So this is Christmas…

My husband has been giving me grief lately, because he feels like he married the next John Grogan. The only thing I seem to post about on this blog are my dogs.

Well, let’s face it, I’ve had a rough couple of years in terms of my life with dogs. First, I lose my best friend and our first family dog. Then we bring home Mugen and he starts sewing us up and then we adopt Lucy and feel like the family is complete only to have her taken from us by cancer less than two years later. Along the way, we adopted Jazzmin because she needed someplace to go and when Lucy was gone, I was so horribly lonely without her that my husband decided we needed a third again and we adopted Jet. That’s a lot of doing with dogs in three years, so I have a lot to talk about when it comes to my crew. I apologize if that’s not what you were hoping to read on my blog.

I know I have bounced around from topic to topic over the years, but a lot of that was due to my going through a growing up phase. I had to figure out who I was as an adult, you see, and I grew up way too fast in terms of taking responsibility. I didn’t have time to sort through this crap along the way, I was too busy being a mom and taking care of a family to do that. So… here I am, having stopped talking about all of the things that I used to discuss here because I made up my mind on the issues and I never really explained why or how I got there.

I’ve made up my mind that our entire political system is nothing but a big fat scam. The guys on both sides of the aisle lie to us to get votes. They say they are going to give you this or that and make your life better, but they fail to tell you the truth: The only person that has the power to make your life better is you. The only way to make the world a better place is to stop being a douche and start donating to charity, real charity that actually gives money to help your cause, not some BS lobbying group. You should be smart enough to do your own research and know the difference between a group of people who are really doing some good, like say your local animal shelter, and a bunch of guys who are lining their pockets so they can afford to live the good life in Washington DC, such as the Humane Society of the United States, and if you’re not smart enough to figure that out, then you’re probably not reading my blog either. So I don’t discuss politics anymore. It’s a waste of time for both of us. Hopefully, you will grow and mature enough to figure out that the only way your situation is going to get better, is if you get off your ass and do something about it and if you want to change somebody else’s situation then you have to get personally involved. The government is NOT going to help the homeless guy on the street corner get back on his feet, but you can, if you want to. You just have to reach out and choose it.

I’ve made my decisions regarding technology and I’m not really interested in debating my choices on the internet anymore because it really does feel like it’s Apple vs The Geeks and guys, I dunno if you noticed, but I’m not really a “geek”. I’m geeky. I love Star Wars and Star Trek. Some of my fondest memories of my childhood involve sitting in front of the television with my dad watching Max Headroom. I used to know how to code over a decade ago. I couldn’t build a website now, even if doing so meant saving my own life. I do appreciate what it is to be a geek though because I married one and because I used to live that life, but somewhere along the way, my geekiness faded away and melted into motherhood. I haven’t given it up completely, but I can’t sit here and debate with you about why Android is better. All I can tell you is that I think that using an Android phone is a pain in the ass. The web browser has never been in the same place twice on any phone I have handled. The battery life kinda sucks and I could give two shits if the CPU is faster or the screen is bigger. I want the darned thing to go all day AND fit in the back pocket of my jeans. That’s what I want. If it’s not what you want, fine. Go buy the phone you want and leave me alone with the one I wanted, k?

Then there’s the whole “Mac” issue. I’m gonna say this once: If you do not use a Mac as your primary computer and you admit to your friends that you hate Apple products, do not offer to do tech support for them! I get so frustrated with people complaining about how difficult Apple products are to use, when they can’t figure out three little words that would make their lives easier: “drag and drop”. Geeks overcomplicate and over think things to the point of putting themselves through hell rather than attempting to use the most obvious solution to their problems. In the Apple universe, that obvious solution usually works. I can’t tell you how many complaint sessions I have ended by saying, “Did you try this really obvious fix that would have solved the whole problem if you’d just done it that way in the first place?”

I get it though, really I do. Some people don’t like things to be easy. That’s a personal preference though, not a standard by which the device itself should be measured. So, you go ahead and work out how you are going to put that square peg in that round hole and I will see you later. If you have a friend that needs help with their Apple product, send them my way. I will be only too happy to bail them out. It will be a hell of a lot less stress for everyone.

But that’s not what I really came here to talk about, this post was supposed to be about Christmas.

Guess I got a little side tracked.

Let’s Talk About Google+

This is the blog post I’ve been avoiding writing.

As a die hard Apple fangirl, I love everything about Apple. However, even I am willing to admit when Apple has gotten something completely wrong. Let’s face it, Apple’s attempt at a social network, Ping, blows chunks. I don’t use it. I want to use it, I think the idea of sharing the music that I love with other people via Ping is awesome, but it doesn’t connect to Facebook and to be brutally honest, it needs that piece of functionality. Ping is tailor made for the Facebook crowd and that’s where it should live, as an app for Facebook, not integrated into iTunes.

I would love to say that Ping has a brilliant user interface that is straight forward and easy to use. I would love to say that Ping has this cool feature or that cool feature that I can’t live without. I would love to point out that so far, the lack of stupid quiz apps and the lack of games that not only want to steal all of my private data, but also are designed to get me addicted to playing them so that I can sink large amounts of cash into them, is a huge bonus.

And while some of those things are true about Ping, mostly the lack of games and stupid quiz apps, the ones that matter, the brilliant user interface and the feature list, are not all that.

Google stepped into that little arena and filled in the gap between what I wanted Ping to be, and what Facebook is when they opened Google+ for public field trials less than a month ago. Google has really surprised me with Ping.

I have been absolutely unimpressed with Android. I don’t see the reason for the hype, I see Android as an also ran. It’s not a bad platform, but it’s not a great platform. I can’t hand an Android phone to a 90 year old grandmother and expect her to be able to make a phone call. I can do that with my iPhone, and in fact, I have run into many an elderly couple looking for cases for their iPhones in the Apple store. I almost never see them at the phone store. If your grandma has to call you for tech support every time she wants to send an email on her smartphone, you’re doing something wrong.

I like user interfaces that just flat out make sense. I do not want something complicated that is different for every single user, or every single device. If someone needs to use my phone to call 911, I want them to be able to do that without having to figure out which screen I put the “Phone” icon on. It should be obvious, and in your face. That’s just good design.

It also seems to me like Google had a plan for Android that isn’t working out for them in the way that they’d hoped and that Amazon is about to take the tool that Google gave them, and blow a great big hole in the side of the tablet market before Samsung can make another iPad knock off that is nowhere near as elegant and more expensive.

I can’t wait to see that fight, because I think Apple is braced for impact, and the Android tablet makers are going to get T-boned.

I feel completely differently about Google+ though.

Google has really put together an elegant product here, something that they could monetize easily by inserting Google ads and I’m not sure that would bother me too much.

What I love, is that I can choose who sees the content I put up on Google+. I maintain control of my material, so if I want my parents to see it, but not every person I know, I can just include the “family” circle in my post and not allow any other circles to see it. I can make new circles too! I don’t have to live with the five they gave me. I have circles for people that I’ve met via the Internet, by the internet forum that I met them on. So I have a MINI circle and a Dog circle and an IRC circle. I can also choose to add people to multiple circles. So if I have someone in the MINI circle that I am closer to than the guy I just met on the forum last week, I can add that person to a “Friends” circle in addition to having them be a part of the MINI circle, so they can see the posts that I make available to a more personal group.

You can get as complicated or as simplistic as you want with the circles. There are no hard and fast rules for how to make one, it’s entirely up to you. Facebook has a similar feature, but it’s hard to maintain if you didn’t start out using it from the get-go.

By contrast, maintaining your circles on G+ is a snap. Say, for example, you end up getting out of a particular hobby. In my case, I just got out of fish keeping. I liked the hobby and it was a lot of fun, but it’s not something that I choose to do. So, I don’t want to read about it every day now. If I had a bunch of people in my circles that did nothing but talk about fish keeping, I could go to the circle for the fish keeping friends, and with two clicks, cut the entire circle loose simply by opening up the circle and choosing “Delete this circle”. Not only does it delete the circle entry itself, but any friends that you have in the circle that you may not want to keep for whatever reason, are also removed from your circles and will no longer be able to see your posts.

It’s just that easy to maintain.

So far, I’m impressed. If an iOS app is approved for the service, I can see myself easily gravitating away from Facebook to using Google+ instead. It’s much more streamlined and more geared around what I want to do with it and how I want to use it, rather than being geared on how the developers think it should be used.

That’s not even the tip of the iceberg here. Those are just the major features that I have used so far. There are also hangouts, which I have not tried to use yet. I also haven’t really talked about Sparks, which is kind of a cool way to aggregate news articles on subjects you’re interested in, because I haven’t delved into how it works too deeply just yet. They’re not that relevant anyway.

The control that Google+ gives the user over their own content is the star of the show.

I still have a few invites to Google+ left. If you’re interested, let me know.

The Internet

I made my first friend on the Internet when I was 14 years old. It was over a service called Quantum Link, which later grew into a little company, that I know you’ve heard of, called AOL. Chris lived on the other side of town from me, and it was odd to actually meet someone from your local area in a chat room. We exchanged phone numbers one night and called each other once a week or so and talked on the phone. We met at the mall downtown a couple of times, mind you this was in the late 80s and early 90s. I don’t think my parents thought there was a chance I would meet a pedophile over q-link. So Chris and I met. He wasn’t a creep. He was everything he said he was and I was nerdier than I said I was, which he already knew and was okay with.

I have nothing but happy memories of my friendship with him. When I think of him, I think of him meeting me at the entrance to the mall with his arms wide open to hug me so hard that I couldn’t breathe. He introduced me to one of my life long loves, alternative music, he’s the reason I know who Tony Hawk is, otherwise, I probably wouldn’t care. When I look back on that friendship, which lasted until I got married and relocated out of state, I smile. Our feelings for each other were completely platonic, but our friendship was very special to me. He was someone who taught me the importance of being myself, of loving what I love and doing what I love. My parents always encouraged that, but Chris showed me why it was important and how something that I thought was optional because other people might judge me this way or that way, was actually not optional at all.

Chris and I never reconnected. It’s been 17 years since the last time I heard his voice. Not even through the internet have we found each other again. We’ve certainly had plenty of avenues opened for us though, IRC, ICQ, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, MySpace or Facebook. Dude, if you’re out there reading this right now, I miss you and would love to hear from you again. I really want to know if I’m right about what you think of Green Day.

Thinking about him this morning came about from a conversation I had on twitter about Google+. Everyone is talking like Google+ is going to be the next Facebook and it’s so amazingly awesomely awesome. That brought up conversations about how Facebook was the new MySpace and I pointed out that I’d never used MySpace because I didn’t understand why it was cool to have a web page that looked like 1997 was calling and wanted its web design back, when the year on the calendar said, “2007”.

That got me thinking about the evolution of the Internet and how this service or that service appeared and changed the game, which got me thinking about larger concerns, because this is where my mind always wanders. “What will they say about Facebook in twenty years?”

This train of thought led me back to us and our place in all of this.
Wait a second and dial that thought back a notch or two. I wasn’t thinking about the whole human race. I’m talking about those of us that are Generation X.

We are living in interesting times! My GOD! The things we have seen!
We have watched the world transition from being primarily dependent on transportation to keep things moving, to being primarily dependent on a computer network to keep things moving. You’ve all seen that episode of the IT Crowd by now, and if you haven’t, here’s what I mean: Jen Introduces The Internet

The panic that ensues here isn’t that wrong! Can you imagine what would happen if the whole of the internet just up and went kaput!

Well, of course we can! Gen Xers know that everything would be just fine because we would go back to 1985 for a few hours and we’d plop down on our butts in front of the television and reminisce about The Transformers and GI Joe, then whatever geek was responsible for cutting that major pipeline would find a work around, and we’d go back to Facebook and Youtube.

I’m not sure that the Millennials, my children, understand a world without the Internet. The internet has been there for as long as they’ve been alive.

And the more I look back on my life and how I got my first computer when I was 13 and I signed up for my first internet service at age 14, the more I realize that I am very much like my children. I am one of the younger members of Gen X, my husband is also a Gen Xer and is 9 years older than me, and he remembers the 70s. I was too little to go see Star Wars in the theater then, so his perspective on this whole scene is even more unique than mine. He actually understands how the technology came to life. He watched as the internet was built, which was something I did not see.

Either way, I think I know what they will say about Generation X when we are old. I suspect it won’t be that different from what was said of my grandparents: “Man did they live in an interesting time in the world.”

And we really are. The internet has changed the world and we have been here to watch it evolve. The 20 somethings and Something-teens take it for granted because it’s always been there, but we got to see the thing that made their lives what they are, be born.

How cool is that?

iTunes in the Cloud: What More Do You Need?

I have been desperately trying to put this blog post together for a week or so now. The reality is, there’s just too much about iOS5 that I love. Suffice it to say that we have iOS5 running on my old 3GS so that my husband can figure out how it works, and maybe, someday, finish that iPhone app that I keep telling him he needs to build. In the mean time, I’ve been carrying the thing around and using it where I would normally be using my iPhone 4.

I could tell you all sorts of cool things about iOS5 that Apple did not talk about at WWDC. But that’s not what has me excited as an end user of iOS5. What has me excited, is iTunes in the Cloud. Being able to sync my books, videos and music over the air is just a God send. This all started because of my mother, of course.

I’m reading this series of books that my mother has mentioned to me every time I’ve talked to her for the last several months. I finally picked them up for free off of SmashWords and am reading them with iBooks. They’re not the best I’ve read to be honest, the plot could use some work, it’s predictable, story pieces connect to each other a little too easily to be believable, but the writing is pretty solid and the world is pretty interesting and I really like the characters, so I’m hooked. The other night, I was reading book two of the series in bed and I had my iPad sitting up against my knees and I wanted to roll over and hide under the covers so the light wouldn’t disturb my husband and I thought to myself, “Oh! I’ll just grab my iPhone!” and I realized in the same moment that I didn’t have the book on my iPhone.

This was last weekend, before Apple’s keynote on Monday. I was a little frustrated at myself for forgetting to sync my books on my iPhone. My eyes lit up like a kid on Christmas morning when I heard them announce iTunes in the Cloud. The first thing I did as soon as that feature became available on my iPhone, was turn it on and start using it. I love being able to have my purchases where I want them, when I want them there, as opposed to where I put them when I bought them.

Then I decided I wanted to revisit George Michael. I used to seriously love George Michael, but we drifted apart after I graduated high school and his pop stardom waned. I caught an episode of Eli Stone and HAD to have Faith again, so I went to buy it this morning. I picked the seven songs I wanted, paid my seven bucks, and immediately the device I have running the iOS5 beta bleeped at me. The notifications window on the lock screen said, “You downloaded a song from your computer. Turn on automatic downloads to receive music on this device without having to sync.”
You can imagine the grin that spread across my face when I read this.

One thing I am learning about iOS 5 is that the intention here is to have your device work with your life, rather than you having to think about your device and wonder if you did this thing or that. I feel like it encourages you to live your digital life effortlessly, and when something important happens, it tells you, rather than you having to constantly tell it. Using the device and getting things done is just so much less of a chore.

It’s what I have wanted all along and never knew I really needed. I was content with tethered life, but now that I have seen a taste of what is on the horizon for Apple users with iCloud, I’m sorely tempted to sell all of my spare iPod cables on Craigslist. I can’t see a reason why you would need to plug your device into your Mac to sync it. It doesn’t matter where I am when I buy music now. I can buy it from my iPad, iPhone or Macbook. It will show up on the other devices before I even think to look for the data on them. What more do I need in this life?

Well, okay, I probably need a million dollars and a contract with a publisher but that’s pipe dreaming here.

WWDC 2011: Back to the Dev

Every year, I watch WWDC with interest. I watch it from a consumer standpoint, and not a developer standpoint. I fully expected Apple to release a hardware product at WWDC this year, but last year, the developers were quite upset that Apple had forgotten about them in all the iPhone 4 hype. Certainly Gizmodo’s checkbook journalism and the sensation that this caused in the media, so huge actually that the story reached CNN, was a show stealer.

This year, was entirely unlike last year. This year, the WWDC keynote delivered by Apple focused on developer tools and developer features in Apple’s upcoming offerings for their devices. Of course, I’m talking about OSX Lion, iCloud and iOS 5.

There is a great article on iCloud by Andy Ihnatko in the Chicago Sun-Times that tells you everything you need to know about iCloud in a way that only Mr. Ihnatko can. You can read the article for yourself, but this quote sums it up nicely, “Apple forcefully made the point that iCloud is meant to do no less than replace the PC in its current role as the hub of the digital experience, and relegate it to the status of Just Another Device that syncs data between itself and everything else”. This says it all.

iCloud is not just some other feature that’s being added to OSX and iOS. iCloud is the future of computing as Apple sees it. It’s the bridge between where we’re going and where we are and it’s going to teach us how to abandon our old ideas about what technology should be, just like iTunes showed us how to walk away from record stores. It will be difficult for those of us that are a bit old school in our computer usage to walk away from the desk or the table and go sit in a park and wirelessly do everything. I have my concerns about having all of my information up in the cloud and I used to argue very hard that cloud computing was not the way to go, even though I knew things would always eventually end up here.

In spite of my dislike of this, and my mistrust, I think that OSX Lion is going to play a huge part in moving me into that future where all of our data is stored in the cloud and we will no longer need to keep massive hard drives on our machines. It is frustrating, however to watch the media compare iCloud to other services, because it is so much more than Amazon Cloud services, or even the OTA sync that Google has in some Android devices. iCloud is not limited to a narrow field of use. iCloud is simply everything.

iCloud will not be available for all of us to play with until July, but we did get a taste of the kind of services that Apple will provide to us with iCloud from iTunes in the Cloud, which is available on your friendly neighborhood Apple device right now. I suggest you play with it and go see what Cloud living will be like in the Apple universe. It’s eye opening to see how easy Apple made this for consumers to use. I hope that iCloud and all of its services will be as uncomplicated for the developers to take advantage of.

One of the things that I do after the WWDC keynote is go out in search of a bunch of news articles from a bunch of sources on the keynote to consider the opinions of other writers before finalizing my own thoughts and ideas. Sometimes it can be eye opening, or there will be a feature that I find to be really cool that I must have missed when I got up to get a drink.

This time, I found a complaint that there is no “free music streaming” of any kind associated with iCloud running around in WaPo, PC World and some more mainstream media outlets. It was interesting to see this noted in these articles because these writers seem to have forgotten the same thing that Apple forgot about at last year’s WWDC. WWDC is all about opening the doors for communication between Apple and their third party developers. That is the purpose of the conference. For those who are unaware, WWDC stands for “World Wide Developers Conference”. Notice that the word “developer” is in there. Apple did forget that for the last couple of years, and it was truly a good thing to see them focus on the developers and all of the innovations that they have made to iOS and OSX under the hood. So I’m wondering why it is that WaPo and PC World forgot the most famous slogan associated with Apple products, so pervasive that it’s a running joke in most high schools around the country.

“There’s an app for that.”

Apple ticked off a lot of developers yesterday. iCloud and AirDrop together effectively replaces the DropBox app under OSX and iOS. Camera + has been outmoded by updates to the native Camera app under iOS. They ticked off their cellular partners by not letting them in on their little iMessages gag and let’s not even get started on how they pretty much made Instapaper obsolete by adding Reading List to Safari. In spite of these things, Apple did not forget why they were there.

This keynote was about the developer. This was about the changes they have made to xcode and about the new APIS and getting the SDK for all of their new features into the hands of the developers so that they could take the tools that Apple was giving them and be let loose to see what they could do with it.

It isn’t about the consumer or the end user here. It’s not about more features for you and me. It’s about more features for the developers to play with so that they can make something truly awesome for all the end users so that when Apple comes back in six months or a year and looks at everything their third party developers did, they can say, “See? Look at that! We made that possible!”

And they most certainly have.

My only lament about this keynote is the realization that my three year old 13″ unibody Macbook with a 2 GHz Core 2 Duo processor is the lowest CPU on the totem pole that will run Lion. That more than likely means no OSXi for me.

Somehow, I suspect that won’t be such a hardship though, even if I don’t upgrade my hardware when OSXi is released.

Scrivener and Me

This could get long, I’m coming off of a very long November.

I am relatively new to Macs. I got my very first Mac in December 2008 and I am still thrilled to tell everyone who will listen, that I am typing on that very same Mac right now. I am impressed and amazed that I have had a computer this long and have never had to call tech support and have not had a hard drive blow up, or the back light in a screen go out for no apparent reason other than it just felt like dying that day. When I went to the genius bar to get my iPhone fixed, the Genius told me I could expect to have my Mac for another three years. I grinned like a kid on Christmas when he told me that.

I love being a Mac owner.

I have been searching for word processing software since I bought my Mac. I wasn’t a fan of Word even when I had PC’s. I don’t really need an “office” suite and OO for Mac is SLOW.

Last year, I bought a competing piece of Mac word processing software and liked it pretty well, but I was having a hard time with organizing my thoughts while working through this year’s NaNo novel. This novel is very important to me, it’s a story that’s been kicking around in my brain for years and I finally decided to get it out of my system and see if I could make a go of something with it. I was getting annoyed with the process of creating in this other software. It didn’t do things that I wanted it to do and was too… featureless.

I broke 50,000 words on November 12. The problem with that, is that what I was writing had no direction, no guidance. It meandered all over the place and didn’t adhere to any sort of time line. There was no good way to organize the scenes I was writing into timeline and write them out of order, which is what I tend to do. Sometimes I want to work on the end of my story first, and go back to the beginning later, or write a scene in the middle and then work chronologically forward from there for a while.

My process has NEVER worked for me when I was using any tools other than a three ring binder, a typewriter and a hole punch.

During the middle of NaNo, I ended up needing to make a day trip out of town, so I updated all of my podcasts and went out on the open road. I was listening to Andy Inahtko talk about the various Mac apps that he loves and he started talking about Scrivener. His praise for Scrivener was just glowing. Then I saw that some authors that I really respected and loved used Scrivener exclusively and then I saw the trial version available for WriMos… I had to at least give it a shot.

On day 14, I downloaded the Scrivener trial and ported over some of my NaNo novel into it.

Scrivener saved my novel.

I was in a place where I was ready to call it done for the year. After I installed it, I ended up organizing the whole thing in the binder. I fit my outline into 11 chapters in the binder with no trouble at all. I cut chunks of text out of my old document and placed them in a new one and it took me about one afternoon to set the whole annoying, frustrating, beast of a project to rights. I wish that I had started the novel this way in the first place.

It’s December now and I’m still working on my novel, which is odd. I love to write, I love being a writer, but I don’t get paid for it. I have always been way too frustrated with the process to try to make it something more than just a creative outlet. It is what I am, not what I do.

Scrivener might just make a doer out of me.

So Easy.

Apple released its iPad on Saturday. Already CNET.com is declaring that HP’s slate will be an ‘iPad Killer’. I find this funny because iPad hasn’t had time to establish itself, let alone sort out what market it is being sold to and yet, CNET is certain of the powerhouse that iPad will become. So much so, that they feel the need to start bestowing titles upon competing devices as though iPad is already dominating a market that barely even exists.

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Random Gemini’s iPad Review.

Welp… I don’t have much to say about the iPad.

Hubby picked ours up yesterday and I have played with it for approximately oh… 15 minutes. Long enough to tell you that I really dig the IDEA of Netflix App on the iPad… and I really dig the idea of Kindle App on the iPad… iBooks looks really swanky and… the AP Mobile News App on iPad… just… owns.

Otherwise… hubby has not taken his hands off our iPad except for while he was sleeping last night and the 20 minutes that he was in the shower this morning… and the 15 minutes during which he was making breakfast.

So… I have no idea what I can tell you about the iPad and its features… because I have no freaking clue what they are yet.

That’s it.

Happy Easter!

Cheap Shoes

I have long known that Mac users and PC users speak a different language.

There’s a fundamental difference between how PC users use their machines and how Mac users do it. The biggest one being that backups and restores are absolutely no problem over here. I still have no idea how one accomplishes this under Windows without copying over massive groups of files, by hand. In fact… now that I think about it, I’m pretty sure that’s the only way to do it under Windows without spending any money on third party software and if that’s the case, that makes me really, really sad.

Apple, may I say again, that Time Machine… simply rocks.

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Apple Releases iPad!

This morning, I realized a little late that the State of the Union Address was today. For those of you that follow me on twitter, you might have noticed my tweet somewhere around 9 am this morning that read as follows: “LOL! comment on engadget: “I’m more excited about Job’s state of the union address than Obama’s… What does that say about us?” This was promptly picked up by the Obama twitter bot. The reality is that I realized that the state of the union address was today when I read that comment on Engadget.

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