Category Archives: observations

I guess this could also be called “opinion” since it’s thoughts on life or happenings where I feel like I want to “weigh in”.

My iPhone Wish List

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So, I’ve now had my iPhone for about two weeks, and it is quite simply the most exciting piece of technology I’ve had for a long time. It is the sort of thing that people merely dreamt about only a few years ago and something I’ve longed for for ages. It was well worth the money and having to break contracts and switch to a more expensive service plan.

However, there are five things that right off-the-bat I would like to have changed or added, in no particular order:

  1. Ability to view lyrics in iPod app – I have a lot of songs in Japanese that I listen to, and it sure would be nice to be able to access the lyrics since I went to the trouble of importing them.
  2. Ability to reorder lists in the Stocks and Weather apps – If you want to add new cities in Weather or new tickers in Stocks, they always go to the bottom of the list. It would sure be handy to be able to reorder or at least alphabetize them—right now you have to delete them and retype them to change the order.
  3. Access Tasks in Calendar – To me this is really a pain: there’s no way to access your iCal tasks on the Phone, making it useless as a way of tracking things I have to do. If not in the iPhone’s calendar app, then how about a separate dedicated app?
  4. Beef up the Calculator app – I’m not talking super-scientific go nuts here, but it would be really nice to at least have a % key. Something really good would be to include tip calculator and maybe foreign currency calculation functions. The world has advanced way beyond +-*/ only calculators (at least it’s got a memory function).
  5. Make the Notes app usable – This is probably the weakest app right now and needs to be so much more. First, the notes need to be able to be synced with my Mac and accessible from there. Having to edit everything on the phone and only being able to see it there is kinda a pain. Second, the ability to do minor formatting would be fantastic—I mean, I’m doing that right now in a browser window typing this Blog entry. Nothing fancy, just the standard text editor functions would be nice for things like numbered lists, Bold/Italic/Underline, etc.—I’m not asking for a word processor, since I don’t plan on writing my next novel in my phone. But formatting would be really helpful in having more organized documents. Finally, It would be nice to have a font other than the goofy one provided which looks something like the repulsive Comic Sans. Since iPhone is based on OS X, what would be the difficulty of porting TextEdit over? That’s all I’d really ever need. I have a feeling that some of these things might be addressed in Leopard from what I’ve seen on Apple’s website.

Other than those observations—which according to my layman’s perspective shouldn’t be too difficult to implement—I’m completely satisfied with how the software performs and how intuitive it is to use it all. Some of this might come out with the next revs of the iPhone software or with the advent of Leopard.

Actually, I almost feel sorry picking-nits like this since it’s such an amazing device. But there are my reasonable two-cents worth!

Happenings and Rants

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So here are some archived “Recent Happenings” and “Recent Rants” from my main page:

Recent Happenings
Today something pretty exciting will be happening: 100,000 people or so will be right outside my door watching the finish of Stage 6 of the Amgen Tour of California bicycle race. They closed McBean Parkway last night in front of the mall and there will be all kinds of festivities there today along with the stage finish this afternoon between 2:30-3:00 PM. At first, I wasn’t so interested but now I think it’ll be pretty exciting!

I’m hoping to take some HD video from my balcony and down on the street, then I’ll edit and upload it as a podcast (if I actually can get that motivated). That way you’ll be able to see what it was like. Not only that, but it’s another beautiful day in Southern California!
The last thing is that I’ve begun exploring the idea of entering an online university program to get my Masters in Education. My boss already said she thinks that it would easily fall under the Tuition Reimbursement program, so the company will pay. Stay tuned!

Recent Rant
Okay, so here’s a first rant: why are PCs such CRAP?

I went through the trouble of redesigning my website with this beautiful new layout and when I first looked on it with MSIE on my PC at the office, it looked horrible. I know that one of the problems seems to be with the default fonts selected, so I changed some of them yet they still look awful. PCs seem to be so far behind the quality of Macs in the world of graphics and display technology. If you really want to see what I’m talking about, have a look at this site from a mac using Safari.

It’s just so frustrating having to futz around with things so they’ll look good on both platforms in the supposedly “standards-based” world of the web.

America is now less safe…

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At least, that’s my opinion after yesterday’s mid-term elections.

So people have got their way: they voted the Republicans out of power in both houses of congress, and the news media is in its typical gloating mood. It’s a sound defeat for the President and a repudiation of everything he’s done, the war in Iraq, etc., etc.

Of course, everyone thinks things are going to change. They’re right: but not in the ways they think. With two years left of a Republican administration in the White House, the country at war with hundreds of thousands of our troops in harm’s way and now a hostile, bitterly partisan congress about to be seated, absolutely nothing will get done. If anything does, it will no doubt make a bigger mess of things. I can just see it now: Nancy Pelosi—Speaker of the House to be and international embarrassment—starting up investigations into whatever the Democrats want to score political points with, then clamoring for an “organized timetable” to withdraw troops from Iraq. Our troops in the field will become even bigger targets and unrest will become even greater as the Muslim world thinks they defeated us and we’ve given up the fight.

The Dems will concentrate on “domestic” issues and do things like raise the minimum wage to stifle the economy, raise taxes (especially on the “wealthy”) to reinforce class warfare, and then probably concentrate on such important things as Roe v. Wade and gay marriage. And if I were Al Qaeda, I’d take the opportunity to wreak some more havoc while we Americans are running around bickering, obfuscating, dissembling and stonewalling. It makes me sick to thing of what’s ahead for the next 24 months. More and higher taxes—yay! Just what I’ll need as a first-time homeowner scraping the bottom of every barrel to afford a place to live in this overpriced So Cal market…

And then we’ll have the next Presidential election and things will go even further downhill. I swear to you right now: if Hillary Clinton is elected president, I—unlike all the liberal leftist Hollywood stars who did nothing but talk—WILL leave the country. Japan is starting to look like more and more of a possibility every day (wait—maybe I shouldn’t be buying a condo…).

What a disaster…

Just what country am I living in anyway?

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I’m generally a person who’s not easily offended, but this one absolutely galled me…

So it’s bad enough that it’s election season—that time of year when I get barrels full of junk mail from candidates and others trying to sway my vote and countless messages from politicians on my answering machine. Just knowing that it’s going to be waiting for me when I walk in the front door every night makes me crabby.

So imagine how I felt when I went to listen to my messages and heard ” Hola. Yo soy Antonio Villaraigosa, alcalde de la ciudad de Los Angeles…” coming out of my phone. For those of you who don’t speak spanish (like me), it was the idiot mayor of this God-forsaken city I live in trying to win my vote by speaking to me in a foreign language! Just what country am I living in? It’s clear where the mayor thinks he is.

Before you go and flip out thinking that I’m some racist white guy, remember you’re reading about someone who speaks 5 languages and has lived abroad on two continents. I wouldn’t even have been upset if he’d spoken English first then Spanish later on. But now I know for sure (as if I didn’t already) that the mayor of this city doesn’t represent me or one of America’s greatest cities—his agenda puts him in charge of a metropolis he thinks should belong a little further south…

Needless to say, I didn’t vote for anything he wanted me to—I was absolutely livid.

End of the Work Week

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It’s hard to believe, but I’ve come to the end of my first work week. I know it was only three days, but it seemed longer, probably because of the quantity of stuff that I’ve got to do now. I’m already teaching on Monday morning, have a lot of voiceover work to do for eLearning and a rather heavy load of stuff to do for the impending EDM Quality system update. I’ve already had a pile of meetings and it seems like I never left. I can’t believe how busy it is right now for everyone.

One of my favorite things was getting to place new dots on my world map. I have the map hanging on the wall in my office, and each time I go somewhere new for the first time, I add a dot. I got to place 5 on Japan, and have now finally gone to Asia. Of course, now I look at the map and realize that I’ve never been to the southern hemisphere. If Amgen would send me to the Australia office, that would take care of that, otherwise I’m looking at Brazil and East Africa as potential vacation destinations. It’s the problem with travel: once you’ve got it in your blood, there’s no turning back. I find it best summed up in one of my all-time favorite quotes:

Traveling carries with it the curse of being at home everywhere and yet nowhere; for wherever one is, some part of oneself remains on another continent. — Margot Fonteyn

To tell the truth, I’d already started thinking about my next trip before I even left for Japan. I started thinking about how—now that i’ve gained enough seniority and vacation days at work—I should be able to take two, two-week vacations each year. That’s a pretty lucky place to be in. That means things like “April in Paris, October in Kyoto”; it means one familiar favorite and one new adventure. I’m pretty excited at the prospects, to tell the truth. Add business travel to that, and I should be pretty well setup. Of course it will all cost money too, and that could become problematic…

So another thing I think I need to do is beef up my website. Shortly before my trip, I ran into two problems: first, I bought my new MacBook Pro and due to some unfortunate data transfer accidents, I lost some of my website data. Second, I was planning on doing some reorg and restructuring and took stuff down but then didn’t have time to put it all back up again. I’m especially in need of re-doing my photo albums. I took down all my special interest pages, so now it looks like I never do anything. I’ll start adding stuff, so stay tuned.

Back to my Regularly Scheduled Life…

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Well, I’m back from my 6-week trip to Japan. It’s hard to believe that a) I was actually gone for that long, and b) that it’s all over and I’m home again. Of course, there’s now a ton of stuff I need to do both at home and the office, I still have jet-lag, it’s incredibly hot here right now and I’m suffering from “post-vacation depression”.

I went back to the office yesterday and started trying to get my bearings once again. BTW, I had a total of 367 emails in my mailbox (and Mike Kubit won the pool), so I spent most of the day dealing with that mess. Then trying to catch up on all the happenings in the office and with the projects I’d left behind—everything just moved on without me. I’ll be pretty busy for the next couple of weeks digging out from under.

The depression especially began when I went to lunch at one of my usual spots, California Pizza Kitchen. As I was sitting there eating one of my regular favorites and thinking about my usual office-related concerns, it started feeling almost like my whole Japan experience never happened. That really started to make me sad. I had such a wonderful time and met such wonderful people, that I didn’t really want it to end—thought it would continue on. But then, “regularly-scheduled life” sets in, and all of a sudden, I’m back in my usual rut. So you can see how that might be depressing…

You can, however, look forward to many, many more musings from me here on this blog since I’ve now sort of gotten in the habit. I also want my new Japanese friends to have an easy way of seeing what I’m up to if they’re so inclined. I have a lot of things to say about just how much my Japan trip changed my life and how happy I am that I went.

But in the meantime, I’ve got lots of work to do…

What? You mean someone’s actually reading this?

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I just found out last night at my Japanese class that at least one of my classmates has been reading my blog. I was also reprimanded for not living up to my January 31st “New Years Resolution” entry to write more often. You can see how successful THAT was…

Anyway, it just seems that this is one of the lower priorities for me. When life gets too busy in all the other areas, that last thing I’m thinking of is putting things down online. However, I’ll try to be better. Domo arigato gozaimasu Chip-san.