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So, I’ve had the iPhone for 7 days, and I’ve been around home and on an out-of-town trip. I’ve used it a lot.

I love it!

Any shortcoming notwithstanding, I love it.

Let’s get a little background out of the way. Since the iPhone came out, I’ve been telling my wife that my next phone will be an iPhone. In my mind that meant something like November or December 2008, after they’d worked the bugs out and after my wife goes back to work.

My old phone has been hurting since the day it went in the pool. Even with a new battery now, it’s standby time is barely 8 hours. That has caused some problems and so, it was with that in mind that my wife decided to buy me the iPhone. I was gobsmacked, to say the least.

I got it, just hours before we left town for our trip, so I had very little time to prepare and it bespeaks well of the iPhone that I didn’t need any preparation.

Irene gave me a gift card for the amount of an 8Gb iPhone (with instructions to buy an iPhone) so I went down to the Apple store at lunch and asked them for a 16GB model. I took along $100 in cash to pay for the difference. They wouldn’t take my cash! I had to pay the balance on a credit card. In retrospect, I suspect that was an overstatement of fact, I probably could have paid for some of the balance in cash and just used the credit card for a token amount. If not, how would I have been able to purchase an iPhone if the gift card would have covered the full price?

I wanted the 16Gb for a couple reasons, first, it’s twice as much storage (duh) and I have over 20GB in my music collection. Second, I knew that the 16GB models must be the latest revision hardware, whilst an 8GB might have been an older on that has been on the shelves for a while.

I didn’t have AT&T for my cell carrier, but when I went home and plugged in the iPod, the process of converting my number from one carrier to another went smoothly. The only thing that I noticed was that, first I received a warning that it might take 6 hours. Soon thereafter I received a notice that everything was complete, and, indeed I was receiving calls; however, I didn’t receive any text messages (except those directly from AT&T) until the next morning, although I was able to send them without difficulty the whole time.

I doubt I have anything particularly insightful to add to all the thousands of iPhone blogs on the web, but I’m generally pessimistic about these things, so perhaps there’s something to be said.

I’ll run through the software first, staring with the four major functions.

The phone. Actually, I have trouble hitting 100 minutes of phone time per month. I’m not a typical cell phone user. The phone is the least important feature to me, all I care about is that I can receive calls if there’s a problem and make one when needed. In that respect, it works fine. I’ve received one visual voicemail, and that worked. Neat idea, but I rarely have enough voicemails to make it difficult to sift through. I have notices a slight difficulty hearing the ringer, so I might get more voicemail than I used to.

The e-mail client. Works well with my .MAC and GMAIL accounts but can only poll them every 15 minutes at the least. The push mail to my Yahoo account works best, but I really hate using my Yahoo account. Maybe that will change. I can’t get it to recognize my lonelocust.com domain IMAP mail from hostmonster.com. I wish I could change the new mail sound, which is identical to the default sound in OSX mail. It’s not loud enough when it’s on my hip, and my holster insulates me from the vibration.

Safari browser. Most places it works great. The lack of a flash player has only bit me once or twice so far. I do wish they’d fix that sooner rather than later. Strangely, I cannot use it to log into my work webmail (Outlook web access) but looking on the net I see that some people have a problem with this and others don’t. Just my luck. Having the full web pages is great, but I do find myself bumping the wrong link with my fingers unless I zoom way in. Landscape mode works better than portrait mode.

iPod mode. In 16GB, I was able to load my entire Japanese soundtrack collection, my James Bond soundtrack collection and my entire selection of pop music rated 4 stars or better and still have a couple GB to spare. I can live with that. I haven’t played with it much, but one time when I did, I was confused when a song started to fade out right in the middle, until I realized it was an incoming call. Nice. Videos look good, really good.

The rest of the stuff is the little widgety things.

• SMS – text messaging, in a sort of iChat way. Works. I wish I could send MMS messages, or send a single message to multiple people. I love that it keeps the old conversations until I delete them. This makes it really easy to send a message to someone I regularly SMS with without having to address to them. I just grab my last chat with them and start typing.
• Calendar – it’s a calendar.
• Photos – Nice. I sync the last couple months work of my photos and they look great.
• Camera – It works, and it takes a decent picture.
• YouTube – I was driving down the freeway to Tucson (I was passenger) watching an episode of Fusion Patrol on my phone, over the cell network. If someone told me 10 years ago I’d be doing that, I’d have laughed at them. Otherwise, as with on the Apple TV, this is a stupid, but somewhat fun function.
• Stocks – Who owns stocks?
• Maps – The Google Maps on this thing kicks ass and takes name. The faux-GPS functionality works well, and the maps, even in satellite view mode are responsive. The freeway traffic conditions were accurate most of the time, too.
• Weather – So you don’t have to go outside to know if it is wet.
• Clock – World Clocks, Alarms, Stopwatch and Timers.
• Calculator – Basic, Non-RPN, Non-Scientific calculator.
• Notes – Notes to yourself, in a comic book font. Can’t seem to do anything with them, like saving them to a computer or loading them from a computer. Makes them less useful than they could be.
• Settings – Yeah. Stuff like that.
• iTunes – Haven’t tried it.

So what about the big picture? The hardware and the OS (if that’s the right word for it.)

I’m sure the whole world has seen the iPhone by now, and it’s a dandy little device. It’s about the right size to hold, and to hold to my ear as a phone.

The touch screen works well, but I find that the left side of my left thumb doesn’t activate the buttons. It’s as if there’s no electrical contact with that part of my thumb. Should I see a doctor?

The onscreen keyboard is too small for me, but it works. The auto correcting is truly frighteningly accurate at times, but if you’re typing non-standard words, it’s a real pain to have the system not correct them. (Accepting auto corrected words is as easy as hitting the space bar. In fact, you can type the entire message without ever looking and the auto correction goes on normally. But if you type something that you don’t want corrected, you have to actually reach up and dismiss the suggested spelling up in the text where you’re writing.)

WiFi and the Edge network. Connecting to WiFi networks is Apple-typically painless, and when you’re connected, it flies. The AT&T Edge network, on the other hand, ranges from tolerable to glacial, with no obvious pattern. When it is good, it’s really not that bad. When it’s bad, though, you’ll be reminded of the dark days of 9600bps modems on a busy Friday night. Still, even a slow connection is a great thing when you’re in the field.

Everybody mentions the physical ringer off switch on the side, and I’m no exception. What a brilliant idea! If I walked into a staff meeting and then realized I’d forgotten to silence my old Motorola phone, there was no way to turn the sound off without making a bunch of noise. How stupid is that?

Finally, I come to the area that I’m so far disappointed with. Battery life. It’s a new toy, and I’ve been using it at every opportunity, and there have been days, especially when we were in Tucson, where I’ve run the battery almost completely down before the day is over. As I’ve gone back to work I haven’t run the battery down, but I still drain about 50% of the battery down. Letting it go overnight without a charge doesn’t seem to be an option.

So, for all it might sound like I’m picking on the iPhone, it’s an absolute joy to have with me. I can easily imagine a time when people will consider such devices to be indispensable. I know my iPhone already is.

Technorati Tags: Apple, iPhone, iTunes, Review

From: Specious Report => Atheist Sees Image of Big Bang in Slice of Toast

“I was just about to spread the butter when I noticed a fairly typical small hole in the bread surrounded by a burnt black ring,” Chapman told local newspaper The Huddlesfield Express. “However the direction and splatter patterns of the crumbs, as well as the changing shades emanating outwards from this black hole, were very clearly similar to the chaotic-dynamic non-linear patterns that one would expect following the Big Bang. It’s the beginning of the world!” he added excitedly.

I’ve been itching to write a spoof article about this sort of thing for some time, but I’ve just never been able to come up with a suitably atheistic graven image… Really, I’m kind of ashamed of my lack of imagination.

Technorati Tags: Atheism, Satire

BBC shows like Ashes to Ashes, Torchwood and Robin Hood are now on the iTunes UK store.

That’s a start. Now, all they have to do is get them on the US iTunes store…

…or, I just need a sympathetic person in the UK and I’m all set.

Now, I wonder, why people in the UK would want to buy shows on iTunes when they can use the BBC’s iPlayer to get them free?

Technorati Tags: Television, UK, Video

The ARC springs a Leek…
(more…)

Knight Rider is one of those shows perhaps best left in the 1980s, but that doesn’t stop studio executives from trying to beat the dead horse a couple more times by ressurecting it (yet again) as a two hour telemovie.

Apart from it being just generally awful, the sponsors (Ford) didn’t miss the fact that the old series was one massive ads for Trans Ams.

In case the audience doesn’t realize that, they chose to populate the every 2.5 minutes ads with Ford and Mustang ads, too.

I have just a couple tiny comments about the show itself, which was generally waste of 2 hours of my life.

1- They should have hired Brent Spiner to be the voice of KITT. Val Kilmer turns in a typically bad performance.

2- What is it with the writers when they choose to introduce their characters by starting us off with their sexual proclivities? Mike what’s-his-name is introduced as being in bed with two women while the FBI agent is introduced with a little bedroom dialog between her and some woman she picked up the night before. Neither advanced the plot except to move us closer to the next Ford ad.

…or where they just trying to be edgy. I hope this isn’t because they’ve been watching Torchwood.

I know what you’re thinking: You’re thinking I’m going to review my new iPhone.

Well, I’m not. At least, not today. I feel I should give it at least one full, four-day weekend before making my assessment.

No, instead, I’m just going to touch on the Apple TV Take 2 upgrade that came down last week.

Basically, I could barely give a hoot about movie rentals because, let’s be honest, most modern movies stink so bad it makes that crap pit I used to play in smell like roses. Still, once in a blue moon a movie comes along that I might be interested in seeing, but not enough to get up out of the chair, so, I can see myself being an occasional Apple TV movie renter. They’ve got Inherit The Wind, a great movie, I plan to rent that ASAP. Also, looking at the available rentals, it feels like there’s less than 200 films – that’s just a perception, but the selection is, at present, stark.

So, completely ignoring the movie rental process, let’s see what’s changed that actually impacts me.

First, the menus have changed. They’ve been rearranged to favor renting movies, which puts my stuff at the bottom of the menu. Bad, but not significant.

Dolby 5.1 content – my content doesn’t have 5.1, and, as my stereo system isn’t even hooked up to my TV, irrelevant. But, that might change because…

The Apple TV is now an Air Tunes device on my network. This is a big Hurrah for Apple. I love Air Tunes. It gets my iTunes out of my computer room and into my family room, which, conveniently, is where my wireless access point has to reside. (Because that’s where the cable modem enters the house.) Unfortunately, it’s no where near the entertainment center, consequently, I had to decide which was more important: Stereo hooked to TV, or stereo hooked to my Airport Express. The Airport Express won because I listen to iTunes far more often than I watch TV and I want my music to sound best.

I’ve always felt this was a great idea but not completely reasoned out. Although I have no formal experiments to back this up, from the consulting I do in people’s homes, my impression is that very few people have their entertainment centers near their wireless access points. Not only do the cable people not care if the cable modem access point is convenient for you, a wireless unit needs to be placed for wireless coverage, not proximity to home entertainment center.

I’ve suspected this is why Apple has been phasing Air Tunes out of their Airport Extreme line. It’s a great technology, but I suspect it hasn’t been as widely adopted as they thought. Apple TV Take 2 solves that. You put the Apple TV in your entertainment center and you are 100% set to listen to iTunes streamed from your computers. Sweet.

Pity that they didn’t think of reversing the process, allowing the Apple TV to send audio to other Air Tunes speakers, but, that’s just a minor thing, that won’t impact most people.

Flickr and .Mac galleries are another improvement which I love. Being able to view photos from iPhoto on the Apple TV was great, but I can’t keep all my photos in iPhoto. There are simply too many. I keep on flickr, where I have unlimited storage. Now the Apple TV can display those or .Mac gallery images, plus it can use them for slideshows and the screen saver. No more wasting space on the Apple TV to keep pictures for the screen saver.

All in all, a good upgrade, and one that might position the Apple TV for a little more respect.

Technorati Tags: Apple, Apple TV, Review, Technology

Had to go to a Taiwanese American Association banquet last night. Not really my cup of tea, but I support the organization and their goals and try to help them when I can.

Irene and the kids enjoyed it, but it might have been a complete write-off for me if it weren’t for this sign in the window of the restaurant the banquet was held at.

If there’s one thing I learned in my college writing classes, it’s, “Write once, proofread twice, before you commit it to neon.”

Technorati Tags: Comedy, Commentary

Have you ever stood in an abandoned house? One that’s falling down, but inside it’s clear that it wasn’t completely emptied before the last inhabitants fled?

In my wanderings over the years, I’ve encountered several such places, and I find, as I look around, that I cannot help but try to imagine the occupants. Their hopes, their dreams, their life encapsulated in a home. Perhaps there are some derelict toys that speak of children growing up in the home, or perhaps books or other personal items. What were they thinking when they left? Where did they go? What was their fate. I find such places more than a little melancholy.

In all my travels, I’ve never encountered such a place like the one I encountered today. Nothing could have prepared me for it.

The abandoned property, the ruined buildings and mobile home you see in these pictures used to be my home.

My mother was killed in a car accident when I was three. My grandparents came to live with my father and me in Tucson. Perhaps because of the accident, my father, who had been a city employee, came to realize that working an 8 to 5 job for someone else was a pointless existence. He quit his job and using the settlement money from the accident, decided to pursue something that he really liked – gambling. Specifically, greyhound racing.

He didn’t go bet all the money on the dogs, nothing like that. He decided to be part of the “industry.” To that end, he purchased one of the boarding kennels that supported the nearby greyhound racing park.

It was far past the southern outskirts of Tucson, in the middle of nowhere. It was, I’m sure, barbaric by modern standards. The dogs were kept in small cages, some 30-40 per kennel. The dogs were periodically let out into a small pen area that fronted each kennel, and a practice track was along one side of the property for training – the kind of training where live rabbits were released for the dogs to pursue. Those were different times, to be sure.

My father owned no dogs, he just rented the kennels. There was a trailer on site and, for most of the week, my father lived there. He’d come “home” to our house in town on weekends, or he’d take me to the kennels for some weekends, and all summer – when we weren’t out camping.

A few things I remember most about the place:

• Cleaning and and painting the kennels whenever a unit was vacated. My dad always had the disinfect and clean out the entire kennel, painting all the cages a uniform color grey.
• Unstopping the drains. Each yard had what amounted to a sink in the ground. The dogs owners tended to flush their newspaper bedding down the drains, which always clogged them up.
• Hauling the newspaper to the dump. The dog owners were supposed to haul their bedding out to a giant cotton trailer that was on the property and when it filled, my dad would haul it to the county dump and dispose of it. Soaked in dog urine, it had its own unique smell that I’ll never forget.
• Playing in the crap pit. OK, this one is pretty nasty. The dog crap was disposed of by digging a gigantic ditch, 8 foot deep, 8 foot wide, 30 ft long on the property. The pit was filled from one end and sprinkled with lime on a daily basis. There were steps dug at the other end. When the pit was relatively empty, it was a cool place to play, but it is another smell I’ll never forget.
• The dogs. Greyhounds aren’t raised as pets and while they’re not particularly violent dogs, they’re also not socialized with kids. My dad would have to carry me through the yards when the dogs were out because they’d be jumping to get me. 40 dogs jumping at you is an intimidating for an under-10 year old.
• The desert. There were a few inhabited properties along the road, but for the most part, the area was unbroken desert. What a cool place for a kid with an imagination to play. Star Trek, mostly. Come to think if it, it was Star Trek when I was playing in the kennels (the cages were cool alien prisons) and the crap pit made a great subterranean world for playing Star Trek.

To be honest, these events in my life are so far distant in time that I have largely forgotten that part of my childhood.

I haven’t seen the place since 1974 or 1975 but I decided that on this trip, I’d make the effort to find the place. When my dad sold the place, the city of Tucson was inexorably moving towards the kennels. It seemed certain it was just a matter of time before they would have to disappear beneath the onslaught of the city.

I had been prepared for many things, but not this. It seemed the wildest bit of imagination that the kennels might still be operating in some capacity, but even that seemed to have a slightly credible possibility. That they might be completely torn down and turned into colorless, featureless modern urban house seemed most likely. Finally, I considered it possible that some of the buildings might be repurposed, but still standing.

Not being familiar with the area, I missed the street as we drove along and had to turn down the next block. That street was lined with soulless, new stucco homes. (Completely out of character in Tucson, but entirely consistent with the urban sprawl that is Phoenix.) Back on the street with the kennels was a different story. The empty desert lots had largely been replaced with trailer parks, and in the intervening time, those had deteriorated into slums. Almost cater-corner across from the kennels is a “new” and completely incongruous middle school.

Amongst all this, the kennels sit forlornly abandoned. There are no “keep out” signs and no fences to stop people from entering the collapsing buildings. The trailer I used to stay in stands wide open, the inside gutted.

Weeds are growing really well over the area where the crap pit used to be. (No challenge to spot the area in the panorama at the top of the post.)

Tumbleweeds have piled up and collected along the northeast corner. Some of the kennels have had their cages removed, others still have the cages with the dogs’ names written on masking tape stuck to the cages. (I remember often they’d write the names directly on the cages in indelible ink and my dad would have to paint them several times before the name wouldn’t “come back” through the paint.) Clothes still hang in some of the buildings. Muzzles and other artifacts of the day to day operation of the kennels are still in evidence. The kennels were still painted the same color grey and the smell inside had an uncannily strong power to bring back memories of the place.

It was if the end came, at first slowly, and then finally, they just walked away. There isn’t even evidence that a for sale sign was placed out on the property in the hopes of recouping some of the loss. It was just time to go.

I can’t tell how long it has been abandoned. Long enough for the ceilings to begin to collapse. Long enough for the trailer to be gutted, and yet the buildings are surprisingly free of graffiti. Tell me how that’s possible less than 50 meters away from a school populated by 10-14 year olds from slum-like conditions?

Words elude me as to how to describe the almost shell-shocked feeling I had at walking around the kennels.

I’ve got, perhaps, a total of three photographs of the kennels from when we owned them, but I was only able to find one. Perhaps it is fitting the picture I found is one of me in an empty kennel yard while my dad does maintenance in the background.

Technorati Tags: Nostalgia

So my wonderful wife got me a new toy for Valentine’s Day.

Ever since the great iPod in the pool catastrophe, which also damaged my mobile, I’ve been having increasing problems with the phone, and so… Now I have an iPhone.

In fact, I’m writing this on a traffic jam using the cell network connection. More as I get more experience with it.

I’ve just got too many bookmarks in my “blog this pile” this week, so, rather than give each the attention it deserves, I’ll just lump them altogether…

This one is just too funny, someone over at Fundies Say The Darndest Things has collected their top 100 list of the most nut-job, fundamentalist, crackpot religious comments, with some beauties like these:

One of the most basic laws in the universe is the Second Law of Thermodynamics. This states that as time goes by, entropy in an environment will increase. Evolution argues differently against a law that is accepted EVERYWHERE BY EVERYONE. Evolution says that we started out simple, and over time became more complex. That just isn’t possible: UNLESS there is a giant outside source of energy supplying the Earth with huge amounts of energy. If there were such a source, scientists would certainly know about it.

Ummmm… How about… the sun?

or

If your original Hebrew disagrees with my original King James — your original Hebrew is wrong. If your original Hebrew agrees with my original King James, your original Hebrew is right.

That quote is, no doubt, about the longstanding theological debate about which came first, 17th century CE or the 4th century BCE. Many a theologian has spent his entire career pondering that question alone.

Or, it might just be a truly dipshit comment.

Moving along to the lighter side, over at Google Groups, there’s an article entitled, “Christians: Tips to Doing Battle With Evil Atheists”, which reminds me of many a “discussion” I’ve had with Christian Fundamentalists back when I used to run the Crunchy Frog BBS. (Oh, so long ago!)

If only this article had been available to them back then, they’d have known important things like:

Don’t under-estimate their knowledge of the Bible. Many of them are more familiar with the Bible than the average Christian is. And they know all of the passages that will cause you a problem, and will not hesitate to challenge you with them.

or

Remember that while the Bible may be authoritative to you, like it is to me, to an atheist it is just an old book and has no more authority than the Iliad.

Then there’s the new movie, “Expelled, No Intelligence Allowed.” (Presumably, they mean, no intelligence will be allowed in the theatre while the movie is showing.) This is nut job Ben Stein’s crack at proving that Intelligent Design ought to be taught in schools alongside real science. PZ Myers, who blogs about this sort of thing over at Pharyngula, has been harping on their rear ends ever since the duped him into appearing in their movie under false pretenses.

In honor of Darwin Day yesterday, the movie’s blog site posted an editorial piece pointing out the injustice that Lincoln’s birthday was removed as a holiday and now we celebrate Darwin Day on February 12. (Lincoln and Darwin were born on the same day.) The injustice, they infer, is that Lincoln was the great emancipator and Darwin was just a racist who believed one race of man was superior to another and produced a theory of fatalistic pessimism.

Dr. Myers has produced an excellent rebuttal, which is worth reading in full. This sort of so-called argument is typical of the creationist loonies (and make no mistake, the Intelligent Design crowd are nothing but Creationists is Halloween lab-coat costumes.)

Finally, this weeks Skeptic e-newsletter has an excellent article that has nothing at all to do with creationism or religion. It’s just a solid grounding in reality about broadcast journalism, entitled “Journalist-Bites-Reality”.

Technorati Tags: Loonies, Rant, Religion