If I may, I would like to take a moment to voice my frustration. Not with anything particularly important. But frustration nonetheless.

Usually, I’m a big fan of competition between business. It usually leads to lower prices and better products and I’m all about that. (Come on wireless providers, someone take the plunge into affordable wireless PC connections!). But sometimes, companies that compliment each other well and together offer something great, do something stupid. Like trying to deliver the whole package themselves.

See, like people, companies are often good at one thing, while being weaker at something else. Hence wonderfully symbiotic business relationships. But, when those companies decide they want to compete with each other, rather than work together, I, the customer, lose!

Who else could I be talking about besides Apple Computers and Google.

I’m a huge fan of both of these companies. Apple does the whole personal computers and handheld devices really, really well. And Google does pretty much everything internet really, really well. Maps, docs, calendars, wave, voice? Hello! It’s freakin’ amazing. Google’s integration on the iPhone couldn’t be any more convenient. Google is even Safari’s default search engine. Of course, because that’s the search engine we all use and love.

But now, Google has gone and done something stupid. They decided they wanted to make their own browser (Chrome, which is pretty great), and their own OS (also Chrome, which is kind of a joke), their own mobile OS (Android, which the jury is still out on) and now their own branded handset which goes head to head with the iPhone (the Nexus One). By the way, did you know that Google doesn’t have call centers ready to answer people’s questions about their products? Yeah, even the $500 Nexus One handset. And of course, now customer service satisfaction is at a dismal low. Probably because it doesn’t exist.

(Interestingly enough, you know who does have call centers and one of the highest customer service rankings anywhere? Apple Computers.)

Of course, Google couldn’t just stick with what it was actually good at. Instead, they had to move into this whole new realm of physical devices and thereby forcing Apple to make other plans. (Possibly even with Microsoft!)

Now, Apple has bought a maps related company. Presumably in anticipation of edging Google Maps off their devices in the future. And, there’s even talk of replacing Google as the default search with Bing. Bing! Are you freaking kidding me? I know, it sounds crazy, but that’s what the rumor sites are saying. That steaming pile of crap they call a search engine is not what I want to use. I want to use GOOGLE!

And seriously, Apple, are you going to send thousands of camera equipped vans all over the world to give us street views for your maps application? No! Of course not! You’re product isn’t widely adopted enough!

Ugh!

So, Apple—please don’t be afraid of Google. Continue to embrace what they do well and give us what we want. Integration with Google and it’s horde of amazing products.

Google—Your web stuff is awesome. But your whole cloud computing, netbook, ChromeOS thing isn’t going to work out unless you also plan to give everyone dedicated, 100% internet. I spend too much time away from a wifi hotspot. ChromOS, useless. Stick to what you do well and don’t run my mobile computing experience into the ground by making other great companies choose lesser solutions.

Microsoft—Just start over completely.

In Conclusion

Competition isn’t always good.

This rant has been brought to you by my frustrations with the unfolding situation between Apple and Google. Now that it’s out of my system, hopefully it won’t come up again any time soon.

I went to Burger King with some friends today. They, as well as a handful of other fast-food chains are participating in some ambiguous charity involving kids and shamrocks. I looked around the restaurant. There wasn’t much explanation.

This little information flyer was sitting on each table. Unfortunately it didn’t explain much. It also didn’t make me want to give money. I mean, you’d think they’d have some people look over something like this and point out things that might be better reworded or omitted altogether.

$30 – Flu Shot. Okay, I’m down with that. Kids need flu shots.

$80 – One Minute of Research. Wait, really? Okay, I get that research can be expensive (never mind the fact that I really have no idea what they’re researching), but this really isn’t going to make anyone feel like they can help. $80 for a minute of research? I think we could omit that one.

$100 – Support Group Session. Maybe I’m missing something. I thought support groups were just a bunch of people in similar circumstances helping to support each other.

$150 – Physical, Occupational, Respiratory and Speech Therapy Consultations. Okay, so at 150 bones, the kids get to figure out what’s wrong with them and maybe even how to fix it. But with research costing $4,800 an hour, good luck affording whatever it is.

$300 – Initial Diagnostic Workup at an MDA Clinic. Okay.

$500 – Annual Repairs of Durable Medical Equipment. Ahem. “Annual Repairs” doesn’t seem to go so well with “Durable Equipment”. Just saying. How about “Preventative Maintenance”?

$800 – Week at MDA Summer Camp. Sounds like a blast.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure whatever this schizophrenic organization is doing is great. But I’m sensing there is a pretty crucial staff member missing—the guy who actually reads print material before it’s sent to press.

As I was taking a shower this morning it occurred to me what was spiraling down the drain. Water. Clean water. I could drink the water coming out of the shower faucet if I wanted to and I would be fine. More than fine—refreshed. And it dawned on me that it’s a privilege to have clean water as an abundant resource.

More than a billion people in the world have no access to clean drinking water. Most of their water comes from dried riverbeds and even puddles. And, oftentimes they have to walk several miles just to reach the tainted water. That’s crazy.

What’s even crazier though is that machines have actually been invented that purify water with surprisingly little energy needed, and fairly quickly. But there’s not very much money in providing clean water to developing countries. So, as of yet the technology project hasn’t picked up enough funding. Or course, I could be mistaken about all that. I saw it on the Discovery Channel, but can’t recall the name of the project.

So, for now, drilling wells is about as good as it gets. It costs about $5,000 to dig a well, which provides clean water to an entire village.

Reading over their website, I think that The Water Project may be the best place to donate money to provide clean water to folks overseas (although Water:Charity would be a cooler, though not necessarily better, option). TWP connects givers to various projects already, or soon to be, in progress. When filling out the donation, they give you the option to designate where your money is going. It even gives you the option to designate that all of your money be used for the actual building process. In other words, none of it turning around for various organization operating costs.

Being that water, just after air, is possibly the most taken-for-granted thing we have, and knowing that so many people don’t have it, I think TWP may be an really excellent way of giving some of our abundance to solve a really serious problem. I’m planning to give. You should think about it too.

It’s Sunday and that means it’s time for video blog number five. This week’s video was provoked by an AT&T flash ad I saw on a blog site. I’m not sure which one, but it was probably Appleinsider.

The video is short and speaks for itself.

I sometimes sit and think about how strange a time it is to be alive. In the world of technology, more has changed in the last 200 years than in all the time leading up to it. That’s pretty incredible. It means we have to be willing to look at everything with fresh eyes.

Even though there may be things that were true of the human experience for a very long time, they may very well not be true any more.

I was thinking especially about cameras. They’re less than 200 years old. In terms of an art medium, this is one that is extremely young. Even though we’d have difficulty imagining life without them. Which makes me wonder what kind of affect the advent of cameras has had on growing up.

It wasn’t until 1900 that the first camera was mass produced, and shortly after that it became something of a household staple. Regular families started having pictures of their kids. It wasn’t long before they started having pictures of their vacations, too.

What was it like for the parents seeing their children grow up with this crazy device that freezes a moment in time and saves it forever? It must have been fascinating.

The advent of personal video cameras, I’m sure, was a similar experience. When I was growing up, my family didn’t own a camcorder, but I was fascinated by them. I imagine that it would be a surreal experience for me to watch a preteen version of myself on screen. Yet millions of people now have that experience and don’t think twice about it. It just is the way it is.

Now it seems like something similar is happening again with the introduction of social media. Search YouTube and you will find millions of videos people’s children. There’s practically an entire generation of children that are growing up on YouTube. That’s bizarre.

It seems impossible to predict the effects of a rapidly mutating social and technological culture on Children. But part of me wishes I could start right now and experience it for myself.

sVery recently, a somewhat successful blogger, mother and Christian, made public her shift in thinking. More specifically, that she has become an atheist. I have to commend her honesty and bravery. If she was as active in her church as her post made it seem, she almost definitely has lost most of, if not all of, her church friends (which statistically among Christians would mean all of her friends. Of course, her own experience is all conjecture on my part).

I am not going to link directly to her post. Specifics aren’t terribly important and digital gossip is still gossip I’d like to avoid.

In her post which puts some background under he conversion, she links to a number of YouTube videos which decry Christianity and the Bible. The YouTube videos, like usual, take many of the harder passages from the bible and isolates them from the whole of scripture. Or, assumes a lot of things about the state of naturalistic thinking and the reason behind that.

In a few words, the woman remade these points with her own lexicon. Citing misogyny, slavery and child abuse as some of her biggest contentions with Christianity. Though in the length of the whole post, these were pretty small points. Perhaps the “wrinkles” in the fabric of her faith which eventually lent themselves to a full fledged tear.

When she really got down to a heated monologue it wasn’t about Christianity, it was about the Church.

This is long, but if you’re a Christian you ought to read it!

The woman absolutely did not want to serve as an elder in her church for a second term.  The woman did not like being an elder.   Being an elder was mostly about money.  How to get it and how to spend it.  She came to understand just how much money it took to maintain the large brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  The amount of money it took made her sick.  It was thousands and thousands of dollars every month.  She thought about how all that money could be used to alleviate human suffering and misery and instead it went to to heat and cool and pay a mortgage on a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  She thought about the hundreds of dollars that she gave every month to maintain the huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  She thought about how if she gave that money to a starving family or a hospital in Africa or a school in the slums of Brazil, she would be doing a much better thing than when she gave that money to heat and cool and staff a huge brick church building that stood empty six days a week.  But the bible commanded that the woman give ten percent of her money to the church and not to starving people in Africa.  The bible was more interested in the empty building and not the miserable people who were suffering and so was god.  The woman did not want to be an elder anymore because she wanted to forget about that money that went to heat and cool the huge brick empty church building, but the woman felt like she had to be an elder. Because that is what christians do.  They serve the church… or the the expensive brick building that stands empty six days a week.

What has she said here? She’s said, in extreme brevity, that there was a painful mismatch between the money they had and what they spent their money on.

In the case of this woman, it seems that her church failed to help her, or at least give her the tools, to iron out the theological wrinkles in her faith. If that isn’t one of the churches important functions, I’m not sure what is. But more than that, her church’s self-absorption led her to misunderstand the whole point. Unfortunately, it ended sadly. Though my own story must lead me to believe no one is out of God’s reach. There is still hope.

I’m heartbroken for this woman, and my own lack of faith leaves me fearful for the huge number of people in the current church system. The church cannot continue like this. It’s disgusting and stories like these are just the refuse of something that should be beautiful, but instead is disfigured and grotesque.

So, can it stop already?

Do you ever wonder why it seems like every movie looks awesome after you see the trailer? Especially action movies? I mean, we really can’t trust trailers. Well, not most of them anyway.

Remember the trailer for the movie Sunshine? It was the sci-fi action movie about the team of scientists headed to reignite the sun which was on the verge of extinction. The movie was alright. I enjoyed it. But it was nowhere as tense as the trailer had led me to believe. Or how about the movie The Day After Tomorrow? The previous movie from the doomsday director of 2012 and Independence Day? While ID was pretty awesome, The Day After Tomorrow was a pretty big disappointment, though you’d never have guessed based on the trailer. Or to continue down the road, how about the X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer? That movie was terrible. But for some reason I still went to see it.

I could really keep listing movies. In fact, if you’ve caught the drift I’m going for, you can probably start naming movies yourself. It seems that regardless of what movie they make, they’ve got the art of a compelling movie trailer down to such a science that absolutely everything looks awesome.

You just can’t trust the trailer anymore. Some people I know wish they wouldn’t show trailers for anything. I used to disagree because watching the trailer was so much fun. But now, seeing no other alternative, I’m beginning to agree.

I have a hypothesis as to why this phenomenon is taking place: It’s all in the music.

Sometime around 1993-1995, someone in Hollywood figured out that epic sounding music was a sure fire way to sell movie tickets. If you watch the trailer for Terminator 2, you’ll notice that it fits pretty nicely in with modern trailers. The music is the most epic possible mash-up from the movie’s score. If you rewind into the the 80’s and watch the trailer for the first Terminator, it’s borderline silly by today’s standards.

But today, enter the music from such commercial artists such as Corner Stone Cues, X-Ray Dog or Immediate Music, and it all starts to make sense.

These groups (which I must say I’m quite a sucker for. I have them all in my iTunes library.) make music that is specifically intended to sound like soundtracks, although it’s not tied to any one particular movie. It’s like a store-brand soundtrack. Feels and sounds like the real thing, but it’s actually not. These groups, and groups like them, appear in virtually all trailers that don’t feature a song from a pop artist. And the songs are so awesome sounding that a string of action packed scenes placed on top of them automatically turn to visual gold.

While it makes the trailers pretty fun to watch, it almost seems like they’re not trying as hard to make really great—or at least really fun—movies, cause they know we’ll go see them anyway. Though, that might sound a little too much like a conspiracy theory

I imagine at this point it’d be pretty much impossible to go backwards to the way things used to be, which frankly, wasn’t so great either. (Really, I’m glad the guy with the weirdly deep, raspy voice isn’t working so much anymore)

I suppose for us movie-goers, we’ll simply have to become more scrutinizing in our taste. Which movies we choose to go and see will have to send a signal to Hollywood that a really awesome trailer isn’t enough to get the eleven bucks out of my pocket.

You’ll have to do better than that, Hollywood.