I’ve been fairly silent around these parts for the past while, mainly because I’ve been focussing on preparing myself and my boat for an imminent long sailing adventure. For those who are interested, my sailing blog has all the skinny on that.

However, I’ve been doing a lot of work on board to get the computer stuff all up and running. I’m still maybe only halfway there, but it occurred to me that it might be time to lay out the basics so far.

I came across a great metaphor for relationships awhile ago - bricks and mortar. Bricks are the “big things” - the events of life that you share with friends. Mortar is the little, everyday stuff, that the people you are closest to just know about, often whether they want to or not.

As Scheherazade wrote in her original blog post that caught my eye, bricks get all the attention. When we think about communication, we think about the bricks. But mortar is what makes it all stick together, and without it there’s no solid foundation.

I know everyone and her dog will be talking about this, but I have to admit that it’s the first announcement Apple has made that actually excites me. The iPhone is an entirely new design, with a wide touchscreen as opposed to buttons. It’s a phone, iPod and tiny computer that runs a version of OS X. It has wifi and bluetooth and is a quad band GSM phone on the Cingular network.

It’s not exactly that I don’t like iTunes - when I first started using it I was blown away by how great it was. And it just kept getting better until it hit that point. The point where it’s trying to do so many things that it doesn’t do anything right for me.

I admit that I’m not a lover of converged devices - I have a pda, a phone and a music player; they are all separate devices to perform separate functions. I like it that way.

If you’re a power podcast user like me, you’ve probably found that iTunes doesn’t have the feature set you’re looking for in a podcatching client. That’s why I was thrilled to discover that myPodder, the client that goes with the online site Podcast Ready, now supports iPods. I was less than excited, though, when I discovered that “support” means that the application runs, not that you can actually play the stuff you download directly on your iPod.

I think every day should be a day without DRM, and so in that vein, I’m supporting Defective by Design’s campaign against DRM. Go visit them. Learn. Download. Support.

Las Vegas - the land without time. It’s a glimpse of our past, but with 24 hour baccarat.

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New technologies generally start being used as “benefits to humanity”. They are medical breakthroughs and other applications for social welfare. After they become more mainstream, though, the luxury applications of new technologies become more common. In this context, let us examine some of the concerns about the increasing interaction between mechanical technologies and biological organisms, most specifically people.

I had the opportunity to watch some of the National Film Board of Canada’s 1971 animated short “Evolution” recently. It is a very cute, childlike explanation of concepts such as survival of the fittest and genetic mutation as adaptation to changing surroundings. Watching it, I found myself thinking - how odd; almost 35 years after the film was made, the very concepts being illustrated have somehow become controversial.