Bumming around YouTube this morning I ran across yet another video featuring an attractive woman and largely about nothing, entertaining, but still about nothing. This one has the double bonus twist of hitting two of my weaknesses, cute Asian girls, and British accents. I like accents in general, but British accents are probably my favorite because of all of the Monty Python, Dr. Who, and Benny Hill I watched in my younger days.

The iPhone launches today and as I’ve said previously, I won’t be getting one. I’m planning to wait for a cheaper and better one later. But long before that happens, there may well be an army of iPhone clones to choose from. One in particular that has just caught my attention is the Neo1973 running OpenMoko. I’m sure there are going to be a lot of phones with touch screen interfaces that do x, y, and z before the year ends, but the OpenMoko platform is about more than that. It’s another one of those radical long haired hippy open source projects that rants about freedom and open (hackable) standards! LOL God I love this stuff!^_^

While the Neo1973 is certainly not on the same level as the iPhone, it does offer some glimpse of what a clone will look like. I like a stylish phone, but more to the point, I really don’t like the look of a QWERTY keyboard on the face of a phone like the Blackberry or similar smartphones. I could get used to it yes, but I don’t like it. A good clone must have a touchscreen interface, but beyond that things will get murky. Why? Because programming a good interface is not trivial. So I’m sure that a lot of them will suck at first. But there is hope, because once the interface is freed from dependence on the hardware, upgrading it is just a matter of better software. And beyond that, personalization of the interface is a reachable goal. I only hope that the threat of lawsuits won’t block this progress.

Honestly I really don’t care anymore about the US Supreme Court’s rejection of school assignment plans that use race as a factor. What I’ve seen in my life time is that if people don’t want to be with someone because of their race, then they’ll use whatever means they can to avoid it. The schools have already resegregated and the court decision can only accelerate and validate this process. In the US we pay a lot of lip service to valuing ethnic diversity, but when you get right down to it, people’s actions speak otherwise. And I for one am tired of trying to fight against that tide. If white, brown, or yellow people don’t want to be with me or my kids because we’re black, then screw them! There’s no point in trying to force the issue through the law. All we can fight for now is fairness in the assignment of resources. But if history is a guide, separate is never equal.

I guess I enjoy hype about as much as the next person. So even though they are plenty of reasons not to buy an iPhone, go ahead, buy one anyway! No really, buy one! Heck, buy two! Why? Oh, I don’t get a commission or anything like that. But I am very selfishly motivated nonetheless. I figure that there are plenty of people out there who have the money for what is likely to be the next high status gadget. The rest of us will have to wait for the cost to come down, and for any bugs to be worked out. The more iPhones Apple sells, the sooner that price will drop due to the usual economies of scale. And more beta test…er first time adopters mean the bugs will be worked out that much faster! So unless the iPhone blows it in a Newtonesque fashion, I hope to be seeing a much cheaper and better iPhone by this time next year. So please people, buy those iPhones tomorrow, for the childr…er me!

The iPhone is coming out on Friday and while I’d love to have one, it’s just too expensive right now and I can live without all of the whiz bang features it has, for now. People have compared it to Sony’s PSP, yeah, crazy people!^_^ I don’t really think it’s a sensible comparison, but there is one thing the iPhone can do that I sooo wish the PSP could. And that is play YouTube videos. While the PSP finally did get some level of Flash support, that support is for Flash version 6, YouTube requires Flash version 7 or better. I really wish Sony’s software writers would at least try to keep up. The PSP is still pretty nice hardware just begging to be fully exploited. If they cannot keep up, then please Sony, open the platform up for the 3rd party homebrew/independents to make some apps! My TiVo can’t play YouTube videos either, but at least TiVo is trying to keep up with the features war by adding new services that take advantage of what’s available on the net. Not perfect, but they’re trying. Perhaps the unlocking of the PSP CPU is a sign of good things to come…

Sakura by NIRGILIS is one of my favorite songs and especially fits the way I feel today. The mix of sadness with a spark of hope is just perfect and I found the perfect AMV for it as well.

This has a been a morose, depressing day for me. After spending a good portion of it unconcious, I finally got out of bed, read some news, got incensed about immigration reform, then I took a silly test, the results of which you will find below. I mostly did it for the Matrix graphic!

Your Score: Androgynous

You scored 66 masculinity and 63 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

The New York Times editorial, Gitmos Across America, well illustrates the kind of abuse immigrants in the US can face, legal ones or not. And once again illustrates, as I’ve written before, that it is the fact that because the rights of illegal immigrants are not spelled out, they are left open for abuse and exploitation.

From the editorial

The cells would be full of people who shouldn’t be there: asylum seekers, the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and those ensnared in paperwork mistakes. Children, like the kindergartners in inmate scrubs walking the halls of a federal detention center outside Austin, Tex. Day laborers, like those in suburban Brewster, N.Y., whose arrests were hailed by a mayor who spoke proudly of his community’s “zero tolerance” for people unlawfully playing soccer in a schoolyard.

The country already detains some 230,000 immigrants a year, at an annual cost of $1.2 billion. Under the current immigration bill, it would build tens of thousands more beds to hold detainees. And it would need many more — Guantánamo Bays across America — if Mr. Graham’s zero-tolerance vision is fully realized.

This flavor of so-called immigration reform will only serve to put more power in the hands of those who benefit by knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Why aren’t any of the US presidental candidates saying anything about this? What about it Senator Obama? What about it Senator Clinton? It doesn’t take a genius to see that these bills don’t address the problem as long as illegals are in legal limbo in the US.

AT&T has just announced the cost of service plans for the Apple iPhone, and according to one analysis, it isn’t too bad at all. Basically, the cheapest plan includes 450 minutes of voice and unlimited data for about $60/month. Considering that my current carrier, Verizon charges $40/month just for data on smartphones add about $40 more for the cheapest voice plan to go with it, I agree that service for the iPhone is nicely priced. I should also note, that Verizon’s data plans comes with a lot of restrictions too. Now this doesn’t mean I’m running out to buy an iPhone any time soon, it’s way too expensive for me right now. But my hope is that it will spark some friendly competition and help bring down the costs of data plans from all major carriers. In the end, I hope to see voice and data become part of the same service glob rather than seen as separate things and priced that way. Convergence man! That’s what I’m talkin bout!

Here’s the awesome geek tech story of the day, imho at least. John Lam writes in his blog that Google developer Steve Yegge has ported Rails to JavaScript line by line in 6 months! Ruby on Rails has become my favorite coding framework, and while I’m no huge fan of JavaScript (caps or no), having Rails available for the language will make javascript projects far more palatable to me! In particular, this should be helpful for those of us who write our Google Gadgets in javascript. Thank you Steve!