By coscooper
iPad and iPhone (and a MBP) are part of my everyday technical life, so you would think I’m some “fan-boy” or something, sorry, “fan(person)”, a term I hate BTW, but I’m not. I just like good solid technology to get things done, not worry about either being “hacked” or things falling apart in my hands, (okay, my iPad is just WiFi on purpose and I did have to put a new glass face on my iPhone). I’m also not enamored by the inflated number of applications “available” on those “other” smart-phones who “they” claim a huge number of programs, which according to my limited research, are mostly half baked, low quality and riddled with security issues, hacks and other such reminiscent “windoze ilk”. Android aside, I digress. While the latest iPhone isn’t in my possession, I do have one that is about a year old. With the new release of iOS4, I anticipated taking advantage of a few new features, knowing full well that most wouldn’t be supported, but some would. My anticipation was met with disappointment.
After several hours of waiting for the upgrade to process, I also didn’t see that one coming, I finally got to dinking around with the new system after dinner last night. Armed with the feature list, I poked through the various settings looking for the new features. It all acted, behaved and frankly looked no different than the previous version. I found nothing compelling that made me think, “Boy am I glad I upgraded!” Instead, I yawned pushed a couple of apps together into folders, about the only thing worth the upgrade and moved onto the next few features. Photo zooming, didn’t happen; home background, still black; tap to focus video, I have a 3G only phone, so that was a bust. Finally, I fired up the iPod application to make a new Playlist, underwhelmed and continued down the list. Gift apps, whoopity doo; spell check, —yawn; Bluetooth keyboard, don’t have one, man, this upgrade was a waste of time all around.
Basically, I did my “dinking” for about thirty minutes, placed it on it’s charger and haven’t picked it up since. Instead, as usual, I opted for my morning reading with the iPad, not thinking twice about what I can do with my old, reliable, beater iPhone. I’ll make a call later, I guess, as long as AT&T doesn’t drop me. Then again, I rarely use the calling feature on my iPhone, so I suppose I’ll stick the earbuds in and take the dog for a walk, I am “underemployed” after all.
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By coscooper
My morning pretty much starts with a set of common rituals I’ve done for years. During the week, I like to catch up on news, read about new technology and get ready for the day. Right now, that ritual includes my iPhone, but… the screen is too small.
In the old days —well about two years ago — after pouring my morning coffee, I’d plod out to the driveway, rain, snow, shine or cold and retrieve the paper. After grabbing the paper, I’d make some breakfast, update my coffee, sit at the table and read through my favorite sections. Of course, to be honest, I started with the comics, THEN went to the real news, or what ever the local paper had decided to pick up from AP and local happenings. After finishing the paper and breakfast, I’d track down my laptop and fire up my email, check through the evenings spam, then move to the important stuff.
That was then, this is now. First, I bought an iPhone last year. Second, we canceled the paper. I had to go looking for other ways to get my morning news. That was one thing about the paper, it didn’t cover all the things I like. Today, I read a lot more about subjects I’m interested, feeling that I’m more informed than before.
Today, I start my day with that cup of coffee, that wont ever change, then I pick up my iPhone, first thing. Starting with the AP application, I sift through their top reports reading what looks interesting. I also like USA Today. Same thing, I sift through their top reports, sports and then tech sections to hit the highlights. All the while, I’m making breakfast, but I’m not as compelled to sit at the table anymore. Now I sit at the bar or in the family room. Kind of anywhere I plop. My last stop on my iPhone is All Things Digital, which is extremely focused on the tech industry with such articles about who’s buying who, new gadgets, what Apple employee left a new iPhone at a bar, new startup interviews, plus they have videos at current conferences and more. I then pop open an aggregate news tool called Fluent News. It pulls in feeds from CNN, ABC, CBS, FOX and others, which I use to fill in any gaps missed by my favorites.
More… so, once the world news and technical news is up-to-date, I’ll check the weather, even though I can see what it looks like outside, it’s still good to know what’s going to happen. Next, I switch to email, usually quickly review due to the screen size. Final stop is Facebook and LinkedIn to see if anything interesting is going on there. Finally, I end my morning with OmniFocus. Since I try to adhere to the GTD strategies, OmniFocus is for planning my daily todo and projects.
That’s pretty much my morning most days. I rarely fire up my laptop until I’m ready to get going with projects and other activities. So, why did I title this blog “I want an iPad!” — well, I do a lot on the iPhone and since I use it more of a mini-computer than a cell phone, an iPad would do all of this better, I think. In fact, since I hardly fire up my laptop until later in the morning, I could probably do just about everything on the iPad. I primarily use Pages, Numbers and Keynote, so since those are available on the iPad, I’m nearly there. I also use OmniGraffle, OmniFocus, a web browser, a writing tool (Scrivener) and dictionary most days. So, looking at what I primarily do, an iPad would just about do it all for me.
My problem is: I just purchased a new laptop last fall, like most, I just can’t justify an iPad no matter how much I’d like to have and use one. While I’m not advocating ditching a laptop or desktop (yet), I’m advocating that 80% of what I do on a daily (morning) basis could be done on an iPad. I still use Fireworks, Photoshop on occasion and many other activities that crank on this laptop, but my morning would be easier if I had an iPad. I WANT AN IPAD!!
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By coscooper
Every day, I log into one of my several computers (both Mac and Windows) and the first window or windoid that is there greeting me is the “There are new updates ready”. Plus, to add insult to injury, every application I launch displays a message that a new version is ready.
Good grief. If things start going south on one of my laptops, I’ll never be able to trouble shoot and figure out where the culprit is.
So, WTF do you do when this happens nearly every day?
- Accept the download and hail-merry it. (Which is what I do too often)
- Never accept the download and keep running with Windows95
- Plan on just allowing it to only update your system on Friday night. (That way you have the entire weekend to recover and rebuild if necessary.)
- Research each request and make an informed decision. (What we all should do, but, then 8 hours later you’d never get any real work done.)
- Change the settings in the control panel to just update at say 3am in the morning, reboot and plead ignorant bliss when on the phone with tech support.
Or a combination of all of the above. Which, is basically what I do. I decide how much pain I’m interested that day, how much time I have and how dumb I want to play when calling support.
Have fun out there…. it’s the wild-wild west of code!
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By coscooper
I should have taken my laptop in a long time ago??? What was I thinking???
My MacBookPro was purchased in May of 2006. About a month after making the purchase, the left cooling fan began to grind ever so slightly, nothing major, but it made enough noise to be annoying. That lasted about a year. Approximately, around May (1 full year after initial purchase) the fan began to hum and grind much louder. I actually downloaded some software to see what the RPM’s of the fan were and turns out, it would surge to over 5,000 RPMs when it’s suppose to run normally around 500 to 900 RPMs.
Around that same time, i experienced a serious melt-down after doing a simple update. Turns out, i had to completely rebuild my hard-drive with a new OS and fortunately, I had a sprinkling of backups on an external Firewire drive. It was still very painful, but I managed to get through it.
On or around mid-summer, it started acting weird again and yet again, it died, causing me to completely rebuild. This time, I wasn’t so lucky as I had just used the Firewire to rebuild Jodi’s laptop not less than a week before and had wiped all of my backups. The plan was to get the automated backups running again, but I was yet again lazy and didn’t get it started in a timely fashion.
After much pain and suffering, rebuilding from memory, it took well over 3 weeks to get it back to any semplance of normalcy. I still find things to this day missing from that install and shrug and hit the side of my head with a DOH!!!
Fast forward to November 9th, 2007. It literally died yet again. This time, it limped for a day or so, but by the Saturday the 10th, it was officially freakin dead and I decided to just let Apple have it back. So, I booked an appointment with the Genius Bar over at the Applestore in Boulder for Sunday the 11th at 10:45AM. The soonest they could see me when I went online Friday night.
Fortunately, I had everything backed up and on Friday, while it “limped” along, I was able to get it turned on in target mode and copy anything I was worried about over to the external Firewire drive using Dylans iBook. All was well and I was confident that I had everthing for when it would be back on my desk in a few weeks and I’d be ready to get back to work.
In the meantime, I confiscated Dylans iBook and moved a few critical items over, temporarily using his little faithful iBook. First things first, I found I couldn’t open anything of significance. I suppose that’s due to it only 256mb of RAM. Yuck!!! It’s a wonder Dylan could get anything done.
So, off to BestBuy I trot and purchased him a 1gb RAM chip… back to the house, installed in less than a minute and I was back off to the races. Ah…. RAM breathing room. His little laptop chugged along as I pounded away using FireWorks and Photoshop. Wasn’t as fast as my MacBook, but it was working, more than I could say for my laptop. I pretty much used it heavily most of Sunday, Monday and Tuesday working on several web sites, updating our Rental site and preparing some graphics for the gift certificates we’d been planning on marketing via email. I was getting pretty settled in and planned on using his iBook through Thanksgiving, figuring Apple would take a week or so, then blame the delay on the holidays.
Here’s where I got blown away. First thing Wednesday, TODAY, I got a call from the Genius Bar over at the Applestore. My laptop was back and I could come by and pick it up anytime. They informed me that they had to replace the entire mother-board and install a new hard-drive, plus they installed the latest OS, 10.4.10… all good as new. All that in 3 days, with two shiopments to and from California.
Okay, I was VERY pleased to say the least. While it’s been a pain in the backside, I usually CANNOT do without my laptop. I use it 7 days a week and being without it for a few days is just never a good time. I’d always figured I’d just wait until it physically blew up and quit working. Well, that’s what I did, suffered through for 3 whole days and voila’ it’s back and seems to be running like a champ.
Dylan gets a full gig of RAM out of the deal as “rental” on his iBook and I agreed to replace his keyboard, which he’d spilled some liquid substance on and has been using an external keyboard. All-in-all, he made out like a bandit. I was still able to get work done for 3 days and I rearranged a few things on my desk and added a one of the new cool flat keyboards offered by Apple. $49 bucks for a wired version. I remember when these use to run $79 and they weren’t this nice. This thing is quiet and has a very small foot print on the desk.
So, now I’m asking myself, why the H-LL didn’t I take it in sooner and just bit the bullet? I’ll never know.
Now, it’s back and I’m off to restore all of my important data and get back to work.
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