Trump vs Biden: Clearing the bar

 

The bar is so low for Trump and so high for Biden. I worry that if Biden makes one little flub, he is toast while if Trump does one little halfway sane thing (like wearing a mask once or twice in public), all will be forgiven.

Trump: Four more years… NOT!

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Do your homework… or off to jail Donald!

“A 15-year-old in Michigan was incarcerated during the coronavirus pandemic after a judge ruled that not completing her schoolwork violated her probation.”

If not doing one’s homework can result in jail time, judging by his profound ignorance, Donald J. Trump should be serving 20 to life!

Donald Trump: Elevator-Farter-in-Chief

You hear Trump supporters say that they refuse to wear a mask as it interferes with their constitutional rights. Being Canadian and not well versed in the American constitution, I imaging this right is in the fine print of the  2nd amendment along with the right to bear arms and the right to eat copious quantities of baked beans, Blazing-Saddles-style and ride elevators all day long continuously farting.

Now the “freedom not to wear masks” can result in the deaths of other elevator passengers or their friends or family.

Farting, not so much.

Despite his supposedly poor dietary habits and (how shall I put it) “ample posterior” a Presidential elevator fart is not likely to be lethal.

Trump ‘aced’ the Cognitive Test? Yeah. Right.

Does anyone really believe that Donald J. Trump, Cheater-in-Chief, would ever take a test that he wasn’t certain to obtain a perfect score?

Donald Trump cheats on his taxes, cheated on his wives, cheats at golf, cheated the banks, cheated his investores, cheats his contractors, cheated on 2016 election, got impeached trying to cheat on the 2020 one, etc., etc.

I think it went something like this: Donald J Trump: “I passed with perfect a score. And it didn’t take too much studying. And it really didn’t take too many attempts. And I was told that of all the questions I answered correctly I got 100% of them right. Nobody has ever seen that before.”

Turtles all the way down.

“Turtles all the way down.” But in Trump world it is incompetence all the way down… and especially all the way up!

iPhone 4S: a catastrophe in the making :)

The iPhone 4S will surely be a success for Apple but it will be a disaster for everybody else:

Fact: The typical iPhone (and other Apple product) owner feels the need to flaunt their new and shiny device to all and sundry.

Fact: The new iPhone 4S looks identical to the old iPhone 4, so waving it around has lost its cachet (you might be a pretender simply waving your old phone around). How lame is that?

Fact: The one way to distinguish old and new is the Siri Voice Assistant.

Sad Fact 1: It will be necessary for iPhone 4S owners to continually ask their phones about the time and the weather, etc. etc. whenever they are at Starbucks, on the train or in the subway.

Sad Fact 2: Deprived iPhone 4 owners will need to obtain voice recognition apps like Voice Assistant or Vlingo so that they can talk to their phones too!

Sad Fact 3: Not to be outdone, Android phone people will start using Android’s voice recognition capablities in public too.

A cacophonous catastrophe in the making.

Photo Attribution: Witer

On Being a Contrarian

There are wo types of contrarians: the kind that makes you rich and the kind that makes you poor. Unfortuanately I’m the latter kind.

Resuming a podcast playlist on an iPod Touch

I like to listen to podcasts on my iPod Touch on my walks. I also like to listen to music and to alternate between music and podcasts. On my previous podcast/listening solution (MortPlayer running on a Windows Mobile phone) you could alternate between two playlists, and the app would remember the track/position they left off and resume there when you returned to listening to that track. With the iPod, no such luck.

When you return to a playlist on the iPod touch however, you must select the particular podcast track (though it does resume properly from the point you left off). You are given some guidance:  the previously played podcast is marked with a small speaker symbol, but to resume that podcast, you must search for it and select it.

A solution is smart playlists together with live updating.  With these, you can cause an already-played podcast to disappear from the playlist. This assures that the interrupted podcast (the first one not completely played) is always at the top of the playlist so you can select it relatively easily.

Podcast Smart Playlist

The solution is not perfect. Podcasts have been listened to  drop off the playlist. You can’t then easily go back to relisten to a podcast once it has been deleted from the list.

Note: An iTunes bug prevented the live updating feature from working properly in some older version of iTunes (I am using 10.0.0.68 on Windows with success).

I’ve recently subscribed to Slacker for my music fix. Because running slacker does not modify my iPod playlist, perhaps I can eliminate the live updating feature, and just click on “now playing” to get back to my podcasts. I’ll have to try that.

Photo Attribution

Slacker Radio available in Canada!

A bit of old news. In browsing the Internet I came across the fact that Slacker Radio is available in Canada (It has been available in Canada since mid January). It is a service like Pandora, where you can specify a song or artist and the service will form a “radio station” with similar music.

The cool part for me is that I can use theri  iPod Touch app, and via WiFi at home I can cache the radio station on my iPod and listen to it offline. I can then use it to listen to music on my walks.

Even better, at least with iOS 4 on my iPod Touch, the play/pause on my bluetooth stereo heeadset works with this app!

Bluetooth Blues…AVRCP aggravation

I’ve got a bluetooth dongle connected to a Windows XP machine that I wish to use with Stereo Bluetooth headphones. The audio works fine. It is the remote control functionality that I have issues with:

• If I play a CD using the old version of Windows Media Player that comes with XP, no problem at all. I can pause the track, go to the next/previous tracks all using the controls on the bluetooth headphones.
• This same functionality does not work with iTunes, nor the Zune software, nor any flash player on a website.

I want to use an app (iTunes or Zune, or perhaps some other) to play podcasts around the house and the pause function would be most helpful. But so far no luck.

I wonder if I am doing something wrong or that is just the way it is…