Ed Abbey may be spinning in his grave, but State Parks have always been the piece of our land management system that compromises for convenience and accessibility. In some ways they’re the gateway drug that helps urbanites understand land management and conservation. In some ways they’re the inverse-wilderness area that helps keep careless, inexperienced tourists away from the more fragile and less-watched wilderness further from highways — at the same time raising funds that partly go to protecting those places.

I think this is a good move, and I may even use the service some day.

Thanks to Steph for the link.

Apparently each new TLD will cost thousands of dollars. Of course, as soon as the change hits, any big company with a brand name to protect will need to register their name. Who will win the rights to generic but valuable terms like .groceries or .videogames or .xxx is a mystery, though ICANN, the nonprofit in charge of the domain name system, seems to be suggesting they might be auctioned off to the highest bidder.

Looks like ICANN wants to raise some cash and doesn’t care much for internet users (confusion) and small-time domain owners (cost).

Thanks Jeff Fortner for the heads up.

I can totally understand falling in love with wide open spaces, so I don’t feel I can be too upset about my car falling in love with Wyoming. Unfortunately I wanted to get to Boulder, so we had to part ways yesterday. My buddy Jordan Kunz was kind enough to pick me up the middle-of-nowhere town of Laramie where my car decided it wanted to hang out. A very friendly mechanice happened to come into work on Saturday after the also very friendly I-80 Towing tow-man called by the friendly AAA operator brought me and the Cabrio over to visit.

So the mechanic has my name and key and promised to have a chat with my car on Monday. I had to leave the car before Jordan came so I’m currently living off my “just enough to survive overnight” bag and the charity of others (e.g. for fresh socks and most other amenities of civilization like toothpaste and a razor). Here’s to hoping that the Cab’s fling with Wyoming is just a 3- or 4- night stand and not true love.

Review summary – Apple has created a little 3″ digital device that does almost everything, uses only your fingers as input, and has no instruction manual… and it works without an instruction manual.

Everyone knows the feature list, so I’m going to play Mr. Negative and tell you what it doesn’t do.

The three most ridiculous shortcomings are:

• Can’t use songs as ringtones or alarms. Are you kidding?
• No IM capabilities (just SMS). No AIM, iChat, ICQ, nada. Wonder if a web interface for any of these would work thru iPhone Safari?
• No scientific calculator. Silly. The widgets in general suck as much as the Mac OS X widgets do (calc, clock, weather, stocks, notes).

Other negatives:

• Mail Sync only syncs your account settings, not your current emails (the only emails you get are the ones iPhone downloads — you can download them all, 25 at a time).
• EDGE is slow. The biggest BS I read on the internet is that Apple chose EDGE “instead of” 3G because EDGE has better availability, lower power reqs, etc. I don’t think there exists a 3G device that isn’t also EDGE or at least GPRS compatible, so “availability” is not an issue. Better explanation might be Qualcomm lawsuit issues and/or physical space (it blows me away what they’ve crammed into this thing — this is a much bigger leap than the first iPod was).
• When your wi-fi connection fails, it doesn’t auto-revert to EDGE… you have to turn wi-fi off and then try again [edit: if wi-fi disconnects it reverts to EDGE... if wi-fi has a connection but DNS or something else fails, you have to turn wi-fi off to get EDGE].
• EQ is as annoying to get to and adjust as it is on the iPod.
• Mail has no way to select multiple items. This is a pain when you have a POP account that gets spam in 10-message batches and you don’t want the home page to constantly remind you that you have 10 unread messages (and don’t want to click each one to get rid of’em).
• Mail settings are universal — no way to set “Automatically CC me on all sent emails” for one account and not another.
• No contextual menus. Come on, a two-finger tap, or a tap-vertical-slide would be the perfect trigger for this. The gestures potential for iPhone is enormous. (aside – all Mac users with a 3+ button mouse need xGestures)
• The on-screen mini-keyboard sucks. I haven’t used smartphone before so this is a guess — it sucks slightly less than other mini-keyboards.
• No GPS. Not that fitting one in would be physically possible.
• Occasionally doesn’t register a “click”
• The camera is a cell-phone camera (crappy). You’ll note Apple didn’t sell this as 4-in-1 “iPod, Internet Comm, Phone, and Digital Camera”
• Calendar is better than iCal (not saying much). I need to find a way to sync this to an Exchange calendar to have any use for it.
• Guess what, YouTube is unusable on EDGE. Web browsing on EDGE is OK for text-heavy sites including Wikipedia.
• As far as I can tell you only get 2 ringing profiles – “silent/vibrate” and “not silent/vibrate” (the profiles I use regularly on my old moto are silent/vibrate/soft/loud/vibe-then-ring). You can set ringtones per-contact at least (but not using songs).
• Unlimited data is free but SMS costs if you go over 200/mo. Use smseverywhere.com or Yahoo SMS in iPhone Safari??
• Safari crashed once for no apparent reason (not a complicated webpage). Seems to have fixed (reset, lost session) itself before I could find instructions to reset it. [For reference - press and hold home button for 5secs from within the frozen app]
• Safari search options are Google or Yahoo. No Wikipedia, etc.
• Mail app didn’t find my subfolders in my inbox folder (IMAP account). This is an issue for me; hopefully I’ll fix it [update: fixed by setting IMAP path prefix].
• Mail can view MSWord attachments, but doesn’t show red-lining from “Track Changes”

Cool things that I wasn’t expecting:

• CoverFlow isn’t as useless as I would’ve thought
• It remembers where you were very well. After call or sleep it pops up right where you were. Also when you open iPod, Safari, Google Maps, etc., they show the last thing you looked at in that app (map/playlist/webpage(s)/etc). Not in Photos.
• Overall the UI is pretty hard to find fault with, which is unheard-of for a cell phone, much less a smartphone. No letdown there.
• The web browser supports multiple windows/sessions.
• It supports VPN. Cool. And of course SSL for mail and everything.
• The built-in speaker is impressive for its size.
• It remembers separate volume level for music, phone call, and speakerphone (if you turn volume up on a call, the volume reverts to what it was when the music resumes after your call).
• Maps shows live traffic info.
• I read a review that said you can only rotate to landscape counter-clockwise. Not true, you can rotate either way. In Pictures, you can rotate 360! (only 90 in Safari/Music). Maps, Calendar, SMS, others don’t rotate.
• The accelerometer is impossible to fool, whether you rotate slow/fast, jerky/smooth.
• “Double-tap to zoom in to fit width of the thing I double-tapped” works surprisingly well.
• You switch between silent/vibrate and ring via a physical 2-way switch on the side… no way to forget which mode you’re in.
• Headphone allows you to pause, skip track, and pick up call from mic button — so I will be able to use this snowboarding this winter (can’t use touchscreen with gloves).
• The screen is really good.
• You can use it while docked (not while syncing)
• Works perfectly with my Alpine car stereo. Doesn’t use car speakers for speakerphone, which would’ve been nice.

Apple’s iPhone Support Forums
iPhone Manual

I bought the iPhone because I was in the market for my first smartphone, UI is very important to me, and I trusted Apple to get it right. It’s only been a few hours but I am not disappointed.

Here’s my before-I-see-the-film review…

“This administration flaunts the law, flaunts the constitution,” Moore said at the press conference, explaining the flap over the trip to Cuba.

Quoted by Fox

I wish this administration would flaunt the Constitution. I also wish public figures would learn English well enough to say what they mean. (OK, there’s a slight chance we can blame Fox for misquoting him.)

Tom’s review of the movie: I dunno, I haven’t seen it yet. Given how many problems there are with U.S. healthcare, the it would be near-impossible for a 2-hour movie not to make a few valid points.

I CAN OFFICIALLY DIE. Now, in my lifetime, I have seen the most beautiful thing in the world! Imagine missing 1982′s most beautiful thing by being born 2 months too late! WAY TO GO, CARDS! WE LOVE YA!!!!!

– From some kid on the facebook group “I BELIEVE!!! Cards Playoffs 2006.”

Friday was also great for work (getting some important stuff done) and non-work (met some cool people at a wild li’l party in SLC). Hooray 10/27.

If you are in Oregon or know anyone who is — get involved and help them on their final push before the registration deadline of Oct 17.

I always knew Jon Stewart was pretty smart, but I had no idea how prescient he was when it comes to GOTV:

Get on the Bus!

[Update: The Bus Project actually surpassed its goal by registering over 16,500 people in Oregon under age 30 (and over 20k total), increasing the size of Oregon's under-30 electorate by 6%. Wow. I have to admit I had some doubts when lead registerer Anna Galland told me the 15,000 goal last spring (even though I'd already seen her do ridiculously amazing things... this seemed pushing the ridiculously amazingness pretty far). Great job guys.]

And it snowed last night!

This is the view out my front door, and a close-up of the snow. I’ve only seen snow like this once before, during an incredible day of powder sledding with Hal Wershow back on Mt Baldy (yes, at only 7000′ in southern California. No it didn’t last long). And it’s only September 16! I cannot wait for the lifts to open.

I’m renting out one of the three bedrooms so I can actually afford to live here. The last room remains as a guest room. Come visit! I have my own washer/dryer, dishwasher and disposal, fireplace, 2.5 bathrooms, fresh paint, and wall-to-wall carpeting. Sweet.

Here’s some more pictures.

My house before the snow (I’m the left half), and my cute back porch.

My living room before and after visiting garage sales and thrift stores. There’s another couch you can’t see and soon there will be a kitchen table behind the couch you can see.

Work is a lot of work but I’m excited about it. I’ll post about it soon.