• He’s very responsible. If he’s running even two minutes late (to his internship that has no solid start time), he’ll call the office to fill us in then walk through the door only 30 seconds after we’ve hung up the phone and apologize for being late.
• He hates chairs. At least, that’s all I can assume since there are two chairs and two stools within 6 steps of where he sits every day and he still insists on sitting on the floor.
• He’s a good kid. Any senior that wants to hang out at our office several days a week and actually enjoys it has to be a good kid. Not that John and I aren’t nice guys, but to a senior in high school, I’m sure we’re less than ideal to hang out with. We’re like the human version of Star 94 or any other bad morning drive radio: adults like us and think we’re fun and even sometimes funny but their high school kids just roll their eyes at them and wonder how they could possibly enjoy us. Especially since we don’t even give away free concert tickets.

But now it’s time for YOU to get to know Alex the Intern a little better too! We sent him some questions and told him he had to answer them or his next intern assignment would be dressing up like the archer in our logo and standing in front of the office waving a sign. Here it is; our first round of “Ask Alex the Intern!” His answers are in blue because, as you’ll soon find out, it’s his favorite color. Any notes I want to make along the way are in red because, as you’re finding out while reading this sentence, I like to have too many colors on a page. Enjoy…

How are ya?

I’m answering ALL the questions! 

Where do you go to school?

I go to school at Woodstock High School.

Favorite color?

My favorite color is blue.

Favorite type of music/band/song?

I really enjoy electronic music, and my favorite artists are deadmau5 and C418. (I have no idea what those letters and numbers mean. I might as well be 100 years old.)

Favorite food(s)?

My favorite food is bacon. (Good man.)

Least favorite food?

Brussel sprouts.

Any pets?

About 20 birds, a betta, and a Sudanese plated lizard. (This deserves and will likely receive an entirely separate post. That’s alotta birds!)

Future aspirations?

Have a tech room so tricked out that the electric company has to come out and reconfigure the stuff at my house so I can run it all.

Dream job?

Senior software engineer at the FF department at Square Enix, or an ethical hacker.

PC or Mac?

PC all the way. (Don’t get him started. Just trust me on this one.)

What’s something you never ever want to do?

I never want to get an account on Facebook. Also, answer the next question…

If you could, and had to, punch either Toby or John, who would it be?

http://xkcd.com/706/ (Well played, sir. Well played.)

Most valuable lesson learned so far in your time at Delphi?

The carpet here isn’t as comfortable as the carpet at my apartment. (USE A CHAIR!)

Read any good books lately?

Silmarillion by J.R.R. Tolkien

Played any good video games?

Minecraft (which will always be awesome), Conduit 2, FFXII, MH3

Favorite leisurely activity?

Minecraft and browsing Memebase.

Is this too many questions?

The number of questions on here is too damn high! (Memebase reference)

So there you have it. Now you know Alex the Intern THAT much better. If you have any other questions or just want to argue with Alex about his answers, feel free to leave them in the comments below!

Well – it depends.  Purpose and usage are everything.  Tablets are GREAT devices, and they can probably DO everything a PC can, but not always as easily.  Tablets are, however, incredibly convenient and portable and shine at certain tasks.

Personally, in addition to a standard PC and a laptop, I have a tablet – an iPad.  The iPad has network connectivity and I’ve attached a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse on several occasions.  Sounds like a pretty complete setup, right?  Do I do my job on it?  Can I do my job on it?  Not usually.  Why?  Is it me?  Am I just not giving it a fair shot?  Admittedly, part of it is a learning curve.  To accomplish the same tasks, in many cases, I would need to purchase custom applications to do tasks I’ve already learned how to do well on another platform.  In some cases, it’s just not physically practical.  Manipulating documents on a ten (or seven) inch screen is in no way the same experience as the larger real estate of a twenty-something inch desktop monitor.  I also can’t balance a tablet on my legs when travelling (no matter what accessories I buy) the same way I can my laptop.

But that really is the point.  Tablets aren’t made to be manipulated the same way a desktop (or laptop) is.  When you find applications and tasks built for the touchscreen, you’d never want to try and do them on a PC again.  Also, the convenience of a zero-boot-time tablet operating system to do a quick email check/send or look up something on-line has caused me to remove my laptop from the living room.  In fact, I can’t remember the last time I took it out of the bag after work hours.  At work, the tablet takes on a different role.  I can’t find a better way to access my media library.  It also serves as a great third (smaller) monitor where I can keep applications like TweetDeck or Seesmic within viewing distance.

Bottom line, if I’ve got serious work to do, I still reach for my PC/Laptop first.  If I’m looking for convenience or specific applications that are either ancillary, or touch-fantastic, it’s iPad all the way.  If you’re in the market to purchase one or the other (I’m looking at you college-student), pick the laptop.  Tablets definitely aren’t toys, but in this writer’s opinion, they aren’t replacing PCs just yet.

- John

This article was originally written for and published in the August/September 2011 issue of Around About East/West Canton.

A couple weeks later, we met Alex. It’s now with great pleasure I get to introduce you to Alex the Intern! (I hope you like fireworks.)

Alex is a great guy so far and has been able to put up with us pretty well. He’s polite, smart and doesn’t seem to mind cleaning the bathroom. Just kidding, we don’t make him do that … yet. We knew Alex was a good fit when on his first day here, John printed a document and before John was able to get out of his chair, Alex jumped up and retrieved the print job off the printer and brought it to John. Take note other interns: that’s how you do it.

We’re still getting to know Alex the Intern here as it’s only his second week but we’d like your help in mining the deepest recesses of his past. Or, you know, just figuring out what he likes to eat for lunch, what his favorite video game is, favorite movie and that sort of thing. We’ll start having a semi-regular segment called “Ask Alex the Intern!” where you can ask Alex anything you’d like. You can leave questions on our Facebook wall, Tweet them to us, email us or leave them in the comments of this blog post. We don’t care how questions get here; just get ‘em here. Who knows, if we’re feeling especially artsy (read: have too much time on our hands one day) we may even video tape Alex the Intern answering your questions and post it to the blog.

Alex, if you read this (he has to; it’s part of his internship) welcome aboard! We look forward to the coming school year and having you around the office.

Phone

My phone is a Motorola Droid X. I love the Android platform and the big screen of the Droid X makes it great for being more than just a phone. Here are the apps I used broken down by function (note: most of the paid apps on this list I got for free through the Amazon App Store’s free app of the day):

• Photographs/Video – We used the phone as a camera a lot on this trip. It’s smaller than my DSLR, convenient and takes good enough photos without much effort. We ended up taking just under 300 pictures on the phone alone. I use the stock Camcorder app on the phone for any of the video. It takes 720p video that looks pretty decent and doesn’t require a lot of work on my part. (I still think the iPhone takes better looking videos and it’s the one part of the Droid X I was a little disappointed with when I first got it.) For still pictures, I use the stock Camera app along with two others: Vignette and Retro Camera Plus. I use Vignette a lot more than Retro Camera Plus though because it has a TON of options for giving your pictures great looking effects. My favorite feature of Vignette over a lot of other camera apps is that it keeps a copy of the original picture without the effects so if you find out your effect didn’t make the picture any better, you still have a copy of your normal looking picture. I also used PicSay Pro to fix some lighting and make minor adjustments to pictures from the phone. (And for the record, I’m still amazed at the types of editing I’m able to do directly on the phone.) Here’s a sample picture my wife took using Vignette of the rainy shore on our last day

• Weather and Maps - For Maps, I still haven’t found anything that beats the built-in Google Maps app. I use it all the time and vacation is no exception. We had some storms come through during the week and I was able to get quick updates using The Weather Channel app. It alerts me when conditions are unsafe and I have the app’s widget right on the homescreen of my phone for weather-at-a-glance. (Dear Apple, please give us widgets on iPhone and iPad. Please.) We had a few people that liked to surf with us so I downloaded Tide Chart Free and they were able to use it to judge when the best waves would hit. We also had fun using Star Chart at night to point out constellations to the kids.
• Music - I used a combination of Google Music and Audio Galaxy to keep the tunes coming. Audio Galaxy is a great app that connects back to your home computer and lets you stream music right from there to the phone. I’ve been impressed with how cleanly the music plays and how little I’ve seen the dreaded “buffering” indicator. Google Music essentially does the same thing, only it streams music you’ve uploaded to Google’s cloud service to your phone. Using these apps frees up space on my phone for my way-too-many-pictures
• Other - I also used the Facebook app for uploading pictures I wanted to share; although I had to use FriendCaster to actually tag people in them. (Dear Facebook, please let us tag people in pictures directly from the app. Please.) And several members of the extended family checked-in to the beach using Facebook Places and tagged everyone there. For sending messages and pictures of the kids back to my side of the family, I use Handcent SMS. It’s the best text messaging app I’ve come across on Android. It looks great, has lots of options, handles media well and gives you great flexibility with notifications.

iPad

I have a first gen iPad that I use all the time. I’ve found it’s perfect for vacation where I’m not creating a lot of content; but rather doing a lot more casual reading, gaming and entertaining. Here’s what I used this time around:

So, what do you take on vacation? Any killer apps I should know about? Feel free to leave me some recommendations in the comments!

-Toby

Toby is Chief Solution Architect at Delphi Global Technology. He hopes that writing about his vacation for work will allow him to write off the entire vacation on his taxes next year. To contact Toby directly, send an email to tflowers@delphigt.com.

The Netflix Blog comment section immediately exploded with customers leaving less than thankful remarks. Netflix users started sharing their plans for ditching their subscriptions and using other services. Popular tech blog TechCrunch published a blog titled ‘Dear Netflix, Thanks For The Customers! Signed, Redbox’ echoing the sentiment of many subscribers to simply get their DVDs from the kiosk-based Redbox Company.  You almost hear the anger in customers’ posts and the underlying hope of “Any second now, they’ll come back, apologize and reverse the plans. Or maybe they’ll continue with the price hike but grandfather in all of us existing subscribers.” As of right now though, Netflix is holding strong to their announcement. No sign of turning back has been given.

Surely, a company like Netflix that’s gotten it this right all along couldn’t possibly think increasing prices while adding no value for their customers was a good idea! What could they be thinking? Had the success gone to their collective heads and arrogance led to greed? Or, are they making a potentially brilliant business decision that involves extreme risk but will pay off ten-fold in the long run if it works? Is it pure greed or pure genius? Here’s the case for each:

Pure Greed

This one’s easy. Netflix knows they’ve got you. I personally use their service and have been happy with both the DVD/Blu-ray portion and the streaming service. Netflix knows they have a great product with their streaming that many users have dumped their Cable providers for altogether. They also know, now that Blockbuster stores are dropping like flies, customers don’t have a strong option for DVD rentals. Even Redbox is still relatively small and, unless they happened to have seen one of their kiosks in a store they frequent, most people still don’t know about them (although, that may be changing now). Netflix can raise the price and rely on people to stay with them because they don’t know the lack of other options their customers have. Netflix even made it easy by saying the changes will automatically go into effect for current subscribers without them having to do anything. You mean I don’t have to put in any effort for you to more than double my bill? Thanks Netflix!

Netflix is relying on the laziness of its subscribers. They’re trusting that their customers are too lazy to find other options and too lazy to bother logging into their account to change their plan. By making the default “do nothing and your price goes up”, they’re ensuring that a large portion of their user base will take the price increase without even noticing it. And really, relying on the laziness of consumers is typically a good strategy.

Unless that’s not really their goal at all …

Pure Genius

One of the main hurdles Netflix has been trying to jump for years is convincing major movie studios to release their movies to Netflix’s streaming service. Netflix doesn’t get nearly all the new movie releases and even when they do, it’s 28 days after the movie has come out on DVD. Now that Netflix has mostly removed businesses like Blockbuster from being a major threat, there isn’t much competition in the DVD rental space. I believe Netflix is hoping their subscribers cancel the DVD portion of their plan and migrate to a streaming only option. If Netflix can essentially kill the DVD market altogether and get everyone streaming their movies then they’ll have the capital and market leverage needed to force the movie studios into content distribution deals. If nobody is renting hard copy DVDs any more, movie studios will be forced to find a streaming distribution method to keep their products in front of consumers and keep the money rolling in. And right now, Netflix is about the only game in town for movie streaming. If they can capture that entire market by forcing their customers to stream all their video content it would be huge.

It’s also important that Netflix make this move now. Blockbuster stores are closing by the dozens every week but Blockbuster Online is still trying to ramp up. Likewise, Redbox is slowly but surely picking up steam. If Netflix waited another year or two to make this move, consumers would have at least two other options for both streaming and DVD movie rentals. Netflix had to make this move while there still aren’t other players on the field. In the meantime, Netflix gets to enjoy the extra cash they get from customers that forget to change their plan and stop setting up distribution warehouses and paying for shipping on all those DVDs to customers that do go through the process of changing their plans. The only way Netflix loses is if customers completely jump ship and give up both plans. But I doubt many people will go that route since there aren’t many other obvious alternatives.  It’s likely that some will jump ship entirely and others will take the price increase by default and Netflix will be left with essentially the same cash flow.

If I had to predict, I think Netflix will suffer a short term public relations hit but endure through it to almost completely own the market a few years down the road. It’s a big risk, but that’s how companies make big bucks. What do you think? Am I giving them too much credit? Are they really just a bunch of money grubbing fat cats? Let me know in the comments.

-Toby

Toby is Chief Solution Architect at Delphi Global Technology. He likes gadgets and gizmos aplenty and has whozits and whatzits galore. He also has two small children, so he’s able to quote Disney movies pretty well. To contact Toby directly, send an email to tflowers@delphigt.com.