Sword Saints

Take back the story

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this; not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who'd made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day's end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them."

Neal Stephenson, Anathem, p. 414

Wednesday haiku

Financial meltdown?
"But deliver us from good
intentions. Amen."

Here to help?

I've been reading the Summer 2008 issue of Wilson Quarterly ("Saving The World") and Matthew Connellly's essay "Controlling Passions" was particularly striking (the full text is only available to subscribers right now). An excerpt (emphasis mine):

Humanitarian challenges rightly create a sense of urgency. The problems begin when those who set out to save the human race refuse to be accountable to any humans in particular. Acting in the name of an abstract "humanity," population controllers found it easier to think of the world as a laboratory populated by potential "acceptors," and to believe they could manipulate millions in pursuit of a global goal. Rather than accept that the causes of poverty are many and complex, including the bad choices some people insist on making, they preferred to focus on neat technical fixes.

Something to consider for those human observers of the Zeroth Law, not to mention every one of our politicians and political candidates.

Rant

I am not Floyd, and I do not want Dish Network. Since getting the iPhone I've gotten at least one call a day from 866-659-3474. I've answered three times, and every time they ask for Floyd. The first time they hung up. The second time I answered the man on the other end said, "Well, since I have you on the line, would you like to hear about the offers from Dish Network?" After that I ignored the phone when I saw that number, until today.

I was strolling through Target with the lad when another call from them came in. It was good that we were in public, as it forced me to be somewhat more civil: "Look, I'm not Floyd. This number has never belonged to anyone named Floyd. You say someone named Floyd entered this number for more information on Dish Network? You and I both know that that is at best a half-truth and at worst an outright lie. Cut the bulshytt and do not call me again, EVER. I do not want your dish, and I will inveigh against it and your sleazy underhanded sales tactics any chance I get. Good day!"

And let it be noted that in the ten years I have had this number I received exactly no telemarketing or sales calls. Not one. In the week since we've ported our numbers to AT&T I've had almost a dozen, from several different numbers. Advantage: T-Mobile.

(Just to be on the safe side, I put the mobile numbers in the Do Not Call registry.)

Wednesday haiku

Why is bad news for
everyone else good news for
our politicians?

Knowledge base

"They knew many things but had no idea why. And strangely this made them more, rather than less, certain that they were right."

Neal Stephenson, Anathem, p.106

Mobilized

It's going to be slow going with these fat fingers of mine, but the TypePad app for iPhone works pretty well. Now to figure out the rest of the apps.

Switch (again)

Our mobile contract has expired, and the time has come to switch providers and get his 'n hers iPhones ... and sign another mobile contract. (Mobile contracts annoy me. Provide good service and I won't want to switch to another provider. Simple, eh? I'd have stuck with T-Mobile without a contract because I always had good service with them. Pity they didn't pick up the iPhone.) But, we've switched just about everything else to Apple in the past four years or so, so why not the mobile phones computing platforms?

I've started collecting some of the more highly recommended free apps for the inevitable arrival. There's an even dozen waiting to sync:

• Air Sharing: Document viewing on the iPhone. Free for a limited time. Can't wait to try it out!
• Aurora Feint The Beginning: Recommended as a fun diversion.
• Evernote: Remember Everything. I haven't used it a whole lot yet, other than the web-based version. Figure it's worth a try for the iPhone.
• Facebook: I know, I don't do a whole lot with Facebook at the moment. Maybe that'll change with the iPhone. Maybe.
• Last.fm: I have a profile, and I scrobble, so I figured it'd be worth a download.
• LinkedIn: Facebook for professionals. Yeah, I don't do a lot there, either, but it's free.
• Pandora Radio: Pandora is all kinds of awesome. Portable streaming radio? OK.
• Remote: Use the iPhone as a remote control for the iMac. Cool.
• Twitterriffic: The free version has infrequent ads, but it's been my favorite Twitter client on the iMac.
• TypePad: Home of Sword Saints. I've been using ecto on the Mac, but I'll gladly give the TypePad app a try.
• Zenbe Lists: Sounds like a great way to take to-do lists (grocery, hardware store, whatever) with me.
• 1Password: I got this for the Mac as part of the MacHeist bundle and quite like it. Hopefully the iPhone version will work just as well.

I'm also realizing that my music library is entirely too big for the iPhone (I've been used to having 60 GB of space to play with), so I've been paring down the music and video libraries to the essentials.

Saturday is iPhone Day (late birthday presents for both of us). Should be fun!

Wednesday haiku

Got lost in a book,
Farenheit Four-Fifty-One,
so I lost some sleep.

Not slacker

I started running back in May. I figured it would be an activity we could do together as a family. So now on weekends we'll pop Nicholas in the jogging stroller and head out for a short run together. I've been running three days a week (two solo, one family), up to my latest mileage of about four miles a run. And we're going to run our first race as a family, a neighborhood 5K, this weekend.

I'm not the overachiever type (those who know me well would quip that I'm barely even an achiever type), so it's not like I'm training for the Next Big Race, trying to set a new personal record, all that jazz. I'm just in it for the health benefits (I've already lost somewhere between two and four inches off the waist since May) and the shared activity with the family. That's enough for me.