iPhone 4 Antenna-gate – Get Over It!

Earlier I retweeted the following: Have you ever noticed 95% of the time: People who hate Macs have never owned one, People who hate PCs have owned one. (thanks @gracesmith @CMoz). Only problem with the observation is that over 95% of the world’s experiences with personal computers are Windows computers, so the default is to hate, versus the Apple Haters where their default is not based on experience with Apple products (except one guy in twitter who lost a project on a mac and we know it was the computer’s fault…). Then there are all of the tech journalists who hate Apple because Apple has been elitist and uncooperative. My thought: get over it. I’m perfectly happy and delighted with my experiences with my Apple products (and I own a lot!). So, get over it, haters.

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iPhone4 vs HTC Evo AND HTC vs iPhone4

No too surprising that these two videos have gone viral. There’s something very irrational about fans and haters. What’s even more illogical is that the video creator got fired from Best Buy because his First Amendments rights didn’t fit BB’s weak ass corporate culture. I bet he would have suffered the same plight had he been an educator. Oh yeah, BB decided to offer him back his job and he decided that this was a wake-up call to do something better with his life than passively tolerate said fan boys, haters and corporate bozos.

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iPad’s Achilles Heel: Moving Media Companies to the Current Century

It’s something that the computer geeks don’t get. It’s part of why Microsoft’s efforts to promote Tablet PCs for the past ten years has completely failed. It’s not about the hardware or the feature list. It’s about the books, magazines, newspapers, and movies I can connect to and my access to my stuff stored on the cloud. In typical Apple fashion they are at least a good five to ten years ahead of the curve and this is resulting in more than a few disconnects. The geeks are thinking GBs storage, USB ports and processor speeds and old media are thinking pay-walls and DRM. And both of them are so dead wrong, it’s embarrassing.

On the media end I should be able able to click on any book and get an electronic or audio version for less than the price of going to my local Borders for a dead tree version. But the publishers have got their heads so far up their asses that they want to charge me a hard cover price or more for a version that doesn’t cost them one physical cent to produce or ship. They would rather sell 1,000 copies for $25 than 1,000,000 copies for $5. Or worse, there’s no e-version available because they can’t figure out how to make a digital version (though I remember a Harry Potter fan copying a 500 page book in less time than it took for the dead tree version to make it to his country).

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In Bad Faith, part 9: He Lives

I’ve noted in my eclectic twitter and facebook feeds a slight trend that I first noticed this past week, before Easter, during which someone commented that they are tired of being, or that they shouldn’t be ashamed of their faith and wanted to shout it out. Then, of course, someone quoted the verses where Jesus said, if you are ashamed to acknowledge me in this life then I won’t acknowledge you in the next life. That was a bit of a buzz-kill, but I still saw a few “He Lives!” that seemed to come from this initial thought that we shouldn’t be ashamed of our Faith. Is this the Christian version of the “I love you, man” that guys say to each other after watching a good football game and a few round of beer?

In Bad Faith, Part 9: He Lives … In the example of Your Day-to-Day Lives

I poke fun because I’m that guy in high school who, with my dear Christian friends, decided one beautiful, sunny lunch break, probably around Easter time, that we needed to not be ashamed of our faith and confronted our non-believing fellow students and got all verbal with them about the gospel. I’m so thankful (and hopeful) that my fellow students might remember said incidents as just another silly adolescent not-thought-out moment. I mean, I forgive them for wanting to and/or throwing stuff at our little group after those incidents. I’ve never been particularly fond of Confrontational Christianity since then. Of course, mom would remind me that words are cheap and that actions speak louder than words. Thanks mom. Love mom’s obviousness.

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Just a Big iTouch – Questions Mere Days Til iPad D-Day

“Let me know how you like the ipad. It looks like a jumbo iphone to me ,” I’ve gotten this question more than a few times in the past few months. And most of us have seen variations of the following Doritos ad, punking the idea that the iPad is just a big iPod/iTouch. Funny AND stupid.

So on April 1st many of the A-List reviewers released their reviews of the iPad. WSJ’s Walt Mosberg mused, Apple iPad Review: Laptop Killer? Pretty Close. NY Times columnist David Pogue doubled downed his review for the geeks and the non-geeks. One of the best video reviews I’ve seen was by Chicago Sun-Times columnist, Andy Ihnatko (see below).

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The Cat Piano & Random Web

I love the random web. A student referred a short film nominated in this year’s oscars, wondering how they got away with using so many logos and trademarked images in their film: logorama (which, interestingly, has a copyright symbol in their movie title!). So I went to YouTube to see the full video. It wasn’t on YouTube, just a take-down-notice. Damn. But then I found the above random video, thus proving the Internet axiom: “If it doesn’t play on YouTube, it doesn’t exist” (are you listening Murdoch?). BTW, Logorama won the oscar for animated short.

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In Bad Faith, Part 7: Entitlement

If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father who is in heaven give good things to them that ask him? (Matthew 7:11 ASV)

It shouldn’t be too surprising that in an era and place of unbridled abundance and wealth (that is the US in the 1970s and following) that these verses would be seen as part of the claim that we deserve good things and God has to give us what we want. Of the many mistakes I’ve made in my walk of faith, having a sense of entitlement, that God owes me something, was no small source of confusion and probably one of the worst ways that I could have envisioned a relationship with the Divine. Funny that I seem to get mostly what I needed, but almost never what I wanted.

In Bad Faith, Part 7: Entitlement

It might be interesting to see the tel-evangelist and the religious huckster try to preach this gospel of entitlement to villagers in a developing spot in the world where their village is routinely wiped out every year by monsoons and flooding. Or in some South American desert community where there’s no electricity or indoor plumbing, how would they spin their message there? How does this gospel of entitlement translate in parts of the world where children catch the measles and die or where they don’t have enough food to feed them and have to watch them slowly starve to death. Conversely, how about hard-working folk who are laid-off or fired because the CEO needs to cut the budget so that he can still get his quarter-million dollar. The CEO got what he wanted, but the thousands and possibly millions who are dependent on that paycheck for their daily bread certainly didn’t. Does God only listen to the prayers of CEOs, or rich Americans?

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Apple iPad Announced: Oh My God, It Doesn’t Have a Rubber Baby Buggy Bumper!

I love CNET. It’s one tech news source where I can find everything from straight tech journalism to flawed editorials on the latest things happening in the tech world. Take the overhyped announcement of the iPad a little bit ago, CNET provided the following excellent straight news reporting on the event:

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“A” is for Ax Murderer

Another student take on Zander’s giving student’s an automatic “A”:

Grades in middle school are controversial, especially now that students earn credits to be promoted to the next grade level. Ask a teacher at my school to “give an ‘A’” and their response is likely to be one of confusion, disbelief, laughter, or even anger. Administrators will tell you that grades should be used to measure student success and communicate progress. Unfortunately, many teachers use grades to communicate a very bad message and focus on “principle.” “Its the principle of the matter,” exclaims a colleague. “If you give an ‘A’ to a student who does nothing in your class, what kind of message are you sending the kid who works their butt off?”

So it goes back to measure and comparison (see chapter 2). Giving an A is not about allowing students a free ride and telling hard working students that it is all for nothing. Rather, it is eliminating the “anticipation of failure” and allowing the class to focus on what is more important; learning. It’s all about placing everyone on a level playing field (pardon the competitive sports analogy) and saying, “you already have the grade, what’s next?” It’s likely that the response will involve a feeling of relief and willingness to explore.

However, I think the next step of giving an ‘A’ is just as important as giving the ‘A’ itself. Teachers who feel that giving an ‘A’ would eliminate student accountability will like this step the most. Requiring that students predict how they have earned the A before they have actually received it, helps them develop goals and builds intrinsic motivation. It also helps them see the possibility of being successful, something many have given up on.

Interested in seeing how I felt about this in October, click here. – Noel Nehrig

And my erudite response:

Grades are a bit like religion. There may have been a point at some time but it’s gotten lost in all of the noise and people are very scared to consider what to do if grades/religion had never existed. In the classroom, has the point of all the effort gotten lost to pursuing a grade? I mean, just like religion, isn’t all of this effort suppose to amount to something intrinsic, some good that goes beyond measure?

Grades are institution solution to communicating student progress and/or position in the A-to-F continuum within the classroom. There the measure, not the point. But i’ve seen instructors at all level quibble looking to seal up any possible loophole that a student might use to game the grading system. At best a grade is an approximation that may or may not be related to student progress fulfilling course requirements. In the end, it’s what we carry in our heads and hearts that matters more than this imperfect approximation. Funny how only those who excel and those who feel besmirched care so much about grades. What’s up with that?

Sources:
Wk 1 Reading- “A” is for Ax Murderer by Noel Nehrig. http://web.me.com/noelnehrig/The_Blog_Prince_for_EMDTMS_MAC/2010_MAC_OCD_Wk1/Entries/2010/2/6_Wk_1_Reading-_%E2%80%9CA%E2%80%9D_is_for_Ax_Murderer.html retrieved on 2/9/2010

Astro’s Got an Axe! by tohoscope. http://www.flickr.com/photos/tohoscope/182444838/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Stone mason by sk8geek. http://www.flickr.com/photos/sk8geek/3917647300/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

Pretty Princess Picking Her Nose by Pink Sherbet Photography. http://www.flickr.com/photos/pinksherbet/3295969599/ retrieved on 2/9/2010

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In Bad Faith, Part 5: What’s Missing?

Dawkins wrote in The God Delusion that all experiences of “Faith” are delusions, that there is no god out there “talking” to you. He wrote that anyone with an ounce of intelligence recognizes that there is no “man behind the curtain,” and that the stories in the Bible, for example, should have been given up when we gave up on our belief in Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy. It all seems very logical. But something is missing here.

Conversely, I love that, for the fundamental or conservative Christian, the answer to every problem faced by us is to “give it up to Jesus.” Lost your job? Give it up to Jesus! Stuck in a rotten marriage? Give it up to Jesus! Need a new car? Give it up to Jesus! It’s a powerful message, especially if you’re a teenager or a drug addict looking to leave that lifestyle. But, for all of us in between, there still seems to be something missing.

In Bad Faith, Part 5: What’s Missing?

Ironically, one of the mistakes that I made as a young Christian adult was to close off my emotions and try to be more logical because my faith told me that one can’t trust emotions. Yeah, that approach didn’t work so well for Mr. Spoke, I don’t know why I thought it’d turn out any better for moi. I tried to be logical and I wasn’t any fun to live with. Just ask my ex-wife. Now, I know that Dawkins isn’t advocating a logic-only/emotionless lifestyle, but there’s a kind of delusion to entertain the idea that human beings are going to be “logical” and “scientific” when it comes to the bigger issues in life or even in ones day to day existence. I think the fictional character, Geordi, in ST: TNG, said it best when he said that we humans go with our “gut” so much because we almost never have enough data to make the decisions that we need to make.

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