hwork.org

1) All 50 States vote on the same day for the presidential primaries.
2) Eliminate the Electoral College and elect the president via the popular vote.
3) Kill Gerrymandering of congressional districts and force state’s to draw lines in boring ways.

Here’s something I did twice in the past two days: buy music. First, I wanted to listen to some TMBG, so I checked out Amazon’s brand-spanking new MP3 store. It’s gotten great reviews, even from iTunes Music Store converts. It’s all non-DRM, and cheaper. However, they didn’t have the original TMBG album, Flood, and so I didn’t buy from them. Maybe this means their selection ain’t good, maybe it doesn’t; all it means for me is that I bought from iTunes that day.

This morning, I woke up to Flower yelling into my GMail window that, finally, new iTunes firmware was released. Very cool. The big feature unleashed was the iTunes Music Store — Mobile. It only works on Wifi — can’t use EDGE. So I decided to try it and bought Kanye West’s Graduation. It was blazing fast. Like woah. Hoo-rah! Burrrrrrow.

Got stuck in safari. Home button didn't work. Holding down the power
button did the trick l. Cant wait for OS upgrades.

Trip notes. Every time the family takes a trip, the dadster writes
keeps a journal. I want to take this idea and digitize it. We could
do a blog. But I think a podcast would do better. Maybe even a video
podcast–that would be nuts, yo!

So, a podcast then.

So, I’ve had this idea for a while and have discussed it with Mark. I want to know, from someone who seems smart, if this idea is legit.

Banks hold people’s money and give out loans. They make money by taking their client’s money and making investments, typically low risk ones. They also collect interest on loans.

In Las Vegas, if everyone won the slots at the exact same time, the casinos would be screwed. Banks are the same way; if everyone withdrew their money at the exact same time, the banks would be screwed. The banks have some money at hand, of course, and they have that antique robot you are keeping inside the local bank’s vault, but the rest of the money invested.

Which brings me to my radical model: banks should hold peoples money for free. No fees; no ATM fees, no yearly fees, no overdraft fees. They get away with this crap because all other banks do it. But I’m pretty sure banks make enough money just on investments, and that a bank could just do that and be dandy. Imagine how simple this bank would be, and how much people would want to be in business with them.

You actually read all of the ‘Unauthorized Activity on your Bank of America account’ phishing emails.

Remembered the best way to post here from ze iPhone: email. It’s pretty easy to do with blogger.

Also, Mark and I finally have found the answer to the iPhone’s quickness on a good Wifi network. @ the Apple Store, the reception was good but the phones were but slow in terms of loading web pages. That led us to believe that we were on EDGE, and not Wifi. Well, we were on Wifi and that made us slink a little bit; we were braced for EDGE to be slow, but not good ole Wifi! How could Wifi be so slow?

Well, it turns out that it isn’t. We’re now comcastic in the apartment, and despite being surrounded by a bazillion networks, Wifi is zippy on our iPhones. It takes a bit longer to render things, but overall we are very happy. Mark says: it’s bad for Apple to have slow Wifi networks at their stores. I agree.

Tucker Hermans now has a blog, detailing the life of a left-leaning, german-speaking, non-bearded dude living in Germany.

So like the iPhone is out and stuffs. We got video for the iPod. We got wifi now. These products will obviously get iteratively better and more sexy. The iPhone — of which I am a new owner (4 gig for $323 total) — will get gps, faster network, smaller, better screen, bigger hard drives, an iSight (frelling sweet!), etc, etc, and etc. Apple TV may keep going forward (though it’s not like they’re pushing it much). The iTunes Store basically has every kind of content now, and it seems much more like wrangling with the content guys about what goes in it. Leopard will come out and that’ll be sweet, and the iMacs, Macbooks will march forward with bigger hdds, faster cores, better batts, etc, etc.

But what’s the next big thing? It seems like most of their killer cards have been played. When they first announced the iTunes music store, you knew that the next step was video. Same thing with the iPod. Then came the iPhone rumors, an ‘all-in-one’ device. The Apple TV was on the horizon as they created the content store and wanted to get it to the most obvious place, the TV. I can’t see the next awesome thing: they sell great computers, they’ve gone mobile, they distribute great content… and now what? What’s the next thing to droll over?

Here are a few ideas:
-Better Laptops. I’m thinking flash-based, multi-touch, some truly thin (like paper) mobile laptops could shake things up a bit.
-iPhone ** 2. This space is huge. There are so many things to work on. Up it up, Apple.
-Home Media Center-ish thing? The iPod of DVRs or something? Dunno.

Bowdoin just added a cool new feature for off-site access: you can now see the ‘internal view’ of the Bowdoin Directory. So, if you’re off-campus but still have a valid Bowdoin user account, you can search for people just like you’re on-campus. Pretty sweet.