Twelve Black Code Monkeys

So Blair, a friend of mine, asked a bunch of us if we wanted to go to Atlantic City a few weeks ago. I hedged because I knew I’d be going to a bachelor party the weekend before and to NYC to visit the fam for the 4th of July. But late last week I was relatively rested. The pace of unpacking has slowed and I just felt like I could use a break, or at least that’s how I rationalized it to myself. Really, I had been psyching myself up for the trip for a while. I spending a lot of time on blackjackinfo.com, studying basic strategy and playing their excellent flash game that includes a strategy coach. I even took their charts and prettied them up, printed them out, and did my poor-man’s amateur scotch-tape lamination. I was ready! Or almost, anyway. I was getting about 97% of my hands correctly played.

Although I grew up in New York, only two and a half hours from Atlantic City, I didn’t get there till college. My parents were just not the gambling type. My mom to this day still hasn’t been there or to any casino. The first few times I went, I just played the slots. This was during college so the amount of money that I could lose without going into debilitating debt was in the double digits. I don’t think I ever came away with more money than I left.

Then about four years ago, our friend Jim had his bachelor party in AC. It had been at least 10 years since the last time I had been there and I was a bit more financially stable. On the way there one of our friends schooled me a bit in black jack basic strategy. I had played blackjack from childhood, but never knew there was an actual strategy based on probability. I’m not even sure that when I had played in the past that it was against a dealer who had to hit until they got to 17. So I was familiar with the very basics, but not any of the intricacies. We played quite a bit over the two days we were there and somehow I walked away with over $300. I was astounded. This was not chump change. It did seem to accumulate fairly steadily playing $10 bets. If it were this easy, I thought, I could, nay, SHOULD, come to AC on a regular basis to supplement my income! Yeah, that’s the ticket.

A couple months later, I could no longer wait. I got my two roommates at the time, Barry and Rich, and headed for AC again. We played black jack the whole time again, but somehow things didn’t work out the way they had before. I was down immediately and kept trying to dig myself out of this hole. By the end of the weekend, we had all lost around $700 each! It was not fun. We chocked it up to not leaving a table that was just continually taking our money. The dealer we had for a long time had a name tag that read “Khan” and we just kept yelling the name in an angry-James T. Kirk impersonation from Stark Trek III as our money slipped away.

This experience, of course, sobered us up to the fact that you can’t COUNT on winning anything when you gamble. This should be obvious but of course psychology can get in the way of the obvious. I for one decided that this was enough money to lose for quite a while and so didn’t want to have anything to do with gambling for a while. A year or so ago, Rich had a bachelor party in Vegas and I really did want to go, not just for the gambling, of course, but because it was his bachelor party and because I’d never been to Vegas. Alas, I could afford to at the time. I did not start thinking of AC at that point and really had no big wish to go there until Blair suggested it a few weeks ago.

So I headed there with Rich and his wife Jen and met Blair and a few friends and Rich’s parents. We spent a good amount of time at Bally’s Wild West playing black jack. Unfortunately the minimum bet was $15, making it a bit more volatile, but fortunately I got on a winning streak immediately and the slightly higher betting amount made it easy for me to accumulate a good chunk of money. Next we headed up to Resorts Casino, but we were there for only an hour at the most before having to go, and luckily at that point I was up as well. We spent a little time on the boardwalk and then grabbed some dinner before heading home.

It was a very successful trip, and I’m sure why. First of all, I won significantly more than I lost. Of course a big part of this is luck and so something that you can’t actually make happen. But also I went with firm limits about how much I was willing to lose and how much I would walk away with. I never got to that upper limit because another “limit” got in the way – our time limit. When you only have a finite amount of time, one that is relatively short, plus you mix meals in and a walk, etc., you don’t end up having an opportunity to lose large sums of money if you play the minimum bets and you choose a game that gives close to 50/50 odds. Of course this isn’t a certainty, but it’s at least a lot more likely with those things taken into account. I also have a different feeling coming home this time. Instead of the previous thoughts of being able to rely on this luck over and over again in order to get extra money, I feel like I was lucky enough this time and should enjoy my winnings for a good while before I go back and risk losing that same money again!

I figure a trip to AC once or twice a year is plenty for me at this point, but now that I have signed up for some of their club cards, they will be sending me offers, some of which, I’m sure, will be pretty tempting. I think the fact my wife isn’t a gambler and doesn’t like the whole idea of it is going to keep me away as much as anything else. We will have to see how this works out, but at least I don’t have illusions of ever relying on gambling as a form of income any more!

A new crack team has been assembled to battle the evil Atkins empire, the low-carb movement that has taken the world by storm in 2004 and, according to this group, threatens to make us all invalids after maybe just a couple of years on the horribly dangerous diet. How odd that I feel better than ever after almost four years and I know others who are going strong after many more than that. We must, I suppose, be genetic anomalies, nay, “mutants.” Yeah, that’s it! I’m Wolverine, damn it! My arteries, heart, liver, and kidneys somehow just keep healing themselves despite the constant onslaught of deadly fat and protein!

What’s amazing to me is that most of their claims are unsubstantiated myth without any foundation, or extremely theoretical foundations. I really thought that we were beyond these “vampire myths” but I guess not. As utterly tired of them as I am, though, in a way I think this may be more helpful than hurtful. Sure some uninformed people may get all alarmed, but these people – if they are currently on a low-carb – are doing it without really knowing why, and perhaps not even doing it in the best way, so chances are they have two strikes against them anyway. Moreover, I think it will get the Atkins folks and others to come back with very specific rebuttals to each of their points. Atkins’ current response seems to be a very quick and dirty general refutation of their claims. Maybe, like myself, they are just tired of dealing with ridiculous stuff like this. It takes a bit of time to find the studies that that supposedly show linkages, but half this stuff isn’t even backed up by studies, it’s just conjecture, so you have to write your own analysis as to why the conjecture isn’t accurate and isn’t supported by any data. I’m hoping they come out with something more detailed tomorrow.

So, who is behind this exactly? It’s not precisely clear. Of course, 11 non-profits are listed on the site, but despite the fact that non-profits legally have to reveal who they get funding from, there is no mention of their funders on the website - at least not on this first day of their initial press release. What are they trying to hide? In fact, it seems that Weight Watchers and so-called “consumer groups” helped fund this effort. I immediately thought this also must be one of PCRM’s (the radical vegan group that has been attacking Atkins for years because they advocate eating animal products, oh my!) dirty tricks, however so far it looks like they aren’t a part of it. Instead, Weight Watchers, is apparently one of the funders, and they have been struggling recently and have blamed mainly the low-carb movement on their financial woes. My guess is that other than Weight Watchers, the funders are food companies or segments of the food industry (the potato and orange juice industries are two that have recently tried combating the low-carb movement on their own) and really anyone whose business is threatened by low-carb. This even includes some medical groups. After all, without patients, you’re out of business, right? Perhaps that’s overly cynical, but whereas most individual doctors want to give their patients the best possible treatment, their hands are tied by larger associations that lay down the law as to what is considered the party line, and also the highly litigious atmosphere in which they work promotes extreme conservatism in approach. Then you have the non-MD “experts” - the dietiticians and nutritionists – who have been recommending the same low-fat approach for twenty plus years who are being rejected in favor of a more popular approach. I’m actually shocked that the American Dietetic Association isn’t a big part of this! I am really looking forward to some further investigatory work of exactly where the funding is coming from, and I’m betting we will see something really enlightening once it’s revealed.

Let me supplement this by saying what most of us know already. You can indeed do (and many people have done) any diet or eating plan in a non-optimal way. Low-fat dieters can eat lots of lean protein, fruits and veggies, or they can eat a tremendous amount of low-fat cookies instead. Low-carbers can eat a nice array of whole foods - meats, fish, cheese, nuts, veggies, and fruits, but they can also eat only fast-food hamburgers fried in trans fats with highly processed cheese but without the bun, low-carb candy, and low-carb ice cream. If these groups truly wanted to educate people about how they could eat better, instead of using the same old myths and scare tactics, they could have taken the high road and suggested a whole-foods, optimal approach to low-carb eating, such as one advocated in Protein Power. This group says that people are eating fewer fruits and veggies because they think they are not part of a low-carb plan. If so, why not simply educate those people that they can and should get pleanty of high-fiber/low-carb fruits and veggies even on a carb-restricted diet? Because this group has not been formed to educate, it’s been formed in hopes that they can scare a lot of people away from low-carb entirely, and back into carb-centric diet. They have a vendetta against Atkins because his company, and others that have been part of the low-carb movement, have made a lot of money, whereas the Krispy Cremes, the pasta makers, bakeries, juice producers, and anyone else whose product or service is antithetical to low-carb is now losing money. It’s so transparent it’s laughable, if it weren’t also so sad.

A local TV station in Miami did a piece recently about how many vegetarians have flocked to low-carb plans like the South Beach Diet. Their reaction is basically shock. They can’t believe that what has been painted as a meat and butter diet by their own kind can actually be done by someone who doesn’t eat meat.

Many vegetarians out there have the same opinion of low-carb plans, as they are characterized as plans about meat and nothing else, but they aren’t. That is one of the stereotypes that will forever haunt low-carbers. Until, of course, enough vegetarians decide to try the diet and find that it is doable without meat. Sure it’s harder because things that are lower in carbs and higher in protein and fat are generally animal based, but not always. Soy products are a good example. The stricter a vegetarian is in terms of what he or she will eat will also make a difference. If eggs and dairy are eaten, they provide more choices. Fish and shellfish provide even more, although some wouldn’t call those who eats fish and shellfish true vegetarians.

Vegans, on the other hand, are another matter. Vegans eat no animal products whatsoever. Basically, they would have to eat primarily soy products for their diet, because practically anything else they eat is mostly carbohydrate. Although the whole issue of whether soy is healthy for you is becoming more controversial, it’s probably a safe bet that eating 90% of your calories from soy is probably not going to be the greatest thing.

In any case, I have this wish that one day vegetarians will not see the low-carb movement or low-carbers as their nemesis, and likewise low-carbers will welcome vegetarians into an eating plan that so many people have found to be beneficial. Many vegetarians, of course, give up meat for religious or spiritual reasons, and that’s fine, that is a personal choice and I will not begrudge anyone of this. However, I would just in kind not like to be judged for what is a personal choice to eat meat. If meat eaters can manage not to make fun of (ethical) vegetarians for liking animals to much to eat them, and (ethical) vegetarians can manage not to condemn meat eaters their personal choice to do something humans (and animals) have been doing since we existed on this planet, then maybe, just maybe, we can obtain world peace.

WebMD has an article about a recent study that supposedly pits two potential ways of eating low carb, one which has more fat, one that has less. The problem is that the study conducted was NOT on low-carb. According to the study, both groups, the high-fat and the more “balanced” group both consumed the same number of carbs, 37% of total calories! Perhaps this is lower carb than the typical American diet, but only slightly.

Let’s figure out what how many carbs these people were consuming. Let’s estimate about 2,000 calories. 37% of that is 740 calories of carbs. 1 gram of carbohydrate is 4 calories, so 740/4 = 167 grams of carbohydrates! Even a pretty calorically-restricted diet of 1500 calories would still mean over 125 grams. For those unfamiliar with low-carb plans, generally speaking, the initial part of the diet which would last 2 weeks, or sometimes longer if the dieter chooses, restricts one to somewhere between 20 and 40 grams of carbs. A second phase differs between plans, but is probably going to be anywhere between 25g and 60g. The third and final phase, which is usually called “maintenance” because you go on it once you’ve reached your goal and now need only to maintain your weight, also varies not just on the plan but on the individual based on what level of carbs they can consume while not gaining. Let’s just say that this would probably be somewhere between 50g and 120g. For a few people it might be lower, and for a few higher, but probably most people would fit somewhere within this wide range. Now, even at 125g, you are exceeding what the vast majority of low-carb dieters consume in carbs even on the phase they reach once they’ve already lost all their weight. At 167g, you are consuming probably three to four times the amount of carbs that the average low-carber (all phases here) is.

The study, which was only for 12 weeks and looking at all of 19 dieters did find that there was no difference in either weight or health factors. But again, these folks were NOT on a low-carb diet.

What I found beyond ridiculous were the obligatory comments of the “expert” dietician, Althea Zanecosky.

“In a high-fat diet, you end up leaving out a majority of fruits and vegetables that have been very much applauded for positive effects on long-term health and weight,” says Zanecosky. “For 25 years I’ve been a dietitian, and I’ve always advised fruits and vegetables. They are very pleasant foods to eat. To not have a banana on my cereal or strawberries over my yogurt would be awful!”

My first comment is: who determines what is “high”? A low-fat dieter might consider a tablespoon of fat a significant amount, but high is a relative term. Secondly, just because your diet is high in fat doesn’t mean that you can’t eat pleanty of vegetables and fruit. I do, and millions of others who eat low-carb plans do as well. Perhaps we don’t have 5 pieces of fruit a day, but who’s to say that eating all that fruit isn’t excessive? Sure, according to Zanecosky, it’s been “very much applauded” but I do not see studies backing up eating a diet of primarily fruits and vegetables. This is not what we were evolved to eat. Our ancestors way before the recent advent of agriculture did not have easily obtainable fruits and vegetables, and those that were found in the wild were much less edible, not having been bred and crossbred by farmers over multiple generations to yield the highly nutritive species we have today.

Basically what Zanecosky is saying here is this: “I have always recommended this, so it must be right, and I could never actually admit to being wrong, and furthermore these foods are pleasant, so they must be good for you in any quantity, and finally, it would just be awful to have to give up something that I’m used to eating.” Well, gee, althea, that convinced me!

The problem is that these so-called “experts” are simply toting this party line that has been honed over the last 25 or 30 years. Following their advice has gotten this country fatter and less healthy than ever before. “But you’re not following our advice” the dieticians cry. Well, certainly not everyone is, and especially not now that the success and popularity of low-carb has thrown cold-water on their movement. But plenty of people did try to follow the low-fat/high-carb regime that these dieticians evangelized for years and it simply did not work or could not be followed over the long haul.

The dieticians mantra and message has failed, and yet they are still given credence, still looked at by the press as the oracles of health. Why? This makes no sense to me. I don’t care if they studied about nutrition for 2 years or 6 years, the problem is that the schools of nutrition have a very official stance on what should and shouldn’t be eaten for good health and weight loss. There is simply no debate. Or at least there hasn’t been. It would be interesting to find out whether the current surge of low-carb plans out there has actually started an internal debate within nutrition schools or whether this has simply made them all the more defensive and uncompromising in all of their students holding the party line.

I sometimes think of myself as someone who want’s to be super-organized (anal?) but my laziness and propensity to get distracted get in the way! I do feel a lot better when things around me are neat and organized, does that count?

I think my first PIM (Personal Information Manager) software that I used must have been Time and Chaos, which was a pretty sophisticated application even way back in the early 90’s. My brother introduced it to me, or maybe it was the other way around. Time and Chaos is still out there and apparently was just completely rewritten. The problem, though, is that if you want to have a solution that a lot of people support, you are probably looking at Microsoft Outlook. But more on that below.

After a while I found Lotus Organizer, which was a cute application which had a more graphical interface based on a date-planner.

Eventually, in ’97 or ’98, I started Using MS Outlook. I liked the fact that it was both an email client as well as an organizer in one. It was the first such integrated solution that I knew of. I finally made the switch and have been using it since. I still think a lot of the features in Time and Chaos and Lotus Organizer were/are more intuitive, but what are you going to do? MS is that 50,000 lb gorilla that is supported by all the other devices out there (phones, PDA’s, etc.) for synching. Of course most organizers can import and export via CSV files and such, but more integrated synching seems limited to only a handful, and Outlook is at the top of that list.

My goal basically is to have one database of contacts, tasks, appointments, etc. that synchs as seamlessly as possible between my home computer, mobile device, and whatever computer I happen to be using away from home (be it my own laptop or a friend’s computer or a public computer at a library, etc.).

In this vein I’ve tried a number of things. One was an Intellisync Go Anywhere (no longer available), which lets you host your Outlook Data and access it from any web browser. The problem with this is that you need your computer to be on and connected to the internet at all times. Mine is, but there’s always issues where the connection might go down and with my luck I would have just left for vacation when some service interruption causes the router to freeze up and require a manual resetting! Also, it was just slow. This was undoubtedly because my upstream pipe is 128KBps!

The other issue that I’ve been wanting to solve for a while is just the whole management of personal email between home and work. I used to work for a place where I had Outlook installed and I would just upload my Outlook data file (at that time it was 10-20MB) to an ftp site, redownload it at work, and then do this again when going from work to home. Quite a few times I would forget or not have the time to wait and with a somewhat iffy connection I would sometimes start the transfer only to get home later and find that it would crap out (or this would happen in the morning. When this did happen I would have to change it so that my messages were not deleted off the server until I got back to my most recent data file, and then redownload the more recent mail and then finally change it back to delete messages off the server. A major pain, as you can see. Eventually I ended up using mainly a web client at work, but once I got home and downloaded my mail to Outlook, it was no longer available on the web! Sure, I could have left a lot of stuff out there, but what with storage limits at the time and not wanting to rely on my web connection for doing everything with email, that just wasn’t going to work.

Then I found out about Fusemail, which is a company that offers a bunch of services that go towards what I was looking for. First, it lets you collect email from various accounts – or “fuse” your email accounts into one. Second, instead of the ubiquitous pop protocol, it offers IMAP, which basically means that the email stays on the server and your client (be it the web or a specific IMAP client like Outlook) is simply a “browser” of sorts reading headers and only retrieving what the user wants to see at a given moment. I still had the issue that I didn’t want to keep all my email up on this IMAP account, and not on my computer, because what if the site goes down, or goes out of business, etc? Also, storage quota was limited, so I couldn’t keep everything up there. So what I did was I would keep the last 3-weeks or so of email, and save the rest back to a local Outlook file. Fusemail also offers an “Outlook plugin” which basically recreates some other types of Outlook data on their server, like Calendar, Tasks, etc. You can synch this with your Outlook File. What I found was that getting this to work properly was troublesome. I got some excellent support from the Fusemail owner, but a few things have caused me to look elsewhere. One is that the web interface to all this Outlook data is uneven. The email client is pretty darn nice, but others are fairly bare bones and some don’t even display things really accurately. For example, if I have a multi-day event and look on the 30-day calendar, it is only listed for the first day of the event. I’m sure that Fusemail will eventually fix these problems, but I just have no idea how big their staff is. It very well could be two guys in the owner’s basement. It could be a dozen more than that, and it will likely grow with it’s increasing success, but right now I’m looking for something more polished.

I think I would have stayed with Fusemail if I had not looked around for an exchange host and found one that was only a couple bucks more per month than my Fusemail account. 1and1.com offers the cheapest hosting package for exchange that I’ve seen, coming it at just $6.99. They also offer a bunch of web hosting packages, but the Exchange hosting is what I needed. Basically, Exchange it Microsoft’s product that takes your Outlook data and makes it into a client-server account, rather than just a stand-alone application on an individual computer. It does a lot more than this, including letting people communicate between their Outlook data – for example schedule meetings and notify/invite others, etc., but the main thing is that it keeps all your data in a central location and then lets you access it in different ways from any computer or device that has the requisite client. So I can use my actual Outlook program at home, but the “Outlook Web Interface” via a regular web browser at home. The web looks and acts so much like the regular Outlook client that it’s easy to get confused which you are actually using. The one big disadvantage is that the web interface is about 1% as configurable as Outlook itself is, which is annoying to anyone who likes to customize their display, or even do some editing of things that isn’t possible on the web.

You of course still have the problem that all your data is kept on a server, and if that goes down you are out of luck. But I think I’ve finally gotten to a point where I’ve figured out an adequate solution for this. First of all, 1and1 gives you enough storage space – 500MB – to where you don’t have to worry too much about running out of room unless you do a lot of emailing of large files. My idea is that you archive your Outlook data every few months, but you just archive the stuff that’s 6 months or older. Of course, this needs to be based on how reliable your exchange host is, and I have no idea how reliable 1and1 will be. I just signed up yesterday. As one of the cheapest out there, I have to consider the possibility they won’t be one of the most reliable, but they look like they have their act together. I will say that setting up the account and getting it working the way I wanted to was not a quick and easy process. It wasn’t horribly difficult, and the information is available on their site, but you do have to hunt for it a bit and certain things do not happen instantly, so after you activate your account, you may not actually be able to log in for a little bit. Or email confirmations with activation codes may not arrive in your inbox instantly, but only after several minutes. This can cause a bit of confusion, but in the end is not too debilitating. I just wouldn’t recommend it for someone whose not particularly technical/computer-savvy. I will give 1and1.com credit for their speed, though. At least for the Web interface. It is very fast to the point where sometimes it really does seem like I’m using Outlook locally…

Now, some of you may be thinking – why not just host your own? This may be ok for those who are lucky (rich?) enough to have a huge pipe going to their house, or basically use their corporate network for their personal use, but neither of these apply. Plus, the cost of an exchange server is prohibitive, plus I simply don’t have time or patience to do all the configuring and playing with such a server even if I had everything else. Once you own your own home, or at least if you own it and take care of it yourself, you find that the free time to play with servers is not all that plentiful – unless you are already a network or systems admin by profession and so all this stuff comes to you second nature.

Coke C2 has apparently made it to stores, or at least to Carbwire. For those who’ve yet to hear anything about it, it is Coke’s answer to the low-carb craze of 2004. Lets ignore the fact that diet sodas have zero carbs, Coke thought it would be a good marketing move to create a new soda specifically marketed at low-carbers. So instead of the zero carbs per bottle, you now have 24g per 16oz bottle. For most Atkinites or even more moderate plans such as South Beach or Protein Power, this would constitute all or most of your daily regimen of carbs. What a brilliant idea! Waste all your carbs on high-fructose corn syrup instead of fibrous veggies and fruits and thus become a walking stereotype of the supposed lack of nutrition of a low-carb diet. Aside from the harmful HFCS, C2 still contains all the phosphorus and carbonation, both of which could potentially promote bone loss, and lets not forget all the wonderful artificial preservatives and flavoring.

Some people have shunned diet soda because of the artificial sweeteners like Nutrasweet (Aspartame) whose safety has been questioned. A newer sweetener, Splenda (or Sucralose) shows to be a little more promising, but really there haven’t been enough studies to make it really clear that it is absolutely safe to consume it on a daily basis. But at least some companies, like the makers of Snapple and Diet Rite, have adopted Splenda over Nutrasweet. Still, as much as I like carbonation, that could be just as much of an issue over the long run.

The thing to do, of course, is to wean one’s self off of sweetness in general. Just as with most things, when you don’t eat something as often, or in as concentrated amounts, you tend to get more and more sensitive to the taste and to taste in general. After I stopped putting artificial sweeteners in my coffee (and almost everything else that was “supposed to be” sweet, I started tasting the natural sweetness in foods. You wouldn’t believe how sweet almonds can taste, for example, when you don’t consume sugar or artificial sweeteners on a regular basis. But of course this isn’t easy to do. Lots of stuff tastes pretty sour or bitter without sugar or artificial sweetener added to it, you just have to trust that this will fade eventually and taste buds CAN be retrained. A lot of people won’t have the patience for this and won’t except eating something that tastes bad even for one sitting, but all I can say is that if you can manage to suffer through a few weeks of not getting that sweet-fix, you will be able to get it continuously after that without any added sugar or artificial sweetener…

Coke is just trying to jump on the bandwagon of low-carb without offering a truly low-carb product, and with the additional caveat of offering a product which has pleanty of other potential harmful components other than the sugar. Even if you don’t try my “shock therapy” idea of sharpening your sweet-tooth, you still may find one thing without sugar to be pretty sweet. I find it very sweet. It’s a type of herbal tea called Good Earth. It’s the “original flavor” that has the spices that make it taste sweet. I steep it for a pretty long time, maybe 20 minutes or even longer, then drink it hot or put it in the fridge and make it iced tea. To me, anyway, it simply tastes like it has lots of sugar in it, but at least according to the carton it’s just regular unsweetened herbal tea.

The Sidekick Sync petition I posted about last week has been making some news! RCR Wireless News had a piece about it on Friday and Mike Dano, the author of the piece, actually contacted T-Mobile and Danger for comment. Unfortunately, though, T-Mobile’s comment was not very encouraging:

“We are aware of the petition and continue to evaluate new Sidekick offerings, but at this time, do not have plans to launch PIM synch.”

Although some on hiptop.com have seen this quote as confirmation that sync will never come to the Sidekick and are vowing to jump ship either immediately, as soon as their contract runs out, or when the new Motorola MPX comes out, I don’t see this as any more definitive than the “information” that we’ve received from T-Mobile about sync to date. Actually it’s less definitive. Up until now we haven’t gotten anything official from T-Mobile itself regarding sync, just unofficial reports and rumors from T-Mobile reps who have been continually saying that sync is just around the corner so to speak. T-Mobile, to the best of my knowledge, has never spoken officially to this and so this comment doesn’t close the door on sync, nor does it promise it. Danger, of course, has been talking about sync, but they could be talking all day about how they have this great sync product and if T-Mobile doesn’t offer it, it doesn’t really do most Sidekick users any good – here I’m assuming that the majority of those who own Sidekicks are T-Mobile subscribers, which I think is a pretty safe bet.

As far as the petition is concerned, we’ve gotten a decent number of signatures so far, but then I don’t know what to expect for this type of petition. I can only ask those of you who feel strongly about this to ask your friends who you know have Sidekicks or are considering buying one to sign. Here are some statistics to keep you entertained:

The two top states represented are California at 15.8% and New York at 12.9%

13.7% of those who signed estimated they would drop the Sidekick in the next 3 months if sync was not offered, and another 28.4% estimated 3-6 months.

Over 60% of those who signed have belonged to T-Mobile for more than a year and over 30% have been subscribers for over two years.

Here are a few of the comments that people have given:

“I will cancel my service with T-mobile and buy the Motorola MPX when it comes out if this feature is not added.”

“Been wanting the Sidekick until I realized this feature didn’t work. I need to synch!”

“Tmobile has shown nil motivation in keeping the Sidekick current and innovative. Where’s some real 3rd party apps, Tmobile?Why are you holding the Sidekick hostage?”

“I have contacted Danger and T-Mobile twice a month since March 2004. Danger blames T-Mobile and T-mobile blames Danger. Even if we get synch in a month, I may never use T-mobile again.”

“Mark/Space has already developed a product that works for Mac users, and Intellisync currently works for Windows users on C&W, please let Mark/Space use the product they developed. Afterall, changing your thoughts on this once M/S was ready to ship their product wasn’t very nice.”

Those of you who own the T-Mobile Sidekick I’m sure have been following the story of “synch” or synchronization. Basically, many PDA’s and PDA-phone’s out there (The Blackberry, Treos, and various PocketPC phones as well as other “smartphones”) have had this capability for years. It is the ability to transfer back and forth data between your phone/device and your computer. Specifically, it allows you to transfer PIM data (contacts, calendar, tasks, notes, etc.) back and forth so that if you make a change or addition on your computer, the next time you “synch” it shows up on your phone, or if you make it on your phone, it shows up on your computer.

The Danger Sidekick is a phone that I’ve owned for a year and a half now. It has some great features like the ability to get pushed email like the blackberry, do AOL instant messaging via a very nice and fast interface, and do web-browsing fairly quickly where proxy servers downsize images and remove and reformat items to better fit the Sidekicks smaller screen. The keyboard is one of the best out there for a small device like this. It has all those PIM apps like Contacts, To-Do, Calendar, etc., and you can even import some of your data over the web, but it is only a one-way process and not a very flexible one.

Danger has promised full synch capabilities for the Sidekick since before it came out - almost 2 years ago. Rumors have abounded of it being ready for almost as long, but somehow it hasn’t been offered yet. Recently it actually was offered, but only to those using the Sidekick via another wireless provider, Cable and Wireless, which doesn’t offer service in the U.S. T-Mobile is really the only game in town for most U.S. Sidekick users and so we are beholden to them. It has been vitally clear on the Yahoo! Group I manage as well as on hiptop.com, the primary forum for Sidekick users, that synch is a critical and yearned for feature. Users have been clamoring for it for a long time. Yet it isn’t offered yet and we have no word from T-Mobile whether it will be any time soon. T-Mobile, perhaps, needs something more visible to show how many of its customers need this functionality and so in that vein I created an online petition. I am hopeful that if we get enough signatures, we can push T-Mobile into offering a functionality that is long overdo (and which they already offer via other devices like the Blackberry). If you are a current Sidekick user, or are considering buying one, I urge you to sign the petition and alleviate probably the most glaring ommission in what is otherwise an extremely useful product!

Wonderful! Not that Self Magazine is a paragon of journalism, nor Jessica Simpson a paragon of nutrition, but unfortunately celebrities to have influence over a large group of people. It seems Simpson was “messed up” because she couldn’t get through the 2-week induction part of the diet and so had to cave to all the temptations around her. I’m not sure how this is getting “messed up.” I think instead it shows that Simpson has little self-discipline, or who knows, maybe she was just doing a creative version of Atkins that was 80% fake carb products, with a bunch of low-fat food thrown in? We have no idea mainly because there’s just not enough info presented. You hear rumors of various celebs doing one diet or another but few are outspoken advocates who trumpet their own experiences. I think a couple of exceptions here would be Marry Lou Henner and Suzanne Summers, but those are the only two I can think of.

Just picked up a new Sony TV this weekend. I did some research on the net and decided that this would be a good set for us. It’s gotten great reviews, can do high-definition with an additional receiver, and is not so huge at 34 inches that it’s going to visually take over our entire living room. Oh, it’s widescreen too, so I can now look at DVD’s in their full aspect ratio. So far we don’t have it hooked to anything but a normal antennae and so the reception is pretty horrible, but we’ll be getting DirectTV installed soon. I have watched a couple of DVD’s on it, though, and I must say that it brings a whole new dimension to watching them - especially animated stuff like Monster’s Inc. or Finding Nemo. There is just so much textural detail that I never noticed even on a 27″ Sony with good (but standard) resolution.

Now, although I should know this stuff already, I am learning that I will need to calibrate the thing properly in order to get the best picture. It is hard to understand this when it already looks so amazing, and I suppose being slightly color-blind doesn’t help either! I have ordered the Avia Guide to Home Theater Home theater information and setup DVD which I read was the best for those not already serious home-theater geeks. It helps you calibrate all the stuff you need plus gives you a lot of good information about the concepts. The one thing that has me a little confused is whether I’ll need access to some special “service menu” that I have no idea how to get into. The TV menu has some basic settings like color, brightness, tint, color temp, etc., but I got the impression from a little bit of reading at The Home Theater Forum that there’s a whole lot more.

I’ll try to post follow-ups to this with more information as I get more educated about it. Oh yeah, I got it from Circuit City, but I think you can order it from Amazon.com and pick it up from a local Circuit City. I don’t know why you would do this though. The thing is seriously heavy, and very bulky to boot! It weighs in at 201 lbs, which, even if I were to share that with another person I could manage for maybe ten seconds at best! I thankfully had it delivered for an extra $45. The guys who delivered it were extremely curteous and also hooked the unit up to my dvd player and satellite receiver and actually preconfigured the tv and the dvd player. Not a bad deal for avoiding a hernia! I had them put it on my current Ikea TV hutch, or whatever you call it, but we are getting a new one from Storehouse that will match the bookcases that are right next to it in the living room, so I will have to move the damn thing, if only sliding it a couple of feet. But still something I’m not looking forward to!