Tuesday, June 05, 2007

I miss Dad sometimes.

I miss dad a lot. Every single goddamned day. Every minute. I miss him for all the time we didn't get to hang out. I miss him during the camping trips where I wished I could ask him what to do.

I miss dad because I'm embarrassed that sometimes, I, the First Class Scout, have no idea how to tie something.

Dad was the victim of an AVM three weeks after our wedding, in February 2006.

Dad has recovered to the best of his ability so far; he has good days and better days, which is a blessing - he was home alone when his event occurred. I couldn't ask for more, but I have wished for it.

Love you, Dad.


Photograph by Terrance Reimer.

Labels: , , , , , , ,

Monday, June 04, 2007

Cluelessness Aplenty

Boy, the folks at News.com really have outdone themselves this time.

In an article about the iPhone's solidified feature set, supposedly revealed by the three :30 commercials aired Sunday night, News.com's Kent German dissects some things we apparently didn't know about Apple's new mobile phone.

Be patient; there's a lot of crap to wade through here. From the article...

Let you fingers do the walking:....On the other hand, we're unclear if locking the iPhone again then turns off the phone and data connectivity. Yes, iPods have always lacked a dedicated power button but this will be a new thing for anyone who doesn't use a Treo. Also, it looks like the Talk and End buttons only show up when you place or receive a call.

Nevermind that Jobs demonstrated all of this functionality on the still available MacWorld Keynote - it seems pretty sure that Apple will have the ATT Wireless folks do a quick demo. But if watching all 90 minutes of the Keynote is too much work for German, we can understand - he works at C|Net, the Fox News of Tech Journalism.

Making calls: After placing a call, you'll have a static onscreen menu for a variety of commands, including mute, hold, speaker (nice!), phone book access, keypad, and add call. .....

Voice mail: Much has been made over the iPhone's visual voice mail that will allow you to choose from a list and go directly to the voice mail you want to hear. It all looks quite nifty, and considering it's the first such feature, it should be one aspect of the iPhone that will be worth its hype.


Wow. German watched the commercials and summarized them. Did he go to the New York Times Judith Miller School of Journalism?

Texting: Like many smart phones, the iPhone will display text conversations in their entirety rather than displaying messages individually. We're not sure if it will support instant messaging, though.

Oooops. I guess he didn't watch the keynote. Jobs clearly demonstrates using an AOL IM and Cingular account to IM other users.

More on mapping: Thankfully, Google Maps are integrated as part of the iPhone. That's a huge step above many cell phones that treat Google Maps like a troublesome third-party application. What's more, you'll also get the satellite view of an area. For map geeks like me, that might be the phone's coolest feature of them all.

Boy, 90 minutes of research could have saved German a lot of embarrassment. He missed the part where Steve talks about using the Google Maps API to create a rich, unique client on the iPhone instead of the normal browser-bound Maps interface.

Did German think those animated red pins came from outer space?

He also forgot to mention PDF services on the iPhone. And the Yahoo-provided push e-mail - like Blackberry e-mail services, but without the expensive Exchange server. And he forgot a few other things, too. Split pane view e-mail, visual voicemail, weather widgets, and Apple's pledge to allow third-party development on the iPhone.

Oh - and the satellite photos on the maps. And the rich HTML e-mail on the phone. And OS X. Three sensors to simplify usage.

Still other things we know, some of which you've heard already:

Yeah...we knew this stuff already. Because we watched the keynote in January.

Nimrod.

Labels: , , , , ,

Geek of the Week

This You Tube" contributor made his (her?) own gas turbine.



Remember 50 years ago, when only whole countries could muster this kind of technology?

A picture of Steve Jobs' Jet, N2N

All Things D:5 - Jobs and Gates Podcast

Video.

Audio.

I really think that as grizzled old technology veterans, we're gonna look back on this as the falling of the Berlin wall after 1997's Microsoft-Apple Galsnost.

Labels: , , , ,