Wild Tangents
Marc talks about life in Nashville, life as a Catholic and life as a geek.

So what you may not know yet is that I got an iPhone yesterday. That was precipitated by being at a customer site that didn’t provide internet access. There were a number of research items I needed to do on the internet that I couldn’t because of the lack of connectivity from my laptop. That’s how I justified it anyway.

So one of the cool features of this little gadget is the ability to add custom ringtones to your contacts. The ringtones can be song clips and they can be different for each contact. So I set a ringtone for calls from my wife Suzette to be “Lovesong”, by The Cure. I tweeted about it later and got at least one response from Tupelo Rob with what he had set as his ringtone for his wife Kristen. That got me to thinking that this might be an interesting topic for discussion. So I put it out to you all, what would your custom ringtone be for your spouse or significant other?

Well, it looks like LogMeIn is going to make aversion for the Palm Folio.

Well, as with any computing device, it turns out the Palm Foleo will only be as good as its software. And the more we hear about the software available or the Foleo, the more we warm up to this little device. First of all, the Foleo runs Linux, which means you might be able to slap some custom software on there in addition to the default applications.

And it turns out you can also use the Foleo to access and control your home or work PC on the go. LogMeIn is showing off a software client for the Palm Foleo at this week’s LinuxWorld conference in San Francisco.

LogMeIn is a “remote control” software for a computer. What it does basically is allow you open a “window” on one computer that will actually be the screen on another computer. For instance, you have a laptop and a desktop. When you travel with the laptop, you would be able to open a window on your laptop that would allow you to see and do almost everything on your desktop back home. It of course requires an internet connection on both ends. Otherwise it’s pretty simple.

If people find more inventive ways such as this to use this little machine, it might have a future. HM…Maybe it wasn’t a yawn after all.

Technorati Tags: computers, geek, Palm, Windows, software, remote

WARNING: This post may or may not contain what could be considered spoilers for the Watchmen graphic novel and/or movie.  You’ve been warned! (sort of) 

Is it just me, or does this casting write up on Sci-Fi wire for the up coming Watchmen movie have a major spoiler in it?

I don’t think it’s just me.

Technorati Tags: comics, movies, spoilers, watchmen

It could have happened some other way. I could have been a singer in a band. I could have been a famous poet. I could have done any number of thing with my life that would make me famous. Instead of all that, I decided to be a Twitter user. The Unofficial Apple Weblog decided to post about a new Twitter app for the now infamous iPhone. The screen shot includes one of my tweets. Why me?

UPDATE:It looks like my fifteen minutes have been extended a good five ten minutes. Appletell has posted pretty much the same story as TUAW.com.

Technorati Tags: Apple, celebrity, cellphone, humor, iphone, macosx, web

Lost is one of those shows you really have to keep track of. You can’t just start watching in the middle and expect know what the heck’s going on. To be honest, you can’t really expect to watch this show from the beginning and know what’s going on. But if you don’t do that, then you’re really LOST. For instance, the show revolves around an island. We don’t really know where this island is, but our heroes (or are they our heroes?) are survivors of Oceanic flight 815 which crashed on the island (or did it?). As new characters have been introduced over the past three seasons, you see the crash from their point of view. Well, it’s amazing how it changes your perspective if you look at all these scenes in chronological order. That’s what someone has made possible with the following video. I’m giving you fair spoiler waning here too. If you do not watch the show, this video could ruin certain aspects of the plot for you.

There’s even more after the jump…..Major spoilers ahead for that though.

Technorati Tags: accident, air travel, airplane, explosion, lost, tv

(more…)

It looks like Amazon is already taking pre-orders for MacOSX Leopard on their website. It carries their “Pre-order pice Guarantee” as well. I’ve only pre-ordered a couple of books before, so I can’t say how well it works. It does however sound like they are trying to take care of their customers with it. If I wanted Leopard on release day and there wasn’t an Apple Store here in Nashville, I might be inclined to do this. I don’t think however that we’ll see the frenzy on Leopard’s release we saw with say, the iPhone. I bet a lot of Mac users will take a “wait and see” approach with it. I know I will. The new feature really aren’t enough for me to install until some of the user community has already decided to be the guinea pigs.

Technorati Tags: amazon, Apple, computers, macosx, software

Someone thought it would be cute to do up some scenes from the Star Wars movies in Latin. It is cute. Get it, “The Empire” and “Roman Empire”. But the sound quality is really bad. You have been warned. Press play if you really want to.

Technorati Tags: geek, movies, latin, scifi, starwars

Well, what an anti-climax today was. The only real big announcements made were complete duds.

First we have Safari browser for Windows. This has got to be the biggest “what were they thinking?” moment for me since Palm announced the Foleo. I mean really. I’m a die hard Mac user and I don’t use Safari. What makes anyone at Apple think that Windows users will convert in droves to Safari? Most of the people who would even have a clue what they doing by installing Safari on their PC would probably already be hooked on Firefox, or maybe Opera.

The other biggie was that there would be a way for third party developers to develop apps for the iPhone. They would have hooks that would allow access to functions on the phone. So basically the answer is that you can develop apps for that sub-par browser I just mentioned and that’s your way to put your own apps on the iPhone. My first thought was that it was a real cop out. My second thought was that anyone who develops…..at all…..would realize this already. I’m not sure why it was even a topic for discussion at this. It was jsut very disappointing.

A few other things of note were of course the previews for Leopard and some gaming news. The Leopard previews were really cool. I’m really looking forward to it. It doesn’t come out until October though. Apple recently announced that it was delayed due to having to shift some resources from Mac OS development to iPhone development. It makes me wonder where the resources to port Safari to Windows came from. The gaming news was that two major gaming players (sorry, couldn’t resist), EA and ID would start producing Mac versions of their games. This is a good thing. Even with the new version of Parallels that allows for 3DFX support for Windows VMs, I would still much rather play games in the native OS.

Overall though, I considered this Stevenote to be rather lame. To think, I could have spent that time getting a cavity drilled or something along those lines instead of sitting at my desk waiting for MacRumorsLive to refresh. All the Twitter conversation was fun though.

Technorati Tags: Apple, computers, development, macintosh, macosx, software, web

I’ve got this poem stuck in my head. you see, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about podcasting. What I’ve thought about is testing the waters and learning the ropes by doing a podcast of poetry. I have been known to write a line or two in the distant past (a small sample can be found here). It seems that all these thoughts of poetry have brought back something from high school. I went to Ridgeway High School back in Memphis. For senior English we had this very “no nonsense”, “tell it like it is” teacher by the name of Harry Raney. Some people said he was crazy, but I always just thought he really cared about preparing us to go to college. One of the first (of many) big assignments Mr Raney would give every year was memorizing the prologue to Chanucer’s “The Canterbury Tales“. “Memorize it you say, that ain’t so bad”! Well, it does get worse. The reason why you had to memorize is so you could recite the whole thing in front of the class, in Old English.

Here’s the first few of the over 800 lines from this prologue:

Whan that Aprill, with his shoures soote
The droghte of March hath perced to the roote
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours yronne,
And smale foweles maken melodye,
That slepen al the nyght with open eye-
(So priketh hem Nature in hir corages);
Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages
And palmeres for to seken straunge strondes
To ferne halwes, kowthe in sondry londes;
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The hooly blisful martir for to seke
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seeke.

I don’t remember how much of this Mr. Raney had us recite. What I’ve put above is all I remember. I’m trying to decide if it is unfortunate or exciting that remember that even.

My wife and I saw Mr. Raney a couple of years ago. He had retired and was working on his “second career”. He seemed happy enough, but it also seemed that he might be missing being up in front of a class preparing them for what awaits after graduation. It unfortunate that he’ not teaching anymore as he was a great teacher.

As for the Canterbury Tales, don’t expect to hear me talking about it on iTunes anytime soon. But I suspect my voice may be coming down in a feed near you soon!

Technorati Tags: Chaucer, highschool, poetry, english, schools

I posted something last week about Niki from Heroes. It was really meant to be a joke, but my buddy Mark made a comment that got me to thinking.

The producers have said that each powered individual on the show only has one inherent power. That is to say for instance Sylar has the ability to graft on to his brain the powers of others. Those powers he steals are not inherent to him though. At the same time, Peter’s empathic powers allow him to take on other’s abilities when he comes into contact with them. The point is though that both of them only have one inherent power. It also seem obvious that the specific powers everyone take on are influenced by who they are. For instance Peter’s empathy is something that is a part of his personality and the way he leads his life. Sylar’s ability to figure out how things work in another powered person’s brain seems to be influenced by his chosen profession as a watchmaker. Hiro’s power could well be influenced by his love for SciFi and comic books.

Now here’s the thing, Jessica and Niki are two individuals. They were twin sisters and since the powers on the show are genetic, isn’t not only possible but probable that they both had (have) powers? Hear me out… It seems that Niki’s power is some sort of super strength/endurance. I say it’s Niki’s because we know the powers are “in the brain” since Sylar “looks” at the brain to “figure out how it works”. We also know that Jessica’s body is buried, along with her brain. Niki’s power could’ve developed as a defense mechanism to her father’s abuse. I can see that. But what if Jessica also developed a power in response to her father’s abuse? What if her power was some sort of projection, something that would allow her to leave her body when she was being abused? Eventually she might have been able to enter someone else’s body. The first time she entered her sister’s body to protet her while their father was abusing Niki, she was probably surprised at how strong she was. She could have used that strength to fight off their father to protect Niki. The problem is that this made their father focus his abuse on Jessica, since he was probably now afraid of Niki and what he knew she could do to him. So what do you think would happen if Jessica was “projected” into Niki on that day she died? It’s something to think about.

Technorati Tags: geek, heroes, tv