scott d. feldstein

Do you have a favorite mint or mint gum? I ask this because I like mints, but most of them are terrible. First off there’s the wintergreen/ spearmint/ peppermint debate. Peppermint is what I like. But even then, sometimes they’re too strong or too weak. Other times they have other strange flavors in them: anise, licorice or vanilla. Finally, most of them are just too sweet.

So what’s good? My current favorite is Altiods Sugar-Free Peppermint Chewing Gum. They’re terrific. One is a refreshing lift. Two is an exhilarating rush. Not too sweet, no strange flavors, and very pepperminty. I keep a tin in the dash of my car pretty much all the time.

As an added bonus, the empty tin is the perfect size to carry my moo cards in! How’s that for classy.

Amazon has just let loose with their AmazonMP3 download store. Finally someone besides Apple made something in this space that doesn’t outright suck!

What’s cool? A first perusal indicates that it has some decent variety, especially for just opening. Also, DRM-hatas everywhere rejoice: there isn’t any! Audiophiles may find the downloads mo’ betta’, too, because they’re 256 bitrate encoded. Own an iPod? These work on it. Own another player? Probably works there, too. Final cool thing: in many cases the prices are cheaper than Apple’s!

What’s not so cool? I guess I’m just spoiled by Apple’s store, but Amazon’s looks like shit. Plus, the URLs are unintelligible, so I can’t cut and paste them easily to my friends to say “hey, check this out.” Oh, and about those prices? I think the catch is, the prices can vary. Meaning, you could pay less than Apples 99¢, but you could pay more. This is, after all, what the recording industry kept pressuring Apple to do and what Apple steadfastly refused to do. Time will tell if this works to anyone’s benefit but the recording industry. I’m betting not.

Verdict: I bought Feist’s 1234 with my existing Amazon account without a hitch. It imported into iTunes (with the help of some mysterious application Amazon wanted me to install) and everything worked great.

Try it! I don’t dare trust the cryptic url i my browser’s address bar, so I’ll have to tell you how to get there. Go to Amazon.com, and look on the left for MP3 Music Downloads.

Since I’m not loving on Apple today, let me spill this: I’m now doing ringtones for my iPhone without them.

It’s not really that I mind paying 99¢ for the 30-second ringtone on top of the 99¢ I already paid for the whole song. It’s the fact that the selection is so slim. Sure, they’re going to add more to it. I don’t doubt that. But will they ever have the off-beat stuff I want?

I wanted Fatboy Slim’s Weapon Of Choice as my default ringtone. That worked out. I’d bought it from iTunes and it happened to be ringtone-able. Sweet! But I also want Dean Martin doing Ain’t That A Kick In The Head for when my sweetheart calls. I did buy the song from iTunes, but sadly it’s not ringtone-able. And neither is the Psapp, Venus Hum or Delerium that I might want to use.

Then when I consider that there’s nothing illegal about me making a ringtone out of music I already legally own – even without paying Apple (or anyone else) any additional money… well, I guess you can see why I’m giving Ambrosia Software’s iToner a shot.

Listen, I don’t hate Linux. Scottfeldstein.net was for years served from an old computer in my closet running the Redhat variety of Linux. I’d even tried it a few times as a desktop operating system, but always found it lacking.

Like clockwork, however, I could always count on a Linux user to tell me every couple of years that this time, with such and such version of Linux, it really was ready for primetime, ready for the desktop – ready, as it were, for grandma. And each time I gave it another try I quickly discovered that it most definitely was not ready.

But it’s been a while. Maybe it was time to give it another chance. Everyone’s talking about Ubuntu Linux being “ready.” But now, after having seen Walt Mossberg’s review of Ubuntu (see video), I wont’ waste my time. Clearly it’s the same old same old.

What’s wrong with Linux developers that they can’t make software that’s polished enough for the consumer market? Maybe they just don’t know what the consumer market wants. But I think the more likely problem is that they don’t care. What they do care about is making products that they like. And they, it hardly needs pointing out, are nerds.

Linux: by nerds, for nerds.

I predict that one day some flavor of Linux will make it big on the desktop. I also predict that it will be universally hated by the existing Linux community for being too… simplified.

Though I’ve been getting fatter and weaker from hardly ever going to class at J. K. Lee, at least I’ve been able to catch a good martial arts movie: Jet Li’s Fearless. Watch this trailer. Really, watch it.

Cool, eh? Now here’s the fun part. Huo Yuanjia was a real guy in China who took on foreign fighters just like the movie. Apparently he’s still known as a hero in China today.

Furthermore, this is one of the good martial arts movies, like Hero, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, House of Flying Daggers, etc. Do yourself a favor and rent it. You won’t be sorry.

I don’t remember exactly when we started reading Harry Potter books aloud together, but I’m sure it’s been at least seven years. I do recall that the first couple of books had already been published by the time we discovered them. How did we come across them? I saw a story on the news about how some religious nuts wanted them banned from their kids’ school. Naturally my first response was “we should give that a try!” So I bought Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as a Christmas gift that year. Over the next few months we’d worked our way through the first and second books. After that, we anticipated the publishing of each new book. And we always read them aloud together: me, my two kids and my ex-wife.

Back when we started, the kids were probably no older than 7 and 9. Now they’re 14 and 17, and not only is the Harry Potter series finally finished, it’s time to recognize that our time of reading together as a family is drawing to a close, too. Heck, a year from now my oldest will likely be moving out to attend college.

And so it’s the end of an era.

Thank you, J. K. Rowling. Thanks for giving us a focal point for so many, many hours of fun and togetherness.

I just bought this album by Gogol Bordello, self-described “gypsy punks.” Once you hear this slavic folk music mashed up with punk you’ll wonder why nobody thought of doing it before.

What makes the whole thing even more delicious is knowing that Eugene Hutz, the actor who played the Ukranian translator in the fabulous movieEverything is Illuminated, is the singer.

As you may know, I have a rather ambivalent reaction to many of Michael Moore’s films even though I largely agree with his politics. He’s a liberal, I’m a liberal; he says we were sold a bill of goods on the Iraq war, I say he’s definitely right; he says we need tax-funded, government-provided health insurance for every citizen, and I agree.

What I tend not to like about Moore is that he always overreaches. In Bowling for Columbine, he rather unfairly sandbags a doddering old Charlton Heston in his own home, in Fahrenheit 9/11 he insinuates that president Bush has some sort of dirty deal going with the House of Saud, and in his latest movie, Sicko, he does the Cuba thing.

Most of Sicko is an expose of the private insurance system. There are Nixon’s rather shocking taped conversations about it, there are tell-alls from insurance industry insiders, and there are of course horror stories from people victimized by the system. But then, as always, Moore overreaches. He has to take 9/11 rescue workers to Cuba to receive medical care for free because they can’t seem to get what they need here in America. While I don’t doubt the veracity of what we’re being shown on screen, there’s a worrisome undercurrent to what Moore is telling us. He seems to be saying that Cuba has better medical care than we do. I doubt this very much. And it makes me wonder whether what Cuba does have isn’t provided ut by the support of other governments and not by their own economic output at all. Moore takes us here for sheer theatrical value, but all things considered I doubt we should hold Cuba up as any kind of American ideal.

The most intriguing part of the film, however is when Moore takes us to Europe. It’s not as shocking as taking 9/11 rescue workers to gitmo to receive “the same care that the evil-doers are getting,” but it is the kind of comparison that can be useful. When we talk to people in a British NHS hospital who, when asked what they owe for their services, chuckle that “this isn’t America,” you can feel the stirrings of something big. When we are shown the degree of medical (and other) services that the French have, it leaves you gasping at our own backwardness.

Even I, who often talk about these systems and compare them to our own, was dumbfounded. This I think is the most powerful part of Sicko: really seeing and hearing the people who live with these superior systems – because it inevitably leads us to ask why we aren’t doing likewise.

1. A woman at a cafe asks me if I know how pawns move in chess; she and her boyfriend are playing a game at the next table. I say I don’t know, sorry. She goes back to her game. But then I remember: iPhone, Google, “rules of chess,” Wikipedia; here you go.

2. It’s not clear to me how well or poorly other smartphones have accomplished the task of putting the internet in your pocket, but my understanding is that they haven’t done it very well. The iPhone has it’s flaws, to be sure, but the web looks like the web and email looks like email, complete with attachments.

3. I’m driving home and get stopped by a train. I pull out the iPhone and read Salon.

4. I’ve never seen another computer, PDA or phone operate with the almost total absence of physical buttons. It has its drawbacks, but ultimately I can see that most small electronic devices will one day operate this way. The necessary interface elements – keyboard, icons, OK buttons – appear when needed, and when they’re not needed the entire face of the device is dedicated to displaying content.

5. The Apple tax. That’s what I call it when Apple implements cutting-edge technology which causes you to spend time and money to get your other stuff to work with it. Case in point: I can’t use any of my headphones on the iPhone. Why not? Because the headphone jack is deeply recessed in order to accommodate an additional connector for the microphone. Microphone? Yeah. The supplied earbud-style headphones come equipped with a small macaroni-sized plastic nub which hangs at roughly the level of your chin. It’s not only a microphone for talking on the phone, but a squeeze button for answering and hanging up incoming calls, pausing and playing music, and for advancing to the next track if you’re just not in the mood for whatever just came on random. Cool? You bet. But I have to buy an adapter to get standard minijacks to work with it. Meanwhile I can’t plug the iPhone into the car stereo, as I used to do with my iPod. $10 should remedy this, but still.

6. In many ways this a device I have been waiting ten years to get my hands on. Back in 1994 or 95 I was introduced to the internet, having only a few months prior acquired my own computer. Since that time, I have known – everyone has known – that access to this global network should be at one’s fingertips at all times. What’s the population of Iraq? I don’t have to let the question hang anymore: wherever I am, I can know what that number is. Multiply that by the number of facts that one wishes one knew throughout the course of any given day and you start to understand what it is to have the internet in your pocket.

7. Motorola, RIM and Palm must have shit themselves when they saw this thing. But should they really worry? I think not. This one product put smartphones on the map, so to speak, for a lot of people who otherwise were scarcely aware of their existence. The market for such devices – no matter who makes them – just grew larger. Let a thousand iPhones bloom.

8. I realize that when I’ve been out, leaving my laptop behind, I no longer have that irresistible itch to open the lid and check email and RSS feeds. I’ve been connected while I was out. I say goodbye now to that I’ve-been-away-from-the-net-too-long anxiety.

9. Things I’d like to see: better music management in iTunes, more browser compatibility such as flash or java, a faster EDGE network for when I’m out of WiFi range, downloadable ringtones, and full Exchange integration.

10. This thing is as amazing as everyone says. Don’t want one? That’s okay. A year from now its influence will be seen in many other phones on the market – including yours, probably.

1. It took overnight for my phone number to be ported. During that time my phone was entirely useless. That sucked! But when I got up this morning, everything was peachy.

2. Problem! I went to set up my gmail account (a hosted address: “scott@scottfeldstein.net,” not “something@gmail.com”), but quickly met a brick wall. The field where you put your address is already populated with an @gmail.com suffix, with no way to edit it. I suspect I’ll be waiting for a software update to allow me to use my hosted gmail account. Meanwhile, I can still access gmail through the Safari web browser, just as I do on my computer.

3. I’m unsure as to how to set up my work email on it. I think I’m going to have to check with the other nerds at work to find out the exact settings I need to use. We do support IMAP on our exchange server, so theoretically everything should work once I know how to configure it.

4. Google maps, photos, music, video and YouTube are amazingly cool on this thing. Surfing the web with Safari is also excellent – if you’re on WiFi instead of AT&T’s EDGE network. When you’re on EDGE, everything seems pretty okay except Safari and YouTube, which are pretty slow.

5. iPhone had no trouble connecting to my WiFi at home, and it automatically switches to it when I’m in range. Nice.

6. I have not played with the camera much, nor with bluetooth.

7. I rode my bike to the farmer’s market in downtown Waukesha this morning and people were stopping me on the street to ask about the phone. I even had one guy lean out of his car window when he was stopped at a red light: “Is that what I think it is?” Be prepared to get a lot of comments if you pick one of these babies up. Also beware of getting mugged for it. Seriously.