Anyway, here’s what’s up.

I just finished the Millennium trilogy. Lisbeth Salander ranks high among the most original characters I’ve seen put to paper. The level of detail Stieg Larsson put into the three books reminds me of the Lord of the Rings trilogy. I consider myself fiction shy and Larsson not only got me reading, but had me losing sleep.

In high rotation: “Love,” the Beatles remix soundtrack to the Cirque du Soleil show of the same name.

Mrs. Blocletters and watched “The Social Network” on On Demand, adding another Oscar contender to our list of seen-its. Ho-hum. I enjoyed it. But I walked out of “Black Swan” thinking “I’ve never seen anything like that before,” and I had no such feeling for the Facebook movie. I honestly don’t understand the Oscar buzz for it I heard this fall before “The King’s Speech” caught fire.

Things, a to-do manager I bought ages ago for my iPhone, gets a reprieve. The slow-as-all-get-out developer finally added repeating tasks, making the app actually useful. I had given up on it, but came back with the update because I paid $10 for the damn software and need to get my money’s worth.

I gave up on a spring marathon. Back pain kept me from the start of training for the inaugural Kalamazoo Marathon. Inertia got the best of me after the back pain went away. I want to run a marathon just for the hell of it (i.e., not a formal race) in the first half of this year, but we’ll see. I can still run seven or eight miles without too much complaint from the body, so the baseline remains.

Oh, and this weekend’s Coolest. Thing. Ever: Using a hack from YouTube, I made an iPhone stylus from a piece of a telescoping antenna and a bit of conductive foam. I stuffed a piece of foam, packing material for a $2 transistor I bought at Radio Shack, into the end of a length of antenna, also from the Shack, and voila, touch-screen love.

And our toddler is growing into a little girl faster than I can brace for it.

I logged the first Aug. 31 — a little over a mile in a little over 10 minutes. The second I ran today, about two and a half miles at a 8:42 average pace. I felt a little tinge of soreness in the injured foot after the first run. After today’s run, I’m happy to report no soreness (so far) in that foot.

What I did notice today, on a fairly hilly run: tightness in my chest. Two months off from running apparently made my heart soft and pasty, and my lungs stingy. I labored through the hills and found myself around the second mile looking for the finish line.

That’s okay, though. It’ll come back, as sure as the foot will heal.

Also, these runs served as a good test for Run Keeper, the new-to-me log app. It works with the GPS in my new iPhone, and seems to track pretty well. The distance it measured for the first run matched Gmaps Pedometer (what I had been using to calculate distance) almost exactly. For the second, longer run, it had a one-twentieth of a mile difference from GPed. While that difference could add up over a much longer run, it’s close enough for me. Plus, I can live with a little difference in exchange for not having to plot the maps myself when I get home. Run Keeper also keeps stats of pace, elevation, speed, calories burned and split times.

I have used the app Pace for almost two years. It records distance, duration and average pace, and calculates calories. I’ll likely still use it, doing double entry, since Run Keeper apparently doesn’t allow for tracking miles logged on a pair of shoes (like the 600-plus-mile Nikes I really should retire — but they’re so comfortable!), or miles logged toward a goal (like marathon training).

Anyway, to summarize: I’m back. And it feels good.

• I can now duplicate the “grip of death,” getting the bars to drop. To get the effect, I have to hold the device just so with my left hand and without a case. I don’t really see this as an issue, since the idea of buying a $200 device and not wrapping a protective case around it is a bit alien to me. My 1st-gen case fits well enough to hold me over until Apple sends a free one.

• The threaded email is long overdue. Having email on the phone match what Gmail has trained me to expect avoids a minor mental hassle. Having integrated inboxes is an added bonus.
• I can’t emphasize much processing speed and battery life have changed in three years since the 1st gen version dropped. I never used Bluetooth or notifications with my 1st gen. Now, it’s the norm.

I did drop one call today. I had the case on the device at the time, so it wasn’t the dreaded antenna issue. Probably just a network hiccup. Of course, that could just be the fanboy talking. Dropped call or not, this is a stellar device. Its value lies in the hundreds of things it does, all well. That it also makes calls just ices the cake.

First impressions:

• The speed and display put the 1st generation iPhone I retired to shame.

• I tried to duplicate the antenna issue and couldn’t. Maybe I just need to work on my “grip of death.” I don’t know.
• The video and camera, both forward and backward facing, work as expected. I didn’t yet put the flash though its paces.

Maybe more thoughts later as I put it through a few days of use.

Let me start this brief review by saying I don’t game much. I tried Cro-Mag Rally on the iPhone, and found it difficult, at best, to control. I find Moonlight Mahjong, which doesn’t make any sudden moves, more my speed — though any serious gamer would call that dull. I like Moonlight because what I often want out of a game on the phone is a bridge to carry me over a few minutes of down time.

Spore demands a little more, but makes for a fun way to spend that time. In evolution mode, I bet most gamers would find it easy, but to me it’s just hard enough to challenge. I got stuck on level 8 for a few sessions, but managed to move on. To me, that mean’s I’ll probably get hours of play out of this game and have a real go of it as levels and difficulty progress. That’s not bad for the $7 sale price. I haven’t tried survival mode yet, but that sounds like more of a challenge. If so, it’ll just extend the life of this little game for me.

Between levels, players can tweak their creature by adding things like spikes and eyes that allow safer navigation of the ether or more effective hunting. The creature editor makes evolving fun, since every pinch and squish you put your creature through is punctuated by a noise that evokes the Pilsbury Dough Boy.

In all, I give Spore high marks for being accessible for a lame-gamer like myself (but not too easy), and for being beautiful in both graphics and implementation.

I speak of such useless bits of coding as iFart Mobile. I instinctively think, surely no one actually downloads a flatulence simulator. But thousands have paid a dollar for it. Really? Whoopie cushions haven’t been funny for, um … like, ever. Why would a digital version elicit laughs from anyone but a 10-year-old or a person with the intellectual capacity of one? I’m all for having fun, and even own a couple of pointless, just because, apps (see Koi Pond). But c’mon.

Enough screed for now. I don’t want to be a complete hater, so I thought I’d run down a few of the apps I find useful, innovative or both (in no particular order):

Zenbe Lists: This list-sharing app is one of the first I downloaded last summer, and I still use it every day. It holds my to-dos and grocery lists.

SteadyCam: I just downloaded this one. It uses the accelerometer to know when the phone is still so low-light pictures come out better. It’s not perfect, but anyone who knows me knows how steady my hands are, and how much I need this functionality. It also has a timer for taking group photos, but I haven’t tried that yet.

12seconds: This one works with 12seconds.tv, a Web site that’s a Twitter-like video service. Since Apple hasn’t seen fit to allow the iPhone to capture video, this app takes three photos and 12 seconds of recorded audio, and creates a mini-slideshow. The output appears on the 12seconds site, and cross-posts to Twitter (which in turn cross-posts to Facebook). Nifty concept.

FStream: I’m not much for the stock radio streams here, but I love that I can enter URL to any streaming audio source. I use this app to get an NPR fix on the go from the two local affiliates.

Pace: Keeping track of miles in a running log is a great motivator for marathon training. This log has every feature I need without bogging down with GPS functions (which I can’t use, since I have a 1st gen iPhone). It also tweets my runs, so anyone who cares can follow my progress.

Moonlight Mahjong: This is the first app I paid for, and I still find it more than worth it. I didn’t know mahjong from a hole in the ground before, but after hours of gameplay I can’t get enough. Plus, the developer adds new layouts regularly.

Facebook: I prefer the Facebook iPhone app to its browser-based cousin. Simple and elegant.

Air Sharing: Turns my iPhone into a wi-fi hard drive. This useful app would qualify as über-useful if, like Readdle Docs, you could email in and out of it over Edge.

iTalk: Voice recordings limited only by the iPhone’s available space. I recorded hours of lectures with iTalk at a recent seminar I attended, and even used recordings from it as the basis for my final project in Soundslides. It records aiff files in three quality settings and easily syncs over wi-fi. Plus, you can start a recording in two taps, which is great for brainstorms at traffic lights. I found this app so useful that I upgraded to the pro version from the free ad-supported one.

Google: Like most products from the Big G, this one keeps getting better. It was useful when I first got it, then they added voice search. Now, it’s sweet.

Mrs. Blocletters signed up for Facebook before I did, and I probably wouldn’t have joined nearly as soon if she hadn’t. But, like the iPhone (and, coincidentally, partly because of the iPhone), it’s taken a prominent role in my digital life. I get a big kick out of reading updates on others’ lives, which seem at the same time superficial and intimate. I enjoy writing status updates, and have even taken praise for the quality of my statuses (though I’m not sure what criteria one might use to judge).

Why?

What do I care that a former coworker is getting new glasses? Does knowing what friends think of the new “90210″ show — a show I’ll never watch — enrich my life? Not exactly. But Facebook has helped me keep connected with people from jobs past, and even reconnect with some I’d lost track of. That has value in lives like mine (and those of many other Gen X- and Gen Y-ers) where work is prominent in, if not the center of, social interaction.

Facebook also allows me to, in effect, swim in the conversations of people I see regularly. I see current coworkers and we’ve already cut through the initial few minutes of catch-up conversation. I don’t have to ask, “What did you do over the weekend?” I already know, so we go right to, “Did you enjoy that movie?”

Status updates are part reverse Hallmark card and part haiku. It’s interesting to me, a people watcher, that friends share their workaday experiences, and insightful to see the words they use and try to glean the subtext.

As far as my own updates, the article I linked to sums it up: “The act of stopping several times a day to observe what you’re feeling or thinking can become, after weeks and weeks, a sort of philosophical act.” As a headline writer by trade, I find it oddly fulfilling. I’m trained to read a thousand words and boil them down to five. Status writing uses the same toolkit.

I re-read the last few weeks of my updates while writing this — an interesting exercise in itself. A life in small, easily digestible, cartoon balloons. My updates, like those of my “friends” (whether close or casual), are by no means a full account. Still, they convey a bit of me, and for most people, that’s more than enough.

Though I desperately need an organizational scheme, I find that my life doesn’t quite rise to the level of David Allen’s “Getting Things Done.” I’ve read the book, and like some of the ideas — particularly the concepts of simplicity and capture. I need a simple system to capture thoughts when I have them. Otherwise, they float away. If you’ve seen “Memento”, you get the idea. I’m not quite tattooing to-dos on my body (yet), but I do have a terrible short-term memory.

Which brings me to Zenbe Lists. The App does one thing well: lists. Create them. Share them. Email them. Embed them. As a bonus, the App syncs quickly over the 2.5G network. Mrs. Blocletters can update the grocery list or the Tar-jay list from her work computer (and eventually, her own iPhone). When I get to the store, I just need a couple seconds to sync to make sure I get the latest. As I check things off, another sync updates the Web site so she can see what I bought.

The interface defines intuitive and easy to use. On the iPhone, three taps get me to entering a new item in any list. On the Web site, it’s even easier.

Since I bought my iPhone last fall, I’ve used Notes for these functions. But, as others have written and I’ve mumbled to myself, Notes doesn’t sync anywhere. Sharing? Forget it.

So, Zenbe Lists fills a niche. It’s more feature-rich than Notes and still intuitive and easy-to-use. Now, as always, the only thing standing between me and organization is me.