samuel.bowles.es

While I do not currently live in Michigan my wife and I are still registered Michigan voters. As American citizens living abroad we still follow U.S. politics. Something made much easier by the internet than it has historically been for expatriates. The intertubes are at this very moment delivering the quiet murmur of distant democrats in recess, waiting to decide whether delegates from my home state will be seated at the democratic convention.

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I recently acquired one of Apple’s latest lusty gadgets: an iPhone. One thing that has been bothering me since I started using it is the way the “phone’s” Mail application treats HTML email. There is no option to turn off HTML rendering of email on the phone and any preferences set for text-only email in Mac OS X Mail are not synced to the phone. This means HTML email is always-on with no opt-out.

I am a recovered-HTML-email-curmudgeon so the fact that HTML email is on does not in and of itself bother me. I would probably turn it on myself if it were not for the second and fatal flaw of iPhone’s Mail app: images auto-load regardless of sender.

The fact that spammers use image-bugs in their messages to confirm receipt of their dispatches is a widely known fact. In fact it’s so widely known that I am unaware of a single email client that ships without an option to disable autoloading of images. Most email clients default to asking your permission to display images every time a message is received. Including the big webmail providers.

If the impossible-to-turn-off autoloading were not bad enough the rest of the interface exacerbates the issue even further. While the iPhone is amazingly well optimized to minimize fat-fingered mistakes it is still a small screen and I have been known to bump a message I did not mean to view. The speed with which the iPhone pages to the selected message, renders the content, and allows you to correct your mistake by thumbing the “Inbox” button to return makes these mistakes completely tolerable. Tolerable, that is, if I were not alerting spammers everywhere that my address is hot and ready.

Unfortunately the inbox is not the only place to fat-finger yourself to a feast of spam. Open a legitimate email, read it, decide your done with it and hit the little trash can at the bottom of the email or worse yet decide you want to respond but accidentally hit the trash can right next door. First you will be treated to the amazingly cool reverse-genie-lamp animation effect as your email is slurped into the trash. Wow. Oh, wait, what’s this? The next message in my inbox. But it’s spam. Crap, and all the homing beacons have already loaded.

While mobile email is incredibly cool, mobile spam is incredibly not. What is strange to me is that I have not seen this issue mentioned in one review of the device, none of the critics, pundents or fans are saying anything about this notable oversight. I just hope a few more people will start writing about it (hopefully people Apple will listen to) and we’ll see a fix for this “bug” soon. Well before June please!

Hace tres meses Yoigo han decido que estos eran sus tarifas “sin trucos”:

“Todos las llamadas de Yoigo a Yoigo cuestan 0 cent/min. Da igual si llamas 3 minutos, 1 hora o hasta que se te acaba la batería del móvil. Como lo oyes, bueno, como lo lees, solo pagas 12 céntimos de establecimiento de llamada.”

¿Suena bien no? Y aseguraba que:

“No es un plan de precios especial, no es una ofertita, no es una promoción concreta. Es una nueva tarifa sin letra pequeña, sin cuota de alta, sin condiciones, o sea, como siempre en Yoigo, tal y como suena.”

Los anuncios han decido específicamente que:

“Esta no es una promoción de Navidad.”

Y que:

“Nuestras tarifas no son promocionales son, sencillamente, muy buenas.”

Pero tres meses después (aproximadamente la duración de un promoción de verano ó navidad que hacen todos los operadores todos los años) ya dicen:

“Para continuar ofreciendo este servicio que combina calidad y el mejor precio del mercado, Yoigo actualiza a partir del 1 de marzo su cuadro de tarifas, según ya anunció el pasado 31 de octubre de 2007. La principal novedad es la actualización de la tarifa de llamadas nacionales entre teléfonos Yoigo, que pasa a ser de 0 céntimos/minuto durante los primeros 60 minutos de conversación cada día sin límite de llamadas.”

¿Y esto que es? Me perece peor que un “promoción”, me perece un “truco”. Lo que querría mas que un buen precio (aunque esto vale mucho) es un operador que no me engaña. Un operador que “oída la letra pequeña tanto como yo”. Un operador que puede ser “honesta y transparente conmigo … sin rodeos”. Me apena aprender que Yoigo no es esta operador.

At the 1939 World’s Fair Franklin D. Roosevelt became the first president to appear on television, no doubt completely oblivious to the extent to which this new technology would change future political contests. Sixteen years later Dwight D. Roosevelt stood before a class of West Point graduates and a camera which would broadcast his speech and said, “… you must be ruthless in a self-imposed command never to rest in the pursuit of new knowledge, in your application of it to your own duties.” These words would be the first spoken by a president who stood before the nation in full-color.

A mere five years later Kenedy would be christened by the media “The Television President”. Within thirty-two years from the first regularly scheduled television service politics had been changed forever.

This year marks a mere thirteen years since the Internet reached the mainstream and it appears to me it is already having a game-changing effect. The most amazing change I see is the way it is making available political narratives that were inaccessible before.

Take as an example this recent ad which was created and broadcast by the Clinton campaign. In my opinion it’s a very effective use of the medium. It easily evokes an emotional response and I would guess it’s the very emotions her campaign managers were seeking: fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They hope that these feelings will lead people to choose her over her “less experienced” competitor.

All of this is “old-school” television politics. Here’s where it gets interesting: Obama responds with a well-considered statement and then his supporters uncover this amazing nugget from the past. In the era of YouTube politicians are less and less able to out-live their past. What you say (or what you repeat) will be replayed by millions often with a similar emotional effect to it’s first broadcast.

Will this mean greater accountability or simply greater caution. Only time will tell.

Some people say I should make up my mind: am I a code monkey or a design junkie? Do I care more about how things look or how they’re built? But for me design runs deep and wide. I get just as excited to have finally groked the function of an object of a class as I do to see, hold or hear something that has been crafted with simplicity and beauty. Here are a few things that have inspired me recently.

Metaphys has designed a wall-garden that is simply breathtaking. As an urban dweller surrounded by far to much concrete I would so love to hang this on our wall. It feels like a sort of memorial to the view we’ll probably never have. The only downside is the price (especially after shipping to Spain) - these seem like such easy things to make. I just wish I could find a source for the “high-tech growing medium, made up tiny sponge balls impregnated with nutrients” that they use. They mention needing to refill the tray with seeds every 4-5 months so it seems I should be able to find them someplace (via swiss miss).

For Christmas this year my friend Jonah got me these wonderful gloves from my wish list. I spotted them in a store linked to by my friend Paul. They are very simple polyester-stretch gloves that come with a variety of patterns emblazoned on them in arclyic resin which functions as either a grip or just a fashion statement. What statement? I have no idea. “I like pretty swirly patterns?” The only bummer is I can really only wear them about two months out of the year here. I know, poor me.

Brooklyn 5 and 10, the store that sold the gloves mentioned above also carries this beautiful “game”. It’s more akin to a zen garden or a stress ball than a “game” but with a bit of a designer’s twist. Created by newartifacts, a group of designers from Uruguay, the site claims the cube can be configured in 68,719,476,736 combinations - you read that right: close to 69 billion. There is no one solution. Just fiddle and play until it makes you smile. Someday I’ll keep one of these on my desk to clear my mind between the other puzzles I face each day.

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