Category Archives: w/r/t technology

Dec 12 2011

how – of all people – Steve Jobs has helped me feel a little less lonely

I wasn’t quite as familiar with Steve Jobs, the public figure, as some other people I know. I remember when we got our first computer, an Apple IIc+, in what must have been 1988, I sat down and dutifully read the instruction manual because I was an awesomely adventurous child. The manual mentioned that Apple had been founded by Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak in one a garage and that they named the company Apple because they couldn’t think of what else to call it. For a long time, that’s about all knew of the guy.

I learned much more about Steve Jobs after he passed away. Like many, many other people, I read Walter Isaacson’s excellent biography and, from it, have no problem describing Jobs as a man with a soul but no heart.

To have a soul is required, I think, to believe in things like poetry and music and change and the sheer force of one person’s will. Jobs did all of these things, and I can see his soul shine through my iPhone and iPad.

To have a heart is required, I think, to be kind, considerate, compassionate and honest. Having a soul is self-directed; having a heart is other-directed. At this, Jobs failed. He was a brilliant man with a brilliant vision and a brilliant passion, but let’s face it: more often than not he seemed to care very little for and about how other people felt.

Which is why it’s so weird that I owe him a big thank you for helping me feel less lonely right now while Ashley is in Disney World.

Because she recently acquired an iPhone,(1) and because we share an iCloud account, I can hop on the Find my iPhone app at any point and see what she and her family are up to.

Okay yes. It’s a little creepy. Or at least it would be if she didn’t know I was checking her location. Granted, this isn’t precisely what Find my iPhone was meant for,(2) but yesterday when I had a quick look and saw that they were watching the Lion King show at Animal Kingdom…well, for a moment it was like I was there with her. There’s a part in the show that I find to be one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen in my life. I won’t spoil it for you, plus there’s simply no way I could describe it with any real effect, but both times I’ve seen it, tears came to my eyes. And both times I’ve seen it, Ashley was with me. And right then, last night, just for a second, I felt what that felt like, instead of just feeling bored and vaguely sad. I felt Ashley right next to me, looking up in wonder. I could even picture her face smiling under the light. And for a little bit I felt somewhat less alone.

Then there’s Photo Stream. For those who don’t know, Photo Stream stores a copy in the cloud of any picture taken on an iDevice for 30 days. So, again, since Ashley and I share an iCloud account, I can see the pictures she takes without her having to send them to me. Photo Stream only syncs photos to the cloud over WiFi, so I can’t see her pictures until after she’s returned to their resort. The other day she took a picture of a gallon of chocolate milk. I have no idea why. Can’t even guess. But it’s exactly what I was looking for, exactly the kind of randomness that is Ashley.(3)

And of course, there’s FaceTime. I love Ashley’s voice a lot, but everyone sounds different over the phone. She says I always sound like I’m waiting to get off the phone, while I think she always sounds a touch put-off. But with FaceTime, Apple’s video-chat, I can hear her lovely voice, see her pretty smile and watch her laugh. That was the highlight of my day yesterday. There’s something about seeing someone, seeing the person you’re talking to, watching her react to what you say, seeing smallish movements of eyebrow and chin, that makes me feel a little less here and a little more there.

And it’s odd that this closeness has been brought about by one of the most emotionally distant people I’ve ever read about. It’s as though he wanted to connect everyone in the world with what they love – music, art, pictures – and the people they care about even though he himself had a hard time connecting with anyone. I’m sure he didn’t create FaceTime or Find my iPhone (though the books mentions that iCloud was something he wanted to make work), but you can believe not a thing shows up on any Apple device out-of-the-box that he didn’t know about and approve of.

He’s caught a lot of flack over the years for a statement he made at a company retreat way back in 1982: “Customers don’t know what they want until we’ve shown them.” But he was right. At least in my case. I didn’t know I wanted ways to miss Ashley just a little bit less until I figured out how to use Apple’s devices to do exactly that. And that’s what technology should do: bring us closer to whom and to what we love.

  1. 2011 will forever be the Year of Apple for us. Make of that what you will.
  2. Which seems to be helping porn stars find their stolen phones.
  3. I should point out that it’s only seeming randomness. She always has a reason.
Nov 18 2011

trans-siberian awesomeness

A few days ago, Ashley and I went to see Trans-Siberian Orchestra. We saw them two years ago for the first time and it was such a great show. And this time it turned out to be exactly the sort of mid-week high-entertainment date-night we both very much needed.

The other plus to the event was that it gave me a chance to really put my new Amie’s camera through its paces. I’ve heard much about the iPhone’s camera over the years, so with the 4S’s 8mpx camera, I figured I’d get some sweet shots.

As you can see below, I was not let down. I’ll point out that while we weren’t exactly far from the stage, I did have to zoom for most of these shots. And the still look great, even despite the vastly different types of lighting, color and motion.

amazing

lasers!

This is the loveliest picture I've ever taken...

...then the singer hit critical mass.

Note how the background lighting looks like a city.

Not even Smurfette's buttcheeks are this blue.

 

So that’s two things that totally rule: TSO and iPhone 4S.

Nov 11 2011

iBo; or, do iPhones dream of actual sheep?

Yesterday was my last day as an Android user. I have given unabashedly in to what I can only term to be iLove, which I can only imagine will in time be followed by iEngagement and iWedding and iMarriage.

Though I’ll bet the stats for iDivorce aren’t nearly as high as the U.S. standard +/- 50%.

But I’ve gotten ahead of myself. Or, iDigress.

Back in June of 2007 I rocked a Motorola CRZR knock-off. It was…considerably less than sweet. All I used it for, though, was calling and this new thing I’d recently found called text messaging. I knew a few people who kept music on their phones, but these people were insane in my humble opinion. Forget that they could only keep around 100 songs and that the music players were about as cumbersome as a petrified club and that they sounded like a miniature diarrhetic sperm whale. Few things in my life had cemented my embrasure of technological advancement more than my 30GB Video iPod, purchased in 2005. It was slim. It was efficient. It was lovely. And it held all of my music. All of it. It’s hard to explain precisely how that affected me. It had something to do with liberation, that if I was walking home and I saw something that called a song to mind, I could listen to it. Right then. If a mood struck me at work, I didn’t have to limit its expression by which CDs I’d brought to work that day. It was incredibly freeing.

Why anyone would use anything less to listen to music was beyond me.

So when the iPhone debuted that month, I didn’t care that much. It wasn’t just that, to my mind, a phone and a music player different devices. What I felt for my iPod really was something like love. It had gotten me through a pretty rough patch in the very recent past and the thought of tossing it aside saddened me in exactly the same way that losing friends has saddened me.

But okay. So this is crazy talk, right? It’s a device. It’s just some wires and parts and a screen. This talk of fidelity doesn’t belong in this context.

Does it?

You can – and should – answer that for yourself. For my part, I’ll say that the Buddhist precepts that are the closest thing to religion I follow allow for the minuscule distinction I see between me and my iPod. In fact, we are made of the same substance, both of us being just light slowed way down. This is as true of the tree and the friend as it is of my iPod.

But again. That’s a question for you to answer. The above applies to me and isn’t meant in any way to be prescriptive.

A few years later, having gotten hip to the smartphone thing and poised with an available upgrade, I didn’t even think about getting an iPhone. The Black Bard was still doing what I asked him to do, was still the device I made sure I always had on me. And Android is a Google product. At that point, Google impacted my life on a daily basis in a much broader fashion than Apple. Yes, I listened to and iLoved my iPod, but I used Google for email, blogging, documents, chat…enough things that it made complete sense to try out an Android phone.

So I did. And I liked it. A lot. For a while.

Then, just like every Windows computer I’ve ever had, it started doing just random things from time to time. It stopped telling me when I had new text messages for a while. It started randomly logging me out of my Google accounts. There were other things, but what it all amounted to is a constant sense of me v. my device.

That line, that distinction between my and my Droid, widened.

And then I noticed that the Bard was slowly dying. It just wouldn’t hold a charge anymore for more than about a day, whether I listened to it or not. I was very sad, and out of lack of options more than anything else, I started using my Motorola Droid to listen to music. And I’ll admit it wasn’t long before I thought you know what? having one device for pretty much everything is really convenient. I began to forgive it for its transgressions, like the morning I woke to discover it had deleted all of my alarms. I began to think well…I am asking a lot of it….

That sense of me v. my device was still there, though, like a Facebook friend you can’t quite dump.

Now, though, I sometimes thought about getting an iPhone. For the first time I connected the years of more-or-less trouble-free interactions I’d had with my iPod with the troubles my Droid was giving me on a near-daily basis. For so long these two devices had such different purposes in my mind that I never compared them. Now I was…and it wasn’t favorable for Android.

But what killed my loyalty to Android was that Ashley wanted to go wedding-dress shopping. And that she’d bought an iPad just an hour earlier. I won’t go into why we bought one since it doesn’t matter here. What matters is that since I couldn’t be involved in shopping for her wedding dress – superstitions are as superstitions do – I asked her if I could use her new iPad to do some of my own homework. I went to Starbucks to steal some Wi-Fi and in three hours I managed to finish the articles I needed to read for class. And annotate them. And take notes. Three hours that would have been more-or-less wasted by wandering around shops while she tried on dresses at the bridal store were, instead, made into one of the most productive three hours I’ve ever experienced.

Thanks to the iPad.

From that moment forth I began to really pay attention to how well the iPad functions and how much I could do with it. I’d previously thought iPads to be completely extraneous – and they are. But that’s not the point here. The more I used the iPad the more I noticed the distinction between interfacing with a device and interacting with one. You and I can interface: we can have some type of exchange mediated by some type of distance or barrier. Or we can interact: remove the barrier.

It was then I realized that my love of the Black Bard was about more than just music.

My Android phone was nothing but a phone. Something I used. It never seemed as though it were sleeping; rather, if just seemed switched off. Disconnected. It was never a friend to me; I never named it.  Whereas the iPad with is something I work with. That line between me and the device is as nil as can be. We can explore reasons for that another time, but I can sum it up this way:

The same gesture on an iDevice and an Android device – swiping the screen with a finger, one of the most basic and frequent things you’ll do with a touchscreen phone – yields small but distinctly different results. On an Android phone, as much as three seconds may pass before anything happens. On an iPhone, the screen moves. Right away. As though it were just napping while it waited for you.

Yesterday was my last day as an Android user.

Friends, I’d like you to meet my iPhone, Amie.

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Aug 17 2011

going out with gowalla

As far as location-based, check-in services go, there’s not much beyond the check-in that I find worthwhile. Sure, Foursquare offers specials for mayors, or in some cases just for checking-in. Facebook Places lets you check-in with friends. Google Latitude lets you see where your friends are pretty much in real-time.

But: Every single time I’ve tried to redeem a Foursquare special I’ve had to explain what it is. Or the clerk had no idea how to actually redeem the special, leading to an awkward situation in which we both know I’m being totally up-front and honest w/r/t the special, that I’m not just trying to get something for nothing, but I end up not getting it anyway.

Or: I don’t want to check-in with my Facebook friends because I have no idea how their settings may be set and don’t want to inadvertently compromise their privacy. Not that I have stupid friends, mind you, but Facebook’s privacy settings are about as easy to navigate as a kayak in a hurricane.

And: Who has the time to watch where their friends are and are going all the time? And why would I? Let’s say I see a pile of my friends hanging out at a local coffee shop. Or a bar. They’re all there. Except me. I don’t need a check-in service to make me feel bad about myself; I do that well enough on my own thank you very much.

So: enter Gowalla.

No specials. No mayors. No real-time.

Instead, you have a passport. And the point of Gowalla is to make your passport as awesome as possible. In other word, the point of Gowalla is the journey, not the destination. You collect stamps, pins and items. Some of the pins are accomplishment-based(1). Some of them are for having completed trips.

 

And it’s the trips that I enjoyed while at Walt Disney World.

Here’s an example: I saw that there was a trip called Walk in Walt’s Footsteps. This one interested me because I have a huge amount of respect for Walt Disney. Some of the required stops on the trip were rides I’d have done anyway: The PeopleMover, Carousel of Progress, Spaceship Earth, and One Man’s Dream. I remembered these from our previous trip and enjoyed them.

But some of the others I never would have ridden if it weren’t that I wanted to complete the trip: Peter Pan’s Flight, The Great Movie Ride, WDW Railroad, and The Wildlife Express Train. Of them all, I really enjoyed the WDW Railroad, and I’m really glad Gowalla sort-of pushed me to ride it.

And to me, that’s what a location-based service should do. It’s more than just an over-inflated way of saying “Bo was here.” And it certainly shouldn’t be an advertising conduit. It should be a way to take your trip further, to do things you wouldn’t have done. To push you to explore. In a tech-culture that allows to me watch riots happening on the other side of the world, that offers myriad form of virtual entertainment, I appreciate anything that asks me to experience things for myself.

Especially if it also has really cool stamps.(2)

  1. Say, 25 check-ins or 10 friends.
  2. Thanks to Dave for reminding me about Disney World’s awesome Gowalla stamps.
Mar 10 2011

Pittsburgh weeks: appointment day

7:00a – Wake up early. We drove to Pitt last night because while her appointment isn’t until 12:45p, they have some type of lab they want from her that has to be done early.

Also we have to talk to a Family House manager about getting a parking pass.

And the other advantage to waking up early is that at Family House if you want a hot or even warmish shower you have to be in there pre- about 8ish. They keep energy costs pretty low at these places and part of that is keeping only a few gallons of hot water on premises.

8:30a – Arrive at hospital. UMPC is one of the few places in which I fully understand the phrase foot traffic. People come and go with all manner of comport and dress. There are banks of elevators. Banks. And still we have to wait. It’s that kind of busy.

The diagnostic lab is pleasantly unpopulated this morning. There’s something primordially frightening about lab waiting rooms and this morning I discover it’s the people. All these people are here because something either is or may be wrong. It must weave some type of psychic tapestry that is blessedly absent this morning.

At any rate, we’ve brought all the right paperwork so we are not victims of hemorroidal-librarian glares. Which is a plus.

We move on to the phlebotomy lab. I comment that I love the word phlebotomy. Ashley is nervous about today’s blood test. The results will determine whether they simply take her off one anti-rejection med or try to replace that med with another. The first option is the favorable one here. I tell her to just get on there and do her best. It’s a joke, but not a terribly funny one.

9:03a – We cross the bridge, starting on the eighth floor and ending on the third. Veritgo-feeling none the more manageable for knowing it would happen.

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9:10a – Breakfast at the cafeteria is not as glorious as lunch, in my humble o. Though I imagine we’ll be back because Ashley loves the rice krispie treats they make and we usually take home two or three.

10:00a – Ashley was up late last night reading, which itself is weird since I’m the reader of the couple. But so anyway she’s tired and we’ve retired to the hospital solarium/atrium/garden type place for a bit of a nap (her) and repast (me). This type of event is one reason I bought a Kindle. I’ve carried it with me all day unobtrusively in my back pocket and now with two hours to kill I have loads of reading choices. That’s worth the cost right there.

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(A note re: formatting – Today’s post has been done and updated on the WordPress for Android app. I’ve not used this app in this capacity before and while I find it robust I have no way of adjusting the included images or really of making my usual footnotes that I know will show up legibly. So today’s post may not look as pretty. Though of course you may think none of my posts look pretty and you likely hate or don’t read the footnotes. All of which is fine. The point is that today I’m sacrificing aesthetic choices for the ability to post in-the-moment. Consider it my version of Anderson Cooper’s tears.)

12:15p – The walk to Ashley’s doctor’s office’s building involves going upstairs to eighth to cross the bridge which puts us disorientingly on third and then an elevator to what purports to be the ground floor but then we descend a bit to take what I always think of as a tunnel but then 3/4 of the through we come across windows that clearly show us a few stories high and finally we’re deposited on the third floor of another building with again little change in personal altitude. This Theseus-ness of the whole thing is inescapable. Nor is my notion that Pittsburgh was built on earthen undulations that froze mid-sine. Next up: PFTs.

12:56p – PFTS: FVC: 3.59, 91%. FEV1: 3.23, 102%. FEF25-75%: 5.20, 144%. PEF: 10.03, 151%. All very good!

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1:05p – In which while attempting to take video of Ashley’s doctor’s office’s toilet’s teratoid roar I nearly drop my phone into its open, high-gallon-per-flush maw but instead drop it on the floor at which it instantly goes dark and I think I’ve broken my phone while embarrassingly filming, yes, a flushing toilet, but it turns out not to be broken yet nevertheless the video is gone and of course I’m too embarrassed to go back in there to get the video even though I’m sure Christiane Amanpour would if she were the type of journalist who videos flushing toilets. So you’re just going to have to imagine the monstrous thing for yourself.

1:15p – The actual appointment. The star attraction, as it were. We meet with one of Ashley’s doctors for a while who asks the same basic questions that pretty much any doctor would ask anyone. It gives you a clear idea that initial assessment – any coughing? any fevers? any emotional troubles? – is the same for everyone, that there are lowest-common-denominator-type symptoms that affect and signify for everyone.

After that, though, it gets a little surreal. I don’t say a whole bunch ever, but I feel like Ashley talks way more than necessary at these appointments. Or at least more than I would talk to my doctors. Then again, though, we have very different objectives in visiting very different types of doctors. And aside from that I’ve seen it more than once that an off-hand comment by Ashley will result in a raised doctoral eyebrow and follow-up questions will ensue.

I told Ashley before the appointment that I was going to rat her out w/r/t not doing her inhaled antibiotic, TOBI. And when the doctor brought it up, rat her out I did. I feel bad about it because I totally understand why she doesn’t do it yet at the same time I’m pretty sure a doctor wouldn’t ask a patient to do TOBI if the patient didn’t need it. So but anyway the doctor took on something of a matronly tone and said a totally matronly thing: ‘What are we going to do with you?’ And then looked at me: ‘What are we going to do with her?’ I told the doc that so far I hadn’t been able to find the proper motivation for Ashley on the TOBI thing.

Eventually someone brought up a new type of nebulizer, the eFlow, which from what I’ve read pretty much rules, comparatively. I’ve mentioned it to Ash in the past but she didn’t think Medicare would cover it for her. Her doctor told us that they probably would. So Ash said she’ll look into it next week. Hopefully it helps because TOBI is really the only thing she and I consistently fight over.

Things get really surreal when the doc checks up on Ashley’s meds. This always seems to take roughly the same amount of time as an average James Cameron film. There’s always something new that one of Ashley’s cadre of docs has put her on without informing Pittsburgh. Then opinion abound as to whether she should really be on that. It is head-spinningly complex.

Finally Ashley’s transplant doc comes in for a quick visit. He’s a pleasant but literally egg-headed man, clearly intelligent and devoted to helping pulmonarily afflicted people feel better. And he always picks out the one thing that no one has yet talked about that’s been in the back of my mind all along. Viz., today he brought up that Ashley’s PFTs are still really grand but have been trending downward over the last year. This is exactly what I thought when I saw the results. He said it’s nothing to get terribly concerned about but he wants her to do PFTs at her local clinic more frequently. I’m all for this because PFTs are about the best way to know if things are moving with a southward list.

But otherwise everything is grand. My job over the next few months is to help her get more exercise, no small task for a 300+ lbs. man. But more exercise will mean better PFTs, and right now that’s what’s worrying her primary doc.

2:30p – We’re done for the day. We stop at the UPMC cafeteria for the prenominate yummy rice krispie treats and then head back to Family House. Debate ensues re: do we stay the night or head home now. Since we couldn’t check out of the House before noon, Ashley feels bad about the American taxpayers paying for an unused room if we go home. So we’ll stay in Pittsburgh tonight and head out in the morning.

And there you go. Except for the ill-advised toilet-flush-video thing, this is pretty much what we go through every four months. It can be a bit nerve-wracking sometimes, and other times everything goes so smoothly it’s almost like a little vacation. You just never know.

Feb 23 2011

thoughts on the Wii Fit Plus by a fat guy after using it only three times

Let’s acknowledge that I bought a Wii Fit primarily for two reasons. Firstly, it’s cheaper than a membership at a gym. Purely pragmatic: why dump money on a gym membership when to this point in my life I’ve shown no compulsion whatsoever to take even the down staircase instead of the elevator. In this light, the price tag makes sense.

Yet the second reason is more important. Fat guys have just as many insecurities as overweight women1 and I guess I can’t speak for everyone but pretty much my entire life revolves around jiggling as little as possible in public. Exercise makes me jiggle2 and if I could jiggle around other people who were also jiggling I’d be pretty much okay with it.

Yet I only ever see skinny people working out at the gym.

When I’ve gone to the gym3 all I’ve ever seen are slender young things working their slender young things. Usually in slender young clothing. If I’d ever walked into a gym and seen a fat guy in sweats on a treadmill with that cheese-puff powdered cheese smeared on his oversized hoodie, I would have joined right away and gotten that guy’s work-out schedule and fit my life around it. Maybe even dipped into his bag of cheese-puffs if he were on the treadmill next to mine.

I’ve never seen said fat guy in a gym. And never will.4

So instead I bought a Wii Fit Plus. And I “work-out” in the living room.

Let’s also acknowledge that working out on a Wii Fit is not like working out for real. I do not expect to get thin. I do not expect to bulk up. I do not expect to lose much more than my dignity.

Because that’s what happens. This machine, which knows me not at all and never would have become part of my life if I hadn’t traded legal tender for it, presumes to know what’s best for my body. As bad as that is – as presumptuous as it is – I can do little more than acquiesce to it. This is fact simply because no matter how foreign this machine is, I have to assume that it’s better for me than my own knowledge and instincts.

Because, as veteran AA members will say: my best thinking got me here.

This is what I think as I face the television and step onto the balance mat, feeling positively unbalanced as a cute-as-ever digital voice preps me for my workout: my best thinking got me here.

That’s where the shame lies. I have to trust the suggestions of digitally created avatars because they can’t be worse for me than I am for myself.

Yes, it’s not a real work-out. Yet I break a sweat.5 Yet after a few days I am sore in a few spots that I’ve concentrated on. While I’ve surrendered my dignity, I yet feel just a smidge better about myself.

Sure it’s not a real work-out. But I’m doing something about being so large.

I’m tired of it. I’m tired of having to make fat jokes about myself before someone else can because of someone says it first it’ll hurt. I’m tired of paying two dollars more for my shirts. I’m tired of my t-shirt-and-jeans routine that became a routine because it’s about the only thing I feel comfortable in and don’t look like an anthropomorphic whale.

All I really hope for with the Wii Fit is to establish a routine. To drop my fear of exercise and pick up a good habit.

This is what I hang onto when I find myself cursing myself for cursing a digital avatar that’s pushing me for just another ten-seconds of planks.6 When your planks are more like a warped two-by-four, that’s all you really have.

  1. And unlike the BBWs out there, our big boobs are not a plus, not a way to attract a mate.
  2. Often in places in which the human body shouldn’t be able to jiggle.
  3. As in for a tour. Not as like ‘going to the gym.’ If that phrase were part of my normal parlance I wouldn’t have to worry about the prenominate jiggling.
  4. Unless, ironically, I joined a gym.
  5. Of course, I sweat if I think about it hard enough. I am large; I sweat multitudes.
  6. Though it pushes oh so encouragingly. Really. This thing is like the Blues Clues of the video game world – all about building self-esteem.
Jan 29 2011

saturday things vol. 3

With every birth there comes the afterbirth. Just so, with every purchase there is the after-purchase: accessories.

When I bought my Kindle a few weeks ago, I did something I don’t usually do and bought a case to go along with it. Normally I wait on these kinds of purchases – let myself get a bit more comfortable with the device before I decide what lagniappe pieces I may or may not need.

This time I not only splurged on a case, but splurged on the expensive case.

The Kindle Lighted Leather Cover

It’s a very durable case with an elastic strap to keep it closed. Amazon has it available in lots of different colors, enough to keep pretty much everyone happy I’d imagine.

I especially enjoy how the Kindle is affixed into the case. That’s right. The verb I used is affixed.

Inside are these two little notches. I know, I know. We don’t need no stinking notches, right? Well…

The lower notch has a slight curve and the upper notch has a latch. The Kindle slides onto the lower notch, and the upper notch can be pressed with your thumb. This system affixes the Kindle securely into the case, so I’m not worried about it sliding out while I reading or while it’s in my backpack.

The case, of course, does add some weight to the device but it’s not uncomfortable. And honestly, using it makes the Kindle feel more like a book in my hands. The only real problem is that the keypad is a bit tough to type on while the case is attached. But the notch system makes the Kindle easy enough to remove if I need to do some hardcore typing, which pretty much only happens when I’m scouring the Kindle Store for free classics.

Now, lastly: the light.

The same case without the light costs $20 less. So…was it worth it?

The light slides out from the upper-right corner. So far it seems fairly sturdy, though I do honestly believe this’ll be the reason I’d need a new case. Like I said, it’s sturdy, but when sliding the light back in it feels like the thin piece of metal will eventually buckle.

That being said, it’s an LED light and provides plenty of light to read by, without be overly bright for a sleeping companion. Furthermore, and probably my favorite thing about it, is that the light runs off the power of the Kindle. Yes, of course powering the light reduces the battery life of the Kindle…but not a great deal. And it’s totally worth not having to buy a pack of AAA batteries and keep one around at all times in case I want to read in the dark.

Here’s where, for me, the case is worth the extra twenty clams. I’m not a person who can sit for long periods of time comfortably. This, unfortunately, goes against the entire practice of reading. With the case and the light, I can move around, change chairs, lie on the bed, the sofa, read upside-down, back-to-the-room, on the floor.

And yeah, that helps me read for longer periods of time. Which helps me read more. Which, yeah, is worth an extra twenty bucks.

Jan 15 2011

saturday things #2

After a month or so of serious consideration and not-quite-internal debate, I decided upon buying an Amazon Kindle. It took me roughly five minutes to fall completely in love with it and to subsequently name it.1

But I’ll get to that in a minute.

First I want to share the reasons I decided a) to buy an e-reader, and 2) to buy this e-reader. Like most things on which I end up spending large amounts of money2 this came down to matters of practicality.

Primarily, I can buy classic books for free or for $.99, thusly enabling me to move some of my books to the storage unit3 and free up precious space in our apartment. If/when I ever move to a larger place, I’ll bring all those books back out and keep them around. But for now keeping them in digital format is extremely helpful.

Also, having those classic books with me at all times means I’m way more likely to actually read them. Mark Twain said that classics are books that everyone wants to have read but no one wants actually to read.4 I’ve worked pretty hard at reading many of the classics, but I could work harder at it. This will help me.

Thirdly, I think I mentioned last week that I always take at least three books with me whenever I go on a trip, even just a weekend trip to visit Ashley’s sister in Chicago. When we went to Disney World last year and I was struggling to pack books in my bag5 Ashley said, ‘Why are you bringing so many books? We’re going to effing Disney World.’ Yes, I said, but years of habit are hard to break. An e-reader makes this way easier: I just toss the device into my bag and I’ve got everything I might want to read right there, plus the ability to get more books.

The next reason is the least immediate to me but is still a valid concern. E-readers are relatively new technology and are already insanely popular.6 This trend will only intensify in my opinion. Given that I will be a life-long reader, I feel it’s time I begin adapting how I read.

The last bit of practical logic is what came to me out of Dave’s comment on last week’s iPad post: ease-of-use can make a device worthwhile even if it merely duplicates functions that other things I own already to. In this case, books allow me to spend my time reading. An e-reader easily lets me spend more time reading a wider variety of material. That makes it worthwhile.

Thanks Dave!

Soooo…

why did I settle upon a Kindle?

It’s actually rather simple. Despite all of my concerns, it came down to one fundamental decision: I want my e-reading experience to be as similar as possible to my non-e-reading experience:

  • Books don’t hurt my eyes because the pages are too bright.
  • Books can’t be read in the dark.
  • Books never tell me that I have an email.
  • Books have pictures, but those pictures never move.7
  • Books don’t need to be charged.

All of these are true of the Kindle except for the last statement. But as Wired put it, “Battery life is long enough for space shuttle missions.” I read for maybe four hours straight last night, after also reading the New York Times at various points throughout the day. The battery is still practically fully charged.

My friend Mike commented last week that on day two of owning a Kindle the device “the device slipped away and it was just me and the words.” This happened to me last night, and I was grateful. So far my Kindle experience has met and in some cases exceeded my expectations.

So now, finally, I give you the promised moment-of-love-and-subsequent-naming.

After I opened the box and enjoyed the new-device rush that’s become such a part of contemporary life, I synced the device to my Amazon account. Once I returned to the home screen I saw that I had an archived item that I could download to the device. Last semester, whilst knee-deep in researching my paper on Infinite Jest, I realized that life would be easier if I could search the text. So I bought the e-book on Amazon and used the Kindle for PC app for this purpose.8

As the book was downloading to the Kindle the other night, I realized this meant that I would have my favorite book of all time with me at all times.

Damn. Totally worth it.

And that’s when I fell in love with it. Which required that I name it. That part was easy.

Adored Readership, give a hearty hello to Foster.9

:-)

  1. I name all of my favorite devices and things, especially the ones that I know will positively affect my life. My iPod is The Black Bard. My Droid is Artoo (as in Dee-too). My laptop is Hermes. There’s a bit of dispute w/r/t naming the car: I want to call it The Falcon, Ashley wants a non-Star-Wars name. We’ve settled on Vue Askew, it being a Saturn Vue and all. My bass guitar has whatever name I choose to give it at that moment, but it always starts with Doctor. My acoustic guitar actually doesn’t have a name, which stuck me as curious when I realized this. But I’ve come to understand that I view that guitar as more of an extension of me and my personality than its own separate entity. In this way, the lack of a name is possibly the highest of compliments in Bo-world.
  2. For my purposes, this is decided by the following: price-of-device>$50, (cash-on-hand + (future cash/t)) – (upcoming bills/t), where t is a specified amount of time.
  3. Climate controlled. Frankly, my storage unit is probably better for my books than the apartment.
  4. Paraphrased. Probably.
  5. Along with deciding which books to pack.
  6. Said quantities of insanity are relative to the book-reading population.
  7. Statement describes reading experience typical of most readers. Individual results may vary.
  8. This is where the lack of page numbers is so damn frustrating. Citing things would be way easier if Amazon could figure this out.
  9. I like how ‘Kindle’ taps into both a noun and verb. Foster accomplishes the same thing while at the same time pays tribute to Mr. Wallace.
Jan 12 2011

the great e-reader debate: the American Way

When it comes to American copyright law, creative works are protected in essentially two different ways.1 The cool part is that everything is protected from copyright infringement the moment that the creative work is created. That sentence? It was covered the second I typed it. The short story I wrote in the fourth grade? Also protected.

Cool, isn’t it?

The problem is proving that you created it, ideally before anyone else either a) created it or 2) can prove they created it.2 But I’m not going to delve too deeply in that right now.

It’s the second protection I’m concerned with here.

If I write a story, I can pay the U.S. Copyright Office to register it and it’s protected in a provable fashion. Which is fine. But what if some publisher wants to publish my story? In this case, I give the publisher the right to disseminate my story. Essentially, I’m transferring a part of my right to copy to the publisher. The publisher then has the right to affix my creative work in the medium of its choosing.4

Obviously, the publishing industry has been a highly corporate industry for quite some time now. Corporations, of course, exist to make money for the shareholders. For the most part, this means selling as many copies of a creative work as possible. To this point in human history, the best way to sell a lot of copies has been to get it into as many bookstores as possible.4

It hasn’t happened yet, but this is about to change.

Right now I can buy pretty much any book I want from Amazon, from Barnes & Noble, and from thousands of other booksellers. Authors sign exclusive deals with publishers, but publishers do not sign with bookstore any more than music labels sign with radio stations.

Until now, booksellers’ only real interest was in selling enough to keep their bookstores open, whether online or on-the-street sellers. But these days at least two of the world’s largest booksellers have a vested interest in selling a product of their own. Aside from offering the best product at the best price, they can sell their product through the products that product offers.

In other words, you don’t just invest in a Kindle. You invest in Amazon.

If you’re Amazon, or more likely an underdog to Amazon, and you want to sell more e-readers, what’s one of the best ways to do it?

Exclusivity.

Nowadays corporations and publishers can protect their offerings restricting how customers use their products. For a long time you could only listen to iTunes songs through iTunes or on an iPod. Sure, people always find ways around these protections, but for the most part the systems of control work. iPods are popular because they’re cool, yes, but also because Apple made buying music easy. You didn’t have to go to the store. You didn’t have to buy the entire album.5 You didn’t have to lug CDs and a cumbersome CD player with you.

All you had to do was listen to the music on your iPod.

E-readers, especially the Nook and Kindle, have done for books what the iPod did for music. But the iPod had far less competition. Yes there were other Mp3 players out there, but there wasn’t any easy-to-use way to purchase and legally download the music for these players. With e-readers there’s plenty of competition, plenty of easy-to-use bookstores.

Plenty of reason to sign an exclusive deal. Or several exclusive deals.

This is the American way: if you can’t beat the competition by making a superior product, you find another way.

I’m so sure that this is the way things will go I’m even willing to guess when it will start. Or perhaps more precisely, with whom: J.K. Rowling.

You won’t find Harry Potter e-books out there. This is one of the most amazing omissions, so much so that I thought I had to be doing my search wrong. But I did find an a few articles stating that Rowling has okayed formatting the series into e-books, and I’ll be very surprised if they come out for multiple readers. Want to sell more Kindles? Sign Rowling and Bloomsbury, her publisher, to an exclusive deal.

This is why I find tablets appealing. As I mentioned yesterday, the iPad and any Android-based tablet will have both Kindle and Nook apps, which I could use to read any book purchased from their respective stores. There are other e-reader apps: iBooks, Aldiko. With a tablet I’d have access to any book irrespective of the American Way.

But, maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there won’t be exclusive deals. I can’t say for sure. But do I take that risk? Do I buy a Kindle and risk not being able to read the Harry Potter books on it?

Or do I just stick to reading good old-fashioned books?

  1. This applies to standard copyright. The Creative Commons licenses are cool and are changing the way we look at copyright. But they generally don’t apply to materials published by big houses.
  2. This is why Mark Zuckerberg lost a boatload of cash to the Winklevoss twins. They could reasonably prove that they gave him the idea for Facebook before he made Facebook.
  3. A few things: bear in mind that I’m be very reductive here. Publishing contracts are crazy and can specify many things. Secondly, most writers don’t actually register their creative works with the U.S. Copyright Office, since there’s usually no need. Copyright is often registered upon publication.
  4. Well and to hype the shit out of it of course.
  5. And these days few artists are using the album as an art form anymore, so why would you buy the album?