Generally Amtrak is pretty decent the acela runs are nice albeit ridiculously more expensive ($100 EACH WAY) than the regional runs given the real time savings (about 30 minutes DC to NYC)

However, if you book a train later in the day and have a meeting cancel, it is a HUGE pain to reschedule for an earlier train. You end up waiting in a line at NYP which is ALWAYS insanely long to speak with a representative that always looks like they hate you solely for having the audacity to ask them to do their job.

When you get to the rep they tell you that to change trains you have to pay an extra random dollar amount despite the fact that when you booked online all the prices were the same. Oh, and while you were waiting in line you missed the train you really wanted to take and the one you would have caught next was cancelled. So then you get the warm fuzzy that can only come from waiting in line forever to accomplish absolutely nothing more than reducing the amount of beer you COULD have had if you’d just sucked it up and waited to begin with.

While you’re standing in line you keep looking at the Amtrak kiosk things where you can pick up and purchase tickets and wonder why the hell you can’t change your ticket at those machines without the wait. The kiosks have a printer, a barcode reader and even a credit card reader so what the hell!?! If you’re a turbo nerd like I apparently am, you actually think about how easy it would be to add this function to these machines programmatically and become even more pissed off at the situation. Then you start thinking about how it’s likely some union jerk that does their programming despite his complete and utter lack of qualification because god forbid they get a qualified non-union guy to do something before they spend the government subsidies that Amtrak gets wasting time letting some teamster who is barely qualified to be a janitor have a fair shot at it.

So that’s my amtrak rant… Far less of a review than I normally give but hey, that’s what you get now that I can post in the heat if the moment from the iPhone. Apparently this is going to become Josh RAW.

About now I was hoping to post an image, doesn’t look like that’s going to happen in the iPhone app, oh well perhaps a future version will add it.

Generally I must say I’m quite pleased with the wordpress iPhone app. If you use wordpress, check it out

*UPDATE* you can add photos see below!

I’m expecting to try some Russian vodkas that I haven’t previously had and perhaps some different wines as well over the weekend so perhaps some interesting reviews in the food/beverage department as well.

Finally,??I’ve also had my Samsung LN-T4671F for several months and will be writing a review of the television shortly, this will also be a doesn’t suck review but there are a few minor issues I’ll be raising. I’ll also discuss some of the other options out there for LCD TV’s and why I went with this particular model.

I’m beating this wine up probably a bit more than it deserves, it’s not flawed it’s just not terribly interesting. I do pick up a little bit of fruit aroma-wise and some on the finish as well as a bit of minerality on the finish but to be honest I really have to work to taste much of anything. If you are looking for a red with little to no personality maybe this would be good for you but I just can’t get into it.

I paired this with a hotdog and some potato chips (yes I was feeling lazy) and after dinner I smoked a cigar. I’ll be reviewing hotdogs here in the next few days (I’m a hotdog snob).

So there you have it a non-flawed, boring wine. I do confess to being a fan of more bold wines; that said, my wife, who is more prone to appreciate??subtlety??than I am also finds this wine boring. I’m putting this as both “Meh” and “Sucks” because you’d be hard pressed to find me spending money for it again but I can’t really say there is anything wrong with it.

If you don’t know what an iPhone is you’ve probably been living under a rock and therefore aren’t seeing this website so we’ll skip that; in case you don’t know about oobgolf let me give you a quick run down. Oobgolf is a golf social networking site that also has the ability to track your progress as you work on your golf infection game. You also have the ability to view your friends scores, and a variety of other social networking type activities.. Oh and they seem to have a gift for finding interesting and amusing stories which are usually somehow related to golf.

In this review I’ll be focusing on the mobile functionality of the site which lets you track your scores via a mobile device while you’re on the course; to my knowledge oob is the only site to do this. To access the mobile functionality you simply point your mobile device at mobile.oobgolf.com when you first get to the site you are presented with this screen:

If you aren’t signed in you’ll get prompted with a login screen, it looks just like a login screen. From here you can start entering new scores, view past scores or look for a new course. I find 99% of the time when I come here on my iPhone I’m at a course and about to start tracking a round so that’s where we will pick up. Once you click (or in the case of my iPhone tap) “Enter New Score” you are taken to a screen where you provide some basic information about your round:

This is really nice, choose your course/tees being played from, etc. Courses you’ve previously entered scores for are in the drop down, if you are playing a course you haven’t played before the “find new course” option gives you a simple search which I have yet to have fail to find my course (oob has a HUGE course database). If you choose to play 9 holes the next screen will ask?? you if you are playing the front 9 or the back 9, this is important, you’ll see why shortly.

Once you’ve selected the basic information about your round you are brought to the entry screen for the first hole:

As you can see the entry screen provides you with information about each hole as you approach it, mobile oobgolf really is a full scorecard replacement! I usually take the scorecard and just turn it to the course map and leave it there. Entering scores on the iPhone is pretty simple and straight forward, the drop downs are nice and pretty as seen below:

As you can see the iPhone zooms in on the drop down you have highlighted and you can use the nice Previous and Next buttons on the iPhone to jump quickly from field to field if you enter a text field you are presented with the standard iPhone keyboard as you can see in the next screenshot.

There is one caveat here, the keyboard doesn’t start in numeric mode for you, it goes into text mode so you have an additional button press to pop it into numeric entry mode the iPhone will actually allow you to put a text value into the number fields which is clearly an issue. I have no idea if this is an iPhone issue or an oob issue but I suspect it’s the iPhone. I had a blackberry 8800 prior to my iPhone and it would automatically detect that the field was a numeric field and not a text field, so either there’s a bug in the iPhone browser or oob needs to code something specific for the iPhone (which is still an iPhone problem in my book).

In terms of a general comparison to the blackberry I have to say I think the blackberry holds a slight edge over the iPhone for this purpose. The click wheel is the main reason for this, you can use the blackberry with one hand to enter your scores VERY easily, with the iPhone it requires two hands. I really don’t think there is anything oob could do to make this better on the iPhone short of having a dedicated iPhone version that used drop downs for ALL of the fields on each hole. Drop downs are easy to operate with one hand using the iPhone but typing is not, I can see where on more traditional mobile phones with numeric keypads drop downs might be a pain though. That said with an iPhone or any device with a click wheel (like a blackberry) drop downs are tops when it comes to quick entry.

As you’re scoring your round oob calculates your projected score for you which is great, it’s based on your handicap as calculated by oob so the more rounds you track with oob the more accurate this will be. The pages that load each time you submit the score for a hole are very small so things move nice and quickly, I’ve never felt like I’ve been waiting for a page to load. Also if you get a phone call while you’re using oob to track the score simply hop back into your browser after the call and you can continue entering your score right where you left off, this works even if your browser closes and you have to log back in, very nice.

When you finish the round you get a summary that looks like the screen below:

A very nice screen showing you your total yardage (based on the tees you chose at the beginning), par, your actual score, +/- (which actually doesn’t seem to work for some reason), Net score (which is your score taking your handicap and the course difficulty into account), and some nice statistics based on your game. Oh yea, it also shows the effect the round had on your handicap as oob calculates it. One of the nice things about using oob is that you not only get all these additional stats, you don’t have to do any math, oob takes care of all of it for you.

As you can see this all works fairly well (quite frankly it works fantastically), that said there are a few minor glitches at least when using the iPhone. I’m not sure if these are iPhone specific or not but in the interest of being complete I’m including them here. The oob guys are pretty great so if they read this it wouldn’t surprise me if they were fixed by the time I play again.

Issue #1??- Pressing the “Go” button on the iPhone keyboard tries to cancel the round, I’m guessing this is simply that they have the default submit button on the page defined as the cancel button instead of the “next” button but I don’t know for sure. Here’s what happens if you press “Go” instead of closing the iPhone keyboard and actually clicking on the “next” button on the oob page itself:

It’s not a disaster or anything but it would be nice if you could use the “go” button on the iPhone keyboard (less clicks)

Issue #2??- You can put text into numeric fields (IE your score, or number of putts) this was mentioned before in the review and it’s really not all that big of a deal but it is a minor annoyance.

Issue #3??- The projected score formula breaks around a hole or two prior to the round end. For some reason the formula being used to calculate what your projected score is breaks as you get close to the end of the round, here you can see I haven’t even played the 9th hole in this 9 hole round and it’s saying my score is projected to be what my score is after playing only 8 holes.

and then here you can see on the 8th hole it’s giving me 5 shots to finish the round in to make the projected score, as you’ve seen I’m no where near that good.

This issue is certainly very minor, as the projected score feature is merely a “nice to have”, of course it would be nice if it worked through the whole round.

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That’s it, overall you can’t beat oobgolf for tracking your golf round. Sure there are some native applications out there for different devices that will track scores for you but none of them give you the power that oob does or the nice charting, etc. on the site once you’re back at your computer. Not to mention the ability to share your scores with your friends, etc.

If you’re a golfer and you haven’t given oobgolf a shot I’d definitely suggest you do this season! Here you can see my oobgolf profile and of course I already know how bad I am so feel free to not comment on that.

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Sometimes I read this stuff and I think, “you’ve got to be kidding me you’re really writing this way about wine?” I like to think of myself as more than a casual hobbyist (I have a few hundred bottles of wine in my cellar) but I also like to think I’m not your typical pretentious wine guy (I’ll drink wine out of box if the occasion calls for it, but don’t serve me white zinfandel). All of this said, sometimes these terms really do describe wines better than anything else I can think of, maybe that comes from reading too many wine magazines which make these words the first that hop into my head when I taste certain things. In an effort to explain this a bit better here’s a few things and how I see them, or rather taste them.

• Earthy or Rustic - This can be a taste or a smell, like portabella??mushrooms??or an old barn (I know this sounds like I’m saying the wine smells or tastes like horse-shit, and maybe I kind of am but somehow when you’re getting this in a wine it isn’t horrible like it sounds).
• Berries??- You know what a berry is right? throw a bunch in a basket (different types) and smell it, thats what this is to me. Or cram them in your mouth, it tastes like berries but not necessarily a particular berry. If I think I get a specific berry or other fruit I’ll call that out specifically.
• Leathery??- This ones a bit more tough, as for me I equate it with a combination of texture and taste, smell a leather couch and imagine what that would taste like plus add a slight “graininess” to it which seems strange but it’s not like it sounds either, but then it kind of is like it sounds too.

This brings me to today’s review which is of medical research. We live in an amazing age, lots of fantastic technical advances, mp3 players the size of pencils, bluetooth headsets the size of thumbtacks, navigation systems that can take you just about anywhere you want to go, etc. In this day and age why is it that ??I have to have a damn cold at all? If I do have to have a cold why isn’t there a drug or something that can make me feel like I don’t have one. And even without that why does blowing my nose have to completely destroy my nose and upper lip? Also why the hell don’t I have a flying car yet, but that’s a different topic.

Here is an example of current medical research:?? Appendix removed through vagina??I mean as valuable as this is, is this really something that is adding a huge value to our society? I believe most appendix operations are now done via??laparoscope??which has a very minimal healing time. We spend thousands of dollars and countless hours researching these kinds of things?

To me medical research priority is simple, start with the things that kill the most people, lower the priority of those things which can be prevented by modifying behavior and/or just being responsible, and get to it. After that move on to the things that are massive inconveniences for massive amounts of people such as the common cold.

Even if you think of this purely from a profit perspective it makes sense. There has to be millions of people who suffer from colds at least once a year. If you had a drug that could make me not get one, I’d buy it and I’m sure a lot of other people would too. Here’s some ideas for some other products I’d buy to deal with cold misery:

• Nose blowing device that didn’t require constant??abrasion??of the outside of my nose.
• Snot pump which prevented me from having to blow my nose to breathe while trying to sleep
• Zicam-like product that didn’t either taste bad or require me to put crap in my nose
• Flying car

Every time I squirt some of this stuff up my nose (a miserable experience) I am supposed to hold my nose shut for 5 seconds, this almost always results in my nostrils being “glued” to the middle part of my nose. This doesn’t hurt or anything but it is annoying as hell. I can’t even describe how annoying it is, I’m getting pissed off just thinking about the next time I have to put this stuff in my nose.

After you do the whole squirt/pinch routine you aren’t supposed to blow your nose for 30 seconds. This isn’t a big deal as long as you don’t mind a gel/snot combo running down your face; I personally happen to mind this a great deal.

All of those dreadful negatives aside it does seem to have the same effect on reducing my cold severity and duration as the other forms this medicine can come in, it just adds worse nasal drip and general snot production.

I guess ultimately I’d say if you have a cold you definitely want Zicam, I’ve tried the chewables, the throat spray and now the nasal drip. Both the chewables and the throat spray taste kind of bad but given the option I’d say the taste is about 1,000 times less unpleasant than the nasal irritation the gel has. If I felt a cold coming on and all I could find was the nasal gel, I’d probably go without Zicam which says a lot about how much I hate this stuff because I really hate being sick. Zicam is great, the delivery mechanism of the nasal gel is horrible.

My Zicam experience break down:

• Nasal Gel - Helps fix your cold, sucks super bad to use and makes your nose way more runny
• Chewables - Helps fix your cold, kind of tastes bad, convenient to carry.
• Throat Spray - Helps fix your cold, kind of tastes bad, not as convenient to carry as the chewables
• Nasal Swaps - Never tried

When I am looking for something softer I usually just reach into the basket I keep by my toilet:

It is of course critical that you hold them in the right direction as their claws can actually be quite sharp, but once you get the hang of things I assure you there is no softer wiping implement to be found.

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I’m on day two with the Zicam, I’ll let do a full review of the Zicam experience once I’m over the cold and can comment on whether or not I feel like it helped.??