Posts Tagged 'tech'

Why I’m looking forward to 2012: Or why a longtime Apple user still won’t be an early adopter

Published 29 January 2010 General 4 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

Let’s get this straight: my first adult computer purchase was an iMac Rev B back in 1998. I’m writing this on a black second-gen MacBook (soon to be replaced with a MacBook Pro). My 32GB iPhone 3GS goes everywhere I go, and I cannot travel without my 160GB iPod Classic. I smoke the ApplePipe in several different flavors, and I’m a daily user at that.

On the other hand, consider the specifics of what I use. I have never bought a first-generation Apple product. And, frankly, taking one look at the iPad’s unveiling this week, I am not persuaded to break my non-streak.

Look, no doubt about it, the iPad is pretty freakin’, well, pretty. It is the latest drop dead gorgeous design from the Cupertino boys, yet another Apple product where to see one with all of its smooth curves is to lust after one. The adaptation of the iPhone touchscreen interface to take advantage of a 9.7 inch screen looks stunning; that trick of using finger swipes to expand photo collections has me panting on my knees all by itself. Not only that, but if the printed newspaper is going to go the way of the Newton, then I want my digital version to look as nice and easy to read as the New York Times app demo did yesterday. That looks like something you can read with your coffee and eggs at the breakfast table.

I’m also daring iBooks to make a believer out of me. Let’s be honest — I love real books too much to be able to stomach spending a few hundred dollars on a Kindle; why would I want to spend a few hundred dollars on a dedicated device that doesn’t do the real thing as well as the real thing and has a smaller screen than the page size of the books I usually read? (There’s also the matter of wanting Isaac Asimov to be sorely wrong about the fate of print books he imagined for the Foundation series.) I’d have to get a Kindle DX to feel like I was reading a real book and not one I’d bought at the grocery store, and that still doesn’t solve my problem of compulsively wanting to underline and make copious notes in what I read. However, if the device in question is also the must-have subset of my portable music collection, movie collection, and a working productivity machine that’s even thinner and lighter than my laptop — well, that’s more than double the functionality of a dedicated e-book reader, and already with a reasonably-sized screen, for all of $10 more than the Kindle DX. Sounds like a no-brainer to me — if I’m going to put out that kind of dosh, it better do all of that.

(That said, looking at the screenshots of the iBooks interface, Delicious Library has got to be pissed right now. Probably not for the first time either, since their iPhone app still seems to be dead in the water.)

Yeahbut.

The truth is, as really and truly super-amazing-awesome all of that is, it doesn’t do anything that I’m just absolutely dying on the vine for it to do. There is not a category of device in my life into which it neatly fits; my MacBook took the place of my old Dell notebook, my iPhone replaced my cracked and cheap Samsung, and the utility of an iPod arose when I started traveling overseas. If the iPad is going to insinuate itself into my life (and not only do I grant that this may be inevitable, but I also sincerely hope that it is), I gotta have a reason. Right now, anyway, the iPad can’t replace all of those things wholesale without me giving up functionality. It can be a smaller version of my stuff (sorry, George Carlin), it can even be the version I curl up with next to a roaring fire while my wife looks on disapprovingly, but that’s all it can be as of yet — a version. Now, we may well be heading to the day when what we now think of as laptops are actually de facto desktops for all intents and purposes, and devices like the iPad become the portable working machine, but I just don’t think we’re there yet.

Besides which, I really can’t bring myself to be an early adopter of anything when it comes to teh gadgetz. 2000 was when I got my first DVD player. 2001 was when my wife and I first got cell phones. I just entered the Blu-Ray and HDTV market this last Christmas. I don’t have so much disposable income that my first thought when I see my wallet is, “Hey! What bleeding-edge device can I go out and buy today?” No, I’m one of those people who relies on the early adopters to work out the kinks for me, so that when the second, third, or fourth generation devices come along that I do buy, there are standards in place (I’m looking at you, high-def videodisc market), and there is a reasonable set of features for a reasonable price.

And make no mistake, the iPad is still missing some things. 1080p video for one, both on the screen and for output (my flatscreen HDTV has spoiled me in just over a month). A front-facing camera for videoconferencing (if not a second camera on the back). A built-in USB port, if not an HDMI port, and a SD slot.

All of these factors put together make me look at the iPad and — well, it’s not that I shrug, it’s just that I wipe off the drool after a few seconds and go back to trying to figure out which MacBook Pro I’m getting.

See, if I know Apple, they know all of this already, and they already have a detailed roll-out plan specifying which generation gets which feature. If the idea is that they have a particular price point in mind and they add features as it becomes feasible to do so within that price point or lower, then there’s no question in my mind that over the next two years or so the product will get to where it’s worth somebody like me buying it. To me, though, it’s not just a question of adding features, but also a matter of what kind of an app library is developed for the device. A couple of years’ worth of individual ingenuity with the SDK could well make the iPad a must-have for reasons I can’t presently predict.

All of this is to say, I expect that sometime in 2012, two things will happen, assuming the world doesn’t end. One, the third-generation iPad will be unveiled, and it will include a sufficient number of the features I enumerate here (the camera or cameras, plus 1080p video, will be the dealmakers for me), probably the second hardware refresh, and it will be at a price point that prompts me to launch the Apple Store app on my 1TB iPhone 6GZX and order one.

Second, rumors will start flowing about the new device secretly being worked on in the bowels of Apple. Maybe it’ll be the iPen you use on your iPad — who knows. I’ll be too busy curled up in front of the fire with my new iPad to care. End of the world or not, 2012 can’t come soon enough.

The slickest, smoothest sales job I have ever seen

Published 1 June 2009 General Leave a Comment
Tags: , , ,

Since fall of 2007, my wife has suffered with a Nokia 6126 as her cell phone. She has loathed that phone since the day she got it, and has counted down the minutes until the hardware upgrade cycle spun back around. For the last few months, I have heard nothing but, “I hate this piece of junk phone, and when I can replace it, I want the simplest, lowest-maintenance phone I can possibly find.”

Meanwhile, I decided a few months ago that I would probably get an iPhone this fall. Basically, I’m waiting for the next rev, the 3.0 firmware, and a lower-priced data plan. Also, since I can’t legitimately get a different SIM card for the iPhone, traveling with it in Greece seems like it would be rather needlessly complicated. I think I’d rather be abroad for two months with an old phone I don’t care about into which I can switch a new SIM rather than a new iPhone where I’m stuck with international data roaming charges. The whole time, whenever I’ve said I want an iPhone, Megan has just shaken her head, saying, “Never. It’s not for me.”

Thus it was that we found ourselves in the AT&T store last Thursday, with Megan telling the nice salesperson named Ryan, “I just want the cheapest phone you have that will let me make calls and send text messages.”

“Well,” he said, “have you considered the iPhone?”

I just sat back and watched, saying nothing. It seems that the iPhone answers its own question, and to actually see one is to fall in love. It took less than five minutes for her to be convinced, and then it was all over but picking out the accessories. As we left the store, she just looked at me and said, “Shut up.”

Now we just need to have her remember to set the “Push” setting to “Manually” when she visits me in Greece.

Finals Week, fall semester 2008

Published 19 December 2008 Academia , College , General 1 Comment
Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

It is Friday of Finals Week; the campus is basically empty, it is grey outside and already hinting at getting dark. The next couple of weeks will be very quiet. While I generally like the winters here (as long as I’m not snapping the bones of my various extremities) I have found, particularly the last couple of winters, that I struggle somewhat with it being nearly dark out by the time I get home after work this time of year. It’s never bothered me before, so I’m not altogether sure what that’s about, but there we are.

My one final this time around was Modern Greek. Confidence, I suppose, is when you know you would have to bomb the exam completely to impact your grade at all, and I didn’t bomb it in the least. Next semester I will be bumping up to the 4th semester of the sequence, which means I have some fill-in work to do between now and then, but I am reasonably unconcerned about my ability to deal with it.

One of the problems I’ve been trying to solve this week has been that, upon realizing that my iTunes library was taking up 33 gigabytes of my 80 gigabyte hard drive, I decided to get a 1 terabyte external hard drive and hook it up to the wireless router that governs the connectivity in our house. Simple, right? Well, no. The router, one of AT&T’s custom jobs that you have to use if you have their DSL service, only has a Type B USB port on the back, and the output port on the MyBook drive is a Micro B. A USB hub didn’t solve the problem, because the only upstream port on the hub was, yep, a Micro B. A USB-to-Ethernet adapter didn’t solve the problem, either. Finally I pulled out the AirPort Extreme router I still have from my cable days, which has a Type A port on the back of it specifically for hard drives, and connected that to AT&T’s router via an Ethernet cable. It works now, more or less, but I don’t understand why this wasn’t easier. Now I’m migrating my iTunes library over, which will take another few days to sort out, I’m sure. A friend of mine in high school used to call such needlessly complicated arrangements “goat-ropes.” I’m still not sure what a “goat-rope” is, exactly, but I think this qualifies.

And, of course, Leopard’s Time Machine functionality still doesn’t work with an external hard drive connected via a wireless router, and I wasn’t about to spend $500 on a 1 TB Time Capsule when an AirPort Extreme router plus a 1 TB external hard drive cost less than $300 combined. So, whatever.

Under the category of miscellaneous observations — you know, Rick Warren certainly wouldn’t have been my choice if anybody had asked me to set up the invocation for the Presidential inauguration. (That probably would have been Metropolitan Jonah.) Still, I am bewildered by claims that his views are not “consistent [with] mainstream American values.” Now, his views are most certainly not consistent with what Ms. Kolbert’s values are, nor with what Ms. Kolbert perhaps hopes “mainstream American values” might someday be, but that does not make them inconsistent with what “mainstream American values” presently are.

We have a real problem in this country, on both sides of the aisle, with acknowledging principled, conscientious disagreement; particularly where certain social issues are involved, the same assertion is made on both sides — “We’re talking about people’s lives. You either agree with me or you’re objectively hating an entire subset of humanity” (whatever group might be impacted by the social issue in question). Somehow we have to get past this and not be constantly assuming the worst about the people with whom we disagree and their motives.

That bears repeating, I think.

I believe wholeheartedly that the level of public discourse in this country will not improve until we can stop assuming the worst about those who disagree with us and what might be motivating them.

“Baby-killer” and “bigot,” to use but two common examples, are labels that do nothing but shut down the conversation. They get used, not to further understanding, but to vilify. They identify as enemies and dehumanize those with whom there is ideological disagreement. They do nothing to identify common ground and attempt to find a way to co-exist.

If nothing else, President-elect Obama’s choice of Pastor Warren seems to acknowledge this problem and seek to find a way to navigate through it. That his choice of Warren has angered some on the Left, and Warren’s acceptance has angered some on the Right, indicates to me that it might in fact be an effective move on the part of both men.

Yesterday I was present for a discussion with somebody who very clearly believed himself to be better-informed than most and in possession of a privileged point of view, a puppet who was able to see the strings, and he made a lot of very sweeping generalizations about a great many things, clearly finding it incomprehensible that any educated, thinking person might disagree with him, thus making anybody who might disagree with him categorically uneducated and unthinking. This person might be broadly described as a Northeastern academic liberal; what was fascinating is that his manner and intellectual approach was virtually identical to that of an Alaskan neo-conservative who espoused almost perfectly antithetical views to me a few months ago. Both opiners dripped utter contempt for any who might see things differently; both were absolutely convinced that they understood reality. You know, real reality.

The truth may very well be that, eventually, the center cannot hold and the United States must splinter. Perhaps that will happen in my lifetime, or my grandchildren’s lifetime. It seems to me, however, that we have to resist such an eventuality. Sitting at the same table as those with whom we disagree is the reality of being the secular, pluralistic, supposedly egalitarian society that we like to pat ourselves on the back for being; we have to co-exist, and we have to get along, even if every settlement has not yet been negotiated and ratified. The result may be messy, the result may be something with which we’re not always happy, but that’s the nature of our system. Agreeing to disagree is the only way civil discourse can happen in the long run.

Now I get to spend the next couple of days researching how to brine a goose. Watch this space for details.

Various points of interest (or not)

Published 4 October 2008 Academia , Beginnings , General , music 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

George List was an emeritus faculty member for the Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology here at IU. He retired in 1976, the year I was born, but still had an office and an assistant here. I first spoke to him over the phone in April, when I started working here at the Archives of Traditional Music; I met him for the first of three times in August. He was ninety-seven years old, he was frail, he was blind, he had been a widower for “seven long years” as he put it, and he had even outlived his son. Despite all of that, he was sharp as a tack, very active mentally, perfectly articulate. He was also clearly very lonely. He made a big impression on me the three times I got to meet him, perhaps more than I realize even now.

He passed away on Sunday, 28 September. It’s affected me this week a lot more than I thought it would — I even had a dream about him a couple of nights ago, although I don’t really remember much about it, beyond wanting to say goodbye in person and trying go back in time a couple of days by crossing the international date line. Aionia mneme.

—

Sometimes there are these fortuitous moments of synchronicity that tell you you were supposed to do something. Megan has been toying with the idea of getting an iPod for a little while, and I finally decided it was time to take the plunge and call it a late birthday present (my regular readers, both of them, may recall that I was in New York and she had just arrived in Germany on her birthday; I was so discombobulated that I didn’t remember to say “Happy birthday”, and she was so discombobulated that she didn’t notice). So we bought one of the new 120gb iPod Classics yesterday (it was $250; for reference, my 80gb Classic was $350 a year and a half ago), and after paying for it, the guy behind us in line, noticing we had bought a different pair of earbuds, asked us, “Hey, do you want the earbuds that come with that?”

We shrugged and said, “No, not really.”

“Can I buy them from you for $10?” He was about to spend $30 or some such on a replacement pair — seemed fair to us, and appeared to be one of those moments where the timing just worked out the way it was supposed to.

Of course, once we got home, we realized that we had also given him the USB cable. Oh well — keeps us humble.

—

Me, Bryn, and some guy at Jeff Fletcher's wedding, 12 September 2005A year ago today my friend Bryn Patrick Martin passed away from a bad reaction to painkillers. It was a stupid way to go and entirely preventable; I’m still mad at him. He was a constant, and I mean a constant, in my life between 1993 and 2003; this picture of him and me smoking cigars (can’t remember who the guy on the far left was) was taken the last time I saw him, 12 September 2003. His devilish smile (and overall countenance), obscene sense of humor, and most of all his fierce loyalty to the people about whom he cared remain very much missed. Aionia mneme.

—

I note among the stats for the last few days that for the first time ever I’ve received a hit off of a Google search for “Richard Barrett.” Exactly how this works I’m not sure, since last time I checked, I think it was the 15th page of results before this blog popped up, so the searcher in question must have been very persistent. Not that I care about my Google rank, exactly, but I do hope that people don’t see all of the matches on the first several pages for the white supremacist Richard Barrett and think that’s me. (If he had any idea who I was, he’d probably hope people didn’t get us confused, too.) If people want to think I’m the English composer or the motivational speaker, that’s probably okay. (Maybe not the R&B pioneer or the minor-league Depression-era Seattle baseball player, since they’re both dead.)

Christ is born! Glorify him!

Published 24 December 2007 General , Media , The Orthodox Faith 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,

nativity.jpgAnd it came to pass that Mary was enrolled with Joseph the old man in Bethlehem, since she was of the seed of David, and was great with the Lamb without seed. And when the time for delivery drew near, and they had no place in the village, the cave did appear to the Queen as a delightful palace. Verily, Christ shall be born, raising the likeness that fell of old.(Troparion from the Royal Hours of the Nativity, Byzantine rite)

A child is born to us, and a son is given to us, whose government is upon his shoulder; and his name will be called, the Angel of great counsel.

(Introit of the third Mass of Christmas Day, Roman rite)

Expect the media to bring up the usual historical “problems” with the Nativity account, according to Fr. Stephen Freeman, and don’t fret about it:

Literalism is a false means of interpretation (hermenuetic) and is a vain attempt to democratize the Holy writings. If they can be read on a literal level, then everyone has equal access to them and everybody has equal authority to interpret them. […] the seasons come and go and the media cannot resist speaking of what they do not know. And so they ask those who do not know to speak on their behalf. But if we would know Christ and the wonder of His incarnation, then we would do well to listen to those who have been appointed to speak and to hear them in the context given to us for listening – the liturgical life of the Church.

photo-6.jpgIn other news, blogging has been light the last couple of days because we’ve been madly scanning and shelving books. The Delicious Library and LibraryThing system has been fantastic, but most definitely less than perfect. One annoying thing is that even if Library of Congress data exists for a book, LibraryThing won’t always find it, requiring you to find it yourself on the Library of Congress website and enter it manually. For books that don’t have LC numbers, I’m not sure what I’m supposed to do; is there a way that one can divine what the number will eventually be?

What’s also frustrating is that LibraryThing is in theory able to identify new ISBNs when a list is uploaded and add only those, and it does this successfully in most cases, but there are somewhere around ten books that are always duplicated when I add a new list. This afternoon I eliminated somewhere around fifty dupes, in some cases there being seven entries for one book.

Another issue: I’ve entered 718 books into Delicious (representing probably roughly half of what we have), and I’ve exported the catalog to LibraryThing on a fairly regular basis. This afternoon, LibraryThing showed 756 books; after eliminating the duplicates, I’m down to 702 in LibraryThing with 8 ISBNs it can’t find (European books, I think). That means there are eight books Delicious is listing in its catalog that for some reason LibraryThing isn’t picking up.

Nonetheless, we’ve been able to accomplish in a weekend what would have surely taken us a month on our own, and that’s most certainly worth it.

Finally–any other Leopard users out there finding that with the latest update, searching for files within the File Upload dialog appears to be broken?

Merry Christmas to all!

Mmmmm, Delicious

Published 20 December 2007 General , Media 11 Comments
Tags: , , , , , , ,

delicious-screenshot.jpg

Usually it’s my pal Gavin who posts this kind of thing, but hey, why not. Maybe he’ll blog about dead languages tomorrow.

Remember what I said about maybe getting Delicious Library going over the break? Well, it’s going… and going… and going. I’ve got 245 books entered in so far. Only about 6,342,351 to go.

The whole thing is pretty slick, actually. You enter books (or DVDs, or CDs) by title, author, ISBN number, or even by scanning the barcode with an iSight camera, and then it pulls the item’s data off of Amazon.com—cover, genre, publisher, series, retail value, description, etc. (all as available, of course). You can hand-edit anything you need to, you can update cover art by dragging an image onto the item’s entry, you can sort by any category you like, and so on. Other very practical features include easily being able to set up a “checkout” system for loaning out books, integration with Amazon.com Marketplace if you want to get rid of things, and so on. It will also make book recommendations based on what you have (with quick ‘n easy links to the product on Amazon.com, of course).

It’s not perfect by any means; Library of Congress or Dewey data would be nice, as would the ability to generate a bibliography, the genres imported from Amazon are not consistently accurate or useful—and it’s going to take a lot of hand-tweaking to make them useful. Custom fields would be a most appreciated feature. On the other hand, this is a version 1.5 product, and I’m told some of these things will be available in v2.0 (due within a couple of months, apparently). Also, you can easily export your Delicious catalog to LibraryThing, which does do Library of Congress and plenty of other things, enough so that it’s worth it to have both, really.

If you’re a Mac user drowning in books, Delicious Library might very well be worth your time.

adventures in writing alexander lingas all saints bloomington all saints orthodox church american orthodox architecture american orthodox music american orthodoxy Antiochian Archdiocese Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America Antiochians books byzantine chant cappella romana chant church architecture ecclesiastical chant ethnomusicologists ethnomusicology fellowship of ss. alban and sergius Greece Greek greek food greekness hazards of church music international travel tips ioannis arvanitis joe mckamey john michael boyer kurt sander Latin liturgical adventures liturgical architecture liturgical music liturgical texts and translation liturgy liturgy and life lycourgos angelopoulos medieval byzantine chant Metropolitan PHILIP militant americanist orthodoxy modern byzantine architecture modern greek music music as iconography my kids will latin and greek when they're newborns my kids will learn latin and greek when they're newborns orthodox architecture orthodox architecture is bloody expensive Orthodox choir schools Orthodox Ecclesiology orthodox outreach orthodox travel pascha at the singing school Patriarchate of Antioch Patriarch IGNATIUS IV Patriarch of Antioch publishing random acts of chant richard barrett in greece richard toensing rod dreher sacred music st. vlads st john of damascus society Syriac the Bishop MARK fan club the convert dilemma the dark knight The Episcopacy The Episcopate the only good language is a dead language this american church life travel we need more american saints why do we need beautiful music in churches?

Blog Stats

  • 248,533 hits

Flickr Photos

IMG_3558
More Photos