I agree with the diopter adjustment, but find it more comfortable to lift my glasses and put the eyepieces over my eyes. Unless you have a large variance in correction between your eyes, you just follow the same steps as Paul outlined above with your "naked" eyes. No sense correcting the image after it's gone through the prisms - just let that one optical system do it all.

[Edited at April 13, 2008 11:57:15 AM.]

I rode to my MD appointment on my bike, rather than taking the car. It was a cool, cloudy, almost raining morning, which made for perfect biking weather. Took a greenway about half the distance, which just added to the fun. The assistant took my blood pressure and noted that it was higher than it has been. When the doctor came in, he looked a bit concerned. I explained I'd riden over, and he softened somewhat, but then re-took it and the lower number was down by about 20 points, and he was a good bit happier. Then he gave me a gold star for the day for biking. ;-) It's about 4.5 miles by car. Prolly only 3.5 or 4 on bicycle.

We get to throw rocks at Steve Ballmer as he breathes fire at Yahoo?

NetNewsWire from Newsgator rocks. I use the "OrangeSquish" theme, which has the title, the poster, the url of all links, and a scrolling box for the text.

You can set it to pull the web sites in, or to launch them in your favorite browser. You control the frequency of updating. You can have it launched and sitting there, with all the text downloaded to read on the plane, without having to be online.

This has been my only way to really follow most websites for the last few years, and has changed both the number of sites I follow and the level to which I'm involved with them. I have 44 individuals and groups just on flickr that I follow, and can tell at a glance if there's anything new. I can easily drag them around to change the order, review the titles of posts, etc.

In LifeHacker, for example, I can skip the posts that I care nothing about (windows downloads, dating hacks, Linux hacks, etc.), and scan the titles of things I may want to read. Same with Gadgeteer, Engadget, and the like. I keep up with three company blogs at work so that I am at least aware of progress in other product groups besides mine. It also helps me to post about my work, so that others can know what I'm doing.

While I wish Google and RIM well (as well as Palm), I am very happy with my iPhone. Given the powerful SDK that is in the hands of many experienced developers, as well as the success of the app store for many people who find niche markets, it's going to be tough to sell Android into those places. How can three guys in a garage build multiple versions and test every hardware configuration of Android, and then find users in the Linux community who will go diametrically opposed to the entire ethos of Open Source by paying the software developers even a fraction of what their efforts are worth?? It's way easier to cobble together a few games for a well-secured single hardware platform, sell 500,000 copies of them at a buck each, and bank that $350,000 (after Apple's $150,000 fee), and be very happy with their six month's work. We had a developer come to the user group locally here that is doing just that. And we're in central North Carolina, not Silicon Valley! And the longer this goes on, the harder it will be for anyone else to catch up. You can love Linux and the ideal of Open Source all you want, but that will not buy a can of beans or pay your ISP bill. At some point, those folks developing apps are going to need cash to reward their efforts, or the community will be just as fragmented and shunned by the mainstream as the desktop Linux development community is.

I'm not against free software, and would gladly pay for items of use, but when I'm told I have to compile my own kernal whenever I change something, and install an app from the command line, my eyes roll back in my head, and I wonder what these folks do for fun. And I picture my 81 year old mother, sitting at her Dell 8 hours away, calling me for tech support, and I laugh out loud. The people mostly drawn to Open Source are those who are only controlled by price (as in very cheap), or those who shun all authority for their own control. Neither of those groups can agree long enough to build s single OS, let alone participate in a far-reaching community/economy. I have lots of university IT friends who just love Linux and are all excited about Android, but they don't want to pay for it, prefering to build their own hardware, or find something almost as good for cheap. And all they tend to do after that is tweak, rebuild, and re-install. Just because you're busy on your hardware doesn't mean you're being productive.

This is not put out here as a flame. This is my real belief (anecdotal as it is) after watching users in a handheld user group since the late '90s when we had a Newton group, then moved to Palm and finally added Zaurus, WinCE, iPhone and the rest. Those who are open source do little more than a few quick demos, then say "I could program it to...." But they never do. And in a year or two, they are back to using their Palm or whatever. Or, sometimes, they are just geeky enough to keep at it, but they have nothing that can be transferred to anyone else, because it is so esoteric that no one else can understand the interface.