Because I spend most of my commute wedged into an over-capacity F train with no hands to spare, I like to keep the number of times I need to fish anything out of my purse to an absolute minimum. To aid in this goal, I’ve been experimenting with various iTunes Smart Playlist methods of combining everything I will want to hear on my way to work into one playlist - this generally consists of any new podcasts followed by whatever music I’m in the mood for. Normally it works fine, but this morning I accidentally tapped Shuffle without realizing it.

Since I had only one new podcast this morning, the result was an episode of The Talk Show mixed into classic Nine Inch Nails album Pretty Hate Machine. This was extremely disorienting until I remembered that John Gruber is the one who talks about iPhones and Trent Reznor is the one who thinks I have a head like a hole.

When the iPhone came out, everybody grumbled and moaned about how Apple had chosen AT&T as its exclusive carrier. I grumbled along with them—and then it hit me: Whom wouldn’t people have grumbled about?

People also hate Verizon, and T-Mobile, and Sprint. Everybody feels oppressed by the contracts, mistreated by customer service and victimized by billing gaffes.

I don’t know why one of these cell executives doesn’t just wake up one morning and realize that the way to dominate the cellphone industry isn’t taking out more ads on billboards and newspapers. It’s creating a service that’s so good, the customers love you, recommend you and (here’s the big one) don’t leave you at the first opportunity.

From Waiting for Products to Arrive over at Pogue’s Posts.

Chris and I live in a large, fairly new apartment building that’s remarkably nice compared to the last place we lived. The hallway carpet is meticulously vacuumed, the doors freshly painted, and the lobby’s fairly ugly hotel-style decor is always gleaming. And yet there’s one glaring exception to all this prim tidiness: the trash room on our floor is a little patch of hell. This is the small closety nook that houses the garbage chute and a couple of big recycling bins, and just outside it is where large or bulky objects are supposed to be left for disposal. But I think there’s something about the anonymity of this procedure that brings out the inner asshole in any given resident as effectively as an unmoderated messageboard.

Even though there’s no real excuse for leaving anything outside the trash room except furniture and large boxes, every time I walk by there’s a heap of random crap that people couldn’t be bothered to bag up and toss down the garbage chute. The one that’s right there. This morning it was a plastic chinese takeout bag, two empty coffee cups, a cardboard paper towel tube, and a Barney’s bag filled with junk mail. This is all just sitting on the carpet outside the trash room itself. Inside the room, there’s once again a pile of miscellaneous shit dumped into what are supposed to be recycling bins, even though the trash chute is at this point less than six inches away. Today in the glass bin it was old clothes, half-full Dean & Deluca takeout containers, and three dirty plates. Maybe I should start leaving passive aggressive notes.

It’s now been about a month and a half since I first got my iPhone, and I can finally say I’ve found a couple of things that irritate me:

1. Photos emailed from the iPhone itself are automatically resized, presumably so it’s faster to send and so that the recipient doesn’t get a gigantic photo in their inbox. That’s fine, but sometimes I want to email a photo to myself or to Flickr when I’m not home to sync with iPhoto. In this situation I don’t want to work with a smaller image, but there’s no way that I can find to email the full version. So it would be nice if you could choose a size to use when emailing, as you can in iPhoto.
2. I don’t like the fact that mail I send from my Gmail account shows up in my iPhone inbox. This one’s not a big deal, because it’s easy enough to hide or delete it, but it seems like silly behavior anyway.
3. It seems to take kind of a long time for MobileMail to render HTML email, even after it’s fully downloaded. Again, it’s just a second or two here and there but it adds up.
4. I wish there were a way to sync Notes with my iMac somehow. Although you can send a note as an email, which isn’t so bad and is what I’ve been doing so far. But real syncing would be nice. Maybe in Leopard.

You may notice that copy and paste are missing from my list, and that’s for two reasons. The first is that everyone else has already complained about the lack of these functions, so I don’t feel I really need to talk about it. The second is that I haven’t actually felt the need to copy or paste anything more than once or twice so far. I suspect this is something that varies wildly from person to person, and in my case there’s just not much that I do on the phone that needs copy or paste. But I won’t argue that it would be nice to have.

All of these are pretty nitpicky complaints, and in general I’m still very happy with my iPhone. None of these things would have kept me from buying the phone if I had known about them in advance.

It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn’t so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

From an Esquire article on, among other things, the Creation Museum

Last night I went to my fourth William Gibson signing, this time for the Spook Country hardcover release. It was at the Barnes & Noble in Union Square, and appropriately enough he read one of the chapters that takes place in Union Square. The questions were mostly doofy and cringe-inducing, as they are wont to be, but Gibson was as pleasant and engaging as he always is. My favorite moment was when he described Hubertus Bigend as “Tom Cruise with too many teeth. And Belgian.”

Fun fact: all my Gibson books are now signed.

Periodically over the past couple of years I’ve had the urge to play through Myst again, which I haven’t seen in over a decade. The mood struck me again today, but it doesn’t look like there’s a version of the original game for OS X, so I may resort to playing it on our Windows machine. I also never played any of the sequels, although I’ve heard from a few people that Riven was good.

And then of course whenever I start thinking about Myst, I end up wanting to play other old Mac games I liked - particularly Scarab of Ra and Cosmic Osmo. Maybe even Oregon Trail and Amazon Trail. Maybe I should dig out one of the old Macs I have that never ran OS X and make a weekend project of it.

Over the weekend I finished the trade paperback version of V for Vendetta, and then for the past day or so I’ve been tearing through Spook Country, which I’ve now finished as well. Both were great reads, but I’m a little sad to be done with them. This is particularly true of Spook Country - I waited so long for a new Gibson book that it was probably unwise of me to devour this one as soon as I got my grubby paws on it. But especially given yesterday’s commuting nightmare, I’ve had plenty of time over the past couple of days with nothing to do but read, and once I started in on the book it was hard to stop. I won’t say much about it, though, as lots of people I know haven’t even bought it yet.

As for the storm, in my neck of the woods it was mostly just inconvenient. No tornado damage on Roosevelt Island, but the train was flooded, of course. I managed to get across the river via the tram, but was stranded once I got there - no subway service at any of the four stations I visited, buses too full, and not an empty cab to be seen. So I stopped in at for some eggs and coffee at a diner around the corner from the place I worked at in 2000, then tried in vain to get a cab for about an hour, and finally gave up and went home.

So this past week hasn’t been a good one for devices that live on my desk. The external hard drive I just bought to replace my old backup drive experienced problems from the moment I took it out of the box, while my iPod stopped syncing or unmounting properly and my iMac’s internal hard drive began showing signs of imminent demise. As a result, I spent a lot of time this weekend tinkering and troubleshooting, and while I did these things I half-watched a number of mediocre movies on cable (The Day After Tomorrow, War of the Worlds, Independence Day, Resident Evil 2).

Chris and I have decided that what we’d really like to see is one movie combining all of our favorite movie disasters: zombies (both rage zombies and the classic undead variety), aliens, evil scientists and radioactive mutants with guns roaming through a flooded, post-apocalyptic Manhattan. Also, Voldemort would be there, riding a dinosaur. I would totally see that fucking movie.