So I’m doing some housekeeping in DEVONthink, and it’s in the process of indexing and creating thumbnails for a folder I just relocated and want to re-index.

And I watch the progress bar move along at this leisurely pace, and then I go and check out DEVONthink’s CPU usage, and it’s sitting here politely sipping at my CPU as it gently moves through the work it has to do:

Umm, no, DEVONthink.

I want you to pound these CPUs.

I did not spend ten freaking grand on Apple’s highest end computer for you to try to be polite about resource use. I’m not on a laptop here.

I appreciate you being polite, but look at Docker over there! I’m not even using any containers right now and Docker is happy to consume even more processor cycles than you! And even Slack is putting in a good effort while not even being visible on screen.

Tear through these files, please! Use up the memory! I have almost 100 gigs of it just sitting right here. There’s 45 gigs not even being used right now! Come on, what are you waiting for?

I share a little bit of the bitterness that visiting space has transitioned from being something that countries did, to being a hobby of wealthy people with the funds to end world hunger but instead are like “nah, I want to spend billions on a rocket to send me up into space for a couple minutes.”

Of course, it’s important to watch for those rose colored glasses. Space exploration holds a special place in the heart of many a nerdy type (myself included), and indeed those who were around to see us set foot on the moon remember it as a point of national pride.

Of course, our interest in going to space was mostly a glorified dick measuring contest with the Soviets, and the nobility of our exploration kind of got retconned in there after the fact. And when the narrative we were taught in grade school was being put together, the history lessons left out the fact that it was a number of brilliant black women like Katherine Johnson who were performing important calculations to support NASA’s mission, even though they were treated like second class citizens and their work went unacknowledged for decades.

Exploring space is a worthwhile endeavor, and humankind should be doing it. It’s not inherently bad for someone to be really rich and have the cash to go into space for fun. It will never stop being sad to me that we culturally have set up capitalism so that it is wants so badly for billionaires to be able to exist and go on these adventures that we insist on letting people go without homes, healthcare, and food, and we do it largely on the principle that we want billionaires to become billionaires.

• I don’t want to have to visit your web site and check the news from there every day; I want to aggregate it.
• I don’t want to need to use your mobile app to read the news.
• I don’t want your article pages to be magazine-like with painstaking layouts and typography. Good writing suits me just fine. If you do want do do those things, keep the design clean.
• I don’t want my news pages littered with ads. In fact, I don’t want any ads at all.
• I don’t want articles cluttered with links to other things I “might be interested in,” half of which are actually ads posing as real content, and many of which have carefully constructed clickbait titles. And i sure as hell don’t want these links inserted into the article content.
• I don’t want to make comments on your site or participate in any sort of community with the other readers, and the only people who seem to aren’t exactly generating positive discourse.
• I don’t want the articles I’m reading to be paginated. I know how to scroll.
• I don’t want a toolbar at the bottom with a call to action for me to share that thing to a bunch of social networks. If I want to share the article, I know how to copy a link.
• I don’t want to pay over $100/year to support the site. News companies are pricing these as though I get all my news from one source, when I’m reading from dozens of sources in a given week.
• I don’t want to see user generated content on my news site. There are other sites where I look at user generated content, like Twitter, or Instagram, or Vine, or YouTube, or Facebook, or one of the dozens of other places.
• I don’t want to read articles that managed somehow to extract four paragraphs of filler from a single tweet. I’d rather just look at the tweet.
• I don’t want my news site to have a social presence, trying to push things to me to read there.
• I don’t want my news site to be incentivized to get me to click on their articles.
• I don’t want a video at the top of the articles I’m reading, and I sure as hell don’t want it to auto-play.

• Well-written articles that are rigorously fact-checked and well contextualized
• • Bonus points if you happened to capture some photos of the event. If you didn’t, that’s okay, you don’t need to show me a stock photo of something related to it.
• A full-article RSS feed that lets me do all my reading from my RSS reader.
• A way to easily pay you a fair price for the above two things, and ensure that you’re beholden to me, and not your parent company, not advertisers, not some bullshit KPIs somebody wants you to hit. 
• the ability to share links to nice clean versions of articles with my friends and followers
• The news org to be independent from corporate owners. If I’m paying you, I want you working for me.
• For news like this to be available to me at the local, regional, national, and international levels (and I don’t mind paying separately for each)

Everywhere you read about technology, the chief complaint about AT&T seems to be its dropped calls in big cities.  And while that’s a very valid complaint and all, AT&T has a much bigger problem on their hands.

It’s their coverage map.

Ask any AT&T rep about their 3G coverage, and one who is well-versed in bull-shittery will quickly point out that AT&T’s 3G network reaches 75-80% of the US population.  Wow, you think.  That’s pretty reasonable.

Unfortunately, that’s just a really flattering interpretation of a pretty lousy 3G footprint.  Much of the US is crammed into some super densely populated areas, so you can reach 75% of the US population without covering much land.  And maybe if you live in a large city that is blanketed in AT&T 3G, it’s not a big deal to you that 3G isn’t available out of your bubble.

However, when you pay your inflated wireless bill, you’re paying for a nationwide wireless network.  You’re paying for a promise that you can go out to these far out places and have some coverage.  You’re paying for a promise that you can be traveling down a highway in a place you don’t know and call up a friend for directions because you’re lost.

But that’s not really something you can do with AT&T, because they just don’t put forth the effort.

I live in the Madison area, and I often travel to Iowa via 151, which is a four lane highway all the way into Iowa.  If I made a phone call starting when I got on the highway and tried maintaining a call all the way into Iowa, my call will drop several times, because the towers are spaced too far apart.

But to AT&T, this is acceptable.  After all, why put the money into an area that isn’t very densely populated?  After all, it doesn’t give you much of a return, so why bother having it there for customers to use?

Again, it all comes back to the promise of a nationwide network.  When you’re paying your bill, you’re not just paying for infrastructure in the area your billing address is.  You are paying for a network to be there when you happen to be on this random road and you break down.  You’re paying to have service to make calls when you’re staying at a friend’s house in some podunk town.

For sure, AT&T needs to address the issues in its big cities.  And they can afford to do so, because they have a lot of subscribers per square mile.  But they also need to start taking more rural areas seriously.  Even EDGE coverage is acceptable here (though they could put up 3G towers and make a handsome profit selling internet service to people out in the country), but there needs to be some coverage.  Verizon has AT&T beat by a long shot, and their network is 3G across the board. And if AT&T wants to keep customers like me, they’re going to have to put forth the infrastructure, or I’m leaving in 2012 when Verizon LTE iPhones are available.