kirktastic

…write a post about Obama selecting Biden for veep. What I like about Biden is he’s not afraid to take McSame and keep Obama above the fray. He was the guy that said about Guiliani: “noun, verb, 9/11″. My only gripe from his speech with Obama yesterday was he said literally way too much. That he doubted Obama’s experience when he was running against him shouldn’t surprise anyone. Everyone running against Obama said he’s inexperienced. To me, McCain is going to need more than that. I think I read McCain is going to pick Mitt Romney as his veep. Yawn.

…write a post about the possibility of a transit strike. Just when I sign up for the pre-tax bus pass at work, the drivers/mechanics and the bus authority can’t come to terms on a new contract. They voted to strike last week. Now both sides say that doesn’t mean they will strike. CapMetro has a contingency plan to cover core routes but neither of the buses I take are core. Well, I just thank god that George Bush solved the energy problem and gas is cheap so I can drive. And now with Ford offering 45% of their F-150 pickup trucks I can go to work without a care in the world!

…write a post about TV. My cable bill is $170 a month. About $50 of that is internet. About $95 is is TV. The rest is taxes and fees and surcharges and a bunch of crap. I only watch about [adult swim], Comedy Central, HBO and Showtime. I used to like the History Channel but lately they don’t show history programs. Instead every time I flip past the channel in glorious HD, there is “Ice Road Truckers”. This is a show about these guys that drive across frozen lakes in Canada. There’s drama (the ice might melt, they might crash) but there is no history. There are plenty of shows not about history. I saw a show about french fries the other day. Yes, they did manage to shoehorn in some history (Thomas Jefferson introduced it to the US) and the machines used to take a field full of potatoes and make them into fries is interesting, but it isn’t history. I have the same gripe with the Travel Channel. They used to have great shows about exotic places covered by Lonely Planet and Rough Guides. But now, it is “America’s Best Hamburgers” and shows about Las Vegas casinos. This switch happened right after 9/11 where they decided that Americans weren’t going anywhere so they changed the format to talk about hamburgers and roller coasters. I don’t know when the History Channel lost its way, but in light of the administration and McCain’s recent “countries in the 21st century don’t invaded other countries” remark, perhaps the suits at History Channel think Americans don’t care about history either. Maybe the problem isn’t the TV programming. Maybe it is me.

…write about iPhones and shit. The iPhone 3G is getting a lot of flack the press for its problems getting on 3G networks. For the most part, the mobile carriers are pointing at Apple. This is nothing new, whenever I had problems with my cellphone’s reception the first thing the person at T-Mobile would do is try and blame my handset which I would buy from Europe since T-Mobile’s US handset selection sucks ass. 3G works mostly for me. Except I do think I’m running into capacity problems from time to time. In the mornings on the bus I get 3G with 5 bars for most of the route. In the much more crowded and awake afternoon commute, I will get fewer bars or switchover to EDGE. Since it is the same phone attempting to connect to the same tower at the different times, I don’t think it is the phone, ATT. A cellphone tower can only handle a finite amount of calls/data. So when I’m downloading pr0n on the bus, that means someone else can’t use its slot on that tower. This isn’t an iPhone specific problem, except iPhones exacerbate the problem because they are so damn awesome and people tend to use them more than other phones. On the old cellphone networks only 56 calls could take place simultaneously. I think you can get a few hundred now, but in areas with lots of 3G phones that could be pretty easy to fill up. Especially since iPhones and other data hungry phones are always downloading something. The 3G coverage maps only show it there’s a tower somewhere not how much capacity is available. Carriers first seem to build out the coverage area, then the density. And this is why I think many people who are in Manhattan or Chicago or San Francisco are having troubles. Sure, there’s coverage, but there are a lot of people trying to use the same tower at the same time. You just need to go back to the online forums to last year and see people with every brand of smartphone whining about 3G coverage to see this isn’t an iPhone issue. iPhone has the halo of the cult of Apple about it so it gets more press. People don’t stand in line overnight to get the Motorola Q phone or Samsung Blackjack. So when thousands of of people in a city block get a new phone on without new enough new capacity, people are not going to get the new signal. Only until the carrier builds out more capacity (which they are more likely to do than add smaller cities and suburbs) will this problem go away. When I was in Europe with my Sony Ericsson 3G phone in 2007 it would switch between the 3G and GPRS (slower than EDGE) networks sometimes. People forget the 3G network in the US is pretty young. You just have to remember back a few years to the dropped calls on the old cellphone networks. Until the carriers started building out capacity people whined about no coverage and dropped calls. Maybe the History Channel can do a show about that.

I don’t think Apple is blameless here. From what I’ve read, the 3G chipset isn’t the best on the market and Apple doesn’t have the years’ experience in engineering like Nokia has in this area. But you can have the best radio in the world and if there’s no room on the tower, you’re not going to get through.

I still find it pretty fucking amazing I can go nearly anywhere in the world and I can make and receive calls on a device the only weighs a few grams and fits in my pocket. It is fun to get a call from a friend asking to go out to see a movie only to say, “sounds great, but I’m in Paris…and it is 4AM here… and this call is costing me $2 a minute.”