Apple has just announced a $100 payback to people who bought iPhones at yesterday’s price. You have to spend it on Apple stuff, but I’m OK with that.

I wasn’t really angered by the price cut, anyway. I mean I would have loved to pay $200 less for the iPhone, but I was willing to pay the price they were charging at the time, so what would be the point of complaining now? Electronics get cheaper, sometimes very quickly.

In his interviews for a new book, President Bush told Robert Draper his real plans for Iraq:

One answer lies in the remarkably forthright interviews Bush gave author Robert Draper for a new book coming out today. As Jim Rutenberg wrote in Sunday’s New York Times, Bush earlier this year explained his Iraq strategy to Draper this way: “I’m playing for October-November.”

Writes Rutenberg: “That is when he hopes the Iraq troop increase will finally show enough results to help him achieve the central goal of his remaining time in office: ‘To get us in a position where the presidential candidates will be comfortable about sustaining a presence,’ and, he said later, ‘stay longer.’

Chew on that.

As you may remember, I use MarsEdit to compose posts, and Movable Type to publish them. I’ve just upgraded to the most recent versions of each. Unfortunately, there seem to be some incompatibilities that are not making me incredibly happy.

For one thing, when I want to choose the text format for a post, I get these options:

That doesn’t look quite right. For another, Movable Type 4 supports entering tags for posts, but I can’t find a way to enter tags within MarsEdit.

That said, I’m generally really fond of both upgrades. Both Movable Type 4 and MarsEdit 2 offer vastly improved support for embedding images in blog posts. What that means is that you’ll probably see more images used around these parts.

The way templates are handled in Movable Type 4 is really impressive. I haven’t dug in completely yet, but the templating system seems more intuitive than ever. More like a real content management system and much more flexible in enabling users to build pages out of components.

The one big Movable Type problem that continues in version 4 is poor performance, especially on the back end. Movable Type remains a CGI application, which really is sort of quaint. That said, I installed FastCGI and am using it to speed up Movable Type. The difference is noticeable.

I’m still ironing out the kinks and I haven’t even started messing with the design, but overall I think this upgrade is going to wind up working out very well.

If you want your mind blown a little, read this article by John Judis on how people’s mortality-related anxiety strengthens their hold on their own values and beliefs. Here’s a snippet:

There is, however, one group of scholars–members of the relatively new field of political psychology–who are trying to explain voter preferences that can’t be easily quantified. The best general introduction to this field is Drew Westen’s recent book, The Political Brain, but the research that is perhaps most relevant to the 2004 election has been conducted by psychologists Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, and Tom Pyszczynski. In the early 1980s, they developed what they clumsily called “terror management theory.” Their idea was not about how to clear the subways in the event of an attack, but about how people cope with the terrifying and potentially paralyzing realization that, as human beings, we are destined to die. Their experiments showed that the mere thought of one’s mortality can trigger a range of emotions–from disdain for other races, religions, and nations, to a preference for charismatic over pragmatic leaders, to a heightened attraction to traditional mores. Initially, the three scholars didn’t attempt to apply their theory to elections. But, after September 11, they conducted experiments designed to do exactly that. What they found sheds new light on the role that fear of death plays in contemporary politics–and, arguably, goes a long way toward unraveling the mystery of Martinsburg.

The server was down for a couple of days for reasons unexplained by my hosting provider. I do know that it went down on Saturday night around midnight (or thereabouts), and that they replaced the network interface card. I suspect that when they installed the new card they failed to set up networking properly, so things remained broken until they sorted that out. Then when it did return they still hadn’t set things up properly (it was only binding to one of my IP addresses, and not the one associated with this Web site), so I had to fix it myself.

Have I mentioned that I really am not a systems administrator?