As you may know I have an iPhone and now I have the iPhone 2.0 software. It is all good. I have the MobileMe trial going and I am going to do some limited testing. If it is good, I may migrate from GMail back to that (it was .Mac and I was a member for over 3 years). What have I downloaded from the App Store? Mostly freebies, I have only paid for one App.

First of all, the 2.0 upgrade does give a definite performance bump to all running applications. Safari, Mail, iPod and the phone all work better. Mobile Safari 2.0 under Edge and WiFi feels snappier. Especially under Edge, AT&T’s Low Fi network. One of the cool things about the iPhone is the fact that, even without a GPS built-in, it can locate where you are. Some apps can use that functionality to share your location with others. Now, the Apps.

Twitterrific: I am currently using the free version of this client for the Twitter microblogging service. Twitterrific, for me, is fast and elegant. I compare it to Hahlo, the mobile Web Twitter client, and they both have their charms, although Hahlo only allows a certain amount of refreshes an hour and then you have to use m.twitter.com. Twitterrific at least allows you to post a lot if you have a lot to get off of your chest. Also, there is a lot under the hood that I haven’t figured out yet.

Twinkle: This is another client for Twitter that allows you to use the location feature to find other Twinkle users within a certain radius. Twinkle was an app that was originally written for “jailbroken” or unlocked iPhones and has now graduated to the big leagues. I like this client, it has potential, there are certain things that are missing that the developers are going to address in a bug fix to be released later this week.

AIM: AOL Instant Messenger. It is there, it works, and I can’t use it because none of my buddies are online. Please, someone come in and help me test it.

Evernote: Evernote on a Mac or Windows allows you to store Webclips, to dos, video, audio and text notes, etc. It can even do OCR (optical character recognition) from text in graphics and photos. For that it’s great, I use it a lot. On the iPhone, not so much, although it does have a built-in voice recorder. The recently released update now has a dashboard, but it still doesn’t feel right. I am going to try for another week or so.

eBay: Very nice. Allows me to log into my account, look at auctions, bid, buy, remind me when I’m outbid, etc. The search is better than on the Web. Great app.

VoiceNotes: App that allows you to make a voice note, name it and file it. Very simple two button interface.

Shazam and midomi: I cluster them together because they do basically the same thing. Say you’re a passenger in a car and the driver has flipped on the local Jack (shuffle play) station. They never tell you what the hell they played or are going to play and you hear a song you like. Whip out your iPhone, fire up Shazam or midomi and have it sample the song for about 10 seconds. They will find the title and flag it for you for purchase at iTunes or for later listening. midomi not only allows you to sample a recorded song, it will allow you to sing or hum a song into the mic and find it. They actually work, although I think midomi uses more source databases than Shazam. Very cool.

PhoneSaber: A light saber on your phone. You can choose the color. Fire it up, move your phone around. It uses the phone’s accelerometer to change the pitch. Swing hard and abruptly stop and you get the sound of the saber striking an object. Useless, but fun, I’ve already had a saber fight with a guy at work.

WeatherBug: I use this as a Widget on Mac OS X’s Dashboard and find it indispensable. On the iPhone, it’s slow and buggy. I’m hoping for an update in the next couple of weeks because if they can’t fix it, it’s outta here.

WeightTrack: Self explanatory. An app provided by the cites of Tulsa and Oklahoma City to help you track the pounds. I love stuff like this, but the weight loss tools I have found on line either cost money or are inadequate. This a weight loss app that Apple would design. Spartan, with the important features left in and everything else out. This tracks your weight and body mass index (BMI, the percentage of fat to your age and height) and graphs it for you. You have to sign up for a free account at OKC or Tulsa Millions Websites to use the graphing features or you can use it standalone.

JirboJam: A nice little game where you match cute animals in threes and clear the board. Animation is great.

Aurora Feint the Beginning: OK, the title is a little arch, but this free game is one of the best I have ever played. It’s a mixture of Tetris and Bejewled. You have to clear three or more tiles in rows or columns like those games, the difference being you can use the accelerometer in your iPhone to turn the orientation of the board and move the tiles in random positions to clear them. It uses the iPhone to its full and is totally addictive.

Baseball: I ‘m a closet baseball fan. I’ve never been a close follower of the game, but now I have an edge on all my non-iPhone owning baseball friends. I have Baseball for the iPhone. A simple app, it has all the stats for all the teams and players from 1888 to 2007. The developer is in a little hot water with Major League Baseball, however. He’s used team logos without permission and now has to update the app to remove them. C’mon MLB, be reasonable, don’t punish a fan for being a fan.

MLB.com At Bat: The app that I paid for ($4.99). Has the schedules for all games played yesterday, today and tomorrow, with current box scores. Go to a game in progress and you can watch (almost) real time highlight videos of the pivotal plays of the game. This knows whether you are on Edge or WiFi and gives accordingly. On Edge, videos are low quality and on WiFI, high quality. Very cool and is good for all games this season including the recently played All Star Game and the World Series. Great for a fan of a team in a city you are not living in and who doesn’t want to buy season passes on cable or satellite (me; live in L.A., S.F. Giants fan). Pricing will be set for 2009.

That’s it so far. I will be reporting on MobileMe as soon as I update my address books on my iPhone and Mac.

Technorati Tags: iphone

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Just been incredibly busy and not had a chance. To get you up to speed, the most major thing that is going on is my friend Jim (CaptSerek in the comments) had a hernia and an operation for that. He is in the hospital now and recovering nicely. I will do a complete report when I come back. There are some things I will be weighing in on:

• The new iPhone software (yes, I have the new software, not the new iPhone)
• John McCain’s gaffes (Suni v. Shia, Czechoslovakia, Obama’s term will be the real Bush third term, etc.).
• The shit storm surrounding Jesse Jackson.
• The New Yorker cover with Obama Nib Dalen and Angela Davis Obama.
• Star Trek

I have to also upgrade Wordpress to version 2.6. I will get to it in the next couple of days, probably on the weekend when I have more time. After the month I’ve had, I haven’t even really wanted to look at a computer. 

Technorati Tags: Blogging, Me, Wordpress

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I’m currently sitting at McChevron, having purchased some WiFi, and now I am blogging.

This is working pretty well, however, I am going to see if there is any kind of Web based alternative to the built in text editor in Wordpress. Obviously, when you think about the limitations of the iPhone as a text editor (the most conspicuos one being the lack of copy and paste, i.e. making a link to another page seems out of the question unless the IRL is short and you can enter it from memory), you can see the problem. Also, the rich text editor doesn’t seem to work at all. For short posts it isn’t too bad.

Back home and I’ve installed WPhone for Wordpress. I can now post with confidence from my iPhone. The interface is clean and easy to understand. Here goes; gonna save and post.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, iphone, mobile, Wordpress

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Norquist describes Obama as ‘John Kerry with a tan’:
Grover Norquist has quite a history of being unhinged. He’s said the Estate Tax is morally equivalent to the Nazi Holocaust; he’s called WWII veterans “anti-American,” and he’s called bipartisanship “another name for date rape.”

Oh. My. Ghod. We all kinda sorta suspected Grover was a tool, this just confirms it.

Technorati Tags: frigtards, get real, politics, stupid

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Why in the hell do I do these? Because I care, bokay?

In any event, I have now found online editor nirvana. Having discovered a plugin that turns the native Wordpress tag system into Technorati tags, I feel I can now blog from the native editor comfortably enough. The plugins I have are Simple Tags, and WP Tags to Technorati.

I also have word processing tools on the Wordpress editor that makes it possible to embed pictures, movies, sounds, etc. I will be doing more of that from now on.

I’ve not given up on ecto entirely. Now that Infinite Sushi has been purchased by a larger interest, I expect to see development ramped up and a new version of the 3.0 beta to be out soon.

Technorati Tags: Blogging, external editor, tags, Technorati, Wordpress

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I work tech support for a company I don’t want to name, because if I do, I’ll get a bunch of emails about work issues at my personal address through this blog. I don’t want that.

Anyways, we had an issue a couple of weeks ago, that while trivial in the great scheme of things, could come back to bite us. One of our agents got into a confrontation with a user and that user eventually got to me as the team lead. I calmed the user down, worked her issue, and got her off the phone, hopefully feeling that I fixed the problem. This issue should never have taken place.

In many organizations, call center performance is based on call volume. Every call costs money, and taking an inordinate time to do tech support over the phone escalates that cost. At my job, we have a lot more satisfied users (in my opinion) than disatisfied users because our call volume is not that high. We also don’t have real “metrics” we have to hit, like call volume, call time, scripts, etc. Additionally, this also means that we don’t have regular team meetings, one-on-ones, internal issue tracking, and so-on.

I feel I am successful at what I do because I’ve been in this industry long enough to know what makes a good call and what makes a bad call. Here’s how I roll:

• Treat all customers equally: We have one free product, an inexpensive product, and then several pricing tiers. Regardless of the product you are using, if you call into my company and get me, I will treat you as if you have a private jet waiting at the airport. This should be a no brainer to anyone who works in this industry, but I use the axiom, “If I call in, how do I want to be treated?”
• Be honest at all times: self explanatory. It doesn’t mean you should reveal trade secrets, but it does mean if a customer asks you a direct question, you should attempt to answer to the best of your ability. If you don’t know, say so, and tell the customer you can try to get an answer.
• Take ownership: We don’t have a really good trouble ticket system, so in order to escalate an issue past our call center, we have customers use the tools in our software to send an error report to our upper level tech support. This generates a ticket number. Of course, upper level tech support triages all tickets and some take priority over others. This means that all tickets cannot be attended to in a timely manner, if at all. Therefore, I tend to give my name and extension number to the customer. This allows them to have someone to reach if they don’t get a response from Tier 2, and allows me to investigate the issue further.

These things should be obvious, but in our organization, getting people to take this job seriously is like pulling molars.

I have to get back to the calls.

Technorati Tags: call center, costs money, tech support

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I actually found Blogo by accident. There are some pretty cool features here, preview using my blog theme being the best one. Mostly, though, it feels uncooked. I’m not really happy with the overall interface, the fact that it didn’t download my category list and then give me a way to insert a category is no good, no inline spell check and the fact that LiveJournal support is “coming soon” and you can see why I will still be using ecto. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to learn programming so I can solve this problem.

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This Memorial Day (tomorrow night) on A&E channel, Ridley and Tony Scott’s version of Michael Chrichton’s seminal techno-thriller, The Andromeda Strain is premiering. I will see it and report back (there will probably be spoilers). Before I do, I want to deal with the reviews that are coming out and some big picture issues about the state of filmed science fiction of late.

It looks like the reviews are mixed, most of them saying, “If you have any knowledge of Mr. Chrichton’s book or Robert Wise’s 1971 big screen adaptation, stay away.” This has never stopped me from watching a remake before, however, I am concerned that it in trying to modernize Andromeda for a new, more hip audience, that the makers of this new version will dumb it down as to make it unbearable. As Joanne Ostrow of the Denver Post opines:

Unfortunately, the story is now inflated to include a government conspiracy, a Clintonesque president, a nasty Army general, a dogged reporter and references to Saddam, Iraq and homeland security to pad the medical mystery.

With bioterrorism a timely topic, and with plague an enduring AIDS metaphor, you’d think the plot would engage on a visceral level. Instead, eminent producing brothers Ridley and Tony Scott have prolonged the flick to miniseries length. Truly awful acting and often silly dialogue botch any tension.

Here’s another point from Ain’t It Cool News that only sends me into a spasmodic laughing jag:

The satellite in the novel and original was designed to find upper atmosphere microorganisms for germ warfare. All fine and dandy right? It ties is nicely with the modern world of WMD’s and biowarfare. For some reason however the writer has decided that this isn’t good enough and in an incredible stretch of the imagination the probe has apparently been sent through a WORMHOLE from the FUTURE! What? I couldn’t believe the sheer stupidity of it. Why drop a perfectly decent plot device that WORKS and makes sense for one that you don’t even get in crap sci-fi?

For those of you that have never read the novel, or seen the original movie, The Andromeda Strain is about a small community coming into contact with a downed satellite, Scoop 1. Scoop’s task, as explained in the last paragraph, was to find microorganisms that the US government could use in biological warfare. As it’s name implies, Scoop scoops up a dandy; a weird alien organism that is capable of making anyone inhaling it, suicidal. Once the human host is dead, all the blood in the body coagulates to powder in a matter of minutes. A team of scientists, led by Dr. Jeremy Stone, is sent to a secret facility in the Nevada desert, set up for just such an emergency.

The original film is very literal, but it’s riveting and the science is dead on. At its core, Andromeda’s about the procedure of isolating a disease organism, the mistakes that can be made, and how common sense can often give way to blind panic. Apparently, this is the part the makers of the new version seem to have missed out on. Science fiction movies, for the most part, have become an action-adventure genre, almost devoid of any true science fictional ideas. Whatever drives the story forward, however dumb or peripheral to the plot a point may be, just get on with it.

This is really distressing when you realize that the Scott brothers produce the series Numb3rs on CBS, a police procedural that entertainingly mixes the art and science of mathematics with finding the bad guys. I was kind of hoping for that here, but, no such luck. If you see the new Andromeda Strain, let me know what you think.

Technorati Tags: remakes, science fiction, television

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I am a bit jealous. I’ve discovered a really good blog tool for Windows called BlogJet. BlogJet is everything that ecto, MarsEdit, Qumana and a whole host of others for the Mac are not. You would think that a platform that is so intent on content creation like the Mac is, would have a full featured offline blog editor. BlogJet allows you to:

• Insert pictures from your PC or Flickr
• Insert YouTube videos
• Insert Smileys
• Record your voice and insert the file in the blog
• Attach Files
• It has a real auto replace (if I type something that I want to be a link, BlogJet will do it automatically)

The only thing it doesn’t do is live blog preview, like Windows Live Writer. I will also check out LiveJournal support for the LJers out there.

As always, more extensive testing is needed, but so far, it looks good.

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California Supreme Court overturns gay marriage ban - Los Angeles Times

This is great news. I have gay friends and a gay cousin-in-law. Loving, gay couples will now get to do what all loving couples should be able to do in the first place, get equal protection under the law. Of course, within minutes of the decision, the wheels of many anti-gay marriage advocates were already turning, their minds a collective raging torrent, flooded with rivulets of thought, cascading into a waterfall of creative alternatives on how best to scuttle this decision (I’d like to thank Hedley Lamarr).

You’d think these people would have better things to do. Their main argument against gay marriage is that it is not specifically enumerated in the state constitution. Interracial marriage wasn’t at the time that decision was made either, but it’s worked out just fine. I want to know how it possibly effects these anti-gay holes. Gay folks in California already had most of the rights of married couples under the Domestic Partnership statute, but the court said in its decision:

Giving a different name, such as “domestic partnership,” to the “official family relationship” of same-sex couples imposes “appreciable harm” both on the couples and their children, the court said.

The distinction might cast “doubt on whether the official family relationship of same-sex couples enjoys dignity equal to that of opposite-sex couples,” George wrote, joined by Justices Joyce L. Kennard, Kathryn Mickle Werdegar and Carlos R. Moreno.

Amen to that. One of the reasons people get married is to celebrate their union and share it with friends and family. Calling it something other than what it is demeans the relationship.

The only way that this could possibly effect anti-gay marriage frigtards is that it makes them feel all oogy inside. i.e., they don’t like public displays of affection between same sex couples because it makes them feel uncomfortable. I think this feeling of ooginess extends more to seeing gay males necking on a park bench, for example, rather than the more “acceptable” lesbian form of the same thing. Most people can handle hot, girl-on-girl action, but when it comes to guys…

Get over it.

It’s not the gay community’s job to make us who are not gay feel all warm and fuzzy inside. They have the right to live their lives like everyone else. Let me spell it out for you; there are no legions of gay people wearing pink Klan outfits breaking into people’s homes in the dead of night, taking your marriage partners at gunpoint and replacing them with a same sex equivalent.

Technorati Tags: california, gay marriage, legal, politics

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