Asymmetric

I love coffee. My first-ever drink from a cup was coffee. I drank cafe on leche every morning (how's that for parenting?)

After eating, I always ask for a coffee to go. It keeps me busy in between texting and browsing the internet while I'm driving (just kidding- very dangerous- don't do it).

Anyways, about half the restaurants don't have the kind of lid that you can keep on as you sip your coffee. I really dislike having to take out my Leatherman to open a slit in the plastic containers designed for soda.

This rule doesn't discriminate, from the most expensive restaurants to the mom and pop meat loaf dives, it's always 50%. Considering that many people probably finish their meal with coffee and a large percentage of them probably like to do as I do, and that coffee lids are available at Sam's Club or Costco for about 40 cents a ton; there's really no excuse not to have them. Please, coffee addicts, forward this post to your favorite restaurant:

Restaurants: Do this for us. Please. It's a small thing that brings many of your customers great joy.

Anyways, I decided to do a search through my massive mp3 collection for coffee songs. Here's what I came up with:

First, always, when possible, is Bach. His Coffee Cantata- BWV 211 is one of his best. I don't know German, but I'd probably laugh if I could understand it, as the lyrics are one of those wonderful Enlightenment topics, the silly peccadilloes of the modern and wealthy (Rape of the Lock by Bach's contemporary, Alexander Pope, is another one). Here, a young girl is addicted to coffee. I like to watch Classical performances, don't you?

The next song is by Otis Redding who alternates with Sam Cooke, Al Green, and maybe one or two others as my favorite Soul singer and is one of my favorite singers of any genre. He lays down his naturally gruff, yet expressive and melismatic voice to the service of "Cigarettes and Coffee." Otis Redding passed away (RIP) before health studies. It's the podcast.

This one was tough. Both the Andrew Sisters and Frank Sinatra sang what is probably the greatest musical indictment of nations relying on one resource for its income, "The Coffee Song." Addendum: First Bach, then Frank.

Probably the greatest R&B compilation is the 15-disc set, The Chess Story. It has the Muddy, Chuck, Bo, and Willie you're all familiar with plus some of the most marvelous music you've never heard, like this song from a Mr. Danny Overbea, "Forty Cups of Coffee."

The Putumayo collections are hit or miss. Many of the songs are middling, if unusual and fresh, but the collections often have one or two songs that make their purchases worthwhile. Such is "Soltarlo" by Claudia Gomez, recompiled by Putumayo on Music from the Coffee Lands.

I'll do Caribbean/Cuban cafe songs tomorrow.

There will come a day when people call their friends and keep to-do lists with an implanted chip activated by brain waves. Until then, we're stuck with the squarish apparatus you might be staring at right now.

The best of them may well be the new Motorola Droid.

Decision process:

1. I had the opportunity to steal an upgrade slot from my daughter (shhhh).

2. I have Verizon, so my choices were limited.

3. Blackberry phones won't download Army emails and have poor browsers. The Storm, my previous phone, doesn't have a physical keyboard. The Storm 2 is worse than the original Storm- the screen feels flimsier. The Tour 9630 has a keyboard, but the browser and Army email issues remain.

4. The HTC Imagio is an interesting device with more software options than the Google. I was and remain weary of the Microsoft Mobile Software, however, and it doesn't have a real keyboard.

5. The Droid Eris is cheaper. It has physical call buttons and a custom HTC Sense UI. Over the buttons is a Blackberry-style trackball, which seems redundant on a touch screen. It's $100.00 cheaper.

On the other hand, it doesn't have a flash for its camera, a physical keyboard (although the touch keyboard is very good), the Google Navigation app, and cool docking station and car mount. The Eris comes with a lower-resolution screen, an older Android operating system, and smaller 8GB memory card.

6. I heard the chicks dig the Droid.

The goal of any modern multimedia/web-enabled phone is how easy it is to summon, accept, and transmit information. Or, the facility with which you can get that tweet off right after checking your email, annotating your calendar, and browsing the internet. Enjoying music and video on a phone can be a wonderful experience on a phone in the correct circumstance.

But first, the technical stuff:

1. The Droid is world-capable, which might be essential for some of you. Certainly, for frequently traveling soldiers and businessmen.

2. 16GBs of storage, enough for your lossless Michael Bolton collection and two seasons of Night Court. Purchase additional cards and you can have, say, a card for Classical music and another for Rock (I mention that because the iPhone doesn't have expansion slots). The card plays mp3 and mp4. If you have some stuff on AVI, you're going to have to take some time to convert.

3. Call quality if fine. If you use your phone pretty often, you're going to have to charge it every evening.

4. This is my first phone with Wifi and I now consider it a near-essential feature.

Why?

Because Verizon limits download to 5GB a month. Fine for email and web browsing, but not for streaming music or podcasts. Most everybody's wifi connection at home or school is faster than 3G.

5. The screen is high resolution and very nice. It's 480 by 854, besting the iPhone's 480-by-320 by [320/854 %!*math]...by a bunch. A higher resolution makes for a better browsing experience because sites are optimized for higher resolutions.

On to usability:

As I mention in the title, I feel that I need only think a task, press the screen a few times, and the Droid grants my desire.

1. I like the integration with Gmail accounts. Gmail is the best free email, since it's the only one that allows for free POP-3 access. Facebook, Friendfeed, Youtube and a bunch of other Web 2.0 applications use a common login with Google. Google also has webmaster, analytics, and ther apps I use.

2. The phone is easy to use. I can use the Droid's other features while I'm on the phone. The proximity sensor turns off and locks the screen while the phone is close to my face.

3. The camera and video recorder work fine. I can send pics easily.

4. The Android browser is fantastic. Pages look like they would on a regular computer. I used Viigo for RSS feeds with my Blackberry. On the Droid, I just use the web-based Google reader. I use a standalone app for podcasts, but that's another post.

5. Toggling wifi, airplane mode, silence, and Bluetooth are three clicks away, each.

6. The Droid can satisfactorily replace a standalone GPS unit for the car. I bought the car mount that automatically turns on car mode. The Droid speaks the streets like on high-end GPS units. It integrates with Bluetooth, another high-end feature. The display is good and includes some 3-D effects. You can choose to navigate places from a Google search or from contacts. Google Earth pictures show up at times. It'll give you walking and bus routes.

All-in-all excellent except for some niggling features that I can't remember right now. It may have been not having a "Home" button.

7. The GPS allows people to goecode their tweets and pictures. You can plot your journeys and trips as you travel, making a sort of digital keepsake.

8. The music and movie apps are OK: Nothing special, but they get the job done. A big feature coming soon is Adobe Flash 10 which will allow people to view online videos besides Youtube (the Droid already streams youtube) and possibly stream audio from internet feeds.

9. The keyboard takes a little getting used to. It's more difficult than the best keyboards (the LG ENV keyboards are my favorite) because of the flat buttons and the fact that the keyboard is off-center to accommodate a direction pad. Still, it's very handy for precision typing.

10. Lots of apps. I can scan documents into PDF files using the camera. There are Bible and breviary apps. All kind of stuff, and the ones that aren't free, cost a couple of bucks. Even OpenDoc Office is only $14.99.

But:

1. The Google Android operating system doesn't support two services I use: Rhapsody and Audible audio books. I think it's because of DRM issues. I hope they resolve it soon. I'd also like a Sirius/XM app.

There you have it. I really like this phone. With its keyboard and great browser, it's the first phone or PDA I've owned that can reasonably impersonate my laptop for short periods of time (half of this post was written on my Droid).

1. T-shirts with a company logo. Imagine if every car were the same except for a huge "Toyota," "Ford," or "BMW" across the hood. That's what we have today with all of the Hollister, BeBe, Abercrombie, Ed Hardy, Aeropostale, Calvin Klein, etc. shirts and Coach, Louis Vuittan, Dooney and Bourke purses. The only genius these shirts display is the marketer's ability to have consumers pay for the company's advertising.

I think women's tops should either have a real design or just be plain.

2. What I said above goes double for logos on the butt, and you can add on some tackiness, to boot.

3. Tasteless Ts. It's bad enough when guys wear offensive t-shirts, whether it's political like "Buck Fush" or sexual, like any number of things (just do a search). It's downright unladylike for women.

In order for society to function at a level of high harmony, it's best that people to wear positive things in public. I thought it a positive trend, relatively, when girls at my school started wearing "I love my boyfriend" shirts.

Sports, games (I've seen Bingo shirts. Apparently, there's such a thing as "Bingo fashion"), nature; the pro-Obama shirts are fine, but not the Joker-Obama hybrid ones.

4. Low-rise jeans. In certain instances, they can be "effective," but two issues "arise." First, about 40% of the low-rise jeans I see should not be around the women they are. There may come a day when legislation catches up to fashion, and the government issues licenses for low-rise jeans, but I don't see a grass roots movement for that today and it's up to individual women, therefore, to self-police.

Second, and I know I'm ruining it for some of you guys, but low-rise jeans can cross the line between wholesomely sexy (noticing a woman's beauty) and prurient/slutty (practically forcing men to imagine marital acts). It's a fine line, but one that exists. I mean, what's the point of showing butt-cleavage, ladies?

Tags: "female fashion", "women's fashion trends"

A few years ago, there was a funny skit in either Living Color or SNL that noticed the "people who ruin everything." I don't remember too well, but it was about those who, through their irresponsibility, took something away from the rest of us. An unfunny example would be the murderers who make airport travel bothersome and time intensive.

So, I was reading about a lawsuit against Wynn resorts for failing to protect their employees against second hand smoke. Some thoughts:

1. Second hand smoke is a scam. No harm, no law suit.

2. Still, if there's a law on the books about smoking in the workplace, and the casino doesn't follow it, they should get in trouble with the law. This was not the case.

3. By making employers responsible for things not conceived of by either legislators, regulators, employees, and employers; the plaintiffs and their attorneys "ruin everything." From now on businesses will be forced to be so proactive as to burden everybody else.

4. Including those people who like to smoke.

5. If the lady thinks smoking is bad, she should have left. Maybe she could have worked as an operator for an online casino where she'd only be smelling the stink from her own home. Now, she should be lobbying for anti-smoking laws.

6. The union and Wynn only care about money.

7. Add in the lawyers, and these things are enough to make people cynical.

The White House sees nothing funny about the security breach that allowed Joe Biden to enter Barack Obama's first official state dinner for Indian Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh.

The Secret Service held a press conference today:

"We're as shocked as anybody. We told the Vice-President that it was important that he go to his underground bunker and find waste and fraud in the stimulus spending. The 'solve the Iraqi crisis' bit was getting old. Anyways, we will be conducting a full investigation."

The Secret Service insisted that President was in no danger, as Joe Biden was on one of his "mellow highs."