Contour Showcase for iPod
Price: $19.95 US
Company: Contour Design, Inc.
http://www.contourdesign.com
I love my iPod, but the slipcase that Apple ships with the iPod is horrible. First, you can only access the music controls by removing the iPod from its slipcase. Second, it doesn’t secure the iPod. If you pick it up the wrong way, it is possible for the iPod to slip out. Third, the power port is also blocked by the slipcase. This means that if you listen primarily in your car, like I do, the case is useless.
The Contour Showcase solves all these problems exceedingly well, and comes with a belt clip. I haven’t had a chance to use the belt clip, but I wouldn’t think twice about shooting hoops with my iPod clipped to my belt. With the Apple slipcase, I felt safer keeping the iPod in my pocket. Another nice feature is that the belt clip is removable if you do not need it. This item is smartly designed.
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Get Connected Kit for new iPod
Company: Xtreme Accessories, LLC.
Price: $49.95
http://www.xtrememac.com
When my .Mac membership came up for renewal, I had a choice of a few different incentives. I chose the $20 credit from the Apple Store. I desperately needed an auto charger for my iPod.
A visit to the Apple store showed just the thing I needed for 19.95, but I was also thinking about replacing the auto cassette adaptor too. It was making a loud grinding noise and was irritating. Sometimes you could hear it over the music, like a mysterious bad musician. The cassette adapter came from an old portable CD player that has a lot of attachments. It also had an audio cable that I hooked up my Dock to, and was running the iPod through the kitchen radio. This is my iPod’s home base, and it made my kitchen radio, a Zenith Bose-wannabe, sound much better. And of course, no commercials!
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Robert Morris (1733-1806), a signer of the Declaration of Independence, helped save America from defeat in the Revolutionary War. He was the patriot who loaned George Washington $10,000 for the provisions needed at Valley Forge. At the time, there was no federal treasury.
In 1781, he became the first Superintendent of Finance, and formed the First National Bank. Seventeen years later, in 1798, he was arrested for debts resulting from land speculation around Washington D.C., and put in Debtors Prison. He was liberated with the passage of the National Bankruptcy Law in 1802.
Morris was a patriot, but we need to revisit our banking system of today. Banking is as unwise today, as he was then. The Savings and Loan bailout of the 1980′s was caused by the same type of land speculation that Morris bet on 200 years earlier. Interest is a way to manipulate the flow of money, and the stock market is now a global mechanism of speculation. It is a ponzi scheme, which hides under the guise of a system for supplying credit and capital. All of the winning is apparent, and short-lived.
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The dictionary definition of the word “hosanna” is ‘a shout of fervent and worshipful praise’, or ‘to express praise or adoration of God.’ This is not something you are likely to hear in the West in regard to Osama bin Laden. But, to a great many people of the world, he is a hero.
He killed thousands of people, did billions of dollars worth of damage, sparked the war on terror and the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, and inspired or conspired many other attacks. Most people in the West are convinced that he is a madman and must be stopped. While I agree he must be stopped, we will never solve this problem if we view him as a madman. If he is viewed as a hero by others, we may catch him, but someone new will fill his role. His cause will not die with his last breath. Are we to assume all these people are madmen too?
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She is tired and worn. She slaves everyday scrubbing floors, preparing meals, dressing her children, and sending them off into the everyday world of America. She has given birth to a discordant family; Brothers do not speak to brothers, sisters do not speak to sisters. She loves them all, and they all claim to love her, but their love does not reach to each other. Liberty is heartbroken. At the days end, while they sleep, she weeps.
She was once a young and vibrant maiden, and was taken to be the good wife of Moral Courage. Together they had a blissful wedding ceremony. The whole world took notice. And soon after there arrived new-born states which filled their house from sea to shining sea.
Her father, in the person of George Washington, made a farewell toast at their reception:
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In the not too distant past, radio and television were invented. As a tool of instant communication, these discoveries were immediately recognized as a national resource. The government took steps to regulate and administer these airwave technologies in a manner that they thought would best serve our ill-defined “national interest.”
The product of America’s media now dominates the global culture. Our movies are viewed worldwide, product tie-ins are manufactured on the Pacific Rim, and we are, I suspect, the world’s largest consumer and producer of music, despite the rise of file sharing.
Prior to the rise of these technologies, communication was slow and based primarily on the printed word. Actors and musicians were relegated to live performing arts. Musical phonographs, Morse code and the telephone, were the interim technological steps.
While radio and television may seem like the zenith of communication, the web now occupies the future of communication. It returns to a reliance on the written word, but it also combines audio and video. Apple’s iChat AV combines live video and audio. It is the precursor to what will be live, interactive, remote and on-demand audio, video and text communication. The instant polls on many news websites and the experiments in web voting are all indicators of a great technological convergence.
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Our jurisprudence system assumes that someone is innocent until proven guilty. We can thank George Mason of Virginia for inspiring the Bill of Rights, and for lobbying for its inclusion in our Constitution. As a new nation, free of the tyranny of a king, it is revealing that Mason felt a declaration of the rights of man were necessary. He had the foresight to recognize that monarchy is not the sole source of tyranny, and that tyranny is often one the basest forms of human nature.
Our legal structure requires recognition that the rights of the individual are paramount to the needs of society. Politically, however, the debate has no rules. We are able to argue the good and bad, and define good and evil, freely. The laws we make constantly breech and are sometimes repelled by Constitutional interpretation, and our social customs are a continuous moral disagreement.
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The Big Lie is usually associated with a despot. Adolf Hitler and Osama Bin Laden come readily to mind. After all, wouldn’t it take some sort of lie to move the millions of citizens of various nations to war against each other and between themselves?
The Big Lie I am thinking of does not show itself readily. There is no Potsdam or 9/11, nor does it reveal itself in most religious literature. If it is discussed at all, it is by inference. While the opposite of the Big Lie may be regarded as the Big Truth, the lack of the Big Lie leads to destruction. The Big Lie must be both embraced and unfettered simultaneously. It is a conscious unconsciousness.
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There are so many things wrong with the development of Apple Records suing Apple Computer AGAIN, which I am at a loss of where to begin. The Helter Skelter insanity of corporate law blurs the line of what is criminal and what is just plain stupid. Let’s start here:
Dumb: Apple Computer
Let’s face it, the world’s best computer company, headed by one of the world’s best inventors, building one of the world’s greatest inventions, and with the highest paid CEO in the country, does some really dumb things. In the battle between quality and quantity, I will always prefer quality, as I suspect most Mac users do. Apple delivers the best product, but always does it in such a way as to sabotage any chance to gain in quantity and cash. While part of the market share issue has to do with the fact that the product is so good that it lasts forever, most of it has to do with how it positions itself in the marketplace.
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An addiction is “being abnormally dependent on something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming.” The key to this description is the word “abnormal.” All addictions are unhealthy. America’s addiction started 222 years ago, when the nation’s first bank, the Bank of America, was formed in 1781.
America’s addiction is not to money. Money in some form has been around forever. People work hard to earn their profit. And profit, whether in the form of cash or a harvest, is the fruit of ones labor. Gathering money and profit are one and the same; they are the just rewards for ones effort.
Like alcoholism, or gambling, this addiction takes over our entire physiological system. It feeds on a natural desire, and seems to reward it, when in fact it is sucking the life out of the subject. It leads to selfish destructive behaviors, and a despairing cycle of fits. The subject seeks to regain control, but never can quite come to grasps with oneself.
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In all of us resides the great modern American coward. He is a strange mixture of confidence, fearlessness, moral righteousness and cowardice.
We are, despite those who would profess our perfection and superiority, only human. Our frailty is not unique to our species, but because of our other successes, we may perhaps be blazing a trail unique in the evolution of modern man. America is the vanguard of modern history, and as such, is also the vanguard of the modern man.
The manufacturing revolution, electricity, light, communication, computers and space travel, as well as civil rights, separation of church and state, and due process, all seedlings in the world at large, found fertile land here and grew enormously and quickly. With the good, so too grew the bad. The throwaway pollution, the crime, the selfishness and the cultural trash.
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The album Tea for the Tillerman by Cat Stevens will always be part of my spirit. I was thirteen in 1970 when my older brother brought it home. He was always my window to the world of music. We had a big box of a stereo console that sat in the living room, with a sliding top that revealed the drop style LP player underneath. The speakers were built in, and it was a fine cabinet of wood veneers and polish. This was the family’s center of the new stereophonic universe.
The Call for a Constitutional Convention
Addendum – The path to peace
There is an assumption that what makes our nation so great is the freedom of speech. There is of course a mechanical reason why this right is necessary, because you cannot make an accusation against the government without it. There is also a psychological need for people to vent their frustrations. And in the pursuit of democracy, there is the expectation that if everyone speaks their mind then a consensus will develop and a unified path will show itself. The original desire for freedom of speech, however, goes back to the Pilgrims. They wanted to express their religious view freely. That is why we have the freedom of religion and the separation of church and state. Most people assume that God exists, but even the opening words to the Declaration makes the assumption that we really do not know. There is a reference to the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. Two distinct and separate ideas, that God is real and that maybe he is not. They sought and found a political solution with the recognition that there are and always will be two fundamentally different ideas regarding ourselves and our place in the universe.
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Apple has many goodies in its arsenal of great things, but one of the best has to be .Mac. A lot of people were put off by the end of iTools and the subscription fee, but .Mac quickly pays for itself in ease of use, storage and “bennies.” iTools was never anything like this. If you have a laptop, which seems to be a growing number of Mac users, it is worth its weight in gold.
I am a big fan of Safari. The tab feature and the easy bookmark control is seductive. I bookmark everything, and have created quite a few subgroups on my menu bar. I love selecting “OPEN IN TABS” and watching ten of my favorites sites open instantly. It is such a timesaver. Of course, this tab power creates a challenge. Where did I put that site that didn’t fit into a category? Not everything can go into MISC. This problem was getting worse because my laptop bookmarks were different from my tower, and I would constantly be searching for X or Y in different places on the different computers. Last week I decided to try my hand at iSync. WOW! This feature alone is worth $99.00. I don’t have much of anything stored in my address book. If I had, I could be syncing my contacts and my iPod and my computers all at once. That is another project for another day. iSync was so easy to use that it is not worth describing. Trust me.
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
The Goals of Mutual Responsibility
Mutual Responsibility has simple utopian goals: food and health, education and worship, for everyone. Despite a long history of disagreement on how to achieve success, most people would recognize these four personal goals as primary to a better society: To be healthy, educated, productively employed, and upstanding. An economic system that prioritizes these qualities is well within America’s grasp.
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Journey Well, my unnamed friend. May the speed at which you enter the unknown bring you comfort and peace. Regrettably, you have missed one of life’s surest experiences, a chance to visit the battlefield of ideas.
The living you left behind will wage moral arguments of political duplicity, with one side convinced of their sureness, and the other convinced of their unsureness. I sit uneasy with both, which is the price of being an idealist.
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
The Middle Ground
Americans, in general, undervalue the power and promise of self-government. We don’t trust the government with our money, but we expect them to use it to solve all our problems. The only other group with money is corporate America, but we don’t want them to control our government. The Contract for Mutual Responsibility finds a middle ground where private property continues, but the government controls the corporations in new areas. It ensures that all workers have their basic physical and spiritual needs met first in the quest for corporate profit.
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
In our country, a clerk making change at a convenience store makes $7.00 an hour in a high-risk situation, and a toll taker making change on a state toll road makes $22.00 with health insurance and pension benefits. The same person making change at a cafeteria could expect yet another different wage and benefit package. We attribute this situation to the free market, but really it’s about power. The unionized toll collector has power, the convenience clerk and the cafeteria workers have less power, relative to the strength of the organizations that they work for, unionized or not.
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Molly, Paul and me
Well, I guess it is official. I now tell people that I am a writer, and that I have a column. This is a radically new self-image for me. Writing is something that I always wanted to do. Now I am actually doing it. I have held my tongue because I did not believe I could add anything useful to the debate. Now I think maybe I can add something of value.
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The Call for a Constitutional Convention
The Modern Society and our Agrarian Beginning
Adam Smith described a system where some work little and receive a lot, while others work a lot and receive little. It did not take into account the plight of the slaves, accept perhaps as property, and is a model based on an agrarian society. Its primary analysis was an explanation of how commerce would prosper more effectively without a king as the primary arbitrator and hoarder of wealth. The king controlled everything, and claimed ownership to every item, even every apple on every apple tree. We have reached the same point today, except this time we are a modern society and the corporations have assumed the role of the king. Copyright law and the litigious nature of our society show how aggressive we have become to claim an equally perpetual ownership.
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Book Review
MyMac Podcast #385
MyMac Podcast #384