From today’s Woot (pretty funny):

Good morning, sales associates! Who’s ready to have a fantastic day?

We’ve got a lot to talk about at this meeting, but first, here’s something kind of fun: anybody here left-handed? Let’s see.. two, three.. five… OK, cool! You guys are all fired! Not because you’re left-handed. We just need to trim the payroll and that’s an easy way for me to make the cut. Otherwise, I’d have to look at your sales records and figure out whose is best and whose is worst and frankly, I’ve got better things to do with my time. If you guys wouldn’t mind leaving now, that’d be cool. This meeting’s for employees only. Company business. Thanks!

So management has been talking about some incentives here in the workplace to keep up morale in the, uh, workplace, and that discussion led us to the following question: who here would like a Toshiba 26” LCD HDTV with a built-in DVD player? Sound good to anybody? We’re talking a 26”, 16:9 LCD screen with 720p resolution and a digital tuner – not to mention that slot-loading, DivX-certified DVD player integrated right into the side of the TV. Sounds pretty sweet, huh? Yeah? Who wants to know how it can be yours?

Well, here’s how: start doing your job a little better and you can buy one out of your paycheck. If you thought we were going to bribe you with a free TV to do what you’re supposed to be doing, it’s time to grow up, OK? You want incentives? Here’s your incentive: sell more or you’ll be out there Dumpster-diving with those left-handed losers. Everybody clear on that?

Finally, one last thing here…speaking of morale, today we’re inaugurating our first-ever Taco Monday! Everybody here likes tacos, right? Well, any employee who brought his or her own taco fixings is allowed to use the break room kitchen to make tacos between 12:15 and 12:30, assuming your lunch break is scheduled for that time. The company will provide the napkins at no charge, but there is a one-napkin-per-employee limit. Anyone found making tacos after 12:30 will be severely disciplined. All right, let’s get out there and have a great Monday – make that a great TACO Monday! Taco! Taco! Taco!

I was thinking the other day about the perceived increase in people with cancer. Let’s say today cf. fifty or seventy-five years ago. Maybe it’s fact, maybe it’s not. Let’s assume for now that it is a fact that today we have more people afflicted with cancer. And other serious diseases.

I was thinking that part of this is likely that since people with these diseases live longer due to advances in medicine, they’re more likely to reproduce and propagate their disease-prone genes. Interesting thought.

It’s probably also worth considering how much this would change if the treatments focused on the root causes of such diseases. Sure, someone can be prone to something but that doesn’t mean we can’t defeat that ailment if we address its exact source, meaning the person and their presumed-hereditarily-disease-prone offspring could be free of the disease despite genetic predisposition.

I borrowed an HDMI cable from a friend today. I have a duplicate order of HDMI cables en route to me and I plan to “repay” him with one of the cables from my batch in a day or so.

This transaction led me to the interesting idea that when lending money, the lender is not interested in which bills he gets back (assuming a cash loan). Instead, he’s interested in a like-kind (of same or higher value) exchange.

So is a monetary loan more of a barter than a loan? I think so. You’re getting something of equal value in exchange (and extra value if you charge interest.) Usually when you loan an item (such as a CD or a shovel) you get the exact same item back. When you loan money, you get back money with the same or higher value. But not the same bills.

I wonder what the barter value (in dollars) of this small insight is.

I took our HDTV home last night, built the IKEA “LACK” stand we bought for it and set it up. Need one more HDMI cable to install our new (sellout.woot.com) Philips refurbished upconverting DVD player.

Bottom line: The TV is too big for the space. But it’s definitely a nice TV. Color mode = Cinema and it looks very nice.

Today I ordered a Panasonic TC-P50X1 720p 50“ Plasma HDTV from Dell.com.

It is a Consumer Reports Best Buy*, which is their highest recommendation. It has great reviews on Amazon.com. I’ve seen the 42” 720p version of this in person at CompUSA and I loved the picture. Granted, it was one of the few TVs at that store set with realistic picture settings. Most TVs there were set for very high saturation and general vividity.

I got this TV for $649.00 plus a 5% Bing.com cashback rebate, which I’m actually pretty confident I’ll get.

Last week I ordered a FiOS DVR, which also provides HDTV service. (They don’t have a DVR that doesn’t provide HDTV service.)

So far, I love having the DVR, as I was confident I would. Last night I watched TT Isle of Man 2009 highlights and Charlie Rose interviewing Warrant Buffett, all recorded on schedule by my FiOS DVR. It costs me $10/mo more than the $5.99/mo my old non-HD tuner was costing me. While I hate paying for cable boxes (I prefer analog to digital cable for this reason) and I’m not a big fan of TV programming in general, I am a believer in making the best of things, so I’ll use the DVR to get the programming i want (Charlie Rose, etc.) and will hopefully enjoy watching movies more with this big screen. It replaces our perhaps 25-inch Sony Trinitron CRT TV, which is working fine.

* Do not confuse Consumer Reports’ “Best Buy” recommendation with the retail store of the same name. One is a classification with a stellar pro-consumer reputation, the other is a retail store with an anti-customer reputation.

24 November 2009 update: I went through difficulty with Dell getting that TV ordered. They canceled the order three times and they never told me why, except that after the first order was placed, they were unable to reach me by phone. Totally weird. In the end, I just went in on a double order with a friend. The TVs arrived at the office today. Boy, those boxes are big.

28 November 2009 update: Here are some customer review links:

• Newegg.com
• Amazon.com

I read this Inc. magazine article online yesterday. In it, Jason Fried described for me what I consider to be my personal ideal scene working environment. I really came away from this article with a feeling of calm.

I like to make note of how I come across things like this. In this case, I was looking through Twitter feeds, I believe, searching for someone. And some tweet mentioned this article. I track the 37Signals blog in Newsstand via Google Reader, but I seldom read it.

I upgraded yesterday. I didn’t want to loose the settings data in my apps, such as saved login info; and I didn’t want to re-define my list of synced music. So I after the upgrade, I restored my user data from my last backup.

This is too bad because I was hoping the restore would restore my apparently corrupted carrier name string. Some Cydia app named MIM that SH referred me to blanked it out but won’t restore it to the default. And I think that creeped into some other storage/settings area the other day and caused me to not be able to send calls and text messages until I’d rebooted and mucked around with a bunch of settings. Phone was restored on reboot, IIRC, but SMS too more fiddling. What a pain in the rear.

The upgrade to OS 3.1.2 from OS 3.1 went fine. I used Pwnage to make the custom IPSW, as I did when I upgraded to 3.1.

I frequently take screen shots of error messages, dialog boxes, informational messages, web page receipts and more. I use OS X’s built-in <Apple-Shift-4> to initiate it. I then choose the area I want to take a picture of. At this point, Sharpshooter intervenes and lets me rename the picture, send it to the trash or move it to a directory other than my user-defined screen shot output directory. I’ve been doing this since… well, my screen shots go back to 28 August 2007.

Enter Dropbox
The latest wrinkle is that I decided it would be convenient to have these screen shots available on any of the machines I use (or even via a web site, in a pinch) so I recently changed my default screen shot output directory to a directory under the control of Dropbox. Now my screenshots are available virtually anywhere for me.

Some blog entry led me to this review of Eucalyptus by Things Made out of Other Things last night.

Eucalyptus is the best ebook reader for iPhone I’ve seen. Worth it for little more than the cost of a paperback (ten bucks). The pinching to zoom out is priceless and the comfort of the book management beats Kindle for iPhone hands down. The page turning beats Stanza. (And I don’t miss Stanza’s annoying, fake page turning sound.) And the book selection beats Classics, though I think Classics is still a pretty nice and unique offering.

The Eucalyptus developers got my ten bucks on the strength of the above review alone and I consider it money well spent. As implied above, I already use Kindle for iPhone, Stanza, Classics and, now, Eucalyptus.

Short version: Newsstand for iPhone and iPod touch is the best goddamned mobile newsreader I have ever laid hands or eyes on. It is the best money I’ve ever spent on iPhone software.

When NewsGator announced that their difficult-to-use web feed service was going down, I was inspired to move to Google Reader and find an iPhone client that would sync with Google Reader. I followed their instructions and moved my feeds with an OPML file.

But what client to buy? I posted about that on 7 August 2009.

I’ve used Newsstand probably every single day since I got it. The days I don’t use it are those rare days where I don’t touch my iPhone for anything. On average, I load Newsstand an estimated ten times on a weekday and less on each weekend day. When I first bought it, it had some forgivable and completely minor rough edges — but it still spanked the competition. And it didn’t yet sync with Google Reader — it just downloaded from it. Syncing hadn’t arrived yet.

Then a new version of Newsstand (2.0) came out which fixed perhaps every single rough edge and, gloriously, added Google Reader syncing. This new version fixed things I’d reported, things I’d seen but hadn’t reported, improved things I didn’t even consider could be improved and added wonderful new features. Some of the improvements include

• In-app email sending. No more need to close Newsstand to email a message to someone.
• Google Reader syncing (not just downloading of posts)
• Awesome GUI cleanup, including things I didn’t know could be spruced up
• Google Mobilizer support. Works but I have a problem with the links that makes it unsuitable for use by me. Logged with developer via email, no reply.
• Something changed about the web browser. Was there no integral web browser before? I just don’t recall.
• Messages are now starred, not flagged. And the stars behave as I’d expect, whereas flags didn’t.
• Delicious.com (del.icio.us) support is now folded into Newsstand, not an external Safari process. Awesome!

Now I’ve been using Newsstand version 2.0 (now 2.1) since August, so I don’t recall all the little details that were obvious to me when I had freshly moved from version 1.x to 2.0. So I hope the author forgives my surely incomplete list if he reads this.

The German developer mostly ignores my emails suggesting enhancements. But version 2.0 included so many of my requests, I can hardly complain. I have a few open (reported, largely without any reply) suggestions but they’re not a big deal. I will admit, however, that I when I get something which is as close to perfection as Newsstand 2.1 is, it pains me to see it linger at 99pct. Perhaps I’ll post these improvement suggestions in the future.

I presently follow 133 Google Reader feeds per the NetNewsWire OS X client that syncs with my Google Reader account and which I have used for actually reading feeds exactly twice. I currently have 10,000+ unread posts, according to Newsstand’s badge. I don’t even try to keep up with them all. Newsstand has been rock solid since I bought version 1.0. It opens very quickly and simply never dies. And, boy, it is fast.

The version 2.0 introduced a crash on adding a feed in a certain way. I believe a minor upgrade fixed that. I don’t recall if I had reported it.

There is no question that this is the best five dollars I’ve spent on iPhone software. I spent $80 on OmniFocus (mostly out of dislike of the competing products) and $20 on their iPhone client. And I hardly use either piece of software. But that five bucks I spent on Newsstand keeps on paying me back. Every single day.

If you want a feed reader for the iPhone or iPod touch, you can’t possibly go wrong with Newsstand from omz:software in Germany.