Note: New to this story? Be sure to read “Taking the Dumb Pipe to China” and “Cognitive Styles of Customer Support Reps ” for the back story.

I’ve reached a treaty with the Invisible Phonejacker Sky Pirates: If I don’t call a particular 866 number from my iPhone, they will not reach into the bowels of the AT&T billing system and see to it I’m billed for a call to China.

Other terms of the treaty: AT&T will not suggest I buy a special long distance calling plan for an extra $3.99 a month and will not charge me an extra $0.15 per minute for calls already made to the 866 number.

This treaty was arrived at after my third escalation. I dealt with someone at AT&T on two separate calls this morning. Unlike the first person I dealt with when I walked through the front door of the AT&T support apparatus, she was empowered to deal with customers like any normal human being might wish to be dealt with. Unlike the next two people along the way after that, she was empowered to be a little bit curious about my problem and contact people who might have an idea what was going on.

To the extent she turned the issue into a sort of joint exploration of the experience I had instead of a bizarre but ultimately unassailable brute fact, I feel a little better. Experts have been consulted, circumstances explained. I’m being treated no worse by AT&T than it treats its own employees. Doesn’t say much nice about what it must be like to work for AT&T, but I’ll take baffled empathy over chilly disregard. I’ll also take “no additional charges at all” over the un-apology that was the company’s initial insistence I be charged something for the whole affair.

But that’s where it ends. Technicians at AT&T are insistent that I must have dialed a “+86″ somewhere along the way, even though that would imply that there’s a magical number in China that can come after the initial “86″ that also connects me to the exact WebEx conference I was trying to reach in the first place.

If I make the mistake of dialing that allegedly toll-free 866 number again (or let the WebEx app on the iPhone dial it for me), I’ll be looking at having to contact someone to get whatever charges might or might not be assessed by the Invisible Phonejacker Sky Pirates removed from my bill.

The remaining unchecked box on the list is what, if any, response WebEx/Cisco will have about the whole thing. My guess: There’s no response it can have, because AT&T has a problem it’s not going to solve while I sit on hold and use Acorn to make funny pictures of iPhones and pirate flags.

Even if someone at AT&T has some moment of clarity, identifies exactly what went wrong, then promptly fixes it, nobody outside of AT&T will ever hear about it: There’ll just be a sudden reduction in Invisible Phonejacker Sky Pirate activity, and we won’t even know to step outside and spend a moment staring into the skies with looks of dumb gratitude.

There are times when Apple’s ugly paternalism really rubs me the wrong way, like the way it removed all the Google Voice apps from the iTunes App Store and then pretended like it wasn’t really trying to keep us from Google Voice, but rather was trying to keep us from getting confused by Google Voice.

But it’s important to remember that all that paternalism is in a good cause. For instance, if we had to spend all our time sorting through confusing and potentially shoddy apps like that bit of garbage from those fly-by-nighters at Google, we wouldn’t be able to find really useful apps like this one: Hand Heater!

Are you a little cold? Turn your mobile device into a heater with this application, easier to carry than a true heating, Hand Heater will improve your daily life.

It … uh … it presents a picture of some heating coils. It makes your iPhone or iPod touch warm. Allegedly?

I don’t know which is more sad: The reviewers who helpfully point out that if you set it to “high” instead of “max,” you’ll be working around a bug in an otherwise excellent implementation of a hand warmer; or the people who are shocked … SHOCKED … that this app doesn’t do what it claims it will and wish they could get their $.99 back.

I just thought of a point I think I should have made a little more clear in my previous account about my AT&T “866 number lands you in China” woes.

I’ve spoken to three representatives so far, and they’ve had one thing in common:

Confronted with a bill that shows three calls to the exact same number—all initiated within three minutes of each other, with one call not being charged anything at all—the representatives acknowledge that it seems strange and inconsistent, but then go on to say that there’s nothing anyone can do about it. Sometimes you just call a toll-free number and get charged for a call to China.

Things have merely worked out that way, they seem to be reasoning, and who’s to say there’s not some sublime purpose guiding the hands of the billing machines?

So, yesterday I tweeted:

Dialed an 866 #WebEx number on my #iPhone, getting charged by #AT&T for calling China. #idontevenknowwhotoblamefail

Here’s the story so far:

The company I work for uses WebEx. In late December, we had a big WebEx conference that was scheduled to last for 90 minutes. I didn’t want to be trapped in front of the computer for that long, so I took advantage of the WebEx iPhone app to dial in.

The WebEx app is pretty slick: You open a link to a WebEx conference in the iPhone, the app opens up, connects you to the (toll free, it’s an 866 number) dial-in number, then you can watch the presentation slides in the app. When other people on the call speak, there’s a little indicator at the bottom of the screen that tells you who’s talking. You can flip back and forth between the slides and the call roster. They included a mute button, too. If more people knew about the mute button, there’d be less suffering in the world because we’d all spend less time wondering who the aggressive nose breather on the call is.

I was new to the app so I dialed in a little early to make sure everything was working. It took me a few tries to figure out how the app worked, but on the third dial-in, I stayed on the call. Everything went fine, then 90 minutes later the call ended.

An Unpleasant Surprise

Fast forward to yesterday.

I sat down at the computer to go through and pay my online bills, including my AT&T bill. I’ve never set up automatic payments because I’m paranoid about telling a company to just dip in and take what it thinks it needs each month. That was probably proven to be a good policy this month, because my bill was a WTF!?-inducing $557.43. It’s usually much, much less. Usually way over $300 less.

For a few seconds I had that sort of swimmy feeling you get when you’ve made a terrible mistake. I sat staring at the screen, wondering if I’d somehow changed our plan, or if Alison, who’d been out of town twice in the past month, had wandered into some bizarre Super Charge zone in Baltimore or Long Beach. Then I had a few paranoid thoughts about Invisible Phonejacker Sky Pirates. I’ve never heard of Invisible Phonejacker Sky Pirates, but they struck me as a reasonable explanation for a few seconds before I regained the analytical faculties that separate us from the common beast in the field.

I pulled up the full view of my bill and began to go over it line by line. I eventually got to an entry on 12/30/09. It was a call to an 866 number listed as “China” for 1 minute, costing $3.49. Then I looked at the next entry. Another call, a minute later, to an 866 number listed as “China” for 96 minutes, costing $335.04.

I looked up and down the bill in the immediate vicinity of those calls and noticed that just before the first call to “China,” I’d placed another call to the exact same 866 number as the other two, only it was listed as “toll free” and incurred no charge.

I didn’t remember the conference I’d sat in on over a month prior, so the only thing I really knew was that I hadn’t called China, and that even if Ben had managed to call China, he’s never had my phone out of my sight for 96 minutes. So I called AT&T. As near as I can recall, this is a verbal snapshot of my mindset:

“I didn’t call China. I’ve never called China. What’s more, 866 numbers are not China numbers. And even more to the point, one of the calls to the exact same number is properly listed as ‘toll free.’ The AT&T rep will courteously listen to my story, I’ll hear some keys clacking in the background, she’ll say something like ‘Oh … oh no.’ I’ll stiffen a little at that, but she’ll realize she’s made me nervous and she’ll quickly put my fears at ease. ‘This is all a terrible mistake. We’ll get this taken care of. May I put you on hold?’ I’ll say ’sure,’ and then I’ll sit for a few minutes until she comes back and tells me it’s all taken care of. She’ll ask if there’s anything else she can do for me today and I’ll laugh and say ‘if you’ve gotten that $300 off my account I think we’re all set.’ She’ll laugh pleasantly, I’ll hang up, and I’ll be on my way.”

An Even More Unpleasant Customer Service Representative

I called AT&T, and the point at which the agent picked up the phone and confirmed my account information is pretty much where the little narrative I imagined completely derailed.

I explained my story. Her initial response was “I don’t know what to tell you.”

I restated my thesis, which was that being charged for a 96 minute call to China when I’d called an allegedly toll free number seemed inappropriate.

She allowed as how she had a “theory” as to why that might be, but didn’t care to elaborate.

I reiterated my thesis once more, reminding her of the bit in my story where I called the same number a minute earlier and was charged nothing at all.

“Maybe you disconnected before you could be charged,” she suggested.

If that was the case, why did my bill say the call lasted four minutes and was “toll free,” when the next call to the exact same number was only one minute long and cost $3.49?

She retreated to her original position, which was that she had a “theory.”

“Aren’t 866 numbers toll free?” I asked.

They were, she said, unless I’d allowed my line to accept some charges once I connected because I’d been calling a party line.

“I didn’t call a ‘party line,’” I said. “I don’t call party lines. Ever.”

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” she replied.

At that point, she decided to actually consult my bill. Since I had my bill on the screen in front of me, I told her where to look using the line numbers that are printed in front of each entry on the bill.

“Items 55, 56 and 57″ I said.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said.

I explained that my copy of the bill numbered each entry.

Her copy did not. Fine, I said, they’re three calls to the same 866 number, and they’re all within a minute of each other on 12/30/09.

“Look,” she said, “I’m going to step you through where we need to be in the bill.”

She then embarked on a painful, three-minute-long process that involved translating the version of the bill she had on her screen to the version I might be seeing on my screen. In the end we arrived at the portion of the bill that covered calls made on 12/30/09. Once we got there she said “I guess you could have opened the PDF version.”

Thanks.

At that point, she looked at the three calls to the same number, reminded me that she had a “theory” she didn’t care to share, and said she could do nothing for me.

Nothing?

“No. I have a theory, but I don’t have any way of knowing.”

“Can you imagine someone at your company who might?”

“I can transfer you to someone who might, but I can’t promise anything. And if you don’t pay you risk suspension of your service, so keep that in mind when you talk to them.”

“Well, may I please be transferred?”

“Yes. I’ll transfer you. Like I said, I have a theory but I can’t do anything about it.”

“O.k. Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. We’ll see what they say.”

“Yes. Thanks!”

“O.k.”

I was put on hold.

Spotlight Proves Useful

While I sat on hold, it occurred to me that I’d called the 866 number for a reason, and that maybe, somewhere on my computer, I could find that reason. So I started searching for the number using Spotlight.

When I typed the first three numbers—866—a few thousand hits appeared.

When I typed the next three numbers, it quickly pared down to under 100.

By the time I had the whole number in, the only messages showing were from people in my company, including one announcing the conference call on 12/30.

The next agent was, well, less of an asshole.

I stepped her through my reasoning, and she agreed that my circumstances made no sense. I repeated a few key points and noted that I had a number of e-mails sent on behalf of my company from WebEx identifying the number as toll-free. Things went from “not making a lot of sense” to “really weird,” which I took as a hopeful sign.

Unfortunately, because we were talking about over $300 in charges, she was powerless. I had to be referred to a special team that would contact me at some point in the next 7 days.

I pointed out that I’d been threatened with suspension of service if I didn’t pay. She offered to create a payment arrangement to tide me over until the charge was off my bill.

The Special Team Calls

So this afternoon, I got a call from someone on that special team.

I was a lot more settled, so I related the story as directly as I could with very little backtracking.

She told me she was happy to remove the charges from my bill, however …

I sat upright at “however,” because to my way of thinking there should be no “howevers” in this situation.

However, there was a call on my account to the same number for 30 minutes just two days ago (yep — another WebEx call). Those charges could not be forgiven, but they could be reduced if I agreed to sign up for AT&T’s special long distance plan and paid $0.15 per minute for that call and any others I decided to make to China in the future (even though I have never consciously decided to call China ever).

I said that was ridiculous when nobody could even explain to me how it was that calling an 866 number to the exact same people could result in either charges for calling to China or no charge at all.

As pleasant as this representative was, I have the impression that she was genuinely puzzled that I wouldn’t agree to a recurring $3.99/month charge and an unmerited $4.50 charge. But she agreed to contact technical support and report the matter. I explained that, as much as I love my iPhone, I would not be able to tolerate AT&T as my carrier if they thought imposing a $3.99 Invisible Phonejacker Sky Pirates prevention surcharge plus $.15 per minute was a reasonable solution.

Twitter Becomes the Best Thing Ever (Maybe)

Not long after that call was over, I got a tweet from “Cisco WebEx” asking me to e-mail an address with my story.

A few hours later I got a very sympathetic e-mail from someone I could look up on LinkedIn who is not a “Cisco WebEx” person, but who is a “marketing consultant.”

She promised to ring someone at WebEx proper and see if they could help.

Someone having something to do with WebEx was my next stop in the process, so it was good that I was spared having to dig around through the corporate Web site to figure out where to begin.

And that’s where things are for now.

If this is halftime, I’d score the game in favor of WebEx if only because AT&T’s team had two perfectly pleasant reps whose relatively sympathetic responses were drowned out by the horrible woman I dealt with first.

More when something happens.

If the iPhone has helped me accomplish one thing, it has probably been to make it easier for me to stay away from Emacs.

It works like this:

It is not controversial to assert that Emacs is an environment all its own. You can find libraries and packages that allow Emacs to acknowledge and talk to outside environments, so it’s not a closed environment, but it’s different enough that there’s some fiddling involved to get it chatting with the outside world.

The iPhone could also be considered an environment all its own, but it’s an environment built with an eye on a broader context. iPhones have a pretty easy time doing things like talking to iCal or Outlook with a few button clicks, for instance. Now, unlike Emacs, there’s a point with the iPhone where no amount of grunting or straining will matter, and if you want it to talk to something else nobody else has bothered to make it talk to, there’s an SDK you can download.

All that said, when Emacs and iPhone can both respond to a particular requirement with “there’s an [app|elisp package] for that,” the iPhone variation will usually involve a quick download and three or four fields in a configuration screen, tops.

When I got an iPhone, I was a pretty heavy Emacs org mode user. The smartphone I had prior to the iPhone was a BlackBerry, and the BlackBerry never really talked to my Mac on any useful level: lost contacts, extra contacts, a new contact for every phone number I had listed for what had once been a single contact, crummy calendar syncing, forget about bookmarks syncing, etc. etc. etc. Because the BlackBerry sucked for me as a Mac user, and because iCal was anemic when it came to todos, org mode was able to fend off everything.

I won’t go into a lot of detail about org mode except to say that it’s neat. You just open a “.org” file in Emacs and start typing using a pretty simple notation. For instance …

* PracNet
** TODO Look at reviews: can we get user information to the front page? (ASP)
   DEADLINE: <2008-07-03 Thu>
** TODO Look at inside pages: make a toolkit for callouts that can fit into the CSS
   DEADLINE: <2008-07-07 Mon>

When that text appears in an Emacs buffer in org mode, it’s nicely color coded. A few keystrokes make it easy to cycle between “TODO” and “DONE” or some other status.

As with all things Emacs, it’s very customizable.

Then the iPhone came along and promised me that if I would accept a few small tradeoffs, it would sync up with a lot more of my stuff: bookmarks, addresses, e-mail, etc. etc. etc. I’d have all that stuff in my pocket, and when I returned home my Mac would automagically commune with it to learn what had changed in my absence.

org mode fell by the wayside, and the little ecosystem I’d created within Emacs crumbled because it was no longer a place to live … just a place to visit when I needed to push text around.

So MobileOrg strikes me as fascinating and horrifying at the same time. All it does is this:

You save your Emacs org mode files on a WebDAV server, load MobileOrg onto your iPhone, and you’ll have org mode on your iPhone and it’ll all sync up, just like Remember the Milk or ToodleDo or any of the other todo services that have “an app for that.”

“If you are a MobileMe user, you already have access to a WebDAV server: iDisk,” says the MobileOrg site in a manner I cannot help but read as insinuating.

“Sucker … walked away from Emacs and even took the extra step of slurping the MobileMe kool-aid thinking it’d harden your resolve against ever returning. Well … fine … keep your precious iDisk … it will become the tool of your re-liberation.”

Less than two years ago, when I was venturing forth from org mode and getting to know the iPhone as a way to keep all my Stuff in sync, MobileOrg would have had me at hello. Now it just gives me the shaking fits.

With Emacs, you don’t just go “la la la … I’m gonna add org mode back and call it a day!” You think to yourself, “I love org mode. I wish there was an easy way to turn an e-mail message into a todo …” and the next thing you know you’re dealing with how to configure GNUS.

Then you think “All my calendar stuff is in Google calendar … how can I get it into my org mode agenda?” and that means you’re off reading this guy’s page and just getting angrier and angrier.

Then you go in the kitchen and make a drink, and while you’re making it and calming down you think to yourself, if I’m doing all this stuff in Emacs anyhow, what would it hurt to follow Twitter in Emacs?

Now you’re not drinking because you’re angry … you’re drinking because you wonder what happened to you and it makes you sad. But you’re drunk, so it seems like a perfectly good idea to build an entire Web site using nothing but Emacs because then you can get a LaTeX version of it for if the asteroids hit and their radiation destroys all HTML. And having decided to do that, part of you thinks about how glad you are you have org mode, so you can organize the lengthy process of making sure you never have to leave Emacs again.

It’s knowing what’s in store for me as I sit here with MobileOrg on my iPhone and the necessary WebDAV share all set up that makes me read this and just want to spit nails:

At its core, Org-mode is a simple outliner for note-taking and list management. You can learn the basics for using it in five minutes. This may be all you need, and Org-mode will not impose more complex features on you.

That’s right … because org-mode is just a collection of lisp running in an editor. It cannot impose more complex features on you. The genius of org-mode is that you will eventually impose more complex features on yourself.

I used to think about sleep this way: It was important to not get too much, or I’d have trouble flipping my sleep schedule around. I remember two weeks in 1999 when Al went off to Spain and I ended up completely turned around by the end of the first week. It’s a creepy, strange feeling.

Then we had Ben and I started to think about sleep this way: I’d never, ever be caught up again.

Things have gotten better since, but I still tended to be a night owl, and it was a pretty good night when I got more than six hours. It was just too easy to get wrapped up in a good book. Finally, last year I had a lot of luck setting my bedtime and sticking to it pretty religiously. I got knocked out of that routine, though, for some reason I can’t even remember and it’s been hard to get back into it.

So the Daily Tracker has come in handy. Using a list of generic tracking items, it allows you to set up a simple log for all sorts of activities. For things you want to track like time or recurrence, it offers the ability to keep a running total and average. It also allows you to create things like reusable checklists:

A few other tracker types:

• daily notes
• to-do list
• integer
• number with one decimal place
• number with two decimal places
• rate (1-5 stars)
• time (hours and minutes)
• mood
• check/x box

I started tracking my sleep earlier this month, which has helped me be more mindful of it, and this past week I added a daily journal, a list of books I’m reading, and a timer for the amount of time I spend reading. The journal has provisions for adding pictures from the camera or camera roll, location stamping and adding voice recording. It also includes an icon for adding a timestamp.

I wouldn’t ordinarily spend any time at all with an app like this for the iPhone because it’s not a platform where I’ve come to expect a lot of data portability, but Daily Tracker does really well in this regard: You can back up all your data to Google Docs in the form of a PDF file that appears blank but holds everything inside. It can also export some of the logs to CSV or a Google spreadsheet.

Working with Pastebot

Daily Tracker is also a nice use case for Pastebot, a clipboard app. With Pastebot, it’s possible to share your iPhone’s clipboard over a Wi-Fi network with a Mac or vice versa, so it’s possible to prepare some text on a Mac, copy it, then paste it into the iPhone for use there. That’s a good way to use a full keyboard for keeping a journal or log when you’re in front of a computer, then copy it into Daily Tracker to keep everything in one place.

Pastebot can do a lot more than that, too. It’s possible to copy images from the iPhone to the Mac over the air. Just copy an image into the clipboard, open Pastebot, pick the image, then select “Paste to Mac,” which will drop it on the open and selected Finder window.

For text clippings, Pastebot includes a few other actions, like “Search via Google” and a bunch of text filters:

• convert to lowercase/uppercase
• encode/decode HTML entities
• find and replace
• quote lines
• smarten/straighten quotes
• wrap in HTML tags

For images, it includes filters, too:

• brightness
• black and white
• invert
• saturation
• sepia

It’s a really smooth way to copy stuff back and forth quickly and easily. My one fond wish is that the iPhone supported background tasks. Having Pastebot running in the background and keeping a history of my Mac and iPhone clipboards would be really nice.

Pro tip on clipboards: You can share clipboard histories between Macs over the air with PTH Pasteboard. It sounds pointless until you move from a desktop to a laptop in the middle of the day and the URL or snippet you copied to your clipboard on the iMac automagically appears in the clipboard history of your MacBook, sparing you a trip upstairs to mail it to yourself or something equally clunky.

I’ve spent the past several weeks thinking a lot about how people come to be “on the Web.” I don’t want to get into the reasons for why I’ve been thinking about it … I just have. I’ve been through a few stages in my own on-the-webness (Web presence):

• I started out with a Geocities account when I was stationed at Fort Bragg

• I progressed to a really simple static site while I was living in Charlottesville

• I fiddled with assorted self-hosted Web software once we moved to Portland

During the first few years we lived in Portland, I was pretty fiercely into the “host everything yourself” mindset: My own blogging software, my own gallery software, even my own bookmarking software.

Once Ben was due to come along, I got away from a lot of that. There’s no sensation quite like waking up to the smell of a smoking server in the room that has been designated as the nursery. I moved to a shared hosting setup, kept my own blogging software, but gradually moved to services like flickr and delicious.

I was making tradeoffs in the kind of pain I wanted to endure. When you self-host everything, there’s a lot of attendant worry: You have to keep up on security updates, you have to make sure all the moving pieces you’ve cobbled together aren’t doing things that break each other. When you outsource all that stuff to the likes of flickr, SmugMug or someone else, you have to worry about those services staying afloat, not deciding you need to pay more to maintain your presence on them, etc. etc.

When social networking sites came along, I was very much into self-hosting almost everything. I signed up for Friendster and Orkut, but they didn’t provide much value. I thought MySpace was garish.

For the past year or so, I’ve been using Facebook more and more because it offers a lot of what people used to go to three or four different providers to get: bookmarks, light blogging, posting pictures and video, etc. etc.

There are a couple of problems with Facebook from the perspective of putting together a Web presence, but the biggest one is that if you start from Facebook, you don’t leave Facebook. Your “stuff” is on Facebook, and that’s largely where it will stay. So it’s demonstrably worse than a flickr or Smugmug (both of which offer either Web services or paid products to quickly get your content back, or a delicious (which provides you several ways to reclaim your bookmarks) or a hosted blog (for which there are usually documented procedures for getting a dump of your corpus). In the end, when you start with Facebook, you’re allowing Facebook to replace the reason you might have joined in the first place—as a place to find and keep in touch with friends—with a new reason: a place to establish your Web identity and presence. Facebook’s got its reasons for wanting you to do that, but because Facebook has shown little interest in facilitating the easy movement of those scraps of your Web presence to other places, you’re faced with the need to keep your own copies of everything, which is why people are attracted to hosted services in the first place: low maintenance and archival requirements.

For the past year or so, I’ve let my distributed Web presence languish and I’ve used Facebook almost exclusively to post pictures, video, etc., but as I’ve thought about this over the past few weeks, I’ve decided that’s backwards. To the extent possible, that distributed Web of hosted services should be feeding into Facebook using the assorted apps and services that make that possible.

There are some pitfalls to feeding Facebook from the outside:

1. There’s a sensibility among the sort of people who want to use Facebook to keep up with their friends that Facebook apps are intrusive and cluttery. I’ve noticed a lot more talk about unfriending Facebook users who spend more time with games and apps than using the service as a sort of microblog/status sharing tool.

2. Some of the services used to feed Facebook from the outside are buggy and unreliable. Some of that is because Facebook itself is sometimes shoddy, but some of it is because the services themselves are poorly written and meet just one or two use cases, then they languish either because the programmer has moved on from Facebook, or because the programmer hits some upward bound of competence and can’t encompass more use cases, or because an API changes somewhere and frustrates the programmer beyond keeping up.

Where the first issue—that growing sensibility that apps are externalities to the “genuine” Facebook experience—is concerned, you risk annoying a few friends because they might perceive you’re dumping stuff into Facebook.

You also risk annoying people who are following you more than one place: If you set up Facebook to echo your Twitter feed, for instance, your Twitter friends who are also your Facebook friends stand to get each tweet twice. Sure, they can turn off the app that’s posting your tweets to your Facebook feed, but they might not know that. Same with anything else you use to feed Facebook.

I guess I think it’s worth that risk. Here’s one example why:

I recently realized that I was missing a collection of pictures I took about 18 months ago. They weren’t the most important pictures in the world, but I’d taken the time with this particular batch to sort through them and do some digital darkroom work. Somehow, at some point, during a process where I’d consolidated all my pictures into one directory, those pictures were left out of the process and I couldn’t find them on my computer. Fortunately, I’d uploaded them to SmugMug, where I was keeping most of the pictures I took that mattered to me. I pay a good amount per year to use SmugMug ($40), but I get to store my originals up there. A few minutes after finding them on SmugMug, I had them back down in the local collection. If I’d uploaded those pictures to Facebook for storage, I wouldn’t have had access to them in their original sizes or resolutions. So with SmugMug, I had a reliable archive/redundant backup I could access quickly and easily. Flickr provides the same service. Dropbox does as well. There are still risks inherent with using those services, but I’d rather count on lightning not striking twice on the same day than just once.

So starting today I’m going to spend some time figuring out ways that my blog, Twitter, pictures and bookmarks can feed into Facebook instead of wishing Facebook wasn’t such a black box. As a small hint at why I’ve been thinking about this at all, I’m also going to be spending time figuring out how to help other people do that, too.

Unblock Me is something I used to have on my Handspring Visor under the name “Traffic.” I’m not some sort of master game logician, so this may be one of those games more analytical types will tear through like the Hulk in a piñata factory, but it’s diverting.

One difference from “Traffic”: It doesn’t seem to keep track of the number of moves required to win, at least in easy mode.

Oh … Winning: you have to slide the blocks around such that the red block can go out the door to the right.

I’ve been trying to like games on the iPhone since, well … I guess since before I had one, when I had an iPod touch. With a few exceptions, I haven’t liked most of the ones I’ve played: they take forever to load, if the phone isn’t in a freshly rebooted state they flake out, and there are weird little hiccups and stutters now and then. Where mobile games are concerned, I’m after something I can turn on and play to kill a few minutes. I don’t want to think about rebooting my phone to get the best performance out of one.

This weekend I got a hankering for a good racing game in the mode of Wipeout and downloaded a few likely candidates from the app store. Bleh. One wouldn’t load more than once out of three attempts after a restart, one had problems keeping up the frame rate (even after a restart), and both had solid four-star average reviews.

I decided to dust off my Nintendo DS and Mario Kart DS. Here’s me on Mario Kart DS almost four years ago:

I’ve played kart games on Playstation, but they’ve never been quite right. The developers (in the games I’ve seen) seem to have decided that since the kart genre is supposed to be forgiving and more “fun” than “intense,” it’s o.k. to just slow everything down instead of working out better physics. It’s a cognitive block they’re dealing with … like they’ve forgotten they’re in control of the game world, so they can mess with the models. The resulting mess has always seemed like “Wipeout or Need for Speed, only using non-hovering cars with throttle governors.” That sucks.

Mario Kart seems to get the notion that the inherent unreality of, you know, heat-seeking turtle shell missiles and the ability to transmogrify into a gigantic flying bullet that travels at high speeds and knocks over everything in its path pretty much shatters the need to bother with realistic crash and bump models. And it understands that to most of us, traveling in an open cab about six inches off the ground seems really, really fast. So Mario Kart feels fast, and sort of intense, but also fun and forgiving.

So Mario Kart, especially from my aging perspective, seems like just about the right thing to scratch the Wipeout itch: feels fast; has crazy, bendy tracks; has competitors who can lob projectiles. Missing: cool techno soundtrack.

To bring things back to the iPhone, Mario Kart has one other thing: When played on a Nintendo DS, it loads up in little time, and it doesn’t exceed the resources of the machine it’s running on (because its programmers knew how much of any given thing (available cycles, memory) the game can count on).

Not to totally slag the iPhone as a game platform. I enjoy simple puzzle games like Wurdle. And I found another pretty nice quick pickup sort of game:

Moon Drop by Nimblebit is a variation on the classic lunar lander genre. It’s simple, it loads quickly, it’s fun, and it has a Twitter-driven leaderboard that’s pretty cool for being such a simple, cheap ($0.99) app. Most importantly, it doesn’t push the iPhone at all. It just works.

Ben and I got to talking about Darth Vader.

“Is he real?”

“As long as he lives in our hearts, Ben.”

Which got us around to Darth Vader costumes, and ways we could celebrate Darth Vader on a special day (which I think was a gambit to get a Darth Vader costume before October).

We came up with National Darth Vader Appreciation Day.

Steps to Celebrating National Darth Vader Appreciation Day

1. Get a Darth Vader costume

2. Go from door to door in your neighborhood knocking on doors.

3. When someone answers the door, yell “Happy National Darth Vader Appreciation Day!”

• Answerer acts appreciative: Thank them for appreciating Darth Vader. Leave
• Answerer acts unappreciative: Say “I find your lack of faith disturbing” then make the finger-pinchy force-choke motion. Leave.

Seems like a good parent-child activity. Child can dress like Darth Vader, parent can dress like Grand Moff Tarkin and say “Vader, release him!” at the appropriate point in the force-choking, especially if it seems like the whole interaction with the confused neighbor is maybe getting heavy. Alternately, child can learn to empathize with parental demands for restraint by being the one to dress like Grand Moff Tarkin and call the over-eager force-choking parent off the victim.