The Good

So in this (not so) glorious country I currently call home, it looks like the slightly more sensible political party of the two will gain control of the house and in some sense the senate, since the two parties are tied at 49 seats but the 2 independents said they'd generally stick with the dems. I kinda feel like celebrating, but politics and democracy in general is so fucked up here that it doesn't really seem worth it.

The Bad

After 6 years of nearly constant fuckups by Bush and company, the horrific thing about this election was that it was still close. Either the dems are idiots, the American public are idiots, or (most likely) both.

In Canada the Liberals had a shady sponsorship scandal where some millions of dollars were misspent. Bush and friends are pissing away orders of magnitude more money than that in Iraq, not to mention the numerous financial scandals that have plagued the republicans in recent months. And then there's the whole sketchy business of Halliburton, its relationship to key figures in the Bush administration, and its successful bids to "rebuild Iraq" (heh, as if that's happening any time soon).

So you'd think that in Canada, maybe we were a little ticked. But in democracy-loving America, there must surely have been an uproar! Sadly, no. Here in the "land of the free," it was still a very close election, and the dems only kinda got the senate, by a hair.

In Canada we ditched the libs altogether, in favour of our own home-grown Bush. The funny thing is I always remember Larry Smith describing "you Canadians" as rock-like sheep, compared to our overly-excitable trigger-happy neighbours. It certainly looks to me like the Yanks are the rock-like sheep here.

The Ugly

Gay marriage ballot issues defeated all over the place. Sigh. Never understimate the intolerance of the religious right. Who's going to step up and be they gay rights equivalent of Martin Luther King Jr.?

November 11, 2006 (link)

Zune

Microsoft still doesn't get it. Ars does:

To unseat a player like the iPod and to convince users to ditch any PlaysforSure tracks they might own, Microsoft needed to hit a home run on launch day.

According to the same review, however, the Zune locked up right out of the box and there are pretty serious problems syncing, in addition to the much touted iPod-killing wifi feature being so severely limited that it's next to useless. If anyone is seriously going to "kill" the iPod now, they have to have something that works flawlessly and smoothly, in addition to having some cool new distinguishing feature that makes it so tempting that users just might be willing to throw away all their iPod FairPlay tracks. In short, it's next to impossible to "kill" the iPod at this stage, and MS doesn't get it.

Unfortunately for them, their anger at this situation, which is not unlike the situation they've created with Windows and Office, does not an iPod killer make.

November 22, 2006 (link)

Waterloo

Since we have a 4-day weekend for American thanksgiving this week, the chumpa lumpas and I came up to Waterloo to work for the 3 days and visit our respective girlfriends. It's been a bit odd being back, but good. I've also been highly impressed by Waterloo's incredible security. More than 6 months after graduating, my account is still fully functional, with a full 100MB quota (sadly, even in this day of $100 300GB hard drives, the standard quota for CS students is still only 100MB, and that's up from 10MB only about 2 years ago). I assume they know I graduated, since they gave me a degree and everything. Hoh well, free wifi for me!

November 29, 2006 (link)

DS Lite

A while ago my gainful employer sent me some gift certificates to Best Buy. They sent them to the wrong address, but due to mrwise's resourcefulness I got them anyway.

In any case, I used them to buy a DS Lite. I must say, I'm very impressed with it. It's beautifully simple, suspends and resumes seamlessly so you can play for a few minutes on the subway and then slip it in your pocket, and the variety of games is great. The wireless gaming works flawlessly too, and the fact that you can play games you don't own is really cool. I really like Nintendo's strategy of sticking to what they do best: gaming. I feel like with all the other systems out there, they just try to be too many things, and end up getting them all wrong.

Tréo

I've gone from loving mine to hating it. When I liked it, I didn't have data at all, since Fido charges ridiculously for data. But one of my main reasons for getting a Tréo as opposed to something cheap and crappy was that I'd be able to read email on it, do Google Maps, etc. So after moving down to NYC, where T-mobile has a reasonable-ish unlimited data plan, I went for it, and promptly discovered that doing anything data-related on the Tréo sucks.

The non-data stuff, like the phone, contacts and calendar, are solid, so if you just want a fancy phone that you can also run Palm software on, I'd still say it's a good machine, but if you want to do email, web, etc. I would recommend strongly against it:

• Their built-in web browser, Blazer, has about the worse possible design I can imagine. The entire UI blocks all the time. You can't scroll a loading page until it's completely loaded. You can't scroll the current page as soon as you click something. There are no tabs. This makes my usual latency-hiding techniques, of (a) loading stuff in another tab while I read current stuff, and (b) clicking a link and then reading the current page until it loads, useless.
• You can get Opera for it, but only the non-native Java version, not a Tréo-specific version. It's somewhat better than Blazer, in that it's faster and blocks less, but since it's Java, it crashes left and right, and sometimes locks up the machine completely, to the point where you have to hit the hardware reset button.
• The built-in mail program, VersaMail, is also a complete piece of junk. It completely fails to handle non-7bit-ASCII encodings, randomly decides to re-download your entire mailbox, blocks while downloading, crashes often, etc.
• The new Gmail phone app is Java-only right now, meaning that while it runs, it exhibits all the crashing and lock-up problems that Opera has. Using Gmail in a web browser is also a no-go due to the above browser problems.

The one bright light is the Google Maps for Mobile app, which is Palm native and rocks my socks off. But I went to the tech talk, and believe you me it was no easy task writing that sucker. Apparently modern Palms run PalmOS on an Xscale processor which is emulating some old 16-bit Motorola CPU or something? Sounds godawful.

I suspect the next PalmOS with Linux and GTK will be a lot better. Hopefully it will also come with tinymail, which is all kinds of awesome.

Anyway, one of the reasons I went Palm instead of Crackberry is that I thought Palm had a larger software library. This is true, but it seems that most new mobile apps are Java, because it's a lot heasier to support a bunch of phones at once that way. All of Google's mobile apps supported Crackberry right away or soon after launching, because Crackberry does Java, for example.

So, dear LazyWeb, how are Crackberries for non-data stuff? Do the phone, contacts and calendar work well? Are there 3rd-party apps for stuff like reading ebooks? How well does the email work with Gmail? I'm unlikely to want to pay for the special Crackberry "push" email, unless I can con Google into paying for it :)

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