Should I buy an iPhone?

This is the question on my mind.

I went past the Apple & ATT stores in downtown SF (very close to my apartment) on Friday night and Saturday. Apple had a line so long I couldn’t see the end of it (outside the store), and ATT sold out phones early.

While the lines outside the store suck, it’s really fun to walk past them and be overheard saying, “I can’t believe they ran out of phones again!”.

Is this a truly great phone, or it just another fashion statement? Why so much buzz?

With Apple, the answer is probably again both.

I think the lines are a combination of true enthusiasts (developers who are writing applications for the iPhone store, and power users) and people overrun with loopy excitement for a product for which they would be hard-pressed to name 7 unique features.

So what is my attraction?

I’ve asked myself this question and really drilled myself. The phone is expensive (via monthly charges), and most of my “required” features (Exchange sync, web, GPS, etc.) are available on other phones (surprisingly, the Samsung Instinct doesn’t sync with Exchange’s calendar - information I got from a Sprint salesman and found many user reviews online claiming the same).

What it comes down to for me has a lot to do with the iPhone App Store. The “open market” nature of the store (developers get 70% of the revenue from sales of their applications), the quality of the SDK (developers, like the ones at Pandora, report that iPhone’s SDK is just superb), that the value of the experience of the phone will grow over time as the community of developers embraces it.

People Who Get Shit Done

My friend Mike and I were talking tonight about those very special people at work.

These are the people you can give a project to, and you know they are going to deliver something on time and of superior quality.  These people will harass people on their team to make it all happen.  They will kick your ass, show up at your home, call you all night, whatever.

They never have excuses unless someone actually died.  But even then, they are likely to pull it off.

These people are the ones who succeed in life.  Their value is recognized.  They become the foundation of a team.  You need them.  Badly.

You just know when you give them an assignment, you don’t have to worry.

Six Feet Under: When They Talk to the Dead

For those of you watch Six Feet Under - you might wonder what is going on in those scenes wherein someone in the Fisher family talks to a ghost around them.

The first thing to contemplate is that one of them, in nearly every episode, has a conversation with either the father or a dead person about to be given a service at the Fisher home. (Every episode has a newly dead spirit talking to one of the Fishers).

The way those scenes are filmed suggest that maybe the character is just day-dreaming. You’re not sure whether the character actually sees and hears the spirit. Most of the time they just snap out of it when someone is asking them, “are you listening to me??”.

But the writers sometimes take it a bit further — for example, in numerous episodes one of the family members hears another one talking out loud to a spirit. They usually knock on the door and say, “were you talking to someone?”.

These comments suggest (not to break it down too much) that the conversations are more real than we might otherwise think. This happens just often enough that it seems that the Fisher house has spiritual presence, which is (I think) an intended irony considering the Fishers are an emotionally detached family. They can speak to the dead, but they struggle to talk to each other.

But the dead play an enabling role. David (who is gay) talks to the spirit of a gay man who was the victim of a hate crime, which gives him the strength and drive to beat up homophobic Christian protesters and come out to his family.

Sometimes the writing seems sloppy and inconsistent. In an episode involving a clairvoyant, the Fisher brothers watch in disbelief as the woman talks to her dead husband. She asks them if they ever speak to the dead and they kind of laugh at her (maybe I am reading this wrong) as though she must be nuts.

Finally, I think that the writers intend that the Fishers do have dialogue with the dead, but they aren’t consciously aware.

I just read the Wikipedia page on the characters and noticed that the birth and death of each character was given - so I guess I have a lot more to learn about what is really going on.

The Three Stages of Environmental Action

I believe that within the next 200 years, we will see the following three stages of action / reaction to the environmental issues brewing:

1. Prevention: people trying to minimize their damage by decreasing their carbon footprint, recycling, etc.
2. Opportunity: people and industries capitalizing on the “greening” of our lives, as well as shifting values in real estate as coast lines disappear.
3. Survival: when populations have to move from places like London and NYC, there will be an “every man for himself” frame of mind.  People will see the severe lack and shifting of resources.  They will panic, economies will plummet, and all hell will break loose.

So what can you do now?

Enjoy the world as it is while you can.  Things are only going to get worse.

The Olympic Torch Runner Political Issue: What San Francisco Should Have Done

We have all heard about the protests that have been accompanying the Olympic torch runners.

In San Francisco today, city officials changed the scheduled route of the torch run when they took one look at the crowd on the Embarcadero.

I had the unique opportunity of taking the ferry this morning from the epicenter of where the protests were anticipated. At 8:00 AM, I watched a bus of policemen unload and get ready.

Rather than changing the route, which is sort of clever, I would have hired hundreds of decoys to run around with fake torches. The decoy runners would be armed with mace, stun guns and tear gas. That way, if anyone got too close, they could let loose and bring a few dozen people down before running off to safety - preferably a pub.

In my version of things, the hundreds of runners would have emerged simultaneously from AT&T Park and immediately sprinted in every direction possible. The confused crowd and media would be split into hundreds of tiny groups largely incapable of keeping pace with the runners.

When all the runners had ripped the crowd apart, I would have then had a fat guy emerge from AT&T park walking with the real torch.

Why a fat guy? Because fat people look funny trying to run. And carrying an Olympic torch, they’re even funnier. And in the middle of this mayhem: hilarious.

Oh, and I’d have him stop for a smoke break every few blocks.

No one would suspect a fat guy smoking cigarettes would have the real torch, so he’d be fine.