On the recommendation of a friend who said my voicemail greeting was rather dreary and the nuisance of three straight days of a collector leaving messages for someone else because of not mentioning my name in said greeting, I rerecorded it. While inserting a modicum of cheer and a basic introduction, I took the opportunity to also omit something, namely the invitation to leave a message. Though not discouraging anyone from leaving one, I instead encouraged the sending of a text message. Why? A typical voicemail takes much longer to access and listen to than an equivalent text message takes to read. Sure, I admit that I like the sound and inflection of a person’s voice, but that can wait for an actual conversation, not a message.

To triumph fully, evil needs two victories, not one. The first victory happens when an evil deed is perpetrated; the second victory, when evil is returned. After the first victory, evil would die if the second victory did not infuse it with new life.

Miroslav Volf, The End of Memory: Remembering Rightly in a Violent World

Would you rather consign your soul to Hell in exchange for the salvation of every other soul, past and present, or vice versa?

…two essential conditions which are attached to all true rights; first, the capacity of individuals to claim and exercise the alleged right; second, the correspondent duty that is married to every right. If a man has a right to marry, some woman must have the duty of marrying him; if a man has a right to rest, some other person must have the duty of supporting him. If rights are confused thus with desires, the mass of men must feel always that some vast, intangible conspiracy thwarts their attainment of what they are told is their inalienable birthright.

Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot

Why have I cared so little about politics until the last presidential election. And now that I care, why do I feel that I have so little say about what happens? The questions, when posed side by side, seem to yield the obvious that I should have cared all along if state and local governments mattered more. The better question is why don’t I still care enough about who is elected mayor, representative, senator, or governor? Because too much power is vested in Washington. Federal bureaucracy controls so much of what should be decided locally and the farther removed the decisions are from those they affect, the less we the people are represented in what’s decided and the less we know about it. It’s almost as if we know that one-size-fits-all solutions have to screw someone over and that hopefully it’s not always the same people getting screwed. In a represenative government, we’re never going to make everyone happy. But it’s easier to move to another town or state than another country if we don’t like a decision. We need to shift our focus away from red or blue states to red or blue counties and better yet red or blue towns by decentralizing federal power. If that happened we’d be far more interested because our voices would be far more relevant. We might even see more colors besides red or blue, yet another cause for apathy.

Chronic remorse, as all the moralists are agreed, is a most undesirable sentiment.  If you have behaved badly, repent, make what amends you can and address yourself to the task of behaving better next time.  On no account brood over your wrongdoing.  Rolling in the muck is not the best way of getting clean.

Aldous Huxley, from his foreword to Brave New World

Life is hopelessly flawed. So I won’t lament what could not have been different. I’m ok w/ the lack of perfection in this lifetime. The upside for me is a loss of inhibition that comes with the loss of fear in making mistakes. Everything we do is flawed so to not do something because we doubt our ability to do it sufficiently well in terms of outcome is to run the greater risk of sinning by omission, not doing enough good. I’d rather be guilty of well-intended sins of commission than fear-induced sins of omission. In other words, eff playing it safe. Boldness over timidity in all things.

While driving, I wondered if the new iPhone 3G S had to be oriented with the screen parallel to the ground for the magnetometer to work properly, like a traditional compass.  This functionality is supposed to enhance the upcoming turn-by-turn GPS apps where a phone is clamped so that the screen is perpendicular to the ground.  But will the magnetometer still function properly?  Well instead of Googling, I put it to the test.  Not only does the magnetometer function as desired when the phone is held vertically but also when tilted to almost 45 degrees past vertical before the Maps app rotates 180 degrees.  Try it out.

While testing, another question came to mind: Will this work in landscape mode?  After testing, I found that the compass doesn’t work as expected in Maps.  When landscaped, the compass points in whatever direction the headphone jack is pointing regardless of whether the screen is parallel or perpendicular to the ground.  However, in the TomTom app demo, it seems to work properly in either portrait or landscape mode.  So it looks like a software limitation in Maps, not a hardware fault of the 3G S.  Not a big deal unless you want to use Maps as a free, bird’s-eye, landscape GPS app until TomTom and others release their apps for sale.

Instead of the usual flick gesture to navigate through screens of iPhone icons, I serendipitously found out that you can tap the slivers of space just under the fourth row of icons and to the right or left of the dots.

To memorize this week’s verse, Deuteronomy 7:9, I captured it from an iPhone Bible app and set it as the wallpaper. Now I can’t help but read it tens of times a day as I check my phone for the time, calls, texts, emails, web, music, weather, calculator, etc.