As I recently posted, Shauna and I picked up some new phones. I had a lot of enthusiasm for the Samsung Moment because of the capabilities offered by Android and the hardware keyboard and managed to sell Shauna on it once she found out she could “skin” the phone. (In her view, the stock model is too masculine.) Now that we’ve been using them for a couple of weeks, I thought I’d share my thoughts and opinions on the devices.

Hardware

This phone has all of the standard stuff you’d expect in a modern smartphone. A high-res color touchscreen, camera with flash, bluetooth, expandable storage via miniSD card… you get the drill. Some of it stands out a bit, though.

The screen is gorgeous. Truth be told, I would place the brightness and clarity beyond any of the other screens in the house, including our new laptop and the Samsung 1080p set downstairs. How can that be? Thank the AMOLED screen. It’s very bright and crisp without drawing a lot of power and does not require any backlighting. It’s a decent size, too, at 1.78″ x 3.2″ displaying 320×480. Devices like the Motorola Droid have bigger displays with higher resolutions, but you aren’t going to get one for $99 after rebates either. The touch sensitivity is generally pretty good, though the interface as a whole can lag if there are a lot of apps running.

I’m also rather impressed with the hardware keyboard. It’s a 4-row design with a dedicated row for numbers. The space bar sits in the middle of the last row which may throw you off a bit after touch-typing forever, but you can easily get used to it. I have a problem, however, where I accidentally hit the volume buttons on the edge when typing. The keys are responsive and have a satisfying click. For those of you used to an on-screen keyboard and predictive typing tools (both of which are part of Android), you might not get a lot of use out of it. When I have to bust out the SSH or write a long blog entry, however, the hardware keyboard is my weapon of choice.

The case as a whole has a good, sturdy feel to it. I’ve read stories of people greatly abusing theirs without ill effects. The backing on the phone is also very pleasant and seems to grip your palm as you hold the phone; I feel a lot less likely to drop it then I did my old Q9c. The slider doesn’t slip around unnecessarily and the phone feels natural in your hand when you have the keyboard extended.

While the phone includes an optical joystick (think of it as a small, clickable touchpad), I don’t use it very often. It’s very sensitive and the slightest movement can easily cause you to overshoot what you wanted to select. I’m sure I could get used to it, but I just don’t find a lot of utility. The Home, Menu, and Back buttons (all standard keys on Android phones) are touch-sensitive. It feels like a very natural extension of the touchscreen itself, though you can accidentally hit them if you’re carelessly swiping to scroll.

The camera itself is pretty decent quality, a 3.2MP that will do fine for most shots. The video quality is passable, though you will notice some pixelation. I’d say that while this isn’t going to replace your main digital camera, it will still take some quality shots for later. I do have a bit of a problem with the camera positioning. If you’re taking a wide-screen shot (and why wouldn’t you be?), your fingers have a tendency to obscure part of the lens. I know it’s just a matter of retraining myself, but it doesn’t feel like a natural way to hold it. For those of you who like to self-shoot, step away from the bathroom mirror. The camera has a small reflective piece of chrome underneath for framing those shots. I personally am unlikely to use it, but I thought it was a nice touch.

Call quality is good with no problems being heard on either end. I think the speakerphone quality is pretty good, though I have had it get a bit drowned out in a noisy environment. Audio playback is surprisingly loud when you want it to be, though I recommend a set of headphones or external speakers if you’re going to listen to music. The phone includes a set of stereo headphones with a call answer/end button, a nice feature that I miss from my long-gone Sony Ericcson T226.

Charging is done via a micro-USB port. The phone includes both a wall charger and a USB cable for attaching it to a PC. This is pretty handy for me since I can leave my wall charger at home and take the USB cable to work to keep a full charge on my workstation. Transferring files is very easy since the phone is instantly recognized as a mass storage device, the same as if you plugged in a thumbdrive or digital camera. This makes transferring files (pictures, videos, music, apps, etc.) incredibly easy.

The phone includes a 2GB microSD card with a full SD adapter and supports up to a 16GB microSDHC card. Most of you are unlikely to even use all of the space on the included card, but it’s nice to have options. All of your application data will get stored on the card, though most of the apps will reside on the phone itself. There’s a roomy 512MB of storage, so only a total app fiend could fill it. A gripe I have about the microSD card, however, is that you have to power off the phone and remove the battery to swap it. My old phone had a little slot in the side for changing cards. I can see why powering down to swap could be necessary since a running app might have data on the phone, but is it necessary to go to that length?

Android Software and Built-in/Included Apps

There’s a lot of hype around the Android platform, and it is well-deserved. It’s a very clean and intuitive interface that takes just minutes to get used to. I’m also impressed with the versatility of the applications you can get after-market. I’ll run you through some of the most useful bits.

The interface is general is very easy to use. A short tap will execute the item you just tapped on. If you tap and hold, you will often get a context menu or other alternate action (for instance, dragging an app from the Drawer to the Home Screen). Swiping left or right to swap the Home Screen makes a lot of organizational sense and swiping or flicking up or down is a natural way to scroll. While the Drawer is a collapsible list of every app on the system, the Home Screen is for the most-used apps only (i.e. Contacts, Facebook, Market, etc.). You can also add folders to group similar apps into one spot and only use one of your Home Screen icons. Many apps also have widgets you can add, icons that are updated live or support quickly performing a function from the Home Screen (like enabling or disabling WiFi).

As you would expect of any phone with Google software, Google services are very tightly integrated. I had already been making extensive use of Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Contacts with all of them syncing to my old phone. To sync them to the new phone, I just had to drop in my login information. Within minutes, my phone book was populated, my calendars were visible (all of them, not just my primary one), and I was getting new e-mail notifications.

The Contacts area is a bit cluttered, however, with e-mail addresses of people I’ve sent maybe 1-2 messages to in the entire 5 years I’ve had my account. It’s a small thing to type in the name to find the person you’re looking for, but I would have hoped that only the entries designated as my contacts would show up. A workaround for this (and a tacit acknowledgment that this isn’t the best behavior) is to star contacts the same you would messages in Gmail. You can then access this list of favorite contacts to quickly scroll through the people you call the most. Once you star at least one contact on the device, you can then add contacts to the star group from your PC. That’s much easier for doing it in bulk. The Contacts app also includes your basic dialpad in you need to call a non-contact.

The Calendars app is very easy to use and includes your standard day, week, month, and today views. I personally prefer the Agenda view, a scroll list of everything on my calendar. Since it includes all calendars and not just your primary one, it’s a great way to view all of those shared and group calendars you’re using. You can toggle exactly which calendars you prefer to see, though, if that would be too overloading.

The Gmail app is just as good as using it from a desktop. You can easily star, label, archive, and delete messages with minimal fuss. Message changes take a few minutes to sync back to the desktop, so you might notice some lag between changes you make. Samsung opted to include Moxier Mail to add Exchange support and it works very well. (If your phone didn’t include it and you use Exchange, consider dropping the $25 to get a copy.) Mail messages are kept isolated in their own bucket so that your personal messages won’t get mixed in. The calendar is synced to Google Calendars, but it, again, is kept in its own space so that you don’t get any co-mingling.

The browser is a slimmed-down version of Google Chrome and it does a great job of rendering even complex web pages. That said, there is no support for Adobe Flash, so some sites might not appear the way you expect them to. In theory, Android will gain Flash support sometime this year. In practice, Google has quietly declared war on Flash by supporting HTML5 as a replacement, so we’ll see how that works out. I like that the browser supports multiple tabs (up to three active), but bookmark management is a mess. There’s no folders or tags to organize them, so I would heavily recommend installing a Delicious add-on for your bookmarking needs. You can also grab an alternative browser such as Opera if you like.

Google Maps is an excellent experience on the phone and  has a very polished feel to it. Scrolling is very fast and intuitive, and a long tap will tell you what the approximate address of the location is. You can then tap an address to quickly flip over to Street View. Directions support driving, transit, and walking (no biking just yet) and when the Android 2.1 update is released, it will also have voice navigation. Latitude is built right in for stalking your friends and integrates nicely into the overall interface. Speaking of location, the phone can be configured to use GPS location OR an approximate location based on the tower the phone is using. The tower-based location, while a battery-saver, is markedly less accurate and can sometimes place you up to several miles from your actual position.

A place where you’ll spend a lot of time is the Market. This is where you can search for and download third-party apps for your phone. Most of the apps are free and many of the rest come at a reasonable price of just a few dollars. (I’ll list some of my favorites later.) Searching generally returns relevant results, though I wish that there were more categories to browse and other ways to stumble upon an app. I also don’t like that you can’t browse the full catalog from a PC. Unlike the iTunes app store, Android has a very lax submission process and allows a larger variety of applications to come through. Surprisingly, it hasn’t lead to hundreds of “fart” applications like iTunes has; the overall app quality is much higher. Almost every part of the device hardware is exposed to applications, so it gives them a lot of power to manipulate the device. Don’t worry, though; every application will tell you exactly what parts of the device it requires access to and every application will run in its own isolated sandbox. In theory, no application should be able to crash the entire system.

There’s a lot of other apps included, but not any you’ll use on a regular basis. I, for instance, see no reason to ever use the NFL or NASCAR apps. The Photo and Video Places app is a “set it and forget it” app for sharing pictures and movies with Facebook and other services. Most of the others are self-explanatory like YouTube or CNN. The real power is in being able to grab just what you want.

Third-Party Apps

Once you configure your Google Account and get some of the preferences set, it’s time to go grab some apps. I’ve got a few dozen installed already and your needs will vary.

Facebook: Unless you live in a cave of social isolation, you’re using Facebook. Grab the app instead of only depending on the mobile website. It’s a lot faster, can directly upload photos from the camera, and provides notifications. It also allows you to add a new Facebook Contacts folder to your Home Screen to look up phone numbers from your Facebook friends. Nifty, eh? That said, you’ll be using the app and the mobile website in conjunction pretty frequently. You can also use the full site in the browser, but that’s kind of overkill unless you need to access a specific piece that won’t work otherwise (like groups).

Twidroid: If you use Twitter, there are a number of apps you can pick from. I happen to be partial to Twidroid, widely agreed to be one of the best clients available. I’ve found the interface to be very intuitive and in some cases even superior to Tweetdeck on my desktop. Like the Facebook app, it will run in the background and provide you with notifications when new tweets arrive. There’s a paid Pro version if you need support for multiple accounts and some other advanced features.

Google Voice: If you have more than one phone number or change yours frequently, Google Voice is for you. Its main feature is the ability to have one number for life that automatically forwards to your other phones based on rules you setup. It can even handle your SMS messages and voicemail including transcription (which sometimes doesn’t work as well as you hope). The app will integrate your Google Voice account with the handset so that all calls are placed using Google Voice. It also gives you a centralized point to access all SMS and VM messages you receive via your account. I find it indispensable. When using the app, I strongly recommend turning off the e-mail notifications and SMS forwarding to avoid duplicate or triplicate notifications.

Weather Channel: This one is included, but you’d probably want to download and use it anyway. It comes with a widget to include the current conditions and weather alerts. The app itself also includes 36-hour/10-day forecasts and weather maps. It will also adjust depending on location, so you don’t need to update it just because you took a trip to San Diego.

Barcode Scanner: Why this isn’t included by default is beyond me. It’s just what it sounds like: a simple barcode scanner. In and of itself, the usefulness is somewhat limited. Standard barcodes don’t do anything without a helper app (we’ll get to that in a minute), but it can read QR codes. QR barcodes can embed information such as a contact, a website address, or how to find a specific app on the market. Want to share a contact? Bring up their barcode from Contacts and have the other phone scan it with Barcode Scanner. Want to download an app you found from your PC? Scan it with the phone and it will open in Market. I think you see where this is going.

Google Shopper: Do you need this? Yes, yes, a million times yes! It can instantly scan the barcode or cover from DVDs, CDs, books, and other products, then provide immediate product information including price comparison and, in some cases, where the item is in stock locally. Yes, it’s that awesome. You can also bookmark the products you find to shop for them later. If you aren’t shopping with this, you’re likely paying way too much.

Key Ring: Grab your car keys right now. How many of those little barcode loyalty card things do you have cluttering it up? How many of those cards do you also have in your wallet? Most of us have at least a half-dozen of them. Key Ring allows you to scan those barcodes and define which store they’re for. You can then pull up the barcode on your phone and scan it instead of the actual card. It’s a nice way to organize those cards and free up some wallet space.

ConnectBot: This is for serious computer nerds only. The kind of computer nerd who, like me, uses SSH on a regular basis. If you don’t know what that is, you don’t need this app. Personally. I find ConnectBot to be every bit as good as puTTY. The interface is clean, the app is responsive, and it’s just like a desktop app.

Setting Profiles: This is, so far, the only app I’ve paid for, and it’s worth it. There’s a zillion different settings you can pick from on your phone. Between vibrate mode, ringer volume, notification volume, turning WiFi on and off, etc., it can be a real chore to change a bunch of settings at once. Setting Profiles allows you to create collections of these settings to easily switch from one to another. You can also define a time when and location where it will be active. For instance, I have my phone go into silent mode if I’m within 1/4 mile of church on a Sunday between 7AM and 9PM. I also have it shut off notifications but turn up the ringer nightly between 11PM and 6AM, when I will normally be sleeping. Trust me when I say you want this, especially at just three bucks.

Last.fm and/or Pandora: Everyone seems to have their Internet radio of choice and both of these sites provide their own apps for streaming. Unless you have a big music collection and a correspondingly large microSD card, you’ll probably want to opt for one or both of these.

Battery Indicator: Android comes with its own battery indicator, but it’s a kind of fuzzy “not sure how much juice is left” type. This app gives you more precise reading, or at least as precise as the hardware will let you get. In this case, the Moment goes to 10% intervals.

eBuddy: The Moment includes IM apps for Google Talk, MSN, AIM, and Yahoo, but I demand more than that. I still have an old ICQ account (though I haven’t talked to anyone on it in many, many years) and I want Facebook IM support. Meebo is fairly popular, but I kept on getting random disconnections from the various chat services for seemingly no reason. Fring is also popular and worked well on my Q9c, but it doesn’t use the contact groups you spent forever setting up and doesn’t show what IM service someone is using on the list of contacts. eBuddy seems to solve all of these problems while giving you support for MSN, Yahoo, AIM, ICQ, Google Talk, Facebook, and, if you still use it, MySpace. I highly recommend it if you need IM on the go.

Movies by Flixster: This is the best way to find movies, period. I would pick it over any website I’ve ever used. It will, based on your location, show you what’s playing, the Rotten Tomatoes score for the movie, where its playing, and, for select theaters, allow you to buy tickets online. It’s like Google’s movies feature kicked up a notch.

Wordplayer: There’s dozens of ebook programs for Android, but none of them is nearly as awesome as Wordplayer. That’s because it integrates directories of free ebooks you can download instantly. Most of the selection is, obviously, limited to classic titles (so you can easily brush up on your Twain and Shakespeare), but it’s wide-ranging and claims to have access to over a million books. (Bear in mind that some of these are dupes with alternate layouts or translations.) If you need something to read to kill time, this is the way to do it.

Beelicious: Remember how I said that the bookmarking feature in the browser stinks? Go get a Delicious account and use this app instead (accessed from the Share menu). You can then easily tag bookmarks and access them from your PC as well.

Remember the Milk: I’ve been using the website for a long time now to generate to-do lists and recurring tasks, features that Gmail just isn’t any good at. The app provides an easy way to interface with your tasks, especially handy if you’re using it for your grocery list. It requires a Pro account for $25 a year (the app itself is free), but you’ll get a 15-day trial to see if you like it first.

SNESoid Lite and NESoid Lite: What, you thought I wasn’t going to play games on this baby? As the names imply, these are SNES and NES emulators so you can play your favorite classic games on the go. I loaded up TMNT IV: Turtles in Time and the play was smooth with no lag or glitches. The paid versions add save states and some other features, though most folks won’t need those.

There’s obviously many more apps that I use, but these are the most useful ones I’ve found.

Conclusions

I’m very impressed by the Android platform and this phone in particular. It’s more like carrying around a small computer than a phone and is flexible enough to meet a variety of needs for many different kinds of users. Sprint’s data network really shines when using the features of this phone and I find myself using it almost as much as a PC.

Gradually, though, it became painfully obvious that Windows Mobile was getting a bit dated. The number of apps available for it was limited at best, mainly because many required a touchscreen. I also found that many mobile websites didn’t much care for the shoddy browser that came with the phone. Alternatives like Skyfire, while functional, would often disconnect for no reason and prove only useful in absolute emergencies. While I was initially excited about all of the things I could now do that I couldn’t do before, I was now running into the frustrating wall of hardware and software limitations. It was time to swap out for something a bit more functional.

Being soured on Windows Mobile, I needed to look elsewhere. I already knew that Blackberries were right out. I had one about six years ago and didn’t much care for the way it worked at all. It also seemed like the application selection was running into the same limitations as Windows Mobile despite a very large user base. And the iPhone? As exciting as the initial announcement was, Apple has earned my ire over the years. I don’t want to deal with their insane application rejection behaviors (I would say policies, but that would imply consistency), I don’t want to deal with AT&T’s crappy and oversaturated data network, and I don’t want to suffer through an on-screen keyboard. Palm was also off of my list since it appears that company may not have long left in this world. WebOS is a pretty darn amazing platform, but the lagging sales make me think that Palm’s offering is too little, too late. I didn’t want to be bitten the same way we were by investing in Sandisk Sansa MP3 players.

Enter Google and Android. For those that don’t know, Android is what’s powering hot phones like the G1 and Motorola Droid. The open app store and easy-to-use SDK has lead to a lot of apps being available for it. The phones are also reasonably powerful and come with a lot of useful features. Once Sprint announced the Samsung Moment, I knew I had to have one. It had all of the hardware features of my old Q9c, but it also added WiFi and a large touchscreen. Once I heard it would be updated from Android 1.5 (Cupcake) to 2.1 (Elcair), I was sold.

Oddly enough, Shauna got kind of excited about the idea of a new phone too. Yes, my wife Shauna. No, she was not abducted by aliens, brainwashed by a cult in the jungles of South America, or the recipient of any blunt force trauma to the head. (For those of you not in on the joke, Shauna has used her phone so infrequently over the last several years that it often would have a dead battery for months at a go.) So two weeks ago, we jumped in the car and drove on down to the Sprint store to check this phone out. A few days later, we had them in our hot little hands and were excitedly grapping apps left and right and playing around with them to our heart’s content. Funny enough, the new plan we got on actually gives us triple the minutes of our old plan, adds unlimited texting, and gives Shauna unlimited data, yet we’re now paying less than we used to. Go figure.

Both of us love these things. I’m very excited to see Elcair rolled out sometime next month to unlock even more features. If you like Sprint’s data network (which, FYI, is the best as far as I’m concerned) and want an awesome smartphone, this is the way to go.

(I’ll be writing up my own review of the phone and what apps I think are must-haves later on. I’ve already rambled on enough.)

Let me take a moment to explain myself. Apple, for a long time, did a great job of driving the market in places it needed to go. The iMac, while often derided as a kiddie toy by hardcore PC users, brought a much-needed sense of style to a market dominated by the same old gray and beige boxes. The iPod single-handedly dislodged MP3 player as the word for a portable music device and became the de facto standard. iTunes defined what digital marketplaces are supposed to look like and function like. The iPhone created the concept of an easy-to-use repository of simple applications that anyone could create or download. All of these things are truly revolutionary changes to the way we use technology and we owe Apple a great big thanks for making it happen.

Lately, though, most of Apple’s products are more evolutionary than revolutionary. I don’t know if Steve Jobs has been losing his touch or if the cancer has forced him to delegate to the less capable, but none of the company’s PC products have really been more than a periodic refresh of the latest technology. The new generations of iPhones, while improved, haven’t really been compelling enough to entice everyone to upgrade ASAP. And the iPad? Aside from an unfortunate name that’s become the butt of far too many immature jokes, it’s really not much more than a really big iPhone. Apple’s biggest opportunity is in really putting something behind the Apple TV, yet they don’t seem to be willing to make that necessary investment and truly transform the emerging web video market with a subscription-based service and, heck, an extension of the app store. There’s more innovation on this set-top box from XMBC and Boxee than from Apple and that’s a big problem.

Therein lies the real issue. When a company can’t come up with any more game-changing products or ways of doing business, it tried to jealously guard its existing products and business models by any means necessary. This inevitably turns into a game of legislating or litigating success. Telecom companies are notorious for getting all kinds of regulatory special favors; their last Christmas present, the Telecommunications Act of 1996, has cost us all around $300B and growing. Now Apple, by deciding to sue HTC, has started down the same slow death spiral that so many failed companies before it have gone down.

What this is really about is Steve Jobs and his enormous ego. Google managed to out-iPhone the iPhone with the Android platform and the Nexus One handset. Apple hasn’t been beaten at its own game in quite some time, especially not with a flagship product, so this is serious egg on their face. Now, instead of realizing that they have ceded the market lead through relative inaction and only minor product updates, they want to try and stamp out the competition for doing it better. (Kind of ironic since CEO Jobs said that stealing ideas is a good thing.) Apple has admitted, in so many words, that it’s out of good ideas. That’s the sure sign it’s as good as dead.

Right now, the plan is to fly out the Saturday or Sunday before to give Liam a chance to recover from a long day of flying. We’ll be in Boston for about a week after the surgery while he recovers, then we’re going to head down to the DC area to stay with Shauna’s brother Bill. I’m probably going to fly back home not long after that and Shauna will stay with Liam until his followup 2-3 weeks later. The reason I may be coming back early is our dogs. They’ll be twitchy enough after two weeks of us being gone and really need to have someone around the house on a somewhat consistent basis. If you want to volunteer to watch them, please let us know. This doesn’t mean just to come over and feed them twice a day, but also to hang out for a bit and give the dogs some socialization. I certainly wouldn’t mind being able to stay with Shauna and Liam for the entire time.

Sunday night I found myself in possession of a butternut squash and in need of a side dish to go with a roast and mashed potatoes. The squash had been sitting on top of our fridge for the better part of a month (yes, they have amazing shelf life) and was just begging to be cooked. I ad-libbed the entire process, but it worked out pretty well.

Ingredients

• One Butternut Squash (may only be available in the winter months)
• Two strips of bacon, diced
• Half of a yellow or white onion, diced
• 2 cups chicken stock or broth
• Salt and pepper to taste

Directions

1. Cut the squash in half lengthwise. (Yes, it will be a bit challenging. Deal.) Scoop out the seeds and strings, then wrap in plastic wrap and microwave on high for 10-12 minutes.
2. When the squash is done, remove the plastic wrap and place it cut side down on a cutting board. Using a knife, carefully peel the skin from the flesh, taking as little of the meat as possible. This may be tricky while the squash is both hot and squishy, so grab an oven mitt for your non-cutting hand as needed. Once peeled, cut the squash into quarter inch cubes.
3. Heat a large skillet over medium high heat. Add the bacon and cook until very crispy. Add the onion and cook until soft and translucent. Add the squash and chicken broth, stirring to break up the chunks. Cook over medium heat, stirring occasionally, until the squash has the consistency of mashed potatoes. Serve hot.

For those of you who are unaware, butternut squash is a sweet squash with a relatively high sugar content. This only intensifies as it ripens, so use immediately for a milder dish or, like we did, let it sit around for a bit to up the flavor. You can also cut the sweetness a bit with about ¼ tsp. nutmeg. I though it went well with roast and mashed potatoes, though you could also use this as a starch substitute.

You see, his normal nap time is between 10AM and 11AM and he usually goes down for about an hour and a half to two hours. You don’t have to be a math major to figure out that this doesn’t jive too well with a church meeting block from 11AM to 2PM. We used to be able to take him into the hall and get him to nap between blocks, but he’s outgrown the carrier and has gotten a bit pickier about where he naps.

The last time we took him to church, we had to leave before the end of sacrament meeting because he was acting up so much. The problem with sticking it out with him is that we’re basically just trying to keep Liam from freaking out and distracting everyone else in the room. One of us is always with him in the hallway trying to get him to doze just a little bit with very limited success. So what do we do about the crazy kid?

Basically, we’ve decided we have to go to church in shifts. I take a week, she takes a week, the other stays home with the kid to make sure he gets his nap. If he wakes up in time, we join the other at church. And I hope he grows out of it sometime soon.

Conan is seriously a class act. He’s been funnier than ever these last couple of weeks and leaving on such a high note is a high road that not too many other people would take. It felt more like a retirement speech than anything else and reminded me of Johnny Carson’s last show (which, yes, I watched when it originally aired).

This whole botched debacle is going to end up with a big list of winners and a short list of losers.

WINNER: Jimmy Kimmel. Seriously, after doing a hilarious impersonation of Jay Leno, he then goes on The Jay Leno Show and makes an absolute mockery of the host, delivering some scathing zingers that have so far gained nearly a million views on YouTube. He then followed up with a mock Ken Burns documentary, The Late Night War, that was side-splitting. It doesn’t look like he’s going to stop that too soon either. Those kinds of bits have no doubt attracted viewers who a few weeks ago would have said “Jimmy who?”

WINNER: David Letterman. Letterman enjoyed some huge ratings advantages over The Tonight Show thanks to the weak lead-in from Leno, a position he hasn’t enjoyed for well over a decade. He’s also gotten some good digs in at Jay and kicked some of the old Late Night War back into action.

WINNER: Conan O’Brien. Yes, I know. He lost The Tonight Show and, unlike Jay, can’t go back to his old slot, and is off the air until at least September, all after having relocated to LA from New York less than a year prior. He did, however, score a sweet severance package (reportedly a solid $33M) as well as $12M in severance for his staff. (Word on the street is that he dropped some of his own money in to push that severance up for everyone.) So, basically, he and his staff are getting a 7-month paid vacation. Conan also picked up immense popularity, dominating Twitter with #teamconan and #imwithcoco posts with the “I’m With COCO” Facebook page now over 678K fans and growing. (For comparison, Stephen Colbert’s Facebook page for his show has under 437K fans.) Conan has a lot of support and respect that he gets to cash in and a lot of money with which to bankroll it.

LOSER: Jay Leno. The classy thing to do would have been to insist that NBC can him to keep his arrangement with Conan to take over Tonight. As Kimmel said, you’ve got $800M dollars, you can afford to bow out. He’s taken most of the flak for this mess from Letterman, Kimmel, Ferguson, and pretty much the entire Internet while clinging to his “the network made me do it, I’m a victim too” narrative. I expect Leno’s ratings to tank upon his return from that ill will.

LOSERS: Jimmy Fallon and Carson Daly. If Leno comes back and rating still suck, you can guess who’s going to end up with an even worse late-night lead-in audience. The only saving grace for both of these guys is that Conan refused the lame-brain stunt to put Leno before The Tonight Show, pushing Fallon and Daly into a ratings black hole.

WINNER: Craig Ferguson. If Letterman dominates the ratings, Ferguson may steal the title back from Fallon for his time slot. He hasn’t made a lot of commentary on the Leno/Conan spat, but he doesn’t need to.

WINNER: TV viewers. This whole thing has provided some great material for weeks and I’ve personally been enjoying the crap out of it. I’m also excited to see where Conan goes because whatever it is, you can be sure he’ll be able to call the shots on where it gets taped and what he can do. It’s a shame that he probably won’t be able to take along some of his characters (Triumph bits always cracked me up), but he’s creative enough to come up with some new stuff. Twitter Tracker and Conando were his A game, proving there’s still a well of originality left to be tapped.

Look, guys, I know you can’t help but screw up, but you’ve pretty much put the icing on the cake now. It’s not very surprising, though. You made Heroes suck for two seasons after a mind-blowing premier and making “save the cheerleader” a popular meme, ABC stole Scrubs right out from under you and ended up with an amazing season 8 finale, and you just about canceled The Office, now one of your most popular shows, until someone clued you in about a little thing called iTunes. Heck, all any of the people I know can talk about is Chuck and you seem hell-bent on sending that one into the garbage can as well.

I guess I should know better after you fumbled your late-night lineup almost 18 years ago. The Tonight Show was run by a living legend, Johnny Carson. I remember staying up until entirely irresponsible hours on Friday nights and all during the summer just to catch his hilarious sketches and monologues. Meanwhile, David Letterman was being just as funny in the time slot right after and would have been a natural fit. Even Johnny Carson thought Letterman would be the  best replacement. But no, you instead get that giant sack of unfunny chin, Jay Leno, to take over, losing Letterman to CBS in the process. About the only saving grace is that you had the good sense to grab Conan O’Brien and gave him a few seasons to find his own.

It almost looked like you were on the way to making some good choices. You put O’Brien in charge of The Tonight Show and he’s been on fire. A week doesn’t go by that some major website doesn’t link his sketches. He’s an Internet sensation in an age when that means something. All the same, you had to counter that good idea with the lame-brain idea that Leno should have his own prime time show, and we know how that’s been working out for you. You should have just sent that horse to the glue factory.

Now you realize that keeping The Chin on staff wasn’t a terribly good idea, but you’re about to “fix” that mistake by making an even bigger one. I mean, you’re seriously going to not only let him keep a show, but slap your best decision in the face to do it? Do you remember at all what happened when you did that to Letterman, or is your memory just that short?

You’re about to take your best late-night asset and chase him off to another network, splitting that coveted late night audience even further. NBC, pull your collective heads out of your collective rear ends and realize you’re about to goof up big time yet again.

You suck, Yahoo. No wonder you’re becoming so irrelevant.

Liam was a great traveler. Considering that we were more-or-less asking him to sit still in cars and planes for 12+ hours, he was barely fussy at all. I guess those long road trips to California conditioned him to that kind of activity. It still took him a day to bounce back from it all, but we were not that family with the screaming baby right behind you.

It was kind of a bittersweet visit with my grandmother, though. My mom recently moved back to start caring for her because she was concerned about her mental health. After a week, I can see why. She would forget that she’d recently told us a story just minutes prior, sometimes recanting the same anecdote several times a day. (Apparently this is a early sign of dementia.) I noticed that she was also having trouble moving around, often hunched over by the end of the day, yet she refuses to consider a wheelchair. I really enjoyed seeing her and spending time with her, but I fear she may not be around long.  I made sure to get pictures and video so that Liam will get a chance to remember his grand grandma if he doesn’t get a chance to see her again.