Here and There

* Original headline contained a typo. Damn iPhone! ;)

Just noticed that the laptop, purchased May 18, 2007, is beginning to fall apart. The software still performs flawlessly.

But I discovered this defect just now:

As Scott mentioned in comment on my last post, WordPress released their mobile iPhone app today. Using it to write this post. How meta.

I think I’ve added a photo from my phone’s library. No positioning available. Not much by way of settings, but the preview function works well, albeit sans photo.

Overall, i’m happy with this.

Mars Edit/WordPress — Both rumored to be in the works. I’ll test them both and go from there.

Picasa Image Uploader — I can’t find any proof that anyone’s working on this. Know otherwise? Tell us!

Yelp App to Write Reviews — Yelp’s current app (free) is nice, but I want the ability to write reviews easily from the iPhone.

And last, but certainly not least …

Scrabulous

Let’s see, over at Fox Whatever-the-Hell-Kinda-Channel and in the general right-wingnut-osphere, over the course of the campaign season, Barack Obama has been portrayed as a Muslim, a Marxist, an America-hating, arugula-loving, fresh-out-of-water radical who can’t bowl and who is married to a Black Panther who wants to eat your babies.

But John McCain thinks Iraq and Pakistan share a border.

He kinda reminds me of Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, who gave this eloquent retort to a question about geography:

We came up to visit friends in Sacramento on Saturday. Met them at the Old Sugar Mill in Clarksburg, just a few miles south of the city along the Sacramento River.

We’ve been to the sugar mill a few times before. It’s renovated and filled with wine-tasting venues. One of our favorites, from the first time we came here, was Todd Taylor.

Taylor, who has always been on-site for weekend tastings, makes only red wines, and its this narrow range and excellent encyclopedic knowledge of grapes, soil, and the wine-making process that yield some of the best California red wines I’ve tasted.

Taylor doesn’t grow his grapes, which frees him to always look for the best of whatever varietal he’s working on, and gives him more energy to devote to the crushing, fermenting, and bottling process. All the wines are single-vineyard.

The wines we tasted this time were: 2006 Sangiovese “Bell Road,” 2005 Syrah “Lehrer Vineyard,” 2006 Zinfindel “Vineyard View,” 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon “Lockwood Oaks,” 2006 Cabernet Sauvignon “Hearst,” 2007 Primitivo “Blue House,” 2007 Zinfandel “Clockspring Vineyards.” Primitivo (a variety of Zinfandel grape typically grown in Italy) and Clockspring were tasted out of the barrel, and will be released later this year.

We left with a bottle of 2005 Syrah, but really, all of the wines we tasted we wonderful. The clear winner was the Primitivo.

God, I almost think they should be bound to keep it up.

I’m a borderline OCD sufferer, sure. But I realize how dependent I’ve become on certain blogs when their keepers go on vacation.

Case in point: Andrew Sullivan’s Daily Dish, perhaps my favorite for the moment. Sullivan, like most responsible bloggers, has left his baby in good, trusted hands. But it’s just not the same.

I’m not totally in love with Craig Crawford’s Trail Mix, but he’s got that damn photo of himself in a hammock up while his minions simply post open threads on a daily basis. Fine. Rub it in, Craig and Co.

I’m not always appreciative of the amazing Jason Kottke’s choice of substitute. The exception would be the last time he went away (can’t find that person’s name, and am in a hurry to pack bags and get out of here).

But yeah. That’s all. And not that I have any fans or devotees on this level, but here I am bailing out for a little more than a day. Don’t miss me.

I finally got the July 21, 2008, issue of the New Yorker that had so many bloggers, blog readers, and media types in a tizzy earlier this week.

I was outraged. And here’s why:

From the moment I saw the cover (Sunday night, I believe it was), I thought it was funny, if not hilarious, if not brilliant. New Yorker cartoons often take a moment to fully sink in and realize the hilariousness of. Ditto here, except that I was realizing how funny and awesome it was — what a great Fuck You to the legions of morons out there who believe any or all of the stereotypes so artfully portrayed by the artist.

But I was pissed looking at this cover, once I held it in my hands, because now all it does is remind me what an annoying little episode it represents in this never-ending campaign season.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe it’ll fade away into the depths of long-term, collective memory. We rarely talk of Reverend Jeremiah Wright these days, after all.

But maybe I’m right. Gee, that would make a great alternative title of this blog. Heh.

The Bush Squad wants to redefine birth control as abortion.

My take: They sat back and reflected, and realized that they hadn’t wreaked enough physical, moral, and sexual havoc on the nation and the world, and decided this would really get the ball rolling again, circa 20 A.D. style.

Bastards. At least Speaker Nancy Pelosi had the decency to waste no time denouncing the move.

Like many bloggers, I live for comments. I don’t get nearly as many as I’d like, and that may easily be because of my inability to mentally stimulate.

But I’d also like to think that part of it is the extra step of having to register (for some), log in, then type a comment and save.

Well …

I’ve just made things a lot easier (I think, anyway): I activated the reCAPTCHA plugin, which allows readers such as yourself to enter a name, email (kept private), website if you’d like, your comment, and which then requires you to type words rendered as images. CAPTCHA, in case you didn’t know, is simply a way for applications to tell humans from computers. Not too many computers are sophisticated enough (yet) to look at a word rendered as an image and then type it out in actual text. Humans can do that. Yay humans!

Having people register and log in to comment is a blog setting I chose awhile ago as a way to prevent the copious amounts of spam I was receiving (and continue to receive, though it’s blocked). With reCAPTCHA, I no longer need such a barrier.

So hopefully removing that requirement will generate more and more comments on this here blog, and we’ll all have a happy new stop on the internets highway.

Happy commenting!

When I have the iPhone connected to my MacBook, and I want to make edits to how iTunes handles the phone, upon hitting the “Apply” button, I get the following window:

The first time I encountered this message, I was trying to change the way iTunes adds apps to the phone. But now I get the message no matter that change is. For example, the screen image above came when I tried to edit the podcast settings.

Anyone aware of a fix?

(And yes, my phone is called “jePhone.” You got a prollem widdat?)

The last two places I’ve worked, the San Francisco Examiner newspaper and Wired.com, both suffered from at least one identical deficiency: Both of their internal website search functions sucked a big one.

Awhile back, a friend and colleague showed me the trick on Google Advanced Search wherein one can limit a search to a specific website.

Go to google.com and click Advanced Search. Then, under “Search within a site or domain:” enter the site you wish to search.

And don’t forget to love the google.

He’s the sorriest excuse for a human, let alone politician, I have ever seen. He’s worse than Helms, Thurmond, and Cheney, combined.

He’s actually saying (and therefore expecting us to believe) that Barack Obama lacks conviction.

The Democratic caucus in the Senate needs to kick him out, now. No excuses!

Readers: Write your Democratic senators today and demand that they strip this bandit of his power.

Weak.

I downloaded and test drove this free app, and it seemed to work well enough … until it came to logging out. I couldn’t find a way to do that.

I went back to my desktop client, logged in, and was prompted to send a reply of “1″ to the AOL admin in order to log out of my mobile client.

Someone tell me I’m missing something, please.

I found that perusing this page was actually mildly entertaining.