Permalink
Comments (4)
Del.icio.usiPhone
I got one, thanks largely to a wonderful birthday cheque from my grandmother. And it really is a thing of beauty. And I'm not going to repeat what everybody else has said. But I will say that the email functionality could do with a bit of work.
The main problem is that there's no "select all" command. If you've already read most of your emails on your computer at home, for instance, then you're very likely to want to mark all those emails as read on your phone when it downloads them. But you can't, not without selecting them one by one. And the same thing goes for deleting emails: there's no way of deleting them en masse. If you don't want vast numbers of emails clogging up your phone's hard drive, then once again you have to laboriously delete them, one by one. And although you can play around with the music and photos and videos on your phone through the iTunes interface, it gives you no access whatsoever to the emails on your phone – so you can't mark them all as read or delete them all that way, either.
There's no select-all when it comes to the content of mail messages, either -- which means there's no way of deleting a large chunk of the email you're replying to, for instance, beyond just sitting there with your finger on the delete key, watching the text slowly disappear word by single word.
I hope and trust that these issues will be fixed in a future software update, and they by no means encroach on my enjoyment of the phone. The little things work wonderfully: the way that if you disconnect the phone from your computer, for instance, it will simply and automatically resume syncing your music when you return; the way that music fades out so that you can take a phone call and then picks up where you left it when the phone call ends; or the way that the keyboard knows what you're typing, and makes the most likely next letters bigger than the least likely next letters.
Mainly, though, I'm just happy that I've finally found a phone which will simply and seamlessly sync with the calendar and address book on my MacBook. I certainly shan't miss my Treo in that respect. And I wish my friend Shane all the best of luck in getting his phone up and running: apparently if you try to switch from Cingular to AT&T (yes, I know they're meant to be the same company), you can end up with no phone service at all for 24 hours. Lovely. I switched from T-Mobile with no difficulties at all.
Exblogmunication
I was "exblogmunicated" by Instapundit Glenn Reynolds in 2006, when he linked to me without linking to me.
Now he's done it again, but if anything even more egregiously.
If I'm on some kind of blacklist, I want to know!
Is there a word for this?
It happens at Amazon, it happens at my local grocery store (sorry about the colour – it's a cellphone pic), and it happens every day all over the world. But is there a name for it?
Where I blog
I've found out of late that not everybody reads my website through RSS, and there are actually people who don't know that the reason I'm barely blogging here is that I'm blogging as much as ten times per day over at marketmovers.org. So check me out over there!
Jerry Falwell is Dead
This is why God invented Christopher Hitchens.
(Via)
Zipcar insurance, part 3
A couple of months ago, I spoke to three Zipcar executives about the Zipcar insurance situation. I reported then:
Zipcar told me that they're going to make it much clearer on their website that their liability coverage is pretty weak; this fact has been very, very buried up until now.
Two months later, what's happened to the web page saying that "gas, reserved parking and insurance are included in all of our rates and there's no crazy paperwork and waivers to fill out"? Um, it's still there. The main "How does Zipcar work?" page still tells you to "remember, gas and insurance are included". The only change is on the insurance page (part of the small print, and hard to find), which used to say that "Insurance is just part of your Zipcar membership" and now says that "Basic insurance is part of your Zipcar membership". They do now helpfully provide a list of state-mandated insurance levels, too.
The main thing that hasn't changed is the insurance situation. The amount of insurance that Zipcar provides (or doesn't provide) is exactly the same as it ever was, and you still have no ability to buy extra insurance from them if you want it. Instead, you're told to "consult with a licensed agent" to see if you can buy the extra insurance elsewhere – something which is both a major hassle and very expensive, since no one's going to sell you insurance for a two-hour car rental.
I've also learned something else about the holes in Zipcar insurance, thanks to a comment on my second post. It's not just liability coverage they lack: it's also uninsured motorist insurance. What that means is that if an uninsured or underinsured motorist runs into you, Zipcar's insurance will not cover your bodily injuries. And again, of course, they don't offer that even as an optional extra.
I sent Kristina from Zipcar an email two weeks ago, asking her what the developments were on the insurance front. I never received a reply. So this afternoon, at 3:39pm, I phoned her at her PR company, RF Binder. I was told she was working at Zipcar; I asked for her number there, but the woman answering the phone wouldn't give it to me. Instead, she took down my message, and said that someone would get back to me.
At 3:59pm, I got the following comment on my old Zipcar post, from someone calling himself "Jude Carlson":
Why are you so negative about Zipcar? Did you know that 100,000 people use it? Obviously, they can't all be wrong about the company. Morover, you are loosing sight of the fact that their program reduces gas emmissions at a greater rate than any other organization and helps people become more mobile at a reasonalble cost. It is easy to point out faults with anything or anybody, but one question we should all ask ourselves is; "Am I doing as much as Zipcar to improve the enviroment and the lives of a hundred thousand people? What have you done latley?
My Movable Type software helpfully logs IP addresses, and this one came from 75.5.124.17, which I looked up. And guess what? It's registered to Zipcar California Inc!
At this point, then, I've stopped giving Zipcar the benefit of the doubt. I think that they are not serious about fixing their broken insurance situation, and indeed it seems that rather than simply return my phone call and talk to me, they're much happier to leave sock-puppet comments on my blog – a classic sign of bad faith.
Up until now, I was reserving judgment. My commenters generally seemed to think that Zipcar was being deliberately misleading, while I still thought there might have been a genuine mistake. Now I agree with those commenters: I've caught Zipcar red-handed in one of the most notorious and devious tactics of all. Shame on Zipcar, and I'm going to start looking for an alternative car-sharing company.
John Adams at Carnegie Hall
Last night was great: Michelle and I went to an ACO celebration of John Adams's 60th birthday at Carnegie Hall, with the composer conducting three of his own works. The second half was a positively blistering and wonderful performance with Leila Josefowicz of the Violin Concerto – that girl can play! Tickets were cheap, for Carnegie: they ranged from $16 to $43, and our seats right in the front row (once a Prommer...) were $35 apiece.
And yet the hall was far, far from being sold out, the presence of a lot of the composer's friends notwithstanding. I don't think this is a problem with Adams, or with contemporary music; I do think it's a problem with Carnegie Hall. I get lots of mail from them telling me what's happening in May 2008, and there are lots of concerts coming up which look great but which don't go on sale for months. (Unless you buy a subscription.) But when individual tickets do go on sale, Carnegie never seems to let me know.
On the road
I had a glorious 35th birthday in Chicago on Saturday. The weather was absolutely perfect all weekend: bright and sunny without being too hot – great for architecture tours, bike riding along the lakefront, or just wandering around.
Not that just wandering around is a particularly Chicago thing to do, it would seem. It's not a walking city, really, and it's hard to get lost there – lord knows there are more than enough skyscrapers by which to orient yourself. The streets are big and wide and don't have a lot of street life – I didn't see a single street vendor, or sidewalk cafe. Presumably because of the bitter winters and hot summers, everything seems to happen indoors. And there seemed to be very little in the way of shops or restaurants outside their own designated corridors.
I'm hardly an expert on Chicago, of course – but I did like it enough that I'm definitely going back. I don't think I'll be staying at the W Lakeshore again, though. In fact, I'm not sure I ever want to stay in a self-consciously hip hotel ever again: I haven't liked the other trendy hotels I've stayed in, either. I think that now I'm 35, I'm officially old and boring – Groove Armada and purple lighting in the elevators just doesn't do anything for me.
Right now, I'm in the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza in Beverly Hills, and although I've only just got here, it seems much more my cup of tea. Good in a big, old-fashioned sort of way. Michelle and I had a less-than-fabulous experience at the Park Hyatt restaurant in Chicago, but their Gerhard Richter was fabulous, and in general I think I like the understated-luxury aesthetic.
As of tomorrow morning, I'm attending the Milken Institute Global Conference, and I'm quite excited about it. I'll be blogging it over at marketmovers.org – do come over and say hi!
Alice Rawsthorn loves Nick Knight
The NYT is running an article about Nick Knight today, written by Alice Rawsthorn. It's a big sloppy wet kiss of a profile, complete with gushing quotes from Nadja Swarovski, who's not only a major Knight client but who is also the lead advertiser on Knight's website, showstudio.com. Rawsthorn herself can't say enough wonderful things about the site:
In 2000, Knight founded the Web site SHOWstudio as a laboratory where he could experiment with interactive technologies. SHOWstudio has since produced more than 250 projects by Knight and others, placing him at the forefront of developments in 3-D scanning, digital sculpture, interactive film and a raft of other innovations...
Despite the beauty of his still images, SHOWstudio may yet prove to be Knight’s most influential project. He has bankrolled the Web site since 2000, at considerable personal expense. As well as enabling Knight to experiment, it has nurtured a new generation of multimedia stylists, designers and digital artists. When a famous face, like Moss’s, is featured on SHOWstudio, as many as 500,000 people log on in a day.
First, about that 500,000 figure: I don't believe it. Half a million unique visitors in a day? I just don't buy it. But I have a couple of friends at the website, and I'll ask them if it's remotely realistic, or what it's referring to. I guess it's conceivable that if Kate Moss gets naked on the site and it's picked up by the gossip blogs, then traffic might spike. Lord knows sex sells on the internet. But that kind of traffic hardly represents the "new generation of multimedia stylists, designers and digital artists".
And second, don't you think that Rawsthorn, when writing for the New York Times, might have disclosed that she was a founding editor of showstudio.com? This is America, where some people actually care about those kind of journalistic ethics.
RSS - All blog entriesRecent comments
Solar energy in California:
Solar energy in California:
Is there a looming crisis in the mortgage mar:
The Parallel Universe of Leadership Events:
The Restaurant Pretentiousness Ratio:
Summit Communications and AFA Press:
Summit Communications and AFA Press:
American Airlines sucks:
American Airlines sucks:
American Airlines sucks:
Felix's del.icio.us links
Archives
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License