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Stuck

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Air travel has never been the same since deregulation in the 80’s. Remember People’s Express? As the first discount carrier, people were amazed at the low fares; what I noticed were the brown bag meals that you had to purchase. It’s been all down hill ever since. Now I’m sitting on the tarmac while maintenance crews are repairing the hydraulics on the plane. The clock is ticking and the probability of meeting my connection becomes increasingly remote. This is the 4th time out of 5 flights this year that this has happened, and it’s the second time with Delta where a mechanical problem has left us waiting on the gate. It’s awful because I can’t rebook without deplaning and abandoning this flight -that option doesn’t improve the odds of me getting home. The other option is to wait it out and get to Memphis and try to get a seat on another flight 5 hours later or rebook on a myriad of different hub options.

I remember a time when traveling by coach still meant reasonable comfort and space. It meant a hot meal on any flight over two hours. It meant flight attendants who weren’t frazzled by having to be anger management specialists. It meant flying with a better class of passenger. Flying used to be fun. Now it’s as appealing as traveling by bus.

Sent from my HTC smartphone

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Eric Schmidt On Privacy (VIDEO): Google CEO Says Anonymity Online Is ‘Dangerous’

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Unless you walk outdoors with a bag over your head, or a ski mask, you are in the public domain. Anonymity allows for all kinds of behavior outside the bounds of social norms and has a long tradition going back to masquerades and shamans. You can pitch a fit, but we do have some constitutional and legal protections to privacy For most people, anonymity is about porn, but for many its about politics, religion, and belief if they live in a society that persecutes their particular political or religious view. Face it, there is no privacy in the old sense unless you completely disconnect and go off the grid.
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

golf culture, golf news, golf philosophy, Golf politics, My Bidness, my golf, Uncategorized , , Leave a comment

Golf Transparency -the egalitarianism of golf

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My GHIN number update came back, and my handicap index is 18.4, with a course handicap of 21 for Wakonda. I have been playing poorly, but I always do better in competition. Golf takes on a different, truer aspect when its played in formal competition. Yesterday evening, I played in the Wakonda Match Play Championship, handicapped flight.

Golf reveals its egalitarian nature in the handicapping system. I played RG, a 16 handicapper who defeated me during my run at the cup several years ago in a memorable match that taught me a lot about myself. He is an excellent player and can spin off some marvelous golf shots that exceed the level suggested by his handicap. Golf allows such unequal competitors to play on a level field with the handicap system. He gave me 5 strokes which were instrumental in keeping the match even. Through 16 holes, we were level, after RG came back from a 3 shot deficit. We were playing in a thunderstorm, barely able to see the shot beyond 20 feet. I was further handicapped by having to wear sunglasses which were prescription sunglasses. Without it, I was basically blind, but due to the waning cloudy light, the ball and target were dark. I do think that the sensory deprivation allowed me to swing better.

I was able to line up, square, square, square and swing with my head still. This allowed me to make a natural bogey, net par with a concession, followed up by a ball on green on the final hole with RG’s unfortunately lost into dark woods. This match was very close, and could only have been so with accurate handicaps.

It makes me wonder why we this concept works in golf but not in life at large. It’s written in the constitution that All Men Are Created Equal, but this is not true, is it?

Golf and Religion, golf culture, golf history, golf literature, golf mysticism, golf philosophy, Golfist Art, my golf, Naturalism, Uncategorized 1 Comment

Golf Passage of the Mysteries

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A poem written driving from Detroit to Des Moines after we missed a connecting flight, we were returning from a spring golf trip to Hilton Head, myself and several most excellent golfing companions. As we pulled out of a convenience store lot, I had the vision of a wizened old man, a specter, hailing us with the following words…
Five and One man, on a journey!
Heading westwards, on into the night.
Burdens shared, and sleep neglected,
Y’all crossing the river, and arrive at first light.
Great joy you have found, and more do you seek
Onwards and onwards, for promises to keep,
Hammer on the right foot, no shoe on the left
Still many hours, before you shall sleep.
So go, I say go, and listen No More,
I am an illusion, but so is your labor,
That ball is not a ball, that hole is not a hole,
And that last hasty meal, you will not savor.
And when you are home, and you lay in your bed
Alive you will feel, alive with no dread
And in seeking all that golfin’ pleasure,
You realize the truth that the company is the treasure.

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Windows Mobile 6.5 -too little, too late, but reasonably great

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As someone who has suffered from almost a decade of desperately mediocre Window Mobile devices, it was with a specific reason I chose to switch out of iPhone to Verizon’s HTC TouchPro2 last fall. There is a program called Walking Hotspot which turns any WinMo device into a Wifi hotspot and I felt that it would support my iPhone and future devices like the current iPad the best.

The phone turned out to be a load of turd as far as smartphones go, but I blamed it mostly on Microsoft and not HTC. HTC puts a skin called Sense UI on all of its Android devices and a similar skin called TouchFlo on Windows devices, and I turned it off several days ago after finally just being unable to deal with the screen lags and freezes. Lo and behold, underneath all the TouchFlo cosmetics was the outdated and ugly Windows Mobile 6.1, which ran pretty well on this latest and greatest hardware.

So it was a no brainer for me to try the Windows Mobile 6.5 upgrade offered by Verizon. I saw several warnings on blogs that it would slow things terribly, but I sensed that it was the TouchFlo skin and not Windows Mobile. The upgrade went well, and lo and behold, turning off the beautiful TouchFlo skin resulted in a spiffy windows 6.5 smartphone that actually works. The screens snap and the device really does alright with Wifi and Bluetooth, things that it was gasping at before. The browser still sucks compared to Safari on iPhone, but borders on usable to where I no longer use iPhone for email so much.

Which leads me to this conclusion: Microsoft spent a decade missing the opportunity to grab and dominate the smartphone market by creating a horrible interface (6.1 and prior) and then allowing third parties to skin up the phone to copy iPhone without regard to performance or battery life. If 6.5 is any indication, Windows Phone 7 will be a formidable entry to the market, more so than Android which is already confusing because of the plethora of skins, form factors, and OS versions.