More rants of a dead man

I just had the best idea for an iphone application. Go ahead steal my idea but give me credit, and some money.
A friend of mine just lost his iphone to the washing machine.
First of all, I can’t imagine why they’re not waterproof. They have no moving parts and there’s no externally accessible battery compartment, I can’t imagine why it’s not waterproof.
But anyway. Here’s my idea: an app that uses the motion sensor (and maybe even the camera) to detect when it’s being bounced around (as in a washing machine) and sends you an email saying “Help! I think I’m in the washing machine! Save me!”
If you have any amount of home automation set up, the iphone could power off the washing machine itself and save itself.
Just an idea there.

I went to the ear doctor a year or so ago to get custom made earplugs because those little squishy ones hurt my ears. He asked me what I wanted them for and I said mowing the lawn and motorcycling things like that.
Apparently he doesn’t like motorcycles and thinks anybody who rides one is dumb. He said that to me in not so many words.
At the end of the doctor visit I ask my customary doctor joke “So, I’m going to live?”
“Well, maybe not if you keep riding that bike.”

Well he lost my business.

But today a year later it just occurred to me, because I’m going on my first bike ride this year this weekend, that I actually ride my
bicycle more in a year than I do my motorcycle, definitely time-wise and even mileage-wise.
On my motorcycle I have a full face helmet, lots of leather with kevlar and all sorts of other shielding.
On my bicycle I wear a small piece of styrofoam on the top of my head and spandex.
On my motorcycle I’m going faster, sure, but I’m also going traffic speed, whereas on my bicycle I’m always going slower than traffic speed and as anybody with any driving experience knows it’s safer to do the traffic speed than the speed limit.
IE you want your speed delta to be as close to zero as possible.

So exactly how is riding a motorcycle less safe than bicycling? But noooooo… nobody has a problem if you say you ride a bicycle.

I have to say I was willing to tolerate google apps until today.
Now they’ve proven themselves to be the shittiest thing in the software world and here’s why.

I’m taking notes on personal things and I wanted to edit at work and home so I figured okay google docs.
So I started my doc today, added a bunch of stuff, came back later, added more.
Came back even more later and went to start typing and it said “trying to contact google…”
and it just sat there. AND IT WOULDN’T LET ME EDIT.

Okay, did we all read that correctly? A word processor that doesn’t function unless it can call home.
What a piece of shit. All this cloud stuff is for fuckheads.
This cements the reality that if you want something to work and be usable it’s got to be a fat client running locally.
I’ll take ms word with its 17 layers of recovery upon blowup over that google piece of shit.
Shit Shit Shit there’s just no other word for it.