RED STICK RANT

Communist China - the authoritarian worker's paradise where everybody has government health care; the nation that is the company store we now owe our national soul to; the proletarian nirvana Thomas Friedman wishes the United States could be just for a day - puts profits before people.

I'm shocked! Shocked! OK, not really.

Apple Computer:

Good: Apple named least "green" tech company. Companies exist to make things and provide services, not be butt-kissers for busy-body moralists. That doesn't mean dumping old SE30's in the Bay is OK - it means they shouldn't have to require employees wear all-natural, free-range, fair-trade skivvies because the Natural Resources Defense Fund or Al Gore thinks it's a nifty idea.

Bad: Apple is tracking you via your iPhone and/or iPad. I'm sorry, but what do they need this for? And, who will try to get their hands on it?
(cough) The government via lobbying by busy-body moralists (cough).

Like a broken clock is right twice a day, so sometimes even the tinfoil-hat crowd gets it right. And today is one of those times - they are rending their Reynolds Wrap® over PatriotApp, an iPhone app that, and I quote, "...allows citizens to assist government agencies in creating safer, cleaner, and more efficient communities."

And well the tinfoilers should be upset. This scares the hell out of me, too. We are at war, so I understand reporting possible security threats - but we already have an app for that.

It's called dialing 9-1-1.

So this app, with its buttons for reporting grave national threats like "Product Safety" and "Environmental Safety", seems to have little really to do with citizen participation in the War on Terror. It does, however, redefine patriotism in terms of being a willing agent of the state, snooping on and tattling on your neighbors. That's something more common to socialist thuggeries, not a free society and a free people.

That may be how the regimes in Cuba or North Korea define the being a patriot; it is not how we Americans understand it.

Further, by asking people to make judgements on activities where they are not qualified know if something is a threat or not, or only have a few facts, is downright dangerous. I mean, do we really want folks (say, an architect, or a green jobs expert...) hitting the 'Pandemic' button because they saw a bunch of people get sick in the shopping mall food court? Really? I mean, really?? Frozen yogurt does go bad, y'know.

No, I really didn't go see a wizard. What I did do was spend three days here:


(image by Red Stick Rant / iPhone)

My annual silent retreat at Manresa House of Retreats in Convent, Louisiana. But, I hear you ask: That's a Jesuit place and... you're not Roman Catholic. Quite true. I go for two reasons: First, I am a Christian, and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola work just fine for any Christian man (the Jesuits will let most Christians in - and yes, it's men only) seeking a serious deepening and understanding of their Faith. Second, The Episcopal Church (tm) doesn't have anything that even comes close to the Manresa experience. And given their current obsession and drive for elitist, boutique status - utterly devoid of any of that yeechy, superstitious religion stuff - they never will. Plus, we all know what our Presiding Bishop thinks of Roman Catholics:

...Episcopalians tend to be better-educated and tend to reproduce at lower rates than some other denominations. Roman Catholics and Mormons both have theological reasons for producing lots of children.

Here's another image from Manresa, taken early Friday morning:


(image by Red Stick Rant / iPhone)

Many of my New Orleans readers will understand why my first thought when I composed this shot was "Drysdale painting".

More after I unpack.

iPhone junkie that I am, I will likely hold off on the iPhone 4.0 when it comes out later this month - at least for a while. There are several reasons (I don't use all the goodies on my current 3GS, I don't need another data plan, it isn't a necessary expense right now, yadda, yadda), but the biggest is this: bandwidth. If ATT can't handle it's current traffic, how does it plan to handle video telephone calls?

Proof.

Steve Jobs? Say it ain't so. Will all those labor-sensitive Lefties be dumping their iPods, iPhones and iPads, and boycotting Apple? iDon't think so.

Der Führer has some things to say about the new iPad.
(Warning: Geek humor alert.)

Nokia looks at the future of the cell phone.

Hattip: Samizdata.

I've had an awful time of late, well, reading. Not comprehension, but finding the time to do it. By the time I hit the rack I'm either too tired or too wired to pick up a book. I started re-reading Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress about a month ago, and I'm currently on... page 48.

So Wednesday I decided to download an audiobook from iTunes and give that a try. I'm hooked. I downloaded P.J. O'Rourke's Driving Like Crazy, and I can't put it down turn it off. I've devoured six-plus chapters in just three commutes (plug the iPhone into the car's audio system), and plan to listen to several more tomorrow while cutting the lawn.

As for the tome itself, Driving Like Crazy is quintessential O'Rourke. It focuses a favorite passion of his, cars and motorbikes, and can be summed up by one of the chapter titles: "How to Drive Fast on Drugs While Getting Your Wing-Wang Squeezed and Not Spill Your Drink." P. J. O'Rourke is my kind of Republican.

Here's a recent ReasonTV interview with O'Rourke, where he talks about the book and recent goings on in the automotive industry. Well worth a watch.

I've been a USAA customer for some time, and it's innovative things like this that keeps me a rabidly loyal customer:

USAA, a privately held bank and insurance company, plans to update its iPhone application this week to introduce the check deposit feature, which requires a customer to photograph both sides of the check with the phone’s camera.

“We’re essentially taking an image of the check, and once you hit the send button, that image is going into our deposit-taking system as any other check would,” said Wayne Peacock, a USAA executive vice president.

Hattip: Jason at Countercolumn.

My present.

Let's see a Blackberry or Treo do... this:



(Jealous, Anne?)

From Apple. Copy and paste and landscape email will be included in 3.0. About time.

All right. Enough about politics, boobs (sorry, I repeat myself), teeth, and funny pictures of cats. Here is something really important: Apple is going to preview the iPhone 3.0 firmware, and the new SDK, at 12 noon CDT tomorrow (17 March). Engadget will be liveblogging.

Yes, dear readers, I'm that much of a geek.

Let's see your Blackberry do this.

Macworld's keynote: not much there, or the end of an era?
Here's the full address if you must.

My Anglican/Episcopal readers will find this pretty cool: A Book of Common Prayer for iPhone. It's called iBCP, by Alexander Orozco, it can be found under the Books heading at the iTunes' Applications Store. (Can't provide a link. alas, so you'll have to navigate there yourself through iTunes.)

After a quick fiddle, it looks pretty good.

Poking round for new iPhone apps, I came across this digital Quran. Hmmm. If I downloaded and later deleted it, would there be rioting in Yemen?

Just asking.

To answer that burning question literally one(s) of my reader(s) asked: No, I did not get an iPhone 2.

Yet.

The only actual advantages the new phone has over the iPhone already in my pocket are, IMHO, 3G and GPS.

3G is great, but it is not, well, everywhere. Especially here in Louisiana. According to ATT's website, go just a few miles east or north of Baton Rouge and 3G goes missing, Right now you can not even keep a continuous 3G connection on I-10 from Baton Rouge to New Orleans. In Slidell? Sorry; you're on the Edge. So I'll wait until the map is more uniformly 3G, not just dots on the landscape.

GPS is something I have been longing for, but now that it's here I really don't know how I'd use it. I've seen a few of the mapping apps, and while nice, I don't need to know where I am with any more precision than the current location-by-cell-phone-tower position. There are needs for such GPS precision - emergency response, navigation and landing big bombs on nasty people - but locating friends in your "social network" is not one of them. Yeah, I know; I'm a curmudgeon. But I honestly don't like anybody enough (wife, kids excluded) to want to know where they are 24/7; and besides, can you say the word stalking? I knew you could.

So as for the new iPhone, I'm gonna wait.

But I didn't wait for the new 2.0 software. No siree. We were on Lookout Mountain in northern Alabama yesterday, and I was on the hotel wireless network at 6:30am downloading the 2.0 firmware upgrade. Got the download and.... oops. Since I use my office server as my default Outlook server, the install got to a point about syncing and stopped. Dead. So I had no phone and no e-mail all the way back to Baton Rouge. (Which was, actually, rather pleasant.) I went to the office last night after we got back, re-ran the install, and all is well.

Quick first impressions:

New calculator. I really like this. I use my iPhone as my default calculator for most things now, but still drag around a Casio scientific calculator for doing more complex math, like logs, tangents, arcs, etc. Now I don't have to.

Contacts: I like having that as a separate button on the desktop.

YouTube in websites: About time.

Outlook improvements: Sweet. Just sweet.

I know there is much more I haven't poked at yet, but I'll get to it. But the biggest improvement is......

The App Store. Real third-party apps! No more "web-only" apps! (Blogger commences to do the happy dance!) I downloaded several that interested me, and here are my first impressions (which are subject to change as experience increases):

Labrynth by Illusion Labs. A digital version of that box with holes and knobs that you had to navigate a steel ball through. Uses the iPhone's accelerometer. It's bloody addictive. Get. This. Game.

Color Tilt by IMAK Creations. A fun "doodle and paint" program, again using the iPhone's accelerometer to pick colors and change colors, with your finger as the brush. I can see this as a useful time killer in meetings.

Cow Toss by Digital Thought Software. You slingshot a cow. That's it. It moos, and makes some bouncing noises. The first time is funny. The second is cute. The third time is annoying. And if you have any brain cells there isn't a fourth time. Until they make it challenging - say, you have to aim a catapulted cow from a castle onto a clueless Arthur king and his silly English "Kennnnnnn-iggits," this is a waste of time. And of 99 cents.

iMahjong by Jirbo. Already played several games. Even worked with my fat little fingers. A definite keeper.
UPDATE: Wife likes it. Kids, too.

LiveSportz by Bluefish Wireless. This app is supposed to enable you to keep up with Major League Baseball, play by play. As a fan of God's Chosen Team, this seemed a no brainer - and since it's free it's a lot cheaper than the official MLB app. Plus, they claim that they will be doing the same for the NFL in the fall. But other than crap out, or crap out and cause my iPhone to reboot, I have not gotten this app to do anything. Not even to set up my "favorite teams." Maybe you must have a 3G connection. But if you do, they don't say it anyplace. Skip this one.
UPDATE: We tried out LiveSportz tonight with the Red Sox / Orioles game. I'm not impressed. We had the game on XM as we tried the app. First inning, when it wasn't freezing up or crapping out, all LiveSportz said was, "Updating..." Whole inning. After dinner, we tried it again during the sixth inning, and... it worked. Updates were lagging behind the XM play-by-play by less than a minute. But then it started giving this "Extended break" message and no more updates, even thought the game was going on on XM. We closed and reopened the app, and it started working again - for about three minutes - and then gave us the "Extended Break" message and some fluff about what a wonderful program this is. Maybe this is just teething trouble, because when this thing works, it's great. But if it doesn't improve in the next few days, I'm tossing it.

Morocco by Bayou Games. A freebie of the classic Othello/Riversi game, it plays well and the price is right. Another keeper.

No. 2 Pencil by Lint Labs. A cute "scribble" app that lets you sketch, doodle, make notes, etc., on a blank sheet of "paper". It's a bit crude, but worthwhile; especially in my profession. It has a lot of possibilities and they intend to improve it, so I'm giving this one a recommend.

Recorder by Retronyms. A simple, no frills voice recorder, with two big drawbacks - first, unliess you are in a very quiet room, or listening by earphones, you can't hear the darn thing in playback; and second, there appears to be no way to start/stop recording to the same recording file - it makes a new file every time. We use a recorder when doing observation inspections and punchlists, so this would be most annoying. I'll wait a few days for improvements - but if not I'll go with another recording app.

This is just a first pass. More later.