Life is a State of Mind

I want an iPhone. Sprint/Nextel is allowing their North American iDen network to deteriorate slowly. I doubt it is deliberate destruction, but I suspect that as components in the network fail they just neglect to replace them. I do not know this for a fact, but call quality and signal strength have been slowly slipping into the worse and worse category.

My i580 is still a rugged and capable phone, tough as nails, useful as a phone - but the network it is on is growing old.

My replacement Palm Tungsten C is having the same screen issues that the old one had. Every once in a while it stops taking touchscreen input… very annoying.

The iPhone seems to be the logical choice to replace both, though notes still don’t sync to the desktop (come on Apple, this is a show stopper). I am stuck with a smaller and smaller investment left on the Nextel/Sprint contract (March 2009 is the end of my two year lock), and at some point Apple will release a new iPhone; but to be honest, the old one is plenty good enough if they’d just fix the software flaw and allow notes to sync to the desktop.

Oh - it would be awesome if Apple bluetooth keyboards worked with Apple bluetooth iPhones… wouldn’t it?

http://technology.newscientist.com/article/dn13777

3 May 1978, first Commercial message on the arpanet, and it pissed people off even then.

You’d think marketing types would get the hint that we don’t like their crap in our inboxes…
Oh wait, that’s right, some morons actually encourage spammers by buying the junk advertised.

It makes sense.

People like Wright, Sharpton, Coulter, Malkin, Robertson all make their living off the polarization of different factions of the American populace. It’s their right. It also means that anyone who can reduce the polarization of these factions by bringing people together is a threat to their very livelihood.

Of course they are all attacking Obama. He threatens their way of life.

What makes Wright’s words so hard for people to hear is the fact that there is some truth to them. Wrong has been done to people of color in this country for hundreds of years. He has damned good reason to be mad. Sadly, getting mad does not solve the problem. Rising above the problem and reaching out to your opponents to find common ground and work together to really resolve problems is how you really improve things for Americans. That is what Obama, and more importantly, his supporters, are trying to do.

Can they be successful? Who knows, but it sure beats sitting around doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results… hey, that sounds familiar…

Forgive Wright his angry rhetoric, try and find a way to work with the people who listen to him and the people who disparage him. Bridging that divide is the real goal here.

I miss the days when server software was written in PL-1 or C and carefully run through Purify software to check for memory leaks by competent, and conscientious programmers who actually deserved and earned the term software engineer.

These days I spend far too much time managing rolling bounces of crappy Java servlet code because no one can even find the memory leaks in their hastily written applications.

After one week of being miserably sick, and then a week of slow recovery while still coughing a lot; with weekends doing living history stuff I have been unable dance from April 6th until the 23rd… Yikes. I managed to finally get into the Tyson’s studio on Wednesday night and again last night and I am hitting Centreville’s studio tonight and it is so good to be dancing again. Really, really, really good. I missed it.

I guess I did not realize how important this hobby has become to my happiness. Erci and I started taking lessons at the Arthur Murray studio back in May, 1996. We have not stopped since, and we continue to enjoy it immensely. We dance several places regularly, and we simply love to dance.

At times it has been painful (plantar fasciitis for me; knee, hip, and foot injuries for her). Often it has been frustrating trying to learn something new and not getting it for weeks or sometimes (rarely) even months. It is an expensive hobby the way we do it (costumes, lessons, shoes, events), but it is probably the last thing we’d give up. It is that much fun… it mixes physical, mental, social, and music interests. It just does not get much better than dance.

My favorites change from year to year, but samba and west coast swing are most consistently and frequently my favorite dances. For over a year I have also really loved foxtrot, quickstep, and rumba; but before that it was swing and cha-cha. I used to hate club swing and hustle, but I am finally learning the hustle step correctly and it makes even that dance much more fun. Mambo and salsa have been the biggest challenges for me, I simply can’t identify which beat is the one on many popular mambo and salsa tunes (I can clearly hear beats, but which is which is my problem). An excellent DVD explaining mambo clave beats has helped enormously… I figure I can find the 2 about 35% of the time now instead of 10% of the time… but that still leaves a lot of good salsa music out for me…

I believe that regular dance helps prevent or delay the onset of Alzheimer’s disease because it makes your brain exercise socially, mentally, and physically all at once. Dancing as probably helped prevent my getting much fatter than I already am. I have certainly met many fantastic people from many walks of life while dancing and at dance events. It is fun being able to dress up once in a while for an event (how many guys my age own their own tuxedo with tails?).

So I did a little forecasting along the remaining primary schedule for the 2008 Democratic nomination process, and it gets a bit ugly…. Here is one of many possible scenarios on how this will play out.

Today Obama has 1719 delegates, counting 232 super delegates, and Clinton has 1586 counting 255 super delegates. He needs 306 more to win out right, and she needs 439 to win out right; the magic number is 2025.
There are about 233 undecided super delegates now.

detailed state by state (or territory) analysis of how this can play out…
Continue Reading »

This is now a repeatable bug.

Everytime Time Machine tries to back up my MacBook Air (OS X 10.5.2) to our Time Capsule (v7.3.1) over our wireless network, the MacBook Air suffers a catastrophic crash (entire OS, the kind where you must press and hold the power button to reset the machine).

Time Machine backups worked fine until very recently, the only things that changed recently are the application, via software update, of:

• MacBook Air EFI Firmware Update 1.0
• MacBook Air Bluetooth Firmware 1.0
• Safari 3.1.1

So logic suggests that one or a combination of those three things has broken Time Machine.
I can disable Time Machine backups and go back to Carbon Copy Cloner for the short term, but I am left wondering what my Time Capsule is for in the long term…

I predicted a Clinton win in Pennsylvania, but only by 6% a month ago… so the 10% margin this morning is disappointing. I blame ABC News and that horribly moderated Republican talking point trap last Wednesday night. Television audiences are still huge compared to newspaper, radio, blogs, and campaign rallies. Even though it was a sham debate by partisan hacks, and even though a record number of people realized it and complained loudly on ABC’s own comment collection site, an astonishingly large number of people watched it and were influenced by the Rovian tactics played out by the so-called moderators.

It is clear that Democratic candidates who want fair debates should refuse to debate anyone unless they are moderated by decent moderators with a proven track record for staying focused on the pertinent issues… like the League of Women Voters. The League has an fantastic record, and only people afraid of a fair debate would refuse their moderation.

The over-vaunted “double digit” win for Clinton does not really change much. The bad news is this slug-fest of an election will go on through at least May 6th, and possibly longer now… the good news is that the primary will go on through at least May 6th and possibly even longer now.
Yes that is both good and bad. The bad is it means more free ride time for John McSame. The good news is that more state’s voters get to participate in the most important primary season in my memory. It is good news for the people of Indiana and North Carolina, and possibly good news for West Virginia, Kentucky, and Oregon. Possible decision points are now May 7th, May 21st, and June 4th… (those are each the day after primary elections with a fair number of delegates, though none have as many as PA does). Obama is still the man to beat because he has accumulated 1,719 delegates versus Clinton’s 1,588.

According to the New York Times there are 227 delegates between now and May 6th, an additional 164 delegates between then and May 20th, and an additional 110 between then and June 3rd. That is only 501 remaining delegates in the remaining states. Either candidate would need 2,025 delegates. Do the math… It is very unlikely that Clinton can win this on delegate counts, she’d have to win nearly all the remaining ones. It is now dodgy wether Obama can win this on delegate counts, he needs only 306 more; but that means averaging 61% of the remaining contests… the Pennsylvania disappointment probably means that this is going all the way to the August convention. It means that an endorsement from Edwards really matters.

One thing that baffles me is how can so many allegedly “blue collar” workers vote for Clinton? That is clearly a vote against their own economic self-interest. Edwards should be their candidate of choice, and I can see them not being enthusiast either Clinton or Obama, but the news is saying they are opting for Clinton. I am scratching my head in confusion.

Interesting comparison, probably invalid for dozens of reasons, but… over 2,300,000 registered as Democrats and voted in yesterday’s primary election… For a primary, turnout was very high; but several workers were saying it was like a general election. Was it?

2004 Presidential Election per Wikipedia:

That means that in the 2004 general election, more people voted for John Kerry than voted for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama yesterday. It means that more voted for George Bush than voted for both candidates yesterday. It means that despite registering nearly 600,000 new Democratic voters this cycle, the number of people who actually vote Democratic in a general election was under-represented. Some sources say that 52% of registered Democrats voted, if that is true then there must be roughly 4.5 million registered Democrats in Pennsylvania at this time… where were the other 48% yesterday? Where will they be in November?

I think Pennsylvania is a pretty solidly Democratic state either way (which is good news).

I just cut my tab feed for washingtonpost.com because their site has resorted to pop-under advertising.

Pop-up advertising is annoying as hell, but at least it is honest and ethical.
Pup-under ads hide in the background, behind your main browser window and try to trick you into clicks and options that are less than honest.

The Post stopped being a really reliable source for news some time ago, so it is no great loss, but the pop-unders is a last straw. Axed.

Update: Gah, turns out that the International Herald Tribune (iht.com) has started this same disgusting pop-under activity. Axing the IHT hurts more as they have been an excellent source of news from a European and South Asian perspective. They are affiliated with the New York Times; I wonder how long it will take NYT to go all slimy too? This makes two sources of news cut today… not a good day.

I am no expert on life, clothing, history of the American Revolution; but to my eye this “John Adams” miniseries on HBO looks fantastic. Costumes look right, the music feels right, the acting is spectacular, and the events appear to be dealt with more honestly than my schooling treated the same events when I was in school.

We are watching the seven part series on our PVR.