Archive for the ‘Rambling’ Category

I'm still deep in the "add 5 cool apps, delete 4 after trying each one once, immediately add 5 more" phase of my iPod Touch love affair. My little mini-desktops are constantly spinning with apps that zoom in just long enough to wiggle the others aside before I bore of them and consign them to iTunes hell.

And yet, even with the amazing time-wasting bonanza available to me through the iTunes store — and that's not even counting the new world open to me if I ever hold my breath and jail-break the thing — there are still whole categories of applications I can't find. So, with a hopeful hint to restless programmers who just need a direction, here are the apps I want.

RealTip

I want to enter the total of my dinner and get the amount of the tip. But, and this is important, only after I check off boxes to describe my waitperson's performance, which would then positively or adversely affect the amount of the gratuity. Did she smile and remember everything, but spill ketchup on my wife's head? Was the food present, warmer than room temperature, and more or less on the plate? Were we treated to unwanted dinner theater involving our waiter and his ex-girlfriend-who-still-lives-with-him? Were we left waiting less than the time it would have taken to hunt, kill, and prepare the food ourselves? RealTip should take it all into account and give me a total I can live with.

GeoPerv

Not sure about your new neighbor? Shivering whenever you walk by your new babysitter? Wondering why your date seems so creepy? Snap a surreptitious pic of him and GeoPerv will instantly compare it to the local sexual offenders database (determined by geolocation) and "To Catch a Predator" reruns.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Fnords have come to the iPhone and iPod Touch!

The newly launched app from Steve Jackson Games allows the Illuminati to send you messages… more obviously than usual, I mean.

Use it to boggle your friends… or ask it for help when you need to make a decision. Think of it as an I Ching for paranoids.

Also comes with stylish Illuminated wallpaper you can use for your iPhone or iTouch.

Free app, and worth every shekel.

So where's the iPhone version of the Principia Discordia?

In other news, I got an iPod Touch. You'll hear more of this later. Oh, yes.

Breastfeed your child on Facebook, even in a private account only friends can see, and Facebook will frown upon you. That's what happened to Heather Farley, who was told to remove a photo she'd posted of herself. She wrote and asked why, and upon receiving nothing back she posted another, only to be told to lose it or lose her account entirely.

This has resulted in some bad publicity for Facebook and a new group, "Hey Facebook, Breastfeeding in Public is not Obscene" which quickly grew to over 90,000 members, 11,000 comments, and over 3,000 breastfeeding photos (along with paintings of Madonna and Child, and a few Hooters pics that snuck in there). In the face of this public outcry and public picketing, will Facebook change its TOS to accommodate such images, which it says violates their no-aureole policy?

Probably not. (Although shouldn't that mean that BF pictures that are aureoleless are OK?) But as long as we're removing images from Facebook that are patently offensive to the eye, I'd like to suggest they take care of the following:

– Guys with hairy backs, wearing thongs.

– Any "cute dog" picture, especially involving costumes, where the poor animal is clearly begging for death's sweet release.

– Women with hairy backs, wearing thongs.

– Photoshopped images of Sarah Palin. That ship has sailed, my friend.

– Pictures of injuries, abcesses, running sores, open wounds, or gangrenous feet posted with a "hey, check this out" message.

– Dangerously ugly people. You know who you are.

– Profile pics cranked out by the latest make-your-own-avatar fad in the forms of anime characters, elves, M&Ms, vampires, or rotting pirates that look just like the other 3,000,000 avatars that everyone else made.

– Pictures of drunken hijinks, unless the person involved is attractive enough to overcome the stigma of red eyes, slack jaws, goofy grins, and dried vomit. Very few people are.

– Any vacation pics where the person in frame is cleverly positioned so that it appears he or she is holding up a massive monument. Honestly, we're all rooting for the monument to fall and crush you. Seriously.

– Any profile photo made "artsy" by the application of a single, apparently random Photoshop filter.

– Any picture of a person with a design shaved into their hair, at any location.

– Pictures of your adorable children doing something that would get a grownup put in prison.

– Any topless man boasting more than a B cup.

So, Facebook, as long as you're being arbiters of good taste, let's get on these, OK? Any one of them — or, shudder, any combination — is far more offensive to me than an infant suckling at a mother's breast.

I love this specific time of year. 2 o'clock in the morning, Christmas day. This is when things happen.

This is the magic time when bikes get assembled, game systems get quietly hooked up, surprise presents make their appearance from carefully concealed locations, and a few cookies get eaten.

Everyone in the house is asleep. I feel like I should be doing something. Finished up a last-minute gift for Teres she's not expecting, but it's not a big deal (new homemade bumper stickers to replace the ones she's worn out, a match set of "I LOVE BON JOVI" and 'AND MY HUBBY TOO, PROBABLY"). I'm used to extravagant surprises. Our Christmas mornings used to involve a fair amount of showmanship.

One morning many years back, my oldest (only, at the time) son woke abruptly at six in the morning to see Santa Claus, white beard,, red suit, hat and all, leaning over him. Santa told him "Merry Christmas, Tony," smiled, and ran for it. By the time he struggled out of his carefully-tucked-in sheets and came after me, I was in my own bed, unKringled and snoring better than Gielgud. The rest of the day his presents were almost untouched; he was still raving about his visitor.

Read the rest of this entry »

• @templesmith I think his problem is he's been a little vague on everything lately. I'd just rather pick the battles he can't defend. #
• @templesmith Love to see someone pick lines out McC's last few speeches and compare them to Bush speeches. More of the same… #
• @templesmith I think that's why Lieberman would be a good veep for him. Another honorable man who seems to have strayed from his principles. #
• Just spent a half hour updating book covers in my LibraryThing account. Not sure why. I'm going to bed now. #
• The strip will be posted tonight. I have decided to blame Tropical Storm Fay for this and all other delays in my life, for at least a month. #
• McCain has announced his running mate: his POW story. His story will accompany him to all functions, and in need will take over the office. #
• Buying a home in Florida? Now's the time to drive around and see where it floods… #
• Five days of steady rain, massive flooding, and two more storm systems forming out in the Atlantic. Welcome to the Sunshine State! #
• Apparently the no-fly list really only protects terrorists. I feel so much safer. http://tinyurl.com/59z99s #
• Currently working up flood photos and being very thankful we didn't have to wade out of our house this morning. #
• Blog: Don't make Superman dark, make him Superman http://tinyurl.com/5zcv39 #

From Thinkprogress.org: "The Presidential Memorial Commission of San Francisco has just recently submitted enough signatures to city election officials ' hoping to place on the ballot an initiative that would rechristen the Oceanside Water Pollution Control Plant as the George W. Bush Sewage Plant.' But on CBC radio last Friday, one of the commission's founders, Brian McConnell, said the group ran in to some unexpected opposition to changing the name: "What we didn't expect was that most of the opposition was coming from people who didn't want to name anything. They just wanted to forget about the past eight years and move on or they felt that this is a facility that does something really quite useful and it would be inappropriate to put his name on it. . . . If you get to the point where people are defending the sewage plant, that's a sign that things have not gone so well."

Well, we have the battle I was really hoping for: Obama/McCain. I didn't think I'd get it, but I'm really looking forward to the next few months. I was really, truly terrified we'd have a Clinton/Giuliani race and I figured that was about it for bi-partisanship in the United States.

However, while I have said in the past that I favor Obama but wouldn't mind McCain in the president's chair, I may have to retract that. McCain has apparently changed his views on presidential power in the last six months. Where he condemned warrentless wiretapping before, now he seems to be condoning it. I want a president who will return the executive branch to being only 1/3 of the government.

The January edition of The Writer magazine (on sale now) has a feature on writing flasher stories and there's an entire story on the cover with a familiar byline. Turns out I can write short stories and three years of newspaper columns with little recognition, and a quickie story I wrote for the heck of it for BirdandMoon.com's 55-word challenge gets me the cover. Gotta love it.

Here's the whole thing (but you should buy a copy anyway, for more comments from me and a nice long article on short, short stories). 55 words, not counting the title.

He Met Her

He met her at the club, lights flashing, music battering.

"So, you heard about my job."

"Yeah."

"But you know, I've learned something. With your love, I can go on even without the big bucks."

"I've learned something, too."

"Really?"

"Yes. I'm much more shallow than I thought."

And she smiled, sadly, and walked away.

Earlier this year I had a mini-stroke that put me in the hospital for three days. Last night I drove home through thunderstorms to find my computer hard drive had been fried to a nice toasty brown. Overall, I'd say the mini-stroke was more fun. At least then I got morphine.

If you've never lost a hard drive, the comparison isn't as odd as you might think. You're caught by surprise, shocked at the suddenness and unfairness of it. The feeling of loss, of frustration, of not being able to do everything you once took for granted; all that crashes down on you and you're left with a pounding headache and an unanswered plea to the deity of your choice.

Although in my experience, with a computer crash you tend to kick things more.

Last night I was too stunned to react. Flipped the switch a few times, listened to my hard drive go click, click, click, and gave up. Wandered listlessly around the house. Considered going my traditional computer repair route but couldn't find the hammer. Spent some time cursing creatively. Sacked out and watched six hours of network television, which is never a good thing to do if you're already depressed and looking for something to make you feel better about life. My wife tried to cheer me up but quit when I kept trying to move her around the room to get a stronger network signal.

What makes the feeling worse is the knowledge that it was preventable, the nagging suspicion that you asked for this, you idiot. You know all the stuff you're supposed to do so this doesn't happen. You should have eaten better, you should have exercised more, you should have protected your surges, you should have performed regular backups. And I work with computers for a living, which just grinds in that extra little salt-in-the-wounds annoyance. It's like being a nutritionist with scurvy.

And it's just sitting there. You know, deep in your heart, that if you manage to turn the computer on in just the right way it'll work. It usually takes 30 or 40 tries and a few more kicks to get past that stage.

I've got my software, and a lot of the things I do is online somewhere so getting all that back is no problem. I even backed some stuff up sometimes, which will be a big help if I can remember where the discs are. But the last few years of e-mail, my contact lists, my working files . . . without warning I lost a lot of my memory, leaving me grasping, confused, and in need of meds.

(I also lost my drafts for today's column, so you narrowly missed hearing my dazzling pearls of wisdom on such heady topics as CBS printing its advertising on eggs and Don Knotts' widow objecting to a proposed statue of her husband as Barney Fife. Even disasters have their upsides.)

Today the long, painful, expensive road to recovery begins. I'll start assessing my system, trying to see what still works and what doesn't. I'll seek professional help, which has its own horrors. I won't have to deal with medication, or physical therapists bending my untoned self back and forth, but I will have to suffer the PC guy who tries to retrieve my hard drive data snickering at my musical tastes and loudly asking why my collection of educational films all have "Brandi" in the filename.

I'll also have to open my computer box and move things about, which never goes well for me. You know that car commercial where it drives by and other cars crumble and fade into dust as it passes? I have that effect on computer innards. The merest glance can melt circuit boards and short wires. Easy, illustrated installations with only two instructions (1. Plug this in. 2. Smile proudly.) invariably require three frustrated tech support calls and one shameful retail exchange of the still faintly smoking component.

On the plus side, I now have a reason why I haven't responded to any of the e-mail that has been piling up in my inbox since my last system crash in 2002. And I can take the plunge and buy a whole new system, an option I was regrettably not given after my mini-stroke (probably not in my HMO).

Soon, probably by this weekend, I will have figured out what's broke. With the help of friends and extremely patient salespeople I will have fixed this computer and/or assembled a new one. I will have gone through the mind-crushingly tedious period of reloading my software, options, and preferences. I will have learned to move on despite my debilitating episode and the resulting limitations. And I will strive to calmly accept my losses, no longer frantically trying to pry open my old hard drive with a screwdriver to scoop the old files out.

I probably won't back up anything, though. I'll be too busy researching the Don Knotts statue.