I’ve always really liked the 4th of July, a holiday that has always seemed particularly celebratory while still being generally more casual and lower pressure than most.  I’ve always had a bit of a patriotic streak and enjoy the day of paying tribute to the United States.  I also have a definite fondness for the marches and other patriotic tunes that dominate the holiday.

For the past several years, my family has been going to Disneyland on the 4th of July to see their special fireworks show.  We have learned how best to manage the crowds on that very busy day, making it a pretty easy experience.  We also get a hotel room close-by in order to avoid having to deal with the night-time traffic.

When I was growing up, more often than not we spent 4th of July at home instead of trying to go out to see a professional fireworks show or some other public event.  Generally, we were pretty satisfied simply enjoying the day at home as a family.  This would usually include watching the Boston Pops’ 4th of July concert on TV or other similar patriotic shows.  We would often have a BBQ dinner at home.  There were a few years that we did go out to municipal fireworks displays, though, so I did at least have that experience a few times as a kid. 

The most memorable trip out to see a 4th of July fireworks show was in 1977.  That summer, my father had just taken a new job that required our family to move from Florida to Flint, Michigan.  For the first couple months, we had to find an alternative place to live while we were waiting for the house my family had purchased to be vacant and ready for us.  We had a Starcraft pop-up style camper that we used on vacations, so we spent that time staying at the Holly Hills Campground (based on an online search, I think it is a KOA now) in nearby Holly, which was just a short distance outside of Flint.

On that 4th, we decided to drive into Flint for their big municipal fireworks show downtown, but it ended up being Mother Nature that put on the more memorable performance that night.  There was a huge rainstorm and I honestly can’t remember for certain whether or not the fireworks display actually took place, although I think it did.  The most memorable part was returning that evening to learn that a tornado had touched down in the campground while we were gone!  We were lucky that the actual touchdown (and most of the damage) was on the opposite end from where our campsite was located, which meant that our camper was ok.  It was definitely a bit of a fright and still is the closest call with a tornado that I ever experienced.

I don’t remember completely for certain, but I don’t think we ever went out to public events on the 4th of July in any of the other years that we lived in Flint, instead opting for celebration at home.  In the late 70s and early 80s, Michigan had pretty loose restrictions on the sale of fireworks for home use, which meant that every supermarket had big display tables with a big selection of firecrackers, sparklers, roman candles, bottle rockets, and other similar items.  My parents were appropriately nervous about these types of things, though, and would only allow us to get some sparklers, which we would only use with close supervision.

Many of the neighbors did buy and use the other kinds of home fireworks, which meant that there was always a sort of second-hand display that we were able to watch a bit on the evening of the 4th.  On the 5th, the neighborhood streets would be very littered with the spent casings from many of the fireworks and firecrackers that had been set off the night before. 

My best friend and I had a tradition, which we obviously never told our parents about (this post may end up as a confession…), walking through the neighborhood on the 5th examining the litter from the night before searching for accidentally discarded fireworks and firecrackers that had not yet been fired.  Each year, we found and gathered up quite a bit of stuff that was still live.  I remember one year we even found an unexploded cherry bomb, which was a particularly exciting find for a couple pre-teen boys.  I don’t remember exactly what we did, but I remember that it was never much of a problem finding a spot outside of eye and earshot of parents in order to light off everything we found.

Regardless of whether I just stayed at home with family or went out to do something special for the holiday, my memories of the 4th of July are pretty much all positive.  Here’s hoping for another great 4th of July holiday tomorrow.  Happy Birthday, USA!

June 6th was the launch date for the Palm Pre, the heavily hyped new smartphone from Palm and Sprint.  What I really want in a phone is something that matches the elegance and simplicity of the user interface on Apple’s iPhone, but still includes a physical keyboard and multitasking capabilities.  The Pre appears to be a very close fit, almost certainly much better than the Windows-mobile based HTC Touch Pro that I bought last year.

I definitely tend to be an early-adopter on new gadgets, so it certainly wouldn’t have been surprising if I had run out to buy a Pre last weekend.  In fact, I would have very much liked to have made that purchase.  Unfortunately, I’m already a Sprint customer and, as I mentioned earlier, I purchased a new phone last year.  Because of this, I am not currently eligible for upgrade pricing, which means that any phone purchased now would cost me considerably higher than the new or upgrade eligible customer pricing, which, of course, is the pricing that Sprint and Palm are advertising publicly.

I am, of course, under a 2-year contract with Sprint that was a necessary condition for the purchase of my last phone.  I completely recognize the validity and legality of that contract and that it is the underlying reason why I am not eligible for upgrading without a price penalty.  My purpose in this post is not to argue that my situation is somehow unfair or that I am being denied an entitlement.  I never had any expectation of being able to upgrade early and I don’t believe that there is anything unethical, much less illegal, about the system.

What I do question pretty strongly is whether or not the current business model used by the cell phone industry is a correct one in today’s marketplace.  Particularly since Apple has turned the smartphone into a much more mainstream product with the iPhone, the industry has entered a phase of extremely rapid growth and enhanced competition with frequent introduction of new models with desirable new features.  I strongly question whether customers are going to continue to be willing to accept a system that requires a 2 year wait between upgrades.

I had initially started thinking about this as subject for a blog post after getting into a Twitter discussion of it during the day of the Pre launch.  I got busy with other things and didn’t find time to start working on it until later.  In the meantime, this became a very hot subject generating a lot of coverage both in blogs and the mainstream press after Apple announced the third-generation version of the iPhone and AT&T revealed that the lower pricing would not be available to current iPhone owners that are still under contract.  This is a change from the approach taken with the last version of the iPhone, which was offered at the new-customer price to owners of the previous version, regardless of contract status.

The central idea behind current business model used by the cell phone industry is that the carriers subsidize a portion of the purchase price for the phone in exchange for the customer committing to a service contract, generally for 2 years.  If the customer chooses to switch carriers before the contract is up, he/she is obligated to pay a fairly substantial fee to buy out the contract.  Most carriers offer the customer the option of a smaller discount on an a new phone half way through the contract.  After the contract expires, the customer is generally eligible to again get the same subsidy offered to a new subscriber.

The contract system eliminates a lot of the need for carriers to expend much effort in customer retention, outside of the discounted phones offered at the end of the contract.  This likely saves the companies a lot of money, but is also almost certainly the biggest contributor to the industry’s reputation for poor customer service.  I have found that no matter which of the big cell phone carriers is mentioned, it doesn’t take long for someone to start telling stories about their horrible experiences.

It is in the best interest of the cellular carriers for most phones to have non-subsidized prices that are prohibitively high for most people since, otherwise, it is a safe bet that most people would forgo the contract.  This would make it much easier for customers to switch carriers at will and, thus, would greatly increase the cost and effort that the companies would have to expend towards retention.  I have little doubt that this would dramatically improve the quality of the customer experience, but it might or might not have a negative impact on profitability.

The big question is whether or not the non-subsidized prices really reflect the true cost of a cell phone or if they are kept artificially inflated by the cell phone manufacturers as a result of the subsidy-based sales model.  I admit that I have no direct knowledge, but my educated speculation is that the subsidized prices are probably more realistic.  The non-subsidized prices for phones (especially smartphones) simply seem way out of proportion with the pricing for other portable electronics.  In most cases, those prices are pretty close to what you would pay for a full-featured laptop computer and considerably higher than netbooks, stand-alone PDAs, or portable media players, any of which would seem more comparable technology.

The most obvious direct comparison would really be between the iPhone and the iPod Touch, which is basically an iPhone without the cellular radio or camera.  The pricing information for the 16GB version of the new iPhone 3GS has indicated that it costs $199 fully-subsidized (the price widely advertised), $399 for customers 1-year into their 2-year contract, or $599 un-subsidized.  The suggested retail price of the 16GB iPod Touch is $299 and it can be found in the $260-$275 range if you shop around.  I can certainly see where the added features of the iPhone would justify a higher price, but does it really make sense that they would double it?

In all fairness, my instinct looking at those numbers is that the $399 price offered after 1-year is probably the most realistic one.  While I suspect the price on the iPod Touch is also a bit inflated (it doesn’t really have direct competitors), it really does look like the $199 price probably brings in a pretty thin profit margin, if there is any at all.  The same is probably true with the similarly priced Palm Pre, although it does also have somewhat lighter specs, including only 8GB of memory. Even if the subsidies do push the prices down below the actual cost of the phone, I can still see justification for why the carriers might want to subsidize even for existing customers still under contract in order to prolong their contract and help to ensure loyalty.

I think that they might want to look to the satellite TV business as a possible example.  I’ve been a DirecTV customer for a number of years and they also use a system of contracts and subsidized equipment.  The big difference from the cellular business, though, is that DirecTV lets current customers upgrade their equipment (such as going to a DVR or hi-definition) at the fully subsidized price no matter how far they are into a contract.  The one catch is that doing so will reset their contractual start date to the date of the upgrade.  This helps to accommodate any need that the customer might have to move up to something better or different, while also pushing further back the date at which he/she might be able to switch to a competitor.

I do imagine that the cellular industry would probably prefer to stick with the current fairly customer-unfriendly system for as long as possible, but I do seem some recent signs that they may very well be changing their approach.  The recent publicity over AT&T’s prices for iPhone upgrades hasn’t been very good for them, even if they are pretty clearly within their rights.  A fan base as loyal as the more vocal iPhone owners, particularly when they are so willing to spend more money to make sure they have the latest and greatest, really does need to be cultivated and protected.  Policies that seem to directly target those loyal customers may not be in the company’s best interest, even if they appear to be the most financially prudent on the surface.

Another interesting development is Sprint’s recent introduction of the Sprint Premier loyalty program.  Customers that have achieved high longevity (10 years or more) or have one of the higher-end service plans (priced over $69.99/month, a fairly common price point for a smartphone with both a voice and data plan) are automatically enrolled in that program.  While the program offers a number of smaller benefits, the big one is that those customers are eligible for the fully-subsidized upgrade price at the end of the first year of a 2-year contract.  While Sprint’s recent issues with customer retention probably made this more necessary for them, it still is a pretty clear acknowledgement that higher-end customers are increasingly unwilling to wait 2 years between upgrades.

This last Friday, Jay Leno hosted his last The Tonight Show episode before his move to a 10pm Monday-Friday primetime variety show in the Fall.  I watched the show and realized that it was the first time in several years that I had watched one of his shows all the way through, although I had seen an occasional segment or two when someone of interest was a guest on the show.

I have really never been a fan of Leno’s version of The Tonight Show, which came as both a surprise and a disappointment to me.  I pretty regularly watched the show when he was the permanent guest host for Johnny Carson and usually enjoyed it quite a bit.  In fact, I had felt that Carson had kind of started to phone in the show during his last few years and I frequently found Leno’s shows to be more engaging.  Leno had also been a very frequent guest on Late Night With David Letterman and was consistently very funny during those shows.

I was going to college in Milwaukee during the late 1980s when Leno was most frequently guest-hosting for Carson.  Twice during that time, Leno brought his touring stand-up comedy concert to town and I went to see him both times.  I can’t really think of many, if any, other shows that have made me laugh harder and more consistently than those two shows.  As a concert stand-up comic, Leno was (probably still is) absolutely hilarious.  I resisted for quite a while buying a ticket for the second concert (which was about a year or so after the first), but my memory of how funny that first one had been eventually got the better of me.  The second time was just as funny and I recall being pretty stunned at how little repetition there was between the two shows.

With all that, I was surprised that I never could warm up at all to Leno’s version of “The Tonight Show”.  I watched the show quite a bit during its first year or so and have continued sampling it periodically over the years, but I have always found the show to be bland and generally not too funny.  I recall liking him much better when guest-hosting for Carson, so much of the problem may come from his own shaping of the show’s style and format.  While I found Leno to be both ingratiating and tremendously funny as a concert stand-up comedian, I generally found him fairly smarmy and even a bit irritating as a talk show host.

The interview segments that I’ve seen have been particularly weak, with Leno allowing way too much latitude for the guests to plug whatever project they are on to promote.  He didn’t seem to be very effective at providing support to guests that were less than comfortable with the format, either.  Last year, I watched his interview with Harrison Ford when he was on the show to promote the new Indiana Jones film.  Ford is notoriously uncomfortable in interviews and has a real tendency to become almost painfully silly unless the interviewer works hard to steer the conversation.  His interview with Leno was borderline embarrassing and a rather stark contrast compared to the segment Ford did with David Letterman the following week.

While I’m sure that Friday night’s final show wasn’t really a representative sample, I still didn’t really see much improvement.  Leno’s monologue wasn’t bad (stand-up is obviously his true calling), although the material seemed a bit thin and Leno kind of over-sold it.  The only interview segment was with Conan O’Brien, the new host of The Tonight Show.  Not surprisingly, it was really more of a passing of the baton than a real interview.  The musical guest was James Taylor, who was apparently a Leno favorite, but is not that dynamic a performer.

The result was fairly boring, leading me to think that he really needed to bring on very strong closing guests that would have left more of a lasting impression to help lead up to his new show in the fall.  I could see a potential argument that this wasn’t really a true “farewell” show since Leno is really just moving to an earlier timeslot, but it still seems that this show was sure to get a bit more of an audience (the reports are that the ratings for Friday were double the average for the show) and it would have helped for this show to leave the viewers wanting more.  I think back to David Letterman’s final NBC show where the guests were Tom Hanks and Bruce Springsteen (making his first appearance on the show), which felt much more like an event.

Leno closed the show with a fairly sweet segment at the end where he brought out all the children that had been born to Tonight Show staff members during his tenure as host.  This was a nice ending, although naturally it would have had a lot more meaning for the staff than for the audience.  The segment also seemed a tad rushed, without any time for Leno to directly interact with any of the kids.  It also struck me as a little off that the very last part of the show was something that was directed more towards the staff and crew than the show’s audience.  My sense is that this might have been a more effective segment for the show’s midpoint, preferably with a bit more actual participation by the kids, and that he would have been better off ending the show with a “see you later” speech that was a little more squarely directed at the studio and home audiences.

Other than the monologue, there was only one major comedy segment during Friday night’s show, which was a highlights reel from Leno’s recurring “Jaywalking” segment.  I had heard references to this as Leno’s most popular comedy bit, but I don’t think I had ever seen one of these segments before.  It is a “man-on-the-street” segment where Leno would go up to people and ask them fairly simple history or current events questions.  The bit would then be edited together from incorrect responses, sometimes with Leno kind of trying to bait the respondents into either a correction or digging themselves deeper.

What struck me was that the segment not was pretty unfunny to me, but it was also surprisingly mean spirited.  It definitely felt like Leno was asking the audience to laugh at the people and not with them.  Despite the flaws with his show, I had always generally found Leno’s comedy to be pretty gentle, remaining fairly good natured even when going after political or celebrity targets.  Certainly, he has long had a reputation for being a nice guy, particularly compared to David Letterman’s more acerbic approach.  Even in the live concert performances I attended, Leno worked very clean (no profanity or significant scatological material) and his comedy was much more observational than confrontational.  The “Jaywalking” bit seemed pretty out of character.

I should acknowledge that I have been a long time David Letterman fan, extending back to before I even had heard of Jay Leno.  I initially discovered Letterman’s NBC show fairly early in its run and would watch it whenever my Junior High School schedule would allow.  Once we got a VCR (during my sophomore year of high school), the show became a usual part of my after-school ritual.  Throughout college, I watched the show as it aired most nights, helped by the fact that it came on 11:30 in Milwaukee.  I don’t watch his show nearly as often today, but we do still have our DVR set to record it each night and occasionally pick and choose an episode to watch (often based on who the guests were) when time allows.

While I was never overly impressed with Leno’s version of the show, I did at least tune it in periodically before Letterman moved his show to the same timeslot over on CBS.  If it weren’t competing with a show that I prefer by quite a bit, I suppose I might have continued to tune in a bit more.  While I don’t think that Letterman is nearly as daring as he was during his early days and his show has probably fallen into way too much of a routine, I do also think he is the top master of this form of program at this time, having now attained a skill level that rivals Carson.

Despite my admiration for Letterman’s skills, I’ve never really been in agreement with those (possibly including Letterman himself) that felt that NBC made a mistake by giving the Tonight Show job to Leno instead.  I think Letterman would likely have been overly constrained by the legacy of The Tonight Show, particularly by the likelihood that he would have succumbed to the pressure to do the show from Southern California instead of New York.  I think he has been better served by creating his own franchise without being bound to maintain someone else’s tradition or do the show from a venue that isn’t as good a fit to his style.

I also have to acknowledge that the choice of Leno over Letterman was almost certainly the best thing for NBC.  Unquestionably, there is a huge amount of subjectivity to one’s reaction to comedy and entertainment in general and there is a lot of indication that many disagree with my subjective opinion of Leno’s Tonight Show.  The show has maintained pretty consistently good ratings during Leno’s tenure (after a bumpy first couple years) and it has usually had more viewers than Letterman’s show by a pretty wide margin.  I honestly am not really sure why, but Leno’s show clearly has had quite a bit of mainstream appeal.

Despite being generally unimpressed with the show over the years, I still have very fond memories of those live shows that I saw and I guess I do still have something of a soft spot for Leno.  That is why I wanted to watch his last show and I suspect I will at least give his new show a chance this fall.  I’ve heard that it may shift more towards a comedy/variety format rather than the usual late night talk show approach, so maybe I’ll find this one to be a better fit for his talents.  I actually hope that is the case.

Anyone who follows this blog at all has certainly noticed that I am far from prolific.  At my best, I’ve occasionally managed to write up 1-2 posts a week, although it also isn’t that unusual for me to sometimes go several weeks without posting anything.  I love having a forum for sharing my thoughts, but I tend to struggle both with finding the time and the motivation to actually sit down and write something.

To address this subject honestly, I definitely have to start by admitting that I am a terrible procrastinator when it comes to writing.  I’ve often said that I generally like writing, but it is probably more accurate to say that I like the idea or writing and the end result of having written.  Motivating myself to sit down and actually write something has never been overly easy, regardless of whether it is something like a blog post that I choose on my own to write or if it is something assigned like a school paper or a work document.  It is very common that the basic form and content of something that I intend to write will rattle around in my mind for quite a few days before I finally get around to sitting down and typing it.

I also can get pretty easily distracted while writing.  In the past, particularly back when I was in school, the most likely distractions were from other people, television, phone calls, or that kind of thing.  For that most part, that could usually be pretty easily managed in such a way that the temptations could be minimized.  With most of my writing now done on Internet-connected computers, there is a lot of readily-available competition for my attention.  Even when I find the time and motivation to sit down and start writing, it is awfully easy to get sidetracked by an incoming email or to be distracted by what I think might be a quick visit to Twitter or Facebook. 

Reading discussion boards, RSS feeds, other blogs and general news/information sites do pretty often win out when I find a block of time where I could possibly do some writing on a blog post.  This is particularly common on my lunch breaks during my work week.  I have a small laptop computer (essentially an early version of what the press commonly calls a "netbook") that I usually take with me when heading off to a restaurant at lunch.  Even when I have the intent of doing some writing during lunch, it isn’t unusual for me to spend more time just surfing the web.  To be honest, writing isn’t really the most relaxing break during a busy day. 

My Amazon Kindle 2 has also become a major competitor for my time, having pretty dramatically increased the amount of time that I am spending on reading for leisure.  Particularly in the evenings after a full day at work and the kid has been put to bed, it is very tempting to just sprawl out on the sofa reading a book on the Kindle instead of sitting down at the computer to work on a blog post.  I have also been opting to spend many of my recent work lunch hours with the Kindle instead of the laptop computer as well.

Brevity has never been one of my strengths as a writer.  Although I generally received very good grades on written works in school and I have often received praise for documents at my jobs, the one common criticism that I do receive is that I can be too wordy.  My blog posts do tend to be pretty long and it isn’t very often that I complete one in a single sitting.  At any given time, it isn’t that unusual for me to have at least a couple unfinished posts in progress.  Knowing this tendency, I always make sure to upload unfinished posts to the blog as a "draft" in order to make it possible for me to work on it from my desktop PC, laptop, or even from my cell phone whenever I find the time and motivation to do so.  Possibly a bit appropriately, even this very post sat partially-written in the “drafts” folder for quite a while before I got around to finishing and publishing it.

I keep trying to come up with ways to switch to shorter, more frequent posts, but I’ve never had much luck with it.  One obvious idea would be to basically just post whatever I can complete in a single writing session along with a "to be continued" tag.  That approach doesn’t appeal to me that much because it limits my ability to revise.  It isn’t that uncommon that I come back to a post after a day or two and rework portions I’ve already written, move text around or remove it, and/or add text at places other than the end.  I don’t really like the idea of posting something before I’m at least reasonably happy with it.

I’ve also experimented with easily recurring ideas such as “week in review” posts.  My problem with this is that I have a bit of a hard time actually coming up with anything interesting to say when I follow that approach.  A number of years ago, I tried for a while to keep a personal journal.  I pretty religiously forced myself to spend 15 minutes or so writing in it every night before going to bed.  Initially, it went ok, but I eventually found that way too many of the entries were starting off with something akin to “Nothing much of interest happened today” and I eventually just abandoned the whole thing.  Recurrent blog post subjects strike me as having the same basic problem and seem likely to go down the same path.

Finally, I think that one other major obstacle that I find difficult to overcome in this blog is simple fear of actually writing about certain topics.  Politics immediately come to mind as a key subject that interests me quite a bit and generates some pretty strong opinions for me, but which I am reluctant to delve into much on this blog.  Part of the reason is that I’m simply not sure that I have the time or motivation to become sufficiently well-informed to avoid sounding naive or, worse, citing things that are simply wrong.  I also guess I’m a little worried about potentially offending friends or family members (my main readers) with opinions on controversial topics.  I don’t avoid the topic entirely (there are a couple political posts in the archives for this site), but I don’t think it will ever become a staple of the site either.

I know that I am going to keep posting to the blog and that I’ll probably always keep trying to find ways to increase the publication frequency, but I also suspect it will always remain at least somewhat intermittent.  I just hope that I can somehow manage to make up for the lack of quantity with at least some level of quality.

One of the very best concerts that I ever saw was Billy Joel and Elton John at the Ohio State University Stadium in Columbus, OH during their first tour together back in 1994.  When I found out that they were touring again this year and would be doing a show at the Honda Center (formerly The Pond) in Anaheim, I was immediately interested in getting tickets to see them again and to give my wife the chance to attend.

The timing for getting tickets turned out to be a bit of a challenge, as they went on-sale last December during the week that we were on vacation in Florida.  The on-sale time, in fact, happened to precisely correspond with our dining reservation at Tusker House in Disney’s Animal Kingdom.  Ticketmaster currently doesn’t have a mobile-friendly web-site that can be used for ordering tickets from a cell phone, so I ended up programming the phone number for their automated ticket ordering system into my phone.  Their phone ordering system is a pretty big hassle to use and the process of ordering tickets used up the majority of the time we were waiting for our table at the restaurant, but I did manage to get the tickets ordered.

Traffic between home and Anaheim can be pretty heavy on a Saturday afternoon, so we made arrangements for our son’s babysitter to arrive in time for my wife and I to leave home around 4pm, which we figured should be plenty of time for us to get there in time for the 7:30pm concert.  The drive wasn’t overwhelmingly bad for a Saturday and we made it down to Orange County by 5:30pm, giving us enough time to stop off at a nearby mall for a quick dinner at the food court.  We then made it over to the Honda Center around 6:45pm or so.  Traffic was a little bit heavy getting into the parking areas, but it wasn’t overwhelmingly bad.  I did think that they would have benefited by a few more people directing traffic (particularly controlling access to the left turn lanes from Katella Ave.), but I’ve seen worse.

I had been to the Honda Center (still The Pond, at that time) once before to see one of Billy Joel’s solo concerts back in 1999.  While I didn’t remember the layout exceptionally well, I did recall that I had been seated in the cheap seats in the top tier for that show and that the view was still reasonably decent.  Considering that the tickets time time were over $100 each for anything on the lower tiers, we went with similar seats again this time.  When we first got to our seats, our first reaction was that we were awfully high up and far from the stage, but we really ended up being pretty happy with where we were.  Our view, while distant, was unobstructed and from the front, which wasn’t true of many of the closer seats.  The picture below, taken using my cell phone camera while we were waiting for the show to start, gives an idea of how far we were from the stage.

The concert started about 20 minutes late (not too bad for a rock concert), with the lights initially going down about 1/2 way followed by an overture of instrumental versions of some of Billy Joel and Elton John’s songs, played as two pianos rose from beneath the stage.  The house lights then went the rest of the way down as Billy Joel entered to "Yankee Doodle" and then Elton John entered to a very British tune that was extremely familiar, but I don’t know the title.  The two greeted one another and then headed to their pianos to start an introductory series of duets.

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