I enjoy watching tennis, but for some reason, other than Wimbledon, it’s usually not “on my radar” and I just end up missing it. That’s a shame, because it keeps me from witnessing moments like this.
Roger Federer has a growing reputation as one of the best — if not the best — players in the history of the game. It’s hard to argue against that assessment when you see this video.
Also, I felt I had to post this because although she might deny it, I think SLP has a serious crush on RF.
Regular reader(s) of this blog will remember my quest last year to acquire a “Beep for Breakfast” cup like the one my grandfather had on his basement sink when I was a kid.
The quest came to a conclusion just under a year ago when an anonymous benefactor (who, it turned out, was one of the regular reader[s] himself) bought one on eBay and sent it to me.
I was thrilled to receive the cup, identical to the one I remembered. I was even more thrilled a couple weeks ago when, while sorting through the mountain of crap I’ve indiscriminately accumulated in my basement, I found the original cup my grandfather had owned — I actually did have it all along!
I suppose it is now my duty to pass on one of these cups to another nostalgic fool such as myself. But I think I’ll just horde them both, thank you very much.
By the way, Grandpa’s cup is on the left. I have no idea how he kept it so pristine for all those years decades. Oh wait, yes I do. This is the same guy who neatly folded cereal boxes and carefully filed them in the trashcan. His trash was neater than anything in my house.
I am a certified electronics aficionado. There’s a MacBook and an iPhone sitting on the desk in front of me, along with an external USB hard drive and a pair of computer speakers; on the adjacent desk, a USB turntable, cassette deck*, and two USB MIDI keyboard controllers. In the drawers of the desk are a mountain of cables, another USB hard drive, an iPod touch, a Bluetooth mouse, a remote control, and about 50 alkaline batteries of all different sizes. Also in the room are an LCD TV, an XBOX 360 and its attendant controllers (including Rock Band instrument controllers), an older laptop computer, a really old Macintosh SE, more cords and miscellaneous accessories, and of course a slew of digital media: more CDs, DVDs and game discs than I can count. (Oh yeah, there are also a couple hundred video game cartridges for the likes of the Atari 2600 and NES.)
I won’t be getting rid of any of this stuff in the immediate future, but someday it will be disposed of. And what of it then?
I don’t think I’ve thrown away any electronics in decades (although I will confess I rarely make the effort to recycle batteries). I know I have never recycled electronics — I don’t even know how I’d go about it. But when an electronic gadget outlives its usefulness for me, I do my best to dispose of it in a productive way: I give it to someone else, or I sell it at a garage sale or on eBay.
But back to the matter of recycling: what exactly happens with electronic gadgets when you recycle them? As is becoming increasingly well-known, most of them get packed up in giant shipping crates and sent across the ocean to places like China, India, Pakistan and sub-Saharan Africa. What happens then is mostly ignored by the rest of the world… out of sight, out of mind. Except it’s still there.
As this iFixit article describes, the “e-waste” ends up in impoverished communities where everyone, including children, works to break down the equipment and harvest valuable metals — copper and gold, mostly, at an average value of about $6 per device — from it by whatever means are available. This usually means burning, which releases toxic fumes into the air; and once the copper and gold are out, the rest is simply dumped, cluttering the landscape and leaving more toxic heavy metals (lead and mercury, especially) to seep into groundwater, further contaminating the environment in which these people live.
So, what are we to do? I’m not much of an activist: I don’t think protests get you very far. When there’s money to be made in something, it’s pretty easy for the makers of that money to ignore the ravings of the hippies picketing outside their doors. But if you want to be a conscientious consumer of electronics, the best thing you can do is to take actions that will prevent your gadgets from winding up in one of those China-bound shipping crates.
I’m not saying “don’t recycle your electronics,” although I suppose I am saying “don’t recycle your electronics if you don’t know where they’re going to end up.” The best thing you can do, I think, is probably what I’ve been doing all along anyway: keep the gadgets, or find someone else who wants them when you’re done with them. Ensure that they’ll get a maximum lifetime of use before they’re disposed of. (And by that time maybe you’ll think of them as collectibles and keep them in your personal electronics museum, like I’ve done with my Mac SE and the Atari 2600.)
Of course, there’s another solution, though it’s one I find a bit hard to swallow: don’t buy the stuff in the first place.
* Regarding the cassette deck: I’m proud to say that it’s something I recently acquired by salvaging it from a “free” pile at a neighbor’s curb after a garage sale.
Yesterday Apple released iTunes 9 and iPhone OS 3.1, and this new version of iTunes addresses one of my biggest few frustrations with the iPhone: organizing your apps.
I cringe at saying “apps,” fearing I sound like Michael Scott talking about something they sell at Dave & Busters. But, given that it’s known as the App Store, I guess that’s what to call them.
Anyway… this is not about what they’re called, it’s about how they’re organized. And up to now, the only way to organize them was to go to your iPhone’s home screen, hold your finger on an icon until they all start to wiggle, and then drag them around. Not bad, when you only have one screen’s worth of apps, or even two or three. But I have seven — and that doesn’t even count the apps I downloaded but deleted from my iPhone.
Trying to keep seven screens’ worth of icons (16 per screen) organized by this finger-dragging method is tedious to say the least. And now that even the default configuration includes two screens, Apple realized they had to do something about it.
But now, we have this:
Brilliant. I love it. The only flaw now is that this layout is too big to fit into the iTunes interface on my MacBook without having to scroll the entire thing, since the iPhone screen is represented at actual-pixel size. (I had to take two screenshots and stitch them together in Photoshop to create the image you see above, which is scaled down slightly from the actual size.
Then again, it’s always something, isn’t it?
Robert Reich was President Clinton’s Secretary of Labor and is now a professor at UC Berkeley. I’ve seen him on TRMS a few times, and I’ve always been impressed.
He has made this video explaining in drop-dead (no, not from the “death panels”) simple terms exactly what the public option is, and how important it is to fight for, right now.
I can take some comfort in knowing that all three people who are in Washington to represent me in Congress — Representative Keith Ellison and Senators Amy Klobuchar and Al Franken — truly do represent me on these issues, and will vote accordingly. (Well, sounds like Sen. Klobuchar might be on the fence, but I’m hopeful she’ll come around after the persuasive and heartfelt email I just sent her.) And I don’t expect many of the Republicans in Congress to do anything more than continue to dig in their heels, bury their heads, spew hatred and lies, and spur liberals like me on to a frothing, cliché-ridden rage. But there are conservative Democrats who will potentially sabotage the entire enterprise for some unknown reason — oh wait, yeah… money — instead of voting with their party and the will of the majority of the American public.