10 Things You Should Know About Me - Eric's Turn

1. Background: I'm a 5th year electrical engineering student from the University of Tennessee.
2. I love gadgets. Currently on my night stand there are 5 different smart phones that I interchange on a random basis. I love the fact that I never have to have a full fledged computer around to keep up on news and communicate with my friends
3. I'm very opinionated. I will rant, constantly. It WILL piss you off at least once. Deal with it.
4. I hate Blackberries
5. I HATE Blackberries
6. I don't drink the Google Kool-Aid. I don't like the fact that one company knows who my friends are, what sites I visit, can read my email, has access to my call history, controls access to my documents, can see my calendar, and knows where I live. I separate my information across several providers.
7. I DO drink the Microsoft Kool-Aid. I like Bing. Windows Mobile is tops. Xbox 360 is amazing. I use Hotmail. I love using Office and Outlook. Windows 7 cured me of Mac Envy. I haven't tried a Zune but only because the Zune store has not integrated itself with Windows Mobile or Xbox Live. Seriously, Microsoft, if you could blend all of your services together across multiple platforms, you could kill Apple. I should be able to see who's on Xbox Live from my Windows Mobile phone and play tracks from my Zune over Wifi on my Xbox 360.
8. I drive fast. If you're going slower than 80 in the left hand lane, I will ride your tail. I will cut you off, I will flip you the bird. Get out of my way, seriously.
9. I enjoy the finer things. I like a good scotch, expensive cigarettes, expensive phones, expensive hotels. Yet there's always a soft spot in my heart for bargain brand beer.
10. I will do anything for a good time. I self medicate but only because my ADD is so bad, I have to do something to keep my mind from racing at 120 MPH.

Look forward to some of my future posts as I will be doing some recurring mini-columns. Each week I will post at least one if not many mobile tech posts titled This Week in Mobile. Once a week I will also try to do an editorial piece about something that's pissing me off in Technology. I also hope to do some app and software reviews for both mobile platforms, and desktop platforms dealing with mobile technologies.

10 Things Tech You Should Know About Me

Just to get to know me a bit, here are 10 things you should know about me and where I stand on pertinent tech issues.

1. Background: I am 4th year Electrical Engineering student at the University of Tennessee, so I generally look at hardware from a nuts and bolts standpoint. I guess you can take that for what its worth.
   
2. I am not a mac, I am not a PC, I am not a Linux, I am a Yes. (Though technically everyone is a PC).
   
3. I am not overly fond of the Apple organization for how they treat developers and how little they trust their consumers with understanding technical knowledge. However, I do think OSX is a good idea and think their mobile devices are quite revolutionary if not over priced.
4. I like Microsoft for what they are good at. Operating Systems (debatable) and Office Suites (also debatable). I do not however like when Microsoft attempts to go out of their comfort zone in mobile devices, internet search and of course internet life. WinMo, Bing, and live deserve a big red stamp with the letters F-A-I-L put across it. A word of advice to the guys in Redmond...leave that stuff to Google, Apple, Palm, Blackberry, Yahoo...you get the idea. To end on a positive note for MSFT, I give a hearty two thumbs up to Windows 7, It's the best OS they've made in a long while.
5. I am a bit of a fanboy when it comes to Linux. I've run several distros including Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint, gOS, and Fedora, with Ubuntu being my favorite. If there weren't so many software compatibility issues I would use it full time. However, there are, so I continue to dual boot.
6. In Google I trust. My life is highly embedded in the Google-sphere, I don't think there is a web app of theirs I haven't touched and at times I find myself on a mission to convert all and bring them to the Church of Google. On Google tech: I love the "cloud" and nearly everything in it, meh on Android (it's nice but doesn't make me scream "HOLY FREAKING SH*T!!!"), and I am extremely excited about seeing what they do with Chrome OS.
7. I don't use an iPod. It's not that they're bad devices, in fact as I stated before, they have become drivers of the mobile tech industry. Its just that for what you get, competitors like Creative consistently put out better products for much much less cash.
   
8. Speaking of Creative...if you haven't heard about Zii, I suggest you take a look. In short its a processor that can adapt to the task at hand. Its much smaller and uses less power than an x86, yet [allegedly] competes with it when it comes to FLOPS. Needless to say, it kicks the crap out of ARM and is perfectly suited for the mobile device market.
   
9. I'm a fan of green living, but don't always practice what I preach... sometimes there just isn't a recycling bin within 50 ft and it's unfortunate, but that baby seal will just have to deal with choking on my plastic Coke bottle.
10. One thing that always "grinds my gears" is the phrase "10 years away." Every so often a really revolutionary piece of technology will come out and someone will label it as "10 years away" and that's when I know that piece of tech has an optimistic 50/50 shot at getting into main stream use. [see superecapacitors and memristors]

I hope this gives you an incite into how I look at the technology industry. I'm sure many of you will disagree with me on some issues and that's why I chose blogger to make this site, so that you can comment and argue your points. Starting tomorrow I should start posting and commenting on the top topics of the day. If that's too far away, feel free follow me on Twitter.