Assorted Afflatuses

Yesterday I recounted my adventure with push IMAP email from Yahoo! on my iPhone. In the time between then and now I sent an email to the Yahoo! technical support team, in the hope that someone would be able to provide a solution to my conundrum. I wrote:

The Yahoo! technical support representative who responded to my email used his English language skills, no doubt honed by a Harvard English degree, to craft this very insightful response:

What a revelation! I can access Yahoo! services on the Internet with my iPhone. No one would never draw that conclusion. Apple, after all, calls the iPhone an "Internet communicator." I, for one, took that to mean it played music. Perhaps I can visit other websites too. Or for that matter, maybe I can use my iPhone to make phone calls. It would never have crossed my mind.

If anyone from Yahoo! quality control reads this email, this man needs a promotion. Never have I received such an insightful and informative response from a technical support technician. Wasted talent, to say the least.

Are They Yahoo?
Why is my email unavailable on my actual computer?

With so many advantages, then, I figured I would take Yahoo! up on their offer. I signed up for a mail account, found a suitable user name and input the settings into my iPhone to start receiving the push IMAP goodness. Remarkably, the whole shebang sang. The second an email was sent to my new Yahoo! address the iPhone leapt to life and immediately informed me that I had a new email to read.

But when it came time to setup my computer the experience dove like the Dow, sinking from peachy to painful in a matter of seconds. I opened Mail on my laptop, pulled up the preferences and entered the appropriate settings. Unlike my iPhone, my MacBook Pro refused to cooperate, claiming that the server could not be found. So I tried again. Zilch.

I next turned to Google, hoping to find an answer. After five minutes of sleuthing I discovered that the iPhone uses a non-standard method of communicating with the Yahoo! servers that permits the iPhone — and no other devices — to access push IMAP email on their servers.

For $500 — in addition to the extra $20 I now pay to AT&T — I cannot have access to my Yahoo! email on my laptop with OS X Mail. I can live without custom ringtones and the sometimes molasses-like speeds of AT&T's EDGE data network. Locking my desktop email client out of my email, however, is something that I cannot tolerate, especially at that price.

The Right Book
A Whole New Mind, by Daniel H. Pink, is one of the most interesting and insightful books I have read in months.

Unfortunately, finding something to meet my demanding standards was next to impossible. For starters, I didn't want to buy anything too expensive, as I could have found the same item on Amazon at half the price. And, because paperback books infuriate me, the book needed to be hard-bound.

I looked for half an hour before I realized that the hardcover criterion needed to go. Eventually, I settled on Daniel H. Pink's A Whole New Mind after reading the mildly intriguing description.

Imagine my surprise, then, when I began reading A Whole New Mind. It blew my expectations out of the water like the HMS Victory bearing down on a French battleship.

The book argues, quite persuasively, that, in a world where computers can crunch numbers billions of times more quickly than any human mind and corporations can so easily ship jobs overseas, the most successful people in our new globalized economy will be able to think logically, with the left side of their brain, and creatively, with the right side.

But more than just that, it offers some really interesting insight into how our brains have been conditioned to think in a very logical, left-brain way. I never realized, for instance, that, because most of the Western world has been reading left to right for the past five millennia — a task that moves the eyes and neck rightward and, thus, involves the left side of the brain — natural selection has conditioned us to be left-brain people.

Like The Lexus and the Olive Tree — and quite unlike Silent Spring — I will be talking about this book for months. For once, the high praise quoted on the back cover actually reflects the pages' content. A Whole New Mind is a must-read for anyone under the age of seventy.

After many painstaking hours, everything not only works properly, it looks good too. With time the home page and my other still-in-the-planning-stages page will go online, but, to be frank, I have spent more time writing HTML, CSS and JavaScript to last me at least a few decades, if not a lifetime.

But, as is so often said during informercials, that's not all. By fixing some weird template issues I have now brought back the coveted anonymous comment feature, albeit with a weird captcha box to (hopefully) stem the torrent of comment spam I was experience before. And, as if that were not enough, it's now possible to sign up for your very own Kibeland-specific user id and password, or to comment using OpenID, LiveJournal and Vox.

As the strange lack of other pages and the generally unfinished look probably indicate, there are some changes going on. The numerous Movable Type upgrades that I have inflicted upon my poor website took their toll, which gummed up the database that stored all of my lovely writing. While you, the end user, may not have noticed anything, I had to deal with painfully slow and somewhat wonky performance, which, among other things, hurt my ability to write.

So, I took action. I gutted all of my databases and installed a brand-new pristine copy of Movable Type. But, of course, something went a little awry. I won't go into the gory details, but it took me all day to put the website in its current state.

Hopefully by sometime tomorrow or Friday everything will be better, with a few visual tweaks (foreshadowed in this wreck) and a new addition. Pardon the hideousness.

Sickness, pain, genocide, bad food — all things I truly despise. But, more recently, I have come to really, truly detest these bizarre pieces of footwear called Crocs that people from all walks of life have adopted. Words alone cannot fully express just how deplorable I find those hideous bright-colored sandal-esque pieces of footwear.

For goodness sake! Buy a pair of tennis shoes, flip flops, sandals — anything — but those horrid pieces of closed cell resin. As I always say, comfort is absolutely, positively, never an excuse for choosing something incredibly hideous and tacky.

But the real reason that I have endeavored to write this little snippet is my recent discovery of a truly fantastic website: ihatecrocs.com. This website, like its second-cousin, Ban Comic Sans, has a multitude of information for the enterprising portion of our population looking for even more confirmation that their deep seeded hatred is justified.

Tonight's mildly absurd CNN + YouTube Democratic presidential debate really underlined how ignorant most of America is. Forget the candidates' inability to truly differentiate themselves in any way, despite what they asserted. In fact, I would go so far as to pardon or forgive their facile responses. The questions posed by these uninformed YouTube activists were, with some exceptions, dreadful.

For the sake and health of my fingers, I will stick with one such example of just how misinformed the American public is. An indication, perhaps, of the urgent need not only to improve education in this country, but also a sign that we must foster a culture that loves to learn. Because, after all, what purpose would we serve by simply spending a fortune on education if the children fail to engage themselves?

But back to the idiotic video. In some meaningless jibber-jabber about the minimum wage, two young women asked the assembled panel of Democratic presidential hopefuls whether or not they would be willing to work for minimum wage.

In theory, this could prove a useful exercise to show the candidates how difficult it is to support one's self or one's family on such a meager income. I know, for instance, that upper management at Burger King in the United Kingdom greatly improved business after they spent a week working the front lines at a Burger King restaurant.

But in reality, making — or even permitting — these people to work for what, relative to their current salaries, amounts to very little, has terrible consequences. Firstly, such a move would further cement the stranglehold of the wealthy on such political offices. As anyone who knows anything about history ought to know, the Romans had the same problem. Office holders were, in that case, paid absolutely nothing, which, despite the fact that the members of the lower Plebeian caste could run and hold office, effectively barred the Plebeians from taking such positions and cemented power in the hands of the old-money Patrician families.

Secondly, forcing members of Congress or the executive branch to work for minimum wage would drive smart, intelligent people away from public service. It has been shown that countries which pay their civil servants wages comparable, or even better, than the wages they might earn with a similar skill set in the private sector, generally have better civil servants. Japan does just that with its teachers. In fact, teachers are paid so much more that the competition to become a teacher in Japan is incredibly fierce. The Japanese, then, can choose the very best teachers to educate their children. And, as a result, the Japanese have stupendous teachers.

Singapore too pays its civil servants well to great effect. The Singaporean Prime Minister's salary comes in at just over 3 million American dollars. Compare that with our president's current salary of just $400,000. Granted, the Singaporean government can be brutal and immoral, but one cannot deny that it is extremely well run.

Just as people generally would not want to work their entire life as a gas station attendant making minimum wage, very few people would see public office as a viable career choice unless they either had money or they had no other choices. That would, effectively, put either very wealthy or very stupid people in office. While the former option might work, the latter is undesirable.

It is a noble notion that public servants should sacrifice a good wage in order to serve their nation. But, as both history and modern economics demonstrate, it is, at best, a chimera. The people who posted this question should probably keep their day jobs.

For years I have shopped the Nordstrom Anniversary sale: the clothing is superb and the prices better. Recently, however, I have been unable to find clothing in my size: not huge. I would, for instance, see something interesting, meander over to the display containing said item and discover that, unfortunately, it was only available in extra extra large. Initially, I attributed this sudden inability to find clothes in my size to the fact that I usually shopped the sale a week or two weeks after its beginning. This, of course, meant that thousands of other people could easily have picked over the clothes deigned to fit humans, leaving me with the whale-sized offerings. And it made sense: people who wear extra extra large clothing probably do not possess the best dress sense.

With this analysis in mind, I devised my strategy for this year's anniversary sale: shop early, find clothes. But, alas, my plan failed. Shopping on the first day of the sale I still found almost nothing. I did, however, find the foible in my logic. Apparently, the growing girth of the modern American has prompted Nordstrom and other department stores from stocking more than one or two items in something smaller than a large.

Smoking, it seems, is not the only vice that negatively affects the healthy and innocent. Now the obesity of others threatens not just healthcare costs and the comfort of spectators at Cirque du Soleil performances, but also Americans' already stunted sense of style (Crocs anyone?). The madness must end. Stop second hand obesity!

Knows It's Not a Bee
Unlike my other, defective iPod, Apple's replacement does not buzz whilst I listen to music

Today, for instance, I took my iPod to one of Apple's famed Genius Bars address the strange buzzing my iPod had begun to emit during music playback. The Genius donned a pair of headphones and informed me that he had, "Never seen anything like this before." What cosmic forces conspired to sell me the one iPod of millions that had a strange buzzing issues I will never know. To Apple's credit, however, the Genius did give me a brand new iPod to replace my defective model that clearly missed its calling as a bee.

But the recent "Defect at the Apple Store" saga does not end there.

A week ago I purchased an iPhone -- hands down the best cell phone I have ever used -- but I had been bothered by a slight looseness on the lower left side of the device's lower plastic antenna cover. So, having waited forty-five minutes to see a Genius, I brandished my steel and black communicator and inquired about the gauche give. As it turns out, that too constituted a defect. So the Genius also replaced my iPhone.

I must commend Apple for so deftly handling this issue. Rarely do I walk into a store with two broken gizmos and walk out an hour later with two fully-functional replacements. Though I would really appreciate it if a consumer electronics company saved me from having to replace the gadget in the first place.