Category Archives: Golf and Computers

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12 Things I Hate about iPhone

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snc10194In no particular order, these are the things I hate about iPhone after using for 6 months. I have an iPhone 3G with unlimited maxed out data plan via AT&T. 

  1. Keyboard – The lack of a physical keyboard is particularly hazardous for me. The predictive logic is fine for normal people, but as a physician, shooting a quick email becomes an exercise in Gotcha when medical terms and abbreviations morph into correctly spelled but wrong words. I know this can be turned off, but this causes just as many headaches as leaving it on. Apple wants you to go to an Apple laptop for any heavy keyboard work. 
  2. Battery Life -If you use it only as a phone, it gets through a workday. But if you use it as a smartphone, it barely gets through the day. Forget about an extended day, which is typical for me. This means carrying an external battery, cables, and adapters. I will gladly take some bulk for super long battery life. 
  3. Lack of Memory Expansion -flash memory is now dirt cheap. You can get 16GB SDHC cards for less than twenty bucks. This is mind bending when you look at the micro-SD form factor. There is no reason for the iPhone not to have this except for the fact that Apple does not like hatches and holes and excessive buttons, and it wants you to upgrade when you tire of the lack of memory. 
  4. No Copy/Paste -the lack of copy/paste is a philosophical decision on Apple’s part to avoid programs from contaminating each other via the clipboard. Every program runs by itself and tidily goes off when you turn it off. This fish bowl approach to tasking ensures that no program acts in a malignant fashion either intentionally or unintentionally. It’s Apple’s way of saying, “It’s a phone! Buy a Macbook for the heavy lifting.”
  5. AT&T -Not completely happy with it, but I guess it’s a compromise. If you had to marry someone, but you lived in a village in the mountains in the Balkans and there were only three available women, four if you didn’t mind the one with no teeth, a glass eye, and a goiter, you make the best of it. AT&T is the oldest one of the bunch with large bosoms and behind to match. Sure you fooled around with the youngest one (Sprint), but everybody else did too -her biggest fault was inconsistency and broken promises. The middle sister (Verizon), the prettiest one, was also the most controlling. The way she smacked her other sisters around and barked order about how she wanted things done her way was not appealing. So you settle with AT&T. I find strange things happening with the new 3G network out here in the hinterlands. I’ll get 5 bars and a 3G symbol one moment with clear reception, and I turn my head and I get 1 bar with an E (for the slower data connection), and the phone call goes kaplooey. It happens in my car, in my house, in my office, outside with no obstruction whatsoever -and it is the Great Plains with no significant geographic barriers. But the oldest sister doesn’t care so much of your demands, understands if you fool around with the other two, and when drunk, take a roll with the toothless, one-eyed one with the goiter (T-Mobile)-after all -she’s got you now for at least five years from iPhone launch. 
  6. No Bluetooth Anything -Polaroid recently asked TUAW (link) to post a generalized request to open up iPhone’s bluetooth for its portable photoprinter which works with just about every cheap-ass phone out there except for iPhone. This is a beef I have particularly when combined with complaint number 1 -no Bluetooth keyboards, no stereo bluetooth headphones with microphones, no Bluetooth printing, nada. Zip. Just the earpieces that go missing after a few days.
  7. No Easy Way to Organize Your Screens -Apple happily lets you have as many screens as needed for the Apps you download, but organizing them is a disaster if you have more than one screenful of apps (I have seven). If you do factory reset or something like it, all the apps are jumbled. It would be great if you could do it on iTunes and save these configurations. Or if the home screen gave you a link to your productivity apps, your games, your casual games, your deep strategic games, your games to show off the iphone with, and your games that you play for hours on end. Also your photo apps and music creation apps. 
  8. No Passthrough Internet -this is more AT&T’s fault than Apple’s, but I blame both since they got hitched up. You can with some phones, hook up your cell phone to your laptop and use its wireless internet connection to browse from your laptop. I did it a couple of times with my older Windows Mobile smartphones but it was a dodgy affair involving turning on and turning off various things and digging through control panels and hoping for a connection. It would be so wonderful to just attach the iphone and get it’s 3G connection as a connectivity option with no toggling or hoping. AT&T wants you to buy a separate data modem plan. 
  9. No Video Recording -I know you can jailbreak to get this feature, but I don’t want to jailbreak. I want it now, no excuses.
  10. Contacts choked -I have over 2000 contacts and also more via my Exchange connection to my office’s directory. This makes looking up contacts a frustrating affair as I wait often an interminable amount of time to look up a phone number. Absolutely unacceptable. Also, search is dumbfoundingly linear -you have to type the contact in the order that it was input. Sometimes, if I can’t remember a last name, I’m SOL. 
  11. No wordprocessing, no spreadsheet, no Filemaker database access -this is so basic, and so missing, but also related to all of the above -no keyboard, no multitasking, no copy/paste.
  12. No Flash, No WMV, no non-Apple media formats, No Java -this is cumbersome at best, and criminal at worst. I just don’t get it. Very few people use Quicktime anymore. I get the feeling that with Flash -Apple loses some control over the apps and games. 

This still doesn’t drive me away from iPhone because it really is the best smartphone experience. But I am not married to it, and will runoff with the next gadget that does fulfill my needs. And I got needs.

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The Freebie -Be Free!

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neooffice-dockiconVery few things in free are life, but for people who purchase new computers, regardless of flavors, a free office suite is available for download onto your Mac, your Windows XP netbook, or your Linux loaded computer. Vista flavors are also available. Just search for OpenOffice (www.openoffice.org) for Windows or Linux, or NeoOffice (for the Mac). 

neooffice-newThe images shown are for NeoOffice, which is a direct native port of OpenOffice into OS X. It offers a word processor, a spreadsheet, a presentation program, a line drawing program, and a database. In OS X, you can publish directly to PDF format or export to Microsoft Office formats. 

This ability trumps any need to purchase a Microsoft Office license. I have found that most people use only 10 percent of the functionality in any software, and the increasingly complex versions of Office offers no benefit. Still, their document formats are the lingua franca of business, and being able to open attachments and see them correctly formatted is a big thing. 

neoffice-docThe programs are fast and very functional. This all builds into my basic premise that Microsoft and its dance partner, Intel, have reached the end of their upgrade rope. Basically, with the current set of Windows XP netbooks, you can watch get on the internet, check email, watch video, and do work. You can do it on a Mac even better. If you need to frag aliens on a shooting game, then you need a high powered rig, but the basic items of fast internet connection and ability to read the basic file formats: MPEGS, Flash, and WMV’s (movies and music), DOCs (wordprocessing), XLS (spreadsheet), PPT (presentations), and databases, allows to do 95% of computing work. It’s available for free. If you can create PDF’s it’s even better because you don’t have to waste paper. 

Even better, you don’t need a computer if you sign up for a Google Docs account. You access it with your gmail login -and you can create the basic triumvirate of doc, xls, and ppt documents right on-line. No need for a flash drive or burning CD’s. 

So what is the value added for paying for software? I use iWork from Apple because stuff created on it just looks better and blows away anything you can make on the free stuff or on Microsoft Office. You have to get something in return for what you pay for. 

But the free stuff is great, because it levels the playing field. It means your four year old computer does not need to be upgraded because you can still create documents on it. It means your netbook that you bought for 300 bucks can do anything the laptop your company tries to load on you, but only lighter and simpler with battery life. It means that by getting a Mac, you get a competitive advantage if making presentations and documents is your livelihood because the stuff on it just looks better. It means being free of the Microsoft/Intel duopoly that demands a tithe every three years.

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The netbook

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Acer One netbook

The netbook, the smart phone, and the future of personal computing

 

The netbook is a new category of laptop computer that is really a refreshing of an old category. Starting with the ASUS eeePC introduced in 2007, several major laptop manufacturers have joined the fray, and the category has exploded. The current set of netbooks are a re-entry into what is a very old category centered around mobility. What the current set includes is connectivity. 

The first ultraportable of note was the Radioshack TRS-80 Model 100.

Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100

Radio Shack TRS 80 Model 100

It was portable and had a full keyboard. It featured a wordprocessor and Microsoft Basic. The Atari Portfolio and the HP95LX brought computing into the coat pocket, and the culmination of this was the Psion Series 5 which was tiny but touch typable. I used it to write my consult notes during residency and maintained a database of frequent fliers. The hospital had HP printers with infrared ports allowing me to print out my notes wirelessly. 

 

 

Atari Portfolio

Atari Portfolio

Psion went on to create the Psion netbook and holds copyright over the name. It is a shame that they gave up the personal computer business after developing the most stable portable operating system (EPOC) and software set ever created. For example, their spreadsheet program, part of an Office compatible suite, took up 22k of memory. My Psion could run over twenty programs concurrently without crashing. EPOC became Symbian which powers Nokia and Sony-Ericksson phones. Having given up the business, they are now chasing the netbook ghost by filing cease and desist letters to websites and businesses that use the word netbook.

HP 200LX

HP 200LX

 

 

I used to own a Psion netbook and it was fantastic to type on with incredible keyboard feel. It was fast, and had instant on -booting up was instantaneous like a cell phone, not like a computer with the minute of bootup time typical for a Windows computer. The EPOC office suite was integrated and allowed cutting and pasting of graphs into documents that would update with changes in the data -this was rock stable and again, took up only a few hundred kilobytes (not megabytes) of memory.

Psion Series 5

Psion Series 5

With AA batteries, the Series 5 would run up to 40 hours. The netbook had a PC card slot for a WiFi card giving it wireless internet back in 1999.

 

 

I believe Microsoft killed the portable computer industry for about ten years with their Windows CE operating system. Microsoft powered clamshell computers were popular for a while but were difficult to use and crashed frequently. I owned a fairly advanced PocketPC clamshell, the NEC 790, but was frustrated by its instability, it’s tendency to freeze and crash, and worst of all lose data, but the full keyboard and instant on capability were enough of a plus to keep me interested for a while. 

 

The salient features of portability, keyboard for human hands, instant on, long battery life, full resolution landscape screen, and wireless internet with full capability -Flash, Quicktime, WMV and other multimedia features, are the killer features of the modern netbook. None of the currently available netbooks (Acer, HP, Dell, MSI, ASUS, and now Sony) fit the bill.

NEC Mobilpro 790

NEC Mobilpro 790

 

Psion netbook - the original

Psion netbook - the original

 

 

 

All are based on the Intel Atom processor. This is a low voltage processor that integrates graphics which translates into slow -how slow? About a hair faster than Centrino Mobile (laptops circa 2005) when running Windows XP. It definitely won’t be lighting up the specs compared to dual core laptops, but it is “good enough,” especially compared to how we used to access the internet via dialup. 

Most of the netbooks come with Windows XP. The whole netbook category along with resistence to upgrading from the coporate side has kept Windows XP alive despite the presence of Vista. A few of the netbooks are presented with a scaled down version of Vista. Having stayed away from Vista like the plague, I can’t say first hand if it’s good or bad, but the word from people using the first generation HP netbooks which ran Vista on the slower VIA processor is that it is slow. This goes against the concept of a fast-boot, efficient, fast running machine. 

 

Apple Newton eMate 300

Apple Newton eMate 300

Linux was offered on the first generation of netbooks, but as they became popular, Microsoft made Windows XP licenses available for these netbooks, essentially killing off Linux on netbooks. This is unfortunate, because Linux starts up quicker and runs more efficiently on netbooks. OpenOffice, an office suite that is available for free, runs very well on Linux. The only downside is there is no iTunes for Linux, but the bulk of the needs are met through open source and usually free software. The great thing about Linux is that the computer are customizing the operating system for their product. The new HP Mini 1000 just presented at CES with a highly customized interface. We are all use to this with the Macintosh, but also with cell phones. In fact, this is a bit of a return to the days of yore, when computer makers created the box and the software. 

 

What does this mean? The netbook is in evolution. It is somewhere between a laptop and a smartphone. The laptop offers the larger screen, USB ports, and a keyboard. The smartphone offers instant on, extreme portability, omnipresent connectivity, long battery life, and great integration between software and hardware. The netbook is slowly moving toward this end, becoming less a commodity, and more a finely honed tool. 

 

HP MiniNote 2133

HP MiniNote 2133

Do I recommend a netbook? Depends. They are easier to carry than a laptop and offer the ability to work anywhere. My Acer One netbook cost less than $400, and has a battery life of over 6 hours, has a 160gB hard drive, and has Wifi. It runs Windows XP which has its faults, but it runs iTunes, turning my netbook into a large screen iPod where I can watch movies and TV shows. With Skype, I can have video chats with family and friends wherever WiFi is available. What is really neat is cloud computing being embraced by Google, Apple, and others. It moves the work onto the browser, and makes it platform agnostic. The problem is the current generation of netbooks are still just small, slightly slower Windows laptops. 

 

The future is the next generation of netbooks which will feature more solid state memory, customized Linux operating systems, and 3G or WiMax high speed internet that is integrated. The solid state memory or SSD (solid state disks) have no moving parts, are fast, and more energy efficient getting you closer to instant on. The customized operating system means that your hardware is more tightly integrated with the software, much like a cellphone. The 3G or WiMax type high speed internet means you can go anywhere untethered from a WiFi network. You can buy netbooks that feature 20Gb SSD’s (solid state disks) with Linux, but these basically disappeared after some muscling in by Microsoft. Windows 7 promises a smaller footprint to be able to run on netbook-like gear, but it completely misses the point. You don’t buy a car from BMW and run it on an engine from GM. You want the software to run seamlessly with the hardware, and this is much more difficult under Windows.

Apple is still digesting this arena. The Newton eMate 300 was an effort by Apple to create an instant on clamshell laptop, but was quickly killed by Steve Jobs upon his return along with the Newton OS and the great Newton 2100. MacBook Air has some netbook features, but fails in it basic concept as another, albeit beautiful, laptop. Ideally, iPhone/iPod Touch would be the platform for it’s netbook, but I don’t see it going that way because of Steve Job’s aversion to buttons. No, this category will be populated by manufacturers looking to capitalize on Apple’s deafness and blindness to this category. BTW, this blog entry was written entirely on my netbook running OpenOffice and uploaded via the Google Chrome browser.

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Call of Duty: World at War for Nintendo DS

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I generally don’t play first person shooter games because they take up too much time and are generally too violent. Call of Duty has always appealed to me because it adds a dimension of history -I am a big history buff, and World War II is the predominant theme of the twentieth century. All things lead to and from it. The game works well on the Nintendo DS which is a surprise for me because it’s such a small device. It does create cramps because you aim with the stylus and move with the D-pad and shoot with the left or right finger buttons. I don’t know how you would play it if you were a lefty. The game sounds best through good headphones. The men and graphics look blocky -this is the fault of the port. I think that the true resolution is seen when you look through the sniper scope -with the men at double size, they lose the blockiness. It feels a bit like Doom circa 1991 when you run around in the blocky graphics. It has WiFi -internet play, although I haven’t tried it. I don’t know if I can keep up with guys shooting from the latest i7 rigs over fiberoptic, but it is cool that I can do this through a portable machine. Here is a little video.

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Central Asian Chant Ringtone

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CHANT FILE CLICK HERE      CHANT FILE CLICK HERE

 

I composed this last night with Garageband using vocal tracks and a Blue Snowflake USB microphone. The twanging sound is from the antique Jew’s Harp. The throat singing is me recorded in two different tracks with vocal settings on “Deep Male Voice” and “Helium” which helps accentuate the overtones (or at least gives the impression that I can produce overtones). I’ve been practicing for years in the shower trying to get the nasal whistling overtones, but this has eluded me. The deeper resonant sounds are easier for me. The chant is a Korean Buddhist prayer for intercession of mercy on the world.

It was inspired by the movie Mongol. The movie and this chant compel me to a desire for riding on the Central Asian steppes in full medieval Mongol warrior regalia at the head of a horde charge. I think Mongol should take Best Foreign Film at this year’s Oscars if it doesn’t get run over by that Indian movie. The trailer attached below I think is in Russian -and shows mostly the battle scenes. The movie is meant to be a first chapter in a trilogy. It shows Genghis Khan in his youth and his relationship with his long-suffering wife. 

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The Crossdressing Mac

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snc10088My Macbook Pro 15 inch (Santa Rosa Core-2 Duo Processor, LED backlit screen, 4Gb RAM, 160GB HD) which I purchased a year ago, is a dream to work on. It lets me stay productive for 3-5 hours at a stretch on a single battery -with the two extras I have, I can go a full 12 hours straight before I have to plug in. It does everything the Mac OS X operating system promises very well. Most PC laptops are pretty much obsolete after a year. Not so my Mac. It is likely to be three or four years before I even consider upgrading. My last three laptops have been Sony Vaio’s and they were a miserable lot -pretty to look at but expensive to purchase, they failed at many of the basic things that my Macbook does so well. Even with a Sony Digital Camcorder, none of the Sony Vaio Laptop’s could handle moviemaking, something my Macbook does with polish. I maintain a professional work-related blog with the built-in iWeb software, and all the basic things that I do are just easy and stress free.three-os

On occasion, I do need to go back into Windows. This is where the Macbook really shines. It is not well known by the average user, but the Intel chipped based Macs all run Windows very well -enough so that PC Magazine rated the Macbook Pro 17inch the fastest PC Laptop in 2007. You can run Windows in two different ways.

First, you can run Boot Camp -software that comes with the Mac, that lets you boot up (start the machine) directly into Windows. It reportedly gives you a 2-5% speed boost compared to running it the way that I do which is using virtualization software. Virtualization software lets you run Windows and Mac (and Linux, another operating system) side by side. I use Parallels 4.0, but there is also VMWare Fusion which does the same thing and is currently on sale. Of course, whether you run Boot Camp or virtualization software, you need a separate Windows license. I purchased a Windows XP Pro DVD last year, when you could still buy them, and loaded it onto my Mac, and I can access Windows-only software at work with no fuss. The image at top is the Mac running Windows in full screen mode -I’m updating to XP service pack 3 in the picture. 

The Mac is like a smart, well educated person who can speak several languages at once. The image on the right shows three windows -the top left is Windows XP updating to SP3, the right green window is Suse Linux booting up, and the bottom window is Safari on this blog page I am writing. The computer is running with no lag, no delay, and couldn’t care less. Try that on a Vista laptop. 

Why do I run Suse Linux? It’s because I’m at heart an incredible geek. It’s a very stable operating system which runs quickly on older hardware. If you have an older Windows laptop that is getting long in the tooth, you can download OpenSuse Linux for free, burn a bootable DVD and freshen your older hardware -it run quickly, quicker than Windows, is more stable, and lets you keep your laptop running a while longer. There is free office suite called OpenOffice that comes with the OpenSuse distribution. There are also other free Linux distributions available. I have OpenSuse in order to play with databases -another get rich quick scheme!

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Nintendo DS versus iPod Touch/iPhone 3G

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img_1309The struggle for the space between the hands is shaping up to be between the established Nintendo DS and the upstart iPod Touch/iPhone. What are the differences and what are the implications of the recently posted numbers for the iTunes App store -10,000 apps and games with 300,000,000 downloads? Where is Sony and the vaunted PSP? What is Microsoft not up to? 

snc10082Nintendo DS

The DS is a marvel of thoughtful design, and in its current manifestation as the DS Lite, it has wonderful hand-feel, two sharp screens, and a battery system designed for children -it’s supposed to go 15-20 hours between charges and is rated for 500 charges. We got G one through Amazon for 125. The cost of entry is modest, but it is the content that they get you with. The games cost on average 35 dollars for the new releases. You can get used games on-line and through local dealers like FYE for a modest discount. The games from Nintendo proper tend to revolve around their established universes of Pokémon and Mario. Other publishers publish in Nintendo, but it’s a mixed bag. Some are slapdash ports of their console games or PC games which don’t project well. Some are fossils of PC games made in the 1990’s with all the blocky graphics moved over to the DS -very lazy way to make easy money with a shiny cover with a 35 dollar price tag. You have to read the reviews, but not all the games get reviewed. The well thought out games are standouts with pretty and appealing graphics, compelling story, and engaging gameplay. The greatness of Nintendo is that it does allow for use of legacy cartridges from the Gameboy Advanced, but not from prior generations. The Gameboy Advanced SP is now available online for around 40-50 bucks -I got ours new two years ago for 75 dollars, and will take Gameboy cartridges going all the way back to Tetris from 1988. 

This is an old and established model of game consoles going all the way back to Atari -make modest profit on a discounted console and make coin on licensing of the games, and Nintendo certifies and manufactures all the cartridges. Cartridges allow for a deeper level of play than minigames -which is the new word for arcade games. The problem is unless you’re a kid on vacation -who has 20-40 hours to complete Pokémon Diamond or Call of Duty (on order -am on vacation). The minigames -the arcade style games, still cost 25-40 dollars, but are the most sociable -Mario Party (on order) is supposed to allow you to play with up to 8 players from a single cartridge -and this is the neat thing about the DS -it does allow for you to have one cartridge and share among several players -which promotes the purchase of more Gameboy’s in multi-sibling families. We got our second one through a generous friend who sent G this handsome blue one.

iPod Touch/iPhone/App Store

 I believe that the combination of iPod Touch and App Store is the future of gaming and all portable entertainment. When you get an iPhone or iPod Touch, you have instant connection to the App Store which now features over 10,000 games. Apple vets these -very controversial in the geek-o-sphere, and the result is that the Apps pretty much work as advertised on the iPod Touch or iPhone. Because Apple limits the exchange of data between programs -allowing only one program to run at a time, it makes the system “locked down,” safe, and stable. The Apps are inventive, useful, and above all FUN. They are also much cheaper than buying cartridges. Many games are FREE, and most are 0.99 to 10.00, and you get very accurate reviews from actual users in the App Store. There is no need to drive to a store. My home has WiFi, as does my place of work, and this ubiquity of data-pipes means the iTunes store is ubiquitous as well. 

My favorite games include Field Runners (reviewed earlier), and Flick Bowling. Apple’s Texas Hold ‘Em game is a good time sink. The great thing is that G and J both like the iPod Touch games and find them easy to learn and play, engaging, and easy to put down. The games take up a few megabytes at most and this means you can have hundreds of games on your iPhone without slowing it down -unlike the programs for Windows Mobile. Apple has pulled off a Trifecta -it owns the game box, the store, the TV (I watch most of my movies and TV via the iPhone), and the critical mass needed to move the market. It has created an ecosystem for capitalizing the exchange of content by making it easier to get this content for the average user -it takes a great deal of geekwork to get pirated free content, and a lot less effort for grabbing fun at $0.99 at a time legally. 

Did I mention that with iPod Touch, you can load Fring -it lets you make telephone calls over a Wifi connection via Skype. How cool is that?

Bye Bye Sony and Windows

Sony has failed repeatedly in its history by trying to create a stranglehold on media standards -the Betamax, the MD Disc, the Memory Stick, Universal Media Disk (UMD), and Blu-Ray. I include Blu-Ray because high speed internet has rendered Blu-Ray obsolete. Apple is beginning to offer more of its content in HD, and the storage is now cheap enough that you can have a library of HD content in your living room. The iPhone’s display is gorgeous and basically is the same as watching a 50 inch screen at 15 feet -try it for yourself -when you walk away from a large screen TV to normal viewing distances, it’s basically the same as holding an iPhone at arm’s length. The problem for Sony is that it perseverates on making overpriced, overly complicated items that few deep pocket geeks enjoy. The Playstation Portable is a jewel -beautiful to hold and see -and it’s completely impossible to watch movies and TV shows on it without serious geek effort. Playstation -fuhgeddaboudit for now -it’s a compelling buy in about two years when they go bust, if you want to invest weeks learning how to play their games. The games cost 30-60 dollars!

Windows and Microsoft have failed with their Windows Mobile platform when at every moment until about three years ago, they had their feet on Apple’s neck. The WinMo phones are a bust -they crash and run very slow. It’s takes a computer science degree to buy third party programs for it and load it on without gumming up the phone with installers and other detritus. They make simple things difficult and annoying. X Box 360, which I don’t have, appears to shine compared to the usual Microsoft offerings, but is caught in Microsoft’s web of mutually intersecting interests and complications. The games also cost a lot compared to free or $0.99. 

Apple -the last person on the island

The first year of Survivor was the most compelling -afterwords, it became unwatchable. The weird guy who was the final survivor made some brilliant moves to be the last one left. This is what has happened with Apple and will be Steve Jobs’ legacy. It realized that people respond to things that are easy to use and fun to play. The iPhone has only one big button and two smaller ones. The content is ubiquitously available through the web. For most students, iPod Touch also allows for true web access previously available only on laptops. The iPhone can be turned into a serious scientific calculator, a golf yardage machine, a GPS device for the car, a musical wind instrument (Ocarina), a level, a beat box, a game machine, and an infinite number of other things that for me represents the culmination of all the future stuff I used to see on sci-fi movies growing up. It’s also managing to sell a lot of laptops during a major recession. 

Nintendo DS

The deep games -the ones requiring gigabytes of memory, are Nintendo DS’s strength. The iPhone has some content like Zork and other adventure games from the ’80’s and 90’s. What Nintendo must do is realize that WiFi is ubiquitous and unlock the DS’s capabilities. You should be able to get a widget you can plug in to download and play content and games from the web on your DS. Put Outlook on the DS along with Facebook with a keyboard for an adult version. It’s only a matter of time before Apple puts out a larger screen version of the Touch with more solid state memory and a 24 hour battery life. 

 

at a one year low, like everything else

at a one year low, like everything else

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The Word Process

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img_1258_2It’s interesting to me that the method that I use to capture my words has an effect on how and what I write. One of my great interests is using old school methods of pencil and pad. The handbound leather book filled with blank sheets of handmade linen paper is a joy to have around. I scribble in it a few times a year.img_12711This is the sketch I made for a series of paintings I have planned entitled, “Practice Signs for the Post-Apocalyptic Physicians and Surgeons.” This one is for an otolaryngologist. 

The writing is done with a Cross fountain pen which was a graduation gift from my fellowship. I used to have a beautiful Mont Blanc pen, another gift, but sadly, I lost it during residency. There is something fun about scribbling that is lost when scrabbling away on a keyboard. 

Speaking of keyboards, the picture below shows a manual Royal office typewriter, the kind that were used in the forties and fifties. I saw this one at a church sale in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the spring of my senior year. It was in mint condition, and I was poor, but I shelled out 25 bucks for it. As a kind of perverse oppositional-defiant pose during medical school, I submitted all my notes to the class note-taking cooperative by typing them out on this dinosaur. I thought it just oozed an old school vibe that went along well with the drafty lecture amphitheaters that were constructed in the 1920’s, and the chain-smoking anatomy professor puffing away after revealing some hidden, secret bodily chamber in the very anatomy lab that inspired the book and movie, “Coma.” The typewriter also went very well with my Barton Fink apartment. 

img_1270My current writing instruments include a Macbook Pro 15 inch running the simple TextEdit that came with it. When I want to create formatted documents, I use Pages (Apple) or NeoOffice (free! port of the OpenOffice suite). Just can’t stand to give another dime to Bill Gates. When I go portable, I use an Acer Aspire One pictured below. It goes 6-7 hrs on a charge, and allows for a fair bit of work, if you don’t mind the cramped keyboard. It is the size of a non-fiction hardback book. The only handicap it has is that it runs on Windows XP. img_1272I confess that I write to enjoy the process of writing as much as reading the final product. Mastering the many ways you can write -whether scratching a mark on a rock or typing in the cloud on Google Docs, is pleasurable. It’s the same in fishing when you tie your own flies or dig out your own worms, grubs, and crickets. Or when you golf by knocking a rock with a stout tree branch.

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The Game

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img_0011I haven’t found a single golf game I could recommend for the iPhone, not a single one. Mario Golf for the Gameboy is the best I’ve seen so far. But, I have found The Game for my iPhone. Every computer I have owned had its Game. My first computer, the Coleco Adam, came with Buck Rogers, but it was the Coleco cartridge game, War Games, from the movie, that managed to blister my thumbs. In college, I had a Fat Mac, with all of 512k and two disk drives, and the Game for it was Dark Castle. Subsequently, in medical school, the Game was Spaceward Ho! for which the authors have ported to OSX -played it on Quadra 900. Funny thing has been that I never got into the 3D shooter games -the closest thing was Turok for the Nintendo 64, both of which I received for free from a friend who was the tech writer for Newsweek. My favorite arcade game in college was a game whose name I don’t remember involving playing as an elf, a dwarf, a wizard, or least favorite -a human. My favorite pinball game was Taxi or Pinbot, whichever was not occupied at the time. The last game that would qualify as The Game was Myth played on a Powerbook G4 that J brought home from work.

The Game shown above is Fieldrunners, available on the iTunes App Store. It is easy to learn, fun to watch and listen to (machine guns, little gnomes squealing as they get mowed down), and completely engrossing. There is a spot on my brain, maybe a tumor, that gets rubbed when I play certain video games, and it just GETS ME. Now, if they get Spaceward Ho! on the iPhone, I’m truly a dead man.