A Word or Two About Apple

I am an unabashed Apple fanboy. I have owned Apple products for years. I am well and truly invested in the Apple ecosystem of content and applications. I still believe that Apple produces the best products that are on the market today. That’s not to say that I don’t have concerns about Apple’s future.

The Apple of today is different from the Apple of a few years ago. A few years ago they were still executing Steve Job’s vision. Apple is an outstanding engineering company. They have proven time and again that they can design and build the best devices on the planet.

Apple has never succeeded by competing with the other companies in their market. They have done so by defining new markets and new products. They have repeatedly imagined totally new ways to deliver wondrous experiences that have taken would be competitors years to understand, much less replicate.

Apple still builds outstanding products. What they need is a visionary. Until they find one, the competition will continue to catch up with them until they have totally lost their edge. I hope they find one soon. I hope they return to the days of reality distortion fields and products that have to be touched and seen to be appreciated.

For now, I love my new MacBook Pro. I think the Touch Bar is entertaining if not indispensable. I think the USB-C ports are brilliant. It is without a doubt, the best computer I have ever owned. Some people insist on driving the best cars. I insist on owning the best computers. This one lives up to my standards.


Sweet dreams, don’t forget to tell the ones you love that you love them, and most important of all, be kind.

Aha!

So after watching the reality distortion field (the video of Steve Jobs announcing the iPad), and sleeping on it, I think I may have a solution. I can afford an iPad if I replace my MacBook with a 21.5″ iMac and use the difference between the price of that and the price of a 15″ MacBook Pro and a 24″ Viewsonic external display to buy a 32GB iPad!

I’ve noticed a bunch of people nay saying the iPad today. One person that agrees with me is Steven Fry. I knew he was an Apple fan boy but I was surprised at how astute he was. I think the key fact here is not that the iPad is the best tablet there could ever be. It’s just that it is the first one to “get” what sets a tablet aside from a laptop. It has certainly captured my imagination.

There. I think I’ve got it out of my system now. And now back to your regularly scheduled blog posts.

In which: We explore the author’s obsession with tablet computers

The internet was on the blink last night at our house. Thus, no blog post. This morning, I thought I knew what I wanted to blog about but somehow throughout the day so much happened that I decided to put that topic off for another day. I had forgotten that it was the day that Apple announced their new product. You know, the one that everyone has been talking about for years, the iPad.

I have wanted a tablet computer ever since I read Alan Kay’s description of the dynabook. I wanted one. Later, I read Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age: or A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer and the flames of my passion were stoked even higher. I couldn’t afford a Newton but it became obvious that it wasn’t the holy grail after all. I owned 3 different Palm Pilots. They never quite filled the bill.

I’ve been waiting for the Apple tablet, the iPad, for years now. Today, I found out that I can have one, … in 60 to 90 days. Now I’ve got to decide whether I want one enough to pay the Apple premium. I am very intrigued. But it won’t be a laptop replacement. It was never intended to be that. I have been planning to buy a MacBook Pro to replace my aging MacBook. I can’t justify buying both a MacBook Pro and an iPad. Therein lies my quandary.

Of course, the rational side of my brain says it is better to wait and see how things play out. After all you should never buy version one of anything. But it is so damn sexy! I wants it. My precious.

Okay, so I buy the 16GB wifi version. That’s only $500 bucks. But for $600 bucks, I could have the 32GB version and for $700 bucks, I could have the 64GB version. And for $830 bucks I could have the 64GB 3G version. I can’t afford $830 bucks. Lets start over again.

No, let’s not. Once again I will be a responsible adult and buy the MacBook Pro. I’ll wait and see how things pan out. It may be a flash in the pan like the AppleTV. I don’t believe it for a minute but time will tell. Maybe by the time it is actually shipping I’ll change my mind. Even better, maybe I’ll think of a creative way to finance one; write an article; sell a program; get a moonlighting consulting gig. Only time will tell.

Ramble on Writing and a Rant

I find myself in one of two situations a lot. Either I’m sitting here in front of an empty page trying to think of something that I want to write about or I just start typing about what ever comes to mind. In the first case nothing gets written. In the second, I get practice writing at the expense of rambling on about nothing in particular and boring myself and any reader that happens to stumble across my blog to death.

One of the things I like about YouTube is that when I watch a video, especially a vlog, and it inspires a comment, I can start a discussion with the vlogger. One of the things I don’t like about YouTube is the limit on the length of comments. I understand that it’s a free service and all those comments cost money to store. But videos cost money to store and comments take so much less storage. Maybe it’s the fact that it is so much easier to make a comment than it is to make a video which results in the volume of comments far exceeding the volume of video responses. Anyway, the point is I like the dialog.

I have yet to have a comment on this blog that wasn’t spam. I don’t think anybody reads it. I don’t know why I bother posting at all. I could just as easily write this stuff and store it on my computer. I guess it is a combination of hope that someone will read it and a kind of romanticism about contributing to the vast corpora of data available over the internet. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll write something that someone wants to read. That’s the idea behind writing here regularly.

I sure like my MacBook. It has changed my life. I can sit in any room in the house and read my email, write in my blog, watch YouTube or surf the web. I actually do many of the things that I couldn’t find time in front of the computer to do now that I don’t have to sit at my desk to do them. I can sit in front of the TV with Pam or take it to the bathroom with me in the morning. I can take it to bed with me. Let’s face it, I’m a computer junky.

Back on the musing about writing topic, I’m reminded of the essay that Paul Graham wrote that explained that essay writing is exploring ideas. Blogging is a kind of essay writing. If you have the discipline and take the time to edit a blog post it is an essay. If you’re lazy, like me, it is whatever flies off of your fingertips while you are thinking. It is more like the notebook that you use to capture the thoughts that you edit into an essay than it is the final essay itself. But I think it has value. It lets people see your train of thought as it evolves. This could be useful, especially if the train ever goes anywhere.

I’m doing better with the frequency of my posts. I haven’t found the place in my daily schedule that will turn this into a habit but I’m working on it. I am about sick of this theme. I’m either going to make up a theme of my own or more likely find another one on the WordPress site and change over to it. I might just hack on this one a bit. I like the colors, its the photograph that needs to change periodically. I need a new camera.

I need to be independently wealthy. I have so many expensive hobbies. Most of them aren’t that expensive once you get set up. I’ve got most of what I need to make videos now. I could use a microphone here and a mixer there and lights and a green screen and software upgrades. But the point is, I can make videos with what I have already. Those accessories would be nice but they aren’t necessary.

I recently upgraded my Amateur Radio license so that I have operating privileges in a bunch of new segments of the radio spectrum. I could build radios to operate in those segments from kits or from scratch. And, I intend to do that. Part of ham radio that I enjoy is homebrewing (building your own hardware). Currently though, I don’t have any working radios. Now radios aren’t that expensive but they are expensive enough that I can’t afford to just go out and buy one. Even a little general coverage receiver is going to cost somewhere around $100.

Right now, I’m struggling to pay my bills. Actually, I’m struggling to pay my bills because I’m helping my daughter get set up in business. So, I’m paying my bills and part of hers. I know this is a temporary situation but it is frustrating. And then there are the other things that come up like house maintenance, car maintenance, we need new furniture, we need newer cars as the ones we have get older and stay broken more frequently.

I know this has turned into a bitch session but it helps to get these things down where you can look at them. Then you can start working on ways to deal with them. Also, when you list all your problems like this, you get a feeling about their scope. In all fairness though, I need to do a blog about all my blessings to balance out this one a little.

Quick (relatively) Update

So much has happened since my last post. I thought I’d get back in the swing of blogging by catching folks up. I figure if you’re not interested in what’s going on with me, nobody is forcing you to read this :-).

First, and by far most importantly, I got a new MacBook! This is so exciting for me. It has a built-in web cam so vlogging is now a breeze. I still intend to make video shorts with the Canon Elura 100 (my DV palmcorder), but I don’t have to go to the trouble to set up the tripod just to record a vlog.

I’ve gotten totally addicted to the community aspect of YouTube/LiveVideo (hereafter referred to as YT). I have to check in on what my friends are doing every day. I still use text commenting for most of my interactions but when I have something to say that doesn’t fit in a comment, I make a video response.

That kind-of explains one of the reasons I haven’t posted here in so long. I use this blog as a platform for publishing my opinion on various topics. The only thing is, my blog is largely unread. My posts on YT get some traffic, and even better, I get feedback from folks. I know, I’ve got comments turned off here. But that’s only because all I ever got were comment SPAM!

We finally got the external webcams to work on my wife’s ibook, after her new MacBook arrived. You don’t really think I could get a new MacBook without getting her one too :-). Now my daughter has my wife’s old G4 iBook, her boyfriend has her old G3 iBook and everyone is happy for the time being.

We discovered Stickam just before we got the new MacBooks. My wife is well on her way to Stickam addiction. I’m afraid I’m not far behind. In case you don’t know, Stickam is a sight that combines interactive video and text chat with a kind of MySpace like home page (I think they may be owned by the same company as MySpace). You can post video, audio, and still pictures to your page. You can make friends and hang out in each others rooms. You can create chat rooms to hold meetings in. I’m still a little fuzzy about all the details. It’s kind of overwhelming at first.

I also discovered a new blog that I love (thanks to revbob over on Ex Cathedra) called The Sheila Variations. She’s a very cool, very literate, artsy type person with neat friends and interesting opinions. I’ve added her to my daily browsing list.

This is turning into a novel. I’ve covered most of the high points so I’ll finish this up and post it. I intend to post more frequently now that Spike (that’s my MacBook’s name) is my constant companion. Cheers!