Wiretap Anywhere by Ambrosia Software
Hi,
I’ve got to say that I’m extremely disappointed in the way you have handled customer information as regards WireTap Anywhere. It’s been since June that you informed us that it wasn’t going to be compatible with OS X Lion - but ever since then, you’ve been conspicuously silent on the subject. For those of us who use WireTap Anywhere in our daily work and registered it despite the high cost, this is scandalous, to say the least.
Your customers, which include some of the most prolific and vocal podcasters out there, deserve to know more about what efforts you are taking to get Wiretap Anywhere to be compatible with Lion, including a transparent record of what communications you are having with Apple in order to get them to cooperate with you on this matter. I’m not asking for a refund, but right now I’m sitting with $129 worth of nothing. I expect _something_.
Best regards,
Breki Tomasson
I feel sorry for the folks over at Ambrosia Software who have their most popular software destroyed by a Mac OS X update, but they’ve handled customer communication dreadfully since then.
I got an answer from Evan Smith of Ambrosia software today and kind of feel pretty sympathetic for him. I know they’re doing their utmost, but I still can’t but help feel they should keep us updated about things, even if it’s just: “Situation the same, still working on it” every now and again:
Hello Breki,
I agree with everything you have said. Unfortunately this doesn’t change the fact that I have been given nothing more that I can share with the public in terms of development or progress. The answer remains the same for the time-being. The product has not been abandoned and the developers are still looking into solutions. I’m sorry that I have nothing more to offer at this time…
The number of Christians around the world has more than tripled in the last 100 years, from about 600 million in 1910 to more than 2 billion in 2010. But the world’s overall population also has risen rapidly, from an estimated 1.8 billion in 1910 to 6.9 billion in 2010. As a result, Christians make up about the same portion of the world’s population today (32%) as they did a century ago (35%).
I don’t know why, but I think stuff like this is fascinating. Especially interesting is when you look at it in relationship to the geographic distribution of Christians, which has changed dramatically over the century in question.
Are we to assume that this - a rough third of the population of Earth - is a golden number of sorts and that the distribution of Christians on Earth will remain more or less stable? If so, then why? If not, then what would explain this trend?
I’d be very interested to see similar numbers for Islam and Judaism; possibly even Hinduism and Buddhism as well.
Source: pewresearch.org
Creative Frustration
One of the problems that I encounter relatively regularly is a sense of enormous creative frustration. I can go around feeling as if I’ve got libraries worth of stories, plots, characters, worlds, mythologies and mysteries in my head, but not enough time or skill to get them out of my head.
At no point in my life does this become more clear than when I’m reading a particularly good book. It happened a couple of weeks ago when I read Zero History by William Gibson and is happening right now as I read REAMDE by Neal Stephenson. I felt it when I read his Baroque Cycle, and I feel it when I start to find interesting patterns in the news.
I could be sitting on the train, listening to a World of Warcraft podcast, staring out the window and trying not to fall asleep when I suddenly realize that I’ve got the basics for an extensive story in my head. It features Iranian hackers, energy extraction from Thorium instead of Uranium, trade routes and their evolution since the 1600s, the Arab Spring, Russian nuclear equipment disappearing, the evolution of the Coal and Steel Union into the European Union and plenty of other things, all woven together in an interesting tapestry of intrigue and mystery.
That’s when the problem begins. I begin to doubt whether I have the knowledge and expertise required to do this story justice. Will people reading it see through my attempts and be able to shoot me down, exposing me as not having any formal education in nuclear physics? Will they realize that I don’t have a dual Ph.D in Muslim History and Intellectual History? Will they write horrible Wikipedia entries about me, exposing me for the fraud that I am?
Writing it down like this, I realize how silly it all sounds, but I can’t deny that there’s a huge creative block in my head, a Hoover Dam of an affair that blocks everything that I try to do.
I have no idea how to unblock my creativity. Am I just being too critical of my own creativity or is it something else?
Truer words never spoken.
