Fnord.

First off. As previously complained about, the iPhone has a skinny little space for the headphone jack, so most ‘phones don’t fit. The adapter sold in Apple stores is a brain-dead design that sticks out like this:

(Picture from the iLounge review)

Bound to break the phone sooner or later, and bulky to boot. So, I searched iLounge for alternatives and found the Griffin version:

(Both pics from iLounge)

A bit pricy at ten bucks, but a superior solution. I will probably end up getting one so I can use existing headphones, car adapter, etc.
Second tip: eBay’s pages take forever to load on the iPhone, try http://www.iphonemyebay.com/ instead. Officially approved by eBay, for whatever that’s worth.

My office is in the Calit2 building on the UCSD campus. Leading up to the front doors is a tile walkway where, it appears, people could purchase their choice of etchings. As I’ve strode over it, I would now and then spot an interesting tile.

(Here’s a re-post of the walkway and building)

Today I took the time to capture a few that amused or interested me. Enjoy!

Some are cryptic, codes or ciphers of some kind:

Update 10/3/07: A contributor decoded this, it’s simply ASCII. Text is “John Tusson CS 2002″.

Some are humorous:

Heh, I can sympathize with that.

Or philosophical:

Or geek humor:

See this Wikipedia entry to explain some of the ‘hello world’ bit.

I suspect the text cipher to be a simple substitution cipher from the repeated ‘Hma’ block, but feel free to let me know what you find. The hexadecimal one, well I dunno yet. See above, decoded.

Quick notes and impressions:

1. I wish that the 1.1.1 firmware didn’t break user code; the home button function would be handy. With hacked firmware, navigation is a bit indirect at times.
2. Videos/movies are just a bit small, noticeably smaller than the PSP. Unexpected, that. Especially widescreen content with black bars. Usable, but not ideal.
3. Battery life is excellent for a smartphone, from my point of view anything over a full day is a bonus. (Though Apollo IM seems to burn a lot of battery in v1.0.) On the minus side, charging is very slow, literally hours. By comparison, my N80 would charge in less than 20 minutes. USB current limit? Whatever the reason, fix it!
4. Pictures are good, they blog easily. (See this example) Not fabulous, not a camera replacement, but good enough.
5. Phone functions very well, especially with the headphone/microphone. Clear, comfortable, sounds great on both ends. Receiver sensitivity is better than my Blackberry 7290 and neck-and-neck with my Sony-Ericsson T637. Update: Chris says that clarity on the other end varies more than the other phones, andis sometimes awful.
6. The headphones are a mixed blessing. I adore the microphone/button, but
   1. Because of the recessed jack I can’t use my Etymotics
   2. The available adapter to fix this is a stupid design and will break the phone
   3. Third-party headphones don’t have microphones yet
   4. Apple earbuds slip out of my ears in a matter of seconds, which results in the nerdly dance of Continually Adjusting the Earbuds like a Fool.
7. Been trying Google Reader for RSS, great on the desktop and still getting used to it on Mobile Safari.
8. Email works well, but
   1. I wanna be able to delete >1 at once
   2. More than one active mailbox requires jumping back and forth - worthless!
9. iPod works great. The fade in/out on phone calls is worth the entire price of admission. I used to miss Chris calling me while on the bus, but now she’s right there. Sweet.
10. I have no need of ringtones, so no opinions on that mess.

Overall? Strong recommend. Superb device, easiest smartphone to use I’ve seen. As with Apple at their finest, it scales from geek to non-techie alike.

On the topic of bottled water:

…but the current campaign against paying good money for bottled water when tap water is perfectly good (and very likely purer) is so sensible on the face of it that I am now done with you. Fini. Kaput. Ausgeschlossen. No more designer water. Water is water. If you want lemon flavoring, add a slice of lemon. You want bubbles, stick a straw in it and blow.
…
No, San Pellegrino and Perrier got rich off the pretensions of liberal wastrels like moi who thought it set us apart from the unlettered masses. We ordered it in restaurants for the same reason we read books we don’t like and go to operas we don’t understand — we say to the waiter, “Perrier,” to give a continental touch to our macaroni and cheese.

and more:

So now I wonder, “What else am I doing that is too dumb for words?” A woman leaned over to me the other night and said, “You’d look so much better with your eyebrows trimmed.” This is just the sort of advice a man yearns for — you don’t want to be walking around with eyebrows the size of sparrows for the rest of your life.
…
I gave up watching television 25 years ago because I liked it so much even though I couldn’t remember what I had watched the day before and could see that if I went on as a viewer my life would become a blank. And now I refuse the iPod because it is an audio bubble that shuts you off from the world, which is where good ideas come from.

Reform feels good, take it from me. To correct course and avoid the reef and find clear sailing is the great tonic of life. A man grows a beard for the pleasure of cutting it off. And now I have the pleasure of boycotting bottled water for tap.

and he then proceeds to tie it all together into a stick-the-landing conclusion:

And now, if liberals can cut consumption of foreign water, then maybe conservatives can start to face up to the disaster they visited on this country with the election of the Current Occupant. None of the current Republican hopefuls can quite bring himself to do this. Face it. When you push an incompetent frat boy on the country, what you get is what has happened. Republicans prize loyalty above all things, so the Republican Congress carried the White House water for years, not bothering with any sort of oversight, but loyalty to the Occupant now is like marriage to a drunk, a very iffy proposition. If they can’t get a grasp on this, the Republicans can’t win in 2008.

I do love him sometimes. The full essay is well worth enduring the Salon ads. Or just pay the thirty bucks per year; I find it worthwhile.

Chris and I wandered over the Vermont Street bridge and had lunch at La Bacione. Decent food, really nice people, and free WiFi!
Nice.

Not only has a Republican made a very public about-face, it’s local! San Diego mayor Jerry Sanders has declared support for gay rights. Mark Morford has a great column on it, here’s a quote:

Could it really be happening? Was there really any way in hell a straight white male BushCo-era Republican would dare step up to a live microphone in front of a TV camera in a major American city and honestly admit that, well, he was wrong, and he is very sorry, and he has now officially reversed his position and now fully supports gay marriage and will actually sign a city council resolution acknowledging and advocating same?

YouTube video here, but read the column first.

Acceptance, it’s a good thing.

Via my new stats package, news that someone in Mongolia has hit Fnord:

I can die happy now.

Terri sent me this today, not sure what the original source is. Lots of google hits, looks like its been around for a while.

As she put it,

Only if it is GOOD coffee. Otherwise you go from first cup to triple shotgun murder in …. one cup.

(Sung)

In the mornin’:

and in the evenin’:

Scales are in minutes, for the routes we most often take. This is computed by this Calit2 website, which is the single most useful thing I’ve seen to date. Quite cool, even has traffic cameras.

Email alerts, etc, etc. I’m just amazed that its not a spin-off corporation yet given its utility.

Via Science in the news, the dual research finding that

1. Women who keep silent during disputes die sooner
2. There’s no difference for men.

And who knew there was an actual ‘Journal of Psychosomatic Medicine’? Damn!

So yell away at him; you’re doing it for your health. How can he argue with that?

To conclude, my best effort at finding a fishwife image, courtesy of Google image search:

(’Fishwife’ by Leon Underwood, Linocut, 1938)

Almost forgot - hostile couples heal slower, too. Mind and body, indeed.

Read and be amused.