Les Bonnes Choses

Go Me! Itsyerbirthday! Go Me! Itsyerbirthday!

I'm taking the evening off from writing serious brain business (partly because I attribute last night's writing up until my bedtime to my inability to sleep). As soon as I finish here, I'm going to watch the Season 2 finale of Game of Thrones, which ties in nicely with the House of Stark themed birthday cake I had at lunch. I was delighted, though the Starks haven't had very good luck in the book series, so I hope it doesn't bode ill.

Anyways, I wrote just the other day about the iPhone 5, which connects nicely to a story I just read online. In short: Samsung hired some brain trust to come up with a social media marketing campaign. Unsurprisingly, it backfired. I suppose everyone is entitled to make a living, but the only purpose of marketing is to convince you to buy crap you actually don't really need. Seriously. If we really needed it, we would've evolved to sprout it out of our heads or something. Given that my job description basically entails trying to figure out how people think (literally), I really have to wonder what sort of qualifications you have to have to be a marketer, and what sort of training they get. In particular, the fact that these people don't seem to have an intuition that nobody wants to feel like they are being manipulated does nothing to improve the regard in which I hold them. Incidentally, I read yesterday that the Samsung phone being advertised actually has better technical specs than does the iPhone 5. Just saying. Full disclosure: I own an iPhone 4 and an android tablet running Jellybean.

Hopefully Jellybean will give me an interesting segue for my next entry. I wonder what I'll do with that?

My summer hiatus from blogging has ended with the season. Mostly. To be sure, I was writing like a fiend. It's just that all my writing energy went to revising the academic papers that I need to get published if I am ever to get myself a job that lets me live in the same city as my wife and children. Ah, yes, and the wife and children were also with me for much of the summer. That meant that when I wasn't writing papers, I was doing stuff with my wife and children. Unfortunately, none of them blog.

So now that fall is upon us, so is the next iteration of the iPhone. The iPhone 5. Rebecca and I each got the iPhone 4 when it came out so we could take advantage of the Facetime feature. The addition of the iMessage feature, just ahead of the release of the iPhone 4S, was a welcome upgrade that didn't even require us to purchase anything. I have some friends with the 4S, and, in my opinion, it's a downgrade from the iPhone 4: the battery life is worse, and the Siri application is proof positive that a great deal of research in to natural language recognition remains to be done. Now the iPhone 5 is available for preorder, and I'm left wondering, WWJD? (what would Jobs do?) When it was first spoiled that they were messing around with the connector cable, I was nonplussed. Is this a contrivance to stimulate the economy? I cannot even imagine how many third party accessories are obsoleted by this change and will have to be replaced.  Sure, you can get an adaptor. But there's bound to be applications for which an adaptor just isn't going to work very well. For example, I just read that BMW and Mini owners will not be able to use the car's built-in iPod-Out functionality. Yeah, I know...