Wednesday, July 30, 2008

Does it Get any Better than iPhone?

Of course it does and it will, but I am right now enjoying the best of several worlds, now that I am up and running with a WinPwn unlocked iPhone, on my T-Mobile family plan, that has as much battery life and 8GB of space for more than enough music, and pictures, and allows me to listen to Pandora Radio with my internet service on the TMobile account.

It was not simple to get where I am now, and I am documenting the steps it took, and preparing to publish an eZine article. Kudos to all the dev teams working on affordable (not free, unless you are too cheap to donate once you see the benefits to be derived from all their work) solutions to the proprietary lockdowns on this technology.

The solution that worked for me did not end up being jailbreakme.com, though their work is well done; my firmware (2.0) was too far along to be able to downgrade far enough, in fact, FW 2.0 does not to my knowledge allow for downgrading. Nevertheless, the solution ended up being an oddly named product, that allowed me to literally pwn my iPhone. That's right, I said pwn it. It's a product called WinPwn 2.0.0.3 (RC1) and it required me to do more than I expected to have to, but once I was done, I now have a T-Mobile powered iPhone that has full on internet capability, clean running You-Tube access, and I do mean clean running.

I watched a full 1 hour streamed documentary without any pauses or ripples, which I have not done on any handheld computer or phone, even my most recent Toshiba e800 running xcpuscalar which overclocked my xscale cpu in the e800 to 530 MHz, and could run most full length movies almost without a glitch could not stream so cleanly.

Yes, I have long known that Apple memory and cpu access technology is faster and cleaner than the equivalent Microsoft OS no matter what the hardware, as evidenced by Apple lately using Intel and Unix OS. In fact, as it turns out, Unix is the OS behind what I am running on my iPhone, though I must qualify that with, "I do not know much of the details, but am researching it for my article."

Suffice to say, this is the next best thing to the Killer App I have long sought, because this is one tool that just about does everything I have long awaited to be available on one device.
I Twitter with ease now, from my iPhone and as I said earlier, can listen to Pandora radio as if it were music on my phone. That's worth the wait.

Friday, July 25, 2008

Listen and Learn

I had a fun experience while leaving my workplace yesterday. I encountered a man standing by a tree looking curiously up into its branches at a locust (cicada) sounding its deafening screechy song. His name is Anthony, and he works in my building, but unlike the myriad workers who pass that tree each day, he had stopped to smell the flowers, or in this case, to observe life in one of its many forms.

We are very much alike, Anthony and I, and we hit it off and had quite a conversation on the way to the parking lot, but not before both standing and looking up into the tree. It was mostly about taking time to notice things around us and not being so caught up in just making it through each day, as so many do.

We must learn to listen, and that does not always mean just with our ears. We hear with our ears, but truly other senses are employed if we are listening. Hearing happens, such as when the proverbial tree falls in the forest, assuming we are there. But listening is something that only happens as a matter of choice, and involves focus, and stillness.

Be still, and listen. A dear friend of mine, Marjam, a half a world away in Estonia, spoke in her blog about the advice of a monk. When asked if he could teach one and only one thing to the world, what would it be? He said merely, "Listen."

I do not wish to take away from the simple profundity of that statement, but wish to add my own experience to it.

I have learned through my life, to still myself, to find a quiet place, or to be quiet wherever I am, and listen.

Life is moving, breathing, laughing, loving, all around us, each moment, and we see so little of it, as we move from one place to another.

Learn to be still.

Learn to Listen.

Shhhhh.

Hear it?

Wednesday, July 23, 2008

How Much Do I Matter Really?

Billions of humans live each day almost oblivious of the rest of those who occupy this blue-green orb.

We touch each other often, but mostly we brush each other on our hurried way to some-thing; some event, or some place where we can occupy our thoughts, or our hands, or merely our time.

In a world of growing connectedness, it will no longer be possible to live out our sometimes solitary lives without affecting and being affected by many more people than in any previous generation.

And Yet...

The way many of us go through each day, this transformation will go largely unnoticed.

Is it possible for one person to help a thousand? How about a million?

It happens each day, and many of us fail to notice that it is not by some miraculous event that many lives are changed, but by little shifts in awareness, of one of us at a time.


On a planet of almost 7 Billion people, having a notable effect in the lives of mere thousands is almost not newsworthy. But newsworthy it remains, because of the simple fact that most of us still allow ourselves to be content, with getting through our own lives, without hurting or damaging too many others along the way.

Find your Voice and make a difference. It is part of what gives us joy in the journey.

Friday, July 11, 2008

The Cluetrain Almost Left Me

I have just recently discovered The Cluetrain Manifesto, and while I feel I am a relative late-comer to the concept, I am by far, still ahead of the popular curve on this. Why is it that most of the people in our land still resist change?

I discovered and bought the book last month, and it sat on my shelf waiting for me to find the time to read it, when, quite by accident, I opened up another book which I knew I should read and simply had not. The 8th Habit has turned out not only to be an eye, and mind opener, but again made reference early in the book, to The Cluetrain Manifesto. Now, I have just begun to read both books, and am studying them for what change they can help me effect in my own life.

I am sure I will have much to say about both, as every chapter in either one jolts me again and again, and even when I re-read the words of a chapter. There are some wonderful teachings which I had already begun to feel the need for, but did not realize at the time what I was feeling.

I am finding my voice, and I am beginning to see that there is so much that I can contribute to help those around me see and accept the direction our world is going. The world and the work of the 21st Century, for most of us in the USA, will be work done with our mouths and with our minds and not so much with our hands, and those who resist will merely continue to complain about how we are losing all of our jobs to foreign nations that will do it for less.

Let's all wake up and realize, the changes we see happening around us should not cause us to curl up and hold on to what we know. It should cause us to start learning again, possibly enrich that which we know, hopefully learn some new things. I see this as very positive, and want to be part of the world we are moving into.

To use a phrase from my childhood, "Resistance is Futile."

Friday, July 4, 2008

Independence Day and Change is on the Horizon

I once voted for the man called W, but I cannot see now, what I saw then. Am I blind or do we have at the helm, a man who could not keep his own business ventures afloat during most of his young life, and who has been emotionally absent from most of the important decisions of his current office visit?

I will not rant, I will just say, that I have been doing a lot of soul searching, and, while I am not happy with the Republican party, I am also not sure that either party offers the change we so richly deserve and so desperately need in this country.

I am studying the latest work of Fareed Zakaria, "The Post-American World". To say that America is losing its primacy in the world is not to say that the USA has not played an important role in the improvement of world economic and political conditions. There is no doubt that we have blazed a trail for the world to emulate, but emulate they are, and we seem to be losing sight of the responsibility we have. And so we must of necessity stop trying to dictate to the rest of the world that they must set up a Democratic government. In fact, it was never Democracy that was setup for us by the Founding Fathers. It was a Republic, "if you can keep it," said Benjamin Franklin, and we may actually have already done our best to dismantle it beyond recognition.

Still, without us, or rather US, there would be precious little in the world to prevent the uprising and despotic rule of any of several tyrants. Many have tried and we have been there to maintain the independence and support, for most of the world, and uphold, freedom for the masses.

Can we patch the wounds we have inflicted on our great nation? We have to care as a nation and strive to regain some of the goodwill which has been lost. But we also need to stop trying to be the self-declared policeman for the world. We are well hated throughout most of the world for our presumptuous leadership, and determination that we know better how to deal with our weapons of mass destruction than anyone else.

Democracy does not mix well with some of the highly religious nations we are trying to help with it. Democracy, and the Republican form of government we were given by our Founding Fathers, does not thrive where there is not individual freedom, morality, and sovereignty. We will see what change we can effect this time around, and what good John McCain can do if he can even defeat the growing wave of support Barack Obama is finding even in conservatives who remain unaware of his extreme views in many areas he does not address right now.

Here's to the audacity of hope, no matter what the results.