We Are The Champions…

My Friends.

Shahid Afridi celebrates the moment of victory (Cricinfo.com)

Congratulations to Pakistan for winning the 2009 ICC T20 World Championship. Much deserved credit to Michael DiAmore for the video and Ayaz Hyder for the upload. If you want to download the video, click here: [download id=”1″].

For The People, By The People?

A disputed national presidential election is verified by a supreme authority electing a leader who clearly did not have support of the majority of the people who cast the ballot.

Sounds familiar?

It should remind you less of the election in Iran right now but more of the bitter end to the 2000 Presidential Election right here in the United States of America between Al Gore and the eventual selected winner George W. Bush.

I just don’t understand what moral grounds the United States really has to stand on when peaceful protesters outside the convention of their own National Party Conventions are thrown in jail and where dirty political tricks are played into fooling uninformed voters, that they can not only foreign elections but get to determine who should be the winner?

Don’t confuse my argument into saying I support the results of Iran because there certainly seems like there might have been wrongdoings committed but until you know for sure, it’s the same thing to say the previous administration willing let a ‘terrorist’ attack happen on their watch. You can certainly say both things but you just don’t have any solid ground to stand on when you do.

You have mayoral elections in cities like Hoboken, NJ where you have law enforcement parking their cars in front of a candidate’s rally that they don’t support. You probably have elections in Illinois where if only six out of every five eligible voter votes, it is considered a success.

We, as a nation, are very proud of a very proud of a very flawed democratic system where has elected on more than one occasion a President who did not win the popular count. We also hold into high regard a foreign policy where we don’t support one communist government because they are of no use to us (except for holding onto a land of theirs known as Guantanamo Bay) but completely willing to support another in the far East and turn a blind eye towards the civil and humanitarian pleas of their people.

Maybe it is in the best long-term interest of our nation to worry more about domestic issues like our continuously failing economy or the lack of healthcare coverage to millions of Americans rather than trying to forcefully determine the fate of an election being conducted on foreign soil. We often try to get too wrap into trying and installing a leader that is more aligned with the ‘Western’ ideals as a quick fix solution rather than trying to see why a problem in the region exists in the first place. That type of mentality did wonders for the people in Afghanistan; it did wonders for those still dying in Iraq. Why not go for the trifecta and do it for the people in Iran as well?

You might not like what you read up there but at least I’m willing to say it. Sound off and let me know what you think.

iPhone OS 3.0 Review

Although I was less than pleased with the iPhone 3G S, the OS 3.0 has been a bundle of joy so far. The long awaited copy/paste as well as deleting/forwarding individual texts and e-mail multiple pictures at once.

I’ll just go through the top 5 that I thought they were most important and you can view the gallery of photos at the end of the post of some of the other features.

1. Copy and Paste

It is about time that OS update 3.0 finally gives you the ability to copy, cut and paste text. If you double tap on a white space, then Select and Select All appear but if you do it on given word, it is highlighted with the options of copy and cut are displayed. This copy paste works across every app on the phone I tried from Twitterific to Safari to Messages to Mail. It definitely makes things a lot easier when copying a link into Twitterific and then having it use its compress URL feature while using Twitter.

2. Deleting / Forwarding Individual Text Messages

This is probably one of the hit or miss things depending on how much you use the forwarding text message feature. I often get a lot of news or sports update that I want to send over to a friend out of state or even just update my brother, but that was a very tedious task before where you just had to type everything over again.

The way to use it is by going into the messages window, selecting Edit on the top right part of the window. This brings you to an edit screen where you can select a single or multiple messages that you either want to delete or forward on.

3. Undo Feature

If you accidentally delete some text, one that you accidentally cut instead of copying or you pasted something that you didn’t want to, you can just simply shake your iPhone and a pop up appears asking if you want to undo your action. Clever move by Apple, very useful.

4. Landscape Texting / E-mail

Another one of the features that is not for everyone but landscape texting is definitely a good option. If you’re trying to read a long e-mail, it definitely is very useful but for texting or writing an e-mail, there just isn’t enough room for me to use it consistently. The landscape keyboard takes up a lot of real estate of the screen but it’s useful for a long text message… but not necessarily for a long e-mail.

5. Spotlight / E-mail Search

The ability to search across the entire phone is very useful. It searches contacts, calendars as well as the body of e-mail messages amongst others. I don’t see myself using the search feature very often but I can see it being quite useful for others. In the past few days though, I have used it to find an old email and even once for an old calendar event. I guess it is a little efficient if you have a lot of pages of apps and you would rather search for it instead of scrolling to the last page to find it.

Apple and the Environment

In my continuing assessment of Apple products and customer care and sometimes a lack of common sense, I think I have finally figured out why Apple products usually cost a million times more with them than anywhere else. Take a look at the tracking page from FedEx at the bottom of the post.

I believe this order was for a replacement headset that was covered under the AppleCare Protection Plan. No wonder this headset costs $29.00 if you buy it regularly since it is getting a 2-day shipping from Shenzhen, China to Hoboken, NJ.

A 0.2 lbs package being shipped half way around the world for something cost a maximum $2 to make. Also, I’m not sure what FedEx charges Apple but I’m guessing it is much less than the $30 quote that I got for a package of the same size shipping from and to the same location as the one above. (Converting the 216.14 Yuan is about $30 USD.) It’s probably safe to say that if Apple is charging $29 for a single headset, not being charged very much from FedEx and in the bulk amounts that they make these accessories, the profit they must be making

Disregard the monetary costs for a second and look at the carbon footprint being applied for a $2 headset. Apple means to tell us that there wasn’t a single headset in the entire United States that they could have shipped instead? Do all their orders for replacement accessories get shipped from China regardless of their destination?

But let us not forget Apple and the Environment, where they explicitly state that “Apple recognizes its responsibility as a global citizen and continually strives to reduce the environmental impact of the work we do and the products we create.” I suppose that responsibility stops once they “create” these products and does not carry over when they are actually shipping them out to customers.

Error 500 Internal Service Errors

For quite a longest time, I had suffered from what seemed to be random “error 500” messages that would appear when I was updating a plugin on my blog or even when I wanted to upload some stuff on to it. I thought maybe it was something with WordPress following an update, then I thought it was my hosting provider (1and1 – which has been a really awesome host) but today I think I might have finally found a solution.

Many thanks to Sascha at Design For Unity where I found the solution but it was rather simple. Hopefully it continues to work. If you are having the same problem, just follow the steps below:

1. Open the .htaccess file in your root folder. If no such file exists, just create a blank notepad file and save it as “.htaccess”. Make sure there is no .txt appended to the end of the file name, just “.htaccess”.

2. Add these lines in the file:

Options All -Indexes

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php

AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

3. Save and hopefully everything should be working now.