Jeeeeeeeeeeeeeesus!!!

Lost on iTunes: a cautionary tale

So my wife and I are halfway through season 3 of Lost. We're moving forward a few episodes at a time, mostly via iTunes (via our Apple TV).

So tonight, we finish episode 12 ("Par Avion") and download episode 13 ("The Man From Tallahassee"). The "previously on Lost" recap begins, and suddenly we start seeing a ton of stuff that hasn't happened yet. After much investigation, we conclude that iTunes is actually serving up episode 16 ("One of Us") when episode 13 is requested.

This is the first time I've experienced a problem like this with iTunes. We spoke with tech support, who was helpful and offered us a refund. They will be changing the file on the server shortly.

But it begs the question: how many people have watched Lost on iTunes and didn't realize what happened?

Anyway, just putting this out there for the record. Perhaps I'll start a Facebook group for people who've watched Lost season 3 on iTunes and have been traumatized by the sudden fast-forward of plot.

Here we go again

http://wcbstv.com/breakingnewsalerts/subway.terror.plot.2.874410.html

The state of our economy

Peter Schiff nails it:



I've been wrong a lot, but this is one area where I feel vindicated (unfortunately). I've been saying this for a long time (albeit not nearly as intelligently or specifically).

What we're seeing now is not a real estate problem. It's not a credit problem. It's not a recession that's part of the normal business cycle.

The conventional wisdom about things that the vast majority of people have been spouting over the past year- that we will bounce back from this- is WRONG.

What we're experiencing now is the initial stage of a profound economic reckoning for America and the world.

As the rest of the world caught up with America over the past twenty years, and gained wealth as a result, they turned to America to borrow that money and the American consumer to buy their goods.

So America wracked up a tremendous amount of debt as a result.

Over the past decade, in particular, the world economy was propelled by the strength of American consumption. The American economy was seemingly buoyed by this strength. Inflated housing prices made this strength seem liquid, when it was in fact not.

And now we have the reckoning. America is saddled with so much debt, and- here's the worst part- unlike the past, when we were able to produce our way out of debt and downturns, we now lack an economy built on production and the corresponding competitive edge over the rest of the world that we used to have.

Our economy has changed so much, there's very little we make here anymore. Manufacturing has fled the country. Healthcare costs make it disproportionately expensive to higher American workers. The sorry state of our education system means that we're not setting ourselves up to be able to compete in the service industries of the future. And the deregulated state of Wall Street has made it possible for our largest and most powerful companies to mask their fundamental weakness by playing a shell game so complex- and so fundamentally devoid of value- that no one can figure out how to untangle the mess. And of course, most of the politicians are just stammering and pointing fingers.

There will be no "bounce back". There is no "back", because where we were was an illusion. Where we are now- and where we will continue to fall to- that is the reality.

So where do we go from here?

The first step is to acknowledge the reality of where we are. It is important to stress the significance of this. We need to realize that this is not so much a crisis, or a failure of the status quo. This is an awakening to reality.

Then, we need to cut out the partisan bickering, the reliance on conventional wisdom, and the temptation to fall back on shortcuts.

We need to look at ourselves and reassess what it is that we do and make as a country, given the resources and the workforce that we have. Propping up our failed institutions and models will not help us. Avoiding the immediate pain inherent in being honest about this will not help us.

I'm not 100% sure about this, but my gut tells me that one example of the right way forward would be to let Detroit fail and let our economy deal with the massive consequences. Because those consequences- that real pain- that is a threshold through which we have to pass in order to get to the next step, where we can truly be honest with ourselves.

The unions in Detroit are too powerful.

No one wins when it costs Detroit companies more than $2,000 additional to make a car compared to other companies who don't have to support the same kind of systemic inefficiencies resulting from our broken union and healthcare system.

We need to dramatically overhaul the healthcare system to shift the burden of paying for healthcare off of companies, and to give people better healthcare options at the same time.

We need to be honest with ourselves, and accept the fact that we no longer live in a world in which American workers and American businesses can continue to succeed while they're failing in the marketplace and being propped up by the government.

In short, I think we need to let things really break in order to properly fix them.

I think the attitude that certain things are too big to be allowed to fail, that certain types of pain are not acceptable- that attitude is a key part of the problem. That attitude is what has kept us from facing reality. That attitude is what has created America's Achilles Heel: the notion that we as a nation have become too great to suffer the consequences of our choices.

We are a great nation.

We are uniquely constructed to be in a unique position to reinvent ourselves. We have a tremendous diversity of natural resources. We have a tremendous diversity of ideas and inspiration. We have a tremendous diversity of people, the world's most valuable resource.

And we are a nation built of people who have come here wanting to be here, believing that here, things are possible that are not possible anywhere else.

Opportunity, hope, and dreams are what this country is made of, and the election of our forty-fourth president is proof positive that all of that is still alive and well in America.

So we've got what it takes to get through this, but it's going to take a lot of honesty, humility, hard work, and pain to get there.

If you think there's going to be a correction, or a bounce-back, or that we've hit bottom... If you think any of those things will happen without your life going through some profound and unexpected changes, much bigger than what people even now are talking about, I think you are wrong.

Slumdog Millionaire

"Slumdog Millionaire" is a fantastic film.

I had virtually no idea what I was going to see when I went last night, other than having picked up on some pretty good buzz from people who'd seen it. It was even better than I expected.

Rock you to sleep tonight

"Chinese Democracy," the eponymous song from GNR's long awaited new album, is basically as good as you could have hoped.

Click here to download it and enjoy it.

Listen to it with headphones, and the volume turned up as loud as your jurisdiction will allow.

Buy the album when it's officially released.

"Chinese Democracy"

The first two minutes or so of Guns N' Roses' "Chinese Democracy"- the title song from their new album- is exactly what I would have hoped the first two minutes of a new Guns N' Roses album fifteen years in the making and called "Chinese Democracy" would sound like.

You can hear the new album here (just go to the page and it will start playing).

It's perfect.

Though I do have to admit, it makes me think of this:

My iPhone has reclaimed its value

Fixed my iPhone.

I restored the software again using iTunes, and then immediately went into Settings and removed the gmail account. Once the gmail account was gone, I was able to toggle my MobileMe sync settings off and then back on again, and everything went back to normal.

So I can't be sure about exactly what caused the problem, but it seems like the gmail account caused some sort of corruption that prevented the iPhone from sending/receiving email, contacts, and calendars, and also prevented the editing of account settings. Going into the account settings immediately following the restore was the trick- the gmail "bug" seemingly hadn't fired yet at that point.

This is just another example of the unfortunate state of the 2.x iPhone software. It's gotten better with 2.1, but it's still flaky way beyond the standard set by 1.x, and beyond what should be tolerable on an omnipresent, mission-critical device.

My iPhone has become worthless

As of around 1pm yesterday, the following is the state of my iPhone: all contacts gone, calendar app won't open at all, can't send/receive email.

Happened seemingly spontaneously.

I suspect this has something to do with MobileMe, Exchange, or a recently added gmail account. Thing is, I can't edit any of my mail or sync settings- when I try, Settings either freezes or just ignores my changes.

I did a full software restore last night, to no avail.

This really sucks. Anyone have any ideas?

Reliable Investments

Classic SNL commercial, timelier than ever. Forwarded to me by my dad.

Governor Schwarzenegger makes a lot of sense

Great interview: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=6264603

All of the post-election attention being focused on the Republican party, and where are they going to go from here, strikes me as a major waste of time and a symptom of a profound lack of imagination on behalf of those engaged. The conversation assumes that the way things were is a stasis worth returning to.

To believe that is ludicrous. I think we have the possibility to enter a new age where we can practice a degree of bi-partisanship- perhaps even post-partisanship- unlike anything we've seen in our lifetime.

This is not to say that we won't have differences, but our president-elect seems to genuinely be thinking this way. I think we owe it to ourselves to stop being confounded by this and start imagining what a world might look like in which maybe we don't reflexively re-polarize ourselves so quickly.

To the cloud!

Late in the evening on Saturday, November 15, 2008, John and Lisa Baxter crossed through an invisible- and seemingly insignificant- milestone. They did so together, but unaware. The consequences would prove to be dramatic in the years to come.

John and Lisa had spent most of that Saturday holed up in their apartment, keeping out of touch from the incessant rain and whiling away the hours reading the newspaper, a few books, watching TV, cooking a meal and some cookies, and browsing a variety of sites on the web. It had been a quiet day of mostly solitary activities, loosely held together by a common proximity and the occasional outreached hand and off-hand smile.

Late in the evening, John and Lisa- both engrossed in their laptops- conducted a pithy conversation over Twitter. They traded sly comments, some inside and outside jokes, and sprinkled the metadata of their relationship across the ether.

Then they brushed their teeth and went to bed.

If one was counting, one would have observed that it was late in the evening on Saturday, November 15, 2008, that John and Lisa Baxter inverted the time-honored laws of inter-personal marital communications by spending more time communicating through intermediary means than by direct, verbal contact.

In other words, that night, the scales of John and Lisa's communications routine tipped in favor of the cloud, and away from the real world.

From that night on, the steady march to the cloud continued, and increased in pace.

It was not uncommon for John and Lisa to spend Friday and Saturday nights holed up in separate rooms, connected to the Internet through laptops or smartphones, relating to each other and their overlapping but unique networks of social connections.

This was happening all over the world, of course. And for some, the transition to the cloud was even more intense.

Lawton St. James (AKA N1krb0kr), a software developer and avid online gamer, was one of the first people to experiment with putting his body into "maintenance mode." This entailed a series of bodily catheters for the input of nutrients and the removal of waste, coupled with the hiring of a "cultivator," a combination trained nurse and personal assistant whose job description was to take care of as many of Lawton St. James' remaining worldly affairs as possible.

N1krb0kr spent roughly 21 hours a day in a conscious state, connected to the Internet through a series of computers and input devices ranging from keyboard to touchpad to microphone to gesture interpreter. There he consumed a steady stream of primary source news from around the world and the net, and meta-commentary on said news through blogs, social conversation networks, and the like.

He earned money through a combination of micro-payments accrued through social advertising resulting from people connecting to his online streams of output and commentary (and inferred commentary through his activities), and from discreet consulting services he provided to people for a variety of purposes.

He engaged in gaming activities and real-time simulations involving a wide variety of content.

And when he dipped out of consciousness, his pulse dimmed, slightly, from the vast grid in which he existed, causing a gentle slowing- but not cessation- of the various streams on which he fed.

Good stuff coming from our President-elect and his team

They've definitely got the slickest communications team and strategy we've ever seen at this level of government. And while it's controlled messaging, it's still refreshing.

I love Paul Rudd

And the Emmy goes to...

Ed Helms, as Andy Bernard, and Oscar Nunez, as Oscar Martinez, from The Office:


http://www.hulu.com/watch/44303/the-office-business-trip?c=734:829

Email

Way the hell too much of it- and to what end?

I bet if we eliminated email and focused on direct, question/answer/get-it-done mediums like phone calls, we'd gain about 75% productivity, and lose maybe 25%. So we'd be about 50% more productive.

On Tuesday of this week- a pretty standard day- I received 340 emails and sent 127. These totals are a combination of personal and work emails, though work accounts for the vast majority. This total does not include messages that were flagged by my spam filters and not delivered directly to my inbox.

How about you? How much email do you send and receive on a typical day?

State of the still-unresolved Senate races

From TPM:

Torture

This post sums up my feelings. It should not be the law of the land.
It should not be condoned. Let any "ticking time bomb" exceptions that
arise be treated as just that: extraordinary circumstances, which- on
balance- I think most reasonable Americans would be able to excuse,
given facts and the light of day.

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2008/11/obama-torture-l.html#more