Pretty, right?
(Click for a bigger version -- about 6MB)
Microsoft and Apple Battle It Out. The Victim: My iPhone Battery
Mostly writing this up so that I'll remember how to fix it the next time it happens. Because, we both know, it will happen again.
I've been traveling a lot lately. Hawaii (vacation), home for a week, Austin (work), home for 3 days, San Francisco (work). So, I relied pretty heavily on my iPhone while I was out and about (checking email, keeping in touch, getting un-lost, etc.)
When out in San Francisco, I wasn't completely surprised when I got towards the end of the work day and noticed that my battery was in the red. I was caught off guard, but I figured "well, I must have crushed it today using the cell signal and GPS and all that." It died just after helping direct me to the local train station to catch the train to the Giants' game.
I plugged the phone in when I got back to the hotel, let it charge up overnight, and figured all would be well. A couple of hours later, my phone was down to 20% battery. And it was ridiculously hot.
This was disconcerting.
I twiddled every setting I could find, turning off GPS, wifi, bluetooth, pretty much anything on the phone I could find. I killed every app. I restarted the phone. Nothing helped: my iPhone was losing its battery at about 1% a minute, meaning it would maybe last 2 hours. If I was lucky.
That was not going to be a fun way to deal with my travel day home.
I googled everything I could. I tried everything I found on the google. Disabling contact syncing. Killing everything, restarting, killing everything again, and restarting again. Spinning the phone around three times while saying "Beetlejuice."
Nada.
I bought a handful of the "System Status" apps, hoping one would show me some process was stuck running. No such luck.
Finally, I stumbled on a link from a site I should have searched right away, Ars Technica. A couple of mentions of "Exchange going rogue."
Huh. I have Exchange. And, when I'm away from work, I end up in a weird state of using a bunch of different clients (my iPhone, iPad, the web interface, and—if I'm lucky—Entourage over VPN). Maybe something had gone wonky.
Delete Exchange account.
Reconfigure Exchange account.
Minutes later, the phone was cool. My batter was staying strong. Sitting in the airport bar, I kept checking my battery, waiting for it to start dying. It hung tough at 25%. 6 hours later, upon arriving in Boston, it was still alive and kicking.
Success.
I should have know. When in doubt, always assume that the battle between Microsoft and Apple will be fraught with danger and innocent victims.
Frenemies
In iOS 6, I this battle extends to Apple and Google. Keep your charger handy.
Chris Kluwe Wins the Internet →
"If gay marriage becomes legal, are you worried that all of a sudden you'll start thinking about penis? 'Oh shit. Gay marriage just passed. Gotta get me some of that hot dong action!' Will all of your friends suddenly turn gay and refuse to come to your Sunday Ticket grill-outs? (Unlikely, since gay people enjoy watching football too.)I can assure you that gay people getting married will have zero effect on your life. They won't come into your house and steal your children. They won't magically turn you into a lustful cockmonster."
Chris Kluwe just won the internet. This is exactly the way the debate about gay marriage should be framed.
And it all comes from an NFL punter. Who'd a thunk it? Kudos, sir. This is phenomenal.
(Via Deadspin.)
It's that time of year ...
Football.
(Fake) Football.
Monday, VT vs GT.
Pushing Growl Alerts into Notification Center →
Until Growl 2.0 is released with its support to pump Growl notifications into the Notification Center, MountainGrowl is here to very cleverly solve that problem.
And, the way it is implemented, it works perfectly with things like Boxcar.
Installed.
Twitter: "Set Doucheyness to full"
"As some of you may have already noticed the download link for the Tweetbot for Mac alpha no longer works. Twitter’s latest API Changes means now we have a large but finite limit on the number of user tokens we can get for Tweetbot for Mac. We’ve been working with Twitter over the last few days to try to work around this limit for the duration of the beta but have been unable to come up with solution that was acceptable to them. Because of this we’ve decided its best for us to pull the alpha."
The recent Twitter API changes were restrictive, but there were at least rumors that Twitter was being "cool" about working with the existing developers and apps out there. You know, so Twitter's users don't suffer.
But this is a sign that Twitter is going full speed ahead on their doucherocket.
I get that they want to dissuade new developers from entering the space. I think it's stupid and short-sighted and that, in the long run, Twitter is condemning themselves to a world where they'll be a new AOL or Friendster. But I get that this is how they think they need to make money (rather than, say, making it possible to have developers build their apps in way that is complementary to Twitter's advertising/revenue model).
This is just capricious, though. How should devs test their apps? A small group of beta testers with a required "Revoke Access" at the end?
I expect that, over the coming 12-24 months, a lot of folks Twitter usage will start to erode. Not enough for Twitter to feel it in their numbers, but it'll be the early adopter, bleeding edge folks. The folks who get covered in the media, who set the tone for "what's cool." The folks who Twitter built their business on the back of.
Once a high profile user (i.e. celebrity) defects, I'm guessing it'll be enough to get the ball rolling.
Twitter will revise these ridiculous requirements. It's just going to take some time.
If I were Facebook, I'd be looking at building a status-type application and embracing the developer community.
(I don't think app.net is the answer, but maybe it'll ruffle a few feathers before imploding.)
(Via The Tapbots blog.)
Later, Hawaii
We're heading home now, but we'll be back.
Akin Illustrates What is Wrong With the GOP
Sorry. More politics.
You want a summation of what's wrong with the GOP, and its terrorist wing, the Tea Party?
In an effort to explain his stance on abortion, Representative Todd Akin, the Republican Senate nominee from Missouri, provoked ire across the political spectrum on Sunday by saying that in instances of what he called ‘legitimate rape,’ women’s bodies somehow blocked an unwanted pregnancy.
Ok. Reprehensible statement. Idiotic. But not unexpected from a pro-lifer.
Mr. Akin, a six-term member of Congress who is backed by Tea Party conservatives, made it clear that his opposition to the practice was nearly absolute, even in instances of rape.
Yeah. So, he's a Tea Partier. That makes a bit more sense. In their world, everything is black and white.
“It seems to me, from what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Mr. Akin said of pregnancies from rape. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something: I think there should be some punishment, but the punishment ought to be of the rapist, and not attacking the child.
Err. Ok. In context, that's way worse. Not only is it just morally reprehensible, and politically suicidal, that shows a complete lack of understanding of basic elementary science. Oh well, just another politician who has no regard for science. I suppose it could be worse.
Mr. Akin, who has a background in engineering and is a member of the House science committee
WHAT?! He's on the House science committee? How the hell does someone who doesn't understand how babies are made get onto the House science committee? Double-you. Tee. Eff.
(Via the New York Times.)
Some Links and Info
I'm not in a place particularly conducive to writing anything of a meaningful length, so here are a few things that might be worth reading.
- Joe Posnanski on the late Johnny Pesky - As always, Joe Posnanski pretty much nails it.
- Going between planes, wifi, 3G, no service, etc, I noticed my iPhone's battery dying rapidly. Turns out, I had a stuck iMessage. If you see iMessage always saying "sending" on a particular contact, start deleting your messages until you find the "stuck" message. Saved my battery.
- Getting your vim config under git - As a web dork, keeping my config synced across machines has been painful. I'd tried keeping them under git before, but never had gotten it quite right. This is the right way. So easy, and makes my life much nicer.
- TextMate 2 goes open source - I've never quite gotten into TextMate, but this is an interesting move. Will it keep being developed and supported commercially? (Maybe, given he GPLv3 license.) Regardless, building it to play around is pretty simple and probably worth it.
- WordPress 3.1 for iOS - For the first time, the WordPress iOS app is meaningfully usable, i.e. I typed this in the app.
Warning: Waffle Fries and Politics
Political talk follows. If you think your politics are different than mine, and you don't want to start hating me, you should stop reading. You should also probably be smarter.
This has been on my mind for a while. I think I have a draft post going back almost a year. I'm probably going to alienate people on both sides. That's not my intent. I just want to point out that there really aren't two sides to this argument.
I "get" (where "get" means "I understand how someone could think that way") a lot of the things that people do that are bad/abusive/douchey. I don't agree with these things, but I can wrap my brain around how people can feel that way. For instance, I "get" how someone could think racist things, how someone could live in a world or be brought up in a world where they're taught to believe that. I don't agree with racism; I find it repugnant and inarguably wrong. But I can see how someone, when brought up in a certain situation, could end up holding racist views. And I feel bad for those people. I don't excuse their behavior; being raised that way in no way excuses their ignorance when they've reached the point that they can make their own judgments. Time and history will show them the error of their ways. Society has moved on, and they are being justifiably, left behind.
I "get" how someone could be homophobic. The particularly religious, the juvenile, the sheltered. I can see how you could, as an adult, arrive at the point of view that being gay is not ok/against nature/whatever that person wants to tell themselves to make them feel like they're ok in being discriminatory against homosexuals. Again, I can see how someone could arrive at that opinion. I don't agree with it, I think it's a ridiculous point of view (and won't even dive into the ridiculous things you would have to believe if you took the Bible literally), but I can see how you'd feel that way.
Those were two of the hardest paragraphs I've probably written here, mostly because I'm fairly certain at least someone people will take away from it that I think being a racist or homophobe is ok. I don't. I think it's reprehensible. I think it's ridiculously outdated thinking. Expressing those views makes me immediately assume the person's views on everything are moronic. That clear enough?
That being said, even if I can rationalize being against homosexuality, I don't "get" being against gay marriage. I just can't wrap my head around it. If I put myself in the shoes of a "traditional marriagist" (and let's be honest, these days, traditional marriage seems to mean having two or three marriages and an affair [rimshot]), I can't get from point A (gay marriage) to point B (gay marriage is bad).
For instance, let's say there's a gay couple. Today (in the US, let's not address the world as a whole), they can be monogomous, live together, share a bank account, pay their taxes (separately), own common goods, eat waffle fries from Chic-Fil-A. The only thing they really can't do in most states is get married and take advantage of the legal things that bestows on them (shared health insurance, visitation rights in the hospital, combined taxes, etc.)
How does any of that impact anyone but the couple?
Put another way, if every state in the US passed a law tomorrow allowing gay marriage, what would happen? How would your life change? More specifically, how would your life change if you were against gay marriage?
Your church can still choose to not perform gay marriage.
You can still choose to think homosexuality and gay marriage are an abomination.
Your can still teach your children to hate gay people.
In other words, you can continue to be an enormous asshole.
Everything is exactly the same. The sun is in the sky, birds are chirping, and you can still be a giant douchebag. Except now we've bestowed common human rights on gay couples. And I can get waffle fries without feeling that I'm losing a small piece of my soul.
I imagine their are two arguments that folks cling to. First, that gay marriage is against the Bible. Second, that gay marriage is a slippery slope to something even more untowards.
The Bible argument is illegitimate. The Bible being against gay marriage simply means you can continue to be against gay marriage. Your church doesn't have to allow gay marriage. Hell (I wrote that without immediately understanding the small amount of irony in word choice), your church can disallow gay members entirely. That's fine. It's a private institution. Be as douchey as you want.
The slippery slope argument is even more asinine. "If we allow gay marriage, what's next, a man marrying a dog?"
No. Stop being an asshole. That's the Godwin's Law of gay marriage arguments. Seriously, stop being an asshole.
So, here we are. I can get why someone wouldn't want homosexuality to exist, but since it does, I can't wrap my head around any legitimate reason to be against gay marriage. Hell (there it is again), wouldn't it be better to wrap some Godliness around a gay couple by putting them into a monogamous relationship? Wouldn't that help to stop the spread of the "gay"?
Again, I'm editorializing my own work here. Obviously, the stereotypes that homosexuals are promiscuous or that homosexuality can be spread like a sickness are ridiculous. And for me to state them is offensive. But, isn't capitalizing on those stereotypes to show why the "traditional marriagists" should be in favor of gay marriage worth it? If not, I apologize to the offended. Unless you're a homophobe. I'm glad you're offended.
Anyway, I would like to get past this human rights hurdle early in my life so that we can move onto surmounting bigger issues. Cancer. The environment. The economy. Getting Dan Harmon back onto Community. We're wasting so much time, mindshare, and hurt feelings fighting a battle that will be over in the next 10 years. Like it or not, gay marriage will be legal in almost every state within the next 10 years. I will state that here confidently. Let's stop pissing into the wind and move on.
It's (well past) time to grant homosexual couples the same rights as heterosexual couples. It's the right thing to do. It's certainly the moral thing to do. (And, arguably, the Christian thing to do.)
When we do, I'll be able to eat some waffle fries again. And they will taste awesome.
Awesomer than ever.