Geek

I love this commercial.

So today Apple announced a new version of their popular iPad, the iPad mini. As the “mini” name implies, this iPad is smaller in nature than the iPad that is near and dear to the consumer’s heart and is designed to compete with the Nexus 7, the Amazon Kindle Fire and the smattering of Windows 8 tablets coming out later this week.

During the announcement, Apple also announced the replacement of “the new iPad” (aka the iPad 3) with a bigger, better, bolder model. While the iPad 2 is still available on the Apple store, the new iPad (aka the iPad 3) has vanished without a trace and has moved to the halls of obscurity. Like those that carry the original iPad, those with the iPad 3, which was available for somewhere around six months this year, will get laughed at, mocked and sneered at by the Apple Elite.

Somewhere a man is already in line for the latest gadgets that don’t come out for a week or two. That’s what Apple people do.

I have to admit that the forced obsolescence of my new iPad kind of has me ticked off. It’s bad enough that my iPhone 4 has been deemed too slow to give me turn-by-turn navigation through that crappy iOS maps app that Apple sprung on everyone (even though several other apps can handle the task just fine) and that my iPhone 4 has been deemed too slow for Siri to tell me she can’t figure out what I mean, but it’s almost a given that in the fairly near future the new iPad will be deemed too slow to do things such as fling birds at pigs and play YouTube videos. This is how Apple operates now; they don’t even wait a year between product releases. We must move move move move move those old devices into landfills as quickly as possible so we can get the latest and greatest innovations such as Siri’s convenient response of “I’m sorry, but I can’t give you flight information.”

By the way, download the Google Search app and ask for flight information and you’ll get it, on an iPhone 4.

Not having the latest and greatest doesn’t hurt my ego in any way. I think my irkedness (is that a word?) is fueled by the fact that both Aperture and iPhoto were randomly crashing this morning while I was trying to export my photo library on my Mac Mini. What happened to, “It just works”? That motto applies less and less these days and that bothers me. Why pay a premium price for the same old subpar experience I could get from a crappy computer from Wal*mart (Always White Trash, Always)?

I could kind of see this forced obsolescence if Apple was announcing new features with these new devices, but they do the same old thing as the old devices but with just a better display and a new connector that is in no way compatible with any other iDevice we have in the house, unless we buy a special cable for $30.

Since I will eventually have to replace my iPhone 4 that can now barely hold a charge between meals and I’ll be forced to use all new accessories anyways, I’m seriously considering jumping out of the Walls of the Fruit Garden™ and into something else. I find Google Now to be a pretty nifty thing and it will segue beautifully into the upcoming Project Glass from Google.

Now that is innovation.

So last week I declared on Twitter that I was giving up on Google+ as one of my social network outlets. I had had enough with trying to make a go of the service and I was going to swear it off completely. It was a declaration worthy of golden gilt.

I lied.

Over the weekend I decided to give Google+ another try. This attempt goes hand in hand with the app.net (or ADN) service, a $36/year service that is aiming to compete with Twitter.

I have to admit that Twitter hasn’t really been blowing my skirt up as much lately. I use it to share random thoughts and to keep up on what other folks are thinking in the world but I don’t really see it as an outlet for one-on-one communication. Google+ lends itself to that a little more than Twitter. Of course, Facebook tries to do it all, and I enjoy reaching out on Facebook, but sometimes I can see only so many of those cleverly* worded e-Cards before I want to throw a lamp or something. Idiocy tends to make me hostile.

So I’ve been trying Google+ again (I think this is the sixth time or so) where I embrace my geekiness and talk about techy stuff. I occasionally talk about other things as well, I’m not all about bits and bytes but since that sort of thing makes up much of a day, it tends to be my focus. Plus, there are a few tech guys that use ONLY Google+ and they share everything they find on there: news bits, tech news, personal adventures, travel photos and the like. I think that’s kind of cool. I kind of get offended when people use these sites as an outlet for hookups; I think the mainstream social networks should be kept to a PG-13 rating at most and honestly, I’m not looking for that sort of thing so don’t even waste my time. A shirtless pic can be enjoyable but don’t show a photo of your dismount off the pile of guys. It’s just my thing. I’m an old fashioned gay, I guess.

So I’m trying to fall in love with my iPad again. I know that I am a very lucky geek to have the new iPad, and I do enjoy using the device, but I’m trying to love it. I’m trying to convince myself that I don’t need to bring a laptop along when I go somewhere, that my iPad will do everything that I want it to do.

I can watch television on my iPad (I just finished “Downton Abbey” and am now ready for the new season), I can read magazines, I can go through email, browse websites, hunt down porn if I so choose and I can be connected to the internet anywhere there is cell service with this nifty little device.

The one thing that I struggle with is writing. And quite frankly, I love to write. The lack of a keyboard on an iPad is the issue; I usually end up using an Apple bluetooth keyboard, but it feels kind of weird to haul such a keyboard into a Panera or other café. It sort of feels blasphemous.

A few months ago there was a Kickstarter project for a device called The Brydge, which basically added a keyboard to your iPad and turned it into something quite like a MacBook Air. The Brydge is rather pricey though at around $180, $200 if you want upgraded speakers. This is a nifty idea, I suppose, but I’m really picky about keyboards. Because of the speed at which I am able to type, it’s really important that I have a full-sized keyboard. Back in the days of my original iPad, I had a case with a built-in keyboard but it was this Barbie’s Doll House version of a keyboard and my fingers didn’t know where to travel to. My brain was more confused than usual when my pinky was aiming for an “a” and all I got was a caps lock light turned on. Any by the way, who needs a caps lock key anyway? I find any prose written in all caps to be quite offensive to my eyes and sensibilities. Didn’t we give up caps lock around the release of the Apple ][e?

So I’m trying to find a way to love my iPad and make it work as my primary portable device. I know I wouldn’t want anything smaller; I have my iPhone 4 to handle those duties. I guess I just need to find a way to get the perfect keyboard attached to the thing. The Brydge? It’s a possibility (though quite pricey). I feel funny asking about iPad keyboards at the Apple store because the associate will quickly gasp in horror before composing himself back to Apple-standard friendliness. Maybe I need to go to Best Buy or something of that ilk and see if there are some keyboards that I can try out.

I’d love it if any of my Apple happy/iPad using readers have a suggestion.

I have officially fallen in love with Netflix’s streaming service. We have used it on and off since it was introduced a few years ago, but after watching the entire single season of “The Event” at my convenience, I am now seeking out other series to watch in the same way.

A couple of weeks ago I started watching “Downton Abbey” from the beginning of the series. I just finished the season one this morning. I’ve also picked up on “Heroes” again, starting with the plot reboot midway through the third season, and that is something that I have been enjoying for the most part. (“Heroes” went way off the rails for a while, there).

Even though I used to make my living writing ad copy for radio and television commercials, I have come to absolutely loathe ads. I can’t stand to watching advertising during television broadcasts, I always buy a paid version of an iPhone or iPad app so I don’t have to see ads floating all over the place, I dislike the ads that are constantly being flung around the LED ribbon at the Carrier Dome during SU games and I go out of my way to avoid internet services that are ad supported. Ads are one of the reasons that I also struggle with Hulu Plus; after paying $9.99 a month I don’t believe I should be watching ads, even if they’re less in number. I’m canceling the Hulu Plus subscription this week but keeping Netflix because there’s no ads being sent my way on that service.

With the ad supported internet services, it’s not that I worry about data mining or sharing my personal preferences, my life is hardly that interesting, I just don’t want services trying to sell me something that I most likely don’t need.

I’m looking forward to starting the next season of “Downton Abbey” tonight. The writing is smart, the score is brilliant music and the show has done a good job of keeping me engaged. And the cool thing about Netflix, of course, is that I can pause watching the show on my computer, pick up in the bedroom on the Apple TV right where I left off while I fold laundry and then pick up again on my iPad when I go to workout or something.

Wicked cool. That’s probably not a phrase in any of the scripts of “Downton Abbey”.

Originally posted on my Google+ stream.

Today I added a new clock to my master-slave clock collection in the house. This one is from 1940. All of the clocks in the collection were made by The Standard Electric Time Company. The are minute impulse clocks, so the make that click-click sound once a minute that was common in American schools in the 20th century. They run on 24VDC and are controlled by a relay board connected to a Pentium II 233Mhz running Debian Linux. The program used to advanced the clocks was written in BASIC by me a couple of years ago and compiled using FreeBASIC. Uptime on the server right now is 340 days.

This particular clock hangs on the wall in my office, replacing a bigger version of one from the same era. It is a smaller, 9-inch model, which would usually found in small offices scattered through a school. Most classrooms had a 12-inch clock hanging on the wall. Gymnasiums, auditoriums, cafeterias, etc tended to have the 15-inch version.

I started collecting these clocks in the mid 1990s. I became fascinated with these clocks on my first day of kindergarten back in 1973.

One of my friends from high school wrote on her wall that she was disappointed with President Obama because he was wining and dining with Hollywood celebrities while poor people starved. This was the first thing that I read this morning and it ticked me off. I promptly deleted her from my friends and it made me wonder why I even bother with Facebook in the first place. People say really stupid things on there. I also wondered if her breath was still as hideous as it was in high school.

I’ve been ranting about Facebook on and off for the past couple of weeks but I think I have come to the point where I have seriously OD’d on it. Aside from a photo of a 1970 Amana Radarange that another friend shared today, I stared at the stream and wondered why the hell I was wasting the time. It’s kind of like watching TRU-TV’s crap reality shows with people that you allegedly know. It got me to wondering, do I really still ‘know’ people that I went to school with 30 years ago? There’s a few on there that I still enjoy very much, but there’s also a couple that were downright cruel to me during high school and now they want to be “friends”. You scarred me for life, why would I want to continue that sort of frivolity? And yes, being told that “you’ll never fit into society because of your mannerisms” will scar a person for life. You’re lucky I don’t hunt your computer down and put a virus on it.

Now while I’m ranting about Facebook friends, I have to share flipside and say that there are a couple from high school that I have been happy to reconnect with. It was amazing to see a bouquet of flowers from “The Lunch Table Crew” at my father’s services last December. That was a bright spot in a bleak time. I have enjoyed thanking old teachers for helping me even though they didn’t really know they were doing it at the time. I like seeing what former bloggers are up to, those I have met in person and those that we haven’t crossed paths with yet and only met electronically. With the decline of personal blogs and the tendencies for folks to microblog in its place, you have to kind of be on Facebook if you want to stay connected with those folks you knew from the ’00s. But for the most part, the platform seriously pisses me off.

I think I need to cut my Facebook consumption by 9/10ths and seriously prune my friends list down in the process. This might make things more manageable and less irritating.

But I’m seriously keeping the friend with the cool Radarange.

So I spent the entire weekend being a geek. This is something that I like to do from time to time, and on-call weekends lend themselves to being of a geeky nature anyways, so I figured I might as well just jump into the geek with both feet. It was a wonderful feeling.

A geek weekend for me is kind of like a weekend for Sheldon Cooper on “The Big Bang Theory”. A few seasons ago he mentioned that he had delightful plans for his weekend by installing several different Linux distros on his laptop to see which one he liked the best.

That’s what I did!

I tried several different variations of Linux on both my non-Mac laptop and my old desktop PC that resides in the darkest corners of our basement. Just for kicks I threw in a second test install of Windows 8 and determined that I still hate the learning curve associated with the completely new interface of Microsoft’s latest offering, so that quickly gave way to another Linux test. I laughed manically as I wiped out Windows. I haven’t done that in a long time.

Earl and Jamie were off to a concert on Saturday night so I had the house to myself. Being alone in the house and in complete geek mode is one of the most recharging things I can do. I suppose that if I were in the same situation a century ago, Earl and Jamie would have been going to a different kind of concert and I would have either been reading a book or taking apart the Victrola. I’m sure I would have felt that “recharged feeling” on the Monday after that weekend a century ago, just as I am feeling recharged today.

Part of my geek weekend was inspired by the fact that I upgraded the studio iMac to Mountain Lion. We purchased this 21-inch iMac in 2009. With the upgrade to Mountain Lion, I now have a dark band across the screen, 1/8th of the way up from the bottom. The gradients of the gray background now look like the stripes in one of my favorite Atari games, “Super Breakout”. I don’t know if Mountain Lion gave the iMac a heart attack or if it was just a coincidence, but I’m really disappointed that an Apple piece of hardware is failing at only three years old. With the premium price paid for Apple hardware, one would expect further longevity. The aforementioned desktop PC is nine years old and it’s holding it’s own just fine and it was cheap!

I’m going to continue to use the iMac for as long as I can still see what I’m doing but when it comes time to replace the studio computer, I’m probably going to reconsider the Apple approach and go with something that can run Ubuntu Studio (Linux). The Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) software I use (Ardour) works in both Linux and on a Mac, we might as well save some bucks if the hardware experience is going to be the same. I get a tingle of delight thinking about the geek weekend involved with changing out the studio computer someday. I don’t usually tingle very easily.

So after trying out all these different distros of Linux (and the two instances of Windows 8), I have decided that Ubuntu Linux is my distro of choice. I am making a concerted effort to not purposely break the install on my laptop to see if it can hold its own for a month.

Being a geek for the weekened does have me recharged. I guess it’s the ISTJ* in me. That’s not a bad thing.

* I’m not usually a fan of labels, but this one doesn’t bother me as much. Introverted Sensing Thinking Judging.