Over the past few days I’ve read not one, but two articles expressing the hate toward bluetooth headsets. And for both articles, I realized that it was misplaced hate. The authors (and commenters) actually hate the way that some people use them. That is, the whole standing around and talking to yourself thing. Fair enough, but some of us just want bluetooth headsets so we don’t have to keep buying special, vendor specific headsets, and yet also don’t want to hold the phone up to our ear for the whole hour-long conference call.

Since I was thwarted in my one lame attempt to get an iPhone, I ended up getting a standard-ish Nokia flip phone. This was supposed to be my “backup phone”. I’m not sure when I would have used the backup phone (when I sent my iPhone in for service? When I didn’t want to take the iPhone with me to a dangerous neighborhood?), but it didn’t seem too wasteful to have a unit to use when the primary phone wasn’t working. Of course, now that I’ve had this Nokia for a few days, I keep liking it more. It fits in my pocket. I can sync it with the Mac via bluetooth. It gets decent reception. It sounds fine. I can use a custom ringtone. (I’m not at the moment, however). It ain’t perfect, but it is working for me. I do miss the calendaring, password safe, and games from the Treo. But, I never did really use that thing to its full potential, so stepping down from the smartphone is working out fine.

Yesterday, my trusty Treo 650 decided to go crazy. OK, I think, I had it for two years, time for something new. Time for an iPhone! Alas, today is a day when the iPhone appears to be mostly out of stock. So, let me describe the particular form of crazy that my Treo has become. I first noticed it last night. I was outside, and it was raining (although not directly on me). I look at the Treo, and it is, for some reason, trying to sync via cable. Cancel. It tries to sync again. It is in an endless loop of syncing. It is acting like it has the sync cable plugged in, and the sync button permanently pressed. After several resets to no avail, I give up and remove the battery for a few hours. Now it doesn’t try to sync all the time (although, it still tries sometimes), but it also doesn’t turn on when asked, either. I’ve tried everything up to and including the data-erasing hard reset with no change. Hopefully, I’ll be able to get an iPhone soonish. I don’t want one bad enough to get it from ebay…

Step…

1. Discover Black Ink. It has a 30-day trial period
2. Try for 30 days. Like in the beginning, like at the end.
3. Buy it. I go the the online store and pay via paypal.
4. Wait for 3 days. See credit card charge go through.
5. During this time, fail to check the spam traps.
6. Wait for 4 more days. Nothing from Red Sweater Software.
7. Send email to support@red-sweater.com asking for actual registration code.
8. Wait 3 more days. Silence.
9. Discover that somehow, searching for “red-sweater” in Mail.app doesn’t find mail in the spam folders.
10. Eventually find 3 emails from Daniel Jalkut with your registration code.

Hmm.. The online store page says “…usually within a few minutes”. Is two weeks to wait long enough? I guess after that I’ll be reversing the charges. Or something.

Late last year, Mike StJohns transcribed one of his DNSSEC-related rants into Internet-Draft form (recently expired). The name of his proposal, “Signature Only DNSSEC” has been referred to as “DNSSEC SO” in shorthand. Mike’s idea was soundly rejected by the IETF working group that it was presented to, DNSEXT. I’ll outline some theories why in a bit. But, its rejection was not because it was a horrible idea. In fact, from some points of view, it is a pretty good idea. In a nutshell, DNSSEC SO says:

That is, if you consider looking up crossword puzzle clues on oneacross.com to be cheating. Or even if you think that looking up stuff in imdb and wikipedia is cheating. I haven’t spend a whole lot of time on crossword puzzles before, mostly because I sort of suck at them. But a few days ago, I discovered Black Ink. I never tried the previous (java-based) version, but this version is pretty good. But it makes looking up stuff in oneacross (which I didn’t even know about before) ridiculously easy. And you are one command-tab stroke away from your browser and the crosswordy goodness of wikipedia, google, and imdb. I haven’t laid down the cash-money for this application yet, but if I keep going I’m going to have to.