And thanks to Hosting Matters for their efficient response.

* misspelling intentional.

Android forums is a handy resource. Particularly, this thread.

Specs and a round up of handy tips and tools.

A blog with tips

And, while I have not heard any reports of people not being able to buy Droid phones, I’ve been unable to find any accessories for it that I want. The local Verizon store at the mall in Maryville had none. And the online store at Verizon appears to be out. So, I cannot find a carrying case or the docking station.

It doesn’t sync media players and your media has to be dragged and dropped from your PC via USB connection. Personally, I prefer that. I always hated itunes and windows media player sync applications. They duplicate things, take too long, and suck. So, not a complaint for me. But it may be for you.

At first, I didn’t dig the keyboard. But now that I’m used to it, I find it a bit more user-friendly than my crackberry. Keys are bigger and the shift/alt functions are a bit more intuitive.

Droid’s desktop (for lack of a better term) has three panels that you can scroll through. On the center (or main) panel, you can’t put shortcuts where it looks like the top row is. I can on the other two panels. I’d like to get four more apps on the main screen.

Another complaint I have is that the cable that came with it is too short.

Some folks may not like the fact that you really need a Google account to play with all the pretty things.

It looks like Verizon is about to make a mistake and charge a ridiculous fee for tethering your phone to your PC for internet connectivity.

Also, another review over at Knoxviews. The docking station looks pretty cool.

Update: Since someone asked about call quality, I’ll say it’s good. With the blackberry, my wife and others would complain that they couldn’t hear me when they called me at the office. My wife says she can hear me much better on this phone. Also, phone calls I receive are just fine.

The AK47 app is lots of fun and the kids like the bubble game.

Bar code scanner is nifty. Scan the bar code of anything and it will look up product reviews online.

I said earlier that I thought it had some sort of proprietary cable. I was wrong. It’s apparently the new micro USB and I had the older USB cables.

GMote is cool. Use your Droid to as a remote for your PC. Handy for watching netflix on the TeeVee and for operating media player.

Turn by turn directions are free. That is slick.

A few complaints:

There is a number in contacts that I did not put there. And I cannot delete it. Odd.

Keyboard was a bit difficult to get used to. I’d constantly hit two keys at once. Getting the hang of it.

I cannot uninstall some of the preloaded apps that I’ll likely never use.

The cool feature that it runs multiple apps at once has one drawback. It doesn’t really close a lot of them when you think you’ve exited. But there’s an app to close them called TasKiller.

Quite a few of it’s features rely on having a gmail account. I already had one so not a big deal.

Since I’ve played with it a lot, battery seems to drain pretty quickly.

I never owned an iPhone but I played with them a lot at the store. Always tempted to buy one but, at the end of the day, I just couldn’t switch to the horrible AT&T service. But in a day, I’ve decided I like the Droid better. If I’d owned an iPhone, that might not be the case.

Droid is an awesome gizmo.

Update: The manual leaves a lot to be desired and I haven’t found a help file yet.

The newspaper was investing time and resources generating stories, but these other sites, run mostly as a hobby, were linking to those stories and moving the conversation about the articles elsewhere.

“There was a point at which KnoxViews was really taking off,” McElroy says, “and it concerned me as I thought, ‘Is the nexus of community dialogue going to be shifting away from the News Sentinel to an Internet forum, and what does that mean for our future?’”

KnoxViews had—and continues to have—an openly progressive tilt, so to forfeit the lion’s share of community dialogue to a site driven by a particular set of political and social values could have marginalized a great many other community voices; or it may have run them into their own respective realms, creating echo chambers of like-minded people rather than a Darwinian common ground where the best ideas survive.

So when the Sentinel relaunched its site in 2007, it linked comments to usernames and allowed them for every article. The effect was palpable. Randy Neal, founder of KnoxViews, says he immediately noticed an exodus from his site to the News Sentinel’s; with the help of some contentious local issues, before long knoxnews.com was hosting nearly 50,000 comments a month. The crisis of irrelevance had been averted.

Interesting. A forum was a threat to the local news rag. The local news rag opens comments and that impacts the forum’s traffic. Of course, about two years ago, was also when Knoxviews decided that dissent would not be tolerated. I find that funny.

Ok, this one works. Thanks to Mike for telling me about WordTwit.

ETA: Doesn’t add links to the blog. That’s kinda worthless. So, no twitter-fu for you.

And Michael says:

Don’t you just love MSM growing pains?

2- Microsoft is pimping Windows 7 for netbooks. Anyone try this?

Via ACK, comes some whining about linking and crediting and whatnot. Yes, a blog is complaining that someone dared to draw traffic to it.

BTW, sparky, shouldn’t your post there link to the offending piece? I know these hyperlink thingies are hard for the press sometimes but that seems a bit, err, inconsistent.

Update: Grantham tackles both the hyperlink and the though questions:

How long the breadcrumb trail has to be before you are ripping off other people’s content is a very good question. Kleinheider did the right thing, but the editor of the Nashville City Paper online probably didn’t.

Links and such are an interesting thing. For instance, this morning I was doing some blogiating* and realized I had over 34 tabs open in the browser. So, by the time I had commented on something, I’d forgotten where I read it. As such, I likely didn’t credit one of the members of the breadcrumb trail. And that happens all the time.

* I think I just invented a new word.

And in case anyone’s curious, a link from SayUncle generates a LOT more hits than one from the Boston Globe.

Update: The internets have apparently unfucked themselves. So, it works now. I guess someone poked Al Gore with a stick.

The FBI has expanded its investigation of reported death threats against the attorneys for the alleged ringleader in the torture slayings of a Knox County couple.

The News Sentinel was served Monday with a federal grand jury subpoena for information related to a comment posted in September on its Web site, knoxnews.com.

On the advice of corporate counsel, the newspaper turned over the information late Monday to FBI Special Agent Gregg Harmon.

Newscoma notes a councilman used the word blogger as a slur. Well, to people in power, it probably is. After all, when they want a message out, they usually go to the press because they have a cushy relationship with the press. The press, after all, has to play nice if they wish to continue having access. Being a concerned citizen with an audience is threatening to those in power.

It’s fast. Real fast. And, unlike Firefox, the hotkeys in wordpress work.

My mistake has been thinking that liberalism,or more properly, progressivism, is an ideology, as is conservatism. That is, an idea, based on facts and reason, useful for describing te behavior of a society, and the best manner of organizing that society. It isn’t. It has more in common with religion than anything else, complete with hierarchy, a rigid orthodoxy, excommunication for dissenters,and an intolerance for questioning.

True. But substitute Republicanism for conservatism and you have the same thing.

Also, it seems that I’ve had quite a few people attempt to befriend me. And I didn’t know who they were, so I hit the ignore button. And now it’s occurring to me that they’re bloggers and blog readers. I guess that’s the danger of using internet pseudonyms. Is there a way to un-ignore those requests so I can go back through them?

And if I ignored you, sorry about that. In social media, I assume there’s a high ratio of spam. But seems FB doesn’t have that problem.

Update: from comments, I apparently cannot un-ignore you. So, if you sent a request and did not hear back, re-send it. But let me know you’re a blog reader. Or you can send me an email at:

To tell me about it.

The most absurd part of it is the way the FTC is trying to make it okay by assuring us that they will be selective in deciding which writers on the internet to pursue. That is, they’ve deliberately made a grotesquely overbroad rule, enough to sweep so many of us into technical violations, but we’re supposed to feel soothed by the knowledge that government agents will decide who among us gets fined.

It’s not like they’ll be selective in enforcement, now is it.

The FTC can also kiss my ass.

Update: It does occur to me that I pretty much have made all those disclosures anyway because I want readers to know the relationship. Not because I care what the FTC says. So, I guess my civil disobedience isn’t all that hardcore.

I told you they’d be back. Everyone comes back.

Via Bob.

Anyway, she called up Honda and said she needed a new mirror. They were happy to do so for $300. Instead, we ordered one for $30, paid $15 to ship it and I put it on myself in about 30 minutes. You really can Google up directions for almost anything.

Steel Challenge videos

I met a hero this weekend

Several pictures, for you enjoyment.

Dirtcrashr on the steel challenge and dirty guns in the desert.

Some gun porn

Molly can shoot! Lots of guys were feeling bad for getting beat by a 13 year old girl.

Sebastian and Alan Gura have an Iphone light saber fight.

The latest Threeper v. Prag dust up that I wasn’t aware of is summarized by Joe.

And, if all goes as planned, as you read this, I’ll be on a layover in the people’s republic of Chicago. Getting a dose of hope and change. And probably breakfast.

21,231 Posts
80,428 Comments
3,567,333 Visits
6,385,322 Page views

the oft-derided USA-PATRIOT Act is still with us. I guess they only hate it during election season.

Everyone is having a bad day.

People hate Mondays.

But they like cats. Facebook is like a Garfield comic. No word on lasagna yet.

The sports franchise from your particular geographic region is superior to the sports franchise from my particular geographic region.

I am the only person on Earth who doesn’t play Mafia Wars.

Off-the-record sessions, such as the ones White House reporters have traditionally attended, are meant to shape the message, not to inform the public. So the next time someone decries the new media, point to the above cozy arrangement as an example of what is getting busted up.

People don’t want to read. They want to click links.

True.

But here’s a story of an accidental discharge wherein one criminal shoots another.

I think so. He just happens to be a calculating sociopath with a cause.

You have been Banned from viewing this Blog.
There are most likely two reasons for this.
1. You were abusive or a troll in the comments section
2. You are from a Forum that I do not want viewing my Blog
3. You are in the countries of Russia, Iran or People’s Republic of China

If you feel this was a mistake contact me at tpblogeditor at gmail dot com.
If you are from the Country of Russia, People’s Republic of China Tell your leaders to embrace true freedom and not political oppression and I might let you back in.
-Pat
Owner
Political Byline dot com

I’ve never been to that site before, I’m in the USofA, and I didn’t get there from a forum. I guess they don’t like traffic from Insty. Seems redirecting traffic from one of the higher traffic blogs is not beneficial for building a readership. And note that I wasn’t actually banned since I managed to get around it in about 0.5 seconds.

Update: Seems to be fixed now.

The Obama administration is proposing to scale back a long-standing ban on tracking how people use government Internet sites with “cookies” and other technologies, raising alarms among privacy groups.

A two-week public comment period ended Monday on a proposal by the White House Office of Management and Budget to end a ban on federal Internet sites using such technologies and replace it with other privacy safeguards. The current prohibition, in place since 2000, can be waived if an agency head cites a “compelling need.”

Bad idea: using the same social networking tools to call him a pervvy wanker and complaining about the fact he expects you to do your job.

Via Kevin.

Interpretation: Five million bloggers exercising their First Amendment right isn’t a good thing for American democracy.

Tam seems, err, unimpressed.

Having heard from a couple of bloggers yesterday, I am going to plead guilty to an inexact application of the word “blogosphere”. Some of the very people I’ve characterized as the future of communications feel – justifiably – that I’ve tossed them under the proverbial bus recently.

That’s not the case. What I have done is use a term of art (blogosphere) as shorthand for all the myriad of internet communications. When I received nearly 100 emails and forwards of excerpts of a single report – and dozens of associated rumors- regarding Daniel Defense, I wrote that the “blogosphere was roiling”. A more accurate depiction would have been “rumors have been flying regarding Daniel Defense across the internet”. It was an unintentional shot at a group of individuals who I really do regard as integral parts of information distribution.

Hats off to Jim Shepherd for the correction.

And so, in the new tradition of newspaper folks, I immediately contacted the AP and asked them to sue him for using my joke to amuse his reader!

Actually, you should send him a bill.