My first real internet-beats-the-news experience. I read about the California earthquake on a couple of friends’ Facebook status messages, then went to a few news sites to read more - and it hadn’t been reported yet. Oh, the internet.
So, I’ve been an iPhone owner and user for two days now, which, you know, makes me an unmitigated expert, by blogosphere rules. Here’s my observations so far:
Good:
- The design is great.
- I like the headphone/microphone combination.
- Data download is fast and reliable, and I seem to have 3G pretty much everywhere that I go.
- Very easy to download new apps.
- I set up four email accounts, using POP, IMAP, and Exchange, and they all work brilliantly.
- Once it has encountered your usual wireless networks, it connects seamlessly (unless the network is a stupid one, like the one we have at work).
- Favorite apps: Major League Baseball, Wordpress, Twittelator (like Twitterific, but with no ads and better design), and Evernote. Pandora is pretty cool, too.
- It’s not going to cost us much more to have the AT&T family plan with unlimited data and 1400 minutes than it did to have just the voice plan at Verizon. Buh?
- Browsing the web is a pleasure. I can do pretty much everything I could do on a normal computer.
Bad:
- There isn’t really a way to set my podcasts to download wirelessly. This is a bummer. I don’t like to have to plug it into my computer.
- Apparently you can only really sync music and video with one computer, which is not true of the iPod.
- No Skype capability (well, I suppose you can probably hack it to work, but it would be nice if it worked out of the box).
- Have had some crackling on the line - rare occurrence when I was a Verizon customer - but Tom tells me AT&T is adding towers in NYC, so I’m hoping that will be cleared up soon.
- It took a phone call today to AT&T to get my number officially ported over (I could make calls, but not receive them). To their credit, they immediately took care of it with no hassle.
Overall, it’s a nice little device, and definitely a step up from the Blackberry.
I post to you from my iPhone and its nifty Wordpress app!
I do have to say that I am looking forward to iPhone updating its own podcasts automatically. I just can’t keep up with daily podcasts (read: The “Writers’ Almanac”) otherwise. Because when am I ever really thinking far enough ahead to plug my iPod into my laptop every day?
That is all.
Well, I’m back at work today, after a not-nearly-long-enough vacation at home. We went to the Coney Island beach and ate mangos; finished Six Feet Under; watched A Streetcar Named Desire, Lust, Caution, Hellboy 2 (apparently I just don’t like Del Toro), and a lot of The Simpsons; ate at home a bit; did our laundry; and basically tried to stay as low-key as possible. I also had H.G. Wells’ Tono-Bungay to read for class on Monday night, which I finished just in time.
We also dropped by the Apple store yesterday to see if we could get iPhones. Let me back up here; I haven’t planned on getting an iPhone, since I have a Blackberry (for work) and a cell phone and both work perfectly well, and I’ve become increasingly averse to bandwagon-jumping in my old (snort) age. Tom, on the other hand, really has a legitimate business need for a data phone, and after copious amounts of research, he concluded that an iPhone would be the best bet. So, he has been planning to get one. After running the numbers and taking into account a few as-yet extenuating factors, we realized that it would be cheaper, in the long run, for us both to jump to AT&T and get iPhones (8GB for me, 16GB for him) now, rather than waiting and keeping a contract with both companies.
So then, yesterday - you know, four days after the device’s release - we arrived at the Apple store only to find the line wrapped around the block and stretching several more blocks north. Yeah. Right. We popped by the AT&T store, which didn’t have any phones and said to come back in the morning. It’s across from my office, so we went by early this morning and waited until they opened. They don’t have any iPhones, they don’t know if they’ll have any iPhones today or indeed any other day. By this point, I was getting frustrated, envisioning my life in the next few weeks as a futile attempt to get an iPhone. Solution: we ordered them. Should have them within a week. Shiny new gadgets, woohoo.
Far more information than you wanted to know. But I’ll bet a few bucks that the iPhone craze in New York is more ridiculous here than anywhere else. Anyone have similarly insane reports?
I have a scarily long and sordid to-do list this week, mostly due to a concentration of articles and papers in the near future. But tonight, I am taking my reading to Central Park for the Philharmonic’s other concert in that park (they were in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park last night). Tom is meeting me with a blanket, a bottle of wine, and some food. Tonight they play Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4, and Sibelius’s Finlandia. Lang Lang is the pianist. Hopefully we can get near the front, since it’s just the two of us.
A few collected links:
- From Papercuts, the NYTimes book blog: The Perfect Novel
- New rules about shooting on New York City streets.
- The Knitting Factory, a Lower East Side institution, is heading to Brooklyn and westward.
- Why more authors should be blogging.
- The aesthetics of buzz in the dining room.
- Art in the Berkshires. First stop: The Clark Art Museum, in Williamstown, Massachusetts. I grew up about forty minutes away from here, on the New York side, but didn’t spend too much time in the museum, unfortunately. Williamstown is great. If I’d been thinking harder, I probably would have tried to go to Williams College.
- The monster collection of Moleskine tips, tricks, and hacks, especially useful for Moleskine newbies. I own too many Moleskines.
I skim a lot of blogs relating to arts and culture during the day, and things catch my eye, but I hate to repeatedly blog little links here. I’ve been experimenting with Tumblr and I think it’s the right way to do it, leaving this blog for stuff that’s actually about us (hence the name, right?).
Ergo, I give you Culture Log.
I’ll be blogging several links and quotes and things per day that I find interesting. It’s all completely subjective. Tumblr doesn’t provide commenting features, which I’ve fallen progressively more out of love with anyhow, and it makes it very easy to quickly blog all kinds of media. Culture Log has an RSS feed, so feel free to subscribe . . . or not. This is mostly for my own edification and for anyone else who wishes to look over my shoulder and see what I’m reading.
I have never received a paper newspaper in my life, except for a mystery three months when I lived with Katie in which we got the Times every day. It wasn’t long after I moved to the city, and I have happy memories of pilfering the Arts section and reading it with coffee on Saturdays. I felt very urbane, and I suppose that technically is.
But now I read the Arts section obsessively, if online, and my recent subscription to Audible came with six months of the New York Times hour-long audio daily digest. So I started listening and realized, man, I love that newspaper.
So after some careful consideration, and the discovery of a 60-percent-off discount because I’m a student, I subscribed to the Saturday & Sunday editions of the Times for home delivery, for the summer (and I’ll see if it’s worth it in the fall). And happily, it was very cheap. Because, frankly, cuddling up with a cup of coffee and my laptop on a Saturday morning just doesn’t cut it. And my newish-and-not-yet-announced ventures are making me feel a need to be up on what is going on in the ever-so-broad world of Culture And The Arts.
To be honest, I’m really excited.
I’m far from a Luddite, but I’ve been falling out of love with technology for a while now. I just don’t really get excited over fancy new techie gadgets or technologies any more. I’m not sure that I ever did, but it avoided lynching when I was at the Tute. (Though I retain a healthy amount of gratefulness for things like WordPress and Facebook and all things Google, which make it easier for me to be an efficient writer/worker/human.)
Via Relief Journal, which is running an excellent series on why writers need technology - veteran blogger/author J. Mark Bertrand explains why writers, especially those who like to, you know, get published, should blog:
It’s 2004. The Art & Soul Conference at Baylor University. I’m in the lobby between sessions, browsing at the Eighth Day Books table. Minding my own business, in other words, in sharp contrast to everyone else. They’re networking. All of them. Somehow they’ve managed to meet up over the course of the event, to learn each other’s names. Not me. I’ve kept to myself. I’m a social moth.
“Hey, aren’t you—”
I turn to find a smiling man at my elbow. People are always saying I remind them of someone. Usually a crazy brother-in-law. I start to say, No, I’m not.
“—Mark Bertrand?”
“No, I’m . . . Oh.” Yes, actually. I am.
“I thought so,” he says. “I read your blog.”
That explains it. At least half the people I know, I met through my blog. Only I don’t usually meet them. Not without planning it in advance. The crazy thing is, for a brief shining moment, I feel like a celebrity. Somebody knows me. Somebody’s familiar with my work.
And the thing is, he’s not the only one. I got an e-mail this week from someone who’d read my book and enjoyed it.
“I’ve been reading your blog for a year and half.”
And then you bought my book. That makes you think, doesn’t it?
I can’t count how many times this has happened to me. It’s always weird when you’re meeting someone for the first time and suddenly you realize from the way that they’re acting that they read your blog. And conversely, it’s a bit strange to meet someone and then realize you read their blog.
And I haven’t even written a whole book yet.
I’m losing interest in the internet.
For most people, shifts in their internet interest happen in tandem with shifts in their job, their education, their geographic location, maybe with marriage or a new relationship or a new baby. For me it’s been none of those. In fact, I can’t figure out what it is, exactly. I can pinpoint it to a few things:
- I’ve been completely distressed and disgusted at how un-civil people are on the internet, especially on blogs and their comments, especially now that the election 2008 debacle is in full swing. It seems that those notions of politeness, kindness, and goodwill that our parents taught us fly right out the window when we feel threatened or annoyed. (I’m not talking about debate here; I’m talking about how we treat people with whom we are debating or with whom we disagree.)
- I’ve realized that I get more nasty and cynical the longer I read things on the internet, especially anything where people are nasty or cynical (or just stupid).
- Since starting school and trying to read these meaty essays for class, I’ve realized that I have developed some kind of nasty ADD-like symptoms where I can’t comprehend anything for more than two sentences before my mind starts wandering. It means it takes me hours to read very little when it’s non-fiction, and you know, that can’t be healthy.
- I’ve been thinking a lot about slower, simpler, more intentional life, and my crazed tab-hopping habits seemed pretty antithetical to that.
I’m not leaving the internet. That would be stupid and impossible and Luddite-like, and kind of ridiculous, since I write for a bunch of internet-based publications and work in an IT department by day and I recognize the value of the internet for things like connecting with friends and intelligent discussion and creative inspiration.
What I have been doing, though, is cleaning out my feed-readers and exercising self-control in which sites I frequent. It’s a constant exercise, but it’s starting to help. I don’t feel quite as frenzied or cynical or irritated with everyone, less quick to jump to judgments.
And I’ve found that I can go home and not open my laptop all evening and be perfectly content. I do things like watch movies and cook dinner for my husband and read books and sometimes go hang out with friends. Wow! I have a life. (Surprisingly, my Blackberry’s been a big help in this regard. I don’t feel the need to open my laptop to check my email - which is a much friendlier medium than blog posts - and therefore can just see what I need to see and get on with my life.)
We first got email (Juno, which was email-only) when I was fourteen, and had the internet about two years later, and now that I think about it, it’s been ten years. I’ve never felt a need to disconnect before. But I’m appreciating a slower life. Maybe I’m just growing up?
I plan to be more consistent about blogging, as I’ve realized lately that I let work take over my life sometimes ::blush:: and all I have to do is say “no” sometimes. So, hi! We’re back.
We spent the weekend mostly hanging out with people, including dinner with the Walkers on Saturday night at our apartment. Ken had a grand old time with my new little compy, fiddling and discovering new and exciting features.
Speaking of the new computer, oh, how I heart it. It’s like everything we ever talked about in Human-Computer Interaction classes as examples of UI defects in Windows are nonexistent on a Mac, right down to toggle behaviors. And the widgets? Brilliant! I tried to install a Windows widget program on one of my machines a few years ago, but it ate so much memory that I had to uninstall to use Photoshop.
At Brandon’s suggestion, I’ve installed both GIMP and Open Office (well, NeoOffice, actually). I haven’t had enough time with GIMP, but the fact that it’s free may make it win over Photoshop for now, by default. And the very fact that OpenOffice is not made by Microsoft (and it looks pretty darn awesome on the screen) makes me happy.
Three notes of somewhat interest:
• Burnside Writers’ Collective has an intriguing article about Anne Rice, her conversion, and her ideas on faith and art.
• The title of this made me laugh, having recently watched Bridget Jones’ Diary.
• Apparently the Vatican has the highest per-capita crime rate in the world. This sounds shocking until you realize that the population there is 492. Lots of purse-snatchings, apparently. (Lots of tourists.) Via Relevant.
Any suggestions for good places to print business cards? I’m talking about something a little better than a Kinkos, where I can send a file (probably an Illustrator file or similar) and get prints. For a decent price.