Ukrops spoiled me.  Growing up in Richmond, there were, you know, other grocery stores but those were just places you went when you were in rush; You did the real grocery shopping at Ukrops.

When I finally moved out of Richmond, I was a bit taken back at the poor quality of grocery stores elsewhere.  Some were ok, the Harris Teeters of the world, while others were almost universally terrible, such as Giant.  Apparently, there used to be Giants in Richmond before I was born but like Safeway, Hannaford, and FarmFresh, it was run out of town by the success of Ukrops.

Times have changed.  It seems most of the other chains have either adapted and improved.  Giant, the poster-child for all the things other grocery store chains did poorly, has the best self-checkout system of the grocery stores around us.  The store has been modernized, cleaned up, and no longer looks like a sad derelict left over from the post-WWII building boom.

Last night, Giant took it up a notch with handheld scanners.

The beauty of this little guy is that I can scan my groceries as I shop, see my total bill at any time, and when I’m ready to check out, I simply zap a little card at the register, pay, and I’m ready to leave.  No lengthy checkout necessary.  For someone who doesn’t particularly care to spend any additional time in a grocery store than necessary, this thing rocks.  For someone who loves tech gadgets as I do, this thing really rocks.

The evolution of grocery stores is much appreciated, especially as the wunderkind struggles.  Now if we can only get payment by cell phone and RFID checkout going, I might actually enjoy going to the grocery store.   Even if it’s only to play with the gadgets.

Twitter is more interesting to follow than to participate in.   That in and of itself is what I see as the biggest problem with Twitter maintaining its current popularity.   It’s the public-voyeurism into those more famous than yourself that seems to be driving Twitters mainstream acceptance. But in the end, very few people are active Tweeters:

Especially as Facebook adopts more and more of the Twitter features into itself, Twitter becomes increasingly more reliant on “celebrities”  (not just actors & actresses but other well-known people: politicians, pundits, authors, etc) to maintain it’s importance.  This is unfortunate as I finally, after 2.5 years, found a true use for Twitter: Real-time news.

The Iran elections were the tipping point.  While CNN and the other news networks droned on incessantly about “non-news”, the Iran elections were making waves in the Twitterverse.  People’s profile pictures were turning green in a sign of solidarity.  In real-time, people were learning and collating all kinds of details about what was happening in Iran.  Everyone, as a whole, were reporting the news while the news organizations themselves were completely oblivious.

And this is what I’ve found Twitter to be good for.  If you want minute-by-minute updates of some event, or to discover what happened on your favorite TV show that you missed, Google is not your friend; Twitter is.  CNN or Google will tell you about it in a few hours or Google will tell you about it in a few hours.  Twitter Search will tell you now.  Now Twitter has a point.

I usually leave stuff like to my Google Reader feed but this post on TechCrunch was good enough for it’s own blog post. Why?

1. A Few Good Men is awesome.
2. Jack Nicholson is even more awesome.
3. AT&T is worthless. Though, to be fair, no more so than their primary competitor.
4. Google Voice is neat (if largely useless for me).
5. iPhone is “the” phone.

AT&T: You want answers?

TechCrunch: We think we’re entitled to them.

AT&T: You want answers?!

TechCrunch: We want Google Voice on our iPhones.

AT&T: You can’t handle the iPhone with Google Voice!

Son, we operate on network that has walls. And those walls have to be guarded by carriers with restrictions. Who’s gonna do it? You? You, Verizon Wireless? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom. You weep for Google Voice and you curse AT&T. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know: That pulling Google Voice, while tragic, probably saved the network. And our existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, saves the network.

You don’t want the Google Voice on your iPhone. Because deep down, in places you don’t talk about at TechCrunch50, you want us protecting the network. You need us protecting that network. We use words like rate limiting, application approval and restrictions…we use these words as the backbone to a life spent defending something. You use them as a punchline.

We have neither the time nor the inclination to explain ourselves to a blog who writes and profits under the blanket of the very network that we provide, then questions the manner in which we provide it. We’d prefer you just said thank you and went on your way. Otherwise, we suggest you pick up a router and build your own network. Either way, We don’t give a damn what you think you’re entitled to.

TechCrunch: Did you order Google Voice taken down?

AT&T: We did the job you sent us to do.

TechCrunch: Did you order Google Voice taken down?

AT&T: You’re goddamn right we did.

If you have no idea what this is about, AT&T recently blocked the release of a Google Voice application for the iPhone.

Update: Brian would like it known that he saw this before me.  Please don’t let this remarkable event lead you to idolize him as he has a big enough ego as it is. 

As the “provider” of the THE PHONE THAT CHANGED EVERYTHING, aka, the iPhone, one might think AT&T would be the darling of the tech world these days.  One would be wrong.  Instead, AT&T is being vilified as the anchor holding the iPhone back.  Articles pop-up daily claiming that Apple needs to drop AT&T exclusivity pronto and get another carrier to pick it up.

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This past weekend was the NFL Draft, a a relatively boring process in principal that has turned into a two-day media blitz. I TiVo’d the draft thinking I would fly through it and get an overview of how things shook out but ended up watching 3.5 hours of the first round.  It’s amazing how much analysis goes into the nuances of a player (and how oddly wrong some of it is) and the repercussions of a given pick on a certain team.   I tend to think of everything I do and see in the same analytical style and found the draft much more compelling than I thought I would.

Along the same lines, I’m the sort of person that finds reading the game recaps online much more interesting in general than watching the games live.  So Saturday night before bed, I brought up Sports Illustrated and ESPN to read their draft summaries of the first & second rounds.   For two companies that usually take the lead in adopting technology into their coverage, they really need to get rid of one really annoying and out-of-date feature they have on their pages:

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”120″ />

For those who aren’t programming nerds like me, that little tag in the head section of an HTML page forces the page to refresh the page every 2 minutes (120 seconds). It’s very difficult to read down through a page when the page refreshes and moves back to the top every X seconds. Both SI and ESPN have this annoyance turned on.

I want my content to be as fresh and updated as possible but that’s why years ago, people started using XMLHttpRequest — it allows you to load the content dynamically without forcing a page refresh. Then, use a little styling and coloring to indicate updated content. Easy enough.

SI, you’re behind the times. You too, ESPN. End Web Developer Rant.

Recently, Facebook altered everyone’s home page to provide a more real-time, “life streaming” type of view of your friends.   The changes are a direct adoption of the Twitter phenomenon, a company Facebook tried but failed to acquire earlier this year.

While the Facebook community revolted, as they do each time Facebook changes, I think the whole idea of “life streaming” is fascinating. I learn a lot more about my friends by observing their behavior and activity online than I do from “Likes”, “Dislikes”, “Relationship Status”, etc (the typical stuff found on a social network).

Even better than viewing miscellaneous status updates from my friends are viewing the items they find interesting.  I use Google Reader to aggregate news and it has a built-in method for quickly sharing articles from the web.  That is automatically displayed to all my friends and vice-versa when they find interesting articles.  I use Reader more than even Search or Maps.   The feed of items along the right pane or via the “My Life In Links” tab above is an RSS feed of my Google Reader Shared Items.

The consistent problem with life streaming is that activity on one online site doesn’t show up on my activity at another site.  There are any number of approaches to resolve this including propagation websites like Ping.fm, aggregators such as FriendFeed, multiple site-posting functions in applications, and any number of others.  They all have varying degrees of usefulness but all seem to be lacking in some way.

In the meantime, I’ve been testing various items.

• Google Reader RSS/Atom Feed or click the “My Life In Links” above.
  
• FriendFeed or click the “FriendFeed” tab above.

I actually thought quite awhile about what to title this entry.  It’s been a few weeks since I’ve written anything and I didn’t want to burst back on the scene with a potty-mouth.  I get mocked for it (especially from the “I shame sailors” girl I married) but in general, I try to avoid “irrational exuberance”.  However, the last day or so has tried my patience and settling for “Curiosity killed the computer” instead of more colorful metaphors is a triumph.  

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I commented previously about my excellent experience with the customer support I received from the Apple Genius Bar (in-store tech support). However, even decent customer support is definitely not in the norm for most companies and a recent email from UStream is my latest such “failure”.

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watching psych w/ christina

After starting twitter way back on Feb 8, 2007 with the profound tweet above*, giving it up for awhile, and then starting back up last May, I’ve more or less kept up regularly.

Besides trying to explain the point of it, the most popular discussion related to Twitter is if it would ever break out into the mainstream.  Slowly and steadily, it has slowly started to accumulate more and more non-tech-related celebrities, for better or worse.  John Cleese, M.C. Hammer, Dave Matthews, and Lance Armstrong  were some of the more tech-savvy celebs who were fairly early adopters of Twitter.

Recently, the biggest name to hop on the Twitter bandwagon is a celebrity most Americans have never heard of but is absolutely huge in the UK, Stephen Fry.  He quickly shot way up the charts and is, as I write this, #2 on the list of most popular Twitterers, passing many of the well-known tech alumni who have dominated the charts since it’s inception.

Other “pop-culture” celebs who are on Twitter include Britney Spears (or rather, her PR person), trucker cap Ashtun Kushter, trucker hat lover Demi Moore, Harry Potter girl Emma Watson, the surprisingly NOT hot Mischa Barton, High School musical girl Vanessa Hudgens, the Guber-nator, and the Guber-nator’s wife.  I don’t see the point of following any of the above but other people will.  The draw of Twitter is increased exponentially the more people there are on there to follow so despite my misgivings of the pop-culturalization of Twitter, I suppose it’s better for all in the long run.

• Famous Twitterers - http://mashable.com/2008/10/20/25-celebrity-twitter-users/
• Celebrity Twitterers - http://allieiswired.com/archives/2009/01/celebrities-who-twitter/
• Top Twitters - http://twitterholic.com/

* For what it’s worth, Christina and I are still watching Psych and it’s a must watch.  Great show!

As people’s expectations start to fall back down to reality, Obama will undoubtedly disappoint some of his more rabid supporters.  His first couple of weeks have had their ups-and-downs — the ongoing “Change-O-Meter” at Slate is both entertaining and possibly disheartening.   That said, I don’t follow politics all that closely but the news that Vivek Kundra was nominated  to essentially be the CTO of the government was very interesting.  From a tech perspective, which is something I do care about, Vivek Kundra sounds like a brilliant choice.  I read an article about him a while back and he sounds like exactly the sort of person we need making decisions related to technology.