The Dark Side

As someone just commented on my last post, I am going to the Dark Side. It’s not enough that Cassie’s snores sound like Vader, but now I am converting quickly to Apple products after a lifetime as a PC. I may even get an iMac or something when my 5 year old HP desktop finally dies.

I guess this makes Microsoft the Old Republic. I know it’s hard to look at Bill Gates as Luke Skywalker, but Steve Jobs has clearly appropriated the Empire’s sense of clean black and white aesthetics, and is slowly taking over the world. Soon he will pull up the hood like Palpatine.

But so what? Everyone complains about the whole “murdering the Jedi” thing, and all the fascism, but I bet the Empire did some good stuff, too. Safe trade routes. Good public school systems. Clean aesthetics. Disposable soldiers that didn’t ask citizens to sacrifice their children. I’m not saying I didn’t cheer along with everyone else when the rebels blew up the Death Star (along with all the civilian contractors), but I wonder how the Empire affected the everyday life of citizens. Probably not as much or as negatively as you might think.

But I digress…

Did my first walk on Tuesday using only the iPhone. No iPod. No smartphone clipped to my belt. No iPad in my bag next to the snacks. No bag at all, really, just a little water bottle on a strap with an apple in the pouch. I walked about 5 miles, and used the device constantly, listening to disc 21 of The Desert Spear US audiobook (almost done!), texting, twittering, checking e-mail taking pictures, writing notes on The Daylight War, etc. I made a point of doing all the stuff I would normally do with all those other devices.

I have to say the iPhone held up pretty well. The walk took about 75 minutes, and in that time I used about 13% of the battery. The iPod app controls are kind of annoying without a clickwheel and proper settings, but it worked well enough. I got a call along the way, which paused the music, resuming when the other party hung up. The camera is great. Check out this tree blown over by the mysterious Brooklyn tornado last week:

I didn’t have a quarter to give the tree scale, but if I stood in the hole it was ripped out of, the roots were several feet above my head. It was a big honkin’ tree.

For writing the iPhone was… meh. Even in landscape, the virtual keyboard is just too small, and with no tactile input to help guide my sausage fingers, I made a lot of typos, which are a pain to fix as there are no arrow keys and touching the screen to move the cursor is awkward and takes your hands out of typing alignment. The screen is also just too small to see any real amount of text because the virtual keyboard takes up most of the space.

But that said, it is fine enough for texting/twittering, and while I could never write prose on it, it was perfectly sufficient to jot down story ideas that I might otherwise have forgotten. With Documents to Go installed on the phone, pad, and my desktop, synching all three devices is easy peasy. So the phone is not a full replacement for the other devices, but it can shoulder their load for short periods of time as necessary, which is all I ask.

Yesterday I tried again using the imapmywalk app to track my mileage/speed/calories burned/etc. I am a nerd, and nothing excites/inspires us to excel like data we can measure and correlate.

But the app was kind of a pain in the ass. It claimed to operate in the background so you could multitask, but every time you open any other app, it pauses your walk route, so if you’re not careful to stop while using the other app and resume the tracking when you start walking again, you can have holes in your workout data. There were also occasional GPS issues, and I had trouble saving the workout and ended up deleting it.

Worst of all, for some reason while the imapmywalk app was running, I could not get the iPod app to stop shuffling, no matter what I did. I had been planning to listen to the 22nd and final disc of The Desert Spear, but it kept shuffling the chapters, which made it impossible. Made me insane until I just ended up putting on music. It’s not like music is so bad, but it pissed me off that I didn’t have the choice. When I got home, my wife told me that there was a built-in Nike app bundled with the iPhone which did essentially the same thing as imapmywalk. I was planning to try it anyway, but a somewhat bizarre occurrence today clinched it. More on that in a bit.

I did get some data from imapmywalk, and used it to extrapolate over the gaps. I walked close to 5 miles, with an average speed of 4.7 mph, which was enough to raise my heart rate. I wasn’t really tired at the end, either. I could easily have done another 5, but I had other things to attend to.

As I said in the last entry, I am thinking of moving up to a slow jog, and for that I needed better shoes than the Payless sneakers I usually wear. I went to Super runners in GCT and had them fit me. The results were… surprising.

Apparently I am a size 12. This in and of itself is not so shocking, but my whole adult life I have worn size 9.5 shoes. No wonder my feet hurt. Anyway, I bought some sleek asics in basic black, so my feet don’t look like little Nascar racers.

You may be wondering why I have time to write this huge blog post about… nothing. Well, like a long-awaited party, the cluster headache that has been cycling like a circling shark ever since I got back from Australia struck last night. I took some Excedrin migraine and did all the usual ritual sacrifices, and thankfully the pain and nausea are light so long as I stay still in dim light. I am useless creatively, so I figured I might as well blog.

Just a few minutes ago, something odd happened. The UPS guy delivered two Amazon packages containing a Nike iPod sensor and a tiny pouch for it that velcroes to your shoelaces. I assumed they were from Dani, but she said they weren’t. Then I looked at the receipt, and saw they were a gift.

From someone I didn’t know (but who apparently reads my blog).

I checked facebook, and I don’t appear to be friends with him there (though fb is acting wonky this afternoon), nor twitter, so WTF?

This is not the first time I have received a wonderful, thoughtful, and unsolicited gift from a reader, but it never ceases to shock me. It’s a reminder that with my new career I touch more lives than I know, and apparently in positive ways that engender good will. More than the gifts, this fact makes me happy beyond words.

Dear Secret Santa,

Thank you for your thoughtful gift. I promise to be very good this year, and to put it to regular use so I am not quite as festively plump by Xmas.

Your Pal,

Peat

Posted on September 23, 2010 at 4:22 pm by PeatB
Filed under Life, Musings, Tech, Writing
5 Comments »