Infidelity on the iPhone?

Hoax or tragedy? This is just too salacious to pass up …

iphone-infidelity-post

In Apple’s discussion forums, under a post titled “Pictures automatically attach to e-mail?“, recently registered Susan042764, with only two posts under her belt, asks …

“Please help! I took my husband’s i-phone and found a raunchy picture of him attached to an e-mail to a woman in his sent e-mail file (a Yahoo account). When I approached him about this (I think that he is cheating on me) he admitted that he took the picture but says that he never sent it to anyone. He claims that he went to the Genius Bar at the local Apple store and they told him that it is an i-phone glitch: that photos sometimes automatically attach themselves to an e-mail address and appear in the sent folder, even though no e-mail was ever sent. Has anyone ever heard of this happening? The future of my marriage depends on this answer!” Read More »

Reminiscing the origins of Tac2 at the tac2blog …

I recently reconnected with some long, but not forgotten, Tac2 colleagues. The Transvaal Amateur Computer Club (tac2) was a hombrew club at the infancy of microcomputing in South Africa. To facilitate a virtual reunion of the club I’m proposing and helping the club draw in members past and present to a new tac2blog where we can reminisce and reconnect by sharing club facts, anecdotes and fond memories of the origins of an industry.

dtp-user-group
Caption: Out of the original Apple User Group grew the Desktop Publishing User Group (DTP/UG). Read More »

How to recover an iTunes playlist!

The iTunes application has a gaping UI problem, it’s far too easy to delete a playlist and, once deleted, it can’t be undone! I’m not talking about having deleted the original song files, just the playlists you assemble — which point to songs in your music library. We all invest hours in selecting and sequencing our music into playlists. To lose a playlist can be pretty tough!

While working in a playlist you can have two different things selected — the playlist name and one or more songs in that playlist. So which will it trash when you hit the delete key? The selected songs or the whole playlist? It depends on which of the two was most recently selected and, therefore, the darkest of the two different selections. Madness. So with just a modicum of inattentive clumsiness you can easily kill off a whole playlist when you really mean to remove only a single track from it — and there’s no Edit>Undo safety net behind this function. Read More »

Miriam Makeba dies doing what she did best: Singing …


A young Miriam Makeba performs Into Yam in the movie Come Back, Africa (1960)

“Mama Africa”, Miriam Makeba, South African musician and human rights activist died of a heart attack after a performance in Italy on Sunday night, November 9th. She was 76 and passed away doing what she does best and doing exactly what she wanted to be doing, claiming “I will sing until the last day of my life”.

Suggested reading: The New York Times Obituary | CNN’s Miriam Makeba dies after collapsing on stage

Rest in Peace Hannali Blohm …

After a heroic two-and-a-half year struggle with cancer Hannali Blohm died in the early hours of Sunday morning at her home in Caracas, Venezuela. She is sister to a very close friend of ours who is, unfortunately, also suffering from the same disease.

I remember Hannali as a very determined and an unusually generous person — who adopted our family by proxy whenever we visited their home in Winterhaven, Florida. We enjoyed many meals with them, including one especially memorable Christmas dinner.

Hannali will be missed by us, but most especially by her extended, very close knit, family.

Halloween in pajamas!

halloween-2008Bo, her friend Alyssa and Carolyn at the Treanor’s Halloween Party, 2008.

This year the adults went in pajamas and the kids went free style: These kids had a Rocky Horror thing going. The pajamas turned out to be such a great idea: Carolyn and I were both suffering with sore throats, we stayed toasty warm all night and then went straight home to bed in our jammies.

A tipple of Gin at the office …

paper-whites-1

Last year I confirmed that after a week-long foot bath in fresh water that bulbs grown in a mix of 7:1 water:alcohol (80 proof, 40% by volume) grow to maturity, shorter but stronger and that they bloom almost as big and are equally long lasting. This overcomes the problem of growing bulbs indoors, in water, which grow tall and lanky, eventually falling over. That was certainly true for Amaryllis. Read More »

Testing Holy Water

An interesting opportunity presented itself at yesterday’s outing to the Long Island Fall Festival at Hecksher Park, Huntington. The Central Presbyterian Church of Huntington Village handed out sealed half-pint bottles of Poland Spring water with a packet of religious material hung off the neck. A rather savvy inducement to engage, I thought, when other vendors were selling drinks at a profitable premium. Read More »

The Financial Crisis: Connecting some of the dots …

Henry M. Paulson Jr., the US Treasury Secretary was recently head of Goldman Sachs — one of the embattled investment banks in the thick of the current financial crisis. Arguably he is one of the actionable architects of the mess we’re in — yet today he leads the way out of it? I’m not so comfortable nor sure about that!

Not only did Paulson head one of the gluttonous investment banks, together with four other banks he took the lead in getting the Securities and Exchange Commission to change the net capital rule which limited how much debt they could take on, thereby deforming the normal boundaries of risk management.

After Sachs Paulson became Treasury Secretary in May of 2006 and with the passage of H.R. 1424 Paulson becomes manager of the Troubled Assets Relief Program (TARP)/United States Emergency Economic Stabilization Fund. There’s an idiom that describes this absurd situation which escapes me now but I can opine how risky this is — and isn’t taking bad risks what got us here in the first place?

Is anybody in Congress asking Paulson to give some of his reputed $700 millions back and I wonder if anybody is keeping an eye on his portfolio in relation to what gets rescued and what he buys into and sells out of now?

I wish I felt more comfortable with letting Paulson take charge of spending our bail out money, but I don’t. I have this uneasy feeling that he and his old cronies are shoring up their own retirement funds with more of our money and that as soon as nobody is looking they’ll switch to hard assets and discounted properties — and leave the stock market to implode.

Suggested reading: Wikipedia’s bio on Henry Paulson | A The New York Times story covering Paulson’s involvement is changing SEC’s rules
Agency’s ’04 Rule Let Banks Pile Up New Debt by Stephen Labaton |

I’m not sure what this is …

Is this about showing off a nerdish use of a recycled Pentium heat sink — as a business card holder — or an opportunity to post an iPhone photo taken with CamerBag’s Helga effect? CameraBag’s Helga vignette is an obvious reference to what used to be an unfortunate side effect of the cheap Chinese Holga toy camera with a plastic lens. The effect’s name Helga is probably an attempt at side stepping Holga’s trademark. Read about CameraBag or find it at the App Store here.

What’s the buzz about Apple’s “brick”?

I don’t hold the inside track here, but what Apple needs in the laptop department are much smaller and lighter portables — so I’m hoping for a “brick” sized mini laptop. The Air went in the right direction with weight but in the wrong direction by foregoing some essential ports and components as well as limping along on a slower processor.

Amazon’s list of best selling laptops put’s Apple’s first entry 8th on the list today. Not good enough! Put back the optical drive and the ethernet port in a smaller form factor and please give it a zippy processor Apple!

October 8th: Here’s speculation on the new Mac laptops from The New York Times — Apple’s “brick” manufacturing process to yield a $800 MacBook? which seem to give me hope for a smaller more powerful and fully featured laptop.

A moment in history, or not?

The Wall Street bail out bill got rejected today, for better or for worse, as Bo and I were visiting the Capitol. Unfortunately we missed actually witnessing the vote take place on H.R.3997* while we were standing in line to get into the House of Representatives’ gallery. Representatives were scurrying around the building and gallery visitors rushed out after the vote. A small contingent of demonstrators dressed in pink were holding a noisy “Tax Revolt” outside. We saw democracy in action today. All in all a very good day to visit the legislative capital of the USA!

*A revised bill H.R. 1424 passed the floor a few days later.

Free Culture: A theory you can play!

This is the challenge …

If you’ve ever wondered about the balance between intellectual property and public domain you might enjoy playing this theoretical game online: The Free Culture Game, A Playable Theory. Read More »

Celebrating National Braai Day

Some South Africans celebrate National Braai* Day on September 24th: We did so tonight in our own off-beat fashion with fish burgers grilled up on the Weber.

A couple of eggs, a bunch of fresh parsley chopped, a diced onion and a flaked can of tuna all folded into a firm, somewhat dry, batch of potato pancake mix. Roll into balls and flatten on the grill plate. Cook five minutes a side to make crisp cakes ready for the bun. Speaking of which, while gently warming the buns, whip the zest of lemon and a good squeeze of the juice into half a cup of good mayonnaise and then dress up both sides of the bun with this tangy sauce. Slide the fish burger pattie in between and enjoy!

Alternative endings: Substitute sardines, boneless and skinless, in oil, for the tuna if you enjoy the real taste of fish or flaked, smoked crab meat for a pretty awesome crab cake burger.

*Barbeque

Why no Flash on the iPhone?

The reasons might be many, but I’ve come to believe that there are just a few key overlapping issues which separate Adobe and Apple on the issue of Flash …

User Interface (UI): Adobe is developing its own cross-platform graphical user interface (GUI) for their applications which is different from Apple’s standard. Its a laudable and sensible thing for Adobe to be doing for end-users, but something which dilutes the value of Apple’s unique and easy to use interface. If the application UI between Wintel, Linux and Apple boxes are essentially the same there is less incentive to pay a premium for Apple hardware. Apple can’t like that much. There’s not much they can do about that on the Mac but they sure can spoil it spreading to the iPhone.

Bypassing the App Store: Since entire web applications and games can run in a Flash player inside a browser there will likely be fewer applications sold via the App Store — and less revenue for Apple. Worse though, since Flash would run those same apps on other phones and computers, this would dilute the uniqueness of the iPhone. Let’s face it, given the choice most developers would prefer to develop cross platform than for a single platform only.

Adding those two things together I can better see why Apple is pushing back on Flash — but of course I wish that they wouldn’t!