As mentioned, I figured I’d start a category for Poker on the blog. It’s become more of a hobby lately and the craze seems to show no sign of slowing. Like lots of people, I got sucked in a year or so ago with the ESPN coverage of the World Series of Poker. Since then, I’ve hooked up season passes for both the WSOP and the World Poker Tour… and while I like Phil Gordon, I don’t need to see celebrities play like idiots on television.

Over the last year, I’ve started playing with co-workers and friends and also tried my hand at some (cheap) online games (try finding a $.15–$.25 game in a casino)… but I’ve yet to play in a live casino card room.

That all changes next month.

In any case, I figured I’d point out some of the resources I’ve been using to learn the game… The obligatory book list includes Harrington on Hold’Em, Small Stakes Hold’Em, Winning Low Limit Hold’Em. The first book I read was Phil Gordon’s Real Deal, which is a nice gentle introduction to the game, the history, the concept of pot odds, and so on.

I’ve also been a huge fan of the Lord Admiral Card Club podcast since the beginning of this year. Cincinnati Sean does an awesome job of putting it together and it’s the first podcast I play when I start my commute on Monday mornings. There are others out there, and some are really bad, but for my money this one is the top dog for poker podcasts. The only other one I’ve been listening to with any regularity is the Ante Up Podcast, which started up a few months back. It’s a little more focused on beginners and live games than it is on the “world of poker,” but they do a good job.

That about covers the basics… if we end up at the same table, be gentle.

Like a lot of people these days, I’ve been hooked into the poker craze. Watching it on television, reading books about it, and playing occasionally with friends and co-workers. I’m too cheap to play for any “real” sums of money, but that makes online poker more attractive… lots of cheap tables, making it very inexpensive to learn the game’s finer points.

In reading some poker blogs, I learned from Las Vegas Vegas about the PokerStars free tournament for bloggers. I hadn’t played there previously, so this will be a nice introduction. The section below identifies my registration and eligibility. 

I have registered to play in the
Online Poker Blogger Championship!

This event is powered by PokerStars.

Registration code: 1375512

 That gets me thinking… might be time for a new category on the blog.

Just in time… my current keyboard in the office (an MS Natural Keyboard Pro ergonomic ) is just starting to get flakey. I think it’s time to move up to the new Natural Ergonomic 4000. I really like the idea of a zoom slider, especially if it works well with Photoshop.

What I can’t tell is if it’s possible to reconfigure that slider to be used for scrolling in certain applications. That would be a killer feature… I sent a suggestion in to the old “mswish@microsoft.com” alias years ago when mouse wheels first started appearing… the empty space between the two keyboard halves on the Natural series is ideal for a scroll wheel/slider. I saw it appear on the side of a Logitech keyboard a couple years ago, but couldn’t bring myself to switch. Anyway, for apps like Visual Studio and Word, scrolling functionality would be great.

I first tried the Natural keyboard (the one prior to the Elite with its goofy layout) in 1995 and, after a week of use, I was hooked. I also use the Trackball Explorer and (knock wood) have never had any type of wrist pain or discomfort. Using both products deters the casual office visitor from driving your machine, but it also makes it frustrating to use someone else’s machine with a standard keyboard/mouse.

Jeff Atwood put together a VS.NET macro that spills out all your VS.NET keyboard shortcuts as an HTML document. Very slick and the rendered “key caps” are a nice touch.

I put a shortcut to the doc it produced on my Firefox toolbar… combined with Firefox’s “Find As You Type” feature, it’s a very fast way to look up that one keyboard shortcut you can never seem to remember (Run To Cursor for me). Jeff also has a great (older) post on the whole “speed == keyboard” view that many developers (myself included) share.

The more shortcuts, the better!

I got this phone just about a month ago on my Verizon account and have been using it pretty heavily… in brief, I am in love with this phone. Slide-away keyboard, a decent amount of memory, nice bright screen, built-in Wifi, built-in Bluetooth, built-in EV-DO, and SD card expandability.

Some thoughts:

1. Samsung includes an extra “extended life” battery, which is good… if you use it a lot, you’ll see the battery drop off fairly quickly. I park it in the charger each night, though, and have yet to have a day where the standard battery (slightly smaller) didn’t make it through just fine. Then again, I’m not someone who’s on the cell phone for more than an hour or so a day. In addition to the extra battery, there’s the cradle, cables, belt holster, a CD-ROM with the Windows Mobile OS, and stereo earbuds that double as a microphone headset.

2. One irritant I’ve found is that the charging cradle has two cables — one for AC and the other for sync’ing via USB. The phone itself, however, will only take the AC cable directly. So you have to have it in the cradle if you want to sync. Not a big deal, you say, but I prefer to have the cradle on my nightstand and let it charge over night… during the day, the phone should be syncing with my machine in the office. To get around this, I picked up one of these for my desk at work and one of these for my laptop bag. Both work great for syncing, but they also charge the phone via USB power — makes battery life pretty much a non-issue for me.

3. It’s running Windows Mobile 2003 SE and I’m hopeful that a Windows Mobile 5 upgrade will be available at some point. No word yet that I know of.

4. I haven’t yet built any apps for it, but I have started to read more articles on the .NET CF… now I just need to come up with some cool ideas to build on. I’m thinking of a “Soccer Coach Assistant” to keep track of players, rosters, track goals/assists during games, etc. If the UI is done well (meaning minimal taps for in-game tracking), it could be a great way to keep statistics for a season (something young players love to hear at the year-end party). Plus, it would get me some exposure to SQL CE, which I know nothing about. Or maybe I’ll build something poker-related, I don’t know… any ideas?

5. The included apps are great… VoiceSignal is a voice-command application that seems to work very well. “Call Home” and it does “Open Excel” and it does, etc. There’s “Launcher” which is a configurable app for one-handed launching of various apps. I also like Picsel Browser, which is a web and document browser that’s very slick… it zooms in and out, pans around, and allows for lots of cool navigation options. It reads Excel docs, Word docs, PDF, images, etc, but I also prefer it over Pocket IE for general surfing. There is also a There’s all the usual Pocket PC apps, including light versions of Word, Excel, Outlook messaging, etc.

6. Combined with Verizon’s EV-DO high-speed service, it’s amazing for on-the-go connectivity. I’m regularly getting 600kpbs or better for downloads. The EV-DO isn’t available everywhere, but the Denver/Boulder area was turned up a few weeks ago and I’ve been lovin’ it. I can stream video into the mobile Windows Media Player and get great, fluid video images. If you’re gonna go with a device like this, I think you pretty much have to get the “Unlimited Data” plan… I did and don’t regret it a bit.

7. The form factor is perfect for me. It may be on the large-ish side for some, but it compares well with the Palm Treo. I like that I get a nice, large (for a phone) screen and then can slide the keyboard open/shut as needed. The keyboard keys take some getting use to because of their size and proximity, but they stick up nicely from the device and have a solid “click” to them.

8. The built-in wifi has been great, though I’m thinking of adding a 3rd party app to manage the wifi. The built in handling for scanning, connecting, and authenticating is just a little unwieldy. Handango has a number of apps that seem to manage wifi connectivity for PPC devices, so I’ll give those a try.

9. No chance to use the built-in Bluetooth yet, though I may have to grab a wireless headset one of these days.

10. I stuck a 1GB SD card in the side and have been installing apps to that (to save space in the built-in RAM)… I’ve also downloaded some WMV video files to watch when I’ve got dead time. There are some “DVD to PocketPC” apps out there that can apparently fit a feature film into 128MB of space, which could be pretty cool. For now, it’s been things like some Channel9 videos and some of the .NET 2.0 GrokTalks.

Finally, Verizon’s service has been awesome. I’ve been with them for about five years now… back in 2002, I got screwed when I moved my account from a company name into my personal name. Nothing changed but the account name, but the way they did it made it appear as a new account — meaning I lost all my existing customer benefits like cheap phone upgrades, etc. Try as I might, nobody could fix it for me. Given that and their previously-crappy selection of PDA style phones, I was pretty sure I’d be jumping ship and heading to T-Mobile or Cingular.

So I checked out this phone when it first came out and really was impressed… I called Verizon customer service a number of times beforehand, with questions about upgrade pricing, various data plans, EV-DO capabilities, family-share minutes (for my wife’s phone), and so on. Without exception, the people I spoke with were friendly, knowledgeable, and very helpful. Obviously, something’s changed over there… so their improved customer service and improved selection of higher-end phones did it for me.

I love this thing.

… you’re going to get better about blogging regularly, you lose it altogether. My “Things To Blog” bookmark folder is overflowing, things are settling down with the new arrival, so let’s try this again…

Oh yeah… and the “I just saw something cool, but can’t tell you about it” blog posts are multiplying in the run-up to PDC. Please let it just be over so the breathless anticipation can end, the hype can die down, and the pragmatists among us can just look at what’s new.

Larry Osterman (long time MS Employee) has a good post today about how peopls within MS have started "nounifying" the word "ask". Like Larry, I think it sounds pretty silly but it got me thinking about a similar pet peeve I’ve got.

Verbifying the word “architect”. You see this a lot on technical blogs, with usage along the lines of “the last system I architected had…” or “we’re currently architecting a distributed widgetizer…”. What’s wrong with the word “design”? Do you think Frank Lloyd Wright ever said to anyone “I had a great time architecting the Guggenheim… ”? Did I.M. Pei ever tell anyone “I architected the crap out of the Javits…”? No — they were designers. Architects design and engineers build. It’s been that way since the dawn of the t-square.

I’m pretty sure I’ve got some others along these lines, but I’ll need another meeting to jog my memory.

I’ve been a FeedDemon user since it was in beta and immediately purchased a license once Nick Bradbury enabled online sales. I’ve since been a happy customer and would pay for any major upgrade down the road.

Unfortunately, Nick’s company was recently acquired by NewsGator, which makes an Outlook AddIn RSS reader by the same name. I looked at NewsGator originally (before jumping on the FeedDemon beta), but decided the Outlook integration wasn’t for me. Last year, NewsGator made some of its Outlook-based customers unhappy by going to a subscription model… and I was glad I hadn’t gone that route. 

What was previously a standalone product that worked well now had all sorts of ancillary “stuff” decorating it… they have a web edition, something called “smart feeds”, something else called “industry intelligence feeds”, some “premium” content, syncing capability, NewsGator Online, NewsGator Mobile, NewsGator Etch-A-Sketch, etc. If you’re using all that stuff, there’s no question that paying for a service that centralizes and synchronizes your RSS experience has immense value.

But what if you just want the plain-old, standalone Outlook AddIn? Can’t have it. It’s combined with these extra options into a few Consumer-or-Business bundles — only available via recurring subscription. Hmm… Glad I’m using FeedDemon, I thought at the time.

Until today, when I see that FeedDemon’s going pretty much the same route. So now the NewsGator VC team has a new plan for more renewable revenue. Oh boy.

Going forward, I have to pay an annual fee [2] to use a product that requires no on-going commitment or service from the vendor. And if I don’t pay the fee, it stops working. But, they say, I’ll get updates for a year. Sure… but there’s no commitment that I’ll see N new features added within 12 months. Or that the new features added will be compelling to me. Still, I’m forced to pay the subscription if I want to keep using the basic functionality I need.

So why do I have an issue with this subscription model? Because my basic needs don’t require any on-going service from the vendor. I’ve purchased a license to use an application. It doesn’t cost the vendor anything to support my use of that application, whether I use it once a month or spend my entire day in it. There are no servers to maintain. There is no staff choosing the latest and greatest data for me.

With a few exceptions [1], services and content should be sold as subscriptions… they provide on-going value.

Standalone applications, on the other hand, are pretty much the same on day 365 as they were on day 1. As such, they should be sold as version specific, one-time-fee, licenses.

If NewsGator released a new FeedDemon 2.0, and if it had some decent features I’d use, I’d pay an upgrade cost. But once I’ve made that purchase, supporting me as a customer doesn’t cost NewsGator a dime. If I’m not using the web edition, synchronization, custom feeds, etc, all of which would require someone to support server-based services, why am I now going to be paying for those on an on-going basis?

Given that the RSS reader space is overflowing with options, more are on the way, and many of those options are either free or open source, why would a vendor make getting at their popular commercial product less flexible?

My suggestion to Nick, Greg, and the NewsGator crew is to make the licensing as simple as possible.

• If the widget(s) you’re purchasing from us can be used standalone without any of our service offerings, it’s licensed as a product. If we put out a new version and you like it, you pay an upgrade cost.
• If the widget(s) you’re purchasing from us require any sort of on-going service, you’re going to pay a recurring subscription fee. Stop paying the fee and you no longer get the service. Email feeds, synchronization, premium content, and so on.

Look at the popular services around us… using the Netflix (content) service has on-going costs (shipping, server-based account management, etc), so I pay a recurring fee to them. Listening to satellite radio (content) requires an on-going signal and infrastructure maintenance, so I pay a recurring fee to XM Radio. Playing online games requires an on-going connection (service) and is heavily server-based, so I pay a recurring fee to Xbox Live.

Look at the standalone products around us… We bought our cars and don’t pay Honda or GM an on-going fee. The cars do today what they did when we bought them. I bought my computer and don’t pay Dell an on-going fee. It does today what it did when I bought it. I bought Microsoft Office and don’t pay Redmond an on-going fee. It does today what it did when I bought it.

Why would I want to start renting a standalone software application now?

Now the caveat:

One of the “benefits” announced with NewsGator’s acquisition of FeedDemon was that licensed FeedDemon customers will get access to NewsGator’s “Business Standard” services for two years. I do think that’s fair and I’m happy to give this stuff a try. I’ve even created a NewsGator Consumer Standard (free, web-only, like Bloglines) in advance to check it out (I think the UI for reading is clunkier than Bloglines, but it’s passable). 

When the time comes that using FeedDemon costs me extra money, I’ll have to look long and hard at how I’m consuming and using RSS feeds. Maybe at that point, I’ll have fallen in love with the service-based capabilities… in which case, I’ll gladly pay the annual service fee. If not, someone else will get my business.

Going this route is a big risk for Nick and for the NewsGator crew. Nick, in particular, has some exposure here… he’s the popular developer of several popular applications. His user base has, in a period of two months, been told that they WILL be moving toward the NewsGator system and they WILL be moving toward a recurring fee structure. 

NewsGator is betting that the existing FeedDemon customer base will fall in love with the server-based capabilities. On the other hand, any existing FeedDemon customer who just wants the basic client app that he/she has today will get a service bill at some point. On that day, RSS Bandit, Bloglines, and other readers are going to start to look pretty attractive.

UPDATE: Per Jack’s comment, it looks like they’re doing the right thing by existing FeedDemon customers. According to Nick’s blog entry today, the FeedDemon application won’t stop working once the subscription expires. The service-oriented features (synchronization, in particular) will likely stop, but that’s to be expected. I still think it’d be nice for customers who don’t need the service options at all to be able to buy a one-time, version-specific license for either FeedDemon or the NewsGator Outlook edition. Still, this is a huge step in the right direction for existing customers and a great example of a vendor listening, and quickly responding, to their customers. Well done.

[1] The exceptions I can think of are products that are likely to require heavy ongoing maintenance or support. High-complexity and/or mission critical applications. For example, we pay for several licenses to the .NET Subscription Service from Developer Express. We do this for two reasons… first, it’s high-complexity and mission-critical for us. Second, I know right up front that I’ll be making regular use of the vendor’s support staff. Build a feature-rich grid control from scratch and there are bound to be glitches and bugs. Those bugs hurt us and hurt our customers, so I’m happy to pay for support that lets us complain and get a fix or workaround quickly. I’m also happy to use that support when we have questions about how to use these controls to their fullest. Further, if we don’t renew our subscription, we lose upgrades and support — but NOT the products we originally licensed. I love their stuff and it’s worth every penny. 

Steve Makofsky (who works on the MS Longhorn team) has a post today about the difference between programmers and software developers. Like Steve, I think Eric Sink’s article on hiring does a good job of capturing the intricacies of hiring developers for a small ISV. Steve’s addition that developers “do what they have to do to ship” is about as succinct, and accurate, a summary as you can get.

I’ve felt this way for a while and try to write our open-position ads to reflect it… Here’s an opening I posted last week. If you’re in the area and fit the bill, send a resume in via Monster.

I also really enjoy the small-team, ISV experience where a developer who’s passionate about their job can work with a similarly inspired product team… and quickly get cool solutions in front of customers. No red tape, no meetings about meetings, no need to painstakingly document each pixel in advance. Just solid idea, design, and implementation.

Marcus Vorwaller, who maintains the “Best Tool for the Job” blog (a great blog, btw) wrote a post earlier today in which he describes why he feels independent podcasting will die. While I do think there’s a ton of (overblown) hype surrounding podcasting lately, I respectfully disagree that it’s going to go away any time soon. He feels that podcasting will ultimately dwindle down to 20 or 30 podcasts that “anyone cares about or will listen to”. I think that’s awfully low and, once the “me too” hype of podcasting goes away, I expect that number to still be measured in the hundreds.

I also think it’s worth noting that his post (and this one) relate to independent podcasting. Not the well-funded, corporate-driven, marketing podcasts that are pushing a product, nor the podcasts that are published from radio stations that already have an investment in equipment and talent.

Here are the reasons he gives for podcasting to die off, along with my disagreements.

1. Pocasts are time-consuming to create. This is certainly true… but you could argue that many of the better (re: interesting and readable) blogs also require an investment in time on the part of the author/content provider — I’m sure Marcus spends a great deal of his personal time on “Best Tool for the Job”. If someone is passionate about what they want to say and getting their message out, they’ll find the time. For most people, blogging is a hobby that they spend some of that precious spare time on… I don’t see any reason that podcasting doesn’t fall into the same category.

2. Podcasts don’t make money. Also true in most cases. While there are some examples of independent shows that are bringing in some money (via donations), they’re certainly not the provider’s sole source of income. But if we agree that podcasts are often put together by hobbyists who are passionate about a topic, then the fact that they’re not generating income isn’t usually a factor.

3. Podcasts are expensive to produce. I suppose this depends on the definition of expensive. $100? $500? I listen to some great podcasts that are recorded on iRiver MP3 players. Another that’s recorded with a USB microphone on a laptop. There are open source audio editors that make cleanup and editing a snap and don’t cost a dime. Nearly anyone who wants to put out a podcast will have a computer and a vast majority of those will have some sort of audio input capability. Is it ideal? No… but it can work quite well and stepping up to the next level of sound quality doesn’t have to be much more expensive than a nice DVD burner or a new monitor.

4. Podcasts are boring. There’s plenty of evidence to support this, given some of the bad stuff out there. On the other hand, there are a lot of shows that are interesting — using my personal definition of “interesting”, which is the point here. One of the podcasts I listen to centers on the world of poker. If you’re not into poker, you’d be bored stiff to listen to it. If you are into poker, you might enjoy it. I also listen to a couple of .NET development-related shows that would bore to tears anyone who’s not spending their days building software with .NET. Based on Marcus’s blog, I’m sure there are a few podcasts that align with his interests. Whether or not those also have decent quality and content he finds compelling is another matter.

5. Podcasts sound bad. I lump this in with the “expensive to produce” argument. Typically, a podcast sounds bad because the provider recorded it with the built-in mic on their laptop, while they sat next to the microwave in their kitchen and and ate potato chips out of a plastic bag. Any halfway decent studio microphone (not anywhere near as expensive as you’d think) does a fine job, as do plenty of USB-based microphones. One nice thing about the explosion around Skype and other VoIP services is that mic manufacturers are flooding the market with inexpensive, USB-based mics. I also don’t think it’s important to have a “radio voice”… like most blogs, independent podcasts are put out there by regular people. They should sound like regular people when we listen and I don’t think one needs the booming monster-truck-rally-announcer style of voice (which are usually treated with audio effects anyway) to be interesting. If your content is interesting, I’ll tolerate a bit of a nasal voice.

6. Podcasts are too long. Are there some that are too long? Probably, but it’s like any other content or form of entertainment. If you’re interested in it, you don’t want it to end. If you’re not interested in it, then you’ve got another option that’s missing from radio broadcasts — the fast-forward. There are times that some of the podcasts I listen to lose me. The topic for a given show might not appeal to me or maybe they’re doing a segment that I find boring. I fast-forward until I’m past it… and if that occurs too often with that particular podcast, I unsubscribe.

7. Podcasts are light on content. It’s the same argument as with “boring”, “sounds bad”, and “too long”. If it doesn’t hold your interest, move on. The upside to this hype is that there’s plenty to choose from. I’ve downloaded some that I thought were just horrible. I really don’t need to hear about your day, what you’re having for dinner, how your dog’s vet appointment went, or that you and your wife are vacationing in the Poconos. If your content isn’t relevant to me, I’m gone.

In any case, I’m curious what others think. Will we eventually see podcasting just plain “go away”, or as Marcus suggests, will it become the exclusive domain of existing broadcasters like NPR and radio stations?