Category: General

I ran with the iRunner app for the first time yesterday. Just about everything about this app is amazing, but it was the totality of the experience that blew me away.

As usual, my head was a virtual disco thanks to the Beats by Dr. Dre headset and the Digitally Imported (DI.fm) app, through which I was blasting the always uplifting Disco House channel.

At every mile, the iRunner app would very politely turn the music down slightly and announce in a female voice like Siri’s the time it took for me to run that mile, my total run time and my average pace. It would then allow the music to resume at its old, pleasant, loud volume.

About midway through the run, my mother called. The iPhone gently halted the music, announced the phone call, which I answered by clicking on the function button of the Beats headset. I spoke with mom briefly, and when she hung up, the iPhone gently resumed the disco house music playback through the di.fm app without my doing a thing.

Throughout the whole process, iRunner kept track of my run, and generated the statistics below.

I am not a betting man (nor am I a gaming man; that euphemism is perhaps the corporate correctness term I hate the most; it’s akin to calling ecstacy Pez; “gaming” avoids all of the serious consequences that gambling contains), but had someone bet me that I would be keeping complete track of my workouts while I listen to CD quality disco music piped via the internet and answering phone calls–all with a device strapped to my arm–five years ago, I would have taken the losing side of that bet.

If I had the iPhone 4S, of course, I could have been dictating my novel as I run, too, supposing for a moment that I were writing a novel.

The wonders never cease, and the rapid pace of progress is astounding. This will positively become a regular workout routine, whether I’m biking or running, because all this technology literally allows one never to miss a beat.

Workout Summary in numbers. Man, was it a slow run, but it was my first run in a few weeks.

Summary of my splits. I was too pooped to complete the last mile.

Now this is an amazing feature. My warmup was appropriately slow, and I managed to maintain a fairly even pace throughout the run, until I ran out of gas on the long hill home.

As I mentioned earlier, I couldn’t quite finish my run, so I didn’t make to the original altitude. Surpassing the starting elevation is a good goal to set.

BBC News – Young cannabis smokers run risk of lower IQ, report claims

The “pothead” is a very lovable guy or gal: sweet, harmless, funny, easy-going, occasionally profound, even keeled, sporadically active and stupid. This last characteristic is up for debate, of course, because it is one of those insulting attributes that we espouse in stereotypes. Every stereotype contains at least one horrendously negative and insulting property, and those properties are usually the result of the human tendency to want to believe the worst about one’s neighbor at least part of the time.

The stupidity of the pothead, however, may be getting some scientific support. The above study suggests that lighting up earlier in life may be correlated with a lower measure of intelligence later in life. Believing this proposition may say more about one’s faith about the reliability of the intelligence quotient than the truth of diminished mental capacity of potheads. Nevertheless, kids should take this lesson to heart: wait until your brain is fully developed before you experiment with it.

BBC News – Samsung tablet not ‘cool’ says UK judge

It’s not often that one encounters judicial rulings of this sort. British judges are not authorities on fashion, style or design, but this particular judge may well have finally entered into the official record what every design expert has been saying about the “coolness” and the “elegance” of Apple design.

“[Samsung products] do not have the same understated and extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design,” said Judge Birss.

“They are not as cool,” he said. “The overall impression produced is different.”

Ironically, this ruling nullified Apple’s attempt to block sale of the Samsung Galaxy S3 in the United Kingdom. It is the ultimate hollow victory for Samsung: the judgment denies Apple’s contention that Samsung is copying Apple by declaring Samsung’s design inferior to Apple’s. It is undoubtedly the compliment Apple never sought.

This is exactly what every single patron of the Galaxy S3 booth at The Grove shopping mall in LA was implicitly saying yesterday. The pitchmen repeatedly had to compare Galaxy features with the iPhone’s: “The voice activated feature called [some forgettable name] is just like Siri”, “You can post to Facebook, just like you can on the iPhone.”, “The Galaxy S3’s screen goes all the way to the edges. It has much narrower borders relative to the iPhone.”, “blah, blah, blah, just like the iPhone”.

One man’s physical juxtaposition of his iPhone with the Galaxy S III made the “elegance” and the logic behind the Apple design even more salient. Who cares to put a thinner, small flat screen TV to their ear? A phone is still, after all, a phone! A retina display of exactly the right size is what an elegant device needs.

Let’s put a rest, then, to all the ridiculous rumors that Apple will be diluting its brand with a giant-screened iPhone 5 or a small-screened iPad “mini”. The existing models have exactly the right size for the purpose that each serves. There is no money to be made by Apple in designing a tablet with the same form factor as the Kindle. The iPad is designed to replace the computer for most people. The Kindle is designed to direct people to amazon.com. Apple has nothing to gain from this latter proposal. It is already directing enough traffic to iTunes and the App Store. The designs are already exactly right. The iPhone 5 will have a marginally larger screen at best, and no iPad “mini” will ever be made.

The codification of Apple’s coolness will lend truth to only one Apple rumor: that the stock will hit $1000 per share soon. This rumor is further bolstered by Apple’s successful bid to impose an injunction against the sale of Google’s Galaxy Nexus, and Google’s desperate revision of the Android operating system to nullify the root cause of the injunction. Apple is being copied because it has achieved and patented—most unfortunately—the right design. The competition wouldn’t be copying it slavishly if it were the wrong design, or even the imperfect design.

For the record, I am an Apple stockholder eager for this outcome.

The tobacco industry is beyond clever. Their cunning and savvy in manipulating people, governments, media and markets are so enormous that the account of their mischief has earned at least one historian a Pulitzer Prize.

And, they are at it again when they attack Proposition 29. Back in 1998 The Washington Post National Weekly Edition published an article (click here to view it) detailing how effective California’s advertising campaigns had been in curbing teen smoking. This campaign reduced teen smoking so dramtacally that the tobacco industry engaged in a surreptitious campaign to divert tobacco tax dollars from anti-smoking advertising to smoking-related health care. (My scanner back in 1998 was pretty bad.) By pitting these two factions of the public health sector, they wreaked much havoc.

Their advertising against Proposition 29 is no different. They know that the additional advertising funded by Prop 29 taxes may well put the nail in the coffin of smoking in California. Don’t buy their lies. Vote for Prop 29. It will save countless fortunes and lives in twenty years in health care dividends.

Don’t be fooled by the anti-29 advertising. Vote yes on this measure and make sure that the price that people pay for tobacco is enough to cover the medical mayhem that this scourge causes.

Last year I downloaded a speed test app and tested the speed on my iPhone 4 from the confines of our lovely local downtown Irish pub, Dargan’s. The results were impressive, clocking it at a healthy 2.6 Megabits download, and 1.2 Megabits upload, the phone competed ably with my home DSL service from DSLExtreme. When the signal is good, bandwidth is darn nice.

Almost exactly one year later, I conducted the test from the interior of the Majestic Ventura Theater before the George Clinton concert started. I had received at least two text messages from AT&T telling me that signal in my area had been improved. I decided, therefore, to see if these improvements had any effect, and, indeed, they did. The theater is located 100 yards from last year’s test site, and the improvements seem to have doubled my bandwidth to 5 Megabits down and over 3 Megabits up. These speeds are, in fact, vastly suprior to the DSL service that I used to have. I now have cable service from Charter, and it clocks in at 12 Megabits down and 5 Megabits up.

Do I need 12 Megabits of speed? Not really. I was quite happy with my DSL service, but AT&T’s anti-competitive behavior made DSL grossly cost ineffective compared with cable modem. Now, all I have to do is wait for unlimited bandwidth via tethering to be cheaper than the $30 I pay monthly for cable service. Having one fewer bill to pay and three fewer modems and routers to operate will be very nice.