Pinging stuff I care about.
The holiday commercial for Macs (vs PCs) made me laugh, because it has some nerd cred: one of the things that sucks about programming for PCs is you typically need to do it in C++, whereas on the mac you get to use tasty Objective-C. (Unless you’re me, in which case you are stuck in a C++ API anyway because you use a cross-platform toolkit which happens to be done in C++…)
The embodiment of the PC, by the way, is comedian and author John Hodgman, who uses a Mac.
Thomas Dolby’s out touring again with a new CD and all, and he’s got this video podcast called The Sole Inhabitant (a phrase from his song White City, and also the name of his current tour), and I have been subscribed to it for a while and I only just got around to watching/listening to it, and wow. It’s footage of Dolby performing live, with a small commentary intro/outro. You get to see practically every keystroke of his performance, and realize that all that electronica is very, very live. Dolby’s rocking the chrome-dome these days, and he looks like some kind of character from a cyberpunk story when he performs — a head studded with gadgets (but practical ones — e.g, wireless earphones, mic, and what appears to be an iSight strapped to the side of his head, footage from which is edited into the podcast) and in one video he’s wearing this weird oversized trenchcoat.
So geeky. So cool. Dolby is the man. I want to be him. I want to be a tenth as cool at my coolest moment as he is while flossing.
I post this partly in case my Trotskyist commenter is still reading, to annoy him… There’s a nifty video interview of Marshall “NVC” Rosenberg, answering basic questions and telling some of the same stories he tells in his books.
YouTube – Young@Heart sing ‘Fix You’ by Coldplay.
Via reddit. Beautiful.
UPDATE: I found out that the enV is crippled too, to the degree that it does not allow file transfer. Screw that. It has a nice camera but eh. I first grabbed myself one of those LG Chocolates, a kind of mutant phone/ipod, slick and mysterious, but one day of use left me hating it with a passion. It was constantly doing things I didn’t want to do because of slips of the touch-sensitive interface. I took it back and settled for the LG 6300, a simple, unprepossessing phone, which I didn’t have to pay anything for after my outrageous discounts. I’m very happy with it so far.
END UPDATE
I just talked to my Verizon Wireless folks and found out that assuming I’m up to commit to two more years of service with them (I am), and I’m willing to order online rather than go to a store (I am), I can get some outrageous discounts. Apparently I’ve had my phone for 2 years and am up for a New Every 2 Program discount. (This sort of thing works better for us people getting on in years, because the years seem to fly by to us.)
I probably won’t drop the $ on it till after Christmas is over and done with, but this is what I want: the enV. Muchos thanks to Jason for pointing me in its direction.
What completely wins me over is the extremely functional Bluetooth stuff. Macs these days have bluetooth, but historically Verizon’s bluetooth offerings have been deliberately crippled. This one doesn’t seem to be.
There are a lot of cool things about the phone I could totally do fine without. But for a small investment after the discount, it seems to be a phone which will stay looking very good for a couple years.
Right now I have the Motorola V710, which is awfully nice, but I’ve always had terrible problems getting it charged. You have to balance the charger cord at some crazy angle to the phone to get it to connect, and possibly because of that, possibly for other reasons, charging is a very iffy business — it thinks it’s charged but dies quickly, stuff like that. This has persisted through two phones and four charger cords, so I’m pretty sure it’s not just that I got a bad phone or charger.
Anyway, looking forward to that crazy enV. Anyone with strong opinions for or against it as a phone drop a comment eh? I haven’t placed the order yet…