iPods and Smartphones

Last summer I took a plane trip to L.A., flying coach as usual.  I was fumbling in my seat with the CDs, swapping them in and out of the CD player.  And when it came time to use the CD player in the rental car, it was the same deal.  My music selection was limited to whatever CDs I happened to bring with me.  The rental car’s stereo had an AUX input.  And I’m thinking…”what if there were a small, convenient, portable device on which I could store several CDs at once, not merely 5-10, but more like 100?”  Of course, this device has existed for some time, idiot – it’s called an iPod!  D’oh! 

            I suppose what had kept me from being interested in the iPod earlier was its fairly small gigabyte capacity.  I had filled up an 80 gig external hard drive fairly easily, without coming close to representing my full music library of CDs.  But when I learned of the iPod Classic, with its 160 gig hard drive, I began to get seriously interested. 

            Long story short, I got an iPod Classic for Christmas, a gift from my girlfriend and her son, which they even had engraved.  I learned to sync it with my computer at home, and I was good to go.  I even got the cable to hook it up to my Neon’s stereo – the Formula stereo is not iPod compatible – and some excellent headphones as well.   I also got an RCA cable which hooks up to the iPod, meaning I can plug into line-in’s on boom boxes, Bose Wave Radios, or regular stereo receivers.  And to protect the thing, as it has a snazzy chrome finish, I’ve got a black rubberized plastic cover, almost like a wetsuit.

            Ultimately I should get a 160 gig external hard drive for iTunes at home, so I can take full advantage of the capacity of the iPod Classic.  It’s a fantastic invention, one I was fairly slow to adopt.

 Smartphone.  I can’t say iPhone, although that would make a snazzier title.  Back in 2005, I bought my prior cell phone, a Sharp TM-150, from T-Mobile.  I had just gotten back from Rio de Janeiro where I had found out that despite T-Mobile cell phone service being available there, my prior phone wouldn’t work because it was a two-band phone, and in Rio they use the third band which this phone didn’t support.  The TM-150 was a tri-band phone…except that I didn’t end up going to Rio again after buying the phone.  But it worked fine in Bucharest!

            Fast forward to 2011, and by now this TM-150, which was state of the art in 2005 – and the source of jealousy of my tech-savvy secretaries who insist on having the most advanced cell phones to satisfy their social lives, and text each other and their friends incessantly – was now a dinosaur…close to Gordon Gekko’s 1985 vintage phone.  Well, it did flip open like the Star Trek communicator!  I even got the Star Trek communicator ringtone.  It could take 8 second video clips and had a SD card which held dozens of pics; the resolution on the screen was a million megapixels.  As I said, very advanced for 2005.  But finally the battery started crapping out, which seemed to be the physical interface where the charger hooks up, not the battery itself, a structural problem which simply meant that physically, the cell phone was finally wearing out.

            So I got a T-Mobile MyTouch 4G.  I wanted to keep T-Mobile, and while tempted by the iPhone 4G, it seems that Android compatibility is fairly decent by now.  It has an 8GB SD card, but the card is buried inside the phone and not easily accessible the way the one on the Sharp was.  Ringtones are simple: instead of having to download specific ringtone files, or use some ringtone editor, the MyTouch allows you to simply select MP3s as ringtones.  I can listen to the mp3s too, but the 8GB capacity is far lower than the 160 GB capacity of the iPod, so it’s not really practical as a general music player.  Likewise, .jpg files uploaded to the phone’s SD card act as wallpapers, although this is more or less the same deal with the Sharp.

            For text messaging, I can now use a little full keyboard instead of punching the numeric keypad multiple times – 4 times for “S” – ad nauseam.  I’m beginning to get the hang of the Swype feature…slowly but surely.  The camera has a flash, and takes fairly decent pics, though not as good as my 14 megapixel Kodak digital camera.  On the other hand, it lets you modify the pics in various ways, some of which are pretty cool.  

            The net feature is pretty good, although it’s damn slow.  Although the apps availability isn’t as good for Androids as it is for iPhones, I have downloaded the apps for movies – so I can immediately check out showtimes for local theaters – and Netflix.  I’ve been using the Kindle feature to read a few books, mainly some Star Wars novels only available in that format.  And the Maps app is pretty much a GPS which works the same way.  Even the woman’s voice is the same (“recalculating!”).  I’ve yet to use the video chat feature; my GF doesn’t have a smartphone yet…her son has a Blackberry Torch and her niece has an iPhone 4G.

            If I have one major beef with the phone it’s the slide and drag type of interface instead of buttons.  But that seems more a matter of a superior interface which simply takes time to get used to, than buttons being inherently superior.  I’m still learning all the useful features the phone has; my secretary, who has had iPhones since they came out and is fairly familiar with Smartphone technology, has been useful at explaining many of the features to me. 

            In short, the “smartphone” really is much more useful and versatile than the old style phones, and I’m sure as time goes by the apps will multiply…to the point where we’ll begin to wonder, as we do with cell phones now, how we ever got along without them. 

The Beast is Back...Again

Lately I’ve been driving the Formula again, now that I’ve been able to replace the rear tires.  And I’ve been pleasantly surprised at the power and torque which have returned after a long absence.  How appropriate that a Firebird, its image and logo that of the mythical phoenix, should rise again from its ashes (thankfully not literally, but I have had nightmares about the car going up in flames).

 In March 2009 I got the car back from the body shop in Stafford, where it had been since January 2008 being returned from the dead – USAA had considered the car totalled.  Having failed emissions in 2007 and told that it needed new injectors – only getting new tags due to a waiver – I took it to a speed shop in April 2009 shortly after getting the car back from the body shop.  The speed shop pronounced my injectors healthy, but said the engine was “gone” and the car would never pass emissions with it under the hood.  In July 2009 two Chevrolet dealers told me the same thing.

 Fortunately, for a car like this, the options for engine replacement were substantial.   A simple remanufactured  replacement engine would cost about $2000, the next step up being a ZZ4 crate engine from GM Performance Parts ($4,000), or a Dart 400 short block ($3,000) + AFR aluminum cylinder heads ($1,500) (=$4,500), even some LS variants ($5000+ for the engine itself, not counting myriad mods required to make an LS engine work in a third-gen Firebird), with $2000 installation, assuming no unforeseen problems – which always seem to erupt anyway.  This was serious cash I don’t have.  So the car sat idle for the remainder of 2009 and most of 2010.   The few times I did drive it, it drove poorly, had a rough idle when cold, almost as if it was going to stall.  The power was way down, and the fuel economy was horrendous – something like 6 mpg, with black smoke belching from the tailpipes.  Moreover, it had a voltage drain on the battery, meaning I’d have to hook it up to a battery charger overnight if I wanted to drive the car the next day.  It was a sick, old car, a car you’d sell for whatever anyone would pay for it, if you didn’t care so much about it.  I was certainly discouraged, but I didn’t give up.

 In late 2010, I brought it to a shop at Fairfax Circle, Bubba’s, with the idea of producing a laundry list of “tasks” for various prices which needed to be done, topped off with the engine replacement.  Bubba, however, was not convinced it needed a new engine, and suspected that the real problem was simply an underperforming fuel system.  Long story short, Bubba fixed the car, and it passed emissions – without a new engine.  It wasn’t cheap, but it was well under the cost of a new engine.  And the voltage drain seems to have disappeared.  The fuel economy has improved dramatically, though not back up to its original peak.   It still needs a few things fixed (headlights stuck on high beams, A/C kaput) but the bottom line is that the car is now FUN TO DRIVE, which it wasn’t before.  Hallelujah!

 I still drive the Neon, especially since gas prices have shot up dramatically, and premium (93 octane) has bumped over $4 a gallon around here.  The Neon will continue to beat the Formula on gas.  The Formula’s bucket seat is deep and low, making it difficult to get in and out of the car; once you’re IN, you’re IN.  The Neon is very much a generic CAR.  Imagine a futuristic utopian society where everything is generic with no name brands: soap, water, coffee, beer, soda, houses, cars, etc.  The Neon could be that cheap plastic thing you drive around because the State has decreed that there will be only one type of anything.  But I can plug my iPod into the stereo!  So it’s not completely un-fun.

Skiing

By now I’ve been skiing 7 times in the last 30 years, the most recent trip being last weekend.  Here are my thoughts on the issue.

 Trips 1 & 2.  1980-81 (?).  These were school ski trips from my school, Marymount, Paris, to Saas Fee, in Switzerland (upper right).  I went with my brother.  This started me out.  Before the trip, we had a huge list of things we had to get: ski pants, jacket, gloves, goggles, thermal underwear, and “apres-ski” boots, which look like big moon boots and were difficult to find – I drove my parents nuts looking all through Paris for these damn things. 

            We got there by overnight train.  Once there, we stayed in a ski chalet about 15 minutes from the slopes.  They had various après-ski activities, of which the ones I remember most were a fondue (cheese & bread), movies featuring the Powder Hound (whoever he was) and a “dutch auction”.  Each trip lasted about a week.

            This is where I first learned to ski:  how to put on the boots, how to put the boots into the skis, how to fold the skis together when not being used, and the basic technique of snow-plowing.  Saas Fee was one of these “whole mountain covered in snow” deals, not what I’ve since experienced in the US of the slopes being a big patch of snow on the side of a green mountain. 

            Snow-plowing is the basic, beginner mode of skiing, wherein you point your skis in a triangle, tips facing in on each other.  It’s very slow but secure.  It doesn’t work very well on steep hills.  Eventually you transition to parallel, in which you keep the skis apart, parallel to each other.  This is much faster and gets you down the hill much quicker, but you have to know what you’re doing.  By now I’ve mastered snow plowing to the point of being able to ski on intermediate slopes, and I’m making the transition to parallel.

 Trip 3.  Sometime in college (1988?) to Ski Roundtop in Pennsylvania.  My brother couldn’t drive yet, so he asked me if I could drive him and his buddies (roommate Dave and a few others) up to this slope in southern PA.  Matt had bought his own skis by this time, but we had no ski rack on the Cavalier, so he has the skis down the middle of the car.  They were all expert skiers, so I was left snowplowing the lesser slopes by myself.

 Trip 4.  Garmisch (1990) with Phil (far left in middle picture – I’m next to him in the blue jacket) and Matt.  Garmisch-Partenkirchen is a small town in Germany on the Austrian border, just south of Munich.  The main mountain there, the Zugspitze, is the tallest mountain in the German Alps – the full map is upper left, but difficult to see when reduced so small (sorry).  The 1936 Winter Olympics were held there.  By this time it was home to the US Armed Forces Recreation Center (AFRC) which gave us access to some fairly utilitarian military hotels – we stayed in the Patton Hotel – and a Breitenau “entertainment complex” which for us just meant a place we could get American pizza.  We’d drink 75 cent beers and $1.50 tequila sunrises at the hotel bar, but since the bar closed at midnight, that didn’t give us enough time to get hammered.  The playoffs were going on by this time, but our teams, the Vikings (me), Steelers (Matt) and Giants (Phil) all got knocked out.  I also remember listening to the first Raging Slab album nonstop, particularly “Geronimo”.  That album always takes me back to Garmisch.

            We’d get the first train up the mountain in the morning and take the last one down in the evening.  The train took about an hour to get up or down, packed with us and 90% Germans.  Matt and Phil were expert skiers, so I’d be skiing by myself yet again; we’d meet up at the main chalet for lunch and rendezvous there around 5 p.m. at the end of the skiing day.  On one particular day we didn’t ski – we took a half day bus trip into Munich, the highlight of which was the Olympic Stadium, which I only later found out was the home stadium of Bayern Munchen. 

            Matt had his own skis.  I had turned in my rentals the day before.  Phil held on to his rentals until the day we were due to leave, resulting in a mad dash to return them, buy the return train tickets, and get the train back from Munich to Paris.  Hold the train, bitte!  Phil was flying to Paris, so he just had to get from the train station to the airport.

 5.  Ski Liberty (December 2009).  By this time, almost 20 years later, I had done no skiing in between, but I picked up where I left off.  The girl I was dating – she refused to deign to call me her boyfriend – wanted to try skiing, so I agreed to drive her and her friends there.  She had never skied, so this time I was the one zipping down the mountain while she took lessons.

 6.  Massanutten (December 2009).  The same girl had friends who had a timeshare at this resort in western Virginia along I-81.  We got there on a Friday night, which we spent at the indoor pool, and reserved all Saturday to skiing, returning on Sunday.  She took lessons again and spent her time on a “bunny slope” which was so mild it looked like a flat surface; what passed for a lift was a conveyer belt.   For my part, I finally started making the transition to parallel skiing.  I still haven’t had any lessons on how to do so, so my technique therein is kind of weak.

 7.  Mt. Peter (March 2011).  The Current GF does deign to call me her boyfriend.  I took her teenage son and his friends to this resort in southeast New York (an hour northwest of Fort Lee, New Jersey) for a full day of skiing.  They were all snowboarding, so yet again I was skiing by myself.  I fell a few times and skied a little worse than at Massanutten, which tells me I need formal lessons on parallel skiing to perfect an imperfect, self-taught technique.

 Falls.  I have fallen a few times, but haven’t wiped out since Saas Fee – we’re talking coming down the mountain at full speed, out of control until you wind up on your back, skis in different directions, hopefully not with anything twisted or broken.  I fell forward once at Mt. Peter on the expert slope, and it took me awhile to get back up, but fortunately I avoided twisting my ankle or having a ski come off and slide its way down the mountain – how am I supposed to get down on one ski?  Most falls are back down onto the mountain, which are not really a big deal.

 Injuries.  I’m glad to say that in 7 times skiing I have never been injured.  I’ve gotten a few bruises, and had some sores where my pants rubbed against my leg under the ski boots, but the injury I’m most concerned about – breaking a leg or grotesquely twisting an ankle 180 degrees – has never occurred.  And I do sometimes tackle intermediate and expert slopes to challenge myself.

 Lifts.  What I’ve seen in the US is consistently chair lifts.  Back in Europe they had these T-bar things, basically boat anchors.  You could only barely lean on them – if you tried to sit down they would not support your weight and you’d fall down in the track.  Since your skis never leave the ground, they seem much safer than chair lifts, which pull you up in the air, but it’s very easy to fall off, and if you do, you’re right in front of the next person coming up the hill.  Moreover, the T-bar is very unstable with only one person on it, so you really have to pair up on it.  A chair lift doesn’t care if it’s one or two people, which really helps as 95% of the time I’m skiing by myself on the mountain itself, regardless of how many people I came with. 

 Rentals.  My brother bought some high quality Rossignol skis, which he then had to carry back and forth, while the rest of us got by with returning rentals and bringing only the clothes on our backs.  I’ve never been skiing consistently enough to make a purchase worth the bother of carrying the damn things around instead of going with rentals. 

 Snowboarding.  This is a fairly recent development.  I don’t think I saw any snowboarders back at Garmisch in 1990.  I have to say I have zero interest in it.  It looks to me like an attempt to transplant surfing to the slopes and live in a Mountain Dew commercial.  All the snowboarders I saw were falling down on their asses fairly often.

 Freaks.  Aside from snowboarders, who are too prevalent to be called freaks, there were variants on the skiing experience I found odd.   

1.  No ski poles.  WTF?  Why ski without poles?  Too cheap to rent them?

2.  Very short skis.  Likewise, what’s the deal with these?

3. Cross-country.  I haven’t seen this in awhile.  Cross-country skiers look like those goofy old people “power walking”. 

4.  Ski overalls and t-shirt.  When the weather permits, the snowboarder Mountain Dew dudes strip down to this get-up, a super casual deal.  Then again, I just wear jeans, but I’ll certainly wear a jacket, even if it isn’t cold enough to merit thermal underwear – which I haven’t worn since Saas Fee.

5.  String.  I saw a few people skiing not only without poles, they were holding string in front of them in a “cat’s cradle” kind of deal.  Ski freaks!

6. Helmets.  What’s with that?  Half the people on the slope were wearing helmets.  Not military helmets, but special ski helmets with the goggles.  I’ve fallen down lots of times, but never fell on my head, which seems like the least likely part of your body to be injured skiing.   Even goggles are questionable: I needed goggles at Ski Liberty due to the incessant snow-makers throwing snow on the slopes, but didn’t have them.  Then I got goggles, and haven’t needed them since.  They wind up in my locker.

Assholes

Bear with me on this, the off-color language does have a point.  I used to like Charlie Sheen, but his recent misbehavior is off the chart.

 Private Assholes.  I’ve had the misfortune to deal with assholes in my life; unfortunately it’s impossible to completely isolate yourself from them.  Basically we’re talking about people who assert the right to get their own way and don’t care how they do it.  Their take on non-assholes is two-fold.  First, they look down on non-assholes as being too weak, lazy or incompetent to assert their will on others the way they do.  To the asshole, a non-asshole is simply hiding behind vague and irrelevant assertions of “morality” and “honesty” to justify their lack of nerve.  Second, assholes would have us believe that everyone behaves the way they do, so what they’re doing is nothing special; but the existence of non-assholes refutes that assertion, embarrassing them.  So they go on the offensive and accuse non-assholes of being pussies.

 I can’t say I agree with the Parker-Stone Dick-Asshole-Pussy Theory (Team America).  It sounds funny but doesn’t explain the difference between dicks and assholes beyond biological terms.

 Good Faith and Fair Dealing.  This is a legal concept usually brought up with respect to implied warranties and commercial dealings.  It’s hardly a novel idea or difficult to grasp.  We can recognize that some dishonesty is inevitable.  Car buyers pretend not to care about the car, so the dealer won’t jack up the price, and dealers fudge on the invoice numbers, but outright fraud (dealer doesn’t have title, or tries to sell a completely different car, or the buyer makes a credit purchase expecting to file bankruptcy soon thereafter and yet still retain the collateral) is unacceptable. 

 The Jungle.  This was Upton Sinclair’s 1905-06 critique of capitalism in Chicago in the early 20^th century.  Although it’s usually described as an expose of the meat packing industry, Sinclair’s overall goal was to discredit the system itself; he only narrowed the focus to the meat packing industry to satisfy the publisher, as he could not find a socialist publisher.  Michael Moore takes a similar approach: instead of attacking the system head on, he simply hits individual targets on consistent points, leaving the viewer to make up his or her mind, having been guided along a rosy garden path by Mr. Moore.

 Anyhow.  Most of the problems which the Lithuanian immigrant family have in Chicago stem from dishonest, abusive behavior by various capitalist villains.  Here are some examples:

1.         The family is “sold” a “new” house for $1500 with a mortgage.  What they actually find is that the house was used, simply repainted, and originally cost the builder only $500.  Their “mortgage” is actually a lease with an option to buy, meaning that if they miss a single payment, the lessor can evict them and they lose their entire investment; on a mortgage default, the borrower can cure the default by paying the arrearage and his/her investment is much better protected.  The lessor actually expects that at some point in the lease, the “owner” will default.  Their neighbors beat the system by paying off the mortgage.  Thus the real problem is fraud and dishonesty by the lender – an “asshole” problem.

2.         The wife’s employer takes a fancy to her, and wants to sleep with her.  He threatens that if she doesn’t agree to this, not only will he fire her, but he will get her husband fired and both of them blacklisted in the entire city.  Naturally she agrees, having been economically coerced into cheating on her husband.  And of course, he eventually finds out.  He beats the crap out of her boss and gets thrown into jail for a month.  Of course in the meantime, he’s lost his job and his position has been filled by the time he gets out of jail.  Another “asshole” problem.

3.         The meat packers pay off the Federal meat inspectors, so diseased or rotten meat is allowed to be mixed in with the wholesome meat, and no one is the wiser.  If a worker loses a finger, limb, or falls into the vat altogether…”shhh!”.  When the book was published in 1906, Theodore Roosevelt went ballistic, accusing Sinclair of slandering the meat packers.  When Sinclair produced proof of the payoffs, Roosevelt then took aim at the packers, the end result being the FDA.  Again, what we have are asshole meat packers (or meat asshole packers).

We’ve seen ENRON, BP, and other more modern examples of corporate bullshit.  So clearly, there are problems.   But what the socialists – whether they call themselves socialists or Democrats or whatever – don’t seem to acknowledge is that under other systems, assholes still persist and cause problems.  Instead of asshole corporate types we end up with asshole bureaucrats, as determined to abuse their positions of power as anyone in a corporate power structure.  We The Living, Ayn Rand’s first novel, showed how the idealists of the Russian Revolution are pushed aside and marginalized by the schemers and opportunists, and the revolution is very quickly corrupted and abused by these assholes.

 Finally, we’re seeing asshole behavior in Libya today, by their dictator.  And the assholes are still in power in Iran and North Korea.  Really, it should have been called the Axis of Assholes.