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The Agonist

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I have agonized over this for a while, particularly after being on call and dropping 3 consecutive calls that left me awake and irritated. Luckily, they weren’t critical, but the iPhone, which I love, works very poorly in my house with AT&T. There is a nearby cell tower, and I should get 5 bars of coverage but we are behind a hill and as you enter its shadow, the bars go to zero, and in my house, 2-3 bars is a good day. I know never to take calls from the kitchen but rather run outdoors if the call is critical.

Therefore, I am quitting AT&T and moving to Verizon. I used to be a 10 year Sprint veteran, but their coverage is equally poor. AT&T in its greed sets their phones for almost no roaming and so won’t switch towers even though there are GSM towers within site (T-mobile I guess). So to Verizon I go with their miserable top down approach to smart phones.

They apparently were offered the iPhone but did not want to relinquish controll over the apps.

I know I had sworn off WinMo, but fact is that HTC has hacked up WinMo 6.1 to work almost like the iPhone with its “flo”-ing user interface. What I like is the fact that you can tether the phone or even better, download a software that will let you make the phone a WiFi hotspot which is nice for my laptop. The irony will be that my iPhone will still be in my pocket for use to call out via Skype over Wifi -this works very well.

I’ll review the HTC Touch Pro2 as soon as I get my hands on it. It’s screen is larger and has higher pixel density than iPhone and it has a real keyboard. It has Bluetooth 2.1 which should let me pair all kinds of gadgets to it including a stereo headset and my earpieces (Plantronic Pro 950 which I consider incredible for cancelling outside wind noise).

Verizon will have to change a lot of things to get iPhone and may not have it in its DNA to undergo this change. AT&T deserves a bag of poop delivered on its doorstep on fire for its negligence of establishing bulletproof coverage. These phones are mission critical and need to be on and reliable.

AT&T had its chance -I asked the customer service rep for microcell -to set up a local in-house micro cell tower. But this would only be an admission of defeat for AT&T and it has not release what would be an enabling technology.

So I ring AT&T’s doorbell, light that paper bag full of steaming poo, and run down the street!

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Sony, the graveyard of media formats

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Sony’s ability to turn gold into lead has a long track record. It started with Betamax but continued with MiniDisk, Memory Stick, UMD, and now Blu-Ray. You’d think they won with Blu-Ray, beating back HD-DVD, but it was a pyrrhic victory of one army of muskets over another army of muskets -on the horizon is a bunch of guys with cruise missiles, machine guns, and Predator drones. If you go to the video rental store (they still have these, but not for long) you will see about two racks for Blu-Ray. Who wants to spend for that when you can get just about as good for a lot less. That’s what its all about -remember Pioneer’s LaserDisk? Videophiles cherish the quality and durability of this format that predated DVD’s, but it was a millionaire’s plaything. Not so much with Blu-Ray which is hampered by the fact that to get the movie, you have to go and buy the movie or order it and wait for it to be delivered. With Netflix, Hulu, and iTunes along with a host of others, satisfaction is immediate. I downloaded Star Trek in HD and watched it with great satisfaction in 720p on my HiDef computer monitor. 23inch monitor for two feet away is the front row.

Sony has too many competing interests and kills itself by handicapping its products. Or it fetishizes design over function and delivers actual 4,000 dollar laptops that can’t make a movie with their own digicamcorders (my personal experience). People sneer that MacBook’s don’t have BluRay, but do you want to spend the extra money for that blue plastic cover? Especially when you already own Star Wars in VHS and DVD?

People are getting the notion that content has value -not the plastic case or the shiny disk. This is where Sony fails in clinging to a dying business model rather than adapting. It is the giant three toed sloth struggling in a tar pit.

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NaNoWriMo Update

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Video update of my NaNoWriMo project, Abandonner: A Memoir of Regret. It is taking all of my powers of literacy and observation of women in their natural environment to write this exploration of the feminine psyche from the perspective of men who abandon them. I am writing in the Chick Lit category.

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The Last Weekend

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IMG_0157The last weekend of golf is like the final sips of a good bottle of wine. Some people stop after the first glass, but I tend to take golf to the bitter dregs if given the opportunity. I played last weekend during a splash of 60 degree weather. I walked 3 holes -the first three of Wakonda which are the toughest three starting holes in Iowa. I birdied the first hole by holing a chip, tripled the second after getting in the bunker off the tee shot and flubbing the sand shot due to wet sand, and bogeying the third after getting on in regulation and three putting.

This was 2009 in a precise nutshell. I should give up golf and only write about it.

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NaNoWriMo -National Novel Writing Month -an excerpt

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bookcoverThe national novel writing month approaches. During this month, the challenge is to complete a 50,000 word novel starting on November 1, 2009 through November 30, 2009. The general daily goal is 1667 words a day. Although I am not suppose to start writing, I have submitted an excerpt for my NaNoWriMo home page which I am submitting here. I chose as the title, abandonner which is the French verb, to abandon. Chick Lit is my genre for NaNoWriMo. It is a topic of interest for me. The inner workings of the woman’s mind and her behavior in a natural setting is an avocation for me. I was the first grandson in a household full of women who pampered and spoiled me back in Korea. This was my Eden. Immigrating to America tore me away from this idyllic state, and the tables are now turned.

This coming month’s effort is dedicated to my deceased grandmother who, it is said, would terrorize the household, sending maids and daughter-in-laws out to the market in search of whatever rare, out of season, imported, or altogether-difficult-to-find fruit, viand, cake, dumpling or morsel that I demanded. I was that important at one time. So here you go, a rare and hopefully tasty tidbit of what is to come draining out of my head:

Parma, Ohio 1975

When I was six, a little Serbian girl fell in love with me. She had alabaster skin with black hair in pixie bangs, and I remember her green eyes staring at me. She always wore a brown knit sweater, a cardigan, that I later found out was made by her grandmother in Serbia. Sometimes she wore a black beret. I was doodling at my desk when she grabbed my hand and dragged me over to her desk. It was late fall and we were all working on Halloween drawings. She handed me a Valentine and kissed me on the cheek and ran away.

We became inseparable that year, the first grade couple of note. We were going to get married. We held hands and ate lunch together and played house with poignant accuracy. Hers was a Serbian household constructed of small wooden furniture and plastic. I mostly did what she told me to do. That Easter, she shared with me a rough bread with a kind of butter she called kajmak. The only time we fought was when I wanted to play ball with the other boys during recess. She would fume and watch with singleminded determination.

Summer came and we promised to see each other in the fall. I lied. She looked sad as we walked down to the school entrance and went opposite ways. She thought it was going to be a summer of separation as our parents did not socialize only to be reunited in the fall. I knew it would be goodbye forever as we were going to move away, but I was rendered mute. When I got home, I was whisked away to a family friend’s to stay the night as our furniture was packed. We left the next morning.

It would be nice to say that I think about her frequently, but that is not true. I hardly think about her at all. If I do, its mostly to wonder if she remembered me and thought about me, and how remarkably sad she must have been that following fall. I decided, in my first grade mind, to not dwell on such sad matters and move forward. If this sadness made me heavy with regret, it would be a rejection of it to let me be light again. But I do think about her, and it was thirty five years later that I met her again…

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The Coda

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the planOne of the greatest television shows ever created was Battlestar Galactica as reimagined by Ronald D. Moore.  The Mini-Series brought the core of the show, a story about a nuclear holocaust and the travails of the survivors, and brought it into the present with an examination of our culture at war without and within. It showed the best of humanity and its worst, and showed the Cylons to be far more complex than an army of Terminators. The whole show ended earlier this year with a very memorable and complex finale that capped an opus that stands up there with the best storytelling. So it was with a bit of trepidation that I downloaded and watched Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. Some people panned it as an editors’ cheap trick, a kind of über fan-film of the kind you watch and cringe at on Youtube.

I disagree. It filled several plot holes that never made sense in the original series, such as the appearance and disappearance of the Librarian Six, known as Shelley Godfrey. I enjoyed this because it fills these plot holes. But like the filler that is used to repair actual pot holes, the patch work is noticeable. The scenes visually jump around and older original footage runs into obviously freshly shot footage that tries very hard to look seemless but isn’t. They also left you with a final plot hole -the whereabouts of a dark haired 6.

That said, it is a fitting coda to a great series. They really should stop now. I only hope they don’t try to make a movie. There is a spinoff, a prequel, called Caprica that looks at the origins of Cylons, but it rates only about 6 out of 10 where the original miniseries was an 11.

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Why the Yankees Must Win

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IMG_0140It was 2001 and all the world was rooting for New York. The World Series was playing into November because of the start of the War at the End of the World that would define this decade. The whole team was still there -Joe Torre, Bernie, Paul, Tino, Luis, Scotty along with Andy, Jorge, Mariano, and Jeter. Characters were on that team -Knoblauch the head case, and Clemens the man who chucks lumber in anger because of ‘roid rage.

It was pretty much a done deal it seemed, a fitting tonic to soothe the wounds of a city in mourning. The loss to the tandem ace pairing of Schilling and Johnson was hard but in the scope of the events that had taken place only a few months before, it was unseemly to complain too much. Bully for the ‘Backs. Life will go on, no?

But we lost all those guys the subsequent year, and it was never the same again. From 2001 to the fall of 2008 when the Yankees didn’t even make the post season, it was very clear that no amount of money could buy back the chemistry of the early Torre years. 2004 seemed automatic but revealed the weakness of the Yankees flailing arms and the team seemed broken and grasping for a way out of the cave.

The core was always there, but they seemed apart from a team that was never equal to the sum of its parts. This year, it seems different. That threeway happy dance in the infield of A-Rod, Jeter, and Teixeira at the end of the ALCS is something different and not seen in a long time.

My belief is that the fate of the country, and even the world is tied to the health of New York City, that city of Babel that will prove or disprove humanity’s ability to get along. The Yankees are an important barometer of the city’s health. A Yankee team that is doing the happy dance in the inaugural year of the new stadium is nothing but good news for everyone, even Philadelphians.

I congratulate the Phillies on their pennant, but they must now do their patriotic duty and service to mankind by giving a good show, even win a game or two in Philadelphia, and bring the show back to New York for a final Yankee victory in game 6. It would be the only decent thing to do.