In the end, we made two orders: one from Amazon and one from Tesco. We saved a non-trivial amount of money. This is in pounds. So at today's rates, £26.78 is worth about $41.79. Worth the effort we spent.

The only other question is stuff like shipping. Shipping was free in both cases. Amazon was also better on price in the 3D Land game, but they're shipping time on the cheap one was 2-4 weeks, which wouldn't make it for Christmas. So the price I show above is for an Amazon retailer who had it in stock and could ship this week.

The London Riots are horrific and terrible. People are being injured, losing everything they own, being robbed, and all for nothing. I mean, the thugs are just stealing because they're greedy and poor. I wonder, however, if this does not shift money from the very wealthy to the very poor.

Unemployment is way up in the UK (7.7% according to The Economist). The people who are rioting probably have no jobs and few prospects of getting a job. Rioting may have made sense to them in some twisted way. But here's how I think it shifts money from the rich to the poor.

All this stuff that is destroyed will need to be rebuilt. All the things that were burned and stolen will need to be replaced. Sadly, there's a tonne of stuff that was not insured, was priceless, or personal. (How do you replace photos of your children that were burned up in a drunk teen's mindless rage?) But there's a lot of run-of-the-mill stuff that will be rebuilt and will be replaced new and was, in fact, insured.

Businesses and people—as much as they can—will use their insurance policies to replace burned out things and stolen things with new things. Those new things have to be built, sewn, created, delivered, assembled, etc. People will have more work to do. Locally, construction and such will likely pick up. Abroad, some of the gadgets, gizmos, cars, and clothes will be bought.

Insurance companies will pay—as little as they are required to—and some of that insurance is insured. At the end of the day, though, it is the insurance companies, their stockholders, and the run-of-the-mill people who pay premiums who will fund the insurance companies' contributions to restoring the destruction. Does this represent a huge shift from the haves to the have-nots? The unemployed construction worker who hasn't been able to get a job now gets to rebuild something. His job is created by an insurance company that is honouring its policy for a business. The rioting and lawlessness create a small increase in employment in the poorest communities, and it's paid for by people who have jobs, pay insurance premiums, and own stock. So, a giant sum of millions of pounds, composed from very small bits of money (a few hundred pounds a year from hundreds of thousands of policyholders) will gradually "trickle down" to labourers, tradesmen, and some of the unemployed. A big shift of money.

There will be a huge pile of uninsured damage. Taxes and public funds will probably be used to assist those who were uninsured, meaning that, ironically, the very taxes that the rioters hate will stay high longer or even go up to pay for the damage they did. This will be a massive economic event, though.

I'm no economist. I'm just pondering the impact.

Clock

This may sound like a trivial thing, but the clock app on the iPhone includes a stopwatch, countdown timer, and alarm clock. Those are really useful things. Most importantly, the alarm clock on the iPhone can be shut off without unlocking the phone. I got an alarm clock app for the iPad, and I'm generally happy with it, but i have to wake up, unlock the iPad with a 6 character password, and then turn off the alarm. The phone is much better for this.

Calculator

Really? We forgot to create a calculator app for this thing? I understand that it's nice when Apple does not put too much into base installation. It leaves room for app developers to create meaningful apps. But put a really basic one on here. Its kinda ridiculous that there isnt even the most basic calculator. The presence of a basic calculator on the iPhone doesn't really stop other calculators from being created there.

Weather

Heres one where I'm a little ambivalent. I mean, it is a handy thing to have on the phone, but its not critical. The nice thing about getting one on the phone is that it is localised to your region. I.e., it is set up to pull British weather in the UK and American weather in the US. I've downloaded a couple free weather apps from the app store only to find that they only understand US weather.

Stock Ticker

This is an app I am glad is missing. I thought it silly to include one by default on all the iPhones. It seems to imply that anyone who owns an iPhone (or iPad) needs up-to-the-minute prices on stocks. The vast major of us don't, so this is actually a good omission. This is a problem that is best left to the app developers to solve, its not a common need for all users.

Then theres iTunes, which is the apple music store, theres the app store, and theres the iPod app. Interestingly enough, these things are 3 separate apps on the iPad, whereas they are all mashed into one bloated iTunes application on my desktop computer. I like this because I can relegate the unused bits to distant corners of the iPad, while keeping the ones I use in more logical locations. On iTunes on my desktop, I get all the crap whether I want it or not.

Can someone please find the guy at Apple who created their Settings organisation? I'd like to kill him. It is the most jumbled up mess they've ever released. There is no rhyme or reason. Things I turn on and off regularly are 2 layers down (cellular data), meanwhile things I set once and never change (background, brightness) are front-and-center.

The details of the story are vague in the available sources. The Register has links to This is South Devon which gives the most details I've found. He "posed as a site administrator"? Is that a social engineering attack or did he actually gain administrative access? Was administrative access as simple as putting "admin=true" on a URL, or was it something more sophisticated? People assume that if you "hack" a system, you must be some superstar whiz with computers. It might not be like that. The stories released so far don't say enough to know. The only published evaluations of Mitchell's skill and sophistication are statements from a judge who said Mitchell used 'considerable professional expertise'. Frankly, the judge is probably not qualified, himself, to make that assessment. I'd like a real computer security expert to understand the details here and explain them. Hacking Zynga games is not hard, so that leads to the question of whether Zynga was exercising due care over something that—they claim—has significant business value to them.

What is Zynga's culpability here? If virtual currency is this important—if what this hacker did was like stealing $12 million—did Zynga have the kind of safeguards one would use to guard $12 million? There is a comparison to the Royal Mint that appears in several versions of this story; I assume it's from a conversation had during the trial. If someone stole the equivalent of $12 million from the Royal Mint, it is true that the mint could print more money. But if the Royal Mint has the equivalent of $12 million laying around in one place, you can believe the security procedures are substantially more significant than what Mr. Mitchell overcame. I mean, if I leave $12 million in cash in a sack in the back seat of my car, and then someone breaks in and takes it, was I really taking reasonable care of that money? Is that really appropriate?

I made movies two years ago showing how to hack two different Zynga games, "Pirates" and "WordTwist." The hack of WordTwist is a complete compromise of the game, but there is no money riding on the game. The hack to Pirates is innocuous and does not really impact the game play. But the point remains: if you want to hack games like this, it's not all that difficult.

In some ways I am not sympathetic to the game company in this instance. Now, I don't believe that Mitchell should get to go free. What he did was a crime, and he has a history of hacking. But if that virtual currency has the moral equivalence of real currency, then the software needs to protect it like it's real currency. I think Zynga is trying to have it both ways: lax security because it's just a game, but then cry foul when someone hacks the game and turns a profit.

If you look at the DHS chronology of changes to the advisory system, you can see that it came in at yellow and was mostly yellow for its first 4 years. In response to the threat posed by liquids on planes, the threat level was briefly raised to red, then it settled down at orange and DHS seems to have forgotten it. For more than 4 years it has just sat at orange—unloved, untended, unimportant.

DHS Threat Level

This is typical of security dashboards. A zillion complexities are somehow squeezed into four ordinal color values. Complex qualities like geography, industry, mode of transportation, political affiliation, population density, and dozens of other factors contribute to how likely or unlikely any given target is on any given day. And somehow, all these zillions of factors were funneled into one big color that is wrong for most people.

It's arguable that the threat level has been green, for example, for huge swaths of the American heartland. Or yellow for certain industries while orange—or even red—for others. It is not clear how anyone anywhere benefited from this dashboard during its 9-year tenure. The fact that it sat at one color for 4 years is just testimony to how impossible it is to decide which of the zillion things justify a bump up or down on so coarse a measure.

As we create security dashboards in software, or in business risk, or in functional testing, or anything else that is hard to measure but begging for metrics, let this be a cautionary tale about dialing the resolution down so far that it becomes meaningless.

I'm not surprised that they didn't release 17 simple, discreet tones. I'm surprised they didn't release 1. Just 1 out of 17 seems reasonable. Or 1 out of 18. Yes, I could jailbreak the phone and put my own tones in and all that. But I want to play by the rules.

To be fair, I think AirPlay and AirPrint are awesome ideas. I can't wait to try them. But the message tones are completely unimportant.

The place they went that no one had gone before? They made a good prequel. Virtually all revisits of classic things (c.f., the Transformers, George Lucas' revisits to Star Wars and E.T., Batman) are terrible. This one is the best in a long, long line of movies and TV shows.

The actors are A+. Unlike George Lucas, who only directs in clichés and can't direct humans to save his life, JJ Abrams knows how to elicit amazing performances from a cast of great actors. None of these actors is a marquee name like Patrick Stewart, but they deliver marquee performances. The major cast is Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto, John Cho, Ben Cross, Bruce Greenwood, and Simon Pegg. You can tell that they studied the original actors some, but yet it's still fresh, new, and worth seeing. It's not a rehash.

Warning! Spoilers!

I'm not interested in writing a review where I can't talk about what happened, so I'm going to give up various details. If you don't want to read spoilers, look elsewhere.

Great Stuff

This is stuff that I think is really outstanding, unique and new to the Star Trek universe.

Spock is really nuanced

I'm not sure i like the fact taht he seems to have an achilles heel for emotion related to his mother, but it works. I especially like the way he gracefully gives up command, recognizing his own instability. It was dignified and played well.

Pike's best line

One of the best lines in the whole film is when Pike challenges Kirk to join Starfleet. It goes something like this: "Your father was captain of a ship for 12 minutes. And in that time he saved the lives of 800 people, including your mother and you. I'd like to see you try to do better." I thought that line was delivered brilliantly, and that it really reached out at Kirk and poked him where he was vulnerable.

All the good lines, none of the bad

All the lines you expect from the classic characters are here.

• Dammit Jim, I'm a doctor not a...
• Fascinating...
• I'm givin her all she's got, Captain

While there's definitely a tribute to the classic lines, they don't dwell on it. It's not like watching a rerun on TV.

New depth for Bones

Dr. McCoy has a more nuanced character. He's sorta pessimistic and gloomy, but in a way that's not too far afield from the original character. I really like his attitude. It's different, but it works. "Tell me something I don't know!"

A new spin on Scotty

Scotty gets a sort of unsung hero geek makeover. He easily gets some of my favorite lines in the movie, and I'm already a big fan of Simon Pegg's work (Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz). The Rolling Stone review suggested that he was one of the scene stealers, I think he was far and away the biggest scene stealer. If he was in the scene, you wanted to watch him. The unsung hero bit is good. It makes him out to be this sorta genius whose greatness is completely taken for granted and nobody realizes how unbelievable it is. Contrast this with, say, Data from the Next Generation, where all his intellectual prowess is totally expected. Scotty is taken for granted in a different way.

Brilliant casting

I'll stop singing their praises soon. But I would watch this group of actors over and over again, assuming they were written and directed at the same quality.

The not-so-good

There were a few things I was not keen on.

Reboot

By invoking time-travel (which is already overused in the Star Trek universe—to the point of being taken for granted), they have rebooted a few things. Now Kirk never knew his father. Now Kirk was born in space fleeing a Romulan ship. Now Kirk and Spock started off hating each other and Spock was the designer of the unwinnable scenario at Starfleet Academy. Vulcan is now destroyed and they're recolonizing some new planet. Now Spock and Uhura are getting it on after hours. I feel like this was a bit of a cop-out on the part of the writers. They needed room to write new and interesting stories for the characters and the whole Star Trek universe has gotten so built up with cruft. It does sorta ignore what has come before, though.

A little George Lucas

One of the things George Lucas does a lot in the various Star Wars movies, especially the prequel abominations, is pointless travel from one place to another that does not advance the plot or the characters. In Star Wars these are like special effects solos the way there are big multi-minute instrument solos in rock concerts. But I digress.

In Star Trek there is a point where Kirk is marooned on the moon overlooking Vulcan (Delta Vega?), which appears about as hospitable as Antarctica. The wise computer tells him to sit tight, help is on the way, but he seems to think that wandering the frozen wastes is a better idea. It's not clear that he has a plan or even a vague idea which direction to go. I get the whole idea that he's a "man of action" and I realize he can't just sit still, but that looked like suicide.

So then he's walking across the wastes. This is the point-A-to-point-B thing. Where's he going? Why is he just walking? A big monster comes to get him. But the big monster is attacked by a bigger monster. This is right out of Episode I: The Phantom Menace when the main characters take a pointless journey from point A to point B "through the planet core." Twice (not once, but twice) on that journey they are attacked by a big sea creature and then rescued when a bigger sea creature eats it.

Star Trek, unfortunately, borrows this gimmick and then gets it a bit wrong. I mean: here's this Tyrannosaurus Delta Vega who was happy to attack the rabid polar bear monster because it looked like lunch. Then T-Rex sees a scrawny human and says "hey, I'd rather chase that wimpy thing that's a third the size of polar bear." This makes no sense. The bigger monster should have gone after the biggest lunch—the monster polar bear—and ignored Kirk. The scene also takes too long. It's too many minutes out of the screen play and we don't really advance the plot or learn something about the characters. I mean, Kirk isn't even ingenious or particularly interesting in these scenes. He's just running, tumbling, etc.

Finally, Kirk just happens to bump into time-travelling Spock. That's just too coincidental. This movie could have cut 10 minutes out by having Spock find Kirk (having seen the pod crash land) or by having Kirk find Spock without the goofy monster chase. Something more believable would have made things move along faster and not strained believability so much.

Of course, when the two of them set out to go to the Starfleet outpost, they arrive there without incident.

Sudden rise to the top?

I like Star Trek, but I'm not a big enough fan to know if the Enterprise was always Starfleet's flagship, or if that detail was added later. Moreover, I'm not sure I buy the timeline. Kirk graduates in 3 years from the academy when most do it in 4, and a couple amazing displays of leadership lands him the position of Captain on the Starfleet flagship? Seems unlikely. I got the feeling, in the original series, that Kirk served under Pike for more than a few hours. I think the timeline has been compressed a bit too much for believability.

Love interest for Spock?

I'm not sure I see the value or the believability in the Spock/Uhura thing. They may have gone a bit too far in the Spock-is-half-human department.

A little time travel never hurt anyone

In the end, we're all OK. The timeline has been altered, there are two Spocks running around, but nobody seems the least bit troubled by this. Nobody's studying it trying to put things right. Everyone's just happy living in an altered timeline, with only the old Spock knowing both timelines. I think this is pretty cavalier on the part of every character who understands what has happened. (i.e., only a few are aware that time travel has occured). Both Spocks, Kirk, and presumably a few others know what has happened. But nobody's worried and there's no need to fix it.

1. You lose sleep over Facebook
2. You spend more than an hour a day on Facebook
3. You become obsessed with old loves
4. You ignore work in favor of Facebook
5. The thought of getting off Facebook leaves you in a cold sweat

What I find surprising is that 3 of these 5 are probably true of most perfectly normal people who watch TV. I happen to watch basically no TV at all, so I have a different perspective than most people; but, I want to keep it balanced in this blog. Substitute "TV" for "Facebook" in this article and see what happens.

When they say "lose sleep over Facebook" they go on to say "stay up late doing facebook and wake up tired the next day." Perfectly normal people have TVs in their bedrooms and stay up later than they should watching it. Sometimes they come in tired the next day. Is this a sign of TV addiction? Or is this just a bad indicator of addiction?

Don't most perfectly normal people watch more than an hour of TV a day? More than an hour of Facebook is considered some kind of addiction indicator, but an hour of TV is just fine? I don't get it.

You become obsessed with old loves. The article goes on to cite an example of gossiping online. You could gossip at work, too, and end up in the same predicament. I'm not sure that this has anything to do with Facebook.

You ignore work in favor of Facebook. Hmm. Most people can't ignore work in favor of TV, so we'll have to let this slide.

The thought of leaving Facebook leaves you in a cold sweat, huh? Ask people to give up their televisions. While "cold sweat" might be a bit of an exaggeration, your average watch-an-hour-a-day person is not going to part quickly with their television. Again, is this really a sign of addiction? If so, are we benignly addicted to TV and everyone's cool with it?

This story leads off with a sad tale of a mom obsessively using Facebook while ignoring her kid's need for help with homework. Doesn't this happen with TV? "Sure honey, I'll help with your homework right after the news is over..." Is this OK? This is somehow different?

I think TV and Facebook are equivalent. They can be abused, or not. I think the addiction "symptoms" cited in this article are absurd because they can be applied to a lot of our lifestyle behaviors.

Enter Barack Obama. He understands what it is to be in the middle. If you have someone truly in the middle, you will be sure to make some people mad some of the time. That's what happens. Obama is proving that he will not only accept the existance of contrary opinions, he will give them airtime. This is not wrong. This is something to be proud of. Plurality of opinion is an American ideal. In America you're welcome no matter what your beliefs.

Some of us find certain beliefs repugnant—so repugnant that we argue vigorously against them. Good. But I, for one, am glad to see a President who is not off-the-deep-end liberal and not off-his-rocker conservative. Even though I agree with Obama more than I disagree with him, I don't want him to be as autocratic as his predecessor. Let the conservative message be heard. Let the liberal message be heard. For goodness' sake and for our country's sake, let's all listen to both and take the best approach for most of the people.

A few things on the web site stand out this way. We know that Tim outsources as much as he can. It's 99% likely that he has outsourced 99% of the web site development. These folks don't really think much about security, or maybe it's really not important. The whole point of going to the web site is to give Tim your email address so he can start emailing you things. This book is not just about selling copies, it's about giving him leads for people who might buy other products.

You can actually read the source code of the web for that asks for your email and discover that it's just going to send you to an unprotected web page. That is, if you know to go to this web page, then you don't have to give him your email address at all. Before you get too excited, there's not actually much there. Consider that the person who knows the "password" is supposed to own (and therefore ostensibly have read) the book. A person who has actually read the book and then goes to this password protected section of his web site will be disappointed.

At the time I went, it had six links:

• Introduction - My Story
• Outsourcing Life
• How to Check E-Mail Twice a Day... or Once Every 10 Days
• Hour-long podcast presentation on "The 4-Hour Workweek" fundamentals
• Lifestyle Design FAQ
• Interview with Tim and Rolf Potts of Yahoo Travel: "Freeing Yourself From The Daily Grind"

None of it is value add. The first two are sample chapters (remember, we already own the book). The next one is a blog entry you could just navigate to by going to his blog (no need to go to the top secret site). The fourth link is a podcast on someone else's site (again, googling for Tim Ferriss and the book title will get you there). The fifth is another sample chapter from the book (that we already bought and read) and the last one is a Yahoo! travel news story.

So, pretty disappointing until you realize that he practice what he preaches. He outsourced the development of the web site, reused some content with minimal effort, and hyped it up to make it appear like added value.

Another overarching thought to this theme of joining the "new rich." If there weren't a whole lot of "old poor" around willing to do the day-in, day-out work that he's outsourcing, there couldn't be a "new rich." It's a dessert-before-dinner (or maybe even dessert-instead-of-dinner) lifestyle because it can't sustain a culture. You can't have any significant fraction of society living this way, because the trains do have to run on time. Someone has to be a policeman, fireman, doctor, lawyer (OK, maybe we can live without the lawyers), teacher, pilot, etc.

I've done a lot of disparaging here. Do I reject it wholesale? No. One of the big things Tim opened my eyes to was the potential I am wasting. I have the potential of creating lots of small revenue streams that will add up to money and time for pursuing dreams much sooner than if I just wait until traditional retirement or the empty nest. Tune in for my incorporation and interpretation of his ideas.