If you don’t know me very well, you’d probably be a bit surprised to hear about some of the things I’ve seen and done.  I certainly look unassuming enough, with my engineer’s glasses, my student’s scruff, and my geek’s sense of humor.  If you know me a bit better, you might’ve heard about some of the crazy situations I’ve fallen into over the years.  If you’ve done much traveling with me, you’d know I suffer from a healthy bit of wanderlust, mixed with a perhaps unhealthy tolerance for danger.

Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of things that scare me.  Among the things I’d reveal, large drops rank somewhere high on the list.  But still, I tend to gravitate towards places and people that I find intriguing.  And sometimes this leads to…interesting encounters.

If you’ve spent much time at all with me, you’ve probably heard a few of these stories.  But talking with a friend recently, he recommended I put them all in one place on my site.  So I suppose I’ll gradually relay these stories as best I can.  In addition to breaking my long radio silence, injecting a short story here and there should liven this blog up a bit (I hope).  I’m thinking of doing this on Thursdays.  Let’s just call them Thrilldays.  Prepare to be thrilled, gentle internet-goer.

So, without any further ado, I present to you: “The time I was hijacked by armed Colombian guerrillas in Ecuador”.

In order to get from the Puente de Cuyabeno (Bridge of Cuyabeno) to Papallacta we would have to first take a 3 hour bus to Lago Agrio, followed by a 5 or 6 hour bus to Papallacta (which is then only about an hour and a half to two hours away from Quito). The 3 hour leg of our trip was uneventful.

We arrived in Lago Agrio expecting to have to take a cab to the terminal terrestre (almost every city here has a major bus terminal called the ‘terminal terrestre’) where we would catch our next bus towards Papallacta and Quito. However, as we were about to get into our cab the Trans Baños bus came by and the yeller/money collector for that bus started yelling “Quito! Quito!” We apologized to the cab driver and threw our bags into the bottom storage compartment for the bus. We were on our way to Papallacta, the best hot baths in Ecuador (consisting of a few dozen pools of different temperatures heated by volcano).

We fell asleep.

What we have later determined to be sometime around 6pm, things got ugly.

I opened my eyes as people were screaming and a man with a gun was yelling for us to put our hands in the air. “La Plata! La Plata!!” (“The Money! The Money!!”) My mind stopped. Everything was a reflex to a reflex to a hint of an action. The first thing I did was take my camera out of my pocket and shove it into the side of the seat. I then took my watch off and shoved it into the side of the seat. Azalea shoved her credit cards into the side of the seat. The men were shouting and making their way towards us. Luckily we had time to do something because we were in the back of the bus. However, we were the only three foreigners on this entire bus. What would they do with us?

“Cierra las ojos!!!”(“Close your eyes!!!”) I was pressed up against the window. I was a part of the window. Azalea leaned into my side. There was no hiding. He was right beside us. “La plata! La plata!” I handed him my wallet and Azalea handed him her little money bag. My wallet only had a few dollars in it, as well as a credit card, my MIT ID (so much for breaking in as a creepy old alum), and my REI member card. The real prize was around my neck. I was wearing one of those secret passport cases wrapped across my shoulder like a carrier bag. Contained in this sleeve was about $70, my passport, my ATM debit card, my list of contact numbers, a 2GB USB thumb drive, a 1GB SD memory card, and a memory card reader. The sleeve was hugging my ribs on the left side of my body. I was only wearing a tshirt over it. This would not work.

In the moments before a gun was in my face, I considered popping the memory card out of my camera and sticking it in my passport holder. For some reason that had always seemed like a good plan to me. In the actual situation, I was afraid it would reveal that I was wearing a secret stash. Should I shove the camera down my pants? Should I leave it? I just dumped the camera in the side of the seat with everything else. However, when I saw they were moving everyone off the bus I didn’t know what to do. For some reason I thought they were going to ditch us in the jungle (they had been driving us deep into the jungle for a while now). It seemed like they could just leave us somewhere and drive off with the bus. I had no time to think it through. I grabbed my camera at the last instant and shoved it back in my cargo pants pocket. I was pulled off the bus.

You’ve seen it a million times in movies, but you never expect to live it. I stepped off the bus and before me on the dirt road were all of the 20 or 30 passengers of the bus lying in the dirt in a row, side by side, faces down. This could’ve been a road to someone’s house…or to a church…or to some exotic resort in the rainforest. But right now, it was our prison. At the end of the line was another man with a gun. I was the last one off the bus.

I was forced to the ground, my face in the dirt. I didn’t feel anything. But I felt that I should feel something. I should be afraid. I should be going into fight or flight. I felt nothing, only reflex. I imitated feeling. I pushed my face deeper into the dirt. Did this make me look more pitiful? More desperate? I shook. Did this make me look afraid? Would this make them more afraid of what they were doing? Would this make it more real for them?

Shots are fired.

They start yelling at Azalea for money. She has already given her money to them. They keep yelling. She frantically explains that the other man has her bag. They keep yelling and make her stand up. They make her go to get her bag from the man standing at the other end of the line with a gun. She runs over.

Shots are fired.

I hear Azalea crying as she runs back to her spot in the dirt, to my left. She is trembling. She has real feeling.

Brett has been taken back onto the bus because his wallet didn’t have enough money in it. They held a gun to him and made him get his bag. Then they had him press his head into a seat while they searched through his backpack. They got his camera. His dues were paid.

I was the last to be searched. I had brought my small daypack off the bus with me. He violently rifled through my daypack, throwing everything that was worthless at my head as I lay in the dirt. He hit me with my jacket, a couple of books, some snack food for our long bus ride.

I considered saying a prayer out loud. These people were religious, weren’t they? Could they step outside of the situation to see what was happening? I couldn’t think of the words to the Our Father in spanish. I said the prayer silently to myself, in english.

The man searched down my body and rolled me over. His search was thorough, and I realized it would’ve been useless to just put the camera down my pants. He found it in my cargo pants pocket easily. However, in his search he did not find my passport case. I am a walking commercial for the company that makes those cases.

I was lying on my back, looking up at him as he fumbled with my camera case to see his prize. I did something stupid. Looking up at him, I pitifully asked if I could have my memory card. Please.

“Hijo de puta!! Cierra los ojos!!!” (“Son of a bitch!! Close your eyes!!!”)

Shots are fired, right above my head.

“Policía!! Policía!!!”

There was a large commotion. Our captors started running into the jungle, firing shots into the air as they went. One of them was wearing my backpack, which was now being used to transport their loot.

I had no concept of time during this…it could’ve been 10 minutes or 2 hours and I wouldn’t have known which was more accurate. Some time after they ran into the jungle, another man came and shook me. He was trying to get me up. Were they back for more?

No. It was the bus driver. I quickly gathered my loose belongings in the dirt before me. A pair of wool socks dropped to the ground. I looked at it for a moment. What was I looking at? I left it and ran onto the bus with the rest of the passengers.

We drove back out of the jungle. I looked through my possessions. They didn’t take my cell phone, which was a relief. They also didn’t take my wallet. I checked it and everything was still in there, they hadn’t even bothered to take the $3. I was relieved. Eventually we stopped on a main road where a police officer took down our reports of what had happened. I listened.

Apparently a man riding the bus had asked the driver to stop somewhere to let him off. We were near Cascales, Ecuador. We were maybe 30 or 40km away from the Colombian border. When he was starting to get off, two men ran out of the jungle with pistols in their hands. They handed a pistol to the first man who was getting off and then the three of them boarded. I don’t recognize accents, but the Ecuadorian passengers could tell these men were Colombian by their accents. Also, they were not men. They were boys. Maybe in their late teens. What had brought them to this? I wanted to know. The driver mentioned that they might have been the same people who hijacked the bus a week before. What??? This would’ve been useful information before getting on their bus.

I went back to my seat having reported my lost possessions. When I got back, my wallet was gone. Another passenger had stolen my wallet. We searched the floors but it never showed up. I was in shock.

The remainder of the bus ride we were a little jumpy. Any time the bus stopped, people would yell “Cierra la puerta!”(Close the door!)” We did not want to stop anywhere else.

Eventually we made it to Papallacta and were left off in front of a hostel. We were alive.

My total losses:
Camera: $300
2GB Memory card: $95, 6 days of photos in the jungle (I had luckily burned a CD of my photos in Quito before leaving for the jungle, so I didn’t lose everything)
Wallet: Credit Card, MIT ID
Leatherman Pocket Knife: $60
Daypack: $15

Tips for being hijacked near Colombia
1. Pack most stuff underneath the bus.
2. Hide things on bus if you have time.
3. Don’t carry valuables on you, aside from a wallet with at least $20 or $30 in it to appease them (if there is any less, they will try to scare more out of you).
4. Do what they say.

Note: This story was excerpted from my original post in a travel journal I kept during a backpacking trip across South America in 2006.  The original article can be find on the Travelpod blog here (which apparently has over 27,000 views! whoa!): http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/rickwastaken/south-2006/1154664720/tpod.html#ixzz1z52Pi0ZS

I firmly believe that most anyone can be taught most anything, if given the right resources.  I’ve stated before that the future of education will be very personal, and there have been a number of recent reports supporting this trend.  However, there’s still a key hurdle that we frequently underestimate: mist.

When I say mist I’m referring specifically to the foggy notions that lead someone to believe a concept or activity is beyond them.  This unfamiliarity with a topic obscures one’s motivation and ability to even begin tackling it.  You become paralyzed by a debilitating lack of confidence that is all too often instigated by those who are best positioned to alleviate it.

Of course, many people likely throw up intellectual barriers simply to boost their egos.  When I use big words that you don’t understand, I point out how much smarter I am.  Math is hard.  This machine looks complicated.  You can’t wiggle a stick around in just the right way to get a manual car to move properly, that takes years of experience*.  Too many people throw up verbal barriers around the knowledge they’ve gained, as though they had to protect it in some sort of zero sum knowledge game.  But knowledge isn’t scarce.  There’s plenty to go around, and it should be shared as freely and openly and empathetically as possible.

While I’d hope my personal encounters with this phenomenon have been isolated incidents (the ivory tower seems to breed mist-makers), it’s unfortunately a pervasive annoyance.  There are mechanics, doctors, politicians, and pretty much any kind of superior with fiscal or egotistical motivations.  Mist is basically the tag line for Apple.  Users can’t do anything to modify or upgrade their iCrap on their own.  Kids are taught that they need a certified “Genius” just to help them change their batteries.  Little boxes of circuits are “magic”.  No, Mr. Jobs, they aren’t magic.  Dragons are magic.  Those are just well-understood tangles of wires.  And mystifying them is bad for America.  If you can’t open it, you don’t own it.  You won’t always find me singing the praises of Microsoft, but it’s interesting to compare them with Apple in this respect.  Windows-powered PCs seem built for modding and tweaking.  In fact, Windows 7 was even my idea.  The difference between these two approaches to customer respect is pretty glaring</rant>.

Clearing the Mist

Fortunately, there seem to be a number of anti-mist movements gaining momentum recently.  Wikipedia brought a vast expanse of knowledge to everyone’s fingertips.  Now you could find some ground when bullshitters tried to pull it out from under you.  A long line of cheap or open source textbooks and video lectures promise to bring even richer learning experiences to everyone (although these both fall short of the ideal education system of the future).  JOVE and Instructables have also built themselves on the idea of opening up knowledge in a more visual way.  Aardvark and Quora have built businesses on providing users with immediate access to expertise, allowing you to bypass information-hiders with murky motives.

These kinds of tools, largely enabled by the internet, have helped accelerate a number of do-it-yourself (DIY) movements, including one of my personal favorites, DIYBio.  It’s important for these initiatives to engage in early education and outreach to remove barriers for kids.  They can do science.  They can build a radio.  They can replace their own batteries.  I definitely wish I had been exposed to more hands-on work at a younger age.  I’ve seen this become an issue with many grown-up people who are constantly held back just because certain topics or tasks are a little bit mystical to them.  In fact, I bet 80% of inaction could be overcome with some simple demystification.  And that’s part of what this blog is all about.

<postscript>

*Ok, maybe that was part of the impetus for this post.  Some people told me driving stick would be too hard and I couldn’t master it in a week, let alone 15 minutes.  I showed them.  And I did it driving on the wrong side of the road!  Take that, mist!

Getting your communications set up abroad can be a real pain, particularly if you want to have regular international communication.  I’m spending 2 months doing research in Cape Town, South Africa, so I wanted to find a cheap solution for keeping in touch with people back in the states.  I ended up going with Google Voice & Skype to make and receive calls at a cheaper rate than what I could get using a carrier directly.

Of course I could have just used my Sprint Android phone here, but their international rates were obscene.  And I couldn’t just slip a new SIM card in (Sprint is CDMA), so I started off with purchasing a cheap new phone at a Cell C store here (local phone company).  If you’re also on a non-GSM phone, you should be able to purchase a cheap phone for <$50 wherever you are.

Receiving Calls

In an ideal world, your friend would call you using some sort of fancy VOIP landline, like Vonage, which would allow them to make free international calls directly to your international number (this is what my parents do).  However, landlines seem to be mostly dead among our generation, so you have to give another option for friends who want to call you directly from a mobile phone.

I first set up a Skype Online Number (previously known as a SkypeIn Number), which is basically a local phone number that forwards directly to your Skype account.  I set mine to be a local number for the SF Bay area, but you’d want to make it whatever is cheapest for your friends to call.  Whenever someone calls this number, they will be forwarded to your Skype account (so you can answer them from your computer if you’re online, and neither of you will be charged any additional fees).

If you then want these calls to forward to your cell phone abroad, you can set up Skype Call Forwarding.  This service will forward calls to a number of your choice whenever you are not logged into Skype on a computer.  The rates are a bit confusing, as you actually go by the regular Skype pay as you go call rates (they don’t have any special rates for the forwarding service – it’s treated the same as if you used Skype to call a phone in that particular country).  Some representative forwarding rates for mobile phones (charged to you, not your friend) include (from cheap->expensive): China – $0.024/min, United States – $0.024/min, South Korea – $0.084, Taiwan – $0.116/min, Japan – $0.177/min, Ireland – $0.227/min, South Africa – $0.268/min, UK – $0.291/min, Spain – $0.312/min, Peru – $0.352/min.  These rates are much lower if you’re having them forwarded to a landline (but then, you should probably just pick the call up on a computer for free directly).

Finally, if you really want to simplify things for your friends, you can add your Skype Online Number to your Google Voice profile, allowing people to reach you on your international cell phone by just calling the Google Voice number they’re already used to.  You can even set up rules and filters to make sure you limit who can actually reach your international phone directly.

Making Calls

In order to make calls, you’ll want to set up a Skype To Go Number.  This is similar to the Skype Online Number (that people call from your home country), but it’s a local number generated for the country where you’re traveling (you can create multiple Skype To Go numbers, too, if you’re traveling to several places).  Then, using your mobile phone, you can call the Skype To Go number where you’ll get a prompt offering to connect you with one of your contacts (you can set up to 6 contacts online beforehand).  This is obviously suboptimal as you lose access to your primary contacts list.  But it’s the best way I’ve found.  Skype will also let you adjust what number shows up on your friend’s caller ID when using this method (so you could set it to be your Google Voice number, so they’d have no idea you’re calling from Timbuktu).

When receiving calls, the only fee you have to pay is usually the small Skype rate per minute (most pay-as-you-go phones don’t charge for receiving calls, so you don’t incur additional fees from your provider abroad).  However, if you want to make a call to someone internationally, you’ll be paying whatever your international provider rate is to call the local Skype To Go number, plus the Skype call rate for mobile phones in your area (same prices listed above).  For me, this works out to 1.50 Rand (~$0.21)/min.  So I’d usually only do this to call a contact and then ask them to call me back (so I don’t get charged $0.268/min from Skype + $0.21/min from Cell C).

The Competition

There are a number of other players coming up in this field.  There are even several that could be cheaper than Skype (depending on which country you’re in).  It’s definitely worth checking them out for your particular circumstances, but they all basically work how I described above.  Competitors include Rebtel, Vopium, LocalPhone, TollFreeForwarding, and Ribbit Mobile.

Hopefully the Google Voice product will be extended to international calling soon, abrogating the need for this jerry-rigged system (and also giving you access to your entire contacts library when calling from abroad).  It would also be nice to see all the major service providers using compatible networks, so users can easily switch their phones as they travel (I unfortunately didn’t think about this too much when I joined Sprint).  But there have been a few perks to my brief romance with a “dumb” phone.  The battery lasts for days, and I can definitely trust it to start up and shut down immediately when I want it to.  Now if only the camera could take pictures with more than 17 pixels in them…

Update: According to @DouglasHwang, Skype fails behind the Great Firewall of China.  Lame.  Maybe one of those other competitors works, though.

I’m about to see some things that can’t be unseen, to learn some things that can’t be unlearned, and to think some things that can’t be unthought.  Within less than a fortnight, a significant amount of my genetic destiny will be revealed to me by the magic of consumer genetics.  And the suspense is killing me.

As a metrics and diy bio junky, I’ve been very eager to explore the essential blueprints to my being.  It’s incredible to even imagine that most everything I am can be reduced to a fundamental set of instructions based on patterns of just four letters (the rest can be accounted for by ‘nurture’, which for me is mainly an amalgam of adventure novels and Saved by the Bell episodes, as best I can tell).

When I first heard about 23andme several years ago, I was pretty sure the future was coming fast.  However, the price tag was still a bit steep for me.  Considering the Moore’s Law depreciation of sequencing costs, I just couldn’t rationalize the expense for a report that didn’t even cover my entire genome.  I even signed up for the Personal Genome Project in the interim.  Unfortunately, they still haven’t taken me in, and my enrollment seems unlikely given their preference for people with known rare genetic conditions.  So I’ve waited for the price to go down.

Happy DNA Day!

And finally an opportunity for low-cost genotyping!  April 23rd was National DNA Day, during which 23andme (named after your 23 chromosome pairs), offered their full package (including ancestry, health, and extended sequence access) for just $99.  This was a $400 discount from the normal $499 price tag.  Obviously, I jumped on the deal.

Of course, 23andme is just one of many consumer sequencing companies (including Navegenics, deCODEme, and Knome, among others).  However, 23andme offers one of the most complete offerings I’ve found.  They give you ~600,000 known “single nucleotide polymorphisms” (or SNP’s, basically just single letters in your sequence where you’re likely to vary from others in a meaningful way), including mitochondrial DNA.  Granted, this is just a small portion of my entire genome (only ~0.02% of my 3 billion bases, to be ~exact).  However, it represents many of the significant places (or loci) where I differ from you or anyone else.  It also includes many compelling factors involved with a range of heritable conditions.  And I’ll be particularly interested to learn things like my eye and hair color.

Some Reasonable Caution

Now, it’s not a terrible idea to take a step back and consider the consequences of such deep self-knowledge.  First of all, I have to ponder the psychological impacts this information could have on me.  What if I find out I have some rare genetic disorder that is reliably linked to a terminal illness?  What if I find some factors that would indicate the need for a drastic change in lifestyle?  What if my dad isn’t my dad?  What if I find that I’m completely boring, genetically?  These are all possibilities.  But I’m prepared (or at least momentarily indifferent) to their consequences.  I believe that understanding the root of your medical condition can help you make educated choices moving forward, and I intend to leverage any information I gain.

However, I am slightly more suspicious of the potential legal implications.  Just imagine a Gattaca-esque  world (by the way – notice the title is made of A, T, G, C) where your job, insurance, and even mate, are essentially determined by the strength of your genetic code.  That’s some pretty scary stuff.  And most people don’t seem to realize how close we are to this (at least technologically).  There are already a number of opportunities for genetic theft.  It will be very important for the government to enact some tough regulations that can withstand any assault on personal genomic privacy.  Fortunately, we currently have a law protecting us from genetic discrimination with respect to insurance and employment.

What I Hope to Get Out of This

It’s no secret that I’m a fan of data.  I’d like to be as quantitative as possible in my life choices.  Within the realm of health, this has primarily manifested itself in the use of activity-tracking applicaitons, such as CardioTrainer for running and Daily Burn (formerly Gyminee) for weight training.  However, my genome represents a vast bank of data that I could never empirically derive by phenotypic analysis alone.  I’m super excited to finally get access to even a small portion of this raw data.

Although obviously I could have accessed a lot of this information by myself using several methods (including outsourcing directly to Illumina, as 23andme has done), I wanted to go through one of these companies (and 23andme in particular).  This is mainly because I appreciate all of the additional analysis and formatting they provide in presenting the absolutely daunting amount of information contained in my raw genetic sequences.  They’ve developed some simple tools to show my ancestry, as well as my health risks (weighted by the reliability of the associated studies in a 5-star format) in a secure, web-based format.  Though I could collect and analyze this information myself, it would certainly take a significant amount of effort, and thus I’m willing to pay a service to provide this convenient user experience.

And speaking of user experience, it’s interesting to note the relationship between 23andme and Google.  Specifically, 23andme received a significant amount of funding from Google (mildly controversial since 23andme cofounder Anne Wojcicki is married to Google cofounder Sergey Brin).  But this all makes sense to me.  It is Google’s stated goal to “organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”  Personal genomic data is perhaps some of the most useful information out there, and Google clearly has an interest in organizing it.  Considering what they’ve done for the web, I’m excited to see what they can do to simplify genetic relationships.  And I suppose I’m about to find out.  All my base are belong to Google.

It’s amazing to think how much communication has changed just during my quarter century of life.  I got to see the rise of the internet, cell phones, and then cell phones with internet.  Bad-ass.  Now it’s hard to imagine what communication will look like 25 years from now, but I’ll bet Google will help push us there in at least some respects.  For example, telephone communications suffer from a number of obnoxious shortcomings that Google has solved through their acquisition and subsequent development of Grand Central, a service you might better recognize as Google Voice.

Sometimes Google makes awesome acquisitions

Google has really been on top of its game when it comes to acquiring awesome products (YouTube, Etherpad, Picnik, Aardvark, Docverse, etc.).  But one of their greatest claims has been Grand Central.  I remember a few years ago when I was using Callwave to transcribe my voicemails and Grand Central to control the flow of my calls from phone to phone.  Eventually, Callwave began charging for the service and, being a cheap grad student, I switched to Messagesling (deadpooled, unfortunately).  However, my investment in Grand Central was validated when Google acquired them in 2007.  But this basically lead to a lot of frustration on our end, as Google seemed to neglect the service for over a year.  And then, out of nowhere, Google released Grand Central again, but rebranded as Google Voice.  And the new service offered a number of improved features (including voice-to-text transcription).  This quickly became my primary telephony manager.

Google Voice has more features than you can shake a stick at

But that’s ok, you don’t have to use all of them.  But just in case you’re curious, here’s a summary:

• Call Forwarding | You set up a custom phone number (area code of your choice) that acts like a forwarding email address.  Anyone calling this number passes through Google’s pipes and gets directed to one or more of your phones based on individual and group settings (coworkers ring the work phone, friends ring the cell).
• Voicemail Transcription | Although the accuracy is questionable, I can generally get the gist of the voicemail based on the transcription, eliminating the need to waste time listening to most messages.
• Call Recording | Simply pressing ‘4’ during a received call starts audio recording (saved to your Google Voice account).  Unfortunately this doesn’t appear to work for outgoing calls yet, but would be awesome for keeping track of customer support communications (for quality assurance purposes only, of course).
• Searchable Aggregation| Everything is stored within arm’s reach, and it’s all searchable.  You can finally get your personal and work communications all together.
• Free SMS | SMS is the biggest scam when it comes to mobile charges, but you can bypass these rates using Google Voice’s SMS capabilities (via the web or the native application).  Although Sprint offers reasonable rates on plans with unlimited texts.
• Phone on the Interwebs | You can readily search your text messages and voicemails via the intuitive web interface, Android application, or mobile website (for those stuck with iPhones).  Google offers call widgets to ease communication even further.  I generally use the chrome plugin to manage texts and voicemails when I’m at my computer.
• Be an Asshole | Google Voice gives you lots of opportunities here.  When someone calls, you have the option to listen-in as they leave a voicemail, deciding whether their puny request merits a response.  You can also block numbers with ease, or set up granular options to forward to voicemail.

Room for improvement

While Google is definitely pushing some metaphorical envelopes with its Voice product, there are still quite a few critical envelopes looking for some pushing-love.

• Let’s begin with integration.  If you don’t have a smart phone capable of running the Google Voice app (including the magic phone), you have to deal with a browser interface, which makes the app basically useless (it would just confuse your friends when you call from a different number from what they have stored).
• Even if you do have the authentic GVoice application, there doesn’t seem to be really good SMS integration.  The app must remain open in order to receive notifications of text messages sent to GVoice (I circumvent this by having GVoice notifications forward to gmail, but not my SMS, so I get voicemail/SMS notification via the gmail notifier on Android).  However, this means you’re out of luck if you wander somewhere without a data connection, like Kirkwood at Lake Tahoe.
• Google still seems to be having trouble working out number porting, so you can’t quite port your current number over yet.  But they do let you make Google Voice your designated voicemail inbox for your current number.
• The Google Voice site seems a bit superfluous, and would probably be best implemented like Buzz, as an integrated layer within gmail.  I already have these events forwarding to gmail, but really the whole communication interface should probably be there.  Threading is also pretty bad in google voice, making SMS conversations a bit cumbersome to deal with.
• I still haven’t noticed much in the way of third party development on Google Voice.  This could lend a lot of power to Google’s platform, so it’s probably just a matter of time before it happens.  Especially considering the competition is playing this very angle.

Competition

Although Google seems to be safely ahead of its competitors, there is still quite a big market to grab, with a number of players reaching for it.  Ribbit has already promoted some early showcases of its salesforce-style solution to telephony.  Apple is also competing with Google Voice in some respects, trying to fascistitize it out of the app market because it’s better than Apple’s native interface.  Gizmo5 also had an interesting technology until – oops, acquired by Google.  Of course you can’t ignore the big old school fish in the new school sea, as Microsoft promotes their Phone Data Manager.  There’s also Jajah and Skype for calling, Skydeck to track calls, Zyb to manage contacts, Slydial to sneak around voicemail, and Jott to interface with messaging.  Am I forgetting anyone?  I guess it doesn’t really matter, Google Voice will take over anyway. U! S! A! U! S! A!!!

People seem to think credit scores are really important.  I guess I haven’t really seen the value so much as a grad student who isn’t taking out any mortgages, though it probably had an impact on my auto loan a few years back.  But I trust the finance people, it’s probably something to be concerned about when it comes to borrowing money for a car, a house, or a bikini.  But really, I just like metrics of any kind, so of course I became interested in credit reports.

Prior to discovering CreditKarma, I used to get 3 free credit reports a year using annualcreditreport.com (note: don’t fall for the catchy jingles, freecreditreport.com is a scam).  The basic idea is that each of the 3 major US credit reporting agencies is required by law to provide you with one free credit report a year, so I just made a note on my calendar to check a specific agency every 4 months.  But this doesn’t give your actual credit score, just a report of your current number of accounts and a history of bad things you may have done.  You usually have to pay some extra fee to get the score, unless you want to play a game of chicken with cancellation deadlines (which I’ve done before).  But I’m done with all that now that I’ve found CreditKarma.

CreditKarma is free and it’s pretty awesome

[See image gallery at overexpressed.com] CreditKarma is sort of like a Mint for your credit score.  You have to enter your credentials once (name, address, social security number), and then they’ll track your score on a monthly basis (but they’ll also check it instantly at any point that you want).  It’s important to note that these aren’t “hard” credit inquiries, so they don’t hurt your score.  It’s also important to note that a lot of people are afraid of identity theft and martians and other crazy stuff, but the company seems pretty reliable to me.

Beyond quantifying your fiscal dependability in a single number, CreditKarma also provides some nice reports breaking down the individual areas that contribute to that score.  They give you a letter grade and a percentile ranking relative to the rest of the herd, helping point you in the right direction to bring that score up to par.  On top of that, you can run a “credit simulation” to predict how your credit would change based on a range of choices (paying off your loan, getting a new credit card, selling your soul, etc.).  Ok, maybe not that last one.  Anyway, all of this is pretty nice, with the only real catch being the targeted offers they show you.  Fortunately, there aren’t any annoying pop-up ads, so it doesn’t really hurt the site’s credibility much…which I guess is good for a credit scoring site.

[See image gallery at overexpressed.com] Ok, I’m a huge fan of gmail. And I’m actually pretty happy with buzz as it’s opened up conversations with people I don’t normally interact with via standard web-based social networks. It’s also great how quick Google is to implement enhancements to these products. But this has led to one major issue I’ve had with google over the past couple of years – their updates frequently break third party plugins that leverage google’s API’s.

<rant>

Of course I wouldn’t necessarily expect Google to work hand-in-hand with every single third party developer, but they should at least keep some major ones in the know.  In this case I’m referring to Remember the Milk.  One of the most useful applications I’ve encountered on the web is the Remember the Milk plugin for gmail.  For those who aren’t in the know, RTM is a simple task manager that lets you easily add tasks by typing things like “Send in rent check Thursday”.  But really there isn’t anything that special about RTM when compared with the vast array of competitors (PhiTodo, Taskbarn, Remindr, teamtasks, Task2Gather, TheBigPic, Producteev, Basecamp, Planzone, and LifeTick, to name a few).  In fact, RTM really disappoints when it comes to organizing and planning big-picture goals (TheBigPic and LifeTick are both much better for this).  But the key redeeming feature for RTM is the gmail plugin.

The RTM gmail plugin is incredible.  It is one of the few utilities that I absolutely rely on to remain organized on a day-to-day basis (others include gmail and gcal).  And the key feature of the gmail plugin is that you can simply star an email and have it automatically become a task in the RTM side panel.  This is extremely helpful for keeping up with emails.  I can prioritize and postpone responses by relevance, and clicking on the task in the side panel will pull the relevant email up so I can address it right away.  These features are especially critical since probably 70% of my tasks come as emails.

Google Broke RTM

[See image gallery at overexpressed.com] However (and this is where my beef with gmail comes in), Google frequently updates the code for gmail, and many times that actually breaks features in the RTM plugin (with over 90 instances of a break and a required RTM fix!).  It’s generally only a relatively small break for a day or so.  But for for the past three weeks (up until late Monday night), the RTM plugin has been completely down.  This is, of course, because of Google’s wide-spread updates and code freeze associated with the release of Buzz, though we had no way of knowing that when the issue first cropped up in the RTM forums.

So it’s mildly frustrating relying so heavily on a plugin that is at the mercy of every minor update pushed by Google.  I’m hopeful that Google will try to work more closely with RTM in the future.  Or maybe they could improve their own native Tasks application to bring it on par with RTM’s other features (though that’s obviously the more monopolistic solution).

</rant>

Anyway, I guess the main take-aways here are:

1. Buzz is awesome, but Google needs to play nicer with third party applications, especially as we become more reliant on these cloud services for day-to-day work.
2. You should try out the RTM Gmail plugin (make sure to use the actual Firefox or Chrome addon, the labs gadget isn’t even close).  I don’t know how I kept track of things before it.  I’ve definitely had trouble keeping up with tasks over the past three weeks while it went dark (sorry to everyone for that).

I’m a firm believer in metrics.  I love tools that help you measure and track things as easily and accurately as possible.  This is probably one reason why I’m so interested in inexpensive diagnostics – to enable regular measurement of physiological changes.  But today I want to talk about measuring money.

People have tried preparing budgets and tracking spending all kinds of ways, ranging from simple spreadsheets to institution-specific tools to expensive software.  There are at least three big issues with these solutions:

1. Too much effort | You really just don’t have the time to manually enter all of your purchases, and to update budgets and goals in a manual fashion over time.  At best you start off sticking to it but gradually slack off and give up.
2. Not enough metrics | These methods generally aren’t very good for organizing purchases and making sure you’re sticking with goals for specific spending categories.  This is critical for sifting through the junk to get relevant information.
3. Too isolated | These tools tend to sit in a box somewhere.  Most likely on your hard drive, though maybe in the cloud if you’re using Google Docs.  You would really want something that you could access anywhere, and that could send you relevant notifications related to your spending and upcoming bills.

This is where Mint comes in.  I’ve been using it for almost 3 years now (since they started their beta back in the summer of 2007), and I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the features and reliability they offer for tracking your finances.  All you do is input the login information you use for each of your online accounts and Mint will automatically import and categorize all of your monthly data in a clean and intuitive interface.  Here are some of the best features:

• It puts everything in one place | No more searching for specific purchases on a clunky bank website only to find you can’t actually see more than the past 6 months.  Mint keeps all of your transaction histories in one place, with simple search and auto-tagging.  It’s really amazing how comprehensive it is.  I’ve got bank accounts, credit cards, student loans, and an auto loan all in there.  If you happen to have a positive net worth, you can even track all those investments you have.
• It’s automatic | Mint is generally about 90% accurate in categorizing my transactions, making it really simple for me to get a quick look at exactly how much I spend on any particular category in a given time period (for example, how much was spent on fast food over the past year).
• It keeps you in the know | The primary concern I hear is mistrust in a startup to hold their financial information.  However, I think Mint increases your security by notifying you of anything fishy going on in your finances.  You can set all kinds of alerts based on spending and account balance thresholds, and Mint will let you know by SMS or email if anything unusual happens (still waiting for an Android app, though).
• It helps you budget | The budgeting tools help you keep track of your spending during the month, notifying you if money is disappearing faster than it should.  This has helped me scale back spending when necessary. [See image gallery at overexpressed.com]
• It identifies trends | Mint offers some very appealing charts to help visualize your spending by category.  This way you can tighten your spending a little in areas that are hurting you most.  It also helped me identify a relatively small, but regularly recurring, withdrawal from my account that should have been canceled.  I was able to immediately contact the offending company and straighten things out. [See image gallery at overexpressed.com]

For those of you who are concerned about leaving all your financial information in the hands of a startup, it should comfort you a little to know that they’ve been secure for the past 3 years of operation, and were even recently acquired by Intuit, a well-established financial software company.  There are tons of reasons to love Mint, and it still surprises me how many of my friends haven’t even heard of it yet.  Now you don’t have ignorance as an excuse.  Go sign up!

[See image gallery at overexpressed.com] Any sufficiently advanced piece of technology makes you look like a badass around friends.  iPhones were cool when they first came out.  Everyone wanted to touch the screen and play that stupid teetering ball game.  The same thing will probably happen with the latest unnecessarily large iteration of the iPhone.  But you really only get a few weeks of drool-inducing awesomeness.  A month, tops.  But I’ve had my Livescribe Pulse pen for almost a year now, and it still makes me a badass around almost anyone I show it to.  Now I’d like to show it to you.

The Pulse

The Problem(s)

New devices don’t always have to solve existing problems, but they should at a minimum introduce you to a problem you never knew you had to begin with.  The Pulse solves several existing and new problems:

• Taking notes: It sucks when you’re jotting down notes on something but can’t quite write fast enough to keep up.  You miss some critical information and fall helplessly behind.  Problem solved.
• Actually using your notes: Ok, so you have a bunch of notebooks filled with tons of valuable information.  Now how do you access all those little bits?  Not so easy.  In an ideal world, you have everything uber-organized with a rainbow of plastic stickers.  In the real world, it’s a mess of spiral notebooks and you really aren’t going to be able to find that reference you’re looking for.  Problem solved.
• Sharing your notes: Yes, it would be nice to have all your notes in Google Docs.  But sometimes it’s just not convenient or possible to use a computer.  So then you have to resort to photocopies.  Even if you do have the notes digitized, you’re probably lacking the original audio that could prove relevant. Problem solved.
• Doing cool stuff in your notebook: This falls more into the category of problems you didn’t really know you had.  But what if you could touch a word and hear its translation into another language?  Or write a calculation and get an instant answer wherever you are on the page?  Or draw interactive elements on the page (like a piano)?  Problem preemptively solved.

How it Works

The Pulse pen fundamentally has two sensors: one to record its position on special “dot paper”, and another to record audio.  Both are incredibly sensitive and accurate, producing amazing results.  The pen uses a high speed infrared camera positioned right below the ink stick to capture images of what the ink is touching.  Livescribe has developed an incredibly large pattern of microscopic dots that are uniquely positioned so that a small look can tell you exactly where you are in the pattern.  This pattern was then cut up into pages and distributed into notebooks.  There are 4 spiral notebooks and 4 bound notebooks.  So when I take notes in Notebook 1, the pen knows exactly where I am and records all of my strokes.

Beyond just recording where I am, the pen can perform an action at a given location based on its internal map of objects drawn on the page.  The coolest example of this is definitely the piano.  It’s just something you have to see.

Docking the pen to your computer via USB will automatically transfer new notes and recordings to the Livescribe Desktop application.  The process is fairly simple and intuitive, though there were some bugs resulting from the release of the latest 2.0 software that have mostly been fixed now.  The notes are then indexed using some incredible OCR algorithms, allowing pretty reliable search, even with chicken scratch like mine.  The desktop application also interfaces directly with Livescribe Online, where you can upload “pencasts” (audio/text recordings) for public or private sharing.

The Features, The Features, What-What the Features!

Just to summarize the main features of the Pulse pen and associated software:

• Synced recording of audio and text | Enables chronological review of lectures according to your notes, and filling in any information you might not have been quick enough to jot down the first time around.
• Audio playback | In the notebook, you can touch any writing on the page and automatically play the audio that was recorded when it was being written.  Once uploaded into the software, you can do the same thing by clicking with the mouse, only now you’ll actually be able to see the text being written as the audio plays.
• Indexing and powerful search | Livescribe is able to index all of your written words with high fidelity, providing a single search box through which you can look up any notes you’ve taken in the past.  Third party apps could potentially index the audio, too.  So now all of your notes will be at your fingertips.
• Sharing and export | You can easily upload pencasts to the Livescribe website, marking them as public or just sharing them privately by email.  Your friends can then view the pencast right in their browser, or just download a pdf of the notes.  Registered users get 500MB of free space.  All notes can be exported to pdf and audio can be exported to AAC, MP4, or WAV. You can even embed the pencasts (try opening it in full-screen and clicking anywhere on the text to skip through the talk):
  Ben’s Plasmonics Talk 06.30.2009 4:08p
  brought to you by Livescribe
  
• Durable pen | I’ve been carrying it around in my pocket daily and still haven’t been able to break it.
• Long battery life | The battery lasts an extremely long time (I can record hours of text/audio on a single charge without getting near drained).  They officially say it can record 5 hours of text & audio, or 6+ hours of just audio & 12+ hours of just text.
• Plenty of space | The data itself doesn’t seem to take up very much room.  I only have a 1GB pen (they also have 2GB and 4GB version), but that’s been plenty for all of the notes and recordings I have made in all of my notebooks over the past year.  I’m only using about half my space so far.  And you can always “archive” your notes, removing them from the pen (but leaving them in your desktop software).
• Inexpensive media | The notebooks run ~$5 each for 200-page spiral notebooks or ~$12 each for smaller 200-page notebooks that are bound like moleskine books (they’re really nicely made for the cost).  The pens are also really affordable at just around $150.
• The App Store | Currently in beta, this is perhaps one of the most compelling features of the Livescribe platform.  The desktop software has an integrated app store through which you can download programs to your pen.  These programs can be associated with special printouts (like a balance sheet or a survey), or they can just work on their own with any piece of dot paper.  Some example applications include a language translator, a digital text converter, and a chemical structure recognition tool.  You could imagine a lot of other interesting applications that could pay off big for developers.

Cool Things to do With It

I really think the Livescribe pen is a valuable tool for almost everyone I know.  If you ever have meetings, classes, or work that requires written documentation, you should probably get one.  Here are the main cases I’ve used it for:

• Meetings | It’s great having this pen to keep track of everything that goes down at any meeting I’m in.  This makes it super easy to share what happened with people who couldn’t make it, or to give notes to people practicing a presentation (they can hear what they said, along with your feedback).  It also helps with accountability – you have an easily searchable record of what everyone said, so it certainly clarifies any later disputes.
• Talks/Classes/Conferences | I guess meetings are kind of a specific instance of this “Talks” category, with the added purpose of documenting decisions.  But the other stuff applies more generally (sharing notes with people afterwards, easily searching through them later).  And if you can’t make it to a talk, you can just loan someone your pen and ask them to take notes just like they normally would – and you magically get a set of notes synced to the entire audio of the talk.
• Work/Lab Notebook | I’ll discuss this in a bit more detail later, but I think the Livescribe platform is really awesome for lab notebooks.  I currently use a modified Livescribe notebook for all of my lab work, and it makes it incredibly easy to search for any past protocol or reagent I may have used.  It’s also really easy to share those protocols with colleagues.  And I think it’s more reliable for authentication purposes (and could be even more so if someone develops a digital signature authentication app).  On top of all that, I’ll be able to take an electronic copy of my notebook with me when I finish, so I won’t have to decide between photocopier hell and losing everything I’ve done.

The Competition

The primary competitor to Livescribe is the Adapx Capturx (pronounced “Captures”) pen.  One of the reasons it took me so long to get a Pulse is that I was waiting to see who would come out on top.  The key differences I’ve noted are:

• Livescribe has its own desktop app | Whereas Capturx integrates into Microsoft Office OneNote.  This is good and bad.  It would be nice to just integrate with an accepted standard like OneNote.  However, I’ve played around with OneNote a lot and I still don’t feel like it’s ready to be my primary notebook.  Additionally, I’ve read that the OneNote OCR does not perform as well as Livescribe’s custom algorithms.  Also, the desktop software enables a lot of other cool things, like synced audio/text playback and simple upload and sharing.
• Capturx lets you print paper with forms on it | This is pretty cool.  You can print out a spreadsheet, for example, and then write numbers in it with the pen.  Then, when you open that sheet on your computer, the numbers will automatically appear in a real excel spreadsheet (rather than just the image you would get with Livescribe).  However, this type of service is definitely in the lineup for Livescribe, and wasn’t a big enough deal to sway me.
• Livescribe has an app store | This was definitely one of the key factors in my decision.  The Livescribe pen has a lot of potential as a new platform that can be unlocked with active development.  I’m excited to see what comes out.  Though I suppose this does mean we’ll have to deal with some farting apps.

Overall, Capturx is more geared towards industrial uses and it’s not even available for direct purchase (you have to email a sales associate).  Livescribe, on the other hand, has firmly placed its bet on education.  Their pens target students for the most part, but I could see them getting picked up by others as interesting applications are developed.  Unless you run a large company and are looking to automate some data entry for a bunch of employees, you want to go with the Livescribe Pulse.

The other obvious competition will come from the onslaught of tablet computers.  I originally thought a tablet computer would be ideal for my purposes.  However, I have found it much more convenient to just use this pen and paper, particularly in situations where it would be inconvenient or impossible to use a computer.  It’s also much more informal and quick, without buggy software to deal with, making it perfect for meetings and lab work.

Room for Improvement

While I’ve been very happy with my Pulse pen (and I’ve even purchased one for my undergraduate researcher), it definitely has some issues.  The pens could be made a bit smaller and have less Jetsonian appearance.  The search component could be made a bit quicker and cleaner to navigate results.  It would also be nice for paper printing to be a bit easier.  I spent about half an hour at Staples trying to print some paper but eventually gave up (though the employee was super impressed with the pen and couldn’t believe these things were sold in Target right now).  It would also be nice to have more options for notebooks (I ended up jerry-rigging a solution for my lab notebook, which I’ll talk about more in a later post).  It would also be really cool to get some kind of video integration (like a companion camera that would sync the video with the audio and text taken by the pen).

Overall, it’s been a worthwhile purchase and I’d recommend it to any of my friends.  I gave a demo to my advisor and he immediately offered to buy one for everyone in our lab.  My parents were super impressed and are getting my sister one for her birthday (mainly to help with school).  You can also buy it most anywhere (Amazon, Target, Staples, Best Buy, Apple Stores, and direct from Livescribe).  It’s worth comparing because there are occasional discounts (10-20% off, or a free set of notebooks, worth $20).

I spent over two years using a fat clamshell phone with glittery rainbow and penguin stickers on it.  This would not be surprising if I was a 14 year old girl.  But I was that girl’s older brother. Aside from the stickers and clunky interface, the phone only had space for approximately 5 text messages (making me constantly have to delete messages to get new ones). However, the camera seemed to miraculously circumvent this limitation, as evidenced by at least 200 dark photos taken of the inside of my pocket.

The reason I subjected myself to this is not for some kind of comedic irony (as a known technophile, regularly comparing my Ericcson brick phone with the circle of iPhones I am generally surrounded with), but rather because I just didn’t see any phones come out during those two and a half years that were worth investing in.  And I’m not just talking about a financial investment (though that is significant as well).  There are also mental and temporal investments.  I have to learn how the phone works, get used to its strengths and flaws, and set everything up just how I want it.  On top of that, I have to invest time learning which apps are best and getting them to work properly.  And up until recently, I didn’t see any phone that was worth the money and effort for me.

The Rise of Android

My labmates seemed to think this was the most appropriate message for my birthday cake. Clearly they know me very well.

So what changed?  Google launched a mobile operating system.  This was a game-changer for me.  Before getting into why Google’s phone OS is awesome, let me just take a moment to clarify just what Android is and isn’t (you can skip this if you know more about technology than 80% of my friends apparently do):

• Android is an operating system, like Windows or OS X on computers, but designed specifically for use on small devices (such as phones or even microwaves).  It will probably be turning up on a lot more devices in the near future.
• Android is open source, meaning anyone can download the full source code and modify it for free.  This makes it attractive for hardware manufacturers as it increases their overall margins on a device.  This is comparable to what is happening with open source operating systems on computers (like Ubuntu or Google’s Chrome OS).  However, while computer operating systems have been developed for decades, advanced smart phone operating systems are still at the nascent stages of design and features offerings.  It’s thus much easier for an open source alternative to actually compete and grab market share from established systems much faster (people aren’t as committed to phone operating systems as many are to Windows, for example).
• Android is not a phone made by Motorola and sold by Verizon.  The Droid phone runs the Android operating system, but the phone itself is not made by Google.  An analogy would be a computer (phone) made by Dell (Motorola) that runs the Windows (Android) operating system.

Ok so now we’re on the same page.  But why is Android so awesome?  In my opinion, Android kicks ass because:

1. It’s open | This has a few advantages.  First, it’s free (ultimately reducing the bottom line on phones).  But beyond that, it is able to grow with fairly rapid development cycles.  Additionally, third party software is not regulated like it is on some fascist phones, leading to more creative and compelling applications.  Shady policies surrounding software moderation are even driving developers to quit the iPhone.
2. It unifies my phone-to-phone experience | It used to be that the only thing you cared about carrying over from one phone to the next was your contacts (and even this wasn’t a given – hence the many requests you see from people who have suddenly lost their address books).  But now you’d like to switch to a new phone and be able to easily port your contacts, photos, text messages, applications, and other settings.  If you lock yourself into a walled operating system and at some point you want to move to a cooler phone with a different OS, you’re basically out of luck.  But since Android is being implemented on tons of phones now, from every carrier, you can readily jump from handset to handset while preserving your basic user experience and data.  Google even plans to integrate a settings backup/restore feature to be implemented in the near future.
3. It’s backed by Google | And Google is awesome.  They encourage optimal user experience in an array of applications.  Almost every important application I use these days is improved by Google’s forward-thinking designs.  And although some people are concerned about Google owning too much of our digital lives, I personally believe Google doesn’t intend to do any evil, and they’ve made some good strides for openness and data portability.  Google is definitely in a strong position to revolutionize the mobile phone industry.
4. It is well-designed | Sure, some of it is just eye candy, but the Android interfaces are really aesthetically pleasing and generally intuitive to manipulate.  It also facilitates an unprecedented amount of customization of user experience.  It’s an efficient and enjoyable OS to interact with.

The Perfect Storm

Yet, even with all of the clear benefits of moving towards an Android operating system, I passed on the earlier iterations of the G1 and MyTouch.  It wasn’t until the HTC Hero launched that I was finally ready to make my investment.

The launch of the Hero was regarded by many as the first real competition for the iPhone in terms of performance and functionality.  While previous Android phones were still a bit buggy and suffered from issues with battery life, speed, and basic functionality as a phone, HTC really built an excellent phone here.  This phone also marked the introduction of HTC’s Sense UI, which is basically a modification of the Android OS to improve the user experience with some additional customization options.  All in all, the hardware was finally there.

[See image gallery at overexpressed.com] On top of this, I was surprised to find how appealing the actual carrier was in this instance.  The Hero was the first Android phone launched on the Sprint network in the US.  I had always used AT&T as my carrier (except for the brief period when it became Cingular and then eventually reverted back).  And Sprint was actually really cheap!  From some basic searching online, I discovered Sprint will give a discount to pretty much anyone with an organization email address.  You just enter your email address at this site and they’ll send you a link to your “Private Sprint Store”.  The specific rates vary, but for Berkeley this amounted to a 20% discount on plans!  So this made the $69.99 unlimited plan (unlimited calls to any phone, unlimited data, and unlimited texts) just $56/month (about half what it would cost to get a similar plan with AT&T or Verizon).  On top of that, I’ve anecdotally found the Sprint network to be really dependable in the areas where I’ve used it (Berkeley, San Francisco, Boston, Maryland, DC), and I seem to get better coverage than I used to with AT&T.  So this helped push me over the edge with the Hero.

The Downside

So it’s about time I get to the title of this post.  There are a few issues I’ve run into with this phone, but perhaps the most significant one is that of OS branching.  Basically, since Android is open source, third parties can modify the core code that Google originally wrote to add specific functionality.  This is like particular distributions of Linux that are modified to function/look a certain way (such as Ubuntu).  In fact, Android itself is a particular distribution of the Linux kernel.  So in the case of the Hero, HTC has modified the core Android code to implement it’s “Sense” UI.  This has likely improved the user experience, though I haven’t played with other android phones (but I have friends using the Motorola Droid who seem to like my phone better specifically because of this UI enhancement).  The downside is that now I have a very special version of Android that has to be specially modified any time there are core upgrades to the Android OS (which have been coming rather frequently with the a new version seemingly released with each new phone).

When I got the Hero, the most up-to-date version of Android was 1.5 (also known as Cupcake, in Google’s line of dessert-inspired names).  It was very quickly upgraded to 1.6 (Donut), but I wasn’t able to make this upgrade on my phone because of the modifications HTC made to the OS (without rooting my phone, voiding warranties, etc.).  Sprint announced an upcoming upgrade to 1.6, but then the Droid came out with 2.0 and the timeline for release has gradually moved back to the point where Spring has now said we’ll skip 1.6 and jump straight to 2.1, sometime in the first half of 2010.  That could be June.  And by then, 2.5 or 3.0 might be released.  So the upgrade cycle definitely lags thanks to OS branching.

Hopefully these sorts of delays will be reduced by adjustments to the core Android platform in the future (and as more phones offer the “full” Google experience), but for now you just have to be satisfied with the phone as it is when you buy it, knowing its OS could be obsolete in a matter of weeks.  And I’m definitely satisfied with my Hero, so Android limbo isn’t so bad afterall.