As I start writing in this space again, there are a lot of things to talk about, but one rather obvious category is travel. This photo is from my recent trip to Paris.

Well, after about a month and a half with the iPhone, and the first real software update, and countless articles read, comments made, and people either asking for or just grabbing my iPhone just to play with it, I think I can make a considered judgement on this interesting little piece of technology.

I love it.

It hasn’t changed my life. But it’s made using the phone a pleasure, it’s changed some of my phone habits just slightly, and it’s made me think about how I use the devices around me to communicate. Before I had just a phone, and one I hated at that. Now I have something I like to use, and that I use in sometimes silly and sometimes smart ways. For instance I use text messaging a lot more than I used to.

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American Scientist has an interesting article about how spam has become the main practical focus of computational linguistics and computational learning theory. It turns out that there are about 6 X 10^23 possible theoretical spellings, but probably only about a million of them are actually comprehensible to a human (that is, “V1@6ra” is probably comprehensible while “\/1*aT9rU@” is not).