electric relaxation

This is pretty cool. Certainly an improvement over our lame NPR ads. But I think this phrasing is horribly awkward, and way too long given that it lacks any punctuation:

Join one of the fastest growing pre-IPO software companies to transform the IT landscape

It’s ambiguous – did we transform the landscape already, or is that what you’re going to do after you join us? Also, it feels like someone sat there with a checklist of things we had to mention: pre-IPO (check), software company (check), IT (check). Why do we even need to mention the IT stuff at all? It’s our bread and butter, but the Mac product is almost certainly a much better recruiting draw. Because Macs are cool, or rather, people are retarded.

I love my Blackberry Pearl, save for one incredibly annoying usability issue: with my stock T-Mobile OS version, there’s no easy way to separate SMS messages from E-Mail, and since I have it hooked up to my office e-mail account and I don’t use server-side filters (only Outlook search folders), I never see SMS messages since they get lost amongst the thousands of VMware emails.

Apparently I’m not the only one complaining about this, and according to the Blackberry forums, this issue has been fixed in some of the newer OSes. I figured it would be useful to document the sequence of steps I followed in order to install the latest Blackberry OS (4.2.1.66, released for the Pearl in Australia by Telstra).

1. Make sure you have the latest Blackberry Desktop Manager release. These are loosely coupled to the OS releases, and you can always easily get them from blackberry.com.
2. Crawl the Blackberry Forums and look for the latest OS update posting. I’m not sure how these guys find out about new releases, other than the brute force polling approach which I wouldn’t put past some of these freaks.
3. Download the OS installer from blackberry.com. The Telstra release is here.
4. Go to %CommonProgramFiles%\Research In Motion\AppLoader and delete vendor.xml. You can back it up if you’re paranoid.
5. Optional: If you want to unlock all the themes, you need to know your Pearl’s vendor ID, which you can get with Alt, R, A, C, E at the home screen. The T-Mobile ID is “100″. Then, go to %CommonProgramFiles%\Research In Motion\Shared\Loader Files\ and edit blackberry.alx (it’s an XML file). Search for entries and you’ll see that they have VendorID masks. You can edit these masks and “|”-in your vendor ID. For example, the Cingular default theme entry looks like this:

      <!-- Cingular US filesets -->
      <fileset Colour="True" Java="1.0" series="8100" _vendorID="102">
         <files>
            net_rim_theme_102a_icon_240x260_b.cod
         </files>
      </fileset>
   

   You want to replace the “102″ for the _vendorID attribute with “100|102″.
   

6. Finally, just start up Desktop Manager and run the Application Loader. It will tell you a new upgrade is available. Follow instructions.

The Washington Post sponsored an experiment in which Joshua Bell, one of the most acclaimed classical musicians of our time, spent 43 minutes playing as a street musician in the DC subway. You can read about it in this article.

I don’t know exactly why, but I found this entire piece to be very moving. Since I’m a pretty self-centered person, I’m also very much concerned with the question of whether I would have been “smart enough” to stop.

I didn’t think much of the fact that all the children stopped, though it reminded me of something I read in the 2006 Best American Nonrequired Reading. There’s a section entitled Best American Answers to the Question: “What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?”. Allison Gopnik, a Berkeley psychologist and author of The Scientist in the Crib, has a theory that for babies and young children, “every day is first love in Paris, every wobbly step is skydiving, every game of hide-and-seek is Einstein in 1905.” The point is, children are fascinated by street musicians, but they’re also fascinated by streets.