Betterness by Kawika Holbrook

Misorganized

In a rash attempt to re-organize how I store my digital music, I made iTunes duplicate the listings of 4,000 or so songs. I have to remove them without deleting the actual music files. I've taken more than an hour to remove empties from "¡¡Going Places!!" by Herb Alpert to the Big Night" soundtrack. I won't be able to sync my iPod or listen to shuffled music until I fix this, which should be sometime in November 2005. Sigh.

"She's got flavor."

Hot girls are a dime a dozen at Valley Fair mall, but a coworker just met someone special. "She's got flavor," he says. "She's part something.... I'm not sure what. Spanish, Portuguese, something." In Hawaii, she would be called "hapa." But the word "flavor" suddenly made me think of my fiancee. Her personality has flavor. And it tastes great. I can't wait to get married in a little more than two months.

Paying My Fair Share

A sense of fairness, perhaps, compels me to pay for shareware these days. More likely, though, is a sense of laziness to route my work around limitations inherent in the free versions. I just bought The Missing Sync for Palm OS from Mark/Space, WeatherPop from Glucose Software, and a membership to the well-written Daring Fireball. The Missing Sync, for example, is $40 that willhelp Jenny kiss off the crusty software from Palm and help her better synchronize with Mac OS X apps like Address Book, iCal and Microsoft Entourage. She doesn't care, but I do -- even though she uses her Palm Tungsten E daily and I never have.

Hoarding Bookmarks

I have a habit of leaving 20 or 30 web pages open so I might get around to posting them on this weblog. However, I rarely do. Eventually, I quit my browser and lose everything. I need to post before leaving the page. One less hassle, one less chance to procrastinate. Let's see how this works.

On Your Knees, Mister

Thanks to Froogle, I think I've found my next office chair: the HÅG Balans for $340.00 -- $100 less than Amazon and $200 less than list price. The Balans is smarter way to sit, and I'm on my ass way to much as it is.

What It Means to Serve

JP Morgan Chase Bank One (or whatever it's called today) claims, "The right relationship is everything," and I'd agree. Paying $7 billion more to keep one CEO employed for 24 months is wrong, which is one reason why I transfered the balance of my credit card debt to USAA's credit card. Not only have I avoided paying a dime of interest on my fiancee's engagement ring, but I'm also supporting a financial services company that "Knows what it means to serve." By virtue of my ex-stepfather's service in Vietnam, I am a USAA member. They rebate insurance unnecessary premiums. They provide me inexpensive car insurance, reasonable renter's insurance, and a low-interest credit card. Most of all, their reps answer phones promptly. That makes a world of difference. Just thought I'd write this before going to bed. For some reason, it makes me feel better.

Happy Birthday to US

I saw the America I love on my street tonight. Families sat on their lawns to watch Santa Clara's second-annual Independence Day fireworks display. As I walked the block, whites, blacks, Asians, Indians, Arabs, Hispanics, and more than I could discern camped on their lawns, talked in their languages, drank their beverages, and watched the lights in the sky. This is home, and our home is open to everyone. Bantu refugees are making "remarkable progress" in their new home of Tuscon, "given that they arrived with the most remarkable disadvantages," according to caseworkers quoted in The New York Times. The Bantus survived the trauma of tribal war in Somalia, discrimination in schools and work, and a rural ignorance of Western culture and modern life. They had never seen a clock. "I adjusted to time," Makai Osman said. "I was scared but I'm punctual now." From what I read and what I see, the times are adjusting to them. Or should I say us.

Walkie Talkie Man

The New York Times says Apple's ingenious combination of the iPod, a marvel of design, and its iTunes store makes collecting and playing music ridiculously easy, impeccably legal and impossible to resist." You can't buy ads like that. But you can make videos like this. The song's so catchy, I bought the tune.

Search, Not Sort

I've spent the good part of my adult life sorting. Everything from darks and lights in the laundry to email in folders. However it will be searching, not sorting, that rules the dekstop in the next few years. "It's easier to find something from among a billion Web pages with Google than it is to find something on your hard disk," Steve Jobs said during Apple's developer's conference said. Google's offering one gigabyte of storage with Gmail, obviating the need to delete old email messages, scroll up an down for related messages, or overlook a poorly titled subject line. Mac OS X, version 10.4 (to be known as "Tiger") and the next version of Windows XP (code-named "Longhorn") promise to bring system-wide search to our computers. Apple's solution, called Spotlight, will find information across files and applications, whether it be an email message or a copyright notice attached to a movie clip. Most of the customers I help -- my parents and friends included -- don't sort very well, despite my admonishments. They leave files on their desktops, worried that any effort to file them properly will damage their computers or hide the file from their view forever. Perhaps next year I can just keep my mouth shut. Meanwhile, I'll be leaving all my archived email in one folder for one month (an idea I found here) to devise fewer distractions from actual communication.