There are a lot of small drawbacks, but I like what they’ve put together so far. Some of the drawbacks come from the limitations of the iPhone itself, cut and paste is an obvious example here.

I like that photo attachments are included (kevin is attached.) The draft writing is easy, at least until you need to start dealing with HTML.

You can also view and edit a certain number of previous posts, which will be handy if I ever decide to fix the title misspellings.

As an aside, I just saw the commercial for Tropic Thunder and now I fear for the future.

Anyhow, as the misspellings in the title suggest, blogging on the iphone is by no means an expedient technique. I corrected spelling in the body, but the iPhone keyboard is still a drag. Thankfully the spelling correct/autocomplete helps speed things up. Oh, as another aside, how is it possible that I’ve missed the caps lock function all this time? Sigh.

Unfortunately, the experience was not without a crash of the app, which is a bummer. But an iPhone 1.0 app is like a 0.67 app everywhere else, so I fully expect improvements.

“Most of the world’s population today,” Johnson writes, “is made up of descendants of those early beer drinkers, and we have largely inherited their genetic tolerance for alcohol.”

I was about to reply to my last post (thanks for the discussion) but this George Will article crossed my desk, and I thought it was relevant to the discussion. Oh, and this:

Johnson suggests, not unreasonably, that this explains why certain of the world’s population groups, such as Native Americans and Australian Aborigines, have had disproportionately high levels of alcoholism: These groups never endured the cruel culling of the genetically unfortunate that town dwellers endured. If so, the high alcoholism rates among Native Americans are not, or at least not entirely, ascribable to the humiliations and deprivations of the reservation system. Rather, the explanation is that not enough of their ancestors lived in towns.

Nobody in the antipoverty community and nobody in city leadership was going to welcome the news that the noble experiment that they’d been engaged in for the past decade had been bringing the city down, in ways they’d never expected.

-American Murder Mystery, TheAtlantic.com

A long article, but an important story regarding public poverty policy. I hadn’t read anything that articulated this before, and it explains what I’ve seen happen to Madison over the last 15 years. I feel so uneducated about the issues surrounding poverty, that I don’t even know what to say about it. If decades of government neglect followed by another decade or so of government intervention have failed, what can we expect in the future? We can’t just give up.

I don’t have any answers, of course. My only suggestion would be to de-fund our anti-narcotics programs and spend that money better elsewhere. But that’s my solution for everything. 

1. Attention Mac & iPhone Users: Download, learn, buy, and use 1Password. Religously. 1Password is designed to make your web browsing safer, by generating a long random password to every site you use. It may seem counter-intuitive to have a long password randomly generated for everything, but 1Password stashes all the random impossible-to-remember passwords behind a single password. 1Password also remembers typical auto-fill info–with multiple identities–as well as credit card details in the same encrypted space as your passwords. If you use the “fill with identity” feature, you can basically two-click through the register process of most websites you’ll run across. After using it for several months, I am to the point now where I only know perhaps three passwords. It works with Safari, Firefox (including Ff3), and iPhone(!). Perhaps other browers too, but I haven’t tested them. $34.95. Wow, I wish I got paid to say that, but maybe it means something that I wasn’t compensated. It is excellent software.
2. There should be probably is a term for when a Google search term returns no results. A word besides “nonexistent,” anyhow.
3. I never thought Facebook would be useful, particularly in the light of classmates and myspace and the like. But in the last few weeks especially, I’ve found Facebook interesting on so many levels. What I’m enjoying is the indisputable fact that Facebook is the de facto social networking site. I’m pleased, particularly because MySpace is the giant <blink> tag of social media (and the schadenfreude of Murdoch paying $530 million for it.) The ads on Facebook are even useful. I discovered an album I’d never heard of (and is totally incredible.) Most importantly, I’ve been able to reconnect with so many old friends on Facebook. People I haven’t seen or heard from in 18 years. That is remarkable. Despite the fact that I’ve been running a blog (or at least some form of web presence) since at least 2000, very few of these people turning up on Facebook have crossed my digital path in all this time. Which leads me to my next point.
4. I see you Google, Yahoo, MSN, miscellaneous and sundry robots and crawlers of my website. Since you make up more than 90% of traffic to chrisash.com, this post is not directed at you. Instead I wish to address the other, ahem, 3 readers of this site. There are perhaps more of you than that. By and large, I maintain this site for myself. I have long-standing rambling issues, and the things I write about here are at least filtered by the exclusion of material from my journal. Nevertheless, I try to write nominally-interesting things. Hopefully humorous. Maybe informational. Possibly insightful. Whether I achieve whatever goals I’ve set for myself is one thing, but it is defeating when the majority of my non-robot traffic is arriving via a set of search terms that are totally unrelated to a post I made almost 5 YEARS ago. Furthermore, the one-hand-clapping nature of the dialogue around here is a bit disconcerting.

Some Communities Sign Up for Terrorism Insurance

WEST BARABOO, Wis. – Communities across the country and some in Wisconsin have signed up for domestic terrorism insurance. 

Local leaders said that that while the likelihood of a terrorist attack is low, it’s still an insurance policy that makes sense. 

West Baraboo trustee Brucer Meyer said that for $87 a year, the community is protected against many scenarios, such as vandalism of the water tower or contamination of the water supply.

I don’t know what is more absurd, the idea that vandalism is considered to be domestic terrorism, or that the insurance only costs $87/year. As an aside, one might say that we have already paid for terrorism insurance by way of establishing the disgusting boondoggle called the Department of Homeland Security. Of course, I’m not advocating that we use DHS to prevent teens from defacing water towers. But if we’re going to dump any damn thing into the rubric of le terrorisme national, then I guess we should be prepared for the coming wave of terrorist litterers, terrorist non-recyclers and terrorist public urinators.

Just as Ned Flanders “doesn’t believe in insurance, he considers it a form of gambling” we can be certain that in the case of terrorism insurance, the house has already won.

1. Noisy
2. Drone-y
3. Have at least 1 Thomas Pynchon reference,

Then look no further than Chef Menteur’s 2005 release, We Await Silent Tristero’s Empire. (Who doesn’t?)

It has a track called Charlie Don’t Surf, which I stumbled upon during the aforementioned research. It doesn’t sound even a tiny bit like the Clash song, which brings me to an important point regarding the Rhapsody music service: do not rely on their ability to have accurate track names. I’m serious, it’s a friggin’ deficiency with them.

Back to the album. It’s good, in a way that incorporates low-tempo, electronic noise, sweet ambience, rock guitar noise, and formlessness into something I could listen to at 3am while driving on the Interstate from Gary, IN to Chicago and surrounded by the rusting metal apocalypse of a formerly industrial country. It’s the kind of music I would play in my all-night coffee shop when I wanted the patrons to get really tired and leave.

It reminds me of the Jah Wobble/Brian Eno (oh, so sorry… Eno/Wobble) work, Spinner. I’m not sure what kind of music lover gets into this style of music, my kind, I guess. It sure isn’t for very many others. Oh, and Chef Menteur is french for “Chief Liar” which has it’s own appropriateness.

Around about the time our Economic Stimulus checks arrived, I decided I was tired of the sophisticated, understated look of the Skagen I’ve worn for the last two years. There was nothing wrong with it. I just love big, complicated watches. So, I went to the best place in Madison to buy a new watch: Dykman’s Time Shop. (I have bought several watches there.)

After reviewing several Tissots and Seikos, I found the Citizen Skyhawk A-T in titanium. My last several watches were titanium, and I’ve loved them so much, I don’t think I would even consider a non-titanium watch anymore. The lightness, scratch-resistance and color are just superior.

This is a BIG watch, both thick and wide. In other words, perfect for me! Let’s run down the features.

• Titanium (also available in stainless band and a horrible rubber band)
• Waterproof (non-scuba)
• UTC time dial, 43-city world time
• Radio-updates from Atomic clock in U.S., Japan or Germany every day.
• Solar powered with over 120 days of reserve power when fully charged.
• 2 alarms, chronograph and timer
• Slide-rule bezel (slide rule? seriously?)
• Luminescent Markers, backlit digital displays, AM/PM dial, battery status/atomic clock indicator dial, mode dial, radio signal strength indicator.

So what do all of these features give you? Primarily, if you live in the U.S., most of Europe or Japan, (and you’ve properly set-up the watch) this watch listens to the radio every night between 1am and 4am and sets the time to the atomic signal. I’m really anal-retentive about time accuracy (god knows why) and this is a killer feature for me. I have a bedside atomic alarm clock too, and with this watch I don’t have to sync the watch to the other atomic clocks like I have done in the past. I’m sure very few people bother to do this, but like I said, I’ve got an issue with timekeeping accuracy.

Since this is a world-time watch, it would be excellent for frequent travelers. The secondary digital display indicates the time in any of the 43 time zones pre-programmed into the watch, and it includes the ability to create a custom time zone for those odd places in the world where clocks are off by a fifteen minutes or a half-hour. Not that I travel often, or at all, but let me give you an example of a great use for the watch. Let’s say you live in NYC and you’re traveling to Tokyo. If your home time is NYC, you would set the secondary display to Tokyo time. Then while you’re in the air over the Pacific, you would pull out the crown, hit the two buttons for 2 seconds and the two time zones will exchange places, putting the watch hands on Tokyo time and the secondary display on NYC time (the UTC dial will remain unchanged, of course.) Useful!

I’m finding the two alarms useful as well. I have one general alarm for the “you must get out of bed now” alarm, and then a floating alarm to remind me to do stuff. The timer is being used quite a bit for steeping coffee in the french press on the weekends.

Due to the titanium, this isn’t as heavy as it might be, and I imagine the stainless version is quite heavy indeed. If I were going to change one aspect of the construction, I’d replace the “non-reflective” crystal with a sapphire crystal. Granted this would somewhat increase the already-formidable cost, but it would greatly extend the potential overall life of the watch.

In all, this is a lot of watch. I’ve owned many cheaper watches that had more features (compass, thermometer, altimeter, pager, etc.) but I think I’ve found the watch that I will own until such time as I can afford that Omega Speedmaster I’ve always wanted. My only hesitancy lies in the reliability of the watch. My last Citizen had floating hands (hands that change position based on watch function) and while I loved it, it ultimately broke and could not be repaired. Hopefully that issue won’t arise with this one, because I’m really enjoying it.

“What kind of food do y’all serve here?”

“Both kinds! Northern, AND Southern Indian Cuisine!”

1) Everything on the Internet is 10(x) if you’re a girl. Example: Apparently Scrabulous on Facebook is a Meat Market. I wouldn’t have guessed this, but a friend told me anecdotally that girls appreciate not being hit upon when you play scrabble with them. So that’s good to know. The corollary is, if you’re a dude on the Internet, someone wants your money. Someone being everyone.

2) I saw a twitter user who followed 35,000+, and was followed by < 100. I’d like to know what those in the latter group were thinking. I have a hard enough time following the 44 people on my list, and I’ve dropped some people with a poor signal-to-noise ratio. In any case, if someone is following over 35000 people, what are the odds they will read what you write? Probably, not.

3) I was reading a comment (I shan’t link to it, it was poorly written) about pc-mac-pc switching, essentially, a person who switched to mac and switched back. The commenter was complaining about Apple being too proprietary and also not a good choice for business users. This is fine. I accept that anyone can choose what computer to use, for whatever reason. What I will take issue with is the idea that because you can’t run Outlook on a Mac, somehow Apple is to blame for being too proprietary. Listen, if you can’t “make email work” when you use something other than Outlook, you should be complaining about Microsoft being proprietary, not Apple. Or you could complain about your own lack of adaptability, whichever. Bottom line: Find what works for you and use it without minimal complaint, or… you know… learn how to use something different.