Apple Music Gains Soundtracks for Every Main Entry in the Final Fantasy Series by Mitchel Broussard
Alright Nintendo, the ball is now in your court. Work on licensing your huge backlog of soundtracks to various streaming services and get it done yesterday.
At least I know what I will have on in the background while I am working at home for a good long time.
79. Self-Learning vs. Online Instruction
Research shows that online classes are most effective when there is substantial interaction among the students and between the students and the instructor. In this episode, Dr. Spiros Protopsaltis and Dr. Sandy Baum join us to discuss the possible adverse effects of proposed changes in federal regulations that may reduce the extent of this interaction.
This is a great episode which talks critically about how online education programs can also fail those same people they are meant to serve. For me, lost in some of the discussion around “access” is that online programs have allowed professionals like myself to pursue higher education degrees when I would have just stopped otherwise.
A lot of time and ink is given to other communities, and rightly so, but I am very thankful for the online opportunities that I have been given and is part of the reason that I continue to teach online as well.
scale is the enemy by Alan Jacobs
But that’s a feature, not a bug. Scale — as-big-as-possible, universal-not-local, something-for-everyone scale — is the enemy.
I am coming around to this way of thinking in many aspects of life … and even technology.
Apple’s Terrible No Good Very Bad Earnings Warning by John Gruber
The other factor is that the modern — that is to say post-iPhone — smartphone market is 11 years old. It’s maturing, and in a mature market people replace devices less frequently.
I have a lot more thoughts on the bad downgrade to the coming quarter that Apple just announced, but my thoughts are not that important nor interesting. However, the anecdotes that I see bear out what Gruber states above: people do not upgrade nearly as often anymore. Coupled with he rise of the discount carriers in the USA and Apple not really having a phone to compete at the lowest levels and you are going to continue to see bouncing sales.
It is possible that Apple’s revenues are going to flatten out quite a bit. You will not see as high of highs, but the coming quarters will be even more interesting from the perspective of what iPhones sales are going to look like going forward.
There are, obviously, options for Apple to drum up sales numbers but the better question is what this new, hopefully humbler, Apple is going to look like going forward.
It was finally time to dig into my social media usage a little bit and make some changes. With that in mind, I have made, or will be making, the following changes:
Part of the reason behind the use of RSS is to curate a good number of feeds for high-quality content I want to read consistently. This will mean being “quick on the trigger” to remove feeds that I do not find valuable anymore.
That’s about it. So far I went the entire weekend without adding Twitter or Facebook back onto my phone. I am hoping this will continue and break me of some very terrible habits when it comes to social media and media consumption in general.