Remington derringer (comics smartphones)

Like the new "random stuff" "blog fu" styled header? Anyway, here's two thoughts I'd like to blast into your brain piece quickly (and there's a theme, see, a Remington derringer can only hold two shots, whereas the "revolver" blog I did had six ... oh never mind) ...

- BANG! I've had a lot of negative things to say about the negatively slanted numbers of people in color (in general) and Black people (in specific) in comics. However, I do wanna give a tip of my fedora (apologies to Stephen Colbert) to this week's batch. Captain America Black Panther Flags Of Our Fathers #1 (although Cap did need top billing to sell the book, T'chaka is a lead), Great Ten #6 (people of Chinese descent) and New Avengers Luke Cage #1 (a brother on the streets of Philly). Three whole books with leads of color from the Big Two. I won't say times are a'changin' -- and whether these books suck or rock is still a question mark -- but that's good to see.

- BANG! I have to publicly thank the wonderful, wonderful work of the members at talk.maemo.org for their outstanding work on the Unofficial N900 iSync Plugin, which gave explicit instructions (well, sort of, I had to figure out that Bluetooth PAN is Bluetooth DUN, thanks to a quick Google search) that helped me completely migrate all of my calendar and contact data out of my old Palm Desktop software and into my N900, synched up via Address Book/iCal ... all without ever touching the cloud (which again proved to be a terrible idea, even for the Dalai Lama). I got an email back from one of the programmers, Dave Smith (and remember, these are open source guys doing it because they saw a need, not for pay, although they're good enough to get paid for it) after I thanked them in an email, but just had to say that an open source community working towards solutions really, really rocks. I love this freakin' phone! Now, if I could just get portrait mode working right ...

Auf wiedersen.

Playing (Music): "Dancing Queen" by ABBA ... really, I love that song!