Frozen Transparency

Any statement that inspires anger in those who hear it is worth investigating. If the statement were actually True, then the cold weight of facts should be sufficient to demonstrate its verity.

I imagine that statement is autological.

I recently stumbled upon this YouTube video, which is of Steve Jobs first presentation at MacWorld after having been hired back into Apple. It’s been eleven years since then, and it’s interesting to watch it purely in terms of history.

Just a few thoughts:

• I hear it in his voice, and I see it in his smile, but it’s hard for me to imagine that as Steve Jobs. He looks so young!
• We often forget that it was Microsoft that bailed Apple out back then. The stock was later sold, but it forms an interesting dynamic in the history between the two companies. Has the student now become the master—or does Microsoft actually want Apple around?
• I thought Powerpoint presentations made today often looked bad. Those slides are horrendous.
• He was a smooth performer then, but he’s gotten even better as the years have gone by.
• Apple really hasn’t changed since Steve Jobs took the helm again. They’ve just gotten popular.

I want to have a personal calendar in the cloud. I want to be able to view it easily at work (bonus points if I can do it in Outlook), and be able to make modifications. I want it to sync with my mobile phone, so I can see my schedule anywhere—and change it, if need be. I would like to allow friends to view my schedule, to varying degrees of transparency, but not give them the ability to modify it.

I want to have one set of contacts that I can access from any computer, therefore on the cloud. I want that list to sync with my mobile phone, so I can edit phone numbers from anywhere and have that information accessible anywhere. That contact information should also contain birthdays (and hook into my calendar for reminders) and addresses, accessible on any computer and my mobile phone.

Since I have one set of contacts, I want it to also be linked with my e-mail. I want one singular e-mail account that all of my e-mail addresses feed to: both free-service addresses and my-domains addresses. I have one primary account that I use to send e-mail, but I want to be able to send e-mail from different addresses in some circumstances. Across my domains, I have an infinite incredibly large yet still finite number of e-mail addresses to siphon into one location—preferably avoiding forwarding chains of any kind, because of the lag induced. While I would like to check my e-mail from my mobile phone, it’s not that big of a deal, and being able to respond to it even less so. However, I want access to all my outgoing addresses from any computer I’m on.

Any other nifty online tools that might have data useful to me on my mobile (such as map locations) should also be in this sync. An RSS reader that synced between mobile and any computer would be nice. Getting all of this under one account with one sign-on in the cloud would be sublime.

Price is not as much an issue for me, although I want to keep costs reasonable. I want to have this implemented by September first (an arbitrary date) if at all possible.

Anyone have any good ideas on how to go about doing it?

Whenever I’ve experienced “training” in the past on how to respect differences in culture, it’s always Europe-descended American culture that must make allowances to the other culture. In literature, it’s always the white American who learns to appreciate black/Asian/Indian/whatever culture, and never the other way around.

Shouldn’t the other culture have to make allowances back, if we’re going to truly respect differences in culture? Why doesn’t anyone ever talk about that?