The iPad2 hologram setting.

So now there's this theory that the iPad is going to cause insomnia but the Kindle will not.

This is a big, long article in CNN that doesn't seem have much science to it.  Theoretically, the light emanating from electronic screens is different from the light from a lamp that bounces off a paper book or a nonglowing screen like the Kindle. Much is made of blueness.

Obama diverts himself and tells us to quit diverting ourselves.

1. "With iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations, -- none of which I know how to work -- information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation," he said today.

2. He's golfing again. He knows how to do that. Is it empowering? Is it emancipating?

Hypocrisy?
	Yes. He'd like to lay down a lot of rules that only apply to other people.
	Yes. He thinks what he likes is worthwhile, but what he doesn't care about seems like a waste.
	No. Golf is outdoor exercise, quite unlike the various high tech screens people fiddle with.
	No. Unlike the people he's scolding,he doesn't need another "tool of empowerment."
pollcode.com free polls

The iPad is kind of like Twitter.

I have it, and I feel like I could be using it. But I don't really use it. Maybe I think I'm going to be using it. But I also think it's possible that I'm never going to use it. I seem to have a need for it, but I have other things that fit that need that I go back to instead over and over again. And yet there it is, over there. I think I'm going to be going there, maybe later. Maybe tomorrow.

Can a kitty use an iPad?

Yes!

Conserve printer toner: Make Century Gothic your font.

Because the lines are thinner, and no ink is wasted on serifs.

On line, it doesn't matter. No one cares if your electrons are black or white.

In the office, how about just not printing stuff out at all? I've been using my iPad in class instead of printing out my class notes. In dollars, how many toner cartridges equals one iPad, hmmm?

Maybe companies/universities should be providing us printer-users with iPads. More likely they'll start dictating what font we should use. It will be like forcing compact fluorescent light bulbs on us. You might say: I'll turn off the lights whenever I leave a room, and I'll use a dimmer and keep my lights low. But the answer is: No, we don't care about other things you do to save electricity; we want you saving electricity the official way, the way that makes you feel bad, fluorescent bulbs.

The same with fonts. Maybe the university will dictate the use of Century Gothic on any document that is to be printed. I might say: But I will take the time to eliminate all verbosity in my documents, making them as short as possible, and I will print out only a small fraction of the things I write and read. But the answer will be: No, we don't care about the other things you do to save toner; we want you saving toner the official way, the way that makes you feel bad, Century Gothic font.

I have a laptop (MacBook Pro) and an iPhone, so what am I doing with an iPad?

Though I bought an iPad as soon as I could, 2 days ago, I'm not going to mindlessly boost the thing, and I'm not going to fool myself about whether it's useful to me. It needs to earn its place in between the fabulously useful laptop and iPhone. Obviously, it's medium size and medium weight. I'm more likely to carry it with me than the laptop, but unlike the iPhone, it's not always going to come along. I can't put it in a pocket or my smallest handbag. And I'm not going to pick it up from my bedside to check the time and a couple websites when I wake up. I'm not going to read it from a completely supine position, as I often do with the iPhone, when I'm in bed and not ready to sit up.



I might use it in bed if I am sitting up, because it turns on instantly and if I'm ready to read but not yet inclined to write. It's very nice for checking email because of the relatively big, bright screen and the way, in landscape mode, I can see the list of email to the left and display any given item on the right. I appreciate that I can lock it into landscape or portrait mode and read while lying on my side. That's something the iPhone won't do. Of course, the iPhone, unlike the iPad, is a phone, and that makes it the one thing I want to have near me all the time.

But most of the time, I'm on the laptop. If I have a table in front of me, I prefer the laptop. Even without a table, I prefer the laptop if I'm going to write. Even though it heats up, I'll have it on my lap while I'm sprawled, half-sitting, on the sofa or in bed. The hinge holding the screen upright and the solid keyboard make it far superior to the iPad for what I want to do.

Maybe I could replace the laptop with a desktop for home use. (I have a desktop in my office, but my home desktop died about a year ago.) The desktop would be better than the laptop for serious writing and working with photographs and video, and then maybe the iPad would insinuate its way into my life as I do things in places in the house away from the desk: at the dining table, in bed, near the TV, on the deck, etc. But I think not. If I'm going to write, and I always feel like I'm about to write, I prefer the laptop.

The iPad might be nice for the simple consumption of movies and books. Or looking through photographs, if you do that. This is especially important if you're away from home, since it's easy to carry and the screen is great. (Note: I was an early adopter of the Kindle, but I haven't used it much — and not at all in the past year. I just hate the way the screen looks, with its low-contrast gray-on-gray.) But I'm the restless type. I don't passively consume media for very long. I need to go back and forth between reading and writing, and though it's far easier to write on the iPad than on the iPhone, I'm not going to write on the iPad unless I'm out somewhere and I've left the laptop behind.

Now, I have a special use for the iPad that I'm going to test out today. I have notes for my classes that I keep on iDisk, so that they are saved in one place on line whether I work on them from my laptop or from my desktop. In the past, I have printed out the relevant pages for class. Occasionally, I've just worked from the laptop in class, which is a bit awkward. My primary motivation for buying the iPad was that I pictured myself displaying the relevant pages of notes on a screen that I could lay flat, next to my textbook, during class. I thought this would be extremely convenient.

There's an iDisk app that lets me get to my documents, but the screen image is terrible. It's readable, but not at all crisp. I paid $9.99 for Apple's word processing program Pages, but I can't find a way to work directly with a document saved to iDisk, the way I do on my laptop and desktop. [ADDED: Apple confirms that it can't be done.] I've cut and pasted to get text from one place to another, and I can see that the text would be displayed in high resolution. But that's an extra, annoying step, and it means that if I do any editing, it will not be saved to the iDisk document. Also, I lose important formatting, notably the extra space between paragraphs.

And why am I even using Pages? I prefer Microsoft Word, which I have used on a Mac since 1985. I had version 1.5 of Word, back in the day when you had the program and your documents on a single floppy disk. But Microsoft won't make a Word app for iPad. This is all very annoying. The #1 thing I wanted to do with iPad is not (yet) doable.

IN SHORT: It's a medium size, medium weight device that has some use, but it's a distant third in usefulness after the laptop and the iPhone.

Got my iPad!

Down at the Apple Store in the West Towne Mall in Madison, Wisconsin. Things were hopping:



That's "Specialist" Chuck Sholdt handing over the goods. He recognized me and said he "felt like [he was] in the presence of royalty." He recognized Meade too — said he'd read all about him.

Back home now, in my favorite reading position...



UPDATE: I'm typing this on the keyboard. I do think I could use this to blog, something I can't do on the iPhone (without a great deal of trouble).

UPDATE2: I bought the iPad app Pages to do word processing and I just plain cannot get it to work. It seems that there should be a toolbar, but I can't get one to display, so I'm at a dead end. Any ideas? AND: I turned it upright, out of landscape mode, and that worked. AND: I wish I could figure out how to get iDisk documents into the Pages App. (And I really am trying to find the answer in various "help" pages. It's especially frustrating because "pages" isn't a distinctive word.)

UPDATE3: Apple confirms that you can't get your iDisk documents into Pages.

"Live Blogging the iPad’s Big Day."

From the long lines at the NYC store(s).

I expect to just drop by the West Towne Apple store and pick mine up easily. We'll see how different Madison is from New York.

UPDATE: Am I pathetic to have searched Twitter to find out about the line at West Towne Mall? And here. I found a picture. I'm not the type to wait outside before the store opens, and since others are, I allow a little time for the door-crasher bulge to process.

UPDATE 2: I got it! A manageable line:

"[S]omething the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka."

"It's covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth... no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote."

Cory Doctorow parlays a William Gibson quote — defining the consumer — in service of his argument against buying an iPad. Me, I've reserved an iPad for pick-up tomorrow. But then "Apple's model customer is that same stupid stereotype of a technophobic, timid, scatterbrained mother as appears in a billion renditions of 'that's too complicated for my mom'...."

Now, now, you boys. Moms may not care about fiddling with the inner workings of technological devices, but that doesn't mean we're not mentally sharp. And — mom-o-phobia aside for a second —  in general, smart people are not interested in paying attention to computer stuff. We just want tools to get to and engage in the things we're interested in. Maybe, you're missing that because computers happen to be one of the things you're interested in.

iPad reviews.

Assembled in a handy chart.