Les Bonnes Choses

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...