The iPhone 4S is more than I expected
I’ve had an iPhone 3GS since January of 2009. I wasn’t eligible for upgrade when the iPhone 4 came out, so I decided to wait until the next version.
I did own both 3G and 3GS model phones — thanks to a generous employer. The 3GS was a far better device, even if all they did was tack an “S” on the end of the name, so I didn’t feel too bad about skipping the iPhone 4. And Apple did what I expected back then. They released an iPhone 4 with a faster processor, better camera, and better voice control.
Is that enough for iPhone 4 users to upgrade? Probably not. But there are a lot of us on the “S” track for upgrades thanks to timing issues or our purchasing preferences, and the 4S looks awfully nice to us. I can buy two faster, stronger, better iPhones for what I would have paid for one last September.
This is the pace we expect from Apple: release, refine, refine, refine. Every year Apple announces new products they get dinged by the gadget press for not re-inventing their product line. But they do that only rarely. Apple generally works by slow, consistent improvement. That’s not disappointing, it’s smart. And it’s pretty comforting to those of us who either can’t or don’t want to replace every Apple device every year.
Stuff I’d write about if I had the time
I flag several posts a day that I’d like to come back to at some point and respond to or write about. Obviously that rarely happens. So here’s a link dump instead:
- John Gruber at Daring Fireball writes about the experience of The Unfamiliar. As someone whose web skills are broad and shallow, this is something I have to deal with pretty frequently. Do I hate something because it’s bad or just because it’s unfamiliar to me?
- John Henley of Unqualified Offerings writes about the problem of compassionate conservatism, which is that volunteer giving and community care simply cannot keep up with demand.
What the actual historical record seems to show between the early 19th to the mid-20th Century, is the actual provisioners of private charity pushing for more public, tax-funded responses to the problems the provisioners worked on. The little platoons themselves apparently felt they were not up to the task.
- John Scalzi on what good criticism looks like, required reading for everyone who writes Amazon reviews.
Big day for cherries
My four-year-old son is such a finicky eater that he has never tasted his own birthday cake. So I was a little surprised when he agreed to eat a maraschino cherry and *even more surprised* when he asked for another one. When he asked for one more, I offered him an all-natural, no preservatives, naturally sweet, pitted dark cherry instead. He ate four.
I am sure there are very few of you who can understand what a momentous occasion this is for me. Suffice it to say that it’s important enough for posterity that I am posting it on this weblog first instead of either Facebook or Twitter, the two standard channels for reporting close encounters with comestibles.
Tinkering
Yeah, so I’ve been tinkering again. Slicehost has been my web host for around two years or so, but they were acquired by Rackspace shortly after I signed up and not much has changed since then. Back in May they announced that they were going to migrate everyone over to Rackspace Cloud hosting, which suited me just fine as long as it was reasonably non-disruptive. But that was some time ago, and I’m still not sure what’s going on. I should probably have been reading the forums, but most of the posts I’ve scanned are people threatening to move to Linode.
Link roundup
Here are some of the things I’ve flagged as very interesting, but don’t really have all that much to say about. I promise, it’s not all politics.
- The Civil War Isn’t Tragic, Con’t: Ta-Nehisi Coates summarizes a James McPherson book arguing that the Civil War was inevitable, not something that could have been avoided with more careful diplomacy, because slavery defined both the economics and the culture of the South.
- Android Development in a Less Open World after Google + Motorola Google now owns one of the handset manufacturers that licenses Android, which puts them in a very competitive position against the other licensees.
- Eye Gaze and the Power of Faces describes how pictures of people in advertising guide our gaze and focus our reading.
89 in the shade
An observation about debugging
Some bugs are caused by carelessness, some by basic errors in logic, and others by unanticipated side effects.
But the worst spring from a fundamental misconception about how the entire system works. To solve these you have to reshape your preconceptions and abandon your biases.
Which makes me wonder if LSD would be a useful debugging tool.
Tweet Your Friends
I have become bored with the Internet, and I think I know why. You can help me fix it, so I have a favor to ask you. I need you to help me find cool stuff on the Internet.
“Cool stuff” is not something from Failblog or the funny cat that made it to the front page of Reddit. Nor is “cool stuff” is not the lead article in Wired or a righteous burn from Talking Points Memo. Cool stuff is what your friends are doing that no one has seen yet. Not because it’s hidden but because no one talking about it.
The best cartoon penguin ever
Bloom County, a pseudo-political comic strip from the 80s, is being republished in several handsome tomes, and I’m getting all of them just as fast as I can afford them. It was one of the most important artifacts of my teenage years. I learned how to draw Bill the Cat and Opus the Penguin fairly well, which was quite a feat considering I can’t draw squat. They decorated my homework like little hearts. My favorite strips hung on the wall. I talked to my friends (and girlfriends) on an Opus phone. It’s long since inoperative, but I keep it around anyway.
It’s been many years since I re-read most of these, and I’m remembering now just how much Bloom County and Opus meant to me.