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One of the best things about winter — yes, there are some — is how clear the sky gets at night.
I’m OK with the fact that I probably play too many video games and watch too many sports. I’m not that important, and no one is relying on me for survival as of yet. But I learned something the other day from a game I was playing. Indulge me, for this requires some explanation.
Disney it ain’t. I think you know what I mean: all those lovely Walt Disney cartoon movies, in which the birds flutter lovingly around the sky, and the fawns gambol in the meadows, the butterflies flit about like ballerinas, and the ever-so-cute bunnies and squirrels and chipmunks scurry — the word probably was invented to describe cartoon rodents and lagomorphs — nearby.
The Imagio is a phone that would be easy to overlook. After all, not only does it face the usual opponent, the iPhone that clearly influenced its design, it also faces the Motorola Droid, which is Verizon’s most newsworthy phone in years – and deservedly so. That the Imagio has been somewhat lost in the dizzying lead up to the Droid’s launch is too bad; the Imagio deserves some attention of its own.
A very good friend of mine directed me to a recent piece in the Atlantic Monthly on the state of health in the US, and the delivery of said services. I say it that way because the author, David Goldhill, says an overemphasis on health management (epitomized in the phrase, “health care”) as opposed to prevention and overall well-being, may be in large measure responsible for exploding costs, and the number of preventable deaths by infection.
My little scribbling this week comes to you from a 20-year-old, pristinely restored Northgate OmniKey keyboard. Back when the crust of the Earth was cooling and computing was young, the Northgate company was one of many upstarts that made very good personal computers. What set them apart, though, were their keyboards. They had a pleasant, clicky feel that many users loved. Northgate sold their keyboards separately, but apparently few people then bought their computers, too, so they went out of business. This made having a Northgate keyboard even cooler.
Verizon is on a bold streak. After launching the “There’s a Map for that” campaign squarely targeting what many would call Apple and AT&T’s key weakness – network reliability – the airwaves have now been covered by “iDon’t” ads that compare what the iPhone doesn’t do with what ”Droid does.” So, what does the Droid do and does it do it well? When the device launches tomorrow, do you want to be in line to buy one?
I have noticed that some celebrants of Reformation Day see it as a day to mark God’s freeing of the true church from the bonds of Catholic slavery even as God delivered Israel from its enslavement to Egypt. Surely it cannot be reduced to such a stark comparison. Surely we would not cast all those who did not subscribe to the Reformer’s pleas to the side of tyranny and evil. So what do we do with this day?
It was the first gray, windy, wintry day, a day that could be in November or February. Such days can chill one to the bone, physically but spiritually, too.