I forget when it happened but one day I realized that Schadenfreude had been a big part of my life, both sending and receiving. I think it's a big part of everyone's life.

The secret of a politician is to get rich and powerful without accumulating so much of it that you die a political death.

Schadenfreude is the reason that people seek out friends at their same level in society. It's why, when a friend gets rich he stops hanging out with you. Because the Schadenfreude you emit is tangible, they can feel it.

We kind of all wish there were no such thing, that we could rise above it, but perhaps not so much in the case of Mitt Romney. Here's a guy who soaks up huge quanitties of Schadenfreude, and it's probably why he's unelectable. Rick Perry on the other hand is so good at projecting anti-Schadenfreude that people think he's to damned dumb to be President, even though we'd love to drink a beer with him (not me so much, but other people).

Not a big deal, but I've been wanting to say a few things about Schadenfreude for a while. And I really like typing the word Schadenfreude.

 2/18/2012; 5:57:26 PM.   .

I read this piece on TechCrunch last week, in which a Samsung product manager says this about Apple and their TV. "TVs are ultimately about picture quality." Okay. That marks Samsung as one of the pigs in an Angry Birds game. Like Kodak and Blackberry in years-gone-by.

I was watching the Knicks game on Time-Warner cable last night, and remembered why TV sucks, and it had nothing to do with picture quality. The picture quality was absolutely fantastic. If you had time-transported me from ten years ago to my couch last night I would have been blown away. HD is great. Unbelievable how beautiful it is. And the sound quality was great too. I have some very nice Polk Audio tower speakers, and a very powerful receiver driving them, connected optically to the set-top-box. Amazing audio experience. Yet the whole overall experience sucked. Because nowadays while I'm watching TV, I want to look stuff up on the web, communicate about the experience on the net with people I communicate with. And see what they're saying. And who knows what else in the years to come.

And I actually do have a computer connected up to the TV set, so technically the signals are there, it's just that the TV is too freaking dumb to know what to do with all those signals. And of course that's what Apple is going to take care of. The same way they took care of Kodak. Because they realized, as so many of us did (in the tech world) that the great thing about cameras is sharing pictures. And the closer to real-time that happens the more we like it. There was a cell phone in our pocket, and a camera. Why not connect the two?

In the same way, there's a computer and a HD video/audio signal coming into the same display. Why not combine the two? It's not as if windowing technology were particularly new, it's not. It's just that old ways of thinking die hard. And that basically is the business Appe is in, taking advantage of people who employ obsolete ways of thinking. TVs are not ultimately about picture quality. In fact picture quality isn't even number one. Integration, connections -- that's the first thing. If I can get great picture quality, and you can be sure Apple will give it to us (probably made by Samsung) that's fine. But first I want to use the tool the way I want to use it.

 2/18/2012; 9:06:34 AM.   .