My contract is up and I'm in the market for a new phone, and possible a new carrier. Naturally I'm considering the Apple iPhone 3G or 3GS, and most everyone I know who has one has had nothing but good things to say about them. Yet as the folks at CNET in the UK have discovered, a lot of people are so focused on its computing aspects, that they don't consider whether its a good telephone.

That's right, we said it -- and we're not taking it back. The iPhone may be the greatest handheld surfing device ever to rock the mobile Web, and a fabulous media player to boot. It may be the highest-rated mobile phone on CNET UK, rocking the pockets of half of our crack editorial team. It's certainly the touchscreen face that launched a thousand apps. But as an actual call-making phone, it's rubbish, and we aim to prove it.

Onto a litany of complains about dropped calls, no-rings and random call-outs. That's all quite disappointing, but I've had those problems with lots of phones I've had over the past few years. I suspect they have more to do with the network than the phone itself.

On the other hand, they may have a point about 'bad phone', but the iphone is hardly a laggard among the current crop of web-enabled phones. The blackberries, blackjacks and various other web-enabled phones are all necessarily bigger formats, and thus clumsier than their sleaker precedessors. Everybody has to wipe sweat off the screen after a call unless they are using a bluetooth headset--OK then, use the headset.

I've always looked askance at complaints about battery life--as long as I get through a busy day with a battery, I'm fine charging it at the bedside. I'm not sure what the advantage of not having to charge the batteries for a week really is--a great camping phone?

My personal issue with cell phones is the conference phone setting. About half of all my conversations involve putting the phone on speaker so I can talk while diddling my laptop. My Blackjack II is great at this, picking up my voice quite well from the middle of a table and providing enough juice to the speaker that I can comfortably hear what going on at the other side of the conversation.

The irony is, no matter what choice I make, in six months my phone won't be cool anymore.

On the theory that its never too late to have a happy childhood, I started restoring cars a few years ago, something most American males start doing in their teen years. I was working on a late model BMW this weekend when a friend drove up in his 1930 Ford Model 'A', complete with jump seat and vacuum-driven windshield wiper.

The disparity in engineering complexity between the two vehicles is remarkable, made more so by the fact that the Model 'A' was produced in the same year my father was born.

The infrastructure necessary to build a BMW extends to just about every corner of our technological universe. It couldn't be built without semi-conductor fabs, chemical plants, and expertise in hundreds of technologically complex fields. I have to use special coolant (at 25 bucks a gallon) to prevent electrolysis, highly-engineered transmission oil, and make sure that dozens of electronic sensors are working correctly to allow the computer to make automatic adjustments through the engine's entire operating range.

The model 'A' on the other hand, I could build myself--with hand tools. Its so simple that I could take it apart and put it back together again without once glancing at a diagram. The water pump uses leather seals (and leaks accordingly...).

It was quite remarkable to see these two vehicles side by side and realize that the evolution occurred within the span of one normal human life-time, and just as sobering to realize that Obama Democrats are presenting exactly the same solutions to perceived societal problems they were in the year the Ford was manufactured.

Building a bridge back to the 1930s...

A neighbour of ours has one:

The moon from our garden in NJ a couple of days ago:

JFK told Congress in 1961:

Finally, if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.

Toby Young writes:

A couple of years ago, my best friend Sean Langan was kidnapped by the Taliban while making a documentary for Channel 4 in Pakistan. During his three-month ordeal he was interrogated by his captors many times and he was often surprised by what they wanted him to confess to. One subject they kept returning to were the moon landings. They refused to believe that America had put men on the moon and, again and again, they tried to browbeat him into admitting that NASA’s programme of manned space flight had been an elaborate hoax.
Why did this matter to them? Sean’s theory is that the moon landings are clear evidence of the superiority of everything the Taliban are opposed to — of reason over revelation, of democracy over theocracy, of science over superstition. In its original conception, NASA’s Apollo Programme was supposed to be an advertisement for the superiority of America to the Soviet Union — a Cold War propaganda exercise — but in the eyes of these Islamist terrorists it also served to discredit America’s current enemies. Their response was to insist the moon landings hadn’t happened.
...
The Constellation Programme could have been all that and more. Yet Obama, in his wisdom, doesn’t see the point of it. To me, this encapsulates the difference between JFK and Obama. When it comes to putting men on the moon, JFK said, “Yes we can.” Obama, in yesterday’s budget proposal, said, “No we can’t.”

I've been reading an enormous volume of uninformed crap about the iPad, and as usual, I'm bewildered at the depth of ignorance displayed by so-called technology experts.

Or is it laziness? Whoring?

There is simply nothing revolutionary about the iPad, which isn't to say it isn't a nice piece of hardware, polished to remarkable utility by Apple's notorious attention to detail. I certainly give them props for that, especially since I'm waiting for a phone call from Dell's local service rep to come replace the motherboard in my less-than-two-year old XPS laptop.

Revolutionary though? Well, not in a technical sense, and not really in the business sense either. At this moment, the iPad is, strictly-speaking--a toy. Its rather remarkable that a machine that literally clones the iTouch's functionality in larger, more unwieldy package, is garnering so much attention and stimulating our collective instincts to reach for and possess shiny objects.

The initial surge of sales reminds me of the Macbook Air, which was frankly, a much more significant technical achievement. As they got past the more-bucks-than-brains niche, the Air just didn't offer much more than gadget-oneupmanship and sales slumped accordingly (and to some, predictably).

Considering how few books, newspapers and magazines are read these days, the idea that Apple is going to do to the publishing industry what its done to the music business has the same underlying logic as the Obama regime's so-called stimulus bill. Which is to say they hope you believe it even as they chortle into their sleeves. The publishing industry already has a remarkably durable form factor in the paperback, which is smaller than an iPad, costs a fraction, doesn't run out of power and can be easily traded, lent and sold without running afoul of Digital Rights Management (DRM) nonsense.

I'm about as digital a guy as there is, but I generally prefer reading an honest-to-God book made from trees, although I will admit to reading e-books on my iPhone.

Why the iPhone and not an iPad? Because the iPhone fits in my shirt pocket and when I am idled for any reason, its quite easy for me to launch the Stanza app and read one of the classics that I probably wouldn't otherwise have time for. The iPhone/Stanza app combination works because it exploits small slices of time and doesn't require me to prepare for these moments by bringing along a text or otherwise giving any forethought to the matter.

This is defined as utility. The iPad simply doesn't have any that a Macbook doesn't do better at the high end, and an iPhone (or iTouch) doesn't do better at the low end.

How I ditched my Blackberry and got an iPhone is an instructive story, which involved the evangelism of existing owners who were doing useful things with it that they previously couldn't. While visiting my daughter down in California, I availed myself of her roommate's laptop to allow us to get on to the WIFI. I found it strange, that while traveling, that her roommate would have left her laptop behind. My daughter's explanation was illuminating--her iPhone made the laptop redundant.

Perhaps the iPad will yet yield a killer app that will make it indispensable, but its hard to see how when its essentially a instance of iTouch giganticism.

It's just a larger, lovelier, portable version of the trackpad on Macbook Pros.

Let me re-phrase that - it's just a larger, lovelier, portable version of the trackpad on Macbook Pros that will up the productivity of a billion people.

I've used a Magic Trackpad at my desktop for a couple of days now. The killer gesture is the drag. Yes, it drags windows around, which is handy, but it moves anything around, such as image boundaries in 'crop' mode, and window corners to re-size the window, files or other objects from hither to thither.

Oh, oh, oh! I've just discovered the 3-finger backward-forward gesture. My life will never be the same.

Blogger site
Phanfare gallery
Galerie albums

Wordpress site
SlideShowPro Director gallery
veryplaintxt theme

I installed Wordpress in my root directory at my long-time host (123connect, owner = accessible Geoff). Then I set up some more Wordpress sites in a sub-directory for various old Blogger blogs which I successfully imported into each Wordpress site with the Blogger Importer plug-in. Then I set up a gallery site and linked to the various separate sites from the Home site. Then I came across Wordpress Multi-User (WPMU) and installed that instead in the root directory, intending to manage a single site. Then I set up a 'static' page for a gallery within the WPMU site, but when I tried to import Blogger posts, WPMU stripped out various images, YouTubes and slideshows. Hence I'm still running separate WP sites for old blogs. I hope that the Blogger Import problem will get fixed as WPMU matures.

So The Light Cavalry Gallery is run within my main Wordpress site, markcadams.com aka thelightcavalry.com, but the various old blogs are separate sites for now linked to or re-directed to from the main site. This is an arcane point to a reader, but unsatisfying to this budding site network administrator.

The Gallery itself is simply embedded from my hosting account at SlideShowPro Director. This has certain advantages - unlimited space, video storage, audio, decent Wordpress plug-in, very detailed Lightroom plug-in. I'm pretty happy with SlideShow Pro (SSP), but I suspect it's slowing things down a bit and has a few annoyances. I'll be reading up on it. My SlideShow Pro images look better than in Phanfare, tho most so far are just downloaded jpgs from Phanfare re-uploaded to SSP Director. The ability to embed a slideshow from SSP is very, very neat. I have many albums to move from Phanfare to SSP which takes more time because I wasn't careful to relate the filenaming to the order.

I've also had to do some theme editing on veryplaintxt to remove default Wordpress clutter. This is a real annoyance as I have to go into the code. It should be a set of Dashboard switches. I want minimalism, goddammit!

The iPad2 was revealed by Steve Jobs today. It's incredible, no question, but the absolute star was the video for the new cover:

It's moving to see Steve Jobs returning from medical leave to do this.

Ok here's my idea:

First I thought why not put 2 iPads on a hinge and use them as linked displays as I use my desktop screens?

• Double the screen real estate


• Fold the screens together to shut


• Fold back-to-back to display to users sitting opposite


• Rotate 90 degrees and eg use lower screen as soft keyboard or trackpad


• Flip or drag objects from screen to screen


• Enhance video conferencing


• Enhance gaming


• .....

Then why 2 iPads? Make it n iPads.

Then why a lead? Make that something Bluetoothy.

Then why waste the redundant processors by using the 2nd to nth screens as slaves? Scale up the processing and turn n iPads into a supercomputer.

Don't laugh. It'll come.