President Obama and I have one thing in common: we both love our Blackberrys.

I just got a new Blackberry Storm in today, and I completely love the thing already. A few of its nicer (for me) features:

In addition to the phone, it has a built in MP3 player and GPS that, while less than perfect, are both quite serviceable. No need to buy a separate GPS or iPod!

In addition to desktop synchronization with Outlook, Google has an app to synchronize my contacts list and calendar with the ones I have saved in Gmail and Google Calendar (which I use FAR more than Outlook). I'm completely in love with this part, as I FINALLY have one stop contact synchronization along with a "server" backup. Gmail is now my official contact list storage - and I can sync it to my Blackberry and from there sync it to Outlook. Hallelujah! Oh, and no more re-entering contact info with a new phone. I'm done with that crap.

While I'm on the subject, I would like to comment on Google and mobile devices: rock on, guys! Here's just one of the many nice touches: instead of having to go to "mobile.google.com", their web site for mobile devices is "m.google.com". That may seem like small potatoes - until you have to type it on a stupid mobile device's keyboard.

With that said, however, the "landscape" version of the Blackberry's keyboard is actually quite usable. It's the first mobile device I've ever said that about, too. It's not perfect, but I can live with it, and with "two thumb" typing I can actually achieve a decent typing speed even without much practice.

The device isn't perfect. Here are a few issues I have with it:

For power reasons, the GPS doesn't stay synched unless you're using a GPS app. It's not the end of the world, but it can be annoying at times.

Speaking of the GPS, the built in Navigation app (Verizon's VZ Navigator) requires a monthly service charge. Um, no thanks. Enter Google maps! Nowhere near as nice (it doesn't have a friendly voice to give you turn-by-turn directions), but it's FREE. One more score for Google.

The touch screen really needs some kind of calibration tool. I'm getting used to it, but I'd far rather make IT get used to ME.

Theoretically I should be able to set it up so that personal e-mail gets sent to the Blackberry even though I don't have a Blackberry Enterprise Server to connect to. I haven't yet figured out how to do this, and I'm kind of good at this sort of thing (to put it mildly). If this functionality actually exists, they've made it too hard. If it doesn't exist, it should

Despite these issues, I'm quite happy with it. Based on what I read, I hear the iPhone is perhaps a notch better... but it also A) costs a lot more, B) requires that I switch to AT&T, and C) would require me to purchase a Mac in order to do custom application development (something I fully intend to play with). Any one of those is a deal killer for me, and all three combined... yeah. This is working out quite nicely, however.

Time to go bust out the development kit and see what kind of trouble fun I can get into.

Update: I got my e-mail integrated with the Blackberry. It was quite simple, I just had to look a bit to find it.

All I can say is thank god they're going this route rather than becoming a branch of Uncle Sam Motors.

And it could come as soon as next week.

About bloody time.

Slate today has an animated chart showing job losses and gains over roughly the past 2 years. I clicked through out of a kind of perverse curiosity, but found it to be far more informative than I expected. As the old saying goes, a picture is worth a thousand words, and this is no exception.

On the chart, blue areas represent net job growth and red areas represent net job losses. Watching those changes over time reveals (or to some, confirms) some very interesting patterns and trends.

The biggest thing is that this chart clearly shows a typical business cycle of gains and losses for most of 2007 and even the early part of 2008. Toward the end of 2008, however, jobs take a clear nosedive - and by November 2008, the job loss is clearly a nationwide problem.

I'm not sure it's meaningful, but I find it interesting that the worst job losses occurred after the government bailout programs were approved.

Dispensers say that more people are requesting medical marijuana. I can't help but wonder if doctors are accepting "depression due to unemployment" as a medical conditioning warranting its prescription now. Maybe Greenspan could track this statistic instead of the men's underwear index.

The Liberty Sun successfully avoided a Somali pirate attack today with a skillful use of evasive maneuvers. This marks the second failed attack against a US flagged ship this month. Once more, I'm extremely proud of how our fellow citizens fared during this attack.

The successful defense against these two attacks prove two things. First, defense training works. Speaking as a martial arts instructor who has taught self defense courses before (and likely will again), whether it's pirate defense or self defense for yourself, training can save your life. If you currently are or expect to be in a situation that might require it, please do yourself a favor and get some training. Even a brief session could be enough to make the difference. I am not qualified to teach anti-piracy tactics - but evidently the father of the Maersk Alabama's first mate teaches it, and that's a pretty ringing endorsemen to me.

Second, whether we arm them or not (a complicated discussion), training the crews of merchant vessels in anti-piracy tactics should be our first line of defense. As has been pointed out many times, the ocean is vast and patrolling it is difficult. But training merchant crews can stop these attacks, at least some of the time. This is obviously not the whole solution, but it needs to be a part of it.

We've been lucky so far. This is about to escalate, however, and we can't be lucky forever. Sooner or later, the pirates are going to have a successful attack against US citizens. We need to be prepared to deal with it.