Infinite State

I just finished Alain de Botton’s The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, which I loved more than anything I’ve read in a very long time. The subject is timely for anyone thinking or feeling reflective on the role of work in their life, which seems to be everyone I know once they turn 40. The writing is beautiful, poetic and insightful with a deep vein of humor about the common absurdities of our experience in the modern world. The photos that accompany most pages are almost equally arresting, adding a visual dimension to de Botton’s rich text.

Highly recommended, and available from NYPL.

Special thanks to David Koosis for the great recommendation to read this.

Up front I’ll just state that I’ve been a fan of tablet computers for years, having used a Fujitsu Stylistic since 2003. The form factor, handwriting recognition, pen interface — all good. So I’ve been more than eager for a tablet Mac since coming back over to this side a year ago. And of course…the iPad is not a tablet, which is disappointing but I’m getting over. Still, I didn’t expect to like it and my initial impressions have been somewhat sour.

There are a few things I really don’t like about it (the iPad) including:

• Closed, closed, closed. You mostly have to talk to it through iTunes, you can’t just mount it and copy to it, you can’t put an app you wrote onto it, etc. It’s a peripheral, folks. It’s a fat-a** iPod. Pricey, too.
• There’s no USB port, which is a big clue.
• It’s all about one app at a time. Halting between them bugs me. My Android phone does better.

Now for the good, since I’m finally starting to find things I genuinely like about it:

• It’s a really nice reader for PDFs and e-books. I just read some Winnie-the-Pooh to my daughter at bedside and it was a pleasure. Bright, self-lit, crisp images in full color, wonderful.
• The battery life is nice and long, depending on usage of course.
• Now that I am using Dropbox+GoodReader, I have a reasonable way to get PDFs from my laptop onto it for reading, and that’s really nice. Stuffing tons of reading material in there makes sense and I love that unlike my bag it doesn’t get thicker or heavier.
• Showing pictures to friends is pretty fantastic, too. Even once they get over the ooh-ahh reaction.
• Having quick/easy access to email and web seems to fill a little niche, too, around the house.
• And I do love the touch interface, just for the simplicity of pointing at what you want. Beats keyboard+mouse for several classes of activities.

So now I guess I’m just waiting to get to the point where I’ll feel comfortable whipping it out on the subway. At which point, I will be really happy to have my mail to browse, the morning Times to look through, and some tech PDFs to read. It’s enough to make me start buying my O’Reilly’s in e-form, and finally stop piling up once-read 3-month half-life tech tracts.

Alright, I am finding some things to like about it. But it’s not a general-purpose computer and I wish that it was more of one. It does feel pretty futuristic, though.

I recently spent some time testing out MyFax for internet fax send/receive. A friend had good experiences, so I was optimistic. Unfortunately, everything was a problem for me. Their web site was complete Safari-unfriendly (I’m on a Mac) and I kept getting error pages that indicated a pretty poor job of running their business. Worse, trying to send email faxes (e.g. 1234567890@myfax.com) with PDF attachments from Mail.app were consistently failing to include the PDF content in the fax. I tried from their web site, same problem. I tried from Firefox and it finally worked. Forget that.

So I tried out RingCentral, thanks to this great FaxCompare site. I was immediately thrilled to find a decent native Mac app client for their service, and it worked perfectly. Notifications are clear and fast (MyFax seemed sluggish) and I’ve had no problems yet. Best of all? I can send faxes with PDF attachments from Mail.app, no problem.

So if you’re on a Mac, looking for a reasonably-priced internet fax service — I’m happy so far.

Just realized I haven’t written anything particularly techy lately. Well, here’s my backlog of study topics and the books I’m working through (more or less in parallel):

• RESTful Web Services
• Amazon Web Services (EC2, S3 and EBS)
• Django
• Canvas+Processing (JS version from Resig)
• Maven (yes, Maven)
• JavaScript (The Good Parts, by Crockford, quite excellent)
• Struts 2 (trying to remember what I forgot)

Alright, that will have to do for now.

Check out http://www.electoral-vote.com, which is a data-driven analysis of the coming election on a state-by-state basis. Information about the site is tucked away but it comes off as the clearest and simplest message about the progress of the campaigns and the leanings of the states yet. Thanks to my friend Jeff for pointing it out.

Updated

And my friend Derrick writes with another fantastic site:

know it, but this is the one you want: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/

Wow, there is great stuff out there now. I wonder whether there is a window in which this kind of information aggregation and presentation can be freely effective before it becomes factored into the “market” of electoral behavior and loses its predictive qualities.

I have finally moved off Dreamhost for mail and on to Lux Scientiae. After years of frustration and disappointment with DH’s performance and support, I finally lost it over some disappearing emails and their complete failure to respond to requests for assistance in a timely or helpful manner. I had been using LuxSci for spam filtering and was very happy with them, so I decided to try them out for IMAP…and they have been fantastic. Their support is fast, knowledgeable, and genuinely helpful. Their pricing was a bit more than DH for pure email, but the value is many times greater through their combination of power web UIs, great webmail client, and better quality services (filtering, serving, options). It’s only been a short time, so I’ll hold off on raves more than this, but it’s really nice to move to a more professional group that really delivers better quality service. If only they had a logo graphic I could link to…

Just wanted to post a quick note about a good experience I had with a repair job by Metro Bikes on 96th near Broadway. I biked in on Saturday afternoon, with the feeling that something wasn’t right in the bottom bracket of my Giant Halfway folding bike.

Sure enough, in 15 seconds, the mechanic had zeroed in on wobble where there shouldn’t be any. 20 minutes later and about $71 poorer, I had a new bracket installed, and a close-up look at the damage to the old one when it came out. They are a Giant dealer, and I was thrilled they had the part in stock and could fix it on the spot. Probably helped it was a bit of a gray day…

I tried to be level-headed. I tried to be analytical. I had to admit that my personal information management was at a low point, with a mishmosh of Thunderbird for Mail, Outlook for Contacts, Google for Calendar, and Remember the Milk for Tasks. I figured my options were to get a MacBook Pro and go with the cool herd, or try something really radical…like go back to Outlook 2003.

And you know what? It’s a relief. Integrated, desktop software. Almost feels like a novelty these days. I was this close to writing a mashup that would pull together what I needed and…forget it. I open my laptop, and even on a train without a connection I can access my calendar, and contacts, and tasks. Fantastic. I remembered why I’d left it for TBird a few years ago — sluggish performance, unstable, no spam filtering. Well, SpamBayes seems to be much more mature now, and oddly TBird was getting pretty sluggish too.

So I guess the punchline is, I can wait a bit longer for that Mac promised land and all the surprises it will bring. For now, it’s just a pleasure to hit F11, type a portion of a name, and get a real contact with categories and everything.

Call me old-fashioned.

I’ve been playing around with GAE for a few days and come to a few early conclusions.

1. It’s very cool, very smart. The quality of the docs and examples is pretty good.
2. It’s all about locking you in to Google’s user and data APIs. In exchange, you get their (presumably) massively scalable platform. Your users really need Google accounts.
3. It’s fabulous for the Python lovers out there, and should help the language grow tremendously (which I think it deserves).
4. This is just the start of the new wave of hosted scalable platforms, and I’m sure there will be much more coming from Google, Amazon, and others.
5. I’d rather pay commodity prices and have complete control over data and advertising. Getting things free always worries me

I like the look of their datastore API, but I would prefer it if there were an open standard for entity persistence, instead of Amazon’s, or Google’s. I think the world is finally read for a post-RDBMS approach to massively scalable persistence of application data, but I’m not happy coding to a proprietary solution (yet).

I’ve been very happy with my Samsung t719 phone, but hadn’t intended to use the Blackberry client software that’s built-in. Turns out it’s pretty useful (and usable) after all.

T-Mobile offers a Blackberry Internet option for $20/month. Since I was already paying the extra $6/month for web-mail access (a brutal but survivable UI for once-in-a-while mail checks on the road), I tried the upgrade and after waiting a day for it to kick in…messages started arriving. I pointed it at my IMAP server and was very pleasantly surprised at how good it is, even on a phone.

The one catch was: how to delete all those messages. There’s no way to select multiples, or “delete all” even. After fruitless searches and scanning of docs and emails and calls, I finally learned that there’s a “delete prior” option on the context menu that appears only when you select a date (a separator between messages of different days on screen). This does most of what I want, avoiding the need to delete dozens of individual messages each day.

All in all, nice software. I particularly like the way the little outside screen shows the email address of the most recently-received message. I’d really like it if it could be set to always default to “Speedy Word” for entering text, but that’s another issue…