[Update: Official iPad app list (iTunes link)]

I’ve been very skeptical about the iPad. Even if you ignored Apple’s legendary “never buy a 1.0” problem with new hardware and software, there was a very serious problem that Steve Jobs and his famous Reality Distortion Field failed to answer at the announcement, or any time since: what’s it good for?

Shiny. Sexy. Big iPod Touch. Horribly mis-managed —and micro-managed— app store. Extremely closed content model. Out of the box, there’s really nothing to do with it except show off your disposable income in a time of high unemployment and rising taxes. And all those eager app-store developers (or, more precisely, the ones who remain eager after the real pros got sick of Apple’s capricious policies and gave up) specialize in pretty, shallow, toy software. Great for an iPhone that fits in your pocket, but they’re not going to sell a 1.5-pound battery-powered cookbook with a high-gloss screen.

Today, Appaddvice has a list of third-party software that will be available at launch, scraped from Apple’s pre-release web site. And now I have to buy one, because their list includes some real killer apps.

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These may be my favorite oddball Amazon recommendations ever:

Because I bought Slow Cooking Curry & Spice Dishes, Amazon recommends

The Mindfulness & Acceptance Workbook for Depression: Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to Move Through Depression & Create a Life Worth Living

Because I own Better Homes and Gardens Complete Step-By-Step Cookbook, Amazon recommends

Principles of Neural Science

Problem: a few students at Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas, are upset that the date on the school’s diplomas is written as In the Year of Our Lord…. Seriously.

Refund their money and send them back to grade school; I don’t think a college has any courses remedial enough for this crew.

"You strap your Prosthetic Leg to your back and head out for some adventure."

"Congress interprets democracy as damage and routes around it."

(with vaguely-sincere apologies to John Gilmore)

Just some random info:

• If the email doesn't use MIME headers at all, it's almost certainly encoded in Shift-JIS (or, more likely, the Microsoft variant CP-932, also known as Windows-31J).
• If it has a proper Content-Type header with RFC 2047 encoding for the header lines, it's almost certainly encoded in ISO-2022-JP, and your mailer should figure this out correctly.
• ...unless their software encoded the header in Shift-JIS but claimed it was ISO-2022-JP, which I've seen a few times. In one case, the Subject and body were right, but the From header was in Shift-JIS.
• Unicode is still quite rare in Japan, and cellphones in particular will ignore the headers and simply decode the message as if it were ISO-2022-JP. If someone tells you that your email is mojibake (文字化け, literally "character corruption"), force your mailer to set the right encoding. For Apple's Mail.app, the command is:
     defaults write com.apple.mail NSPreferredMailCharset ISO-2022-JP
• Oddly enough, most phones will apparently handle raw Shift-JIS; at least, spammers feel comfortable using it.
• If the body encoding is specified, but the headers are not RFC 2047 encoded, then the headers usually are encoded the same, but not always. Mail.app reliably guesses wrong for these.
• Messages are generally formatted for a fixed-width font where most characters are double-width, not just the kanji and kana. Graphics characters and emoticons are quite common, and many messages will look like crap in the wrong sort of font. This also applies to blog entries.
• The EUC-JP encoding basically doesn't exist outside of legacy Unix code and old data files.
• Japanese spam tends to be polite, grammatically correct, and riddled with loanwords.

It was nice knowing you. If you wonder why you’re empty now, Nancy and Harry and Barry took it all for their big-pig friends.

This little piggy has no market,
This little piggy has no home,
This little piggy eats dog food,
This little piggy lost a job.
And Big Nancy Piggy says "let them eat pork", all the way home.

Oh, and if you see Nancy, could you ask her what’s in the bill? She promised to tell us once it passed, and I’m simply dying to know how much my taxes will go up while I start paying more for worse health care.

Update! A performance artist on the streets of Mumbai has done an excellent impression of the future of the US economy and health-care system.

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What if Roger Zelazny wrote a hard-boiled murder mystery, and no one knew about it for more than thirty-five years? Well, now you can buy it on Amazon…

It’s been out since last February, but it didn’t make it onto my recommendations list until a few weeks ago. And, of course, I’d never have gone looking in that genre.

How is it? Not bad. It was a complete manuscript, but it’s got some rough spots, as if he planned to go back and work it over again, but then moved on to something else. Their best guess puts it right around the same time as Nine Princes in Amber, and I can see some similarities (stylistically, that is) to the opening section on Earth, before Corwin recovers his memory.