James's Weblog

One of things I lamented when I replaced my Treo with a Pre was that since the Pre uses a capacitive touchscreen, it doesn’t use a stylus, so I no longer had my Treo’s combination stylus/ballpoint pen wherever I went. There have been numerous times where the pen came in handy, and after I switched to the Pre, there have been numerous times where I’ve found myself not having a pen when I needed one. I’ve been looking for a good wallet pen as a substitute but haven’t found anything appealing:

• The Wallet Pen—the one recommended by Oprah—is $50 (a 3-pack costs a staggering $125). I think Oprah must be one of the few people who thinks it’s affordable. If I put that in my wallet, it’d be the most valuable thing in it.
• The Derringer Pen is much cheaper at $8 (a 5-pack costs $32), although that still seems expensive to my inner miser.
• The FoldzFlat pen is a cheap plastic pen for $2 (or $25 for a stainless version) that folds into the form factor of a thick credit card. This is the right price, but my wallet has enough credit card-sized things in it already.

Last week the obvious occurred to me: I could carry the stylus/pen from my Treo in my wallet. Duh. It’s thin, it has a sturdy metal barrel, and it even has a cap. It doesn’t have a clip, but I think that’s okay since a clip would add to the bulk. I think it’s thinner than either the Wallet Pen or the Derringer pen. It fits easily but snugly into the bill compartment of my wallet.

The price is reasonable: it’s effectively free for me since I bought a 3-pack of them years ago, but normally a 3-pack costs around $10–15. It’s a third-party accessory, and there are various companies that produce and sell different versions for different PDAs, so it’s possible to shop around too.

Oh, Chelmsford. Cheap attempts to get national recognition through Fox News by equating Santa to Nazis aren’t what I want my childhood hometown known for, although I do commend the application of Godwin’s Law.

Can’t we follow Futurama’s lead by making Christmas non-religious and renaming it to Xmas? (Preferably with fewer murderous robots.)

Obviously there’s the whole thing about the Palm Pre versus the iPhone, but Palm has had a tradition of following Apple’s moves, even ignoring the direct comparisons between the Palm Pilot and the Apple Newton.

It’s a shame that Cobalt was stillborn; I think an upgraded version of Palm OS would have been exactly what I wanted. (ALP could be it, but it still hasn’t shipped on any actual devices, and being so late to the party, I suspect it might end up suffering the same fate as Cobalt.)

An attempt to measure the state of a relationship can affect its outcome.

Is one person genuinely interested in the other, or is it just polite fiction? Should that wave function really be collapsed?

(Not that I have the slightest clue about dating. And, yes, I’m probably overthinking all of this, although I make no admission to being smart.)

I never really spent much time watching the Olympics, but this year I watched it every day, partly because it happened to be in China, partly because only recently have I been able to watch HDTV programming, so watching everything in high definition still seems novel.

• The opening ceremony was very impressive, but why did China have to taint it with the digital doctoring?
• The new gymnastics scoring system is totally broken. Laypeople can’t relate to the scores and have no idea what’s good or bad. This was even worse for the team and all-around competitions since not all gymnasts performed the same exercise at the same time and each exercise had its own baseline for difficulty scores. I also think the difficulty scores get way too much weight. And, of course, the tie-breaking system is a joke.
• The outfits that the U.S. women’s gymnastics team wore made them look like Coca-Cola cans with blond ponytails.
• The linesmen who run up to the javelins and shot-put balls as they’re landing are nuts.
• I think I liked it better when the Summer and Winter Olympics were in the same year. I think having Olympic games every other year is too frequent and takes some of the magic out of it; I remember the 1984 and 1988 games seeming more special. (Of course, that might be because they happened to be the first two that I have any recollection of, and the competition between the two sides of the Iron Curtain heightened some of the drama.) Plus, they got to distract everyone from all the presidential politicking.
• Isn’t this a perfect opportunity for NBC affiliates to do something useful with their other digital subchannels instead of showing around-the-clock HD weather reports?
• Why were events shown live in the Eastern Time Zone (and presumably in the Central Time Zone) but not for the rest of the U.S.? Meanwhile people on the west coast had three extra hours for various newscasters and websites to spoil results for them.

There’s a market on El Camino in Mountain View called “Teh Market”. I haven’t been inside yet, but it sounds like an invitation for a bad Abbott and Costello instant messaging conversation:

abbott2718: teh market has a great deal on beef jerky
costello314: which market?
abbott2718: teh market
costello314: the market?
abbott2718: obviously it’s a market
costello314: what’s the name of the market?
abbott2718: teh market
costello314: that’s what i want to know
abbott2718: what’s what you want to know?
costello314: the name of the market.
abbott2718: teh market.
costello314: why do you keep making typos in the?
abbott2718: in the what?
costello314: in the.
abbott2718: what?
costello314: not what. the.
abbott2718: the what?
costello314: sigh. teh.
abbott2718: right, that market has a great deal on beef jerky

I have four physical computers at work sharing two monitors, two keyboards, and three mice in various configurations. To make it slightly less complicated and to continue my obsession with Trackpoint keyboards, I bought a French-Canadian SpaceSaver keyboard from eBay. It’s completely unused, and it’s one-third the price of the equivalent US English keyboard (which currently isn’t available on eBay anyway). I don’t plan to use it that much, so the slightly unusual key configuration didn’t seem like a big deal, and I wanted something fairly compact to keep out of the way.

That said, I imagine that French-Canadians must be mutants. Whereas typical U.S. English keyboards have Enter keys that are about double the width of normal keys, the Enter key on this French-Canadian keyboard is tall instead of wide. Consequently, there’s an extra key between ' (apostrophe) and Enter, and my pinky finger can’t reach the Enter key without moving my hand off of the home row. Argh.

Sony announced yesterday that they will not release any new CLIÉ handhelds in the U.S. this year:

Sony has divulged that they will not be releasing any new Clie Handhelds products in the coming fall. Sony will be suspending new Clie product development for the US while they reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market.

Sony has issued a press statement in which they announce they are going to reassess the direction of the conventional PDA market and will not introduce any new Clie handheld models in the us this fall.

While certainly significant, I think most web sites have blown this out of proportion a bit:

• It’s only for the U.S.. I expect that Sony will continue releasing new models in Japan.
• It’s only for this year. Palm OS 6/Cobalt will be out late this year, which will be a good time for Sony to get back on the saddle.

I can’t say that I’m surprised by the news; Sony’s poor sense of direction was one of the many reasons why I quit. The writing had been on the wall for a long time, but Sony was too busy not listening to customers to read it.

It’s a good idea for Sony to re-evaluate their PDA plans, to do some soul-searching, and to find themselves. They can’t even figure out what the “CLIÉ” acronym stands for. Originally it meant “Communication, Link, Information, Entertainment.” After a year or two, I guess the Sony heads realized that it made no sense (especially considering that the CLIÉ line had no wireless communication abilities, had few accessories to connect to, and for the most part wasn’t very entertaining), so they changed it to the even more enigmatic “Creativity, Lifestyle, Innovation, Emotion” (or “Create Lifestyle with Innovation and Emotion”, depending on whom you ask). “What happened to the ‘Entertainment’ part?” we wondered, since that was the only part that (should have) made sense. Furthermore, all of the model numbers are prefixed with “PEG–“, which somehow stands for “Personal Entertainment Organizer.” Maybe it’s comprehensible in Japanese.

How did Sony manage to get itself lost like this?

Bad drivers. I’ve already complained about the management and its inability to ask for directions.

Poor steering. What do you expect from a huge, 18-wheeled corporation? The CLIÉ handheld line is stuck; Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue its original goal for mobile entertainment without intruding into the markets of its PSP and iPod-wanna-be products. Sony can’t whole-heartedly pursue the smartphone market either—one of the last bastions of hope for PDAs—because Sony-Ericsson already is entrenched in the cellphone space. Instead, CLIÉ models are shoehorned into hybrid entertainment/network-communicator/PDA roles. In many respects, they’re good PDAs, but they’re lackluster as music players, gaming devices, and digital cameras. They can’t excel in any single area without competing against other Sony divisions, so they’re instead doomed to well-rounded mediocrity.

So everyone knows that Star Wars: Episode III is going to suck and blow harder than Charybdis. Episode I, Episode II, and Lucas’ butchering of the original trilogy certainly don’t provide much evidence to the contrary. (Han shot first, damnit.)

Not only will there doubtlessly be poor dialogue and worse acting by the main players, but we already know the plot. We know where Episode II leaves off and where Episode IV begins; we only need to connect to the dots. Yawn.

“Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” or “I find your lack of faith disturbing.”

But maybe there’s a way to salvage this mess. What if we don’t know what we think we know?

For example, everyone is expecting Anakin to become Vader. What if he’s not? Perhaps Vader is a clone of Anakin. This could explain a few things:

• The stupid midochlorian plot element of Episode I. It could have been written in as a (lame) way to get a blood sample from Anakin sent off to Coruscant.
• How Vader was unaware that he had children. Perhaps they weren’t his but instead were the original Anakin’s.
• Obi-Wan’s lies and half-truths from different points of view. Maybe Vader really did kill Luke’s father.
• Why Emperor Palpatine, while speaking to Vader in The Empire Strikes Back, refers to Luke as “the son of Skywalker”.

Or it could be the other way around, and a clone of Anakin sires Luke and Leia.

Of course, it’s far more likely that Episode III is going to be another boring piece of trash with nothing substantial to add. I can dream, though…

(“Nerrrrrrrrrrrd.”)

I’ve been reading a lot of Calvin and Hobbes books recently. I thought that this strip was relevant to the current weblog craze. (Used without permission.)

And yes, I’m a hypocrite.