I walked into a meeting today while holding my Droid, and one of my coworkers said something remarkably poignant: “You have a Zune and a Droid? You really don’t like Apple, do you?” It caught me off guard a bit, but I said, “Well yeah, that’s part of it.”

And it is just part of it. (As a sidenote, I’ve been meaning to write a post like this.) I’ve thought a lot about it, and my view on technology can be summed up thusly:

When making decisions on technology, I generally prefer to go with either the underdog or the less cool option.

I’ve never owned an iPod; I had a Creative Zen before my Zune, and my next player will be a Zune HD. Admittedly I owned an iBook, but I’ve since had two Lenovo laptops. And like I said before, my phone is a Droid. Yes, the Android operating system was built by one of the largest companies out there, but they’re still pretty far behind in the smartphone world (though they’re on the way up in a big way). And maybe Lenovo and Microsoft aren’t the underdogs exactly, but it’s more of just a general distaste for Apple. All the cool kids are using Macs these days, but I’m over the hype. I prefer to have options with hardware, and I don’t need one company controlling their whole product from the top down.

But every single computer I’ve ever built for me has had an AMD processor, and as most people know, AMD is perpetually second to Intel. My new camera is a Panasonic Lumix GF1, which is built on the Micro Four Thirds standard. M4/3 is a relative newcomer to the field and it’s had some good reviews, but it’s not widely supported and it’s in big competition with other systems like it, so I consider it to be somewhat lesser right now.

In some places, though, I can’t go with the underdog. For example, I used to use Scriptaculous for all the Javascript I wrote, but recently I’ve shifted to jQuery – and I can’t go back. It’s so elegant and beautiful to write, its userbase is really active in writing plugins for it, and more companies are using it for their websites. In that case, though, I made the switch because it interferes with my career.

Oh, I actually just thought of another place: I use and actively support Firefox. A fair amount of people have jumped ship and use Chrome now, but I’m going to stick with Firefox because they’re the underdog. IE technically has a majority share, but Google’s browser is moving up, and Firefox is getting hurt by its relatively slow speed (though personally I’ve never had an issue with it.) There’s actually another component to that: I don’t like to give any one company a near-monopoly on my life. My phone, email, search engine, RSS reader, company email and phone browser are all Google, so I don’t need them having a hand on my browser. And yes, for the record, when Firefox Mobile is ready, I will use that as well.

Hi Dan. I was wondering if I could take you away for a few minutes from your searching through the back alleys of Wikipedia for ideas for your next book, in the hopes that we could discuss your recent one.

Yes, I read The Lost Symbol. I’m not really sure why I read it, to be honest; I think I have a penchant for reading schlocky books. Anyway, it was more or less the same book as your previous one, save for some rearranging of characters and locations. You basically wrote an alternate novelization of National Treasure – which is okay, because those movies are awesome. And I can deal with the way you draw really tenuous lines between everything; the front of the book says “a novel”, and anyone who takes any of it at face value is gullible. I’ll even give you credit for pointing out Christianity’s links to pagan rituals, since most of your readers probably either have no idea about most of that, or choose to ignore it.

The main reason I’m writing to you is to ask you this: why did you choose to put in a Twitter joke at the end of the book?

Seriously. What function does it serve at all to have your main character say that he doesn’t know how to make a “twitter”, only to then have the female lead tell him that it’s called a “tweet”? Were you trying to be clever? Show that you have a finger on the pulse of Internet trends? I can’t figure it out at all, and I actually rolled my eyes after I finished the paragraph.

Anyway, it’s late, and I should probably get some sleep. You probably need to get back to playing six degrees of separation on Wikipedia, so… go do that. For added fun, try the Random article link on the left side of the page – it’ll be so interesting!!!!!

After a week-long hiatus, I started playing Final Fantasy 13 again. I had basically burned myself out, getting stuck in battles for which I was underequipped or clearly had no chance of winning. I’m going to try to avoid spoilers, but it basically started when the game became nonlinear. It went from this “walk down the corridor” sort of game, to “here’s a big area, go wander around, and maybe if you get bored, go find the exit.” Fairly abrupt shift, I think, and that’s when the frustration started.

You know, I really wanted to like FF13. It’s been eight years since I played a Final Fantasy game, and I had really been looking forward to it. There’s just something holding me back. Maybe it’s their use of apostrophes.

Just a quick little post: I saw that a whole bunch of TV shows got the axe today. Heroes, Flashforward and Happy Town all got cancelled.  (Yes, the original Law & Order got cancelled too, but I don’t watch that.)

I admit that I slogged through all of Heroes – somewhere into the third season it was time to stop watching, but I felt that I had put enough time into it that I should at least see how it ends. The show is cancelled, but from what I’ve been reading, they’re going to try to give it an ending with a two- or four-hour miniseries finale. Fair enough.

Flashforward was a bit of a surprise, though its ratings have been plummeting. It’s become a little ridiculous, though, in its inability to give any answers but also string the viewer along. Honestly I don’t really care about any of the characters on it, and I suspect I’m not alone in that.

As to Happy Town, well… I watched the most recent episode, and I realized that this cancellation was the right idea. The show is just way ridiculous; even the music is hilarious in its shift between dramatic and whimsical. The characters are lame and uninteresting, and it’s mostly just pseudo-mystical that’s not going anywhere. Still, I feel bad for Amy Acker, as this is the second show she’s been on that’s been cancelled. Sad.

All the right shows got picked up: Community, 30 Rock, Castle (SVU?) V as well, but that show is frustrating to watch. And there should be a new set of shows that could be interesting: I’ve got my eye on JJ Abrams’ new show Undercovers, and maybe The Event and The Cape. We’ll see.

Ha, wow. Now that I have the site actually done, I have to fill it. That didn’t seem as daunting before as it does now. I have a few things that I’ll write about eventually, but I don’t want to start in on them just yet.

I know – let’s talk politics. Clearly everyone has gone crazy in the past year. Like, really crazy. Just today, Pat Buchanan asked:

Indeed, of the last seven justices nominated by Democrats JFK, LBJ, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, one was black, Marshall; one was Puerto Rican, Sonia Sotomayor. The other five were Jews: Arthur Goldberg, Abe Fortas, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Stephen Breyer and Elena Kagan.

If Kagan is confirmed, Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats.

Is this the Democrats’ idea of diversity?

Now, I know that I’m giving a platform to what Buchanan has to say, but come on – the Jews? Really? We’re back to good old-fashioned anti-Semitism, I suppose.

It’s nice to know that, despite the fact that people everywhere are trying to outdo the last person to do something really ridiculous, there are still some glimmers of sanity. Consider LittleGreenFootballs. Pre-9/11, it was just one guy’s blog about biking and random crap. After the towers fell, though, he sort of went off the deep end and became fairly anti-Muslim, and his readers followed. Since then, though, he’s really pulled it together: he’s very against the teabaggers, Creationists, Glenn Beck, Glenn Beck fans, and homophobes. I actually got the link for the above quote from glancing at LGF earlier in the day. Obviously I don’t condone everything he writes, but some of the stuff he publishes, like a set of pictures of stupid teabagger signs – referred to as Teabonics, is actually pretty good.

And if nothing else, it makes me happy that there are still some people who haven’t permanently descended into this anti-government rhetoric that’s become so strong as of late. Finally, I’ll leave you with a quote from the President. Here he’s talking about the Republicans:

After they drove the car into the ditch, made it as difficult as possible for us to pull it back, now they want the keys back. No! You can’t drive! We don’t want to have to go back into the ditch. We just got the car out.