Sisyphus Understands

Well, of all the presidential debates I have seen, that was by far the most recent.

Seriously, it didn't seem like either of the candidates was realy trying, or wanted to be there. Of the two, only McCain seemed willing to be specific about what he would do as President, and then only on a couple of questions. Most of the time he spent talking about how "bipartisan" he was (don't get me wrong - I like Senator Lieberman, but I don't need to hear his name 400 times in 90 minutes...). Obama, on the other hand, seemed to spend the entire night trying not to be pinned down to anything, or refuting things he's already said.

Granted, the town hall format is not the most enlightening in many cases, but with al the focus on the economy, I figured that at least one candidate would come with some specific proposals that carried some weight.

Oh, well. One more debate to go - I can only hope that the final one is more informative than the first two...

OK, so I broke down and got one. The two of you out there who are actually surprised that I succumbed, talk to the others - everyone knows I can't resist a new toy!

Overall, I have to say I've been very impressed with the performance so far. Admittedly, I wouldn't want to try doing any power emailing on this thing, but for short notes it is actually very handy (important safety tip - do NOT use this while driving! Only very foolish people do things like this...) Everything on it functions as advertised by Apple, something I've come to expect from their products.

The third party apps I've downloaded have been very handy as well. AccuFuel is a neat little application that tracks my gas mileage for me, and I've got NetNewsWire on both the iPhone and the MacBook now, so they remain in sync with each other - no tedious rereading blog articles.

The only things I have issues with so far are the lack of an accesible file system (I'd love to be able to copy files to take with me and review at my leisure), any type of productivity suite (even a text editor would be good), and the fact that the shows I record using BeyondTV will not play back correctly on the iPhone (this is a glitch in BeyondTV - they haven't updated their H.264 codec for the iPhone or iPod Touch yet).

Otherwise, I'm loving this little toy. And the battery life is actually pretty good, if you follow Apple's advice and turn off the servicces you're not using at the time (like the GPS). They all come turned on by default, so check your system settings!