From CNN: How not to annoy people via e-mail

From the article: “We’re addressing the very way you use e-mail, the logistics of hurtling e-mails into the tangled switchboard of the Web. Here, three blatantly annoying sins to avoid before hitting send.”

Dear lord, please read this article, and email the link to your entire address book…er…wait…um…nevermind that last. Instead, the next time someone sends you a chain letter with a few hundred email addresses in the To: header field and pages and pages of FWD: headers in the body of the mail, point them to this commentary on CNN so they knock it the heck off.

From the REPS Online Twitter feed comes the news that Yuri Rasovsky, contemporary producer/author of radio drama, has died of esophageal cancer at his Los Angeles home. He was 67. You can find the full obit at The Hollywood Reporter, and visit Yuri’s website.

Yes, I realize it’s odd for me to be posting about a contemporary audio dramatist, but Yuri adapted for radio, directed, and produced one of the precious few contemporary audio dramas I believe is on a par with the very best of classic Old-Time Radio; a 1983 production of “By His Bootstraps,” starring Richard Dryfuss. Dryfuss in this production has that magical “it” that only the finest of the workaday radio actors had…the ability to sound completely and utterly natural while performing using only the voice. The supporting actors in this production do not exemplify this mysterious “it,” IMHO which allows one a contrast to explain what it is I do not like about almost all Modern Audio Drama (summed-up I think as, “Ohmygod I can hear that actor ACTING!”), but since this play is based on the time-travel short story written by Robert Heinlein, Dryfuss doesn’t need to share the microphone with many other than himself. Dryfuss’ performance, coupled with Yuri’s direction and technical skill in layering the performance, creates a tapestry one can easily get lost in.

Yes, this is actually the old curmudgeon praising a program of MAD.

If you can find a copy, I urge you to give it a listen, especially if like me you are an unabashed Heinlein fan. And another “thank you” to Richard Fish for both introducing me to Yuri via email, and providing a copy some years ago when my self-recorded copy went missing.

I rarely make New Year’s Resolutions…they are far too easy to ignore on January 2nd. But this year I did think it would be a great idea to blog more, posting more podcasts of Old-Radio Shows and sharing my pearls of wisdom about arcane subjects no one cares about.

Well, that worked out well.

But as I desperately hold on to the Winter Holidays for the last remaining days (we celebrate Christmas here, and the tree is starting to lose its needles), I’m looking around for a Christmas show to run this weekend, just to remind everyone that the holidays are more a frame of mind than a calendar date, and awesomeness doesn’t need to be limited to only a week or two at the end of the year.

The podcast, sparse as it might be, might not last much longer, though. If the Congress of the United States decides to pass the terrible bills SOPA and ProtectIP, anyone with a burr in their saddle could shut down pretty much any website, turning off the DNS and in the extreme taking away the domain name…much of this without the need for anything so trivial as a judge.

We’ll ignore my feeling that “intellectual property” doesn’t exist (the framers of the Constitution were very careful to separate out property and copyright). We’ll ignore that the rest of the world must look at the U.S. as a bunch of thugs who believe we can completely control the Internet, like some gang demanding protection money from the shop-holders on a street. No, my objections to this set of bills written in toto by the entertainment industry is simpler than that.

It won’t work, and will cause havoc on the Internet.

Look, I’ve been working in IT (Information Technologies) since the 1980’s (using a VAX and a Bitnet-to-Internet gateway to get information from the Net!), and over the years have needed to go to…less than savory corners of the Internet for information and sometimes hacks to get clients’ machines working again. While certainly no expert, I do know how to get around the minimal and silly restrictions these bills detail; now imagine how trivial getting around these restrictions would be for your usual fourteen-year-old kid. Nope, if someone wants to share a copy of Harry Potter and the Milking of the Movie-going Public, they will, and this bill ain’t gonna stop ‘em.

No, but it might cause people to be attacked by the Industry for posting videos of their children’s birthday party if “that song” is in it, or a podcast like this one because of some obscure theme song. Right now, there is a financial cost to taking serious action against a website or family, which would (by design) be eliminated by these bills.

The most reasoned dissection of these bills and their likely effect on the Net is in this TechDirt article. Take a moment and read it (you can skip the comments, which tend to be…er…less considered and measured), and then take another moment to contact your congrescritters today and point them to that article.

And once you’ve done that, grab a glass of egg nog and hum softly a holiday song. You’ll feel much better, I promise.

 
…the communication below, expressing at the same time our great gratification that its faithful author is numbered among the friends of The Sun:

Dear Editor, I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says “If you see it in The Sun it’s so.”
Please tell me the truth. Is there a Santa Claus?
Virginia O’Hanlon
115 West Ninety-fifth St.

VIRGINIA, Your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge

Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus! It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.

Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.

You tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, not even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.

No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.

— Editorial page of the New York Sun, September 21, 1897

From our entire family to yours - Annie, Katie (who knows perfectly well there is a Santa Claus), and yours truly; no matter what you are celebrating at this truly amazing time of the year, Happy Holidays!

On the Amazon Free eBooks: Collections page, Amazon used to list two collections - their classics and out-of-copyright collection (which, FWIW, is available from Project Gutenberg without the hassle of using Amazon), and their Limited Time Offers collection, a list of books that are for a limited time available free.

They have changed that page to remove the Limited Time Offers, which, frankly, is the only collection I care about (see above Gutenberg comment), so I’m placing it here so others can use the page…at least as long as the Big A decides to allow their computers to maintain it.

Darned shame they felt the need to remove that link. Granted, some of the Limited Time Offers aren’t great (sample chapters, short stories not books, etc.), but I’ve still scored a bunch of stuff from there. I “bought” bunches of free cookbooks and am always watching for new Gooseberry Patch titles to show up there, some novels I really hope to find time to read someday, and even some 2012 calendars. I sort the Limited Time Offers page by popularity, which generally percolates the newest stuff up to the top, and when I see something I’d like, “purchase” it immediately since tomorrow the book’s price might be back up to $9.99. (Of course I have also purchased ebooks from both Amazon and Barnes and Noble for real cash money, but free is too nice a price to pass up.

And no, I don’t own a Kindle, I own an Android tablet. And no, I don’t use Kindle for Android since it’s pretty buggy, I use another ebook reader. And yes, I know the Digital Rights Management imposed on the ebooks is supposed to prevent me from doing so, but all of us here know how much I loathe DRM and so remove it at my earliest opportunity on general principle.

Anyway, if you read ebooks and have an Amazon account, check out the free ebook list. Frequently.

Apparently a bunch of small providers are using some brain-damaged outfit called Synacor to “spam-protect” their email (Embarq is one example), and this outfit has decided the most recent issue of the Internet OTR Digest has, “spam-like characteristics.” This is geek-speak for, “our filters are too broad, and while they still allow spam to get into your mailbox, we’ll false-positive legitimate email just so we can up our rejection stats.”

Yeah, I know, I’m being a wise-guy, but it’s annoying. If you missed issue #187, you can try to pull it from the archive server but that will probably fail, too. I can’t do anything about bad code generating a false-positive for the Digest, so please complain to your provider and suggest they find some other solution to the spam problem.

Ah, well, at least this issue isn’t being rejected by AOL or the Barracuda appliance…

A while back, our living room rear-projector TV burned out a bulb; since the replacement bulb didn’t work, I’m assuming the bulb ballast board died, a non-trivial repair best left to a time when I’m not rushed dealing with other domestic and business stuff. So we’ve been watching on a largish 28″ tube set; at least when there’s electricity here at Chez Charlie. Until yesterday that is, when it started to flash on-and-off like some damaged neon sign.

No problem, thought I, and entered the black hole I laughingly refer to as a basement, arising with an old 19″ that has spent decades down there waiting for a time of need. As I turned it on and tuned it to the media player, I laughed with my daughter that if the screen sizes kept getting smaller, we’d soon be watching television on her netbook.

Laughing, that is, until a flutter, darkness, and the smell of ozone combined with burning insulation…
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Twitter is desperate to monetize its service, and in doing so is determined to track its users as much as possible - and on a social networking service, that’s a lot. It’s latest tracking system is the t.co “shortened” link…they act as if they are doing you a favor, but in truth they are tracking 1) what URIs are clicked on a lot, and 2) which specific URIs you click on. There is simply no way to opt-out of this nonsense, and while before not adding a “real” URI but instead typing “blogs.oldradio.net” would bypass their “shortener,” no longer; even that becomes expanded (that’s right, expanded!) to a t.co URI.

And frankly I’m sick to death of companies tracking every d*mned thing we all do on the Internet, so I’m removing the URIs from the blog’s auto-tweet. My interested followers will already have the blog bookmarked (and the smart ones will be using my RSS feed over on the sidebar to monitor the blog anyway), so this way I can at least prevent Twitter from monetizing my tweets by tracking my followers.

But then, I’m not trying to make money here on the blog, so I don’t need to monitor my visitors, or how they get here.

My daughter is going on a school trip this week, so my wife is busy getting things ready. In her copious spare time, she’s offered to sew luggage tags for both Katie and a friend. Naturally, her sewing machine decided to “play up,” and she can’t find the yellowed manual to fix it.

Enter me, search-engine guru extraordinaire.

I hit the web searching for the manual…oddly, unlike almost every other device or appliance, there are a buttload of places selling PDF copies of the manuals. Even bet these slimeballs don’t have rights to ‘em, but there it is. I found some manuals, but none for the cabinet-based White sewing machine the Mrs. uses.

Then I stumbled over this blog post, and success - went to Singer, entered the model number alone (no other information, as suggested by the blog post) and there was the manual to her sewing machine.

And I used technology a little more than most might - I transferred the downloaded PDF via WiFi to her 7″ tablet, which she took to the basement and the machine, referencing the manual on the tablet while she worked. So no trees were harmed by printing the manual out, she was able to work with the machine, and everyone was happy.

I love technology…

…of Bob Edwards’ new book A Voice in the Box; My Life in Radio - get it now while you can! Check out this post at BobEdwards.Info for complete details about the free offer, and this blog post for my review of the book!

I’m probably the only person who actually reads these stupid things, but in some of the ebooks I own (screw ‘em, I own the books just as if I had purchased the paper version) the following appears in the “fine print” buried in the back of the book:

No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of [publisher].

There is a small problem with this, though. If you purchase from Amazon, you will need Kindle for PC (or a real Kindle); if you purchase from Barnes and Noble, you need Nook for PC (or a Nook). These applications (or the software in the real-world devices) are, “information storage and retrieval systems.” So by purchasing and reading the book in the application or device you are supposed to be using, you are actually violating the letter of the license the publisher believes it can force upon you.

Not the dumbest thing content providers have written, but pretty stupid nevertheless.

Of course, I have to admit, I routinely violate the letter of these stupid “shrink wrap” agreements…I figure if I don’t provide it to anyone else, what I do with these books is my business. If I wish to read them on my Android tablet without installing fifteen different ebook readers, one for each type of DRM these chuckleheads can come up with, well, I will. I don’t share with anyone else, since that is clearly wrong, but changing formats for my own convenience is a violation I’m quite prepared to live with.

I’m again annoyed…for no reason, Twitter has decided to replace my short links with its own t.co tracking links. I’m changing the way Twitpress reports to Twitter to see if I can avoid it, and this post is just a test of that change.

I am having quite a time with domains and DNS. Let me explain…

It all started the other day, when I decided to renew some domains I have under my control that will expire in the next few months. I currently have domains at two different registrars, and decided to move all of them to one. So before making the transfer, I decided to renew the domains at the one I decided to keep.

I couldn’t. Why? Because in the recent months they have changed their payment screen to require loading a javascript from GoogleAPIs. I don’t accept GoogleAPI connections, for the same reason I don’t allow most any connection to Google’s machines…Google knows far too much about us all, and I don’t want them to know much about me.

But without accepting that AJAX code directly from Google’s servers I couldn’t pay them. When I suggested to customer service they shouldn’t do something quite so stupid (it is a one-line change to set up a fall-back to serve the js code from their own servers if the connection to Google fails, and something every web programmer should do without thinking about it), they basically said I had no choice.

Of course, I do have a choice, so I am now moving the domains under my direct control off of their registry to another. But this is causing some…issues…what with bouncing multiple domains from registrar to registrar.

While I was at it, I registered a new domain name for future use (androidwithoutgoogle.com…see a pattern here?), registering it with the registrar that doesn’t expect me to share private information with the Big G of course. But I needed to add DNS records so the domain could be found.

For years, I’ve been using EveryDNS.Net, a free and excellent DNS service. Before it was sold to DynDNS, I routinely made a $20 donation every year for the service, and considered that cheap for the rock-solid service I was provided. But as I mentioned, it was sold. Things didn’t really change, or so I though. But when I got there this evening, I discovered…

DynDNS was closing down the free service on August 31st, and required me to “migrate” my domains to the paid-DynDNS static system. Please note…no one bothered to tell me this, and had I not added that domain today, I wouldn’t have found out until all of my domains disappeared from the Internet on the 1st of September! We’re not just talking about business sites like lofcom.com or hobby sites like oldradio.net, but sites like fotr.net and this blog, for heaven’s sake!

To say I am annoyed is putting it mildly…and while DynDNS only wants a five-spot to “migrate,” they can kiss me where the sun doesn’t shine if they think they’re going to get a penny from me after not bothering to contact me and let me know they were shutting down the free service!

(Easy, Charlie…take a deep breath…ok…better.)

So now I need to change the DNS servers for all of my domains, and need to do it pronto so there is no interruption in service. I found a few more free systems, and will post more about them in a future blog post, but it’s clear I’m going to be a little busy over the next few days to make certain there isn’t any disaster when the EveryDNS.net service is shuttered.

Yes, I know it’s been a while since I posted here on the blog. It’s summertime, and there’s lots of activity here around Chez Charlie - while I have found time for the occasional Tweet (you do follow me on Twitter, yes?), I haven’t had the time to post more lengthy commentary on life, politics, the Net, or much of anything else.

I’ll see if I can change that sometime this week…maybe a podcast of Old Radio programming or something.

This is primarily targeted to subscribers of the Internet OTR Digest, but the truth is, everyone should be able to take something away from this post, so even if you’re not a subscriber, hang in so it doesn’t happen to you.

The hacked-account spam issue is becoming epidemic; it seems like every week I’m removing 10-15 email addresses from the Digest to prevent the onslaught of spam, and there doesn’t seem to be any end in sight. Just today, Sunday, I’ve removed two addresses, and yesterday the account of a well-known and respected poster was hijacked. Some spam asks for money for the account holder who’s stuck in Europe after a theft…some points to bogus pharmacological websites…others to sites with nekked people. All of them are creating a pretty severe problem.

Understand, I’m not directly blaming the account holders for the spam…I realize if your password is hacked, you can’t do much to prevent the scammers from using your account other than change the password and sheepishly apologize to everyone who received the spam. But it’s important to understand how to keep your account from being hacked in the first place, so your friends, family, and other folks don’t have to deal with the deluge of spam coming from…well…you.

While this can affect anyone, the vast majority of accounts attacked currently are from the free email providers; AOL, Yahoo, MSN/Hotmail, et al. There are lots of accounts there, usually operated by those not involved in computers or technology as a profession, making them easy pickings for the scum that want to use the account to sell bogus Vicodan or access to porn. This doesn’t mean, however, that if you use an account from your provider that you are “safe,” it just means you aren’t being targeted at this time. At any moment, the bad guys could turn their attention to Earthlink, Verizon, or any other email provider.

Some might think, “Ah, it’s just email…I don’t need to fix it. If my email gets compromised, I’ll just get another free account.” And that’s fine, if you don’t mind annoying your friends, family, and possibly the thousands on the OTR Digest. Having your account spew this junk is bound to make you look bad, get annoyed telephone calls, and generally embarrass you. So it’s probably a good idea to do whatever you can to keep it from happening.
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This morning, I took my daughter to school because of a Grecian festival. Originally the plan was for me to carry some of her stuff into the building, requiring a stop at the office to sign in, but she changed her mind at the last minute and decided to enter through another door and carry it all herself. I carried the box to that door and started to hand it to her when a teacher came racing to the door, arms waving furiously, frantically exclaiming I needed to enter at the other door. I’m guessing this teacher doesn’t see much action at her post so when she does, she performs her duty with gusto…

Since I obviously had no intention of entering through any door, I declined, and unfortunately scoffed at her misguided idea that she was, “protecting [my] child” (I have always reacted badly to being challenged in an irrational manner). But that teacher’s goofy over-reaction to a mistaken assumption got me thinking hard today about how artificial her “security” really was, and by extension how much security we deal with every day is bogus and useless.

Let’s create two scenarios…the first a well-meaning parent who doesn’t know the rules. This parent attempts to enter without signing in at the office; the teacher gently and politely redirects this parent to the office (a much more reasonable method than this morning’s adrenaline-charged attack, in my opinion), the parent immediately complies, and all is right with the world.

In the second, someone is at the school to do harm…in this case, the teacher attempts to redirect the person to the office, but this miscreant brandishes a weapon, dispatches the teacher, and proceeds to, well, do harm. (Please remember we are the next-door neighbor to a district that had a devastatingly-identical attack occur some years ago which created this “policy” of “protection” in districts across the state.)

The inevitable takeaway from this is that the teacher’s stationing is irrelevant, and does nothing more than provide a false sense of security. Her role depends wholly on the willingness of the person attempting entry to, “do the right thing” - if that person wants to do otherwise, there is little or nothing the teacher can do about it. There is no security here, just an attempt by the school/district administration to pretend there is, and we parents dutifully go along with their delusion and convince ourselves there is some safety for our children other than that most people actually do want to, “do the right thing.” Heck, a hand-painted sign on the door would have exactly the same effect, simply depending upon the cooperation of the visitor. Worse, the time of someone who is paid to work with students is wasted, reduced to acting as an infrequent hall-monitor to grown-ups.

This lead me to ponder the bigger picture, and how much “security” in this society is false. I decided, unfortunately, almost all of it. We live in an unsafe world, and do a disservice to ourselves by this delusion that we can be “safe” by doing silly busy-work like frantically waving our arms to prevent entry by those who aren’t even interested in entering, or reaching into someone’s private area in an airport screening line. The gains are artificial, the security an illusion, the reaction knee-jerk.

No answers here, just observations. Maybe life isn’t meant to be “safe,” and maybe instead of deluding ourselves we should be honest and teach our children this simple truth. Or maybe we all need those little delusions just to get through the day. I don’t know the solution, but I’m pretty sure I know the problem…it’s us, and our ability to pretend simplistic actions have a prayer of doing us any good.

As is my yearly habit, I’ll not be touching any computers tomorrow, the Ides of March. The Internet will just need to do without me for a day, while I read a book, watch an episode of Star Trek (haven’t yet decided which one), wander aimlessly around the house, and generally act pretty much like the cat does every day of the year.

Please try not to break things while I’m gone, thanks.

So I bought my first Android device the other day, a small 7″ “tablet” that was on sale at a local CVS. And yes, I understand the irony about my opinions about Google and the Android device, but so you know, the plan is, now that the device is rooted (that is, I control it the way I should without the hassle) and once the root filesystem can be made read/write, is to remove as much Google as possible from the device. (Hey, it’s still better than an iDevice that has big-brother-Steve telling me what I can and can’t run…) I really only bought it to learn the ins-and-outs of Android, but while it’s here I might as well use it for some other things as well like re-reading a certain unpublished manuscript.

Having the device for only few days, I’ve been spending most of that time searching the Web trying to figure out the simple stuff that would be obvious in a more user-friendly operating system (clearly Android wasn’t made for your benefit, but Google’s), and I am listing here in no particular order some of the stuff I had to track down. Hopefully this will save others the trouble of searching hither-and-yon just to get answers to some simple questions…

• MAC Number
  It’s actually pretty easy to find once you know where to look; hit Menu (that funky lined icon in the upper-right), then Settings, then scroll the whole way down to “About Device,” then “Status.” It’s there. (Sheesh.)

• Unmount microSD Card
  Back to Menu, then Settings, then “SD card & device storage,” and in there you’ll find, “Unmount SD card.”

• Unmount USB Flash Drive
  Er…you can’t. Seriously. Smarter folks than I have suggested suspending the device and then removing the flash drive; to be completely safe, though, plan on shutting the thing down completely, removing the drive, then restarting the device.

• Lock the Screen
  This may be device-specific, but on this tablet, tapping the Power button (that is the “real” button, not a screen widget) immediately blanks the screen and places the device into lock mode (Suspend, sorta…there are power issues with this device)…tap the screen and it immediately wakes, allowing a slide of the lock to unlock the device. A press-and-hold on the power button (again the “real” one) throws up a box allowing for Suspend, Power Off, or Cancel. It takes a while to boot from a hard power-off, though, so I’ve been avoiding it as much as possible.

• Stop the Music!
  Ok, this is one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen, but the music player in the thing doesn’t have a frelling “Stop” button. Seriously. You can pause it, but not stop it. If you’re playing music on a microSD card, unmounting it as described above will stop the music (!), but you’d think someone would have thought about a simple stop button. (You’d also think they’d have the sense not to force a music database update every time you change cards or sneeze, either, but nevermind that now.)

  Anyway, one reasonable albeit press-intensive way of stopping the player is to clear the playlist. While in the playback screen, tap the playlist button, then hit Menu, then Clear Playlist. You can also use ES Task Manager to kill the music player; inelegant, but rapidly effective…

  Might the guy who came up with the GUI on the music player please purchase a clue?

• Rooting the Device
  “root” is historically the name given to the “Superuser” in un*x machines, so “rooting” an Android device means…um…basically getting what you paid for in the first place. Android devices, like iDevices, seem to think you’re a chucklehead who can’t possibly understand a tiny device enough to actually control it, so these things are shipped so that the company controls what you may and may not do with them. By “rooting,” one takes control of the device back. I mean, I’m the one who shelled out the bucks, shouldn’t I be able to do whatever I wish with it?

  As to how, it isn’t as hard as it sounds once you find the correct firmware image to use. Each device has a specific image, and using the wrong one causes Bad Things To Happen, so search carefully. Once you do, though, it’s as simple as getting the image file on the root (this time it means “top level,” although the similarity isn’t an accident) of the internal memory and disconnecting from the computer. Seriously, that’s all there is to it.

• Specific to the CMP738a - What’s with USB Host?
  Everything I’ve read suggests you turn off USB Host mode before connecting the device to your computer. But USB Host mode should only work on the full-sized USB post, and you connect this device to your computer via the miniUSB connector on the other side of the miniHDMI jack. I’ve followed this so far, but it shouldn’t be necessary to turn off USB Host. (Although every time I connect to the computer, the device reports it’s shutting down USB storage. Again…huh?)

  And while I’m whining, why is it that Windows7 always wants to “fix” the internal “ROCK-CHIPS” memory space? I’m afraid to let it, for obvious reasons (don’t want Android to have issues with its own “drive”), but it’s frightening anyway that there’s a tussle between the two operating systems….

It’s kinda hard avoiding the Android Application Market (I intend to sideload everything since, as I’ve noted here more than once, I have no intention of giving Google any information about me whatsoever), but so far, so good. I’m keeping copies of the apps I download on the desk computer so that when (not if) the next version of the rooted OS is released (hopefully with a read/write main filesystem so I can start dumping the unnecessary Google apps taking up space) I can re-install without re-downloading. Titanium Backup is another option for backing up apps and data before an upgrade, once you’ve root’ed the device.

I’m also going to update this page as I learn more about the device…I’ll point to it with new blog posts, but will maintain all of the, “Why the devil isn’t this in the manual?” stuff right here.

As many of you know, I am disorganized to a fault. I make lists, and eventually get everything finished, but “reaction” items (things that have to be done now because of some imminent crisis) always come first, and the not-so-emergent stuff gets knocked down the list.

But I really need to get my act together and organize better, something that was driven home this afternoon. To explain, months ago on the anniversary of Norman Corwin’s 100th birthday KCET re-ran a program from 1969 of Mr. Corwin directing his classic, The Plot to Overthrow Christmas. I asked on the Digest if anyone had recorded the program, and if so requested a copy. Herb Harrison, a long-time subscriber and someone with whom I had occasionally corresponded, was kind enough to email me and tell me he would send a VHS video tape, which he did.

That package sat unopened on my desk for a few months before I finally found the time to record it into one of the computers and create a DVD. I slowly, over the following months, added some discs to that stack on the shelf, and finally got around to sending those disks to Mr. Harrison early this year, with my belated but heartfelt thanks.

Unfortunately, today I received the package returned to me, with a note that Herbert George Harrison passed away in the first week of December, 2010.

So over the next few days I’m going to try to catch up on all the things I owe folks…if there’s anything I told you I would send and haven’t yet, drop me email and remind me. Meanwhile, I will try to get myself organized enough that nothing like this will ever happen again.