Category Archives: Technology

From Beneath You, It Leaks…

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Helping to install and sort through old technology has raised a spectre that I’ve rarely thought of before. There is one place that almost everyone has in their home that they spend absolutely no time thinking about. Somewhere in your house you have a box with some sort of gadget: a box of remote controls, a few alarm clocks, perhaps an old music player or two. Hidden in these little bits of convenience technology is usually a pair of batteries. These cells just lay around for years and nobody pays them any mind, everyone but of course chemistry. Chemistry knows full well, and when it goes along with time, hand in hand, it’s sometimes a recipe for some really hazardous consequences.

Alkaline battery cells that are very old will tend to leak battery acid. This is really not good for anyone, nor the environment. These little caches of chemical consequence lay inert and placid for a very long time. They are almost always stored in pretty tit plastic housing containers where time, gravity, and chemistry can really work their wonders on them. When you open up one of these old gadgets you might discover an oozing corroded leaking alkaline battery cell. Getting this cleaned up can be a challenge if it has progressed far enough. So, if you happen to have a box of these battery-powered gadgets laying about that you won’t ever really use again or won’t for a very long time, please take the alkaline battery cells out of these devices!

Just throwing them in the bin is not enough either. These cells really need to be recycled. If you have a glass jar or a plastic bin, store all the dead or questionable alkaline battery cells there until you eventually take them to a battery recycler. In Michigan we have a chain called BatteryPlus and they accept recycled batteries of any type gladly and for free. BestBuy also provides a battery recycling collection program as well if you can’t get to a BatteryPlus location. At the least you really shouldn’t just toss these cells into the trash – the chemicals they are made out of aren’t good for anything. Not good for birds at might come into contact with the cells in a landfill and not good for any amphibian that might find itself in runoff water from a landfill. It’s corrosive, it’s harmful, and it is likely waiting silently for you in your very own basement or junk drawer.

If you work in a business or run one, one of the best things you can do for the environment is to sponsor a battery recycling collection point. I do this at my workplace. I found a useless plastic index card box, slapped a label on it and told everyone to please use it. People, if told that a recycling depot is handy will use it! My recycling bin at work fills up every few weeks with an assortment of dead cells in various states of decay. On my way along I carry this box of hazardous waste off to BatteryPlus. They greet me with a smile and thanks for recycling. It’s good for the environment and takes almost zero thought and nearly zero investment. The rewards, birds and frogs that aren’t poisoned are all you need to see to know you’ve done the right thing.

Multiple iOS Ringtone Surprise

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Apple’s provision for Ringtones and Alerts on their iOS devices leaves quite a lot to be desired. I bought a handful of alert tones from the iTunes store and thought I could place them on my iPhone and my iPad. Turns out that unless you have your devices synced completely to the iTunes Library, something I never do, you are pretty much out of luck. If you want to get ringtones or alert tones on your other devices, you have to buy them multiple times! This is very shortsighted of Apple and I won’t play that game. That being said, I have bought enough ringtones to make me happy for what I need on my iPhone, so it’s not like I’ll ever go back to the ringtones again for more.

For those out there with multiple iOS devices, watch out. Apple only sort of loves you, they also kind of hate you too.

What's New Pussycat?

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I really do wish that Plinky would re-organize their interface in a kind of whack-a-mole motif. They post questions to answers you blog about afterwards. It would be more convenient to be able to see a list of Plinky prompts you haven’t answered yet so you don’t accidentally answer a prompt twice or more. This is a general motif I wish more sites would adopt, especially the more social sites. Twitter would be nicer if you could mark stuff you’ve seen so you can see only the new things, same way with Facebook. Tumblr? It would be nice to have tracking tools for what you have seen, what you have saved, and what you have reblogged.

This sort of thing was answered well enough by Twitteriffic, back when I used Twitter a lot and I quite enjoyed their new-tweet-marker. I can only hope that other services help bring these features to the forefront for users to take advantage of. Only time will tell I suppose, if an idea like this will take off, or not.

iTunes Wish List!

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Apple is missing the Titanic of Cash as it sails on by them, seeking out that iceberg in the North Atlantic. It’s been weeks since I’ve looked at my iTunes Wish List and I just went back to add more tracks that I caught with Shazam, an app on the iPhone that you can use to listen to music and then tag it on your phone so you can remember the details later on.

So much is being missed! This whole thing hurts my head. I’ve got $300 in music that is languishing in my iTunes Wish List and there is no way for me to share it with anyone else. The list is a dead duck. What good is it that I can edit the list and buy things from it if I can’t hand a link out to family and friends? It seems so stupid that I can’t even wrap my mind around it. Apple has all the pieces arranged on the chess board to make a holiday killing but they are playing dead on the whole subject! iTunes, which handles music and it’s store quite deftly (I think), iCloud which enables every connected iOS device to get music all at the same time. It’s like a perfect moneymaking storm! Here’s how I imagine it could go:

  1. Someone (like me) uses iTunes or Shazam and starts to flesh out their iTunes Wish List. This information is stored at Apple, so there isn’t any reason why it can’t be used in other ways to help sell music. Just think of the shameless cross-functional promotion that Shazam could roll out in their iOS app! If you hear music you really love, set Shazam to listen to it, then add it to your iTunes wish list!
  2. On November 1st of the year (date pulled from thin air) Apple emails the primary account holders email address (which is what the Apple ID is formed on) a very friendly email that says something like “For the holidays, we thought you might like a link to your iTunes Wish List. Here’s the link: http://itunes.apple.com/wishlist/634323421232100” Happy Holidays from Apple! Unbidden you get a handy link you can then embed in a tweet, a Google Plus status, a Facebook status, a WordPress Blog Page, or even cross-promote using the Amazon Universal Wish List site. There are so many ways to share links it’s disgusting.
  3. People go to the site and put checkmarks next to the albums or the tracks that they’d like to buy for that person as a gift. Lets say you want to get someone $30 worth of music, but you don’t know what music they’d really love, why not just go to their iTunes wish list? It boggles my mind! As people make checkmarks the total builds and they can cash out using a credit card, paypal, or whatever. The next screen gives the purchaser a great option “Deliver Now” vs. “Deliver on a Date”. If they use the first option then Apple can send a gift receipt immediately, otherwise Apple defers the purchase until the date and time specified.
  4. Apple can then leverage iCloud and so the receiver of the gift watches on the date and time that the gift giver indicated when all their purchased music either becomes available for download or starts automatically downloading over iCloud! At least the person can get a gift receipt letting them know that they have music that they can download on iTunes after they login to their Apple ID.
  5. As people buy tracks and albums from this website Apple can arrange their site like Amazon does to give the recipient a choice to “spoil the surprise” by listing what has been purchased or “decline to spoil the surprise” by either locking the wish list down or hiding tracks that are “in play” for giving.
  6. This would be a great way to avoid collisions when it comes to gift giving. When someone buys an album through iTunes as a gift for someone else that line item is dropped from the wish list website link so that nobody else can buy the music and effectively buy-a-gift-twice.

This entire idea is great for everyone! Music labels love it, it’s selling music. Music artists love it, it’s selling music. Apple loves it, it’s selling music! Gift givers really love it because they can go to a one-stop-shop, plunk down exactly how much they want to get for their loved ones and it’s all taken care of! Gift recipients love it because they get a clear demonstration on how cool iCloud can be when they see a flurry of gift receipts coming from Apple over email and then iCloud chats up the iOS devices connected and all that music starts to load into the device!

Marketing? Jesus Christ on a pogostick! This stuff writes itself! You could put a little animated iCloud character in a Santa outfit! Apple could try to market itself as one of Santa’s favorite elf! If the iCloud symbol is too abstract you could put a animated musical symbol in a box with a bow and show it off that way! The television spots encouraging people to flesh out their iTunes Wish List would be an utter gold mine for Apple, for the Labels, the Artists, to say nothing of making life easier for the rest of us!

And just to state the obvious if Apple ever reads any of this, I want you to have all of this blog post to use as your own. This entire post is copylefted, I don’t give a damn what anyone does with anything I write. Want to make money? Please bring this to life!

All that music is just languishing on my dead-end iTunes Wish List. Duh Apple, DUH!

Christmas Redux

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Christmas never ends. That’s the trick with having family in far-off places. We travel and end up having multiple iterations of the holiday. It would be one thing if we shipped Christmas and concentrated on our families but so far we’ve been meeting up and there have been little explosions of Christmas over and over again.

This Christmas had a definite theme. I am becoming thoroughly French. Scott, in the guise of Santa gave me Rosetta Stone Francais, the full shot which should give me basic fluency with a level commensurate with emigration if I so choose, not that I would. I really enjoy the french way of life, the language, the cuisine, and that second part, that’s another part of Christmas. I have a Crepe Stand, a pan, several tools and a crash course with a french chef in Chicago to make french crepes. I am definitely cruising towards a fate made of crepes. There are worse things. Waking up in the morning and making a fresh crepe and filling it with Nutella – yeah, what punishment that is going to be. How ever will I cope. 🙂

Other members of my family gave me money to buy gifts I wanted on my own. With the money so far I bought two pair of Levi’s 501 jeans in my newer smaller size. My waist is about 36.5, these two jeans are 38’s and they are shrink-to-fit, so they fit wonderfully well and the style of the 501’s really appeal to me because they are button-fly, something very different from the tyranny of the copper-colored zippers. There is a part of me that doesn’t like the idea of sharp zipper teeth in that region of my anatomy. I know there isn’t any risk of anything happening, but it’s a matter of principle.

So I have lots of cash on hand and a huge number of iTunes tracks on my wish list there. That’s something that I really don’t understand. Apple enables their customers to make a wish list, but they don’t enable you to export it or build a list, or even export it socially so that other people can see your list and perhaps surprise you by buying the music and then leverage iCloud on Christmas morning to an iPod which is magically chock-full of music that you wished for. We’ll have to see if some of that will be in the plan for my Christmas cash.

Western let us know before the holidays that they would be making a one-time-payment to us employees as a kind of bonus. It was in lieu of not getting a COLA, having our health insurance premiums increased, and a factor of other reasons that are only really attractive to the accountants. I got my $400, but thanks to the IRS, I only got to have $256 of that. It is more than I would have otherwise, so I don’t complain too loudly, but still, it is a little source of irk. I’d rather have it the other way around.

So Christmas has come, and come again. When we get back Santa will eventually swing around AGAIN. I liken it to the idea that Santa has an odd case of retrograde amnesia. He visits over and over again, spreading Christmas cheer well into mid-January. It’s a theme we’ve all fallen into, we dwell in the Christmastime afterglow and then we announce with mock surprise that we found something that Santa left under the tree that the elves forgot to place properly. In a way, Santa gets the last word, even if he has to visit on Saint Swithins Day to win.

Trip to Albany

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We drove from Kalamazoo to O’Hare airport yesterday morning and there was absolutely no traffic to contend with. Parked and got in, got our tickets, passed through security and both legs of our trip went without an issue.

One telling bit was the security at O’Hare. I have to admit that it was mostly security theater. I say this because I had stored my empty HydroFlask 1L bottle in the base of my backpack. The HydroFlask is made of stainless steel and should be very opaque to X-Rays yet the TSA scanners elected to not ask to see it opened up and demonstrated that it was empty. One thing I dodged this time was having to walk through the backscatter scanner. For some unknown reason we were shunted off to the magnetometer instead of the backscatter scanner. I was actively going to request an enhanced pat-down if I had no choice but to go through the backscatter scanner.

This time through the entire meat-grinder of airplane travel and TSA security we didn’t have any delays, nor did we have any hangups anywhere. It was unusually easy and straightforward. I have to be careful lest I harvest any sense of hope that it could be like this in the future. 🙂

Although the lapse in security at O’Hare was a concern. It’s a good thing I’m a good guy and not a bad guy. 🙂

While I was on both legs of my trip out to Albany I figured that my Nook Simple Touch wasn’t really an electronic device because of it’s eInk technology. While the page is being displayed, the device is technically in an off-state. So while we were busy climbing and descending in and out of 10,000 feet of altitude I decided it was meaningless to pussyfoot around with using the device so I went along and just used it while the stewardi was busy walking away from me and closing it down when they wander past. It’s stupid that eInk technology is classed with other devices, like iPads and iPhones. The Nook worked great anyways and I really was happy with how it helped me pass the time aloft.

DC Comics – Comixology App

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Several months ago DC and Comixology rolled out a day-and-date program for their comic books. I was, initially at least, really excited for the development and I was ready to leave paper-based comic books in the past. The Comixology app was upgraded and I was ready to rock and roll with the new system. I had my Comixology app all up-to-date, called DC Comics running on my iPad.

The app was pretty to see at first, and as I used it I quickly found my initial pleasure quickly evaporating before my eyes. The first hit was the frequent app jettisoning. In the iOS Operating System when an application does something unplanned, illegal, or encounters some other fault on the platform it will crash, pushing the user back to the app selection interface. This fault is called a jettison, and I learned that fact from another iOS app that was chock-full of these jettisons. Beyond the functional failures of the app lie all the design issues with the user experience that I have a problem with.

I spent a long time comparing the old way I used to get comics to what the Comixology app would suggest is the new way. In the old way, with paper comics I would head out on Wednesday afternoon to the local comicbook store where my pull list was on-file there, after walking in the staff would greet me and get my pre-compiled list of comic books. I would then be able to sort through my pile, but it was almost always just a silly formality and so I would walk up with my pile of comics and the checkout would mostly just be the staff pressing a button, all my books on my list getting tallied up and then a total. I’d pay, then take my comics to lunch with Scott and we’d read and eat and talk about what DC or Marvel were up to. All in all, it worked out very well.

For the past few years, ever since I bought my first iPod Touch I considered how awesome it would be to have a device much bigger than the touch but nearly as thin, and I called it the iPod Touch XL. On this device I could read my comics on the display. Years rolled on by and Apple had introduced the iPad. I was in line that April morning when they had it for sale and I bought my iPad without any hesitation. I finally had the device that I wanted all along.

Zoom forward to a few weeks ago, after Comixology released “DC Comics” updated app, featuring the new art for DC’s “New 52” program. I was so happy, at least at first, and I moved forward. I didn’t renew my club card at my local comic book shop, and I stopped buying paper comics there. I was moving to the digital world. I opened up the DC app, and after several jettisons later I had connected my Comixology store username to the app and connected my Apple ID to the app as well. Apple takes a 30% cut of all in-app sales and the sales themselves are mediated through the App Store. So I browsed through the DC Comics app and started to pick out a host of Issue #1’s for titles I knew I would likely enjoy. I knew I wanted “New Guardians” along with Green Lantern, Green Lantern Corps, Superman, Action Comics, Adventure Comics, Superboy, Batman and Robin, Detective Comics, Justice League and Justice League International. I also noticed that DC was going to publish a new series based on the Red Lantern component of the Green Lantern universe and that was another thing that attracted my eye. So I started to buy comics in-app. It was certainly a smooth process, tap on the comic image that I wanted, then tap to purchase, enter in my Apple ID and the app would begin to download the comic book I wanted. Using the Comixology app to actually read the comics was never a problem for me. I quite enjoy the frame-by-frame lead-through embedded in the comic books that I download, but right after that I started noticing issues.

The problems were annoying and frustrating. The apps instability was the first thing I noticed. While paging through a Superman comic book the app would jettison. This was merely an inconvenience because I could restart the app and pick up where I left off. But then I started to notice some real problems. I would read my comics while on the treadmill at the gym, and I’d use the gym’s free wifi. As I stood there walking away on the treadmill I tapped in vain on the “DC Comics” Comixology app looking for “New Guardians #1” because I knew from earlier in that day that DC had released it, because I saw it on the shelf at the local comic book store. While I stopped buying, Scott did not, so every Wednesday I can see what books should be in the “DC Comics” app around 2pm later that day. It took me half and hour to find the “New Guardians #1” issue. The way that the app is organized, you have your comics and you have “The Store”. This is a structure that I’m comfortable with, however the way it’s designed, it doesn’t live up to even it’s own structure. For each comic book that I wanted to read, I plowed manually through the app and set alarms, as the “set alert” button was on each titles purchase screen. This button does nothing.

So my frustration comes from what I think the app should do and what the app fails to do. As I described to Scott earlier tonight, Comixology went miles to produce a shiny app that looks great. All I want is for them to give me just 5 more inches, they’ve gone miles, why not just a little touch more? I started to compare the app to the local comic book store. At the store I had a pull-list, a pile of comics were waiting for me to pick up, all I had to do was plunk down payment and that would be that. The app doesn’t tell me when a new edition of one of my comics is available, as that “set alert” button DOES NOTHING. So when I start the DC Comics app I have to slog through the store trying to find the issues I want, and trying to keep in mind what issues I own and what issues are unbought and whether or not I still want to read that particular comic book. Now along with this irritating app comes at the same time several comics from DC where the quality has gone down the toilet. I tried a lot of comics and found that I didn’t like many of them, Batwoman and Batgirl were both irritating, spending more time being stupid than being the female version of Batman. I also really don’t like the new Robin, which is Batman’s apparent son Damien Wayne. Yeah I understand the story, but I don’t like the character. So I got angry. Angry at the app because I couldn’t easily get the comics I wanted, angry that the “Alert” button was meaningless and angry at DC for selling me crap.

I stopped buying comics in paper at the local comic book store. I have also not returned to the DC Comics app. I have comics that I bought that are unread in that app and I don’t really care one way or another. Perhaps on some quiet snowy day I’ll slog through the damn thing and polish what I bought off. Mostly I’m dissapointed and sad. I don’t think what I had in mind is too difficult to pull off in iOS and the fact that Comixology so deeply overhauled their entire comic book app on iOS, and left such functionality out really boggles my mind.

So what would I want to see? Scott asked this of me after I was done railing against the Comixology app. I don’t want paper comic books, I want virtual ones on my iPad. I know that for sure. What I want is to open up the DC Comics app on any given Wednesday around 3pm or so and be presented with a list of all the comic books that I am following, all listed nicely with a checkbox next to each that is by default on, and a nice big friendly button marked “Purchase Comics”. I tap the button, enter in my Apple ID password and the app automatically downloads all the comics I want to read. I’d also want the app to link these purchases serially so when I’m done reading Green Lantern, the next one up, say Detective Comics is the next, ready to read with a tap of a button. I want to be able to start the DC Comics app, start with one comic book and then tap my way through my entire comics purchase serially. So what is it that I’m after?

  • I’d like to be able to define a pull-list in the DC Comics app.
  • I’d like the “Alert Me” button removed, or better yet, HAVE IT DO SOMETHING and throw notifications through Notification Center “DC Comics – Superman #3 is now available.”
  • I’d like it more, if after I start the app, that it presents me with a list of comics that I haven’t bought yet, but own their predecessors with a clear way to “turn them on” or “turn them off” and buy them in one single transaction.
  • I’d like to see “My Comics” extended with links into “The Store” so that when I tap on “Adventure Comics” that the app has enough wits to show me all the issues of that title that I haven’t bought. I want to continue reading the stories, and this is the most convenient way to my mind on how to arrange that.

What I don’t want to do is slog my ass through “The Store” searching in vain in the “Day and Date Release” comics list which never really has the comics I’m looking for. Instead I have to either search on the title explicitly or I have to search for the “New 52” story arc section and rifle through that section. It’s really quite an unpleasant experience to be swiping through lists of comics you don’t care about only to discover that the comic book you really really wanted, in this case, “New Guardians #1” was released two weeks ago and you never knew because it wasn’t in the “Day and Date” release list. You sizzle when you go to “The Store” and verify that “Alert Me” is indeed on, and then you get even more angry when you realize that the stupid thing doesn’t do anything at all. It doesn’t alert anyone. It doesn’t fire off Notifications, it doesn’t do anything but toggle on and toggle off.

But I’m not an iOS Developer and I don’t work for Comixology. I’m just one lonely angry customer with a list of ideas and I don’t think my tiny angry voice amounts to very much in the great analysis when it’s all tallied up. Comixology will continue to sell comic books with their Jettison-a-palooza app with all it’s do nothing options and intentionally labyrinthine store that forces you to swipe past comic books you will never ever buy because you have absolutely zero interest. I will never buy Batwing. I don’t care for Bats in Africa. Moving on…

And that’s what drives me the most crazy. It’s like this great app was only half-designed. That there are entire sections that feel like it should be in there. Functionality that when you discover it’s absence you crinkle up your eyes and wonder “What the hell were they thinking?” To go so far, to create such a slick app and then leave the most consumer-friendly (and most comic-book-store analogue) features totally absent boggles the mind. The lack of all of these features seems terribly absurd, and of course begs the thought that if it’s so half-baked, perhaps it’s designed to fail. Designed to piss people off so much, to irritate them so thuroughly that they’d rather slog their behinds back to their local comic book store and set up those pull lists again and go back to hauling dead trees around.

So I don’t use the app. I complained on Twitter, mostly as an explanation of why I’m leaving comic books for good. I am no longer really a customer, I used to be, I so much want to be, but I don’t want to go to my local comic book shop anymore, and I don’t want to use DC Comics anymore because it’s so unhelpful. I’ve got money and I might have interest and what really grinds my gears is that I’m fine with 90% of the app beyond the parts I really don’t like. The things that irritate me upset me enough to sour the entire experience. I’m so angry at wasting time hunting and pecking for comic books that I have blown out time I could have spent ACTUALLY READING THEM with trying to navigate through a store I don’t really like. And the biggest rub of all? What I ask out of Comixology and the DC Comics app in particular doesn’t strike me as being a monumentally difficult thing to arrange. The app knows I have a Comixology account, it knows I have an Apple ID. I have to assume there is room in iCloud for apps to store arrays of data. Why not enable the customer to create pull-lists and then adjust the app so it’s as helpful as Alfred? Batman would never put up with this crap. 🙂

So this entire blog post is half me railing against technology that has failed me and a response to someone on Twitter who wants to know why I’m leaving comic books. I could put up with junky content from DC in hopes that it gets better, but I really can’t put up with that app. That’s really what it comes down to. Such a shame. What would change my tune?

Alfred. He would change my tune. Alfred in DC Comics app. That’s really all there is to it.

Green Jade

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“What’s the number one thing you want for Christmas?” This question started me thinking on the nature of wanting things and the challenge of gift-giving during the holiday season.

When I was a kid it was easy, I wanted a toy or a gadget, something that I absolutely had to have. Over the years, as I grew up probably, this desire for things started to mutate. It went from wanting when I was very young to sometimes needful things as I got older. As I continue to age along my path I discover that I want things less and less. I think it’s partially because of the poor economy – I can’t really ask anyone to get me anything because times are tough, unemployment is high, and nobody should feel awkward about not being able to get that perfect gift for someone else. We are all bound to budgets and we either use our savings or we borrow to make sure that someone has a “good Christmas”. I have found that I’d rather send cards and holiday greetings, spend time with people that I want to spend time with, rather than receive some token object of affection. It’s an impossible road to tread, because the culture is so wound up in giving things to each other that you feel awkward making a list and then you feel even worse if you don’t have a list to give in the first place. It’s kind of like a trap, in that regard.

A lot of the old standbys just aren’t as attractive to me any longer. Music is mostly artificial flotsam and jetsam, pounded into shape by machines, delivered either by an object like a CD or virtually, on iTunes. Much of modern media follows this bend that music has taken. Most of it is utter crap, and while it’s nice to have things that are good and you do enjoy, the chances that you already have what you like is almost a certainty. The issue here is there isn’t anything really new or notable when it comes to a lot of modern media choices. It is best exemplified by how people make and enjoy the media. In the 21st century most media is faucet-delivered. This has two angles to it, not only is what comes out of the faucet kind of bland, dull, and uninteresting, but in many respects opening the faucet and leaving it run doesn’t cost anything. In music, you have Spotify. A free account with which you can listen to nearly anything at all anytime you like. Faucet Music. Netflix. Faucet Movies. GameFly. Faucet Games. I don’t seek out music any longer, the artists I like are dead or have moved on to survival employment and no longer make music. Movies? They are the essence of faucet media. You find a production company, a script put together in a crayon-by-numbers way and as long as it makes its initial investment back you’ll be on a permanent treadmill of meaningless sequels. I don’t really like going out to the movies anymore, there are so few movies out there that interest me. There is a very tender balance between how much bullshit I’m willing to put up with and how much that bullshit costs, all balanced on a fulcrum where on the other side is what I could be doing with my time if I wasn’t enduring said bullshit. So there is no point in buying a BluRay of anything and wrapping it up as a gift. Most of the dreck that Hollywood secretes is recycled monumental bullshit. Remember Avatar? Try Pocahontas, try Fern Gully. It would be one thing if this was an isolated example, but it isn’t. This sort of derivative bullshit soaks modern media to the dripping point.

So I stand back from all of this and think about what I really want. What do I want for Christmas? I want time. Time to do what I want to do. It’s the only thing I lust after these days – time enough to read, time enough to do whatever else it is that I want to do. Time is impossible to buy, and utterly irrational to try to wrap up for someone else. Really all that matters for the holidays is to be with the people you truly want to be with. Sometimes you can’t make it and you feel bad because there is so much space between you, and sometimes you don’t make it because life is better when it’s lived apart.

This entire line of reasoning is a terrible thing for retailers who make their money on selling things, and for that I am sorry. But things aren’t want-ful much anymore. Sometimes they are need-ful, sometimes they are like-ful, but only in a rare set of instances is a thing actually want-ful. In some ways perhaps, the faucet services like Spotify and Netflix have done more damage to their subject media than they ever intended to. By making everything available, the value of that everything drops to zero. Just leave the faucet running, it doesn’t matter.

Work Doing

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I won’t ever forget anything at work ever again.

It all comes down to adhering to a rather involved procedure to keep my work tasks organized, people connected, and to leave a cookie trail behind me so that if I have to ever refer to what happened in the past, there is an easy way to get at it.

At work I use the Mail.app on Mac OSX Snow Leopard, on my work iMac. Technically since I use IMAP the application itself is irrelevant, but this is where I do most of my work tasks day-to-day. WMU provides a web-based interface called Webmail Plus, but I really prefer to not use that. I get more mileage out of Mail.app.

Everyone has learned that the best way to alert me and my staff to things that they need is by email. Email creates a kind of digital documentation, a little slip of virtual paper that people write up and tack to our door. It doesn’t get lost and serves as a reminder of things we have to do, with details that we need to complete the tasks. It’s really the best way to go since email is so ubiquitous.

I get tasks in Mail.app whenever I run the app or bring it to the foreground. Because it’s IMAP whatever I change in the account is reflected everywhere else I have a connection to that account, like a window. So my iPhone, my iPad, my MacBook, my home Mac Mini, or my work iMac always has the right list of emails in my Webmail Plus Inbox.

When I get a new task in Mail.app I use the key combination Command-Shift-E, which in Mail.app redirects the incoming email so I can send it somewhere else. It’s better than forward, it resends the message as if it was originally sent to where I want it to go. I redirect all my tasks to my Toodledo account’s email address. Right before I send the redirected message, I tack on to the subject of the task a little bit of text “@work #today” which informs Toodledo to make a new task for me, set it in my Work Context, set the due date for Today (or really whatever day I want) and then hit send. Doing this keeps my Webmail Plus Inbox blissfully empty. I get tasks and punt them forward to my Toodledo to track them and organize them.

Once the task is in my Toodledo list, I configure the list to show me Work tasks, organized by due-date and then by priority. I don’t really enrich the tasks with priority data so the principal sort is actually alphanumeric beyond the due-date sort. It’s in Toodledo that I spend a majority of my time. Toodledo captures everything, the text, any attachment files, you name it. This way I am sure I am not missing any tasks. I may be late with a task or two, but none should fall off the edge. As I work tasks I complete whatever it is the task requires and then I copy the body of the task, which is the body of the redirected email into a new email and then tack on some pleasantries like “Task complete” or some-such and on the CC line I include the email address for my department WordPress.com blog, and right above the signature line on my outgoing email to the task requestor I include a WordPress [tags] and [end] blocks to keep the usually messy signatures from clogging up my blog and setting all the tags so that when people ask me about a certain thing I can browse the tag-cloud on the WordPress blog and find the task, the time and the date it was completed. I don’t have to muck about with Sent Items or any of that malarkey. As an added extra, WordPress automatically creates pages for tags and sets up RSS feeds for tags so interested parties can just browse to the tags they are most interested in to see what is going on. Most people aren’t interested and the WordPress blog ends up mostly being for me. I quite enjoy it, I no longer have to spend time trying to remember when I did whatever I do and so I can sort of mindlessly chug through tasks without having to waste any precious brainpower on any of it. WordPress, Toodledo, and Mail.app do all the heavy lifting and storage for me, all delightfully complimentary.

In the morning I adjust a search on Toodledo to find all the tasks in Toodledo that I have completed the day before and then I use Toodledo and Byword to quickly markdown the tasks as a numbered list and then ship that off using MarsEdit off to the blog. The overall goal is to free myself as much as possible from the headache-inducing parts of my job as I can manage. Did I do something? When did I do it? Was there some kind of trick in fixing something or other? It’s all in the blog. In many ways I have replaced the need to form new memories about my work off to WordPress, so I really don’t know in a day-to-day way exactly what I have done here. I don’t want to know it. WordPress knows it for me. The only thing I bring to the table are my skills and abilities. Everything else has been farmed out elsewhere.

There is something very secure about such a way of managing my life. I can’t answer any questions posed to me about my job. I don’t form any long-term memories about this place. I’ve gotten used to the relaxed almost meditative way that I chew through my days. Technology keeps the things I find irritable or troubling. In many ways, doing it this way has vouchsafed the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind. My spotless mind.

Winter ArtHop

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I am very tired of driving.

On Friday, after work I left Walwood and the overzealous front door swung back too fast and destroyed a piece of pottery that I bought for myself for Christmas. So already I was starting the weekend a little grumpy and bent out of shape. Thankfully it was the only thing that suffered damage so that’s at least a blessing in and of itself.

On Friday we attended ArtHop in Kalamazoo. ArtHop is a frequently held Friday event throughout downtown Kalamazoo. Many downtown galleries and art installations open up and host residents and tourists alike. Many places provide snacks and some provide complimentary glasses of wine. On most wintertime ArtHops it’s bitter cold outside and blazing hot once you get into these art installation galleries. Even with the front door open a shop can be jammed packed with people and be significantly warmer inside than you think. Dressing for these events is a challenge because you want to make sure you dress properly for the bitter cold and have a way to throw off layers if you are going to spend more time in the thick of a gallery or browse some curio shop. This season the weather has been off. Winter ArtHop was in the middle of mid-40’s temperatures, so that changed the playing field a lot and made the whole layer-up/layer-down switch almost pointless. There were lots of interesting art to see and all of it could be purchased but I didn’t see anything that I thought I had to have, or anything I wanted to give as a gift. Some places show off their interiors or use ArtHop to push their services. Some places just have unexpected things inside them, such as this:

Galloping Too Fast

And other places don’t actually have any art to sell, but use it to push their business. A few of these included salons downtown that specialize in fancy personal styling. The people behind the desk have exceptionally fancy hair and other places just push DJ’s:

Trying too hard

After we left these places and started to traverse the walking mall right smack dab in downtown Kalamazoo we realized we had run out of time to do the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts or Park Trades Center. So we instead toured the one place that didn’t have running hours because it doesn’t have walls. Bronson Park, right in the center of town (image by youngavenger) :

Christmas Tree in Bronson Park

Right along with this tour it struck me that I was outside at night and it was a cloudless night. Unfortunately the environment wasn’t good for actual skywatching. There were really only two objects visible in the entire night sky and that was the Moon and a very bright star. Originally I thought it was Venus, but after I used my iPhone’s StarWalk app I discovered to my chagrin that it wasn’t Venus but rather Jupiter.

After our time downtown and not seeing any convenient place to find a restroom we went back to Walwood Hall and dealt with our need of restrooms there. We were originally going to head to Red Robin down in Portage but since we were so close to downtown we changed our mind and went to Olde Peninsula Brewpub instead.