Things I Know

Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. has had more than his share of talent, success, and medical problems.  He announced Monday that he’s taking another medical leave, his third.  Mr. Jobs has a right to medical privacy, but he’s such an integral part of Apple’s success, I believe he should be as open as possible with his stockholders.

Fewer than four weeks to pitchers and catchers now.  If the Jets hadn’t beaten the Patriots on Sunday, sports-talk radio could move on to discussing what star pitchers the Yankees should acquire in order to achieve their God-given entitlement to another World Series championship.

At this point, it doesn’t look like there’s any real purpose to talking about the Mets’ prospects for the 2011 season.  They do seem to be cornering the market on reclamation projects, but that’s about it.

To answer my own question, we don’t have two kinds of mini USB plugs.  One of them is called a micro USB plug.  Nevertheless, the only reason I can see for having both is to sell more cell-phone chargers and connecting cables.

Rep. Giffords, while still in the ICU, reportedly gave her husband a neck rub.  Please join me in praying that her recovery continues to be amazing and goes on to become complete.

Sometimes we learn things on TV that probably shouldn’t be general knowledge.  I learned, for instance, that if you’re going to shoot someone in the head, you have a better chance of killing them or causing devastating brain damage if you shoot from side to side rather than from the front or back.

When I wrote speeches for local government officials, I wrote short ones.  To my mind, almost all speeches by government officials (The Gettysburg Address is an exception) are too long.  That said, the only thing wrong with President Obama’s speech in Tucson is that it was too long.  I did think the audience hooting and cheering to all elements in the program including the Presidents speech was more appropriate to a pep rally than to a memorial service though.

 Clearly bad people as well as good people die too young, so while I like the song, Billy Joel was wrong about that.  Still, former Newsday columnist Ed Lowe died on Sunday at age 64 which was far too young.  And he went through medical hell before it died, including a massive stroke and liver cancer.  Many people loved Ed, respected him, considered him a great talent, or some combination of the three.  I didn’t know him well enough to love him, but I fit comfortably into the other two categories.  The only thing I can think of that’s good about what happened is hundreds, if not thousands of people took the time to let him know they fell into some or all of those three groups before he left us.

I have created a closed loop, and hope I can eventually extract myself from it.  Like everyone else on the planet, I have a gmail account.  Unlike many of them, I never used it.  So, in case anyone ever figured out my correct gmail address, and wanted or needed to contact me, I set it up to forward to an email account I do use.  Then, I bought a Droid phone.  For the uninitiated, Droid phones link most easily to gmail accounts.  So, I set up the other account to forward to my gmail address so I could see my email on my phone.  Now, I have to delete things constantly to stay on top of the two email accounts endlessly forwarding everything to each other.

I’m looking for a reliable way to convert movies and TV shows to MP4 files so I can watch them on my new Droid X phone.  If anyone reading this has a good method, please feel free to let me know what it is.   If it’s free or if the trial version is free, even better.

I’m also looking for a better way to handle podcasts on the phone.  If I use the built-in music app, I have to use proprietary software to load the files, or re-sync the SD card.  Since I have four thousand songs on the phone, re-syncing takes a while.  If I use a file manager to play the podcasts, it calls up the music app to do it, but I can’t then do something else (such as look at a map), and have the podcast keep playing. 

I’ve had the fancy head unit in my truck since July, and still haven’t figured out how to turn it entirely off without using the ignition key to do it.  I know it always has to draw a little power to preserve the memory.  I’m talking about turning it off to the extent of no sound and no video.

I’ve been leaning against a heating pad for two weeks, and my back still hurts.