Disorderly Content

I was reminded recently of a favorite aphorism: never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by stupidity. A month ago on a vacation trip to Lost Wages, I suddenly found myself unable to retrieve work email. When I got home I asked our IT people about it, and was told that they didn't support iPhones and I'd just have to deal with it. Never mind the fact that it had been working find for two years...

Anyway, a few weeks later I got a notice that we were all getting new Blackberries and that we could give up our personal phones to join the corporate plan. Which would be better than having to carry around and worry about charging two devices, if I weren't such an iPhone fan. (And I'm not the only one at work, for what it's worth.) But it turns out that the disabling of mail access to us iPhoners wasn't intentional; it was an unfortunate result of a new antispam appliance. Still, the result was the same.

I'd had a Blackberry before, and kind of liked it. But now that I've bitten the Apple, well, I'm not thrilled with the latest RIM model. The Curve is a nice device, with a nice screen. But those tiny-ass buttons? Not designed for my chubby fingers or my aging eyes. Punching a phone number on the Curve's micro-keys is torture compared to the big digits the iPhone throws up on its big display. And the UI? Definitely not at Apple's level. Cumbersome doesn't begin to describe it.

So now I get to carry an iPhone and a Curve. And I'll whine about it to anyone who'll listen, at least until somebody does push mail for the iPhone and I can give back the Berry. Hey, how's that for a slogan? Give Back The Berry. You can tell I used to be in Marketing, can't you?

I remember opening the box on my first iPod and being impressed by how easy, and beautiful and even organic it all felt. Poor Microsoft. It seems they can't get anything right...

You know, I'm thinking the publisher might have wanted to, you know, read the book before they printed it.

Never again. That's it - I am not putting myself through that again! As God - or the Flying Spaghetti Monster - as my witness, that's it!

I refer to Macworld, the annual chance to see what kind of cool stuff is going on in the world of Steve. Which I generally look forward to, or at least I did. But, as I say, no longer. The problem starts (and almost ends) with the idiots at IDG who put on the show. To save money, they decided not to send badges out in advance of the show, unless you were willing to pay a couple of bucks for the privilege. Which, foolishly I didn't. And neither did a few thousand other people, leading to a line that I still hadn't reached the front of after two solid hours! It was so bad that the conference people gave up, letting anybody with a printed preregistration go into the exhibit halls without a badge. Which I did, managing to walk by every exhibit in both halls in less time than it took me to fail to get my badge.

And there's the second reason I won't be back to Macworld: there's hardly anything to see that I hadn't already seen on the Internets. With trial downloads of most software and several Apple Stores (and Fry's, if I get really desperate for a tech fix), I hardly need a trade show to get up close and personal with new toys. I mean, it was nice to see the MacBook Air and hold it up and ooh and ahh, but I probably could have survived the week or two until they show up at the store, right? Okay, and I did enjoy playing with a Nikon D3 and a 200mm F1.2 lens, a combination that weighed about as much as three MacBooks. But I probably could have had that experience at Keeble in Palo Alto. No, I think the time for trade shows is past, at least for this Mac devotee.

And yes, the Air is cool. But it's also a lot more expensive than my Air-less MacBook, and a laptop without a drive for playing DVDs? Not for me...

Bad enough that The Phone Company will screw its customers by revealing anything the government wants without even a hint of due process. But now it's revealed that AT&T has shut off all those illegal wiretaps. The reason? The FBI is behind in paying its bills. No cash, no screwing. Yep, sounds like prostitution to me.

I'm sitting here and watching last night's Daily Show, now New and Improved With 100% Less Writers! And as shaky as the show may be in its "we're making this stuff up as fast as we can" improvizational style, it still feels like a weight has been lifted from my chest. I want the writers to win, and I'm willing to put up with a certain amount of pain to show my solidarity. But a steady diet of reality programs? That's just cruel.

Mike Huckabee is a postive guy. He's so positive that he can't bring himself to run a negative ad targeting Mitt Romney, although he did show the ad to the collected press to make sure they knew how negative he wasn't being. Which I guess is the point of this blog post by Robert J. Elisberg of the Huffington Post, which explains how he wrote and then discarded a negative piece about Mr. Huckabee, and of course had to include the discarded post so we'd all know how negative he almost was. You can't ask for fairer than that, can you?

Air travel sucks, which is hardly news. Between the gauntlet we call airport security and the understaffed and unready for the slightest disruption airlines, what used to be a tedious but sometimes pleasant experience has turned into something even Dante would have had trouble describing. But, as the title says, it could always be worse. At least I've never had to fly Skybus. Read this account on Consumerist and see if you don't agree that even United doesn't get this bad.

The guys at JibJab have taken the awfulness that was 2007 and put it to music. Among the very few bright spots? The iPhone. Obviously I concur.

It's a new year, which means it's time to make a bunch of resolutions that may not make it through the first weekend. I've been remiss in my blogging, so that may as well be the first resolution on my list. We'll see how I do...

Last night I was driving to a friend's for a little NYE celebrating. On the way I was listening to the latest podcast from the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which told of their just completed San Francisco run (which I attended -- twice), and of their plans for the first half of the new year. (Not to be confused with the New Year. But I digress.) And at the end of that list of plans was a mention of a run at San Jose Rep starting in mid-June. Great news! Even better is that it'll be their Great Books Abridged show, which I haven't seen yet. (I saw the Shakespeare and History of America shows in London years ago, and the Hollywood and Bible shows during the SF run.) So I'm feeling pretty upbeat as the podcast draws to an end. And then to my surprise I hear that their random fan shoutout ("No reason. It's just random!") is to me! Took me a second, as Austin gave the shoutout to Disorderly, the handle I use on various websites including theirs. And which, as you may have guessed, comes from this very blog and the very website on which it resides. So I'm famous! Sorta!