Mac +/- for Macs & Mac users, plus or minus, more or less.

UVa is a conservative school. Ask Anastasia, who was a TA here. These are, to a great extent, the children of privilege, power and pedigree.
Walking (say it with me) the mile from my car to my office this morning, I passed 3 different moving Free Ride to Vote for Obama vans. Every sidewalk was chalked up with reminder after reminder to vote today for Obama. Posters were up on every kiosk. A pro-Obama student with a signboard was in front of every major building, ready to help anyone get to the polls.

On that mile long walk, the entire evidence of the McCain GOTV effort was one white chalk "N" added in front of a single instance of the word "OBAMA" chalked on a walkway.

Two young ladies walking side by side, chatting.

The blonde with bug-eye sunglasses says "...I don't know, his roommate called me more than he did."

Just updated to Drupal 5.10 easy as pie. Tried to go to 6.4, but UVa's sql server is too old a version for that.

But such an easy install: Drag it over and run the update script and done!

So the site should be secure again now.

I've got a Blackberry 8830 through work, so I can become the expert on Blackberry for the university.

Never used one before. Never had any smart phone before, though I used a Palm for years, and a Newton before that.

I really, really hate this phone. If I hadn't purchased an iPod Touch a few weeks before getting the work phone, I'd probably only dislike it. But I have seen the Promised Land of interfaces, and Rim could not find it with a map.

Documentation is very scarce in the box. I am a tech guy, I can spend time learning it, because it is my job to do so. But it has left me completely convinced that the typical mode of set up for this device is for the user to hand it to his or her IT person and say "Make this work."

Mark Space's Missing Sync syncing is unreliable and very very slow. And it is insulting that we have to buy software to make it work at all--the free from Rim pocketmac sw was a complete failure.

Reading anything on the tiny, overly busy screen is a pain.

It comes pre-configured with an (in)convenience button that goes off randomly, leaving my pants repeating "Say a command!" at random times.

Oh, and it's broken now, with a scroll button that only goes up, left and right. No, I didn't drop it or spill anything on it. Hopefully I can get that fixed at Alltel tonight.

Blech.

Technorati Tags: Alltel, Tech, UVa

I tried uploading this directly to lolcats.com, but their site is such a mess that I couldn't do it.

So here you are:

Why in the world would the new, otherwise super-cool-give-me-one-now iPod Touch not include the same Mail application that comes on the iPhone? Can anyone explain a business reason for this? I can't imagine there's a technical reason, since Mail already works on the iPhone.

Sure, an 8 GB iPod touch might not be the best thing for syncing two or three big email accounts, but default download preferences for IMAP accounts could fix that issue.

So I can only think of a business issue, something that I'm no analyst of. All the lack of Mail on the touch does is drive everyone to their various webmail gateways, which does fix the problem of storing mail on the touch, but I still don't see why. Apple has nothing to gain by that, since dot Mac mail isn't advertising supported.

Until Yahoo, gmail and the other big webmail providers have a good versions of their interface for iPhone and touch, the user experience for touch users will be terrible.

Let's hope for a pre-release software update!

82° but about 80% humidity with a not very nice parking lot for a view. Nevertheless, the AT&T store in Charlottesville may have been one of the best places to get an iPhone yesterday. About 70 people were in line at 6 pm, with more coming, but news reports claimed that the store had enough stock that they would not sell out that night or even through the whole weekend.

I couldn’t tell if this Apple-polo wearing guy was excited that he had already completed his purchase, or downtrodden that the line was too long for him to put up with. He was not the first guy in line. But he was walking away at quarter after six.

While I have very mixed feelings about AT&T ("Your world. Delivered. to the NSA.) still the lure of the iPhone is very very strong. I'm free and clear on my current cell service through Alltel. I even held off on refreshing to new phones to avoid a recommitment to a new year-long plan, just to be free to switch to an iPhone if it looked as good as I thought it would. With the announcement of AT&T's "affordable" (that is, not horrifyingly expensive) monthly plans, I'm ready to buy. Except for this. I can taste the disappointment. Even my wife has said "those iPhones sure look cool." Come on, AT&T, I'm not that far out in the country.

Technorati Tags: Alltel, Apple, iPhone, Tech

From the Stadium Parking Lot

Life is full of contradictions. Or at least people are.

Technorati Tags: Around Grounds, Funny, UVa, Virginia