Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts
Showing posts with label iPhone. Show all posts
"There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book," says Patti Smith, winning the National Book Award.
Last night, in the nonfiction category, for her memoir "Just Kids" about her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe:
I used to hang out in bookstores and buy piles of books. Nowadays, I hang out of the internet, and though I read many, many hours a day, it's mostly on the computer screen. When I've had enough screen time, I like to listen to audiobooks. There are 27 audiobooks in my iPhone at the moment. But I do occasionally choose to have my reading in old-fashioned book form. This year, of the few books I bought, one was "Just Kids."
I'm not really into the romanticism of the physical object that is the book. I think the internet is more beautiful than a book. But is the internet "in our material world"?
Accepting the award to applause and cheers, Ms. Smith — clearly the favorite of the night — choked up as she recalled her days as a clerk in the Scribner bookstore as a young woman.Congratulations to Patti Smith. She's a longtime favorite of mine.
“I dreamed of having a book of my own, of writing one that I could put on a shelf,” she said. “Please, no matter how we advance technologically, please don’t abandon the book. There is nothing in our material world more beautiful than the book.”
I used to hang out in bookstores and buy piles of books. Nowadays, I hang out of the internet, and though I read many, many hours a day, it's mostly on the computer screen. When I've had enough screen time, I like to listen to audiobooks. There are 27 audiobooks in my iPhone at the moment. But I do occasionally choose to have my reading in old-fashioned book form. This year, of the few books I bought, one was "Just Kids."
I'm not really into the romanticism of the physical object that is the book. I think the internet is more beautiful than a book. But is the internet "in our material world"?
"My girls would wear Chanel, maybe a little black dress... They were very elegant."
"A lot of guys who stay at the hotels go down to the bar and they'll have a few drinks with a pretty girl. At some point, she hits him with a price. It's an impulse buy."
The business model that is prostitution at luxury hotels.
As for Charlie Sheen:
It's fun watching that video about an iPhone Square and thinking about prostitutes using it. It's so everything-but-prostitutes.
The business model that is prostitution at luxury hotels.
As for Charlie Sheen:
Insiders were skeptical Sheen "stiffed" Anderson for $12,000. "The first thing they do is take an imprint of the credit card," one pro said.Lipstick! Carbon paper! Come on. If they're wearing Chanel, you'd think they'd have one of these things:
What? They walk around with little credit card machines? "No, they're too bulky," the woman said. "The girls just roll their lipstick over the carbon paper to get an imprint."
It's fun watching that video about an iPhone Square and thinking about prostitutes using it. It's so everything-but-prostitutes.
Lawprof crosses street.
Husband stalks with iPhone.
ADDED: Instapundit asks:
WHY DID THE LAWPROF cross the road?And, I cross the street to get to the adorable husband again here.
Life on the Mississippi.
At Wyalusing State Park today, we rented a canoe...
... and paddled 5 miles of Mississippi River. Part of it was out on the open river like that, and part of it was in these slow back channels called sloughs:
I could do photos because I brought my iPhone. I didn't want to risk one of my good digital cameras, but I decided to risk the iPhone on the theory that if we fell in and the phone died, I could buy one of the new iPhones, which is something I'd like to do anyway.
We fantasized about living on a houseboat (complete with sliding board):
And look — look closely....
A bald eagle!
... and paddled 5 miles of Mississippi River. Part of it was out on the open river like that, and part of it was in these slow back channels called sloughs:
I could do photos because I brought my iPhone. I didn't want to risk one of my good digital cameras, but I decided to risk the iPhone on the theory that if we fell in and the phone died, I could buy one of the new iPhones, which is something I'd like to do anyway.
We fantasized about living on a houseboat (complete with sliding board):
And look — look closely....
A bald eagle!
Blogging's not easy.
I've got to fortify myself.
There now, you've getting an intimate look at the Meadhouse blogspace.
Apple on the supposed problems with the new iPhone: "Their big drop in bars is because their high bars were never real in the first place."
So it's not a flaw in the new iPhone, it's something that was phony in all the phones all along. Hmmm. How convenient! Just when I was trying to decide if I should buy the new iPhone or stick with the old one while the bugs are getting ironed out of the new one.
Apple... said it will fix its signal strength formula to conform to other AT&T phones through a free software update for iPhone models 3G, 3Gs and 4 within a few weeks.Massaging our perceptions. Who knows if the reception is really bad or not? People are fixated on the way their bars look. So make the bars bigger.
''We are also making bars 1, 2 and 3 a bit taller so they will be easier to see,'' Apple said.
"Just as German taxpayers are finally fed up with subsidising Greek pensioners, so Flemings are fed up with subsidising Walloons...."
The troubles in Belgium.
Just yesterday, my iPhone aggressively autocorrected my attempt to type "walk" as "Walloon." We could Walloon together. Ominous!
***
Just yesterday, my iPhone aggressively autocorrected my attempt to type "walk" as "Walloon." We could Walloon together. Ominous!
On the Tumbling Rock Trail...
... I was wearing dark glasses with yellowish lenses. On the way back, I took the glasses off and suddenly all that gray-looking quartzite rock popped into technicolor. All that purple and rose with tinges of lichen green!
What a crazy thing! Taking those sunglasses off was like dropping acid.
These pictures — all done with an iPhone — were taken at Devil's Lake.
What a crazy thing! Taking those sunglasses off was like dropping acid.
These pictures — all done with an iPhone — were taken at Devil's Lake.
PocketJustice.
A free iPhone app:
PocketJustice brings the U.S. Supreme Court down to earth through abstracts of the Court's constitutional decisions and access to its public sessions. The application includes voting alignments and biographical sketches for all 110 justices. PocketJustice harnesses recordings of the Court's public proceedings to deliver hundreds of hours of oral arguments and opinion announcements. In many of these cases, PocketJustice provides synchronized, searchable transcripts identifying all speakers. This version offers information and audio for the top 100 constitutional law cases.Wow! Downloaded.
I have a laptop (MacBook Pro) and an iPhone, so what am I doing with an iPad?
Though I bought an iPad as soon as I could, 2 days ago, I'm not going to mindlessly boost the thing, and I'm not going to fool myself about whether it's useful to me. It needs to earn its place in between the fabulously useful laptop and iPhone. Obviously, it's medium size and medium weight. I'm more likely to carry it with me than the laptop, but unlike the iPhone, it's not always going to come along. I can't put it in a pocket or my smallest handbag. And I'm not going to pick it up from my bedside to check the time and a couple websites when I wake up. I'm not going to read it from a completely supine position, as I often do with the iPhone, when I'm in bed and not ready to sit up.
I might use it in bed if I am sitting up, because it turns on instantly and if I'm ready to read but not yet inclined to write. It's very nice for checking email because of the relatively big, bright screen and the way, in landscape mode, I can see the list of email to the left and display any given item on the right. I appreciate that I can lock it into landscape or portrait mode and read while lying on my side. That's something the iPhone won't do. Of course, the iPhone, unlike the iPad, is a phone, and that makes it the one thing I want to have near me all the time.
But most of the time, I'm on the laptop. If I have a table in front of me, I prefer the laptop. Even without a table, I prefer the laptop if I'm going to write. Even though it heats up, I'll have it on my lap while I'm sprawled, half-sitting, on the sofa or in bed. The hinge holding the screen upright and the solid keyboard make it far superior to the iPad for what I want to do.
Maybe I could replace the laptop with a desktop for home use. (I have a desktop in my office, but my home desktop died about a year ago.) The desktop would be better than the laptop for serious writing and working with photographs and video, and then maybe the iPad would insinuate its way into my life as I do things in places in the house away from the desk: at the dining table, in bed, near the TV, on the deck, etc. But I think not. If I'm going to write, and I always feel like I'm about to write, I prefer the laptop.
The iPad might be nice for the simple consumption of movies and books. Or looking through photographs, if you do that. This is especially important if you're away from home, since it's easy to carry and the screen is great. (Note: I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I haven't used it much — and not at all in the past year. I just hate the way the screen looks, with its low-contrast gray-on-gray.) But I'm the restless type. I don't passively consume media for very long. I need to go back and forth between reading and writing, and though it's far easier to write on the iPad than on the iPhone, I'm not going to write on the iPad unless I'm out somewhere and I've left the laptop behind.
Now, I have a special use for the iPad that I'm going to test out today. I have notes for my classes that I keep on iDisk, so that they are saved in one place on line whether I work on them from my laptop or from my desktop. In the past, I have printed out the relevant pages for class. Occasionally, I've just worked from the laptop in class, which is a bit awkward. My primary motivation for buying the iPad was that I pictured myself displaying the relevant pages of notes on a screen that I could lay flat, next to my textbook, during class. I thought this would be extremely convenient.
There's an iDisk app that lets me get to my documents, but the screen image is terrible. It's readable, but not at all crisp. I paid $9.99 for Apple's word processing program Pages, but I can't find a way to work directly with a document saved to iDisk, the way I do on my laptop and desktop. [ADDED: Apple confirms that it can't be done.] I've cut and pasted to get text from one place to another, and I can see that the text would be displayed in high resolution. But that's an extra, annoying step, and it means that if I do any editing, it will not be saved to the iDisk document. Also, I lose important formatting, notably the extra space between paragraphs.
And why am I even using Pages? I prefer Microsoft Word, which I have used on a Mac since 1985. I had version 1.5 of Word, back in the day when you had the program and your documents on a single floppy disk. But Microsoft won't make a Word app for iPad. This is all very annoying. The #1 thing I wanted to do with iPad is not (yet) doable.
IN SHORT: It's a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it's a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.
I might use it in bed if I am sitting up, because it turns on instantly and if I'm ready to read but not yet inclined to write. It's very nice for checking email because of the relatively big, bright screen and the way, in landscape mode, I can see the list of email to the left and display any given item on the right. I appreciate that I can lock it into landscape or portrait mode and read while lying on my side. That's something the iPhone won't do. Of course, the iPhone, unlike the iPad, is a phone, and that makes it the one thing I want to have near me all the time.
But most of the time, I'm on the laptop. If I have a table in front of me, I prefer the laptop. Even without a table, I prefer the laptop if I'm going to write. Even though it heats up, I'll have it on my lap while I'm sprawled, half-sitting, on the sofa or in bed. The hinge holding the screen upright and the solid keyboard make it far superior to the iPad for what I want to do.
Maybe I could replace the laptop with a desktop for home use. (I have a desktop in my office, but my home desktop died about a year ago.) The desktop would be better than the laptop for serious writing and working with photographs and video, and then maybe the iPad would insinuate its way into my life as I do things in places in the house away from the desk: at the dining table, in bed, near the TV, on the deck, etc. But I think not. If I'm going to write, and I always feel like I'm about to write, I prefer the laptop.
The iPad might be nice for the simple consumption of movies and books. Or looking through photographs, if you do that. This is especially important if you're away from home, since it's easy to carry and the screen is great. (Note: I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I haven't used it much — and not at all in the past year. I just hate the way the screen looks, with its low-contrast gray-on-gray.) But I'm the restless type. I don't passively consume media for very long. I need to go back and forth between reading and writing, and though it's far easier to write on the iPad than on the iPhone, I'm not going to write on the iPad unless I'm out somewhere and I've left the laptop behind.
Now, I have a special use for the iPad that I'm going to test out today. I have notes for my classes that I keep on iDisk, so that they are saved in one place on line whether I work on them from my laptop or from my desktop. In the past, I have printed out the relevant pages for class. Occasionally, I've just worked from the laptop in class, which is a bit awkward. My primary motivation for buying the iPad was that I pictured myself displaying the relevant pages of notes on a screen that I could lay flat, next to my textbook, during class. I thought this would be extremely convenient.
There's an iDisk app that lets me get to my documents, but the screen image is terrible. It's readable, but not at all crisp. I paid $9.99 for Apple's word processing program Pages, but I can't find a way to work directly with a document saved to iDisk, the way I do on my laptop and desktop. [ADDED: Apple confirms that it can't be done.] I've cut and pasted to get text from one place to another, and I can see that the text would be displayed in high resolution. But that's an extra, annoying step, and it means that if I do any editing, it will not be saved to the iDisk document. Also, I lose important formatting, notably the extra space between paragraphs.
And why am I even using Pages? I prefer Microsoft Word, which I have used on a Mac since 1985. I had version 1.5 of Word, back in the day when you had the program and your documents on a single floppy disk. But Microsoft won't make a Word app for iPad. This is all very annoying. The #1 thing I wanted to do with iPad is not (yet) doable.
IN SHORT: It's a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it's a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.
Meade goes to Washington: Pictures from the Capitol, from just a few minutes ago.
I just spoke to Meade, who arrived in Washington, D.C., after a 22-hour bus ride, in time for the protest at the Capitol. He's taking pictures and video, but what I have right now is from the iPhone:
I think the yellow flags say "Don't Tread on Me" (or as we say around here: Don't Tread on Meade).
Nice soviet-style graphics in this one:
This shows the crowd-size:
Consider that the weather is absolutely beautiful — and either discount the crowd-size or get over there and make it bigger.
I love this guy:
He had a whole traffic-sign theme going:
Meade got his name as David Rothwell — from the eastern shore of Maryland.
And I really love this guy:
Citizen Meade!
I spoke to him from the scene, where the phone battery is close to dying. I'll put up the video of the phone call in a minute, but basically he's having a great time amongst the right-wingers who, he assures me, are not crazy.
ADDED: Here's the video of the phone call:
And Meade texts that he'd like you to see this:
I think the yellow flags say "Don't Tread on Me" (or as we say around here: Don't Tread on Meade).
Nice soviet-style graphics in this one:
This shows the crowd-size:
Consider that the weather is absolutely beautiful — and either discount the crowd-size or get over there and make it bigger.
I love this guy:
He had a whole traffic-sign theme going:
Meade got his name as David Rothwell — from the eastern shore of Maryland.
And I really love this guy:
Citizen Meade!
I spoke to him from the scene, where the phone battery is close to dying. I'll put up the video of the phone call in a minute, but basically he's having a great time amongst the right-wingers who, he assures me, are not crazy.
ADDED: Here's the video of the phone call:
And Meade texts that he'd like you to see this:
"People from the village come up to me and tease me, 'We hear you've started drawing on your telephone.'"
"And I tell them, 'Well, no, actually, it's just that occasionally I speak on my sketch pad.'"
David Hockney and his iPhone.
David Hockney and his iPhone.
... Hockney limits his contact with the screen exclusively to the pad of his thumb. "The thing is," Hockney explains, "if you are using your pointer or other fingers, you actually have to be working from your elbow. Only the thumb has the opposable joint which allows you to move over the screen with maximum speed and agility, and the screen is exactly the right size, you can easily reach every corner with your thumb." He goes on to note how people used to worry that computers would one day render us "all thumbs," but it's incredible the dexterity, the expressive range, lodged in "these not-so-simple thumbs of ours."
2 products that look a lot better in the ads than they've worked for me.
1. MobileMe. This thing supposedly syncs the calendars in all your computers and your iPhone. I use an iPhone, 2 different desktops, and at least one laptop and thought it would be cool to be able to put things onto my calendar using whatever device is in front of me at the moment. Now that I've done that, I've got to check for appointments on multiple calendars, because the syncing has not been reliable, and I have no idea how well it's working at any given time. It's not a convenience, but a big distraction. Maybe Apple can fix it, but lord, how it has wasted my time and infused my life with an uneasy sense that I don't know if I'm missing appointments.
2. Tempur-Pedic. You think this mattress will deliver a marvelous sleep experience?
2. Tempur-Pedic. You think this mattress will deliver a marvelous sleep experience?
What happened on Bellyache Ridge.
Here we are just married, on the rock where moments before, we exchanged rings — solemnizing our own marriage, pursuant to Colorado's wonderful statutory law.
You can see that my toenails are fortuitously painted the same color as the mountain asters that surround the wedding rock that we found atop Bellyache Ridge. (Enlarge photo.) (The color is actually called "Done Out in Deco," not "Mountain Aster.")
I'm standing, in order to take this picture, and Meade is still sitting, using his iPhone, talking to his mother, the only one of our parents who is still living. I've already finished my iPhone calls to my sons and my comment to this blog, but I sat there alongside my new husband for a good while after our private wedding vows and the putting on of the rings.
Now, you may ask: How come there was cell phone service way up there? It was funny, but we drove up Bellyache Ridge Road, which went way up a mountain, including a long section at the top that was a narrow dirt road, and after we found a place to ditch the car and hiked farther up, we encountered a big old cell phone tower:
We had to wonder if this was a pretty enough place, now, but next to the tower, we saw a wild garden of what I had called "living Koosh Balls" in a blog post earlier in the day. (They're really called musk thistle.)
Look closely — or enlarge the photo — and you'll see that there is a yellow swallowtail butterfly on one of the Koosh balls. The flowers and the butterfly and everything else seemed to say that this was the place, and we found our big flat rock to sit on and performed our wedding. And only later did we realize how useful and apt it was that we could use our iPhones there — apt because Meade and I had met through this blog, and blogging, emailing, texting, and telephoning had been a big part of our relationship. So that ugly tower really did belong on our wedding mountain, Bellyache Ridge.
The mountaintop had been deserted when we climbed up and while we took our vows, but then suddenly a lone runner came over the ridge, like some kind of angel sent to witness. After she passed by, we talked about her and how she was our witness and how strange it was that she'd had no idea that she was our witness and that we weren't merely a couple sitting on a rock, but we were newlywed within that minute. Then, when we finally climbed back down the path, she was looping back, so we saw our angel again. We called out to her and told her everything. She took our picture for us:
Thanks, Millie!
You can see that my toenails are fortuitously painted the same color as the mountain asters that surround the wedding rock that we found atop Bellyache Ridge. (Enlarge photo.) (The color is actually called "Done Out in Deco," not "Mountain Aster.")
I'm standing, in order to take this picture, and Meade is still sitting, using his iPhone, talking to his mother, the only one of our parents who is still living. I've already finished my iPhone calls to my sons and my comment to this blog, but I sat there alongside my new husband for a good while after our private wedding vows and the putting on of the rings.
Now, you may ask: How come there was cell phone service way up there? It was funny, but we drove up Bellyache Ridge Road, which went way up a mountain, including a long section at the top that was a narrow dirt road, and after we found a place to ditch the car and hiked farther up, we encountered a big old cell phone tower:
We had to wonder if this was a pretty enough place, now, but next to the tower, we saw a wild garden of what I had called "living Koosh Balls" in a blog post earlier in the day. (They're really called musk thistle.)
Look closely — or enlarge the photo — and you'll see that there is a yellow swallowtail butterfly on one of the Koosh balls. The flowers and the butterfly and everything else seemed to say that this was the place, and we found our big flat rock to sit on and performed our wedding. And only later did we realize how useful and apt it was that we could use our iPhones there — apt because Meade and I had met through this blog, and blogging, emailing, texting, and telephoning had been a big part of our relationship. So that ugly tower really did belong on our wedding mountain, Bellyache Ridge.
The mountaintop had been deserted when we climbed up and while we took our vows, but then suddenly a lone runner came over the ridge, like some kind of angel sent to witness. After she passed by, we talked about her and how she was our witness and how strange it was that she'd had no idea that she was our witness and that we weren't merely a couple sitting on a rock, but we were newlywed within that minute. Then, when we finally climbed back down the path, she was looping back, so we saw our angel again. We called out to her and told her everything. She took our picture for us:
Thanks, Millie!
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