When the Goldwater Institute announced yesterday that it had developed a pledge of support for individual rights—reproduced in full below—that political candidates could endorse, I was dubious. Politicians will say anything to get re-elected and candidates will say even more. Furthermore, the understanding of "individual rights" among politicians is utterly laughable.

When I saw the initial set of signatories, I had my suspicions confirmed. The list includes such luminaries as Tom Horne, Andrew Thomas, and Russell Pearce. The few other signers I recognize are your standard conservative fare—guns, God, and gringos.

What is going on in the state of Arizona now and in most of the recent past has nothing to do with individual rights. A principled defense of individual rights is simply not possible for an unprincipled politician who daily spends the property his legislative signature causes to be stolen and restricts the freedom of those his legislation enshackles. You can't be both the whip-master and the abolitionist.

Individual Rights Protection Pledge

I support the opening declaration of the Arizona Constitution which reads, “Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, and are established to protect and maintain individual rights…” I pledge to use my elected office to protect and maintain the individual rights of the citizens of Arizona. I will focus my lawmaking authority on keeping government focused on its core functions in an effort to protect individual rights. I will carefully consider how each vote I make and each law and regulation I support will impact the right of Arizonans to live their lives free from excessive government interference. I pledge that actions I take as an elected official will comply with the Arizona and U.S. Constitutions.

Furthermore, I pledge to respect the intentions of our state’s framers by complying with the spirit of the taxpayer protections included in our state constitution. Specifically:

1. I will respect the intention that our state founders set by including a debt limit in the Arizona Constitution. I will commit to stop deficit spending. I will not vote for a budget that adds to the state’s (or county’s) structural deficit, including sale-leaseback or securitization schemes and “roll-overs.” I will not vote to increase the size of any program’s budget, including education, while the state (or county) faces a structural deficit.
2. I will respect the intention that our state founders set by including the “gift clause” in the Arizona Constitution. I will support tax proposals that apply equally to all taxpayers. I will not support laws that single out certain industries or individual companies for special tax benefits or penalties, except those that eliminate tax or regulatory burdens that are specific to one industry.

Let's see. I worked on My SmartSpace, a widget dashboard application, and the iPhone version of that (both native and Webified). I developed Video.me, a video sharing site tailored to fill in the gaps that YouTube leaves. I've also joined an internal initiative called the Product Sponsorship Team, which helps guide the direction of a select group of products—in my case I'm on the Calendar team.

Yes, that's about it. It doesn't sound like too much when you boil it down to a paragraph but it has kept me plenty busy. Busy enough to neglect a lot of my online presence, aside from Twitter.

My current role is a developer affiliated with our Social Media Team. They are a great bunch of people and I am truly enjoying my work. In many respects, I feel like it is a continuation of my work on the Gadgets Team: I am managing a dozen or more projects in various states of development and I have a considerable amount of input into what I work on.

Basically, I do whatever needs doing for our social networking efforts. I advise various teams within Go Daddy about how to get the most out of Facebook and Twitter's APIs. It's interesting and wildly varied.

And sometimes I get called on to do something completely off the wall:

I think it would have worked better without the eye makeup, but that wasn't my call to make. It turned out amazing and I can't believe how well Go Daddy Productions did with what the footage they shot.

[The views expressed on this website/weblog are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect the views of Go Daddy Software, Inc.]

If I wanted to produce content, this might be a very different entry. I am writing this on my iPad and the keyboard is quite capable for non-marked-up text but falls down hard once you start needing to do angle brackets. I was going to link up the other iPad apps I mentioned above but gave up. As it stands, i don't do as much blogging as I used to and I'd prefer what little I do do to be more essay than linked-up blog entry.

The battery life is incredible. I've streamed a lot of video, surfed more than ever, and read e-books but I've never gotten the battery below 44% or so. I had read somewhere--sorry, no link--that the iPad is basically two batteries with a computer and i believe it. I'd imagine that the 3G model is going to have a slightly-diminished battery life but i wouldn't be surprised if the reduction was minimal. Apple certainly exceeded my expectations here.

The one thing I wasn't expecting was the gawkers. I was in the waiting room of a hospital and it was the subject of much conversation. I have to factor in impromptu discussions about its merits when leaving to attend meetings at work. Everyone I've shown it to who is not a programmer has been wowed, which is as I expected.

It's certainly not for everyone but I'm glad I bought it. Time will tell if the "never buy the first generation of an Apple product" advice holds true though I am optimistic that this will be the exception.

At home, I have a Dell netbook, an iMac, a MacBook, and an iPhone 3G. The iMac is in an office, the Dell is on a shelf somewhere, the MacBook is propped up next to the couch, and the iPhone 3G is in my pocket. At night after the kids are in bed, my wife and I start our computing tasks. She takes the MacBook and I go with the iPhone. Most of my time is spent in my apps but there is some browsing otherwise. It is an astonishingly capable general computing device: it's comfortable to just sprawl on the couch, holding the phone in one hand, and just tap-tap-tapping away. There's no fan and it never gets hot; it's fairly speedy given what I'm throwing at it; and it has a broad selection of apps that are very well-designed.

The MacBook, on the other hand, is less comfortable. It's requires a particular set of positions to work with, gets hot pretty quickly, and there's an inherent disconnect between the trackpad and the cursor on the screen. While the user interface is much better than any other operating system out there, the iPhone's simplicity and intimacy has made me realize the window/mouse/filesystem paradigm's deficiencies. (I bought the Dell netbook because I thought it would suffice for my needs, which are generally Web-based with a modicum of text entry. It truly is the worst of all the tradeoffs and the Dell's keyboard was designed by someone who clearly hates contractions.)

There is something very intimate and intuitive about using your finger as a pointer. "I want to open that link." "Let's open that app." "Move to the next picture." It's no accident that most user interfaces in the science-fiction future involve access by voice, sight, and touch. These input methods are in-born, always available (barring disease or defect), and natural. The reason why they were science fiction (and the science present was stuck in mice and keyboards) was because current technology just couldn't process the intention behind those methods quick enough to make them practical. Voices are inherently variable and muddled; touch is generally too soft to detect and materials too weak to withstand continual, harder pressing.

Steve Jobs said that the iPad will offer the best browsing experience and I fully believe him. I even expect that I will become a fairly proficient typist using its virtual keypad. At this point, I am faster typing on my iPhone than I was on my old BlackBerry with a physical keyboard. It surprised me when I was able to compose a blog entry using the WordPress app and do a passable job at it. With the keyboard dock, this could easily become my main computing machine.

The most revolutionary aspect of the iPad is the abstraction that it represents. Gone are files, windows, cursors, directories, and installers. The user of the iPad never has a sense of the computer within—this is enormously freeing for developers because they needn't worry about the detritus of computing. All he knows are applications, documents, and content. This is a machine for doing, not the relentless tweaking, customizing, and other time wasters.

If this thing takes off (and I think it will), then it will spread throughout the computing ecosystem as much of Apple's recent work has led by example. Poo poo it all you want today, but five years from now this will be the dominant user interface out there. It is the Microsoft Surface for your hand and the possibilities that that entails are dizzying.

[UPDATE (1/29/2010): Added link about the freeing nature of the iPad. {via}]

[UPDATE 2 (1/29/2010): There's a lot of great commentary along these lines, but I think that Fraser Speirs (he of the great FlickrExport) has nailed what I was driving at.]

[UPDATE (1/30/2010): Fixed a link.]

• Gmail: you can put periods throughout the username and Google will ignore them. So "bbrown" can be "b.brown," "bbr.own," or even "b.b.r.o.w.n." and the emails will come through.
• Gmail: you can append a plus sign and additional text to the username and Google will also ignore that text. "bbrown+specialdeal," "bbrown+spam," and "bbrown+yahoo" all get to their proper final destination. This and the other tip plus Gmail's filters enable you to create disposable email addresses without preplanning.
• Mailinator is the king of throwaway email addresses. In a form, enter something@mailinator.com and you can access that username's messages through the mailinator Web site. Anyone else can access the email, so this isn't really useful for anything besides anonymous emailing. Some sites have caught on and check for the mailinator domain name, but there are plenty of aliases available (you can even point your own domain's MX record there).