When I was in the Shoals area visiting over the holidays, I did notice that EDGE was way slower there than I remember it being when I was having to use it when I had the original iPhone. I could barely use the Google Maps because it took forever to get the map data to transfer. If AT&T is doing this in the Shoals area, it’s ridiculous, since there is no 3G there.

The fact that they’re doing it elsewhere really sucks.

The 3G iPhone rocks, I love it. I don’t regret purchasing it so soon after laying out the cash for the original one at all. I routinely stream radio stations in the car, and play YouTube videos on my way to work, something that you just can’t do with the original. Still… this smells of bait and switch. For a lot of of folks the original iPhone is fine at true EDGE speeds.

Because of the great weather we’ve had over the break, I’ve had the chance to get in some geocache hunts. Today we hit a couple of the easier park and grab ones while out for lunch, but the main hunts were in Johnson Park in Collierville. Johnson Park has a great boardwalk that goes out about a mile to the banks of the Wolf River. There are several caches hidden in the woods off the boardwalk with several more just across the river on some newer trails. One of the more interesting searches was around a grove of some really interesting old trees with huge hollow trunks. That’s the fun of geocaching, getting out and seeing things that you’ve been living near, but never knew were there. Last week, I snuck up on a doe as I came over a ridge to the river in a park in Germantown.

Here’s a great idea to take advantage of the iPhone’s ability to display custom pictures when people call:

Visuals for iPhone. ($0.99)

Over the last few months, I’ve taken up geocaching as a hobby. I picked up a dedicated GPS for it, but I started out doing it on my phone, which worked pretty well. The advantage of a dedicated unit is durability. My Garmin Oregon is water proof, you don’t necessarily want your iPhone out in the elements. But for finding park n grab caches and a lot of the easier caches, the iPhone works great. The official geocaching app for iPhone is on sale for $2.99, normally $9.99.

Geocaching for iPhone ($2.99)

The iPhone is quickly becoming a powerhouse portable gaming device. Developers are learning to craft original games that really utilize the accelerometer and multi-touch controls. Even though it’s a bit expensive, Rolando is worth every penny. It’s a blast to play. Highly polished. In fact, you can pretty much go ahead and download all of the games that the developer, ngmoco, has released to date.
Rolando for iPhone ($9.99)

Another fun little gem for the iPhone is Sneezies. It’s inexpensive and good for passing some time in line. Anna loves playing around with this one. The point of the game is to pick just the right spot to drop in the pixie dust that will set off a chain reaction of sneezing creatures to hit your goal for each level. It’s really well done.

Sneezies for iPhone ($0.99)

Weightbot has been getting a lot of press here lately. I’ll echo the praise, it’s a great iPhone app to go along with all those New Year’s Resolutions to lose weight. It’s got an outstanding UI, really makes you want to use it. I’ve been using it for a while and tracking my slow descent over the last year.

You tap on a date, enter your weight and then once you have some data in, turn the phone sideways to see an overall, monthly, or weekly trend that helps you see what kind of progress you’re making.

It’s nice to be able to easily track these kind of things, much like the great Nike+iPod app that tracks your running. I’m up to 275 miles since I started using it last February.

Started out 2008 about this size:

Ending 2008 at this size:

Favorite Albums This Year:

• Fleet Foxes
Who knew that the best My Morning Jacket album this year wouldn’t be put out by My Morning Jacket? Far and away, this was my favorite album of the year. The band describes itself as “baroque harmonic pop jams.” Calling them just a My Morning Jacket sound-a-like really doesn’t do the album justice. MMJ couldn’t pull off the Beach Boys-esque sound of White Winter Hymnal.

Watch to them perform Sun Giant (from a separate EP and Blue Ridge Mountains in a park in Paris:

• She and Him - Volume One
Usually when an actor tries to make a crossover into music, it’s because of an ego trip. They know that they’ll make a ton of money because people will buy the album just because it’s their face on the album. That’s not really the case with Zooey Deschanel. She’s done some good work in the movies, and some not so good work (see The Happening). Her partnership album with M. Ward came out of a soundtrack for a film, but it’s really a great pairing. It’s a very 60’s retro vibe, and it works.

• Phantom Planet - Raise the Dead
I was really sad to hear that Phantom Planet broke up. I guess you want to go out on a high, and this was really a swan song for them. It’s catchy and crunchy at the same time, and really not for folks who only like their theme song to The O.C.

The Best Songs of 2008

Download zip of all songs | Preview Songs in iTunes

1.	Cloud Cult	No One Said It Would Be Easy
2.	Phantom Planet	Do the Panic
3.	Beck	Gamma Ray
4.	Jenny Lewis	The Next Messiah
5.	The Dexateens	Altar Blues
6.	Liam Finn	Second Chance
7.	Shearwater	Leviathan Bound
8.	Aimee Mann	Thirty One Today
9.	Tift Merritt	Broken
10.	She & Him	Why Do You Let Me Stay Here
11.	Fleet Foxes	Ragged Wood
12.	Mates of State	Get Better
13.	The Submarines	You and Me and the Bouregoise
14.	Sons and Daughters	Split Lips
15.	The Ting Tings	Keep Your Head
16.	Pomplamoose	Beat the Horse
17.	Death Cab for Cutie	No Sunlight
18.	Anathallo	The River

Last weekend’s SEC Championship stuck with me for a few days. Obnoxious Florida fans (and other rival schools of ours) will say that we got dominated, but if you watch that game, it’s obvious that we’re mighty close to a championship caliber program again. The difference in the game was mistakes, and a ridiculously talented QB for Florida. I think that we could’ve overcome the QB had we not made the mistakes. Special teams and untimely penalties were the difference between first and second place in the SEC. Like Bart said on his blog the other day, I’m totally against having rings made proclaiming us SEC Western Division Champions. There is no glory in winning the Western Division. There is only SEC Champion and National Champion, nothing less.

Last Winter, there were rumors that Saban was considering moving all of the returning juniors to the scout team and going with a total youth movement. Good to see that was neither true, nor necessary. You don’t get a true legacy at Alabama without a championship ring, but I think that this team will long be remembered for turning things around for Alabama. ROLL TIDE ROLL!

It actually makes for a good teaching moment on not giving up. With the iPhone, it will get you close to the cache… within 35-50 feet of it, but you do have to sometimes do some hunting. That’s one of the main complaints that the article has with it. Works great with open sky, but takes some extra hunting with tree cover. There were a couple of finds that took a while, which teaches her not to give up.

The app has a compass that works when you’re moving, and you can use the distance meter to triangulate the area where you should search, so if you want to try it out, it will definitely get the job done.

TUAW Review: Geocaching iPhone app - The Unofficial Apple Weblog TUAW.

Geocaching $9.99 [ iTunes link ]

The only drawback is the steep price. I think it should be about $5, personally. If you just want to give it a try one weekend, I would actually recommend you start with another app that will work just as well for you: Geopher Lite ($1.99 [ iTunes link ] ). It requires you to manually enter the latitude and longitude, but I found the compass to be a little more responsive. The benefit of the official app is that it formats everything in an iPhone friendly way and it will use your account on the geocaching.com site to hide caches that you’ve previously found. Plus, it will gain more and more features like logging your finds, etc.

Make sure you have a car charger for your phone… the GPS function eats up the batteries like mad. Expect it to only last about 2-3 hours.

I actually just bought a Garmin Oregon 300 for geocaching and auto navigation. Haven’t had the chance to get out and try it out geocaching yet, but overall, I’m pleased with it. The touch screen works pretty well, and the interface is pretty well thought-out. It’s water-proof, and you can easily load routes from Google Maps onto it, or caches from geocaching.com, including descriptions, hints, and logging features. One improvement I would like to see is a louder beep for car use.

I’ve installed the auto-navigation software so that it will function just like their dashboard units (doesn’t have a speaker, so it doesn’t do text-to-speech), and I’ve also dropped in the topographical maps, which aren’t that handy here in Memphis which is relatively flat, but when we’re out hunting for caches in the Shoals area, they’ll come in handy. Hope to give it a run this weekend.

Absolutely incredible. Works as advertised. I said, “Alabama football schedule 2009,” and it recognized my voice search in about 2 seconds and found it. I said “Camp Sumatanga” and it recognized it perfectly. I said “Toad the Wet Sprocket Something’s Always Wrong lyrics” and it found it immediately. WOW. This will be a handy tool for when you’re driving, or even when you’re not. It’s so much faster than typing on the iPhone keyboard.

The only thing that stumped it was “Winston Baccus blog.” It had trouble with my last name. But overall, I can see myself using this one a lot.

In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power — with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.

…

The Republican Congress never once stood up against the Bush/Rove machine that demanded support for unconstitutional wars, attacks on civil liberties here at home, and an economic policy based on more spending, more debt, and more inflation — while constantly preaching the flawed doctrine that deficits don’t matter as long as taxes aren’t raised.
But what the Republican leadership didn’t realize was that ALL spending is a tax on middle-class Americans through price inflation and that eventually the inevitable consequence is paying for the extravagance with a financial crisis.

Pop quiz… what former world power does this remind you of. After banning YouTube, US Military launches TroopTube.

We glorify it. I admit, I enjoy playing shoot-em-up games. I love Call of Duty and other WWII games. I enjoy the history of it. But I’m sure that we can only have those kinds of games because we have some distance from them. I’m sure it’ll be only a matter of time before there’s a first-person shooter where you have to escape from the World Trade Center before it collapses, or you have to try to kill the terrorist before he crashes into the towers. I’ll give it 10-15 years.

My dad tells stories of my grandfather’s survival reflex kicking in during 4th of July celebrations. When he’d hear a loud noise, he would hit the deck immediately.

Recently, a couple of shows have given me a greater understanding of what he might have gone through. Tom Hank’s HBO series Band of Brothers is based on real people and real events. There are episodes in it that give you a brief glimpse into the psychological toll of the war. And the recent PBS mini-series The War also gives you first-hand reports from those who were there. Telling stories on film that you probably couldn’t tell in polite company 40 or even 20 years ago.

Our veterans have been put through hell in our name. We should honor their sacrifice and service by staying out of unnecessary wars, thus my use of the original name of today’s holiday. WWII came about out of the disastrous policy decisions after WWI. Nothing happens in a vacuum.

I’ll admit that I was suckered in by the Bush Administration in the lead-up to the Iraq War. I have an admiration for those who weren’t. They were right. I get emails forwarded to me talking about the good things we’re doing in Iraq, how many policemen they have now, how many hospitals we’re building. Truth is, even though they were under the despotic Hussein, they had more police and order and schools and hospitals before we showed up. Sure their lives weren’t great, but were it not for their oil, we wouldn’t be there. People don’t like to believe it, but it’s the truth. War is good for the state, and we are a warlike people. “No,” you say, “we’re a peaceful people.” How do you explain this then? At the height of the Roman Empire, the Romans had an estimated 37 major military bases scattered around their dominions. At the height of the British Empire, the British had 36 of them planetwide. Depending on just who you listen to and how you count, we have hundreds of bases. According to Pentagon records, in fact, there are 761 active military “sites” abroad. [HT: Tom Engelhardt]

World War II didn’t start in a vacuum either.

Controversial, but interesting nonetheless: Thanks for the Freedom, Vets.

Excerpt: In America, we enjoy the freedom of giving half our income to the government through various forms of taxes. We have the freedom to participate in a Ponzi scheme known as Social Security. We have the freedom to vote for the president. Unlike the voters of Iraq under Saddam Hussein, who only had one choice for president, we have two choices!

On the subject of our next scheduled war in Iran: Documents linking Iran to nuclear weapons push may have been fabricated. C’mon…they wouldn’t do that, would they?

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” — H.L. Mencken