My Quiet Life

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So, I got my beta invite to google voice a few weeks ago. It looked pretty slick, but as far as I could tell, it was built around the assumption that you would give out your new google voice number to people to use as your primary number -- google voice could then forward it to your cellphone from there. Well, I've had the same phone number for like 12 years, so I have no intention of changing.. So I let my google voice account sit around unused.. until now. It occurred to me that I could of course forward my cell phone to google voice. However, on my iPhone, if you go to Settings -> Phone, the "Forwarding" is either on or off.. either it forwards all calls right off the bat or not at all,which is not what I want. I want to get actual calls on my phone but have it forward to google voice if I don't answer.

Apparently this is possible, it's just not accessible via the iPhone/AT&T settings interface. I found this handy reference:

Immediate Call Forwarding: Dial *21* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
Busy Call Forwarding: Dial *67* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
Call Forwarding No Reply: Dial *61* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.
Call Forwarding Not Reachable: Dial *62* plus the 10-digit number to which your calls should be forwarded and #. Press Send.

So, by using *67*, *61*, *62*, I now have all voicemail from my cellphone going right to google voice. Pretty sweet. Downside to this? Voicemail is no longer accessible right from the iPhone voicemail interface. And, although Google Voice will e-mail you a transcript of the VM, it doesn't email a WAV of the actual message -- merely a link to a google.com/voice URL where you can listen to it. Incidentally, for some reason, this link yields a 404 when accessed via my iphone. So, it would appear that actually listening to voicemail on google voice via my iPhone may be a problem with this setup.. Not sure if I can hang with that.. Interesting to toy with, though..

So, sounds like there's plenty of interest.

I created a yahoo group for it.. Go sign up. There's a poll for when we should first meet up.

(Why yahoo groups? a) they have good mailing list support, b) they have calendaring and polls)

Anyone have any interest in starting a regular photography club type thing? Or even just having one get-together, to start..

This would be a beginner-to-intermediate group -- people that are just interested in learning basic techniques, how to get the most out of their camera, nerd out a bit, etc..

There are a few reasons I thought this might be a good idea:

• I've had interest expressed in this sort of thing from a few people -- we just never made it happen..
• I often get a lot of questions from people all the time (which I'm happy to answer) and vice-versa -- may as well share the wealth
• Without going into too much snarky detail, the other photography meetups and clubs in town I've visited were a complete waste of time.. either a forum for circular back-patting on their work, or a glorified social club where most of the time was spent arguing about where they'd eat. Regardless, they had no real structure and no one seemed to be sharing or learning anything at all..

Let me know if you have any interest in the comments, and if it seems like it's worth it, we can put together a google group or something.. I want to keep it small, though, so you don't have to forward this on to every photographer you know -- not out of elitism/exclusivity or anything, but I don't really have the time or inclination to organize some massive new photography club.. I just thought a smaller group of friends/like-minded people interested in photography would be fun..

So, I'm selling all my books. No, I haven't forsaken the written word, but I have already read half of them, and the other half, I can get again, from a library or in ebook format (I just bought an amazon kindle, and i LOVE it).

So, I'll be taking most of my books to McKay's shortly to sell them, but I figured I'd give my esteemed friends first crack at them..

Because I'm extraordinarily lazy, though, I am not actually going to list them.. Instead, I have some pictures (hey, i'm a photographer, what do you want). These are very large images -- you should be able to make out what most of the books are:

• Mostly non-fiction -- politics, philosophy, sociology, etc.
• Fiction
• Reference -- I may keep more of these, since they are handy/

Let me know if you have questions about what something is..

I went and saw this on Friday with The Briggs.. A quick review (warning: my "reviews" are just an excuse to ramble about whatever it made me think of): the first half is a typical judd apatow comedy, the second half is a sorta meh romcomish situation dramedy. or something. It was a lot longer than I expected. I think the Apatow brand of humor has about run its course for me, however this movie did prove that there's probably no upper limit on the number of dick jokes I will laugh at in one sitting. Also, Eric Bana is increasingly one of my favorite actors -- and I was going to say something about his hilariously over-the-top Australian accent and how great it was, until I remember that he actually is Australian. Faaaaaack.

Lastly, one thing I really did like, hopefully without too many spoilers, so I guess skip this part if you're worried about it: towards the end of the movie (once it transitioned from dick-joke comedy into dramedy), there's this moment where Adam Sandler's character is pursuing a long-lost love, who has moved on with her life, re-married, and has a happy family. The gist of his monologue is that why shouldn't he have happiness, maybe he didn't work hard enough at it, he just had to try harder to get her back, etc etc. (apologies for the brutal paraphrasing). I was about to slap my forehead at this point: here with go with this again.

This is a pervasive and very dangerous idea/theme in our popular culture that manifests in basically every movie or story dealing with love or relationships: the protagonist has this one long lost true love -- the "one that got away" -- and through the course of the movie, resolves to get her/him back, despite the fact that the ship has sailed. He/she acts boldly -- insanely, perhaps -- and through this craziness, truth shines through, true love wins the day, fireworks, rainbows, and that bullshit. This is a dangerous thing to be featured so prominently, of course, because real life rarely works that way -- and it no doubt plants the seed in many a poor soul's brain that they should obstinately pursue a "long lost" love, much to the detriment of everyone involved. How many stalkers and restraining orders have been born of a poorly-conceived romantic comedy? This is an epidemic that could be prevented, people.

(Side-note thought: What's the difference between a creepy stalker and a daring, romantic soul? Creepy stalkers aren't hot. Badump bump.)

Anyways, so there's that, and it's also just a pretty cliched movie theme. I was glad to see, then, that this movie doesn't actually fall victim to that, which is good. I won't say how, since maybe you want to still see the movie.

All in all, it was an okay movie, not great. Usually for "not great" movies, people say "wait for DVD", but I've never found that to be true for me. If I'm gonna bother to get something on DVD, I want it to be good. Seeing a movie in a theatre on a Friday after work -- meh, it doesn't have to be anything that great. This movie was good for that. A mediocre friday night movie. So, go see it in a theatre. Have some popcorn. Laugh at a dick joke or two.

I am reading Freakonomics for a book club thing.. A minor quibble with one part. There's a section where they are looking for evidence of racial discrimination among dating websites by comparing people that list "no racial preference" and their actual email choices:

The white men who said that race didn’t matter sent 90 percent of their e-mail queries to white women. The white women who said race didn’t matter sent about 97 percent of their e-mail queries to white men.

Is it possible that race really didn't matter for these white women and men and that they simply never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them?

The above condemning conclusion-as-a-question doesn't necessarily follow from the presented numbers. It's meaningless without the race breakdown of the dating websites in question. That is: this large skew represents foremost the fact that ... most people on the dating websites in question are probably white. I don't have that data (they probably didn't either). But at worst, we can assume the dating website demographics match the US: which has around 74% white people -- thus indicating that white men chose white women 90% of the time from a pool that is already 75% white. (technically I should look up the demographics for race + sex, but I am too lazy). This still indicates a preference, but doesn't justify saying that they "never happened to browse a nonwhite date that interested them". It merely indicates a 14% difference of preference. If you really wanted to find hypocrisy in someone saying that they have no racial preference, you'd have to find a way to isolate the data such that the choices between white/non-white were 50/50 every time.

Like I said, it's a minor quibble.. This happens to me a lot when I read pop science.. Maybe I am too comfortable reading annoyingly annotated sociology texts, but this sort of thing irks me.. Now that I've found them skirting past statistical subtleties to make a point, I feel like I need to read their book even more carefully -- like I would a more academic text -- except without the benefit of sourced data. It's also somewhat ironic, in that this snippet comes directly after a section discussing "experts" using information asymmetry to their advantage.

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