a massive technical library. I’d also want my books available on my other devices: Don’t give me a single device that hoards my stuff. Give me a system that handles my entire physical library (video, print, records, etc.) like iTunes handles my music across multiple computers and iPods. My inner minimalist quivers with delight at the mental image of bookshelves devoid of everything but that glass slab on a plate stand.

My initial infatuation with the Macbook Air has faded. It’s back to waiting for the tablet that’s a media device, eBook reader, portable home directory, and espresso maker. Just don’t make it a phone too. Apple’s involvement with AT&T and that whole plague-ridden industry has tainted its products and tarnished its reputation.