Global Nerdy

Strangely enough, I haven’t had much need to crank out invoices and do other accounting, billing, and similar tasks until now. I’ve either worked with a company who had someone do that for me, or I’ve worked with a partner who’s handled the paper-pushing. Now that I’m doing the lone wolf consulting thing — and let me tell you, the boss is an effing genius — I’m in the process of evaluating make-your-life-easier business admin tools.

I’ve decided to try out FreshBooks first. I know the people — a good number of them personally — I know many of their satisfied customers, and hey, they’re just down the street from me. I notice that they’ve changed mottos from “painless billing” to “cloud accounting”. Right now, I need a simple invoicing system, but as things progress, I’ll dip my toe into their accounting features.

So far, my experience has been pleasant — the sign-up process threw as few obstacles as possible in my path, the short, sweet, and useful “How to make your first invoice” video was everything it should be and nothing more, and I’ve sent my first couple of invoices without a hitch. I logged in, got my stuff done, got out, and went back to what it is I’m paid to do without a hassle. That’s exactly what I want from this sort of service, and FreshBooks has delivered. Well done, folks.

Looking for a new typewriter typeface, but tired of all those variants of Courier or Letter Gothic? Take a look at Royal Vogue, which is made from scans from the output of a 1920s Royal portable typewriter. It’s still obviously a typewriter ‘face, but it’s also very clearly art deco. It’s free-as-in-beer, and you can download it from the Royal Vogue page on The Classic Typewriter Page.

Randy Liedtke came up with a prank that’s equal parts eeeevil and clever: baking cookies that look like iPhones. He goes driving, holds them as if they’re the real thing, and if a cop pulls him over, he takes a bite and asks if cookies are against the law.

The Rise and Fall of BlackBerry: An Oral History is the cover story of this week’s Bloomberg Businessweek. The dead-tree edition of the magazine should be on stands by now, and the article itself has been online since Saturday. If you follow it with the Globe and Mail’s investigative report titled Inside the fall of BlackBerry: How the smartphone inventor failed to adapt (co-written by my friend and former Crazy Go Nuts University schoolmate Sean Silcoff, and published in late September), you’ll have a pretty complete picture of what happened to the company that once made mobile devices that were considered must-haves.

In the video below, Bloomberg’s Felix Gilette talks about the making of the article, as well as one of the most telling quotes, which came from Vincent Washington, who was RIM’s, and later, BlackBerry’s senior business development manager from 2001 to 2011:

One thing we missed out on was that Justin Bieber wanted to rep BlackBerry. He said, “Give me $200,000 and 20 devices, and I’m your brand ambassador,” basically. And we pitched that to marketing: Here’s a Canadian kid, he grew up here, all the teeny-boppers will love that. They basically threw us out of the room. They said, “This kid is a fad. He’s not going to last.” I said at the meeting: “This kid might outlive RIM.” Everyone laughed.

The perspectives in Bloomberg Businessweek’s article come from reasonably high-up BlackBerry/RIM employees, but not any of the CEOs: not the original duo of Lazaridis and Balsillie, nor replacement CEO Thorsten Heins, nor current interim CEO John Chen.

…and that you’re dismayed because President Obama hasn’t dropped by to show his support. I thought I’d share this photo of Steve Buscemi playing the world’s tiniest violin, just for you.

We’ve all had some form of this experience (sometimes, I need to flip the USB plug only once):

Apple’s solution to the problem was the Lightning connector, a beautiful and proprietary 8-pin connector that can be inserted with either side facing up, and for which they’d be very happy to charge a licensing fee for building devices that are compatible with it:

For people who like Apple devices and for whom good design is important, Lightning is worth the price. For those who thought that beige desktops and big grey laptops were just-fine-thank-you-very-much, their reaction’s more like this:

It looks as though good ol’ USB will finally follow suit. Brad Saunders, chair of the USB 3.0 Promoter Group says that the proposed USB Type-C connector — an addition to the USB 3.1 spec — will be about the size of a Micro USB plug and be reversible. The spec for the connector is expected to be finalized “by the middle of 2014”, presumably in order to give manufacturers time to ramp up for the holiday season.

According to Intel’s Alex Peleg:

“[The USB Type-C connector] will enable an entirely new super-thin class of devices from phones to tablets, to 2-in-1s, to laptops to desktops. This new industry standards-based thin connector delivering data, power, and video is the only connector one will need across all devices.”

Let’s hope it’s prettier than the current Micro USB 3 connector. It would appear that it was “designed” by people who, to use an expression I heard ages ago, “have the visual sense that God gave oysters”:

While it remains to be seen how the connector standards will turn out, one thing is clear: I’ve got boxes and boxes of cables that are soon to become obsolete.

Japan is big on both weirdness and mobile phone culture, so it’s not surprising that they occasionally combine the two. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Kitan Club phone stands!

They’re adorable and odd in that way that only the Japanese can make them. The cat stands attach to the back of your mobile phone — or keitai in Japanese — with a suction cup, holding it upright on a table or some other handy level surface.

If you’d rather have a stand with the cat holding up your phone with its back, Atlas-style, Kitan Club’s got you covered too…

You can find Kitan Club stands on sale on eBay, where you’ll be treated to oddball photos of Kitan Club stands posed in “action shots”, like the one below: