I simply do not use these services any more. Although I’m not necessarily planning to completely delete the accounts, I am removing external links that point to my profiles, starting with the links column right here on this blog.

Gowalla—I had been on the fence about this one for a long while anyway. Collecting items (as stupid as that was) pretty much was its only fun feature, and that’s gone. Version 4.0 is weird and I simply don’t like it. I only connected to 14 people (a fraction of the number to whom I’m connected on Foursquare). With only a single exception, none of those have checked in for at least four months—when Gowalla 4.0 debuted. Some of those people haven’t checked in for more than two years! And to top it all off, I just discovered that Facebook acquired Gowalla and the service is completely shutting down.

MySpace—do I really need to say anything here?

LinkedIn—I’ve determined that I completely missed the point of LinkedIn from the start. I created my profile to treat it as something of an online professional reference for people with whom I wish to interact. Ergo, I only connected to people I already knew who probably already had most of the information on my profile, anyway. I’ve never had a wish to use it to branch out and make connections beyond those I know. I don’t want a bunch of unknowns having access to my detailed work history. But that appears to be what LinkedIn is for—making those connections either for business deals or job searches. I’m interested in neither, so I’m putting LinkedIn on hiatus. It is probably the only service that I’ll ultimately/literally delete the account.

Google+ is on probation. I’m not ready to blast it yet, but it’s close. It needs a full API for third-party developers NOW. It also needs a mobile app that does more than the miniscule subset of Google+ features—especially ability to share links and access/update business pages. My social media blasting cannon will make preparations to target this service soon if something doesn’t change even sooner.

Not long afterward, Halloween time, the girls decided to add on to my title, branding me the stealer of candy corn.

Jump forward to today, and I’m pretty much the stealer of everything. Makes no difference I’m the one who bought the alleged stolen items from the grocery store, I’m the XYZ stealer.

Naturally, I attempt to have fun with it by branding them as the stealer of whatever it is they’re eating—an action that is always met with the response that they didn’t steal it because it was either given to them or mommy said they could have it. It’s one of those games kids will always win.

Well, Meg got me especially good tonight as I was trying to brand her as stealer of the play-dough she was using. She claimed she couldn’t possibly steal it because it was hers. I inquired how she knew it was only hers? Who’s to say I didn’t play with it after she went to sleep.

Her response: you don’t use the play-dough after I go to bed. You watch TV!

Guilty as charged.

All generalizations are false, including this one.

It’s actually a very insightful statement. Each of us—myself included—would be well advised to keep ourselves in check about making too many generalizations. And while we’re at it, consider a corollary I came up with:

All constants are true, except this one.

My wife’s cousin asked on Facebook this morning which choice of two different reactions to a scenario was better. In short, my answer was, “it depends.”

Yeah, that seems like a cop-out answer. Yet, as I see it, we humans seem to rely too heavily on things being constant. We feel good when we can apply a rule to a particular situation with the mentality that this rule always works in this scenario. I’m as guilty as the next person.

The reality is, as I see it, God’s love is the only constant that exists in the universe. Everything else is a variable. If you think about everything in your life that you’ve always believed should be done a certain way, you will realize that situations do exist where the right thing to do is deviate from that pattern.

Whether it’s meaningless simple choices, corporate policy, or an ethical life choice, it depends!

We should be willing and able to bend when necessary. Doing so enables us to handle situations that we couldn’t handle if we stuck to constants. Consider the support structure of large buildings. One might think the steel beams used in construction have to be a rigid as possible for the building to be stable. Yet, engineers know very well that such buildings have to be able to flex a little bit in order to survive severe winds. A rigid structure is prone to snap when faced with high winds, but when the structure is designed to be flexible, rather than snapping, it simply sways a bit in the wind. Sure, standing at the top during such winds may be kind of a scary ride, but you’d be safe.

So too with us. Never assume the same answer or rule always applies to every instance of a particular situation. Whether you’re standing at the top of a swaying building, or making a choice which you know is the right choice, even though it goes against all the experience of your past—it may be frightening but, in the end, you’ll be just fine.

For some bizarre reason, I don’t generally tap the suggestion to clear it. Various forms of retyping is how I usually get around incorrect autocorrections. In this case, I didn’t mind dragging out the “awwwwwww” even longer (the picture deserved it). I typed one more “w” and the iPhone suggested, “sweetest.”

Wanna try to convince me Apple hasn’t infused iPhones with artificial intelligence? ;-)

I’m not saying I would turn it down if someone handed me one and said, “This is for you.” But for myself, no, I’m not planning on picking up an iPad 2. There, I said it.

Unlike the iPhone 4 which brought significantly newer functionality compared to my iPhone 3G that I knew I would take advantage of, I don’t get that same sense about the iPad 2.

iOS 4.3 is where some of the new features come from that were mentioned in Wednesday’s announcement, and iOS 4.3 will run just fine on my iPad 1. I’ll enjoy the performance boost given to Safari, the ability to restore the side switch to an orientation lock, and access to my computer’s iTunes library. Although it was unclear at first, from what I can tell, the iMovie app will more or less work on my iPad 1. But even if it doesn’t, I’m content to work with iMovie on my iPhone.

Apple made plenty of comments about how much faster the iPad 2′s processor is, but I’ve never had a sensation that my iPad 1 is slow. The iPad 2 processor probably really shines when using it for gaming, but I don’t do much gaming.

I definitely have no significant need of cameras in my iPad. I can video chat with my iPhone 4, and even in Apple’s own promo video, the people looked kinda goofy holding up the iPad to take photos or video of things with the rear-facing camera.

Online mogul Chris Pirillo probably described the updated iPad most effectively: the iPad 2 is evolutionary compared to the iPad 1. It’s reasonable to expect that the iPad 3 will instead be revolutionary compared to both the iPad 1 and 2. So get back to me when iPad 3 is announced. Perhaps then I’ll be looking to trade up. What would Apple need to throw in the mix to make an iPad 3 a worth-while upgrade for me? Honestly, I have no idea, but that’s why I love Apple. They have a talented team of engineers who are skilled at figuring out what people like me want. I’m an Apple fan for that very reason. No other computer maker does that.

By the way, I can’t help but chuckle at all the disdain toward Apple about there not being a Retina display in the iPad 2. Follow me here: my 23-inch and 24-inch monitors at work and home, respectively, run 1920×1200 and are driven by respectable graphic cards. To retain best-looking compatibility, if there was to be a resolution upgrade, Apple would only exactly quadruple it, just as they did for the iPhone 4. That means 2048×1536, which is some pretty kick-butt resolution even for a desktop computer. In spite of the enhanced processor and graphics chip in the iPad 2, my impression is that it would struggle to drive a 2048×1536 display. We might see a device with that resolution when the third generation model comes around—maybe.

I’m entering Disney’s Magic Kingdom park, except it’s different. For some reason, the entire front section (Main Street USA and its outskirts) is not there. Instead, there’s just a large, open, outdoor area, and it’s all smoothly paved with blacktop. The summer sun beating down on the blacktop is making it almost unbearably hot. The rest of the park is visible up ahead.

People are scattered around walking in random directions toward different parts of the park, and in a few places within the open, paved area of the missing Main Street are vendor tents. I walk inside one to cool off for a moment and notice that this particular tent has those jars of Bama swirled peanut butter and jelly for sale. (At Disney!!??)

I then realize there’s something inside the Bama jars that can make them light up, causing the jelly to glow, but only the jelly—because jelly is translucent and peanut butter is not, duh! The reason for this technological gimmick completely escapes me.

The last part of the dream I can remember is discovering that my car’s remote lock fob turns the lights in all the jars on and off. After messing around with the employees in that tent and causing minor panic attacks as to what’s going on, I eventually ’fess up, we all have a big laugh, and I continue on toward Tomorrowland.

Zoom mode is helpful when a station broadcasting 4:3 shows widescreen content in letterboxed format. I can zoom it to fill my 16:9 screen.

Stretch mode, however, is stupid. Its purpose would be to make widescreen content squeezed into a 4:3 broadcast fill a 16:9 screen. But I’ve never once seen this happen. What I have frequently seen is the opposite: 4:3 content stretched to fill a 16:9 screen.

Dear Bright House, please convert your useless stretch viewing mode to a more helpful squeeze viewing mode.

In case you didn’t know, the State of Florida invoked legislation that requires no expiration on gift cards, and specified amounts can’t be deducted on a regular basis after a certain date has passed.

What I’m thinking is starting to happen is that Florida’s change in law only applies when these cards originate from Florida, and vendors are taking advantage of this. I’ve received two different Visa gift cards, and I discovered several days ago that the older of the two had reduced in value from $30 to $21.15 without my having used it (a $2.95 deduction per month starting six months after acquisition). My supposition is that vendors do whatever they can to no longer release cards that originate in Florida, even if they ultimately end up in Florida. Ergo, when a person procrastinates at using the card, the vendor still gets to subtract value from the card and pad their bottom line.

Dear friends and family, I appreciate gifts I’ve received from you. In the future, please do one of the following:

1. Use cash or a check.
2. Amazon.com credit (it doesn’t expire).
3. Confirm beyond all doubt the gift card you’re picking up originated from Florida and is not subject to expiration or balance subtraction.

The full version makes sense, but the short version? If I buy one, I certainly hope I’d get one! After all, that’s why I’m buying one. If someone is giving me an extra item free if I buy one, shouldn’t the phrase be, “buy one, get two?”

For starters, of all the past packages of Sun Chips, the color of this bag is the least appealing I’ve ever seen. It’s a drab shade of brown and doesn’t visually persuade me to pick it up.

Then there’s the typo. “Sundried” tells me it’s a haphazard assortment of different kinds of tomatoes. Dear Sun Chips makers, it should be “Sun-dried Tomato.”

But then when looking at the ingredients, one has to wonder why “Monterey Jack and Sundried Tomato” was even chosen as the flavor name in the first place. Unless I’m mistaken, product ingredients are always listed such that the ingredient that has the greatest proportion of the entire product is listed first, and then other ingredients are listed in order of their overall proportion. In other words, there is less of the last-listed ingredient than there is of any other ingredient. So lets look at the ingredients of this new Sun Chips product:

So, what are we consuming here:

• whole corn
• sunflower oil
• whole wheat
• whole oat flour
• rice flour
• monterey jack and sun dried tomato seasoning (note different, but still lacking hyphenated spelling)
• sugar
• corn bran
• natural flavor
• corn maltodextrin

Okay, there’s various corn, wheat, flour, and oil to make up the chips themselves, and some seasoning for the flavor. But then there’s the whole list of what makes up the seasoning:

• buttermilk
• salt
• corn maltodextrin
• tomato powder (note, not “sun dried” tomato powder)
• sugar
• cheddar cheese (cheddar??)
• whey
• spices (um, parsley is an herb, not a spice)
• garlic powder
• onion powder
• cream
• skim milk powder
• citric acid
• oh there’s the monterey jack cheese
• mozzarella cheese
• and there finally is the sun dried tomato powder
• natural sun dried tomato flavor
• blue cheese
• paprika

If I’m right that the later ingredients are less in quantity than the earlier ingredients, there’s more cheddar in this product than monterey jack, and with the addition of mozzarella and blue cheeses, it’s not impossible that there could be more of all other types of cheese than monterey jack alone. And what’s with the “sun dried” variety of tomato being down at the end?

From what I can tell, some marketer was simply hell-bent on naming this product as monterey jack and sundried tomato, regardless of the ingredients.

Assuming you’ve even read this far into my little soapbox, I’ll suggest you set all of that aside and consider the one last fact that trumps everything I’ve typed to this point: the flavor was boring, so no, I won’t be buying these again. I’m hoping the Garden Salsa flavor doesn’t disappear forever from Subway!

One of our intimate times together while dating provoked me to ask Lee one evening, “Can you imagine being monotonous—after all, this is ME we’re talking about?” What I meant to ask was: Can you imagine being in a monogamous relationship? I wanted to be sure he could see himself be faithful to me—and only me—something I wasn’t sure previous relationships had afforded me; and after hearing him say he’d have been OK in his previous relationship never being married—just as long as he was with her—concerned me. So, I brought up what I saw to be a legitimate question.

Imagine my shock when he started laughing almost hysterically at me. “Be monotonous…with you? NOT POSSIBLE!” My heart must’ve sunk ten feet. He couldn’t imagine being with only me. And if that were the case, that meant no future for us—no point in dating either.

The look on his face held humor, but grew serious when he observed the solemn look that must’ve been on mine. He was so with me in that moment, I couldn’t understand how someone who got me so completely couldn’t imagine being with only me. Why wasn’t I enough?

Instead of childishly withdrawing, I dared to ask, “Why isn’t that possible?”

“Because nothing is boring with you, my dear!” he answered.

Now I was really confused. “So, you’d rather be bored the rest of your life?”

“No. And I’m not gonna hafta be. I have you.”

About this time, a light bulb came on in my head and I fumbled to push Lee away from me and retrieve my iPhone.

“What’s wrong?” Lee watched me dumb-founded. “Is it something I said?”

“No. I think it’s something I said.” I flipped through the apps until I found the dictionary. Discovering my mistake, I laughed like crazy until tears fell. Poor Lee was bewildered.

Taking in my amusement, he finally asked, “Are you going to share it with me?”

Regaining my composure, I relived the past several minutes, cluing him in on what I had really meant to say. “See? Nothing will ever be monotonous with you,” he laughed, “and for reasons such as this!”

He then assured me that he, too, believes in MONOGOMOUS relationships and that he found whom he wanted to be monogamous with—forever.

In the end, we both agreed: Monogamy does NOT equal monotony!

I do want to utilize is blog space more often—so it’s now up to me to get back to keeping a more open mind about the kinds of things I want to write about.

Before the fall, the lens behaved as I would expect it. I could zoom in for a telephoto shot of an object, focus on that object, then come back to a wide angle shot with the focus ring not changing, and the image would still be in focus. Ditto in reverse.

After the fall, this is no longer the case. Vis:

The top left photo was focused manually at wide angle. The top right photo shows the result from zooming to full telephoto with the focus ring completely unchanged. Likewise, the bottom left photo is manually focused with a telephoto shot, and the bottom right photo retains that same focus after pulling back to wide angle.

Nikon received the lens and “repaired” it for $145.63. The invoice indicates replacing three roller/guide rings, a rubber ring, a lens element, lens FPC, then a general check and clean.

Alas, upon return, I find nothing different about its behavior. The above photos were taken today after the lens had been returned.

Tech reps very loosely implied that this is normal behavior, but I call foul because the lens could maintain focus throughout the zoom range prior to the accident. There was also an implication that perhaps the problem is the D90 camera, but since the focus issue does not appear on the D90 when I use an older Tamron lens, and the focus issue does appear when I put the Nikon lens on an older D100 camera, evidence points solidly toward damage with the lens.

I’m pestering Nikon to do one of two things: take the lens back with pre-paid postage and try again, or refund the amount I paid because nothing is different about the lens’ operation—in other words, it feels as though they “repaired” a nonexistent problem.

I don’t mind if the result of working with Nikon is that the damage caused cannot be repaired and the lens must be replaced, but I’m not going to pay $145.63 for work on a lens and still have to buy a new lens.

Any thoughts?

P.S. for those technically inclined, you can click through the above thumbnails to the original JPG files with EXIF data intact.

For many years, my practice has been to create a unique e-mail alias for every company with which I e-mail regularly or need an address for a registration. Presently, there are nearly 150 address aliases defined.

The result of this effort is that I get practically no spam to my personal e-mail address, and when I do, it’s a pretty sure guarantee that I know who instigated.

It’s been many months—probably more than a year—since I’ve received any spam at all to any of my e-mail aliases. Yesterday, one came to an alias I had created for AppZapper, a utility that aids in removing preferences, caches, libraries, and more when uninstalling an application. Giving AppZapper the benefit of the doubt, I e-mailed to inform them that I didn’t appreciate my address being sold off for spam lists, but that if that didn’t happen, they may need to investigate a compromise in their database security.

The reply I got was essentially, “We don’t do that,” as in, they claim to not sell off e-mail lists.

Continuing to give them the benefit of the doubt, I responded to say they should investigate the breach since they do not sell e-mail lists, and I provided the complete source code of the e-mail and header.

The next reply from AppZapper was advice to contact my ISP (more correctly, my domain host), suggesting that the compromise is there. BZZZT. Wrong answer.

Seriously, I ask you: Spam arrives to a single e-mail alias among nearly 150 that have gone spam-free for a number of years. If a compromise of access to the database is the reason, where do you think that compromise occurred?

No, AppZapper, if the compromise was with my domain host, it is quite certain I’d be receiving spam to many of my e-mail aliases—not just the one for your product. Because of this dodge, I no longer believe a compromise is the explanation. If it were, you’d be willing to investigate and resolve the breach. By dodging the issue and blindly claiming it’s the fault of my domain host, I’m simply convinced that you do, in fact, avail e-mail lists to spammers.

Consequently, AppZapper will no longer live on my computers and any relevant venue I’m part of will hear about the shenanigans.

Moreover, a trusted friend has further reason to believe AppZapper has limited ethical standards. Apparently, AppZapper chose the Camino web browser as a sample application in its demonstrations for application removal. As a result, many users who don’t quite understand what’s going on are following the example and, expectedly, losing all their web site bookmarks. My friend, who is on the Camino development team, says they have repeatedly asked AppZapper to stop using them as an example, especially since AppZapper never asked permission in the first place. The requests have essentially fallen on deaf ears, and Camino support is getting the fallout of distraught users who’ve lost their bookmarks, caused by activities suggested by AppZapper. My friend’s supposition: “They’re probably assuming that we don’t have the legal resources to put up a fight if it comes to that. ‘Hey, let’s pick on an open-source example.’”

AppZapper is an AppFailure.

I appreciate as much as anyone else the mentality of not being wasteful, but you’re being less green with all those plastic food service gloves you plow through during the day than by dumping out a portion of a batch of iced tea when you close at night!

Cheers!

I can’t really say what was going through my mind that day. I’d pretty much only be able to say I kind of mentally shut down. Suffice to say, it was all we could do to make the best of the rest of my family’s vacation, even down to our return home. Flights were only just barely starting to get going again. We had tried to make a reservation. Within an hour after doing so, we were informed that it had been cancelled and we’d have to try again. I think something similar happened again the next time we tried.

So, between the reservation challenges, and knowing how awful airports would be even if we’d managed to make a reservation, we gave up and decided to rent a one-way vehicle to drive back home. This decision is the source of two positives I got out of the whole 9/11 experience.

For one, we drove through several states I’d never before visited, so having to drive let me see some of this country of ours, including a stop at Mount Rushmore—certainly an appropriate stop to make, considering the circumstances. Another positive was that I got to visit my friend Andy at his home in Lincoln, Nebraska, which is the only time I ever saw him at that location before he moved to Kentucky.

Never forget.

loveless vessels

we vow
solo love

we see
love solve loss

else we see
love sow woe

selves we woo
we lose

losses we levee
we owe

we sell
loose vows

so we love

less well

so low
so level

wolves evolve