The stock market has lost something like 10% in a SINGLE DAY. All because the congress couldn’t figure out what the hell they are doing. Rather than waiting and forming a stable consensus, they brought the bill to a vote and let it fail. In doing so they have failed the country. All 435 members of the house share in this responsibility equally. If they voted for it, they failed to do enough to build consensus with their colleagues. If they voted against it, they need to explain to the country why they didn’t raise the objection before.

I don’t think I’ve ever done it before, but I wrote my congressman (R-CA) about it:

I see from your website that you voted against today’s financial bailout bill. As a result of your action, the stock market has declined dramatically. We have been hearing from various experts for the past several days that the situation is very bad, yet you have ignored this advice and contributed to an escalation of the problem.

You are therefore personally responsible for the decline in the market. Allowing such an important bill to fail is irresponsible. As a member of congress, you are part of a very small group of national leaders. Safeguarding the health of our economy is just as important as protecting our physical security. It is part of your responsibility as a leader and duty as an American to put politics and ideology aside in this time of crisis and figure out a way out of this situation.

If you and your colleagues cannot support the bill as proposed, you must work together to come up with a reasonable solution, before it is put to a vote. We saw the result of this failure in the market today. You are all, Democrat and Republican, equally responsible for this result. Each one of you owes the country and your constituents a detailed explanation of your position and reasoning.

Speaking of the PCH:

What??

Isn’t it just easier to say “KEEP OUT” or “NO TRESSPASSING”?

So far, the new iPhone software released on Friday doesn’t look good. I’ve had two problems in as many days.

Yesterday, the bluetooth headset did not deactivate after a call ended until after I unlocked the phone with the slider dodad.

But the worst happened today. I was driving down the PCH enjoying the day and a listening to a podcast when my phone decided to stop playing the podcast and dial a friend. At first I thought he was calling me, but after an akward confused silance I realized what had happened. Needless to say, this is very bizzare and totally unacceptable. Imagine being in the middle of a personal conversation when your phone decides to call a random contact!!

So, 2.0.1 is still looking pretty good.

… and if you do, don’t upgrade to 2.0.2 if you can help it.

I upgraded to the 3G about 2 weeks before 2.0.2 was released, then upgraded the software shortly after it was available, so I don’t know which to blame for the problems I have.

In addition to the 3G call dropping and other issues that seem to be more AT&T’s problem than Apple’s, there are major problems with the stability of the software. It hangs unexpectedly at inconvienent times, and apps seem to crash with alarming frequency. We have come to count on Apple for products that “just work” but this version seems to break that confidence. A couple of examples: The SMS application seems to take forever to load (ok it’s just a few seconds, but enough time to be annoying). The contact manager seems to suffer from the same problem, plus it can stop responding and hang for several seconds instead of scrolling through the contacts as expected. Other built in apps (such as Safari) seem to have the same problem. In a final bit of irony, www.apple.com is almost impossible to use from the iPhone (good luck trying to find an Apple store on the iPhone).

One begins to wonder what is going on over at Apple. If their product is going to live up to its promise, these bugs must be fixed. If not, Apple is going to lose its position in the phone market to cheaper competitors that are just as buggy, in the same way that Apple gave up the OS market to Microsoft; a crappy but cheaper system winning out over a better designed but somewhat behind the curve OS + hardware combination.

So, I would go back to 1st generation iPhone if I could, but the screen is cracked so that isn’t really an option.