It’s really not the iPads or iPods or even my dearly beloved Mac. It’s that way of doing things because somehow he was sure he was right. Only geniuses can get away with that and this was a genius. I have admired him for the last 27 years. There is too much laziness and small-mindedness in corporate America. This was the one who was different.

Thanks for everything, Steve.

Other than having to be careful where I take it since I don’t have a case yet, I’ve used it as much as possible. I find myself going to it over and over again not only out in the city but in the comfort of my own home. It’s so instantaneous that doing things on the iPod feels sluggish and doing things on the iMac feels like so much work (and then I have to sit on that swivel computer chair). It’s so fast and the apps are so often streamlined versions of full programs. It’s small yet not too small. It makes the web and a lot of other activities immediately 3D. I’ve cooked with it (Epicurious), read in it (Nook and Kindle), facebooked, browsed pictures, taken notes at a conference, and used it to edit some files, and now I’m blogging on it. It makes things immediately real in a way personal computing has not been. It’s interactive.

There are a few downsides. The absence of the Tab key is irritating beyond belief, especially for dialog. Moving about in a document is less than easy since there are no arrow keys and the touch step is a little awkward and far from accurate. I will be writing and editing scenes on it but not whole novels. Somehow I keep missing the space bar and end up with words about twenty words long though I’m getting better at it. There appear to be no perfect cases available for it for now since people are backordered and I’m very picky. Mine is still in its shipping plastic suit. People need to make apps that work both as iPhone and iPad more often. It’s a ripoff I need to pay twice to use THE SAME APP!

Overall, I love this thing. It’s blazing fast, something full computers cannot be by their nature. Welcome to the new word of personal computing.

Because every human on this Earth someday comes to the conclusion that they should take care of themselves.

Thanks to a local business and some string pulling, I was able to get myself a great birthday gift. I used it today to write a lengthy scene. I was envious at the girl at the next table because she had a MacBook Air (a thing of beauty) but I had the IT thing of the spring. The iPad 2… in white. It weighs next to nothing and sits well my fashionable, moderately-sized purses. And that’s what I wanted, right? What I need for it is a word processor app I can use without being online. Even TextEdit is far more sophisticated a word processor than most apps since they’re good at handling chunks of data in useful ways but not so much at writing scenes of fiction. The keyboard is completely useable, though. Maybe not for marathon sessions of 10,000 words + but certainly enough for lengthy scenes and blog posts. The only thing that’s hard is the absence of the tab key and the extra work required to write dialouge. Dialouge is hard enough on a normal keyboard at my iMac, with its many syntax needs. On the iPad, where you have to switch out between so many instances of the keyboard to get to all the keys you need, it can be infuriating. But I bought it because everyone wants it, its perfectly capable for notes, it looks awesome, the apps are great, and its my birthday and I wanted it. So there.

GoodReader and Evernote are standing in for my writing needs right now but I can’t wishing with all my might Google (or someone) would write an app that mirrors (and syncs) with the fabulous Google Docs. Evernote is close but it doesn’t have the same tools to handle large text files, great for notes but not hardcore text. Google Docs is the answer, but I’d like to use it without being online, some kind of a standalone version of it that would sync with the server as soon as a connection to the web was made. I can only dream on. Better food apps are needed, too, like a cheese compedium. Come on, Max McCalman, you can do it (or a techie paid to ghostwrite it for you)!

John, Paul, George, and Ringo... on iTunes where they belong.

Now on iTunes.

Subjects for the new BA headers are, in no order since they change: bottles at the Plaza Dorrego fair, a statue from the cemetery in Recoleta, the ceiling from Cafe Tortoni, and the ceiling and lights at the Abasto. These things have something in common, can you guess?

More later.

P.S. I have forgotten a lot of the Photoshop essential shortcut keystrokes. Have I really become that useless? Plusly, that program grinds my computer into the dust. Maybe I need a new one.

Most notably tonight, I finally redid the design of this blog. I’ve been wanting to change it for a while because the old one was something I had changed over from the original WordPress theme. While I managed to be happy with how it looked, WordPress themes are also a little advanced for a non-pro to do on their own and it had some display issues, especially how the right column wouldn’t flow quite right when a post was short. Once again, because writing a WP theme on my own is over my head, I found something I liked and have edited it to suit my purposes. I am in progress of changing the colors since I still like the coloring of the old site. Instead of cityscapes, though, I’ve gone for interesting textures for the banner though they’re still photos of international locations. They’re just tighter crops.

For now, unless I think better of it later, I’ve discontinued the music highlight. I wanted to keep it but it’s just too tedious to be changing it all the time. I never figured out a better way to do it. If there’s an album I really like, I’ll just post about it. I have also done away with the Flickr widget. I liked it, but I think one photo is enough. I’ve gone even more spartan. A new addition is the Quote of the Day. I considered making it something I changed by hand for about five seconds… but then I couldn’t name it “Quote of the Day” because it would never be done that often. I’m using a javascipt from another site. Unfortunately, it has a link in it and the title is of their own doing so it’s not the same point size as the other headers on the blog. The quote I wanted to use when I thought about doing it on my own is a great one, though, and it deserves to be quoted here and now:

A belief in hell and the knowledge that every ambition is doomed to frustration at the hands of a skeleton have never prevented the majority of human beings from behaving as though death were no more than an unfounded rumor.

 

Aldous Huxley

He is fantastic.

For better or worse, my all-white iMac G5 is gone. I rushed home today after work because the new workhorse was supposed to be delivered between 1600-1800. I was running late. A friend had something happen and I had to wait until she got out and then there was the obligatory consolation. I must have just missed the delivery but I shouldn’t have worried. I should have known my doorwoman would be more than happy to sign for it. There it was, box crisp and striking right beside the reception desk. It was never shipped so this marks my first desktop to not have a FedEx label on it. A guy I met on the elevator said he’d be happy to install Leopard on it whenever I wanted it.

It’s better-looking than I thought it would be and since I hardly get any sunlight in my apartment, the glossy screen won’t hurt too much. There are a few other things about its general design I don’t like which make Theodora still the best computer I’ve ever owned. The back is not only black but convex, making it harder to see the ports now stashed along the bottom rather than the side. There’s only one Firewire 400 port. One. Good thing the two external drives can daisy-chain into each other and come equipped with an extra Firewire port each. And then there’s the keyboard. The keys themselves are a marked improvement and I’ll get used to the new uses for the function keys. But I had to get the wired version because removing the number pad from the wireless version was a grave, grave error. I hate wired keyboards, though. Damn wires. Now I will be hosting my own sale of AA batteries. I have enough stocked for two nuclear holocausts.

But for better or worse, I’ll have to live with the changes and then there are the pros, especially the real estate. 24 inches of pristine screen. Stereo sound’s nice, too. The first song I played on it was Badly Drawn Boy’s “Born in the UK”.

This is Marco.

(And if you’re thinking what I think you’re thinking, stop thinking it.)

I’m typing this on my laptop that’s sitting on top of my desk. My laptop, Julian, is occupying space where a keyboard would once sit. It’s empty this afternoon. This morning I packed up my beloved iMac G5 and rewrapped it in its original packaging and took it into the local Apple reseller. I hate parting with things I love and I adored that computer. Not only has it been the best-looking computer I’ve ever owned, its arrival also marked one of the most wildly serendipitous days of my life. May 14, 2004.

When I think of all that’s happened since then, it seems so long ago, but I remember details of that day better than I remember last week. That was the day of Daniel, the U2 ticket, the hammer of justice, and the new computer. It was my first desktop since 1999 and it’s the first to leave the tight circle of family and friends. It predates the built in camera but its white and chrome design is far and away my favorite look of Apple computers. I named it Theodora thanks to my reading a history of Constantinople. It also marks the end of my desktops having female names.

The new one, which will be delivered Monday, is the new chrome and black look, glossy screen, and 24 inches diagonally. It’s as big as my TV and I think I’ll name it with a boy’s name because of its masculine coloring. I don’t know yet what its name will be.

I felt like a bad mother today, though. A faithless friend. A backstabber. I took my old friend in, my main squeeze, the boss of my digital life. I dropped her off among techies who will never care for her the way I do. They’ll dump her hard disc and resell her to some student. I just hope no one scratches her screen or jams pennies into her Superdrive. I hope someone cleans her keyboard with compressed air like I did, that someone buffs all fingerprints away, that someone refuses to drag her keyboard across a desk, scratching the underneath. I hope she goes to a good home and that someone comes to depend on her the way I did. I hope her new owner loves her the way I did. Justinian, a firewire hard disc full of movies and photographs, still sits on the corner of this desk, but its mate is gone.

I’ll probably be disgusted at this post tomorrow but it’s been a week that’s left me emotionally labile. Doing away with the central object in my entire home brings out the worst. I’ve always loved my Macs and I think I loved this one the most.

The whole outcry reminds me of the U2 ticket scandal.

So I will not be reviewing a Chumby. I will not even be owning a Chumby. I don’t like non-communication from any company since it doesn’t bode well for future needs like tech support. I will no longer be speaking about the Chumby in any way at all.

I’ve never been picked for anything before. The Chumby people say they tried to pick a cross section of the mainstream market as their first 50 and they picked me. I wish I could remember what I wrote. I remember not putting a whole lot of thought into it and then thinking I should have written more to have a better chance of being picked. I guess what I wrote worked. This should be cool.

The funny thing is I’m mostly attracted to it because I think it’s cute. The details on the website aren’t all that exhaustive. I wonder if I can get this great flamenco web radio station on it. I also wonder if it’ll work well with the free public WiFi network I jump onto when the modem’s acting up. My own home wireless network has had career-ending problems.

The congregation of people in the back of the store is centered around the tables with sample iPhones. I held one for fifteen whole minutes. My contract with Cingular is up today (not like it matters), but there’s still a 2-year-old Razr in my bag. It isn’t that I don’t like the iPhone. it’s that it’s expensive and I have yet to see a reason why I should spend $600 for a phone when the Razr, while physically cute but beset with the same interface problems the iPhone is sworn to fix, still makes calls. I may as well wear through the new battery I bought for it in February and see if the iPhone prices go down at all.