There and Back Again: Memphis

Well, I knew it was going to be a busy week, but I didn’t realize exactly how busy. I barely got around to checking my e-mail some days. The conference was a big success, and my presentation seemed to be well-received (I haven’t looked at the speaker evaluations yet, maybe in a few days).

Me being all professional

The big let-down was Memphis itself. I can’t say I enjoyed the town all that much. The famous Beale Street seemed like a low-rent, bad copy of Bourbon Street, minus the charm and nice architecture of the French Quarter, and the rest of the city was not all that appealing.

I did have a nice view of the Mississippi from my hotel window, though.

Sunset over the Mississippi

Friday Cat Blogging

Rainy day, “fall really is here” edition.

Tommy & Gimi

The days are noticeably shorter by now, and for once, the rainy season seems to be kicking in early. Nights are colder, and the cats are spending more time cuddling with us and each other.

Congratulations to Al Gore & the UN

Great news!

Former Vice President Al Gore and the U.N.’s climate change panel won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for spreading awareness of man-made climate change and laying the foundations for counteracting it.

Although it will undoubtedly make the wingnuts’ heads explode, and give even more fodder to the UN conspiracy theorists (like Ron Paul).

Ann Coulter on the “imperfect” Jews

I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that Ann Coulter can go on national TV and say that Jews all need to be perfected or that the world would be better off it it were all Christian, or that she doesn’t think that there’s anything wrong with saying so.

Appearing on Donny Deutsch’s CNBC show, “The Big Idea,” on Monday night, columnist/author Ann Coulter suggested that the U.S. would be a better place if there weren’t any Jewish people and that they needed to “perfect” themselves into — Christians.

It’s really hard for me to talk about Coulter without wanting to break into a string of profanity. She seems to enjoy waving red flags in front of bulls and then laughing at the chaos. Generally, I figure that ignoring her is better than stooping to her level or buying into her brand of craziness. But some things are over the line and need to be called as such.

To be clear: Coulter is entitled to believe whatever she wants. If she thinks that Jews are imperfect and that Christians are better than Jews, that’s her right. But there’s another name for that belief, and it’s called bigotry.

It’s wrong, and so is she.

Small wonder that with bigots like her out there as the face of Christianity, the overall perception of Christianity in the US is rapidly plummeting.

Belated Thoughts on the iBrick

The Apple iPhone/ iBrick thing is starting to become old news. Since I’m happy waiting on the sidelines until a 3G iPhone comes out, I haven’t weighed in much, but there’s one or two things I do want to put out there.

I get that users want to hack their iPhones. It’s such an amazing device, and it would be even more perfect if you could only add [insert favorite missing application here]. It makes perfect sense. I’d be tempted to do it too, which is why I am deeply grateful I didn’t buy an iPhone.

What I don’t get is the outrage over Apple’s lockdown. It’s not like Apple encouraged developers to hack their phones and unlock their SIM cards, then turned around and went the other way. Apple was really clear from Day 1 that they expected software development to go via web apps, not installed apps. So why is anyone surprised when Apple started enforcing what they already said they were going to do? Did they really think that they’d let the “hackintosh” crew do whatever they wanted to the iPhone?

The fact that Apple was willing to go to the length of making hacked iPhones utterly unusable as phones strongly suggests to me that they’re doing it not just because of any Steve Jobs control freak tendencies, but because they have to in order to maintain the AT&T contract. And if they want to sell iPhones in the USA, that’s what they have to do. There is no getting onto the US wireless network without getting into bed with a telco. I don’t like it one bit, but it’s the way the industry is right now, and if you want to be in the game you cannot ignore reality.

I well remember when the Treo was first coming onto the market, hearing from some of the Handspring and Palm people about how utterly painful it was to get telcos to be willing to let it in. That was 5+ years ago, but somehow I suspect not all that much has changed.

At any rate, what I understand least of all is this: paying $100 to some 3rd-party outfit for an iPhone “unbricking” that will at best only work until the next Apple patch.

The phrase ‘”throwing your money away” comes to mind.

Update: Nice to see I’m not the only one weighing in this week.