As part of my new Band of the Week series I wanted to kick things off with my second band, Porcupine Tree.  I’m sorta skipping the first one I had, Mofro as I wasn’t a huge fan of them to be honest.  Not bad at all, just not my thing.  You can read more about them over at Jason’s blog as he really likes them and has a little write up on them.

I’ve been listening to them pretty much non stop for the last 10 days or so and I’m totally hooked.  In fact they may the best new band I’ve heard this year.  They are pretty hard to describe as they play in a number of very different genres, changing significantly from track to track.  As I’ve listened to them this week I’ve been making notes every time I hear something in their music that makes me think of another band.  I’d say that are a huge mix of Metallica, Pink Floyd, Cold Play, Rush, Phish, The Doors and Infected Mushroom (trance).  I told you it was a huge mix.

Unfortunately for me they aren’t coming to Denver this year so I won’t get to hear them live.  I can only imagine they are fantastic live as their music is full of energy and improvisation.  If you’re looking for something new and different I’d highly suggest you give them a listen as I think they are really fantastic.

As I’ve read a few articles around the net about the iPad and all the issues with it another thing struck me – the iPad isn’t the best way to experience the internet, it’s the worst – in fact it’s the anti-internet device. 

The internet is built on open standards.  Open ideas.  Open flow of information.  I can put anything up on the net and anyone virtually anywhere can access it.  There is no middle man, no one that decides what users can and can not do with that information.  From text, photos, videos, software, music, etc. the internet is about as free and open as anything on the entire planet.  But with the iPad you don’t get this freedom, you don’t get this openness.  What you do get is a closed, controlled and locked down experience.

I’m said many times how the lack of Flash on the iPad is huge.  It is.  Huge.  This is such a limiting factor for a device that is supposed to be “the best way to browse the web”.  Uh, no, I don’t think so.  Many webpages don’t render properly and there is no tabbed browsing.  Best device for the web?  No.  The only way I can get photos onto the iPad is through a computer that I have to already have.  Best device for photos?  No.  The way to get videos on the device is to buy them from iTunes or stream through “approved” apps.  Best device for video?  No.  It’s the exact same with music, once again I need a PC and iTunes.  Best for music?  No.  And software, here is the real issue.  I can put NOTHING that I want on the iPad, only what Apple allows me to install.  With their terribly inconsistent rules and controls over what that software is and what it can do.  Can you imagine spending the time to create an app only to have it rejected – I can, our Jinzora app was rejected for “duplicate functionality”.  Really, there’s another Jinzora app in the App Store?  No.  And do you realize that if Apple had to go through the same approval process with the iWork suite they just released that would be rejected too – it uses APIs that aren’t publicly available.  Best for software?  No.

So what is this thing best at?  Fingerprints.  Acting as a mirror.  Making me much poorer.  Impressing people that I have the latest shiny Apple product.  Sure it’s fun and shiny but haven’t we all grown beyond that.  Don’t we want substance.  So I’m sorry, the iPad isn’t the best internet experience, it’s not even a good internet experience.  What is it, well it’s the anti-internet experience.  Closed.  Locked down.  Isolated.  Controlled.  Thanks Apple, but I had enough with the iPhone and I’ve already had enough with the iPad.

On Monday night I sat down to watch one of my favorite shows Chuck.  If you haven’t seen it in a while (or ever) you should give it another watch has it has picked up considerably over the last 4-5 episodes this season.  I’m not sure if they hired new writers or just decided to change the show a bit but whatever they did really stepped it up a big notch.  On Monday night I watched the first 38 minutes of the episode, thanks to my DVR that’s all I got to see.  I’m not sure what happened but of course it cut off right before the climax of the episode.

So I decided to head to NBC.com so I could watch the last few minutes.  Fail.  Major fail.  After spending over 20 minutes trying to get it to stream (it would constantly stutter and stop, and I have 50MB cable modem service) I decided to download and install their plugin.  It claims to give you access offline, HD quality and no buffering as it downloads the video for local playback.  Sounds perfect but it isn’t.  After another 15 minutes I said screw it and stopped.

I then searched my favorite BitTorrent site to see if I could find it.  Yup, in less than 10 seconds.  With more than 20,000 people sharing it.  It downloaded in less than 10 minutes.  And looks great (720p HD).  And I now have the episode forever if I want.

I truly hope that the content publishers figure this out and soon.  After trying for almost 45 minutes to do it the “right” way I was able to watch what I wanted in less than 15 the “wrong” way.  Score one for the wrong way…

Sounds simple enough, right?  Well let me be clear with what I mean by “corporate image”.  With Windows Vista Microsoft introduced a new imaging system through the Windows Automated Installation Kit that allows corporations to create Windows 7 (or Vista) images that can easily and quickly be deployed on machines.  I’ve used this process over the years to create Windows XP, Vista, and now Windows 7 images that are highly customized for our company.  Basically I can completely customize our build, installing all the software we use and configuring settings for just about everything – then easily deploy that to our machines.  This keeps things consistent and easy to support.

The trouble has been how do I install it on a Macbook (Air or Pro) given the non-standard way Apple does, well, everything.  After a fair bit of trial and error I found the correct steps to achieve that goal.  They are:

• Run the Boot Camp assistant in OS X
  Create your partition (I used 64GB) and begin the install of Windows 7 with the standard Windows 7 DVD
• Once the Windows 7 install loads up proceed as you would with a regular install.  All you want to do here is create and format the Windows partition – and that’s it.  Once you’ve created (and formatted) the partition just hard power the machine off.
• Power the machine back on while holding the mouse button – this will eject the Windows 7 DVD.
• Once the machine comes on it will most likely boot in to OS X.  Once there insert your WinPE boot disk (you’ll have created this when you built your install image).  Go into System Preferences and set that to be the boot disk.  Reboot
• Once you boot off your WinPE disk you can install your image as normal.  I actually have the image files on a 64GB USB thumb drive since my image is about 9GB.  I just inserted that, waited for it to mount then went on my way.
• When the image has finished copying to the drive again hard power off the computer.  This time you can just power it back on, you don’t need to worry about ejecting the disk.
• Windows will go through the standard install process for your image as it would on any other computer.  Let that finish.
• Once Windows is installed and running be sure to install the Windows Boot Camp drivers by inserting your original OS X DVD.
• Now reboot while holding the “alt | Option” key.  This will let you select the OS you’d like to boot into.
• Done.

I went on further step and installed the latest version of Parallels so once I was finished with the Boot Camp install I simply pointed Parallels at that and loaded it up.  Everything came online perfectly and I now have my corporate image installed on the machine and can use it in either OS X via Parallels or natively via Boot Camp.  And now finally my Macbook Pro has a usable operating system on it.

As part of the redesign of our blogs we added a number of plugins to WordPress to extend functionality that we needed.  Brad recently asked me which plugins we are using so I thought instead of a reply to just him that I’d let everyone know.  So here they are:

All in One SEO Pack: This plugin automates much of the optimization you would need to perform to make sure that you are highly listed in search engines, specifically Google.  It adds the necessary meta tags, etc to be sure that everything is indexed properly.

Excerpt Editor: We haven’t used this one extensively yet but in short it will automate the creation of excerpt posts on your home page.  This helps drive traffic to your topic pages increasing your page views and if you run ads increasing your impressions.  We ultimately decided to ditch this one as we decided it was more important for people to get the whole post right from the home page.

Exec-PHP: This one lets you embed PHP code inside posts/widgets.  We use this for some of the functions in the sidebar

FD Feedburner Plugin: Automates the creation of your RSS links to FeedBurner and ensures everything is correct.

Google Analyticator: Easier than dropping the code in the footer of your site.  Makes getting Google stats a breeze

Google XML Sitemaps: Automates the process of creating sitemaps for the Google indexer (and others).

IntenseDebate: The commenting system we use, one of the best out there

Lijit Search: Sets up the search box to use Lijit instead of the standard stuff.

Most Comments: This plugin adds the widget to the sidebar to let us show most popular posts by comments.  You can configure the date range and number of comments needed to be popular

WP Super Cache: I’m still experimenting with this plugin but it has great potential.  Essentially it auto generates cached versions of all your pages so they don’t have to be generated at viewing time.  If you get hit with a flood of traffic this can be the difference between staying up or going offline.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin: Gives us the easy and automated related posts at the bottom of each individual post.  Easy to setup and configure

That’s pretty much it for the moment, we are working on a new Retweet plugin as we haven’t found one that really works for us.  If you have any favorites we should add to the list please just drop me a comment and I’ll have a look.

If you know me at all you know that I go through phones at a pretty fast clip.  In the last 12 months or so I’ve had the iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, HTC Hero, Droid Eris and finally the Motorola Droid.  Well let me introduce you to what is sure to become my next phone, the HTC EVO 4G.

The spec sheet on the EVO reads like my ultimate smartphone wish list.  I’ve become a huge fan of Android since I got my Droid (Sorry Ari, couldn’t disagree with you more).  It’s very fast, stable, fun, has a ton of apps and does a number of things the iPhone can’t.  I won’t drone on about that since that really isn’t the point of this post.  But needless to say I’m an Adroid convert and I think this phone will go a long way with others to further that.

So what’s this thing got under the hood, well let’s check.  800×480 resolution display (that’s nearly 4x the resolution of the iPhone).  4.3” screen (yeah, that’s big and I am concerned it could be too big).  1 GHZ CPU.  1GB of ROM, 512MB RAM.  8MP camera with flash (yup, 8MP – good by pocket camera).  720 video recording (good by video camera).  HDMI output (hello playing video on friend’s TVs).  Front facing 1.3MP camera.  Removable memory (MicroSD).  Removable battery.  Virtually as thin as the iPhone.  Android 2.1 with HTC SenseUI (their very pretty interface stuff).  And a kick stand to hold it up for video, etc.  Holy shit.

So basically if it’s not too big for the pocket (early reports are it is not) then this thing is going to be amazing.  While I’m not trilled it’s coming to Sprint the great part there is it’ll be their first 4G phone (and the first 4G phone in the US).  Hello video conferencing on the go.  And goodbye iPad – with a device like this I think the iPad will be irrelevant to me.