WNSTN

(Want to comment on this? I cross-posted it on my blog to allow for comments)

So yesterday I tested my self control by waiting to find out about the Apple iPad. I did this by closing down Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader until Apple released the Keynote video online. It worked, except for in a moment of weakness I signed onto Facebook and saw that it was named the iPad.

That is the worst name ever.

But I remember a few years ago when Apple released the iPhone and everyone laughed at how dumb the name was. Fast forward to now, when millions of people have used the word iPhone multiple times a day, and we all think it’s the most obvious name because the Apple Reality Distortion Field has settled in. I imagine in a year or two this will be the case with the iPad - we’ll move away from feminine hygiene jokes and everyone will just want the device.

So I watched the SteveNote last night and took in all the demos of the software and then read a few blog posts, some positive, some negative. And I think most people writing about it are missing it. This is partially because, as with all new Apple products, the Tablet had been rumored to save mankind from itself and what Jobs announced yesterday unfortunately is simply Apple’s version of the next generation of computing. And there were a lot of rumors that were, as always, false which was disappointing to many people.

Here, for my future self and anyone else who may be interested, are my thoughts on some of the main features of the iPad.

Why Does this Exist? Apple has always been brave enough to tell people what they want, rather than responding to the masses’ requests and delivering some futile attempt to give everyone what they want. With the iPhone, Apple blew everyone out of the water because it wasn’t much like anything we expected. The iPhone, simply, was revolutionary. But the iPad is, on a hardware level, just a large iPod Touch. Not very revolutionary. The iPad exists therefore, to allow users to gain the potential that touch computing offers without the size limitations of an iPhone or iPod Touch. It won’t fit in your pocket, but it’s a lot easier to use while on the go than an iPhone is.

Software & OS I think a lot of people are let down by the software, whereas it is the thing that most excites me. When Apple released the iPhone no third-party software was allowed on it, and furthermore there was no “roadmap” of when it would be available. The iPad on the other hand, comes with 140,000-ish non-optimized apps and a roadmap for the development of iPad optimized apps. With the immediately available SDK and the iTunes store (whether you love it or hate it), the iPad on a software level is nothing but Potential. The demo of iWork didn’t seem that interesting yesterday because who thinks making documents is interesting; but I think the iPad will give us a sense of tactile creation again. By dragging and drawing and resizing with our fingers, designers can work in a more innate method. Hopefully Adobe (or some more nimble competitor) will come out with an Illustrator and Photoshop for the iPad that will remind us how poor mouse-based designing actually is.

In fact, the options seem incredible when you consider the size of the device. An iPhone is limited by its extremely small screen, but the nearly 10” tablet gives you some good working room. Imagine Architects being able to sketch plans or modify blueprints on the fly; contractors being able to pull up blueprints and double check everything on site. Imagine hospitals finally being able to access centralized medical records. Imagine using the iPad as a control device for the programs you use on your computer, or as a better remote for your home theater or Apple TV. Imagine a cable that plugs it into your DSLR letting you measure levels and exposure on a touchscreen, or previewing video that you are shooting. Imagine all the different uses that a large touch screen offers, and eventually they will probably be created for the iPad.

MultiTasking. This seems to be the most shocking of all revelations about the iPad - it doesn’t multi-task! But let us remember, it does multi-task, it just doesn’t let  you run everything. When you are using an iPhone, and based on what I’m reading from people who played with it, the iPad works the same, there are multiple tasks happening in the background. Mail is running, Safari is always in the state you last used it (all browser windows remain open and in the order you opened them), and the iPod is ready to play music. So the iPad and iPhone DO multi-task, but only with the tasks that Apple thinks should always be running. This can be frustrating, but consider the alternative.

Since the release of the Nexus One, the Google designed Android phone, one of the comments many people have made is that multi-tasking is great, but you never know what programs are running. There is an app-switcher, but it only shows six recently used apps. For many users, even advanced, geeky users, the only way to quit out of all programs is to restart the phone. That’s a horrible user experience, because most people won’t correlate a slow phone with too many apps being open because there is nothing in the OS that lets them know too many apps are open. So a slow phone will be a fault with Android, and Google will take the fall. Apple does not want this to happen, so they are taking the totalitarian approach of only Apple approved tasks are able to run always.

The iPhone has Push notifications from a web server that are able to keep you up to date on the phone even if an app is closed, but it remains to be seen how an iPad will solve this issue. Personally in my use of an iPhone, the lack of multi-tasking has never been much of an issue, except in a few specific cases. Apps launch so quickly most of the time that it does not matter whether it had been opened or closed before I wanted to switch to it. But the one exception is music - it is annoying if I am playing music in an App that isn’t the iPod, and need to do something else on the phone. Say I’m listening to Pandora while on the road. If I need to check Google Maps I have to close Pandora and stop the music to do so. This doesn’t kill the usefulness of the device, but it does make me use Pandora less because it just isn’t as convenient.

The lack of multi-tasking does make sense right now for the iPad since it seems to be working on a slightly modified version of the iPhone OS. I have no clue how fundamental the lack of multi-tasking is to the OS, and I have no clue if Apple plans to modify the devices abilities. What I would love to see is a simple system of multi-tasking. Allow me to select the apps I want to be able to remain open in the Background. An easy way that I see to do this is if the “dock” on the iPad had permission to keep apps open. In other words, the four apps that are at the bottom of the dock are the ones that can remain open. I’ll always know which apps are running, and at any time I can rearrange to end the tasks and shift my preferences.

Lack of a Camera This surprised me. I can only hope it’s coming in future versions of the iPad. One on the front would be cool, but one on the back would be just as cool, if apps could be written that allowed for me to draw over live images or manipulate pictures taken on the device (as already exist for the iPhone). I’m sure Apple has a reason to not include a camera on the device - possibly for the same reasons they didn’t add a camera to the iPod touch? But hopefully future generations of the device will add one. If one is added, we won’t find out until they announce it.

The iPad is a really cool device. It looks closer to the “future” than anything else since the iPhone. The best part about it is that it exists - it’s not a prototype, it’s not a beta, it is a real, working, touchscreen computer with thousands of apps and the potential for thousands more. I don’t think I’ll buy one until the next generation at the least, but the $499 price point makes it tempting to buy now. The iPad, despite it’s crappy name, is to me, a device with a ton of potential.

So yesterday I tested my self control by waiting to find out about the Apple iPad. I did this by closing down Twitter, Facebook and Google Reader until Apple released the Keynote video online. It worked, except for in a moment of weakness I signed onto Facebook and saw that it was named the iPad.

That is the worst name ever.

But I remember a few years ago when Apple released the iPhone and everyone laughed at how dumb the name was. Fast forward to now, when millions of people have used the word iPhone multiple times a day, and we all think it’s the most obvious name because the Apple Reality Distortion Field has settled in. I imagine in a year or two this will be the case with the iPad - we’ll move away from feminine hygiene jokes and everyone will just want the device.

So I watched the SteveNote last night and took in all the demos of the software and then read a few blog posts, some positive, some negative. And I think most people writing about it are missing it. This is partially because, as with all new Apple products, the Tablet had been rumored to save mankind from itself and what Jobs announced yesterday unfortunately is simply Apple’s version of the next generation of computing. And there were a lot of rumors that were, as always, false which was disappointing to many people.

Here, for my future self and anyone else who may be interested, are my thoughts on some of the main features of the iPad.

Why Does this Exist? Apple has always been brave enough to tell people what they want, rather than responding to the masses’ requests and delivering some futile attempt to give everyone what they want. With the iPhone, Apple blew everyone out of the water because it wasn’t much like anything we expected. The iPhone, simply, was revolutionary. But the iPad is, on a hardware level, just a large iPod Touch. Not very revolutionary. The iPad exists therefore, to allow users to gain the potential that touch computing offers without the size limitations of an iPhone or iPod Touch. It won’t fit in your pocket, but it’s a lot easier to use while on the go than an iPhone is.

Software & OS I think a lot of people are let down by the software, whereas it is the thing that most excites me. When Apple released the iPhone no third-party software was allowed on it, and furthermore there was no “roadmap” of when it would be available. The iPad on the other hand, comes with 140,000-ish non-optimized apps and a roadmap for the development of iPad optimized apps. With the immediately available SDK and the iTunes store (whether you love it or hate it), the iPad on a software level is nothing but Potential. The demo of iWork didn’t seem that interesting yesterday because who thinks making documents is interesting; but I think the iPad will give us a sense of tactile creation again. By dragging and drawing and resizing with our fingers, designers can work in a more innate method. Hopefully Adobe (or some more nimble competitor) will come out with an Illustrator and Photoshop for the iPad that will remind us how poor mouse-based designing actually is.

In fact, the options seem incredible when you consider the size of the device. An iPhone is limited by its extremely small screen, but the nearly 10” tablet gives you some good working room. Imagine Architects being able to sketch plans or modify blueprints on the fly; contractors being able to pull up blueprints and double check everything on site. Imagine hospitals finally being able to access centralized medical records. Imagine using the iPad as a control device for the programs you use on your computer, or as a better remote for your home theater or Apple TV. Imagine a cable that plugs it into your DSLR letting you measure levels and exposure on a touchscreen, or previewing video that you are shooting. Imagine all the different uses that a large touch screen offers, and eventually they will probably be created for the iPad.

MultiTasking. This seems to be the most shocking of all revelations about the iPad - it doesn’t multi-task! But let us remember, it does multi-task, it just doesn’t let you run everything. When you are using an iPhone, and based on what I’m reading from people who played with it, the iPad works the same, there are multiple tasks happening in the background. Mail is running, Safari is always in the state you last used it (all browser windows remain open and in the order you opened them), and the iPod is ready to play music. So the iPad and iPhone DO multi-task, but only with the tasks that Apple thinks should always be running. This can be frustrating, but consider the alternative.

Since the release of the Nexus One, the Google designed Android phone, one of the comments many people have made is that multi-tasking is great, but you never know what programs are running. There is an app-switcher, but it only shows six recently used apps. For many users, even advanced, geeky users, the only way to quit out of all programs is to restart the phone. That’s a horrible user experience, because most people won’t correlate a slow phone with too many apps being open because there is nothing in the OS that lets them know too many apps are open. So a slow phone will be a fault with Android, and Google will take the fall. Apple does not want this to happen, so they are taking the totalitarian approach of only Apple approved tasks are able to run always.

The iPhone has Push notifications from a web server that are able to keep you up to date on the phone even if an app is closed, but it remains to be seen how an iPad will solve this issue. Personally in my use of an iPhone, the lack of multi-tasking has never been much of an issue, except in a few specific cases. Apps launch so quickly most of the time that it does not matter whether it had been opened or closed before I wanted to switch to it. But the one exception is music - it is annoying if I am playing music in an App that isn’t the iPod, and need to do something else on the phone. Say I’m listening to Pandora while on the road. If I need to check Google Maps I have to close Pandora and stop the music to do so. This doesn’t kill the usefulness of the device, but it does make me use Pandora less because it just isn’t as convenient.

The lack of multi-tasking does make sense right now for the iPad since it seems to be working on a slightly modified version of the iPhone OS. I have no clue how fundamental the lack of multi-tasking is to the OS, and I have no clue if Apple plans to modify the devices abilities. What I would love to see is a simple system of multi-tasking. Allow me to select the apps I want to be able to remain open in the Background. An easy way that I see to do this is if the “dock” on the iPad had permission to keep apps open. In other words, the four apps that are at the bottom of the dock are the ones that can remain open. I’ll always know which apps are running, and at any time I can rearrange to end the tasks and shift my preferences.

Lack of a Camera This surprised me. I can only hope it’s coming in future versions of the iPad. One on the front would be cool, but one on the back would be just as cool, if apps could be written that allowed for me to draw over live images or manipulate pictures taken on the device (as already exist for the iPhone). I’m sure Apple has a reason to not include a camera on the device - possibly for the same reasons they didn’t add a camera to the iPod touch? But hopefully future generations of the device will add one. If one is added, we won’t find out until they announce it.

The iPad is a really cool device. It looks closer to the “future” than anything else since the iPhone. The best part about it is that it exists - it’s not a prototype, it’s not a beta, it is a real, working, touchscreen computer with thousands of apps and the potential for thousands more. I don’t think I’ll buy one until the next generation at the least, but the $499 price point makes it tempting to buy now. The iPad, despite it’s crappy name, is to me, a device with a ton of potential.

Ending a yearlong investigation, the Justice Department on Monday announced its conditions for accepting a proposed merger betweenTicketmaster Entertainment and Live Nation, a deal that could significantly remake the live entertainment business by combining touring, management and ticketing into one company. (…)

David Balto, a former antitrust lawyer at the Justice Department who is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, said that the Justice Department’s extensive study and tough stance reflected the changed priorities of the Obama administration.

“In the Republican administration this might have sailed through with hardly a nick,” he said. “They gave a careful, thorough evaluation and took a novel approach to remedy which hopefully will work.”

-The NYT

Really? That’s our standard of measure? The last guy wouldn’t have done a thing, but we made them modify the proposal!

Well Mr. David Balto, whether or not the previous administration would have done anything to stop this merger, it fell to your hands to decide how to handle it. And I’m glad that you did a year-long thorough evaluation into the merger of Ticketmaster - a company with very recent antitrust practices; that has no clear competitor because of its tendency to sign exclusivity deals with major venues as a ticket seller and thus the ability to charge whatever they want in fees - with LiveNation - a company that manages a few hundred of the biggest entertainment acts in the nation today - to find out if there might be any anti-competitive motives for the merger.

Now, thanks to your wisdom, Justice Department, millions of people in the US can look forward to ever escalating fees and ticket prices charged for concerts by the same company that manages the very acts that are putting on the concerts with nary an opportunity for competition, choice, or fairness.

Seems like an obvious question, no?

One day he started on a new set of slides, prepared for him by a lab at the University of Pittsburgh where he had ordered specialized staining. He was ordering so many slides, he had to start paying for this out of his own pocket. He put the first slide from the new set under his microscope and looked in.

“What is this?” he said out loud. “Geez. Gee! What is this?”

Brown and red splotches. All over the place. Large accumulations of tau proteins. Tau was kind of like sludge, clogging up the works, killing cells in regions responsible for mood, emotions, and executive functioning.

This was why Mike Webster was crazy.

Omalu showed the slides to Wecht and to scientists at the University of Pittsburgh. Everyone agreed: This was a disease, or a form of it, that no one had ever seen before. Omalu wondered what to call it. He wanted a good acronym. Eventually, he came up with CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy. He wrote a paper detailing his findings. He titled it “Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy in a National Football League Player” and put it in an envelope and sent it to the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Neurosurgery. He thought NFL doctors would be pleased when they read it. He really did. He thought they would welcome a finding as important as this: scientific evidence that the kind of repeated blows to the head sustained in football could cause severe, debilitating brain damage. He thought they could use his research to try and fix the problem.

“I was naive,” he says now. “There are times I wish I never looked at Mike Webster’s brain. It has dragged me into worldly affairs I do not want to be associated with. Human meanness, wickedness, and selfishness. People trying to cover up, to control how information is released. I started this not knowing I was walking into a minefield. That is my only regret.”

This article in GQ talks about the discovery of CTE -chronic traumatic encephalopathy - and how the NFL has worked hard to discredit the scientists researching it and deny what they are finding. Good article from the scientist’s angle about how the discovery came about and what exactly is happening with it. Gives me another reason to not like football too; now I feel that to cheer on Pro football players is similar to the ancient Roman gladiator fights, except that no one is paying attention when they die years down the road, often times by their own doing.

Among His Effects We Found a Photograph

by Ed Ochester

My mother is beautiful as a flapper.
She is so in love
that she has been gazing
secretly at my father
for forty years.
He’s in uniform,
with puttees and swagger stick,
a tiny cork mustache
bobbing above a shoreline of teeth.
They are “poor but happy.”
In his hand is a lost book
he had memorized,
with a thousand clear answers
to everything.

That’s from today’s Writer’s Almanac. Last night I did a bunch of grown up things like pay bills and move all our paystubs from last year into an archive folder so I could start filing away pay stubs from this year and sort through all my movies and CD’s to see which ones I want to keep and which I want to sell at McKay. After doing these things, I needed some consolation, and that consolation came in the form of literature.

I started reading Wendell Berry’s The Art of the Commonplace, a collection of his Agrarian essays. In the introductory essay by the editor, Norman Wirzba, I found a quote worth copying into my moleskine.

The effect of careerism is thus to make ourselves frustratingly helpless and ignorant in regard to basic human skills - growing food, maintaining a home, caring for and educating children, promoting friendship and cooperation, facing illness and death - as well as financially dependent on other specialists who provide for us what we cannot provide for ourselves. Specialization also leads to the sense of our own isolation from the broader wholes of which we are part. Isolated, we wonder how what we do matters, and perhaps more important, we shield ourselves from the harmful and the beneficial effects of what we do. Berry suggests that instead of measuring someone’s intelligence in terms of master of specialized information, we should instead judge it by “the good order or harmoniousness of his or her surroundings.”

I’ve thought about this a great deal. It’s one of the reasons I appreciate the idea of a liberal arts education but I didn’t finish mine; I learn much better by doing and college in the end pushes you to become a specialist. I’ll never be a specialist in anything, or at least in one thing because as I near mastery of one thing I have recognized five others that I must learn to finish mastering that one thing.

So it was good and all that I read that thought, and it made me excited to read some of Berry’s actual essays, to be challenged in some of my ways or assumptions. And so I turned to the first essay - A Native Hill - and began reading. And about half way through the essay he really just explains why I am the way I am. I don’t know if this means I beat him to the punch (since he was in his 30’s when he wrote this), but this is as accurate an explanation of why I pursue and explore the things I do as I’ve ever found. So, for digital posterity, I quote at large from his essay, with no other commentary.

After more than thirty years I have at last arrived at the candor necessary to stand on this part of the earth that is so full of my own history and so much damaged by it, and ask: What is this place? What is in it? What is its nature? How should men live in it? What must I do?

I have not found the answers, though I believe that in partial and fragmentary ways they have begun to come to me. But the questions are more important than their answers. In the final sense they have no answers. They are like the questions - they are perhaps the same questions - that were the discipline of Job. They are a part of what the necessary enactment of humility, teaching a man what his importance is, what his responsibility is, and what his place is, both on the earth and in the order of things. And though the answers must always come obscurely and in fragments, the questions must be asked. They are fertile questions. In their implications and effects, they are moral and aesthetic and, in the best and fullest sense, practical. They promise a relationship to the world that is decent and preserving.

They are also, both in origin and effect, religious. I am uneasy with this term, for such religion as has been openly practiced in this part of the world has promoted and fed upon a destructive schism between body and soul, Heaven and earth. It has encouraged people to believe that the world is of no importance, and that their only obligation in it is to submit to certain churchly formulas in order to get to Heaven. And so the people who might have been expected to care most selflessly for the world have had their minds turned elsewhere - to a pursuit of “salvation” that was really only another form of gluttony and self-love, the desire to perpetuate their lives beyond the life of the world. The Heaven-bent have abused the earth thoughtlessly, by inattention, and their negligence has permitted and encouraged others to abuse it deliberately. Once the creator was removed from the creation, divinity became only a remote abstraction, a social weapon in the hands of the religious institutions. This split in public values produced or was accompanied by, as it was bound to be, an equally artificial and ugly division in people’s lives, so that a man, while pursuing Heaven with the sublime appetite he thought of as his soul, could turn his heart against his neighbors and his hands agains the world. For these reasons, though I know that my questions are religious, I dislike having to say that they are.

But when I ask them my aim is not primarily to get to Heaven. Though Heaven is certainly more important than the earth if all they say about it is true, it is still morally incidental to it and dependent on it, and I can only imagine it and desire it in terms of what I know of the earth. And so my questions do not aspire beyond the earth. They aspire toward it and into it. Perhaps they aspire through it. They are religious because they are asked at the limit of what I know; they acknowledge mystery and honor its presence in the creation; they are spoke in reverence for the order and grace that I see, and that I trust beyond my power to see.

“I admit it… I have a problem: I’ve been shopping in thrift stores for so long now that I can barely bring myself to even shop retail, let alone actually purchase anything new. But, there are worse problems to have, I suppose. Don’t get me wrong, I make no apologies for this. Shopping second hand is fun, economical and even “green.” If you haven’t been bitten by the bug, you don’t know what you’re missing.”

-Commerce with a Conscience

I too have this problem. I started thrifting at 16, because I had a part time job and felt I should buy my own clothes but couldn’t quite afford new ones. And for years I was a master at thrifting; until it became really hip and everyone thought that thrift stores were the greatest thing ever. Also, I moved out of Alabama which had the awesome Alabama’s Thrift Store that was purchased by America’s Thrift Store which always was a treasure trove of good clothes. I could walk into the one by my house and be guaranteed of finding one or two excellent pieces of clothes for less than $7.

But when the thrifting phase kicked in - and you know it was popular because American Eagle and Gap were selling t-shirts that looked like they were vintage, you know, the ones with the goofy company names and logos like you find at a Thrift Store if you search, except that these were retailing for 14.99 or more and had American Eagle somewhere on the front - that is when I lost my love of thrift stores. The crap to gem ratio was really low for awhile there, and to say “I got this at a thrift store” was a secret password into hipsterism. And I am, I freely admit, a reluctant hipster.

All that to say, that if you live in Nashville, there is hope on the horizon for the world of Thrift stores. If Southern Thrift and Music City Thrift (and Goodwill, the “we charge the same price for used clothing as Kohls does for new clothing” thrift store) just aren’t churning out the goodness you once knew, then my friends, go to Humankind Nashville. It’s a new non-profit thrift store directly across the street from the Goodwill near Five Points, and it’s fantastic.

It’s a curated thrift store with cheap prices, a designer thrift store if you will, a thrift store for people who have grown tired of the constant searching of the racks hoping for once worthwhile piece of clothing to justify touching all the dusty, aging clothes that fill other thrift stores. The two gentlemen who own it had the brilliant idea of sorting through all donated items and keeping only the nice stuff, and then charging dirt cheap prices for said nice stuff. And best of all, the thrift store is non-profit - donating all proceeds to help refugees in Nashville buy school supplies.

But most of all, it has good clothes. At reasonable prices. So, please, go check it out.

Prerequisite for this post: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKythlXAIY

Embedding is disabled by request, or I’d do so on this here post. No matter, go to the ‘Tube, watch OK Go’s latest one-take viral wonder, and then hop back over here.

Here, I’ll wait. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UJKythlXAIY

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langer:

Do not jump into your automobile next June and rush out to the canyon country hoping to see some of that which I have attempted to evoke in these pages. In the first place you can’t see anything from a car; you’ve got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk, better yet crawl, on hands and knees, over the sandstone and through the thornbush and cactus. When traces of blood begin to mark your trail you’ll see something, maybe.

I see a lot of people perfectly content to drive their proverbial RVs through the Canyonlands, to just add a symbolic tint to their Twitter avatars and call it political action. Newsflash, kids: you’re not getting anything done. You’ve got to get off of this goddamned contraption and get out their on your hands and knees and actually do something. And if you’re too busy to do that then write a check to the people we rely on in times like these to be able to get out there and leave a little blood on the trail.