Most Republicans I talk to say “We really don’t have a good choice this year in either candidate.”

Most Democrats say this is the most important election in generations.

It’s nearly over.

Yesterday I was showing my iPhone to a colleague when I started playing with the settings and found out that it was even cooler than I had thought.

One of the most difficult aspects of trying to read Chinese is looking up characters in the dictionary. If you recognize a character and know how it sounds, you can look it up via the pinyin romanization. However, 9 times out of 10, you don’t know what it sounds like. So, you have to look determine what the character’s radical is and check that radical in the radical index. That will then tell you where in the dictionary to look for your specific word. It takes ages.

Most Chinese-English dictionaries I’ve had have a very worn our radical page.

I downloaded some dictionaries for my iPhone a while back to have a play with them. The dictionaries were cool, but it still relied on me entering text via the online keyboard. I never checked the international settings and found that I can set up more than one keyboard on the device. I could also select to enter Pinyin or draw actual characters.

Now I can draw a character into the dictionary program (I’m using Slovo-Ed at the moment) and immediately see a list of characters which look like the one I’m trying to draw. It is really, really cool.

Seriously, if you have every used a Chinese-English dictionary, you will know how much of a time saver this would be!

My best friend growing up was Ted Falagan. We met in the fourth grade and he was my best friend all the way through high school. There was nobody I was more close to (outside my own family) in my formative years. We were into sci-fi, comic books, movies, and television.

He has been making movies as long as I can remember. We used to make little films on a bulky camcorder around our houses growing up. He’s still making movies in San Diego (with a troupe of actors called the Fault Line Players), but now he’s doing it professionally.

One of the nice things about the internet age is that I can see my friend’s movies online even when I am on the other side of the world. While his films regularly appear in film festivals around the states, some of them have recently been put up on Youtube. Most of them can be found here and here.

Here’s one of my favourite movies available at the moment, although there are other good ones:

The baseball playoffs have already started. It seems like the San Diego Padres have been in them so frequently lately that I expect to watch some playoffs in early October.

But this year, they didn’t do to well (an understatement) and the season is over.

The big highlight of the year for me was a few Sundays ago when Chris Young took a perfect game into 8 2/3 innings against the Nationals. It was a day game so I could watch it live in the evening here. It was very exciting and very close. I was also heartbreaking when he was homered off of.

Oh well, next year.

Last night, BBC2 started the third season of Heroes in the UK.  This is less than two weeks since the show premiered in the US.  This is great news for those living abroad who have less time to wait and avoid online spoilers until they can watch the show.

Previously, a show like this would take a few months to be shown in the UK.  Typically, a show starting in the Fall season would premier here in January or February.  I believe the motivation was to allow the show to run continuously without reruns.  But this makes it difficult for fans in the UK when surfing the Internet and not wanting to find out too much before getting a chance to see the show.  It’s a lot like taping a sports event and then trying to avoid the sports news until you get a chance to watch it.

I think piracy has helped bring this about.  The big assumption that people are trying to steal content without paying is not always correct.  If more shows are managed like this, you would see a lot less illegal downloads.  If networks offered fee-based programming online, pirated tv shows would dwindle.  Even iTunes shows wait until the UK premiers before something is offered.  But at least they didn’t have to wait long for Heroes.

Still, it did take nearly two weeks to be shown here.  I read a blog post from torrent freak a few days ago, ‘Heroes’ Causes BitTorrent Boom, which says that downloads of the show last week broke new records.  Even two weeks is a long time on the net.

By releasing content earlier, the US TV networks can control their own content before it spreads via piracy.

. . . make sure the sensor is in the right way.

A few years ago, I started using the sensor with velcro strapped to my shoe. It worked great. I even wrote about it.

This week I got a new pair of running shoes and started using a Marware pouch. I found that my three mile runs were being logged as two miles. I was gutted and the pouch was on its way to the bin.

Then I read the instructions more carefully. I had put the sensor in upside down.

Now I’m back from a run and want to post this before I forget. If you found this post because you are googling Marware pouch problems, I hope you find this tip useful.