Shopping Carts in Ravines

I have very few complaints about Apple products. Largely fitting that pattern, the iPhone 3G is the best phone I’ve ever owned and has exceeded my requirements as a digital organizer.

Similarly, Safari on OS X has consistently been a fast, stable and standards-embracing browser and while any browser lacking my Firefox extensions must come in second place, I use Safari daily on sites FF can’t handle and love my ‘view in Safari’ FF extension.

However, the only reason I ever open Safari on my iPhone is because without jailbreaking it I have no other choice.

Firstly, finding out that Apple’s so-called ‘full Internet experience’ didn’t include Flash was a little ridiculous considering Flash is as common as CSS and an absolute requirement for a huge number of sites.

Once you try actually surfing the web, though, it’s no wonder they crippled it like that. The rock solid browser on my MacBook Pro became the least stable of any app on my iPhone and some of the bugs are so serious and so obvious that the only way they could be present is for Apple to have knowingly shipped them.

1. Safari crashes constantly, often for no apparent reason. Even on basic text-focussed pages when no data activity or zooming/scrolling is even taking place, which also makes the whole web app thing a total crock. Crashing is so endemic that before they even fix the stuff that is bringing Safari down all the time, they should implement an auto-reopen option. Google Chrome-style tab isolation would be terrif too.

2. The totally ludicrous runaway backspace bug. After hitting space twice to write a period with a gap (something you can do accidentally even if you don’t ever intend to use the feature), sometimes hitting backspace to correct it will cause a runaway deletion to occur where you watch in horror as words or even lines are deleted piece by piece as if you were holding the backspace down. For a blog writer and blog user, this is equivalent to shipping an automobile that jams into reverse whenever you tap on the brakes, and makes the browser keyboard literally useless except for filling out brief forms.

3. I have the feeling this is a bad decision more than it is a bug, but… Safari suffers from a strange tendency towards the unnecessary reloading of tabs. Website data that can’t be retained in a computer’s memory is stored on its hard disk in a ‘cache’ which is updated later on when the website is reloaded. The mobile version of the browser still has a cache - you can see that in the settings - yet it doesn’t seem to do anything. When you open a new Safari browsing window, use it to load a page, and then switch back to one you had open previously, most of the time it will automatically reload the entire page, even when both aren’t particularly hefty pages. It’s not like my 16 gig iPhone is lacking the ability to hold onto Google News Mobile Version for 5 seconds, the devices have plenty of storage room and proper use of a cache is a no-brainer: it would save on sluggish reloading time and keep data charges down.

I did write most of this entire entry on my iPhone, but using the Wordpress app. Even if I was painfully careful to avoid the backspace bug, I guarantee that Safari would have crashed. I’d bet money on that every time.

So what does Safari on the iPhone have going for it? The main thing that makes this whole mess any better is how painful most mobile browsing has been until now. And beyond that, it is functional to some extent - though I would never recommend that anyone do any writing within Safari beyond the length of a sentence or two, and never anything of particular importance.

Treat it like Windows 3.x and constantly expect a crash. If you don’t mind reopening the browser a few times, maybe you’ll be able to manage getting through reading the day’s news and a few blog posts before you give up.

Development of upcoming Linux-based phones should be interesting to watch, because right now the iPhone is great Apple hardware but is kind of lacking when it comes to representing Apple software.

Take a look at the reader-voted top Safari complaints at PleasefixtheiPhone.com.

I’d just like to point out that the commonly accepted RSS logo, first popularized around 2005-2006, bears a remarkable resemblance to disembodied mystery-solving literatus Ghostwriter from the same-named television series of 1992-1995.

The RSS logo, if you’re unfamiliar, is depicted on my avatar’s shirt in the sidebar and will also appear in or near the address bar of most modern web browsers. Incidentally, clicking either the sidebar or address bar RSS icon will allow you to subscribe to the new post feed for this site. [What is RSS?]

Compare that to this Ghostwriter logo:

The animated Ghostwriter character appears in the show as the dot and lines used here for the centre of the letter “o” in Ghost.

And the RSS logo:

Am I right? I’m so right.

Write a comment with your name, age, city or municipality of residence and your explanation for this mystery and you could win a trip to New York City to hang out with Spike Lee!
Disclaimer: Winner must be between the ages of 6 and 16 and the current year must be 1993.

Nutrition consultant & educator Karen Hanrahan has kept a plain McDonald’s hamburger from 1996 without doing anything in particular to preserve it and it is in nearly the exact same shape as when it was sold 12 years ago:

That’s 1996 on the left, 2008 on the right.

She writes, “Ladies, Gentleman, and children alike - this is a chemical food. There is absolutely no nutrition here. Not one ounce of food value… McDonalds fills an empty space in your belly. It does nothing to nourish the cell, it is not a nutritious food.”

When I reference Urban Hiking, what I’m thinking of in my mind is occasions where I’ve walked long distances through unfamiliar areas to reach a far-off destination (say, across a city) without ever having felt a sense of being lost but instead retaining a sense of exploration and enough focus to be charting the previously unfamiliar territory between my position and my desired destination. Part of my ability to do this is a keen sense for cardinal points, but honestly they sell that in stores and it fits in your pocket.

Here is an example from Aug 2, 2006 when I decided to walk home after a windy thunderstorm from Bloor downtown to Northern Etobicoke just using continuous course correction based on an awareness of directions and always choosing the path less familiar when presented with a choice.

Urban Hiking is fun, educational and exploration-based but has some more practical direct applications than the modern sport of Urban Exploration in places like warehouses (which is wicked) and storm drains (which seems to me like an unpleasant place to spend your time).

Urban Hiking is about assessing the often unfamiliar immediate environment for information (paths/potential paths) while remaining anchored in the broader geography.

With cardinal points, a sense of adventure and the ability to evaluate your surroundings for opportunities on the fly, it becomes irrelevant if you are unacquainted with your immediate location. You can avoid ever being lost yet still be constantly getting acquainted and discovering areas and experiences.

By retaining a conscious and lucid mind about your surroundings you can master their layout and choose routes through areas that avoid pollution (proximity to busy roadways), potential crime or physical obstacles. This allows you to choose your experiences-en-route as being as scenic or shortcut-quick as you desire.

For me, one of the definite highlights of the trip to NYC was visiting The Village Petstore and Charcoal Grill, an animatronics-based non-graffiti exhibit by infamous street and guerilla artist Banksy, who also happens to be my favourite contemporary artist. (Although for the record, Tom Green did the hang-your-own-painting-in-a-big-gallery trick in Ottawa first!)

I found out about the exhibit (and that it was by Banksy, as it exists anonymously and is staffed by randoms) from Wooster Collective, whose RSS feed I really need to stay up on because I just missed them speaking in Toronto by a day. I’m really glad they were careful about spoilers and left out some of my favourite things, like the leopard. (The exhibit is closed now.)

Many people who lined up did so only because they were walking down the rather busy street it was on and saw a line of people waiting to get into what appeared to be a pet store with a leopard in the window. I heard a lot of “Uh, I think it’s an art thing?”
Some things you had to see online though, like the record of the view from the mother CCTV camera’s lens:

Unlike his first North American exhibit in LA where Banksy painted an elephant to match a magenta-and-gold wallpaper print, officially decreed illegally animal abuse, much of this exhibit had strong anti-animal-exploitation themes. Banksy not only said that this was a conscious flip, but that much of the money from the elephant exhibit went into funding this one.

A woman outside was handing out Go Veg For Thanksgiving pamphlets but I rejected them because I’m already vegan, I already have good Thanksgiving recipes, and our Thanksgiving had already passed anyway. I don’t think she was officially associated with the exhibit, just using the opportunity.

So, I recently took a trip to New York City, leaving from and returning to Toronto via Buffalo with Megabus, a company that seems to mostly rent Coach Canada / Coach USA’s buses out and drive them themselves.

Our first driver was very conscientious and genial, and counted heads to make sure everyone was present after a stop. When we got to Buffalo, the driver switched. Nothing much happened for most of the trip, and after the Buffalo Airport stop we were down to 5 passengers bound for NYC.

I was sleeping in the back through part of New York state and awoke to find a woman lying injured in the aisle of 5-passenger bus and moaning / calling out for help saying her shoulder hurt and she couldn’t get up. She had apparently fallen, and the driver wasn’t pulling over or doing anything to respond to the situation, he just kept speeding down the highway.

Even with all the passengers on the bus standing up and yelling at him variations of “Stop! Stop the bus! Someone’s hurt! Pull over! Someone is injured! Don’t you have policies to follow? What is wrong with you, why are you not stopping? Why are you still speeding down the highway when a woman is injured back here and needs a hospital?” and so on, he continued to speed and not respond.

The bus continued down the road for ten to twenty minutes (in traffic and at or above the speed limit) with the woman lying, moaning in pain, on the ground. One passenger called the bus company and the only thing that came of the conversation was him yelling “Don’t tell me he has it under control! He doesn’t have anything under control, he’s speeding down the road!“

The driver finally pulled over in Hackensack, New Jersey after some conversation in Spanish over his radio, and he asks for everyone’s information while the passengers use their own phones to call an ambulance and contact the woman’s local relative. He wrote down my name incorrectly even though I showed him my ID and explained which was my middle and which was my last name.

Volunteer college kid paramedics wearing track pants (one yellow with a robot bursting out of his rear) arrived to try to awkwardly lift the woman and load her into an ambulance. Apparently this is what happens in the States. The woman said that she had a checkered suitcase under the bus and “it” was loaded into the ambulance with her.

When we arrived in NYC, the only suitcase left was not our solid black one but a checkered (houndstooth) one with a pink ribbon tied around it. It then took the whole of the next 24 hours to deal with tracking down the hospital she went to, trying to explain to the staff there that they might need to remove it, trying to track down the relative the woman was going to visit, and trying to get the bus company to do anything at all to assist with this. What they did was misinform the woman’s relative, claiming that we had their bag with us.

We eventually had to make our way through an unfamiliar city at our own expense to locate the home of the injured woman’s relative and retrieve our bag that she had luckily taken on to NYC and not left in New Jersey. Luckily, they were some of the nicest people we interacted with in the States. We found out then that the woman had broken her shoulder.

Then, on the way back, we were given the wrong bus departure information on our itinerary and missed our bus. We ended up having to sleep for 11 hours on the floor of the subway level of the Port Authority bus terminal with random riders and homeless people and then as we waited for our Toronto-via-Buffalo bus at gate 309 as instructed, the driver called out “Buffalo” without mentioning Toronto at gate 310 and had I not gone and asked we would’ve been stuck there for another span of hours, playing Fuzzle and watching one-footed pigeons hobble around and fly laps inside.

One infamous guerilla art stunt that got Banksy some fame was installing his own works in major art galleries.

I just want to state for the record that Tom Green did this first in Ottawa.