ipad impressions.

So we’ve owned an iPad for a few weeks now, and I’ve had plenty of time to get acquainted with the little slab. As a review of sorts, I’ll offer some impressions in bullet list form.

• It’s useful in ways that I hadn’t expected, and not so useful in ways I had hoped it would be. You can’t really form a complete opinion on the iPad, however, if you haven’t used one for a few days to see how it fits your everyday life.
• The virtual keyboard works amazingly well, especially for my six-finger typing system. I can type almost as quickly as on the netbook’s physical keyboard.  If you’re a touch typist, however, it may not work so well for you, due to the complete lack of tactile feedback or finger-indexing features.
• Thanks to the backlit screen that is also the ultimate backlit keyboard, the iPad is just about the best device for surfing the Intertubes in bed with the lights off.
• It’s a lot more sturdy than you’d think a device this size with a glass screen could be.
• The interface is so intuitive that even little kids take to it like ducks to water. I got a few games for Quinn and Lyra, and the touchscreen is so easy to figure out that the kids needed absolutely no instruction beyond demonstrating an initial drag and drop. There’s no tech barrier between user and application, which is a huge deal for kids and elderly people. As an assistive technology, the iPad has a ludicrous amount of potential.

• The size is perfect: small enough to be easily portable, and big enough to be useful.
• Movies look spectacular on that screen, and surfing the web on the touchscreen is the most fun way to go about it without a doubt.  Media consumption is where the iPad blows the doors off every other piece of consumer technology out there.
• The iPad makes a crappy iPod because you have to hold it, or put it on a flat surface. You can’t just stick it in a pocket like an iPod.  It does, however, have a really good external speaker for such a small device, so you can set it down on the desk or counter to listen to stuff while you do other things.
• Connectivity kind of sucks at the moment, being limited to emailing stuff over WiFi. I could bang out fiction on the iPad, something I’d never consider doing on the iPod touch, but the inability to get files off and onto the iPad easily keeps me from using it more often in that capacity. I synchronize my desktop Mac and the netbook with DropBox, but the iOS DropBox app only supports read access. Once they have file synchronization licked, it’ll actually be a viable option for writing work on the go–the onscreen keyboard works very well, and the iPad can be paired up with external Bluetooth keyboards.
• Battery life is very, very good. Watching a full-length movie drops the cell from 100% to 85% or so. I can use the iPad all day long off and on, browsing the web and running various apps, and the battery will still be at 40-50% in the evening.
• It’s a lot of fun to use. There’s absolutely nothing like it on the market. Saying it’s a netbook without a keyboard doesn’t quite do it justice. It’s everything I like about the iPod touch, only with three times the screen diagonal. It starts instantaneously, doesn’t run hot, and has a much superior direct user interface. The netbook wins by a mile when it comes to connectivity and application compatibility, but the iPad has the edge in ease of use, cool factor, and media playback.

Overall, I like the little slab a lot. Give me a decent word processing app and the ability to synchronize my .rtf files with DropBox, and I could even see taking it out for writing work on occasion. As things stand, it’s a killer media player and Intertubes device, and a very slick piece of technology. The longer I play with it, the more I like it, despite its few shortcomings.

a lesson in diligence and optimism.

There’s a very large orb weaver who builds a net every morning on the outside of my desk window.  Recently, he has been joined by a second and third one.  This morning, they built three webs simultaneously, sandwiched one behind the other:

Orb weavers don’t generally like to share their spaces, so how is it that three of them are hanging out and building webs in the same square foot of space?

They’re building on different planes.  One net is on the outside of the window frame, one is between the storm window and the regular window pane, and the third one is between the inner window pane and the screen insert.  All three orb weavers are separated by layers of glass and screen.  When they all get busy at the same time, it makes for a neat display, though.  It looks like there’s a three-spider team building the Mother of All Nets.

I will say this, though…the third spider is awfully optimistic.  He’s counting on catching all the flies and bugs that make it past the first two nets.

you were probably not napoleon.

You know the New Age types who think they remember their previous lives?

Why is it that almost every one of them was someone significant or romantic/heroic?  Nobody ever goes, “Yeah, I was a spear carrier in the Sultan of Akkabad’s army.  In my first battle, I tripped over my shoelaces and stabbed myself in the groin.  A week later, I died painfully from my infections,” or “I was a peasant in northern Germany during the Thirty Years’ War.  I shoveled shit for twenty years, and then a bunch of Gustavus Adolphus’ soldiers burned down my farm and killed me.”

I mean, considering the total mediocrity and unremarkability of most people’s existences in the course of human history, that kind of previous life would be statistically far more likely than having been the Fifteenth Duke of Chutney, or Michelangelo’s understudy.

quinn in print, again.

Check out who’s in the August/September issue of Concealed Carry magazine:

My contributor copies just arrived, along with some cashable mail.  Quinn was pleased to see himself on the pages of a magazine.  And you can bet your bee hind we’ll be sending copies to both grandmothers, just like we did the last time I used the kids as props for article photos.

not flying the unfriendly skies.

We’re going on a trip in late October.  Friends of ours are getting married, and we’ll be going to South Carolina for the event.  After the wedding, we’re going over to North Carolina for a visit with Robin’s parents, and then it’s back home to Upper Cryogenica.

This is a trip of 2000+ miles, and we’ll be driving.  That’s right–I’m loading up the Grand Marnier with gear and provisions, and we’re hitting the open road, all four of us.  (The doggies are staying home with a house sitter.)  We are going to drive because we hate the idea of subjecting ourselves to the airport security kabuki with two preschoolers in tow, and being treated like criminal cattle isn’t high on my list of experiences for the kids.  Instead, we’re going on our own schedule, we won’t be forcibly relieved of anything more dangerous than a Q-Tip, and we’ll be bringing our own food instead of being forced to subside on airline food and overpriced chain restaurant fare in overcrowded airport feeding stations.  We’ll stop where we want along the way, and the Grand Marnier offers more luggage space and legroom than a row of coach seats and a pair of overhead bins.

Yes, that’s correct: we made a conscious decision not to fly because of the hassle associated with the security nonsense at the airport. That’s the money for four tickets, and the associated food expenses along the way, that won’t be spent with the airlines or at airport restaurants.  I haven’t priced any tickets from NH to the Carolinas recently, but I’m willing to wager that we’re talking about a non-trivial amount of cash here for a family of four.

I wonder how many other families are making similar decisions for the holiday traveling season ahead?

You know, if you established a new federal agency with the express purpose of choking the life out of commercial air travel (and expand the scope of government surveillance powers along the way), you would be hard-pressed to do as good of a job as it as the TSA and its legions of uniformed ass-grabbers…

they have taken over the house.

Day Three of remodeling. The plastic now covers most of downstairs.  Am holed up with the kids in the upstairs bedroom loft. Can’t access the kitchen.  Running short on supplies—natives getting stir-crazy.  Send licorice, bourbon, Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs, and flexible restraints in preschooler size.

<sounds of drilling and sawing>

We have a home restoration crew in the house.  They’re repairing all the water damage we got before we put the new roof on the place, so it’s three days of drywall dust, fresh paint smell, and dog hysteria at Castle Frostbite.  Add to that mix two kids who think that anyone coming through the door wants to know everything about Thomas the Tank Engine and Winnie the Pooh, and you have an environment that’s not very conducive to writing.  I’ll be staying up late for a few days to get some work done in the living room, when everyone’s in bed.

After we’re done with the repairs, the plan is to move the kids into the smaller of the downstairs bedrooms, and use the bigger one for a combined office for Robin and me.  Their current bedroom—the future office—is quite spacious, and having only two kid beds and a dresser in there is a waste of all that space.  (The kids play all over the house, but mostly in the adjacent second living room, which we call the “sitting room.”)  When we claim that big bedroom as office space, we’ll finally have enough wall space to put up bookshelves and unbox the majority of our library, which has been stored up in the attic since we moved in.  I mean, how are you supposed to know it’s an office if the walls aren’t lined with books?

And yet another $NON_TRIVIAL_AMOUNT of cash later, another part of the house is hammered into shape.  At least the homeowner’s insurance paid for the lion’s share of this one.  Slowly but surely, Castle Frostbite is turning into an adequate and proper dwelling.

name that spider.

Arachnophobes: do not click past the split.

Interested parties: click past the split and name that spider species.  He hangs out in front of my office window.

Arachnophobes who are reading this through an RSS reader where split posts don’t: sorry for the scare. You can come down from the ceiling now.

Living in the country, we have a lot of spiders around, in, under, and generally all over the property.  Luckily, the really big ones tend to stay outside.  I don’t mind them, since they eat the pesky bugs.  Once you see how many bloodsuckers and buzzy annoyances just one spider of that size catches in its web in just a few days, you’re not so fast to take down nets and kill spiders anymore.

my weapon is david.

Of all the cool things to do around here in northern New England, this one’s pretty high up on the list:

Learning to handle Harris hawks at the British School of Falconry in Vermont.

One of these days, I’ll go there for some writing research.  Oh, yes, I will.  I mean, what’s more awesomely elegant than hunting with a freaking hawk? 

best writing day ever.

What I did with my day:

Wrote a 3,800-word short story called “Chance Decker, Werewolf P.I.”

It’s pretty damn good, IMHO.  I’ll shop it around a bit and see if I can get any bites.  If I don’t have it sold in a reasonable amount of time, I’ll post it here.  Either way, you’ll get to read it, if paranormal mystery is your bag, baby.

3,800 words comes out to 11 pages of single-spaced print.  Started the thing this morning, and finished it around 3pm.  I’ve rarely had a story jump into my head so fully realized, and so much fun to write.

With all the writing, I totally forgot to make the pizza dough.  It’s rising now, but it will be 8pm before there will be consumable pizza in the house.  Guess the kids are getting leftover lasagna for dinner.  But!  Sacrifices must be made for art, nicht wahr?