A Blue Eyed Buddhist

Hey, I don’t want to pimp my own stuff here too much, but be sure to go buy my album, okay? And check out me and my band.

And then while you’re at it, check out the motorcycle that I customized.

If you need some pictures taken, I’m your guy. Of course, you’ll have to go to Manchester to visit my studio.

Sometimes in my spare time I design children’s books or paint on walls.

Terre Haute, Indiana built a high school on the site of an old, closed-down airport that had been named after me.

I once won the “Nobel Prize” of the environment and have taught at BYU-Hawaii, occasionally giving lectures there.

I’ve actually done drawings in a number of styles. Here’s some more of my work.

If I’m feeling aggressive, sometimes I’ll play a little rugby in London. I look good carrying the rock, although this picture doesn’t really show my face.

Bird flu attacks Cambodia? I’m there, dude. (Another really bad picture of me.) (Okay, it was just an exercise to prepare for a bird flu outbreak, but still- I’m the man.)

Need a bridge built? My team and I can whip one together for you- check out the last two pictures on this page.

How about some whole life or health insurance in California or Oregon? I’m your guy.

My Wikipedia page is a testament to the movies I’ve made.

Please don’t ask me about the two people I slaughtered in a drunken blackout state, or all the legal appeals back and forth that happened after I confessed to it at an AA meeting. (That stuff is supposed to be confidential!)

In 98-99 I played some soccer. (That was before I moved to rugby, you see.)

My speeding ticket outside of Plymouth on the A303 was utter bollocks, I tell you. (Another lousy picture of me.)

Unfortunately, my experience as a lawyer is all in the United Kingdom, so it doesn’t really help me that much here in the States.

I’d rather not talk too much about the movies that I starred in, thanks. (Warning: Adult content in that link.)

In my spare time I enjoy coaching some football.

For a while I had a nice perm that really gave me curly hair. Then I gave up teaching the cello.

Despite being a Buddhist, they still let me do a little personal counseling at the Christian Psychological Services in Kansas.

You know, all in all it’s remarkable I have time to post to this blog (which I know I haven’t done enough of recently) when you consider how busy I am running a telephone company in Utah (first column third row down), helping out with researching waste management at the University of Northhampton in the UK, serving as chief counsel for the Fraternal Order of Police in Ohio, managing my 3000 acre ranch in Kansas, or serving as dean for the School of Professional Studies at Vanguard University of Southern California.

Whew. I’m a busy guy.

Just out of curiosity… have you ever run your name through the web pages at Google Images? You should give it a shot sometime.

You know, I learn stuff all the time that I would have never known before- thanks to the Internet.

This diary entry on the DailyKos site is a terrific example. It’ll take about 5 or 8 minutes to read through, but if you’re like me you’ll come away knowing about 100 times more about Georgia, Russia, and the relationships in that part of the world (along with the US and western Europe) than you knew before.

Go on, give it a shot. Take ten minutes out of your day and read it. It’s a lot better than anything *I* could write about the situation.

So I’ve had my new iPhone 3G for a while now. How is it?

Well, the 3G speed is definitely an improvement over the original 2.5G (EDGE) speeds of the old iPhone. The A-GPS is pretty slick, too; when you’re out in the open, the thing can locate your position on a map with impressive accuracy.

Other than that, though… well, it’s pretty much like the original iPhone.

A much bigger deal in the whole iPhone world was actually the 2.0 version of the OS software of the phone. 2.0 came out at the same time as Apple opened up the iTunes store’s applications for iPhones (and iPod Touch models as well), and you have to have 2.0 loaded to be able to use the apps.

This is too bad, because 2.0 is… well, it’s not exactly buggy, although it did have some bugs in it and I’ve heard of people having to completely wipe and reload everything at least a couple of times thanks to irretrievable crashes while using 2.0.

But there’s definitely still some problems with 2.0. It’s giving Apple a bit of a black eye; the original iPhone was such a smash hit because it’s such an awesome device, and the 3G is selling like mad… but I bet there’s a small-but-significant number of people who’re getting bent out of shape with the thing.

Here’s my tip: First of all, absolutely be sure you’ve got the latest iPhone OS. The first bugfix version, 2.0.1, has made a definite difference for me. Second, don’t go hogwild loading apps. Yeah, they’re cool, but they slow the thing down.

The problems I’ve noticed is that there’s a definite, annoying lag while typing. The original version of the software didn’t have any lag; you could type away and not notice any lag at all, really. Some applications take a LONG time to start up compared to how they were on the 1.X versions of the OS; for example, text messaging takes several seconds to start up a lot of the time on version 2.0, but on 1.x it fired right up.

And then there’s the flat-out crashes. I haven’t had any, but my iPhone did freeze up for over a minute at one point. I was ready to restart it but it wound up closing down the app and then it recovered. What’s weird is that same app had run previously without any problems, and it’s run since without any problems (it’s an application that gives you the score of the ballgame), so I don’t know exactly what made it happen.

Are these problems enough to dissuade me from telling people to get an iPhone? Nope. It still rocks- it’s incredible the amount of crap that you can do with it. Of course, if you’re a super-dedicated emailer, you might want to stick with something with a real keyboard- same if you’re a teen or tween who texts like mad (one gal at work said her teenage daughter sends thousands of texts a month).

But all in all, the iPhone is still an absolutely incredible device. I’m eager to see what Google does in terms of matching MobileMe; right now they aren’t sweating it too much, because Apple really screwed up that implementation and even Steve Jobs admitted that they tried to do too much at one time.

The convergence of the stuff in the iPhone- the GPS, mapping application, phone, iPod music player, web browser, contacts listing, you name it- is simply incredible and unmatched by any other device. The size and shape is about right. The 3G even got rid of that moronic headphone jack on the original version.

If your cell plan is up and you’re willing to bite the bullet and pay the higher rates that AT&T is jacking us for with the iPhone, by all means, go get one.

So Luis gave me the scoop on how to get images into my mobile blogging posts. Thanks Luis!

If this works it will be a picture of Green Lake:

And here is a pic of the Wonder Dog waiting patiently for me to quit fooling around with my iphone and resume our walk around the lake: