Conflated Catholic Confraternity points finger at PZ

July 30th, 2008 • christianity, idiocy
Tags: crackergate

I’ve been mulling over this trite screed all day. I actually held off on posting earlier because I wanted to see what PZ would write. And rip it apart he did. This contrite piece of garbage is full of logical fallacies but they’re well worded, at least.

They’re up in arms trying to get PZ fired for something he did in his down time at home so it’s wholly — well, in this case, physically holey — unrelated to school. Can we all mail bomb write to your contrite brotherhood of buggerers and get you fired for being a gas bag? No and you’re not going to succeed in getting PZ usurped from his post at UM Morris either. The overall buffoonery from this whole ordeal is simply laughable and the lengths at which Bill Donahue and now these deacons and pastors are willing to go just to protect some crackers is amazing. Only if they would put their misplaced time towards something useful, like bringing the troops home or fighting climate change, they might lead happy lives like the rest of us secularists do. They drag out the Bill of Rights and how it offers them religious protection but only when it applies to those non-practitioners who choose to malign it, a point PZ also makes and drives home hard. They do not understand that freedom of speech also protects us non-believers and we’re free to verbally, and written, abuse your religion all we want to. I don’t use this blog as a soapbox against fairy tales any more but I sure as hell do out in public.

Lies and hate speech which incite contempt or violence are not protected under the law. Hence, inscribing Swastikas on Jewish synagogues or publicly burning copies of the Christian Bible or the Muslim Koran, especially by a faculty member of a public university, are just as heinous and just as unconstitutional.

Being wholly ignorant of the law — just how they like it — they trot out the fact that this is a hate-inducing act of slamming a nail through a wafer. You’re right, it certainly was. PZ received a large number of death threats and gigs of hatemail (probably many gigabytes of it). Is this not heinous as well? Or is it OK that fellow God-fearing Catholics were threatening a man with death — and a castration or two — and asking him to desecrate the Qu’ran? Not only is that a faceplam-inducing piece of flaming crap, it’s contradictory. You can defame non-theists all you want but you think there’s some non-existent law that protects you from us doing the same? We’re not lawyers but we’re smarter than you apparently and we know that both sides can start flame wars until the end of time, the non-theist side will just laugh the whole time.

One fails to see the relevance of the desecration of a Catholic sacrament to the science of Biology.

One does fail to see a link that does not exist, no matter how hard you want it to. PZ teaches biology at school, he does whatever he wants to do at home. Just as you do.

A biologist has no business ‘dissing’ any religion, rather, they should be busy teaching the scientific discipline they were hired to teach.

He does and he does it at school. He could be out building a yurt behind his house after work for what it matters but that doesn’t concern this Catholic gathering of buggering windbags. Yurts have nothing to do with biology either but then again, he doesn’t teach yurt building in his genetics classes. The next line of the press release is a real clincher as it says “tolerating” this kind of behavior is “repugnant”. Really? Since when does a secular institution have to not tolerate someone not teaching fairy tales in a science classroom?

This whole ordeal shows how out of touch with reality Bill Donahue and the Catholic Confraternity are.

3rd annual Florida Farm to Fuel

July 30th, 2008 • environmentalism
Tags: conference, environmentalism

The 3rd annual Florida Farm to Fuel conference starts in about 9 hours in Orlando. According to Domestic Fuel it sounds like it’s going to be thoroughly interesting this year given Crist’s recent pushes for environmentalism in Florida. He and a few people from FAU recently returned from their ten day jaunt in the UK, gaining knowledge on what the Britons are doing in the fields of alternative fuel sources and how they’re working to educate consumers about eco-friendly choices.

From what I’ve found, there hasn’t been a lot of public talk about what they learned on their trip but I have a feeling that’s due to the fact that the conference was (is) right around the corner from their return date. Wouldn’t want to spoil all that green goodness before the conference! The conference lasts until August 1st at which time I’m sure Florida news websites will be clamoring to publish what happened in Orlando this week; at least I can dream that they will. No doubt Crist and Charles Bronson (not that Charles Bronson!) will be discussing FPL’s upcoming solar farm plans. I hope they’ll also be discussing some options regarding offshore wind turbine generator farms, rumors that have been floating around for about a year now. I know they’d probably get demolished by even light Category 2 hurricanes, it’d be nice if they were an option for us.

With all of the sugar cane production and waste produced from it, this will hopefully be discussed in a way to use that waste as biofuel, either through syngas or other means. There will be a panel discussing a number of different feedstocks for biofuels but I hope this is a discussion of feedstock waste for biofuel and not food-from-the-food-stream for biofuels. Unfortunately, these feedstock panels seem to constitute a huge portion of the panel time which can only mean the latter will more than likely be the topic of focus. Why can’t someone from Maker’s Mark be there to discuss how they’re turning biowaste into biofuel to fuel their distilleries? I know that’d be a lot more interesting than “oil feedstocks for biofuel” (whatever those would be).

I’m looking forward to it to say the least.

Carnival of the Green 138

July 29th, 2008 • 2 comments blog, carnival
Tags: carnival, cotg

It’s up at Allie’s Answers! I need to submit to host already.

How the story of Adam and Even would likely happen today

July 29th, 2008 • comic
Tags: comics

This is one of my favorite web comics, White Ninja. If you go on to read more of them, don’t worry, you’re not lost in the story because there’s not one. Each strip has no relation to the others besides White Ninja and ancillary characters.

Arctic Circle full of gas, running low on oil

July 25th, 2008 • environmentalism
Tags: environmetalism, oil

In a short but sweet post on the NY Times Dot Earth (free!), it’s revealed that according to the US Geological Survey, the Arctic is literally chock full of uncharted natural gas but rides low on oil. The area above the Arctic Circle holds up to a third of the world’s uncharted gas which is as much as Russia? That’s mind boggling. But it is good to hear that it holds so little oil. The depth that most of that stuff lies will definitely quell many drilling prospects until we’re at the end of raping the Earth for oil but hopefully by that time, governments around the world — especially the US — will have already “seen the light” and have viable alternative energy sources in full production or near the end of the testing phase.

Granted, this will not stop people from using this area for gas extraction and given the huge amount that’s there, companies would be foolish not to try and get it. I imagine the harsh conditions and tough drilling will deter all but the hardiest, and greediest, companies from going there and risking huge sums of money to extract the gas. I’m going to applaud anyone willing to go there and drill or do just about anything.

The real part of this story that caught me was the elucidating comments especially the information from NASA’s Dr. James Hansen. He’s been a vocal proponent of seeking viable alternative energy sources and fast. He’s also a big proponent of the 350 Project(sometimes referred to as “Back to 350″) and he recently co-authored a worthwhile paper from Columbia about where we need to aim for belching carbon emissions, numerically (linked to climateprogress.org because the author also explains much of what’s discussed in laymen’s terms, the link to the paper is in the first paragraph). But back to the NT Times comments. Granted, theirs is a blog that’s frequented by people of environmentally-grounded mindsets but they still show a good cross section of what Americans think and know, much to the dismay of the ever-disconnected politicians.

Americans, for the most part, know what Americans want and even though we ‘treehuggers’ are always harbinging doom, we too know what America wants. And these comments really show that many of us know our stuff and want change. Someone with Dr. Hansen’s credentials chiming in ring true that scientists aren’t making this stuff up much to the chagrin of deniers and decriers (and probably waify Creationists too). We want something different and we want it soon so having President Bush and nominee McCain pushing for more drilling only makes sense to people with stock in oil companies and you can be assured that their push for off shore drilling will soon change to a push for Arctic drilling where the land is “untapped and raw” (my words, not theirs for now). This is why things like the Prius have huge waiting lists and people are guffawing over new hybrids and the Chevy Volt. Although the latter by new technology standards, gets great mileage but realistically after all the hype, is going to be the first major falter in fuel cell cars, it’s all pretty looks and no substance. I admit it’s a decent first mass marketed push but it’s not nearly enough. As the noose tightens slowly around the neck of oil usage and our purse strings too, we all want something different, some real, measurable, viable change. And with this new data, given what politicians and companies are going to push for, we’re going to want change even more.

It’s stupid humid outside right now

July 22nd, 2008 • 2 comments chatter

I’ve just returned from my umpteenth trip to the trash cans today and I just realized how insanely humid it is right now. Simpleweather.com only reports the temperature at 81F but a balmy 79% humidity. And normally, this would mean it’s about to rain except that it’s mostly clear skies and there’s no real breeze flowing. Why the hell is it so humid in the middle of the night? I’m literally dripping in sweat right now and it’s not all that pleasant to me but it’s too late to take a shower; you try going to sleep with 3ft of wet hair and a wet pillow, you won’t be happy!

We found some cool stuff today but since the afternoon, it’s been a total bust. We managed to score two nice little plates, a nearly full (!!!) bottle of Drano MAX (which we badly need) and a few other sundry items. But we also got rid of a set of large horizontal blinds to a nice old lady and a lady from Delray came to pick up a table a neighbor gave us Saturday night. There’s other pickups scheduled for later in the week but we’ve still got a patio full of stuff, waiting for people to claim it.

I hope they can claim it soon so we can find more goodies, I need to put my new set of convertible hand-trucks to good use!

Sometimes, solar charging isn’t worth it

July 21st, 2008 • 4 comments environmentalism
Tags: freeloader, solar charging

Last week I received my Solar Technology Freeloader (I actually bought mine at Firebox.com) in hopes of eschewing my Sidekick’s charger for a solar-powered charger. Well, it got charged but it was because I used the included USB cable to charge the Freeloader’s battery not from solar charging. I’ve charged the Freeloader in the extremely abundant Florida sun twice and twice has my phone completely drained the battery in less than 15 minutes. Could this be a defective battery? Quite possibly. Do I believe it’s a defective battery? Not at all. Before I bought the Freeloader, I looked for reviews and very few actual reviews were found and those there were found were either from England OR they were reviewing the press release for the device from 2005. I should have taken this as a warning that it may not work or at least, not work so well.

This is pretty much the wrong product for someone that’s environmentally-minded. The packaging isn’t recyclable at all except for the inside box that holds the charger and cables. It’s regular paperboard without any finish. The charger itself is a mix of small photovoltaic panels (2 of them), aluminum, and plastic (whose number is not defined in the manual) and the Li-ion battery. I know the aluminum can be recycled but the rest of the device body itself is questionable. The battery is replaceable but according to the manual and agreement, an end user cannot replace the battery themselves but they can buy as many replacement batteries as they want to. Why would I buy a replacement battery that I can’t replace? It’s different if I have to take the device to the company to replace the battery a la iPhone. This really hinders any widespread adoption for the product especially since they only ship inside the UK and nowhere else for consumers. Solar Technologies may not want to pay for shipping to other countries but it seriously will limit the use of their device.

There are three LEDs on one side to show charging/discharging status and two ports on the other side for charging by USB or discharging with one of the 18 included charging tips. As instructed in the manual, my first time charging the device was using the supplied mini-USB cable to charge via my computer’s USB ports. OK, fine, I did that. It charged up in about 3 hours and then I then used the Freeloader to charge my phone. It did so for a little under 2 hours which is what the packaging materials claim. Great, I thought I’d found a reason to no longer use my wall charger. I was wrong. Since I fully discharged the Freeloader in the middle of the day, I stuck it outside to charge in direct sunlight for at least 5 hours. I had no way to tell if it was fully charged up or not since the device only uses two of the LEDs to show ‘solar charge’ status although, one of the LEDs is used for showing the device charging by USB *and* it will shut off once fully charged by USB. This cannot be done via solar charging at all and is a bad product design. The LEDs never shut off when solar charging but they do with USB charging, why would it only work for one function? This confusing design aside, I still decided to use it.

After it had charged for 4-5 hours and I figured it was fully charged, I slapped on the mini-USB connector tip and plugged the charger into my phone. 10 minutes later I got a call from my dad so I unplugged the charger but once I was done I plugged it back up. Well, it was dead. Completely. No juice left at all. This was after 10 minutes of use and 4-5 hours of charging. If that length of time — which is specified in the manual to be the required solar charging time — is not sufficient then what is? I live in Florida so we get tons of strong daylight year round but am I supposed to believe that I need to leave this outside for 8+ hours to charge when the manual does state that’s not needed? There’s an “add on” called the Supercharger however I’m not sure what its purpose is at all. Solar Technologies claims it can charger the Freeloader in as little as 4 hours — the manual states it can charge itself in as little as 5 hours — and their other promo material states it can charge the Freeloader in “half the time”. Half of what? 4 hours is not half of 5 hours by any math I know of. Overall, the Freeloader doesn’t meet expectations or even what’s in the manual.

The build quality isn’t all that great either. The device is comprised of plastic clamshelled inside thin aluminum which should add at least some structural rigidity and protection. While I don’t plan on dropping this to find out the latter part, I know that the product feels very cheap overall. The solar panel portions of the device can easily torsion from side-to-side which means you could very simply snap them if you accidentally sat on them. Yes, I know they’re glass but I’m talking about when the solar panel halves are put together! Overall build quality simply feels cheap and does not give the end user a great deal of insurance that their Freeloader won’t simply fall to bits if it’s dropped from small heights.

Friday, the 18th, I left my charger in the car all day charging. To my surprise one of the solar panel’s plastics had warped in the sun. It warped in such a way to actually push part of the panel out of the battery compartment (they’re push-connected like pushing a phone charger tip into a cell phone) and so it wasn’t charging properly. I did not know when this had happened or if it was affecting the ability to charge. So when I plugged my Freeloader into my phone, I gave it a 15 minute time limit before I would check it again. Sadly, it didn’t last 12 minutes. And this was after charging in direct sunlight for over 6 hours — remember, 5 is all that’s required according to the manual. So either I’ve gotten a defective unit or this just doesn’t work in the first place. The device manual says it supports iPods (up to 18 hours) and PSPs (up to 2.5 hours) but I can’t get it to charge my cell phone for more than 15 minutes, how it will do anything more demanding like a PSP is completely beyond me.

I was extremely disappointed by this solar charger. I haven’t been this letdown by a product in a long time. I should have known from the very small number of in-person product reviews that either it was a bum product or a gimmick or simply no one bought it. Now I know that it was both the former and the latter. With seemingly poor quality control done on these, I can’t feel comfortable charging my device in the sun any longer for fear or warping one of the other connections and it no longer charging at all or simply short circuiting completely. I am not going to request an exchange from Firebox because I don’t want to wait another week for the device that may or may not work; a refund will suffice. I will then use this money towards another solar charger such as the Solio or Solio Hybrid 1000HD.

Would I ever buy a product from Solar Technology again? Not if my life depended on it. If I’m going to use a product such as the Freeloader to charge my electronic devices, well, it better do just that.

Dictionaries did not explode in printing presses

July 20th, 2008 • idiocy

This is an IDer’s explanation that God, without question, exists. He states early in the video that the most minute portion of anything in the physical universe is explainable by a mind behind it. So rocks and atoms have minds behind them. Is there a planet of rock people sending their prisoners here for us to see rocks? And apparently, rocks have a moral stance behind them and they’re spiritual. OK, rocks aren’t mentioned explicitly but you can substitute any non-man-made but physical item in the Universe.

Around 2:10 in, this creationist is stating that the human enzyme is proof of God. I want to know how this explains palm trees and Kentucky bluegrass (the grass not the music). He also posits (about 3:40 in) that there are 4 “fundamental questions” in life which only have three answers. So, what happened to that final answer? There’s an imbalanced ratio here.

How can FAU strive to keep kids on campus?

July 20th, 2008 • chatter
Tags: fau, school

Perusing my nearly week’s worth of unread feeds, I came across this article about upcoming efforts to keep Florida Atlantic University’s resident students on campus more. I think this is a step in the right direction for FAU to try and start competing on a higher level for students from other state universities. Charles Brown, FAU’s dean of student affairs (we have a dean for student affairs?! I thought it would have a director not a dean), is working to concoct ways of keeping those resident students residing over the weekend.

As a commuter student and former employee at Boca’s other University, this is going to be a very hard sell. At Lynn University, most resident students stayed for the weekend for entirely different reasons than FAU students may: over 90% of resident students aren’t from Florida. I worked there for almost three years and came face-to-face with students everyday of that time and nearly none of them were actually from Florida, let alone the South Florida area. Many of these students’ parents could easily afford weekly jet flights back home so their kids could jaunt around with their hometown chums but many didn’t because Boca has a number of underage-friendly clubs where it’s easy to party all weekend– the only extracurricular activity a huge portion of these students ever participate in and weekends start on Wednesday night. They figured it was easier to stay in town to get in trouble and have fun, well out of the reach of their parents.

This is the complete opposite of much of FAU’s student body from what I’ve noticed. I’ve encountered a marginal handful of foreign and exchange students and students from other states but the majority are Floridians and most of those are from counties surrounding Palm Beach that didn’t (or couldn’t) go to UF or FSU. With friends and parents only minutes or hours away, many resident students see no reason to stay in town. And I can’t blame them as many of FAU’s student activities are not only poorly advertised but are poorly organized. The most prominent flyers you will see on campus at any given time are for bars and college night specials; I only know this because they’re the highest profile litter on the entire campus much to my dismay. You can’t walk to any class or building without seeing at least a dozen of these things and in that same amount of time, you may see 4 or 5 fliers for student activities. And the bigger problem with student flyers is they have a very low circulation. When I walk from the SO building (social sciences and Jewish studies) to the Breezeway (our campus’s student focal point) for a cup of coffee, I will see flyers for different activities at both buildings but rarely any for the same activity at both buildings. And how hard would it be to distribute them to both buildings? Stupefyingly easy as the buildings are only about 150 feet apart.

This is only part of the problem, the other problem is any actual promotion of events. FAU’s MyFAU portal for both students and faculty members does an extremely poor job of promoting events by both students and the college alike. I get more information on what the college is putting on from fauevents.com (owned by the school) or from the Boca Raton News’ RSS feed than I do from the school’s own internal information portal. Sad, I know. Student events are even less prominent on MyFAU. There’s more information on getting a physical at the school’s clinic than there are about the numerous fashion shows during any given semester. My girlfriend has missed many opportunities to both see and photograph these fashion shows because she never saw any promotion for them, she only found out about them by passing by or by simply hearing the music being played. And this year’s Battle of the Bands? Besides the fact that the bands were complete rubbish, there were more people in bands and playing then there were in attendance and students were walking right past without even giving one moment’s thought to what was going on. We only saw the flyer for the show the day of the show and because we overheard it at the library while researching for one of my papers. I would have been far more apt to attend this free event if I’d known about it, either by more prominently displayed flyers or a blurb on MyFAU.

So now Dean Brown has now set lofty goals for himself and his department. He wants to increase visibility for events in order to keep current students and recruit future students. Some of this will definitely be helped by FAU’s football team being the only Florida university to win a bowl game this year so weekend football attendance will definitely increase. But what about other activities? Since he’s the head of student affairs, he always has a throng of students working for him to help promote student activities so how is he going to make up for this apparent past failure? I’m not sure but I know that at Lynn, most students knew exactly what was going on during the week and weekend because of the student activities department. I worked with those guys quite frequently and they had a great handle on getting the word out on what’s happening. Between student-based promotions at local clubs such as Club Boca or Club 99/Aqua, there were big bright flyers all over the place for everything that went on. Dean Brown could take a cue or two from Jen Herzog, the former director of student affairs at Lynn. I know full well that activities are promoted most heavily to the social group most interested in the event itself but what about the rest of the student population? Those previously mentioned fashion shows were almost solely only promoted and represented to the cliques putting them on, in this case the minority sororities that conduct many events throughout the year. Much of what’s done is by word of mouth and in their own social cliques but there’s little other promotion done.

How will Brown combat this and make sure a real effort is given to spreading the word? Do we need event street teams? Do we need better promo materials? What about promotion outside the campus for commuter students (although, this is not the focal point of the new-found focus of Dean Brown’s vision)? Or better promotions at the places students frequent the most like the clubs and hookah bars around town? I don’t know what he has planned but I know the most forward-facing promotional venue he needs is staring him and every student and faculty member right in the face: MyFAU. Everyone has to use this portal during school sessions for everything from email to online classes so I hope he’s going to make better use of the free publicity. Or maybe he’ll have student affairs send email blasts to resident students about upcoming events. I know, it’d pretty much be spam but remember, people do read and respond to spam occasionally. Since we’re looking to start a club in the fall, any increased efforts that Brown and his department can or will make can only serve to help us and other clubs out that want to plan weekend activities.

FAU is going through its growing pains from a commuter-focused school to a more residential-focus school and that’s going to take some time to adjust to. When the largest portion of your students — and finances — are from off campus students, you have to make every dime worth it to get your residents to hang around. And there’s truly no limit to any possibility of activities to hold either: movie nights (either on campus or a quick jaunt over to Muvico or Sunrise Cinemas Mizner, both are roughly 5 minutes from campus), gaming competitions, MXC-style games, campus- or city-wide litter clean-up efforts, volunteer programs, fashion shows, speakers and panels on important and upcoming issues (these occur very often but they’re almost solely in the middle of the day during the week), art shows, plays, and so on. With 2500+ resident students and many more thousand commuters, the available options of what to do to keep us hanging around are in fact nearly infinite. I can’t count how many there’s been a speaker or panel on something interesting or salient that I wanted to attend but could not since they’re all during my work day. If some of these were shifted to the weekends, far more people would be willing to show up. And since there’s nearly no classes on Fridays, this is a pretty obvious time and place to put these events.

Long awaited Sidekick LX OTA finally arrived

July 17th, 2008 • 5 comments chatter
Tags: sidekick

Since June, there’s been a new OTA update floating around for the LX/Slides and it’s supposed to be this fanciful awesome new thing. Problem is it was (and probably still is) in the “pioneer” roll-out stage. The “pioneer” stage is set up for dedicated users, hardcore Sidekick lovers, and other people that T-Mobile/Danger like to get the update first. This has been on-going since June 25th, the official release of the newest OTA update. So far, only scant details about what the update provides are known and most users are clamouring to get it because it finally includes video recording. Great, it’s rubbish and useless, also has no sound output. More on that shortly. I’m glad I finally got the update but not for the video recording.

What I’m glad the update provided was a slightly faster UI experience and a much improved load time for viewing pictures from the microSD media. Typically using the microSD as storage lead to insanely slow load times in the photo album viewer and for no good reason. It seems they’ve added precaching for thumbnail generation. Danger also overhauled the capture UI from the mostly unobtrusive overlay with a few icons on the bottom right-hand corner to an overly obtrusive iconified stack taking up the right-hand portion of the UI. Great, now I get to lose valuable screen space for composition to useless icons. They’ve vignetted the whole capture screen to accommodate the icons by adding small black bars to the left and right sides, similar to what you see on an HDTV while watching a non-stretched SD channel. Why? This is completely pointless. This could’ve been achieved simply by adding extra icons to the out-of-the-way UI that was previously in place. It’s a case of over-engineering. I’m just glad the media viewer app is faster.

On to the video. As other sites have commented, the video quality is absolute rubbish for a non-VGA camera. Video composition is made difficult by the previous UI changes and because the viewfinder scrunches up the entire video to fit into a tiny square, not very user-friendly to me. Videos also lack sound. While this can be a deal breaker for some people, I don’t care because I can take better snapshots in rapid succession to produce a better animated GIF than I can shoot a video. Videos can only be 20 seconds long and are 176×144 in size. That’s basically useless for resolution although I’m sure longer video lengths will be added in the future. Video was added because so many users were asking for it, frankly it should’ve been left out until the next revision (not the Sidekick 2008 but whatever model will be next with 3G). My girlfriend had a really cheap webcam about 8 years ago that shot better video than this, with a cheaper VGA processor and comparable optics. It’s fairly useless.

Overall, there are some nice overall UI changes. MMS views haven’t changed but there was a slight change to the SMS UI in that the little preview box at the bottom now says “Highlight a message to preview.” Can’t say this is really needed but then again, some users need hand-holding on why there’s a white box taking up half the screen. Email viewing has changed slightly and I do mean slightly. The only change is when viewing an email, you’re shown a gradient-colored header versus the old blue-hued one. Small changed but it’s OK. The Address Book app got a makeover as well. It now has 4 tabs: All (contacts), Favorites (contacts), Recent Calls, and Online Now. The addition of tabs are the only change. The first three tabs can be useful but the last tab is useless because if you’re already signed into one of the IM clients, you know if one of your contacts is already online, you don’t need a tab to tell you that.

Apparently the IM clients got updated but I can’t tell at all. All I use is the AIM client and it feels the same. They did get new icons though, I suppose that’s a good thing. This was supposed to be a massive update since it’s the first one released for the nearly year-old models when in fact, other than slight UI changes, most of the work was put into having useless video recording. There’s also the option of now installing applications without having to restart the device to use them which is nice if you actually install any of the apps. Given that I only use the SSH app and none of the others slightly intrigue me, I’m not the target market for that.

A lot more could’ve been done with this update. How about finally making the calendar useful to use and input data into? There are threads upon threads on Danger’s own Sidekick-centric site about this and these requests are constantly ignored. When will there be any online calendar syncing? This has been a request that’s been on their forums since late 2005 from what I can see. Given that all of the major online calendar apps have open APIs or use iCal for exporting, I see no reason why we can’t sync Google Calendar or Live’s calendar. There are workarounds for this but they’re not streamlined and are kludgey at best. Sergey Brin and Larry Page were said to be utterly guffawing over the Sidekick 2 back when it came out and there was a lot of possibility for them to outright purchase Danger or partner with them for applications. That went absolutely nowhere. One thing I miss about my Dash is that I had GooSync to sync my Google Calendars to my phone. It wasn’t free and it wasn’t automatic but it was way better than nothing at all. If people think the Blackberry or iPhone have a closed architecture ensconced in a very high walled garden, they’ve never used a Sidekick.

I love my LX to death and I’m happy I finally got the update but it seems like a stop-gap until the next release which, given T-mo’s national roll-out of 3G coming in just 2 months, can certainly only be less than a year away. If not, T-mo will lose Sidekick users to other phones quite easily and lose a market share of the only phone they have that’s unique to their carrier.