I Think, Therefore I Rant!

By all accounts, save one, Apple’s iPhone has been an amazing success. When you factor

• the number of competitors in the marketplace,
• Apple as a relative newcomer to the cell phone market,
• the strict relationship with only one carrier

it is amazing that the iPhone has had such a strong impact on the revenue of Apple as well as the sales of other phones.

The one area that Apple really needs to develop is the developer network. While the App Store is the best method yet developed for delivering software to a cell phone, it does not appear that it is a great commercial success for many of its developers.  The vast majority of the apps on the store are priced so cheaply (or free) that it is not likely that they will return a profit to their developers.

I wrote about Iranian flogging almost a year ago.  It still is disgusting although I guess it is getting slightly better.  At least now they are “reviewing” the sentences of “death by stoning” and commuted some of the sentences.

According to the BBC, it is rare for someone to be stoned to death - they haven’t done it in a year.  A YEAR?!?!?  For a country the size of California, that seems like fairly recent behavior.

How do you stone someone “Iranian style”?  Here is what the BBC reported:

The country’s penal code stipulates that before carrying out the punishment, men should be buried up to their waists and women up to their chests. The stones used must be large enough to cause the condemned pain, but not sufficient to kill immediately.

So if the stones don’t kill immediately that means it takes several strikes to do the deed.

In case you don’t know, the Brickyard 400 race in Indianapolis, Indiana had severe tire problems for all of the cars. The management instituted “competitive yellow flags” that allowed all of the drivers to pit their cars and get new rubber.  While the cause of this fiasco appears to be multi-faceted, the solution that NASCAR management put in place was terrible.  I am not going to blame the Speedway or Goodyear (although they both should have worked to prevent this problem), I am going to blame NASCAR and the drivers for not dealing with it.

I am amazed that this is not being made a bigger issue.  I guess Obama is paying everyone off with his millions of dollars so that they don’t talk about his millions of dollars.

Obama promised that if he was nominated, he would use public money for his campaign.  Now he is backing out of that promise and is going to forgo those restrictions so that he can outspend John McCain by what some think will be 5 to 1.

Obama will run the richest campaign ever for the office of the US President!

While I have a hard time saying that people can’t give money to their favorite candidate, I do have problems with massive amounts of money being used to “buy” the campaign.  Never before has the disparity between candidates been so massive.  John McCain will only have 84M from the government to spend on the election and Barack Obama will be able to spend as much as he can raise and estimates say that could be 300-400M!

I regularly listen to KCRW’s “Left, Right and Center” on my iPod. While I enjoy the intelligent discussion I think they should rename the program to “Left, Very Left, Ultra Left, and Pretty Far Right”. The show now has a blog so I think it is fair to chastise them a little and condemn them for not being as open as they claim that they are - if they disagree they can say so on their blog.

Tony Blankley does an excellent job of holding down the right. His opinions are typically well thought out and his intellect does a decent job in offsetting the radical left. My biggest complaint is that he always seems to have predicted everything and wrote about it months ago and it is amazing that us mortals have only just now got to where he has been for a long time. It appears that, in his opinion, if we were just smart enough to read his column every week we wouldn’t have any problems in the world.

I am a big fan of the music of Sheryl Crow. I have all of her CDs and have bought each one (no, I didn’t “borrow” someone else’s MP3 files). I have enjoyed her music over the years but, to be honest, her first CD was probably her best and she could be accused of coasting since then - a couple good songs per CD with so-so songs after that.

I have listened to Ms. Crow’s latest CD several times. It is titled “Detours”. It is an apt title since it is a detour from her usual high quality work! I feel like the Democratic Party, Al Gore, and Laurie David have been injected into my brain via my ears! To think that I spent $15 for a CD of political propaganda.

A lot of us use instant messaging (IM) in our private and professional lives. It is a convenient and quick way to talk to others without the formality and delay of email. A new jargon has been created to talk in this medium and emoticons are often used to express feelings and emphasis.

You can tell a lot about someone by reading their instant messages. The biggest thing you can tell to see if someone is just plain clueless is if they send you messages like this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game
IDontKnowHowToIM: this weekend? I thought
IDontKnowHowToIM: it was great and I was
IDontKnowHowToIM: amazed at how well Tom
IDontKnowHowToIM: Brady played he must be
IDontKnowHowToIM: the best player in NFL

What IDontKnowHowToIM meant to type was this:

IDontKnowHowToIM: Did you watch the game this weekend? I thought it was great and I was amazed at how well Tom Brady played he must be the best player in NFL

Do you even know what a favicon is? It is the little image that sits just to the left of the URL in your address bar. For this site the favicon looks like this: If you can’t see it then that pretty much proves my point!

When you surf to a page that you have previously visited, the browser checks to see if anything has changed since the last time that you visited. It then downloads the new text and graphics and combines this with data in your cache and displays this to you. This technique can greatly reduce your surf time.

Unfortunately, most modern browsers (Firefox and Internet Explorer) do a pretty lousy job of checking and updating if the favicon for a site has changed. In fact, if you using an older version of IE, it may not even display a favicon. Even Firefox will occasionally display the wrong favicon for a site.

I write this just a few days after the NFC championship game for the 2007 season. In this game, Green Bay hosted a frigid game between their beloved Packers and the New York Giants. The game was well played by both teams and ended in a tie at 20.

As dictated by the rules, the teams then met to flip the coin again and the Packers won the toss. Within the NFL, overtimes are decided by the first team to score any kind of point. The typical strategy is to get close enough for field goal and end the OT quickly. This definitely favors the team that wins the OT toss!

As fate would have it, the Packers turned over the ball and the Giants won the game with their own field goal. While this particular instance provided both teams an opportunity to have the ball, the rules are not that fair.

I recently came across a post on a different kind of top 20 (or worse 20) list. This list is of bad software (or at least poorly behaving software). The focus of the article was on web applications but, too be honest, I think there are still some ‘regular’ applications that make these same mistakes as well.

I don’t want to reproduce the entire 20 items, you can go to the original article here and read those. I would like to point out that that author forgot some of my personal least favorites:

• 21. Desktop search that doesn’t pay attention to my bookmarks/favorites.
• 22. Blog software that puts you into the middle of the article (the site that this list originally shows up in is guilty of this one).
• 23. Software that installs wherever it wants to without asking the user
• 24. Fighting music formats