Community, the Best Comedy on Television

I can't stop watching Thursday's episode of Community. This show is really firing on all cylinders right now combining brilliant pop-culture parody with lovably weird characters. Set among a Spanish study group at Greendale Community College; a small, not very well regarded school; Community has created a surprisingly rich tapestry to tell its stories with even minor background characters like "Leonard" and "Starburns" getting their moments to shine. As for the main cast of characters, they all seem to be searching for either redemption or acceptance. Jeff, the disbarred lawyer; Pierce, the ex-CEO who has never really had or wanted friends until now; Britta, the embittered slacker; Shirley, the recent divorcée; Annie, the overachiever and former pill-popper; Troy, the immature dumb jock; Abed, the pop-culture loving kid who can't seem to connect with "normal" people—at times the show feels like Lost with robot jokes.

While Thursday's episode continues Abed's obsession with movies and TV, it also shows a strong emotional edge as Abed finally finds a way to connect with people by getting them to all speak the same language—"chicken." Abed's inability to express himself and connect to people has been a running theme all throughout the series. In the pilot Jeff speculates that he has Asperger Syndrome. Abed's father is constantly frustrated by his son's oddness and only comes to accept his behavior when he explains it through a movie that he makes. So while Abed does insist that he has "self-esteem coming out of my butt," he definitely has a serious problem dealing with other people. Thus when he gets his opportunity to relate to people through his control of Greendale's popular chicken finger snacks, Abed takes it and runs with it. But this connection is tenuous and it is easy for him to see that it will disappear when people get tired of the chicken fingers. That's an awful lot of character development to put into a half-hour show and still manage to squeeze in a brilliant mob-movie parody and a lesson for Jeff on the consequences of exploiting your friends for your own gain.

IAU Decides Earth is No Longer a Planet

HONOLULU (AP) -- The International Astronomical Union (IAU), the international body of scientists responsible for naming stars, planets, and other astronomical bodies, announced today that following a vote taken at its annual Spring meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii that it was reclassifying the Earth. The IAU voted to strip Earth of its "planet" designation and reclassifying it as a "giant dwarf planet." An IAU spokesman said that the change is meant to eliminate confusion following its 2006 decision to demote Pluto from "planet" to "dwarf planet" status.

"We chose to reclassify Pluto in part because it is part of a larger body of objects which we call the 'Kuiper Belt,'" said IAU spokesman James Brown. "Since Pluto is too puny to clear this area of debris, we felt that a new designation was necessary to distinguish Pluto from proper planets like Venus and Neptune." Brown went on to explain the motivation which drove the IAU's decision regarding Earth. "As with Pluto, the way we see Earth's place in the solar system must change as new discoveries are made. Earth was once regarded as the center of the universe but as science progressed, our view of Earth's place in the universe had to change. As more and more Near Earth Objects (NEOs) have been discovered it appears that Earth, despite its much larger mass and gravity, like Pluto is not able to completely clear the neighborhood around its orbit. While many NEOs like Apophis will probably either collide with Earth or be ejected from their orbits by Earth's gravity, there are also enough objects like Cruithne with weird but stable orbits that we feel that a new classification was necessary to describe Earth's place in the solar system."

A second vote to decide whether or not Jupiter should be promoted from a "planet" to a "dwarf brown dwarf" has been scheduled for the IAU's winter meeting in December.

Teaching My Tether to Get Along With Classic

I posted this guide to Hotsyncing my Pre with my netbook using My Tether as a wifi hotspot in Precentral in this thread. I am archiving it here on my blog because I don't want to have to spend a lot of time searching for it on Precentral's vast forums.

Running My Tether and Can't Hotsync? Use My Tether to Hotsync!

---

I'm not sure if this post will fall into the "Duh, we all knew that already" category or the "That's just crazy enough to work!" category but it's new to me and I haven't seen it on these forums.

I was thinking about doing a hard reset on my Classic PalmOS installation in hopes of getting it to perform better but wanted to do one final Hotsync in order to back it up. But I had been having a lot of trouble performing a Hotsync. Wifi? Failed. Bluetooth? Failed. Then I remembered reading in these forums that a lot of users of My Tether were having trouble hotsyncing.

So I had what seemed at the time to be a crazy idea. Since My Tether is doing a fairly good job of turning my Pre into a wifi Hotspot, why not tether my Pre to my netbook via wifi and do a wifi Hotsync that way? Since I was having no success in Hotsynching while connected to my home wifi network, this felt like a rather unlikely solution but I tried it anyway. And it worked.

So to summarize:

The Problem: Cannot Hotsync Classic via wifi or Bluetooth.

The Cause: Users of My Tether often suffer this problem and it is widely believed that My Tether is the culprit.

The Solution:

1. Launch both My Tether and Classic.
2. Turn on wifi tethering in My Tether.
3. Connect to your Pre as you would connect to any other wifi hotspot.
4. Take note of the IP address which your Pre assigns to your computer.
   • In Windows 7,
     1. Click on the wifi icon in your system tray to bring up your wifi network.
     2. Right click on your wifi network (by default My Tether calls itself, AoNet).
     3. Click on Status and then click on the Details button.
     4. Your IP adress will be listed in the Network Details box that comes up.
   • In Windows XP,
     1. Your connection will sometimes put a network icon in your system tray.
     2. Click on it and select the Support tab of the status dialog that pops up.
     3. Your IP Address will be listed here.
        or
        1. If this icon is not in your system tray, open My Network Places instead.
        2. Click on View network connections in the sidebar and click on Wireless Network Connection.
        3. It will pop up the same status dialog as in the above example.
5. Launch the Hotsync app in Classic.
6. Tap on Select PC.
7. The Hotsync app will be unable to find a PC and will ask you to enter your PC's name or IP address by hand.
8. Enter the IP address that your Pre assigned to your PC.
9. Tap Done.
10. Tap Hotsync.

That should be it. You should now be able to do a successful hotsync. Or at least that's what I did to get Hotsync running in Classic.

Snake Oil or Useful Health Supplement?

Links to this nifty infographic have been making the rounds for some time. But there is an interesting discussion about it and the at Scienceblogs that might be worth a look.

An Unofficial RSS for a Web Comic You've Probably Never Heard of...

...or maybe you have but you don't follow it because you couldn't find an RSS feed for it. It turns out that all you(I) had to do was Google it. And there it was and is. And that makes these fragmented sentences worth it.

Maybe the Nexus One Wasn't Supposed to be a Hit

Image by spieri_sf via Flickr

There has been quite bit of buzz about the Nexus One and its failure in the marketplace. Google's first branded smartphone has sold only 135,000 units, making it a bona fide flop. But I have to wonder if Google needed or even wanted it to succeed. While the Nexus One was Google's first smartphone, it was hardly a unique product. It was only one of a rather long and always growing line of Android handsets being built by a wide variety of cell phone vendors. In fact, I distinctly recall a lot of grumbling that with the Nexus One, Google was going to be competing directly with its own customers, the companies which had licensed the Android operating system.

And this makes the "failure" of the Nexus One fairly convenient for Google and for its licensees. Now Google can reassure its licensees, "See guys, we're not taking away sales from you!" But despite the lackluster sales, the Nexus One did raise the bar putting powerful hardware into an attractive package which handset makers still have to match. And this was likely the point of the Nexus One all along to let competitors like The Droid get the sales while the Nexus One keeps them honest and nudges them in the direction that Google wants them to go. No more underpowered Android handsets.

This wouldn't be the first time that Google has done something like this, putting out a product that was designed more to nudge rivals than to actually succeed on its own. While Google Chrome is growing in popularity and is now the basis for an ambitious new operating system, Chrome's original purpose seemed to be to assure that Google apps like GMail would run really, really fast. As a result, Chrome was a very fast browser with no extensions, no themes, and other glaring flaws. If the history of Chrome is any indication, I doubt if anyone at Google is losing any sleep over the Nexus One's sales.

'Til Death—Directionless and Less Than the Sum of its Parts

'Til Death originally started out as a fairly generic Everybody Loves Raymond type of sitcom that got by on Brad Garrett's energy and some occasional wackiness by the supporting cast. Fast forward to the present and Garrett's energy is gone, the wackiness level is through the roof, and the show has gone from an overachiever to and underachiever.



'Til Death is probably the most self-aware sitcom on television right now with Eddie's son in law Doug having developed a "mental condition" where he believes that he is on a TV sitcom. As a result, the show trots out every sitcom cliche in hopes that it will somehow be fresh because they are winking at it. The trouble is that TV shows have been breaking the fourth wall for decades; so when 'Til Death does it, the winking self-awareness doesn't feel fresh.

That's not to say that the show doesn't work hard to be inventive. I'm currently watching an episode where the cast is dreaming of Doug and Ally's wedding filmed entirely as a series of cartoons. But ultimately, it all feels like the writers are throwing darts at the wall hoping that something will stick. And right now, not enough is sticking.

While the over the top performances by almost the entire supporting cast do guarantee the occasional laugh, this show used to get more laughs without trying half as hard as they do now. This raises the question of what happened and I think that the answer is that they've essentially taken their star, Brad Garrett, and turned him into a straight man. It reminds me of the "What Up With That?" skit on Saturday Night Live which is an interview show where there are so many ridulous distractions with singing and dancing that the host never gets around to interviewing his guests. At this point in its existence, 'Til Death is a lot like that skit. There is so much over the top silliness that there is little room for anyone to be consistently funny.

Google Reinvents Graffiti

Google has added a new feature to Android which looks a lot like an old feature from another mobile OS. Palm's old PalmOS PDAs had stylus-based input system called "Graffiti" where you would enter characters based on set of predefined pen strokes. It worked very well for years until the emergence of smartphones required Palm and Handspring to adopt keyboards for their devices. Add a long lawsuit by Xerox and Graffiti disappeared into the mists of gadget history.

Sort of. The idea of Graffiti remains popular enough that there is even a version available for iPhones. So it was probably only a matter of time before someone tried to bring it to Google's Android OS. That someone turned out to be Google itself which recently released a Gesture Search application which allows you to run searches by simply drawing letters. This is essentially what you did with the old PalmOS Graffiti.

But Gesture Search is a single standalone application while Graffiti was an essential part of the PalmOS and could be used with every PalmOS application. In fact even after Palm abandoned having a dedicated Graffiti input area for its Treo phones, it was still possible to install an app which would allow you to enter Graffiti strokes directly on the phone's screen.

That has gotten me to think about webOS on my Palm Pre. While there is a virtual keyboard available for webOS, there is nothing like Graffiti or even Gesture Search available for webOS. And that's disappointing because after all, Palm was the company which made this sort of input work in the first place.

And I think that Palm is uniquely suited to make it work again. Palm already has the code to Graffiti and Graffiti II—the successor to Graffiti which Palm introduced in part because of the Xerox lawsuit. And Palm has a its dashboard notification system which would be a convenient place to keep the controls for a Graffiti-style input system. So there really is no reason why Palm couldn't create another version of Graffiti and have it work on the entire operating system.

I used Graffiti for years on Palm PDAs. And I've used smartphone keyboards for years. But I was never really able to get used to using virtual keyboards which is one reason why I never got an iPhone. Now if I could have Palm's old Graffiti writing system back and have it live in my Palm Pre's dashboard, that would be a great alternative to sliding open my Pre when I only have to enter one or two characters.

Official Google Mobile Blog: Search your Android phone with written gestures

Rogue Antispyware

The Internet is full of websites where they tell you what software you should be running but how many places are there that tell you what you what not to run. Well here's one that I encountered on Usenet: Rogue Antispyware, your guide to rogue security software that you should not not have on your computer.

Phone Angst

People have been obsessing over their phones for a while now but I think that Palm may be taking it to a new level with webOS on its Pre and Pixi phones. Since Palm has committed to a regular upgrade schedule for webOS with big updates coming once a month along with minor updates in between the big ones. All told Palm has put out nine updates for webOS since June 2009 and buzz for the tenth update, webOS 1.4, is growing among its users.

Part of it is just the newness of the platform. Google's Android has been around for well over a year. Apple's iPhone has been around for three years. Palm's webOS has been around for just eight months and is still very much a work in progress. webOS 1.4 is expected to bring among other things support for video recording, a feature which the iPhone and Android phones have had for some time.

But I think that an essential part of all the phone angst that webOS is generating among its users is that Palm has always generated a strange dichotomy of feelings among its user community. The loyalty of the Apple user community is legendary and with the iPhone it has only grown and reached ever more cult-like proportions. Microsoft has its fanboys too but mostly its users tend to show more of a grudging acceptance than actual love. With Palm, the feel of the user community is a lot more complicated. Loyalty tends to mix with anger over perceived wrongs and missed opportunities which make members the Palm user community like one half of a separated couple—still in love but distrustful and bracing for the worst.

My own phone angst is as much a result of the platform's newness as it is to the its rapid pace of development. I jumped on the Pre early on and I love to tweak the hell out of it using Homebrew patches which I load through Preware. And the Preware people have worked hard to keep up with the pace of webOS development. As result, I sometimes have to deal with days when I have to uninstall and reinstall almost all my patches. Today was one such day as the Preware folks in anticipation of webOS 1.4 updated their patches for compatibility with it. As result I found myself staring at a phone which needed to update over forty patches. Luckily the Preware developers have worked hard to make this process as painless as possible and I clicked the "Update All" button and Preware went to work:



Arrrrgh!

I decide to try the "Emergency Patch Recovery" (EPR) utility. This program has been useful to me in the past by allowing me to wipe out all of my phone's patches in one feel swoop rather than having to uninstall them one by one. But first I have to uninstall my phone's theme and do a Luna Restart (a quick restart that Preware can do when you don't need to do complete reboot). So I fire up Preware again and suddenly it only has to update seventeen patches instead of forty. Hmmm, that's new. So I hold off on running EPR and hit the "Update All" button again. So I close Preware and start it again. Now only nine patches need updating. So I hit the "Update All" button yet again. And this time Preware goes through the process without a hitch.

So all's well that ends well. I find a theme that I like, install it, and do a full reboot of my phone so all the updated patches can take effect. The surprising thing was that I did all this over the course of a couple of hours as I was going about my day. Except for the Java restart and the reboot at the end, my Pre remained in use doing other things while I had Preware churning away in the background (Preware takes a long time to load its list of applications and to do updates). It wasn't perfect but it was a much smoother process than what I've experienced in the past with having to update patches one by one. So my phone angst is a little lower at the end of this day...

...and that's a good thing because I'm going to have to do this all over again later this week or the next week when webOS 1.4 comes out.