Yearly Archives: 2007

Vote for local businesses as the best 4

This entry was posted in food Ypsilanti on by (updated 5881 days ago)

I got an email from Kate Conat tonight that Channel 4 in Detroit is running a poll right now called 4 the Best with all kinds of SE Michigan businesses nominated in various categories.  Locally we’ve got several nominees including Cafe Luwak for best sandwich shop, the Sidetrack for best burger and Smokehouse Blues for best wings.  Zingerman’s Bakehouse is also in the running for best bakery.  Head over to www.clickondetroit.com/4thebest and cast your votes for some local businesses.

This entry was posted in cars Ypsilanti on by

smart fortwoIt’s that time of year again, the Art Fairs are back! The action kicks off this weekend at the Corner Brewery with the Shadow Art Fair. From noon to midnight on Saturday July 14 over forty artists will be hawking their wares amidst live music from Patrick Elkins, Black jake and the Carnies and more. Once the fun is over at the brewery if you have any cash left over you can over to A2 for some other fair. Actually their is a reason why some of you might want to head down to South University between Wednesday and Saturday to check out the Smart USA road show. The tiny Smart ForTwo is coming to the US market early next year and they are touring the country this Summer to let people check out the cars. If you’re interested you can even get a test drive in a Smart.

Reasons not to buy an iPhone 4

This entry was posted in business technology on by

iphoneJust in case you haven’t been paying any attention for the past six months there is a new cell phone going on sale next week. Some company called Apple is putting it out. Apple apparently has a reputation for great industrial design in their products and this phone sure looks cool. Now looking cool and actually working well don’t necessarily go hand in hand. Certainly an iPod looks cool and the click wheel interface definitely works great, but the touch screen interface of the iPhone is a whole new ball game. It remains to be seen how well it work and it may be great. Or not! Not having actually tried an iPhone I’ll stick to outlining some other reasons not to buy one regardless of how well it works.

  1. AT&T. This alone should be all the reason anyone needs to stay away from the iPhone regardless of how good it may be. AT&T has cooperated willingly in the NSA domestic spying program and for that they should be punished by everyone refusing to do business with them. They have also recently announced plans to monitor the data that their DSL customers are sending and receiving so that they can notify the extortionists at the RIAA and MPAA when suspect content is being transmitted.
  2. Cost. The 4GB model will be $499 and the 8GB version is $599. These are the kinds of prices usually charged for unlocked phones that can be used with any cellular provider. Usually when you buy a phone from a company like AT&T or Verizon they subsidize the price in exchange for signing up for a one or two year contract. If you leave your contract early you pay a hefty early termination fee. AT&T will be charging the ETF even though they are not subsidizing the phone.
  3. More Cost. The phone goes on sale next Friday and AT&T has just released the service plans for the iPhone and they start at $60 a month for 450 minutes.  If you have a family plan you’re SOL, no sharing minutes.
  4. If you currently have a GSM phone and plan, you can’t just buy an iPhone and pop in yor SIM card.  You have to sign up for a new two year service plan with AT&T
  5. With a regular iPod you can enable disk mode and drag files onto the drive and use it for portable storage.  The iPhone has no disk mode.
  6. With most phones today you can drop any mp3 file on the phone and use it as a ringtone.  The iPhone you can’t use your own files as ring tones.  You’ll have to buy from AT&T.
  7. You can’t record video with the iPhone camera, stills only
  8. You can’t swap out the battery.  If you have a cell phone that you use with any regularity you know the chances of the phone having any useful life by the middle of the second year is slim.  Presumably you can open up an iPhone like an iPod and replace the battery but it’s not trivial.  No one should sell a phone or media player without a user replaceable battery.
  9. The durability of the glass face on the iPhone is still a very open question.  I’d wait and see on that one.
  10. Finally and most importantly, AT&T is the only service provider. See reason No. 1 above.

Ypsi Board of Education to vote on reinstating Braves nickname! 2

This entry was posted in Announcements [A] schools Ypsilanti on by

The agenda for the June 25 Ypsi School Board meeting is out and Tom Reiber has put the following item on the action items list.

     h. Ypsilanti High School Nickname Reinstatement Recommendation (Enclosure #9)

All of us with some common sense need to call Mr. Reiber and tell him that the students have selected a new nickname and it’s time for the adults to start acting like grown ups instead of whiny little babies and get over it.  The kids are.

You can reach Tom Reiber at home at (734) 434-1425 and by e-mail at techtom@comcast.net.  Everyone should come out to the board meeting on Monday night and speak out against this.

Statement to the Board of Education on sex ed and the Braves 10

This entry was posted in schools Ypsilanti on by

Last Monday night I made the following statement before the Ypsilanti Public Schools Board of Trustees during the public comments and I wanted to share it here.

I’ve got two kids in the Ypsilanti Schools. My daughter has been in the Ypsilanti public schools for ten years and my son for seven. In that decade aside from ridiculously cursory HIV awareness, they’ve gotten absolutely zero reproductive health education. The fact that this district has failed to provide any comprehensive health education to it’s students is an absolute disgrace. Just because one very vocal opponent has repeatedly spoken up at every single meeting of this board and some administrators may be squeamish about teaching kids about condoms, it’s not an excuse for continuing to stall on a very important element of these kids education.

Earlier this year you saw the results of a survey that was conducted by the Reproductive Health Advisory Board where almost seven hundred parents overwhelmingly said they want comprehensive reproductive health education. Some people may want to just tell kids not to have sex before marriage but the reality is that sticking your head in the sand like that will do absolutely nothing to protect kids. No matter how much you urge kids not to have sex the reality is that it will happen. Not all of them will but a significant number will. They always have and they always will. Believing anything else is deluding yourself.

Given that we need to make sure that we teach kids about healthy relationships, alternatives to intercourse and how to minimize risks if they do choose to have sex. The reproductive health advisory board has spent more than two years evaluating curricula and have chosen a comprehensive plan. They presented it to you and in public presentations. It’s time to stop stalling just because certain members of this administration and a very vocal minority of the population are uncomfortable with reproductive health education. The parents have spoken and the kids need this. We must face the reality that kids will have sex and most parents are just as uncomfortable as you are when it comes to talking about sex to them. Any parents that don’t want their kids to get this education are free to opt out of either the whole program or any individual lesson.

Finally on an unrelated note, this board in a previous iteration made a difficult and correct decision to retire the Braves nickname. It’s just a nickname and people need to get over it and move on. It offends a group within our community and tradition doesn’t make it OK. I urge you not to re-open this issue and not to restore the name. Starting this fall and over the coming years the kids will get used to a new name and within a few years none of them will care about the old name. Meanwhile alumni will always have their memories. Thank You.

What the … !

This entry was posted in TV on by (updated 5887 days ago)

After storming into TV viewers collective consciousness eight and a half years ago, The Sopranos stumbled out punch drunk and not knowing when to quit last night. The first two seasons were absolutely brilliant with top notch acting and writing. Ever since then David Chase and his team have taken longer and longer between successive seasons as all manner of famous and not so famous actors have gotten in on the action.

In engineering there is an old saying that in every project there comes a time when you have to shoot the engineers and get on with the job. It appears that someone needed to whack Mr. Chase at some point and finish the damn story about four years ago. As the wait time for each season stretched out the result seemed to be that Chase was just trying to jam in too many meandering, pointless story lines. The Sopranos needed some serious editing, but most definitely not the kind the final episode got last night.

By the time we finished watching that final hour last night, it seemed like they had shot three or four hours of footage from three or four separate scripts produced by different writers and then just through threw together randoms sequences from each into a one hour episode. At the end Chase looked at what they had wrought and just said “Aw Fuck It!” and turned off the lights. That was without a doubt the most unsatisfying ending I have ever seen. For a series that brought us so many brilliant performances over the years along with exposing some great but obscure music to go out in this way was a disgrace.

Positive attention for Ypsi events

This entry was posted in cars Ypsilanti on by

corvairFor those who haven’t been paying attention to my activity over on Autoblog.com I’ve been giving car related events in Ypsi some national blog love of late.  I’ve done features on the Show and Shine, Vintage VW and Orphan Car shows in recent weeks.  If you didn’t get a chance to get down to Riverside Park you can still see some of the vehicles that were on display.  It was nice to see a big turnout for each of the events both from participants and spectators.

Driveway Drive-in

This entry was posted in family stuff this and that on by

saturn outlookMy kids are of an age where they will very likely never get to experience going to a drive-in theater to watch a movie or whatever it is people used to do at drive-ins. However, today I received a Saturn Outlook that I’m driving for a week for a review. As soon as Max got in and saw the rear seat entertainment system he immediately wanted to watch a movie. So he’s been sitting in back row of the Outlook for the past hour and a half watching Little Miss Sunshine on the seven inch screen, complete with a big bowl of popcorn and a drink.

Ideas. not intellectual property

This entry was posted in copyright patents on by (updated 6376 days ago)

Last weekend Mark Helprin published an op-ed piece in the New York Times that essentially argued that copyrights should exist in perpetuity. The essence of his argument is that if he writes something, his descendants for all time should be able to earn a living off of that. That’s kind of like saying that my current employer should continue paying my children and grandchildren and great grandchildren ad infinitum for the work I do now. This is an absurd argument on the face of it and Helprin comes across as a fool for even putting the idea forward. Today Techdirt has a wonderfully articulate rebuttal of Helprin’s idea starting from an explanation of the difference between physical and intellectual property.

The purpose of property is to better manage the allocation of scarce resources. Since the resource is limited and not everyone can have it, property rights and property law make complete sense for a civilized society, allowing those with rights to the property to buy, sell and exchange their property. This allows for resources to be efficiently allocated through commerce and the laws of supply and demand. It’s a sensible system for the best allocation of scarce resources. However, when it comes to infinite resources, there’s simply no need to worry about efficient allocation — since anyone can have a copy.

Perhaps what we need to do to make some progress in this whole discussion is to change the terminology to words that are more accurately represent what we are talking about. The whole term intellectual property should be discarded immediately in favor of Ideas. Once we are talking about Ideas the tone of the argument changes. When a company like HBO or Disney starts talking about getting a perpetual monopoly (and a copyright or patent is a government granted monopoly) on an Idea, it might start getting average people’s attention so that they stand up and say NO MORE! Check out the rest of Techdirt’s article here.