Patrick C. O'Sullivan

Bit the bullet, bought the iPad, estimated 7-10 days on the web site is actually 19 days according to the order processing software.  Figures.

On a positive note, I went to the doctor today, he said that I am indeed dying but so is everyone else, and it probably won’t be from the problem I went to see him about in my case.  He couldn’t be more specific and recommended that I see an actuary if I wanted a better estimate.  He did say that he has the iPad and really likes it.  He wished that it had a camera and a phone.  I wish it had an earlier ship date.

Realized tonight that there is a ceiling fan on the deck.  My beer is now half full.

It’s been quite windy in the Keys for the last few days.  I haven’t been doing as much biking as I planned because of the wind.  At least that’s what I’ve been telling myself.

Today the wind finally died.

I’m sitting on the deck and typing this.  There are tarpon feeding in the canal.  It is quiet and dark, all the tourists are gone, just the occasional splash, a sharp crescent moon, and John Doyle playing softly on the stereo.  I can see the stars.  It’s a balmy 80 degrees (27C) and all of a sudden I’m thinking that I wish there was some wind.

Oh yeah, and my beer’s half empty.  Life is hard.

Looking west from Pigeon Key in the Florida Keys.  Pigeon Key is about three miles from Marathon,  Florida.  It is accessible via the old railroad/highway bridge paralleling the aptly named Seven Mile Bridge.  It’s a brilliant walk, I’ve done it many times, but I tried it on a bicycle this time.  Not recommended.  The bike goes too fast to enjoy the view and the expansion joints on the road surface seem to think they’re supposed to be crossties.  Walk, and wear a hat.

I’d really like to get an iPad.   My fingers, when they aren’t rehearsing iPhone gestures on a grand scale, stray toward my wallet.   No contact yet, no slide of embossed plastic against age-hardened leather.   I think I know why.

I couldn’t resist the iPhone when it was new.  Or the Mac Mini.  Or the Intel Macbook Pro.  Or the unibody MacBook Pro.   I do not regret those purchases, but still I wonder.  Should I have waited?  Within what seemed like weeks of each purchase there was an even newer model, a model with all the features I really wanted.   Not enough better, or faster, so that I had to buy, but marginally better, so that I found myself wishing, found myself regretting, a tiny bit of satisfaction leaching away each day.

If only I had waited.   Not serious waiting, the sort of waiting where I look up from my Compaq luggable to gape stupidly at a Windows 7 advert before turtling down to Wordstar again, but the sort of groaning, missed it by a few weeks waiting that isn’t productivity damning, but joy-sucking, like picking the wrong lane during rush hour.   The other lane isn’t moving that much faster, is it?  It sure looks like it from here.  A foolish thought, but there you go.

Perhaps this rapid refresh, persistent disappointment cycle is a misperception on my part.  I tend to buy after the fanboy-standing-in-line period and the seven-to-ten day wait vacuum, in that glorious, ephemeral moment of ‘get it in twenty-four hours’ just before the minor upgrade is announced.  Will you lure me in for the fifth time, Apple?  Probably.  But not yet.  Because you fat-fingered my reflexive buy button this time.

I have a Kindle which from day one possessed that most important of attributes, the ability to purchase and download a book at the airport.  Or the hotel lobby.  Or any other place where I have time to kill.  Time that seems to stretch long while I’m trying to connect my laptop to the ‘free’ or extortionarily priced wifi, only to snap back a millisecond before the boarding call is announced or the taxi shows up.   I’m still working up the guts to enter my credit card information when they call my row.

Not so with the Kindle.  It just works.  I can spend my time reading something new, not in repetitive, techno-exploratory-trial-and-error wifi hell.  The staged release of the iPad, the delayed availability of the 3G version, opened my eyes.  Even if I wanted the iPad I would have to wait.

The iPad launch offended me.  It was a violation of a fundamental sales law: sell what you have.  It is an illustration of my business relationship with Apple, exposed in a way that forces me to face it.  Imagine if I had seen the product roadmap for all the products I had purchased over the years and all those I hadn’t, with release dates, specs, and prices all neatly spelled out.

I’d still be hunched over the Compaq.

#

Where’d I put my wallet?

I had the good fortune to be the guest of NASA for a space shuttle launch a few years ago.  It was a well-orchestrated affair; the tour by former Apollo mission control engineers, the night-visit to the site, the photo opportunity in the warm and moist dark.

The gantry, shuttle, and launch vehicle were limned in light, every detail sharp, so that even at a great distance it was perfectly visible, motionless, but poised.  It looked ready to go.  It looked eager to go.   Men were going to ride it into space.

It struck me that I was witnessing the culmination of not just days and weeks of work, but centuries of achievement, one rising from the other, and leading to this.  I thought I understood the significance of what I saw, but I didn’t.

The following day I watched the launch from the official viewing platform.  We were miles away, and after a brief presentation by NASA officials, and a short series of comments by one of the astronauts, we were subjected to some off-topic blathering by a government functionary unassociated with the space program.  It angered me.   I don’t even recall what the topic was, but it had nothing to do with the incredible, awesome event we were about to witness.

There was some question about the weather.  Would they be able to launch?  They started playing the countdown over the speakers.  The shuttle began to lift, it seemed painfully slow at first, I imagined what the thrust must feel like, and then the sound, a rumbling, the balcony shook, the building shook, the earth trembled, and I watched as the billowing cloud drew out into a dense vapor trail, an arrowing spire of cloud that rose, and continued to rise and glow in the afternoon sunlight, then separation, and still I watched, and watched, and when I thought there was nothing left to see, upturned faces lit by distant starlight.

I purchased an e-Book from Amazon, a book by a writer I know, a book I was very much looking forward to reading on the long plane flight to presently un-oiled Florida.  I wasn’t disappointed that the Kindle could not display the stunning cover art in color.   I wasn’t disappointed that I couldn’t ruffle through the pages, couldn’t feel them flip against my fingers as I fidgeted, waiting for permission to use my approved electronic device once we attained cruising altitude.  I’ve had a Kindle for years and I expected this.

No, what has my blood boiling is the totally inexcusable formatting of the book itself.  There are two line feeds between paragraphs!

Now, you might say, or whoever is responsible for this abomination might say, “Get over it, chum.  All the words are there”.  Sure they are, and none of the art, or the flow, or what the author intended.

We use white space to signal a change of scene, a temporal change, or some other discontinuity in the narrative.  Imagine an entire book, cut up and parceled out, as if each individual paragraph were the end of a scene.  I didn’t realize just how ingrained the meaning of this white space was in my mind until I tried to read this book.  The writing is very fine, I will buy a copy of the book in paper format so I can read it, but by God, I shouldn’t have to.

I have well over a hundred paid-for e-Books in my Amazon account, books from major publishing houses.  I tell you that the formatting and copy editing of e-Books  for Kindle is an embarrassment.  No decent person, let alone a business person that actually wanted repeat business, would put out such shoddy work.   These are books from major publishers, books that have been electronically edited and set, not scanned-in conversions of ancient out-of-print books where optical character conversion issues might be blamed.   Books that real businesses wish to exchange for my money.

A few typos?  I might accept that.  I’m used to copy editing on the screen and am hyper-sensitive to such errors there.  It could be that the printed versions have these errors and I would miss them.   However, a recent science fiction book I purchased used upper case to indicate that a computer was ’speaking’.  Did the publisher get this right?  NO ThEy dID nOT.  It was inconsistently wrong, so wrong, in fact, that it is impossible for any human capable of reading English not to have noticed.  Irritating, to say the least.   But an entire book of double line feeds between paragraphs?

Correction:  Almost the entire book.  The copyright notice is formatted correctly.

A reasonable person could argue that this e-Book could not have been tested for my device.  Fair enough.  I have the instantaneously obsolete original Kindle, a Kindle 2, Kindle for Mac, Kindle for iPhone, and the DX.   Surely you can guess the results.  Only the original Kindle’s markup capabilities are different enough to affect the display.  But they don’t.

Well, says the hacker deep inside, just change the file yourself, you know, global search and replace.  How hard can it be?

Impossible.  That’s how hard, unless I want to become a copyright violator and troll the web for digital rights management removal software.  And I don’t.  Ever.  And neither should you, says the writer.

This isn’t a blast against Amazon, or the Kindle, or against DRM, or against print publishers.  I still buy paper books, and I pre-order hardcover editions from the authors I like.  I love books in all formats, and I appreciate and understand the challenge of getting them right.  But I won’t buy another e-Book without previewing it first.

Here’s the thing.  I’m not an early adopter when it comes to e-Books.  I’m a reluctant user, a mainstream target market customer for books that happens to travel.  A lot.  I couldn’t fit all the books I read on a typical trip into a suitcase, let alone a carry-on.  Hence the e-Reader, whether it’s Kindle or iPad, or Nook, or Cranny, or whatever else comes out.  I’m a traditional publishing house’s best customer.  And I’m not satisfied.

<cr><lf>

<cr><lf>

Maybe I’ll see what else is out there.

I haven’t decided if I will attend this event, but if you are interested details are here.  June 2nd through 6th.  There will be a staging of George Fitzmaurice’s The Magic Glasses I’d like to see.

I have long admired this gate in Iveagh Gardens.  This garden is perhaps the least visited park in Dublin.

I will be presenting a paper at the 2010 Joyce Symposium in Prague.   It should be a fun time.  If you would like to attend the link to the conference home page is here.   Here’s a brief synopsis of my paper:

Milk is a particularly useful topic to consider when examining Edwardian culture and cultural change in Ireland.  As a common food item undergoing a transformation from local production to mass-production milk carries with it implications of class.  As the staple of infants, milk is intimately related to cultural norms and societal attitudes regarding poverty, child rearing, motherhood, and the lot of women in society.  Milk, as an agrarian product long associated with Ireland, carries with it implications of nationalism and historical symbolism that are exposed in the thoughts of Joyce’s characters.

Through milk imagery Joyce further indicates fine intra-class distinctions within the colonial Dublin middle class of Ulysses.  Dublin was slow to benefit from the scientific advancements spearheaded in Europe at this time and Joyce exploits this fact.  In subsequent decades many of these class markers disappeared from the developed world.  A close study of Ulysses in light of milk imagery reveals these telling indicators of class that are now nearly forgotten.